edelbitter (u/edelbitter)

edelbitter commented on Mozilla's latest quagmire rubenerd.com/mozillas-lat... · Posted by u/nivethan

hd4 · 2 months ago

It's advisable to use a prefs.js for this sort of thing

https://kb.mozillazine.org/Prefs.js_file

edelbitter · 2 months ago

Mozilla suggests policies [1] (which, in turn are capable of default-setting or enforcing most prefs and has proper release notes) and has removed a bunch of pages that previously recommended directly editing prefs.js or shipping user.js (which had been changed in backwards-incompatible ways before when the parser was swapped).

[1]: https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/

edelbitter commented on Mozilla's latest quagmire rubenerd.com/mozillas-lat... · Posted by u/nivethan

M95D · 2 months ago

The state of mess the code is in?

edelbitter · 2 months ago

To be fair, Mozilla-affiliated developers have accomplished some serious cleanup in recent years. New & redesigned features are fake tabs with special permissions instead of that unholy intertwining of web standards and local UI in C++. Storage is almost-proper sqlite3. Dynamic linking against system libraries old&new just works(tm). Even the vendored Rust packages more or less build fine, now even across multiple compiler versions. Plus, AMDs new-ish CPUs with ginormous L3 brought recompile (and thus, bisect) times to almost reasonable levels, so that is not as pressing of an issue any more. I would guesstimate only 25 years left at the current speed till Firefox can be considered maintainable again.

edelbitter commented on Mozilla's latest quagmire rubenerd.com/mozillas-lat... · Posted by u/nivethan

hekkle · 2 months ago

Putting the flags in Firefox just seems logical not "Hostile Design". Yes, there could be an easier way to turn it off, such as a menu item, but the flags need to be there first before the menu entry can exist.

The author claims to be an "IaaS engineer", surely, he can figure out how to write a firefox plugin, that can do what he wants, and use that to help non-technical users, and if it becomes popular enough will probably effect the change he wishes to see.

edelbitter · 2 months ago

Its not just that each new "feature" is unnecessarily difficult to disable, and already active-with-privacy-side-effect by the time you notice.

Most new "features" are by now covered by an existing setting and/or policy. Yet I recognize a pattern of introducing new "but did you opt out of THIS NEW thing?" or "but did you opt out of VERSION TWO of this previously rejected thing?" setting/policy. It has become unsafe to upgrade to new Firefox releases, because each one will disrespect previous user choice in another unexpected way.

edelbitter commented on Mozilla's latest quagmire rubenerd.com/mozillas-lat... · Posted by u/nivethan

arjie · 2 months ago

Mozilla has the classic problem of a non-profit that achieved its aims. I was around back in the day and my friends and I were avid evangelists of Firefox - a few cogs in the wheel of the marketing installing Firefox on school machines and getting all the elderly people to use it and so on. There were user groups and student ambassador programs and so on. It was an incredible marketing effort combined with an effort to bring standards and compliance to them into the mainstream. And it worked because they added features at a rate that IE simply did not match.

The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.

I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.

Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.

Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.

That's just life.

edelbitter · 2 months ago

This new "please accept cookies and scripts to prove you are running Google Chrome without Adblockers" Internet does not exactly look like mission accomplished to me. And that is before we even get to the part of the Internet that goes straight to "please run this Android app so we can ask Google who truly owns your device".

If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.

edelbitter commented on My friends and I accidentally faked the Ryzen 7 9700X3D leaks old.reddit.com/r/pcmaster... · Posted by u/djrockstar1

sunaookami · 3 months ago

Tech journalism was always infamously bad.

edelbitter · 3 months ago

I sometimes use lwn.net as an exemplary showcase of things non-tech journalists should learn (e.g.: add references whenever paraphrasing material some or all readers might have direct access to)

edelbitter commented on Solarpunk is happening in Africa climatedrift.substack.com... · Posted by u/JoiDegn

stingrae · 3 months ago

"This worked great if you were electrifying America in the 1930s, when labor was cheap, materials were subsidized, and the government could strong-arm right-of-way access."

It was good in the moment. The issue is maintaining it without the same cheap labor and materials. PG&E in California is a perfect example. There is no way for them to maintain the grid which is aging and causing fires. We are going to have to switch to a slightly similar regional power generation/storage model.

edelbitter · 3 months ago

As long as grid upgrades & maintenance continue to work reasonably well across western Europe, bad examples from the US are not particularly worrying. Economics of scale still very much apply; there is a point in maintaining expensive grid infrastructure. Especially so when using it to improve other expensive infrastructure, such as electric high-speed passenger rail.

edelbitter commented on 72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study gamesindustry.biz/72-of-d... · Posted by u/mrzool

carlos_rpn · 3 months ago

Anytime I see the complaint about the 30% fee, I wonder what people feel would be fair for the service, because it also includes storage, distribution for new instalations and patching for older ones, along with generating keys to be sold at other stores.

Would people feel better with a lower fee, but no distribution network, for example?

edelbitter · 3 months ago

I would love for steam to offer even the complement: Only distribution & SSO services, so I can have fast downloads and quick non-replayable-auth for games I buy/subscribe elsewhere (not subject to steam peculiarities about squeezing out maximum price for each region by purchasing power).

Of course, that would need to have a wildly different fee schedule than when they carry major legal & reputational risks plus more significant customer support volume.

edelbitter commented on Resolution limit of the eye – how many pixels can we see? nature.com/articles/s4146... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

edelbitter · 3 months ago

One would expect the results to be highly correlated to corrected vision which is all over the place.. but they get suspiciously tightly grouped results.

Did they maybe not measure how many pixels we can see.. but rather how laughably bad COTS IPS are at contrast, as the examined pattern approaches their resolution? I wonder what happens if you repeat that with a reasonably bright 16K OLED.

edelbitter commented on Cryptographic Issues in Cloudflare's Circl FourQ Implementation (CVE-2025-8556) botanica.software/blog/cr... · Posted by u/botanica_labs

tptacek · 4 months ago

It's more subtle than that and is not actually that simple (though the attack is). The "modern" curve constructions pioneered by Bernstein are supposed to be misuse-resistant in this regard; Bernstein popularized both Montgomery and Edwards curves. His two major curve implementations are Curve25519 and Ed25519, which are different mathematical representations of the same underlying curve. Curve25519 famously isn't vulnerable to this attack!

edelbitter · 4 months ago

Bernstein also published a simple checklist [1] of what people are likely to do wrong if not ruled out by design. Bullet point 2 on that list was:

> Your implementation leaks secret data when the input isn't a curve point.

[1]: https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/

edelbitter commented on The zipper is getting its first major upgrade in 100 years wired.com/story/the-zippe... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

behnamoh · 4 months ago

> That incremental progress mirrors YKK’s founding philosophy, the “Cycle of Goodness.” The principle—that no one prospers without benefiting others—has supposedly guided the company for decades. It’s visible in its other micro-improvements: corrosion-resistant alloys, sound-dampened sliders, recyclable polyester tapes. AiryString continues that tradition, shrinking the zipper’s physical and environmental footprint at once.

This is alien to SF AI startups and patent trolls.

edelbitter · 4 months ago

Having your customers suddenly require proprietary machinery (only sold/licensed by you) to unlock the full potential of your upgraded product line.. does seem compatible with the SF startup way of thinking.