When I went to the German site and tried to generate a data request, the generated email was in English. Is that intended? I think I'm Germany you're much more likely to get a response if you write in German.
One of the most valuable things about a conversation with a mentor is getting insight into their thinking processes: how do they decompose a problem into smaller parts, what mental models they make use of, etc.
Given that, in my experience I've always learned a lot when I've asked my mentors to talk about a challenge they're currently facing and have them ramble on about it while I ask clarifying questions.
It will be difficult because I have been using Firefox for years and tried to avoid anything Chrome-based and I am not very happy with Google's Manifest v3 approach, but Mozilla just crossed a red line for me.
Did it really cross a red line for you? I feel like Firefox is judged much more harshly than Chrome and it's unfair.
Mozilla the company has made some terrible decisions that I strongly disagree with (update page featuring a movie ad, pocket integration, removing a search engine from the defaults, nerfing android addons for no reason)
But compared to every other browser, I don't understand how people think it's even a comparison. Chrome (user history tracking, targeted advertising, FLOC, manifest v3, strong-arming due to market share, etc etc), Edge (same as chrome but replace G with M), and Brave (referral link injection, cryptocoin adware).
To me, no single thing on FF's list is worse than any single thing in the other list. And together it's out of the question which is better.
I don't think it's useful to tell regular people not to use Firefox either unless you tell them they really shouldn't be using the other three (which I doubt many are doing). Am I missing something? Honest question - do you really think the negatives of having someone use not-firefox outweigh the negatives of Firefox?
> I feel like Firefox is judged much more harshly than Chrome and it's unfair.
Mozilla claimed that their mission was to empower users. Some people are more upset by hypocrisy than the actual actions. If they want to change https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ from "More power to you." to, say, "More power to us." then I'd personally be a lot less irritated at them.
(This isn't specifically a comment on the current subject, BTW; I've been increasingly irritated by Mozilla's hypocrisy for years now.)
I do understand the frustration with things like that but I just think people forget the big picture. Totaling all annoyances and negatives about Mozilla (which are a lot) against the competition makes me seriously glad I don't use them.
This hypocracy+everything I listed about FF+everything else Mozilla has done is a drop in the bucket compared to the user-hostile world that is Edge/Brave/Chrome.
To be clear: I agree with you. I harden Firefox because their defaults do not make me happy. But it's going to take a whole lot more bad decisions before they're worse than their competition.
I think we agree, then; I'm writing this from Firefox:) It's just that being the least-bad option seems a more hollow victory with every incident, and if a genuinely good option ever showed up I'd jump happily.
Not OP (and not yet uninstalling firefox, but it feels ever closer), but it feels like mozilla have done something sneaky and questionable every quarter now for the past 2 years. For OP, this is possibly the straw that broke the camel's back
As far as I know, Firefox is the easiest browser to add this back in. Right click on basically any search box and Add A Search Shortcut and you can bind it to "ya" or something.
Similar to duck duck go bangs but it has to be a prefix and ! Isn't required. w => wipedia, y => youtube
I feel like this is a weird attitude to have toward an open-source software project. "Sure, developers added 900 performance improvements / new features / bug fixes this quarter to a browser I get to use for free, but they also did 2 non-critical things I don't really care for so now I oppose this software."
I do think it would have been _better_ if Firefox made the set of included-by-default search providers something that gets merged into your profile, so that future removals only affect new installations / new profiles (and existing users who happen to use that engine don't have to go out of their way to re-add them after an update). I don't really care _which_ search engine definitions come with a browser out-of-the-box, as long as they're easy to customize.
I fancy myself a fairly technically aware person, and I have no idea what improvements, features or bug fixes Firefox added this quarter that would outweigh all the little and big bad things. In terms of performance, a recent patch made Electrolysis or what it is they called their per-domain process thing the default, immediately making CPU and especially RAM usage shoot up massively (as well as introducing some new bugs pertaining to dead IPC pipes). I tried to put up with it for maybe a week and then switched it off by an about:config switch, which I'm entirely sure they will remove in another 10 versions at the latest. The only way in which I see them adding features takes the form of supporting the latest of the stream of under-the-hood changes that keep coming out of Google's web standard printer, which generally seem to add no user-visible functionality or benefits but are inevitably relied on by some random subset of important websites resulting in the internet gradually breaking if I don't want to update my browser.
I would much rather they use their dwindling influence on standards bodies to block and sabotage the changes that necessitate the constant updating (and attendant maintenance burden which takes smaller browser projects out of the running) at every turn; and if it so happens that this results in their influence disappearing even faster and/or them getting booted, then at least this may pave the way for the long-overdue antitrust suit against Google that many have been saying Mozilla's existence serves to prevent.
(It's not like Firefox is developed by unpaid volunteers. Am I using the browser "for free" if Google sees it as advantageous to pay them money for, among others, my continued existence as a user of the browser?)
I agree with the grandparent comment. And it is because of separation of concerns. You can put it in the same basket as freedom of speech, but it's a bit different.
A browser is a browser. It does not have to promote a moral view. In fact it has to provide ways to find information. Not to limit purposefully ways to find information.
It sounds like your issue is not that the browser is promoting a moral view but rather that it’s promoting one in conflict with the moral view you think it should be promoting.
Making a reply to say you won’t make a reply because a reply you make could be downvoted does not really follow. Can folk who disagree with you not just now downvote this reply, both for political disagreements but also wasting everyone’s time?
One IMO realistic use-case is providing a wealth preservation mechanism for people living in a country with a corrupt government that's experiencing hyperinflation, for example Lebanon.
> One IMO realistic use-case is providing a wealth preservation mechanism for people living in a country with a corrupt government that's experiencing hyperinflation, for example Lebanon.
Sure, but (like it or not) that's covered under the umbrella of "crime".
In that case, I think the point is that some "crime" is ethically justified and worth supporting technologically. The OP's statement implies that all crime is bad.
> One IMO realistic use-case is providing a wealth preservation
Any other fiat currency already provides this such as usd, euro, Israeli currency etc and they are at least currently far easier to aquire and done have any gas feeds other than consumption tax if any
On Lebanon where electricity is unreliable seems like a particularly bad idea to use any sort of Crypto, let alone the user friction as a consequence of network gas prices
On real world scenarios, if a country is having issues relating to inflation or is a small market to begin with, consumer prices are denominated on Usd or some other currency anyway
True but opening foreign bank accounts is difficult and like western countries physical cash can be legally seized by authorities even if it was acquired legally.
This is only if the end user allows seizure. If I have only a 12-word seed in my memory and not a single private key written down anywhere in my house and no bitcoin wallet installed on any computer, you have absolutely no way of confiscating anything. It's something that a lot of outsiders do not even realize. Bitcoin is actually entirely un-confiscatable. If someone commits private keys to memory or entirely encrypts and off-sites private keys, exactly how can the money be confiscated? It cannot be confiscated. Any human in the world can move freely about the globe at this point in time with billions of asset value solely residing inside their brain. Import that memory into any mobile or desktop client wallet anywhere in the world, or recite the key secretly to someone else they trust anywhere in the world.
People living under a corrupt government and experiencing hyperinflation are no safer or necessarily better off with cryptocurrency. Conducting cryptocurrency transactions requires a non-trivial amount of infrastructure. Even "offline" transactions with a Rube Goldbergian number of mesh network components needs all those components to work.
A fortune in Bitcoin in a conflict/disaster zone is no more useful than a fortune in dollars in a bank if you can't access it readily. Your fortune means shit if you can't buy a loaf of bread.
Even if you can access the infrastructure necessary to spend cryptocurrency to buy a loaf of bread they provide no protection against localized inflation. Prices of goods in a conflict zone increase significantly due to dangers/difficulty associated with the supply chain or lack thereof. Sometimes they increase due simply to greed. Transacting in a cryptocurrency doesn't help at all with this. Your Bitcoin fortune can be wiped out just feeding your family since your only other option is to starve to death.
Have you heard of solarpunk? It's a movement that arose out of a desire to balance techno-optimism with recognition of the dire need for technology that is more Earth- and human-friendly.
Has your wife considered that her symptoms are PPD (https://ppdassociation.org/diagnosis), i.e. have a psychological cause which can be unconscious?
I had been suffering from unspecific aches, extreme tiredness, insomnia, sore throats, and other non-specific symptoms for the past 8 months. I had to take months of medical leave and went through 10+ doctors, accumulating negative tests and inconsistent diagnoses as I went along. Then, despairing, I read The Mindbody Prescription by Dr. Sarno and realized that my symptoms were due to repressed unconscious emotions. Since starting a free online recovery program a couple of months ago, I've gotten 80% better and I'm planning to resume work in a couple of weeks.
I know this sounds just like more quackery, but I promise you it isn't. There's more and more peer-reviewed research supporting the theory behind PPD, and the track record of long-term recovered patients speaks for itself. Feel free to email me at me [at] bobmichael [dot] io if you or your wife would like to chat more about this.
As a counterpoint, my wife also has a ~~something~~ diagnosis. She's been dealing with it for 10+ years now. She eventually went through 2 or 3 of these types of recovery programs and they did nothing for her. Some of them were even sort of gaslighting, saying that it was all psychological, when it very clearly isn't.
I don't want to diminish what anyone else has gone through, just be sure that you're prepared for yet another treatment to not work if you try something like this. I hope that it does work for those who try it, but it may not, and that can be even more frustrating to someone who has been told by doctor after doctor that "it's all in their head." She tried fixing whatever's in her head, and that also didn't work.
Your assertion is equally as silly though. Pain is not necessary for life, but it definitely has a lot of merit as a survival mechanism and danger signal.
If you really want to learn from the mistake, it sounds like you need to ask for a personal leave for a few months and really take a bet on one of your ideas. There's not much to lose, in the worst case you learn from how it went and can decide whether you may want to raise the stakes and quit.
