Opinion: The Scars Of Firefox Will Linger

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Cari tutti

I'm looking back. Reluctantly.

The transition of Firefox to 57 marks a point.

The TiddlyWiki issues are the LEAST of it. TW now has multiple ways of saving thanks to a great community of folk who care to gift the many ways to go on.

But I STILL have many problems that keep me on Firefox ESR holding back as long as possible.

The change to "web extensions" is a shift to "web restrictions." Empirically there is virtually NO evidence the retired Firefox extension API ever led to any serious issue. Show me any data it was actually abused. But  there is an issue about misplaced paranoia.

MY issue NOW is  NOT TiddlyWiki in FireFox. Its everything else. The environment I created.

The ability through extensions to Edit Before Print, to  exactly Manage Tabs, to have searchable Scrapbook of web downloaded pages (about 3,000), to Customise the Firefox interface etc.

My POINT  is that transfer of TiddlyWiki usage is in a context of material praxis that enfolds many other things that DIE at 57.

The change in Firefox at 57 is one of the worst non-upgradeable ones in computer history.

Best wishes
Josiah

[coda coder]

Condense that to 280 chars and tweet it @Firefox @FirefoxNightly

[Mark S.]

My theory is that someone at the big G bribed someone at Moz to take a dive.

They do promise it will be 2x faster and 33% less memory. My FF is  definitely a memory hoarder.

You can use BJ's webclipper along with his VisualEditor to make your own searchable scrapbook in TW. The downside at the moment is that you will need to download supporting images separately. I've always felt that stuff in Scrapbook was kind of locked into a proprietary system. That is, it wasn't easy to transfer the info off to be used on other desktops, browsers, or devices.

-- Mark

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mark S. wrote:

They do promise it will be 2x faster and 33% less memory. My FF is  definitely a memory hoarder.

A faster chrome? Good luck to them keeping any long-term advantage on an overall approach they fell in bed with.

J.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

I already tried and failed.

[Mark S.]

Even though I've had a twitter account for years, I still don't understand how it all works. When I go to @Firefox, it's all twinkles and sunbeams with a few technical questions in between. I assume they somehow suppress any negativity from their followers. Is there a way to see the actual comment flow to @Firefox? I know there must be some push-back, because the forum on mozilla has an almost unbroken stream of individuals expressing in eloquent, impassioned mini-essays their concern for what is happening. None of them get answered, of course.

-- Mark

[@TiddlyTweeter]

There was ONE thread of great significance in a dev group at Mozilla in which the "Saving Problem" was debated at length many moons ago. TiddlyWiki featured in it. It went nowhere. I can't find it now.

Twitter doesn't really have threads unless you elect to reply to a reply. You just ignore stuff that is a pain in the ass and then it stays in the void.

[coda coder]

On Wednesday, November 8, 2017 at 3:20:23 PM UTC-6, Mark S. wrote:

    Even though I've had a twitter account for years, I still don't understand how it all works. When I go to @Firefox, it's all twinkles and sunbeams with a few technical questions in between.

I know EXACTLY what you mean.  It's annoying as hell.  I've spent countless hours "helping" by filing damn good bug report on bugzilla too -- that's a very hit or miss affair.

 

    I assume they somehow suppress any negativity from their followers.

I don't think that's possible.  Really.  Thing is, there's enough traffic (tweets) that any individual tweet is just lost in the noise.

 

    Is there a way to see the actual comment flow to @Firefox?

Assuming you're viewing twitter in the browser, click on a tweet -- any responses will appear below.

    I know there must be some push-back,

There is:  https://twitter.cm/CodaCoder/status/928323164974727168 -- every chance I get I moan about the same thing.  They raved about the big switch to react (in the debugger), raved about going open source with it on github; what did we get? A far worse debugger UX. it was only after months and months of nagging they added (wait for it) watches.  A debugger that can't watch variables? What???

One responder on twitter said "Join the #slack group", been there, done that, all "twinkles and sunbeams" like you said.  Waste of time.

 

    because the forum on mozilla has an almost unbroken stream of individuals expressing in eloquent, impassioned mini-essays their concern for what is happening. None of them get answered, of course.

Yep, I've read them, too. I don't know what the answer is (not sure I even care any more).  They've certainly lost a ton of brownie points over this in my view.

(sorry about weird formatting above -- GG did something weird when I pasted the twitter link -- notepad to the rescue!)

Coda

[TonyM]

Mark,

On Memory hoarders, for Chrome and Firefox, I recently realised that 90% of what I do is in browsers, at least with the work on my plate, and my growing network of tiddlywikis on my desktop class laptop.. 

As a result I realised I needed the browsers to be first class citizens, as apps on my computer and I have configured them to use more memory than they do by default. My new computer has 16GB of RAM so giving 1-2GB a browser where I spend most of my time was a no brainer. 

I still have performance issues occasionally, I have still not identified, they come when I am tired and less patient, and cant think in the gaps. They seem to be some indeterminate issues with internet speed, and browser performance.

Regards

Tony

[Mark S.]

This is real hoarding though. Giving it more memory would probably make things worse. Gradually, no matter how many tabs I have open, the total FF memory grows. Somewhere around 2g it becomes unstable and crashes if I don't restart first. Typically I need to restart once or twice a day. By contrast, I can leave Chrome up for days and it stays down around 300m per thread. It's looking like the new FF will avoid that problem, but of course I'm still using it lightly.

It's entirely possible that one or more of the extensions that I'm using is locking in the memory. The way extensions use memory is part of the reason for the change, the people at Moz say.

Mark

[@TiddlyTweeter]

FF took memory and didn't give it back. If you read the talk about it blame was often put on extensions. But extensionless it did the same after a short while. The memory handling was from the start a mess. Its been used as a bit of a trojan horse to dump extensions in the process of becoming chrome mate-able. Its memory is better now, though still greedyish, recoverable. But i don't think most of that is due to ditching the orphans.

J.

[Birthe C]

I experience the same as Mark explains in Firefox on Windows on my best computer. The unexplainable is, that Firefox on Linux Mint Mate 17.3 on my 10  year old laptop - only 32 bit and with 2gb ram I have no problems at all. I am synchronizing, so I am rather sure they are used in the same way for the same things.

Can anyone explain that to me?


Birthe