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Posted by tomman
If you run a popular site, advertisers will find a way to reach you, since they know your place is a good vehicle to sell whatever products and services they have, assuming they understand the following:

1) Target: obviously you're going to have a hard time selling flour on a PC overclockers' site.
2) Don't overdo it!

If you run one of said "controversial sites" (politics, Nazi/KKK/Taliban shit, Poetteringware™, etc.), no sane advertiser will want to touch it, but I'm pretty much sure their target will find a way to support their site. Just not involving buttcoins or PayPal buttons you can't use anyway, since historically there have been other ways to do so.

"People not wanting to pay for things" are a completely different problem, and advertising/cryptojunk won't solve that - it's a SOCIAL problem product of the inherent selfishness built into the human being. "Adware" is just a consequence of that fact - at a first look ads aren't evil (if you aren't interested, just scroll down), but the "Big Data" era perverted the concept down to the bone, and advertising is now considered an evil greater than wars and communism.

I don't mind a discreet 468x60 ad banner at page top or bottom, linked to a simple redirect server-side script ("servername/foo/adclick.something?adID=whatever"). But the moment you go over that simple threshold and start shoving down client-side tracking scripts, pop-ups/pop-unders, Flash, autoplaying audio/video, aggressive jQuery abuse, shitcoin miners... well, now you understand why adblockers exist and why anyone (outside of normies) want the advertising industry to die in a sea of fire.

To be clear: I don't block ads out of privacy reasons (as I've said countless times: I am statistics noise, I live in a shithole where I can't even buy your shit even if I really wanted to!). I started blocking ads out of PERFORMANCE reasons: my hardware is old, and my network access is slow and very unreliable. It first started with Flashblock when websites started abusing Flash for autoplay crap, and now extended to a DNS block which kills most adverts dead in the water, safe or not. And even without ads, the modern web is just a bloated unbrowsable mess for anyone without a top-of-the-line Mac/gamer-class rig/$1000 flagship cellphone :/

CRYPTOJUNK IS NOT REAL MONEY.
...
So are illegal drugs, slaves, pirated software, stolen goods, Enron shares, tulips, WoW gold, and most poisons.
The fact I can exchange something for money doesn't really makes it a form of money, or even something of value. It only shows that with enough BS/force, I can convince a fool to lose their money.

Repeat after me:
CRYPTOJUNK IS NOT REAL MONEY.
It has never been, it will NEVER be, no matter how many Silly Valley VCs and vulture banks you get on board.
(And don't come with me with "butbutbut your bank accounts are nothing but numbers on a database on a computer!" Those numbers ARE backed and protected by a complex regulatory system in place by the government, which I trust more than any idiot doing a ICO despite being... well, a bunch of communists!)

Posted by tomman
Repeat after me:
CRYPTOJUNK IS NOT REAL MONEY.

Yeah right, next you're going to tell me that becoming a bank robber should be extremely profitable too, nevermind the fact it's also extremely illegal (i.e. a crime).

Sorry but no. Those Venezuelans "buying" into the cryptocraze are nothing but a tiny TINY minority that are well aware they're walking on quicksands (but anyone over here is so desperate to eat they're willing to do whatever weird/shady acts they can, as long as they can eat, damned be the consequences later). I can't believe I have to say this again, but I've met people that actually have dealt with cryptojunk. Close friends of mine, even! They all left the business after making a tiny profit because it's too volatile and too shady to become a full-time job. And then you have the commies that are trying to use cryptojunk as the vehicle to commit outright fraud legally. Hey, I heard the local crypto authority (yes, what a fine waste of our national budget: backing smelly buttcoins that not even scammers want) is hiring, why not apply there?!

All extensions disabled due to expiration of intermediate signing cert
May 03, 2019 (comments)
Mozilla opens a new front in the war against its own users. Instead of wasting money on useless side projects nobody wants, they decide to torpedo their own primary product. The only mechanism Mozilla has to restore functionality is to repurpose user-spying malware-distribution pipelines. In the process of trying to unfuck the only program any of them run on their computers, Hackernews is startled to discover that the configuration window in Firefox does not have any predictable correlation to the configuration of Firefox. Many of them declare they are giving up and switching to alternative software from Google, a company widely regarded for respecting the privacy of anyone at all.

Posted by tomman

while I do have an Hotmail account since forever, I haven't used that one in years, plus you can't use it with real mail clients unless if you pay, I guess.

Posted by Kawa
You two aren't gonna convince each other about buttcoin. I suggest you drop it and move on with the rest of the conversation. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is Mozilla being Mozilla.

Posted by tomman
I love how the nerdsphere likes to "solve" browser problems:

- Is Mozilla flipping the finger at you? Switch to Chrome!
- Is Google too evil for your pure soul? Switch to Firefox!

Posted by CaptainJistuce

Posted by tomman

while I do have an Hotmail account since forever, I haven't used that one in years, plus you can't use it with real mail clients unless if you pay, I guess.

I use my hotmale account with email clients without paying.

Posted by Nicholas Steel
How... did you of all people not know Hotmail was still free?

Posted by Nicholas Steel
How... did you of all people not know Hotmail was still free?

Almost simultaneously with Pandora, Mozilla (Miroglio et al 2018) conducted a longitudinal (but non-randomized, using propensity scoring+regression) study of browser users which found that after installing adblock, the subset of adblock users experienced “increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over [matched] controls) and the number of pages viewed (+15% over control)”.

(This, incidentally, is a testament to the value of browser extensions to users: in a mature piece of software like Firefox, usually, nothing improves a metric like 28%. One wonders if Mozilla fully appreciates this finding?)

The performance of applications on the web platform is becoming increasingly bottlenecked by the startup (load) time. Large amounts of JavaScript code are required to create rich web experiences that we’ve become used to. When we look at the total size of JavaScript requested on mobile devices from HTTPArchive, we see that an average page loads 350KB of JavaScript, while 10% of pages go over the 1MB threshold. The rise of more complex applications can push these numbers even higher.

Interesting to not see Google involved on this, but then they would prefer to download an app for that™ on your Android smartdevices, or maybe some Chrome-specific feature.

Posted by some guy who presumably works there
There is a big effort to break up libraries to reduce app sizes. Messenger is especially sensitive to their app size and will ask hard questions to any developer that includes a huge new library, whether on purpose or by accident.

Posted by sureanem
But of course, this is too difficult for these so-called people who find anything that isn't Python/JavaScript/Scratch "toxic masculinity" - not making this one up.

genuine enthusiasm for the cancer that is HTML5 (or as I've recently taken to calling it, HTML5 plus JavaScript)

I don't get it. They have infinite money. Can't they just pay another team (in another country and language, so that there's no overlap) to re-write the whole app, have them do it properly, then fire the old team when testers can't tell the two apps apart any longer in double blind testing?

Because I tell you, I'd far rather use IE6+XP than this. At least with IE6+XP you're using stable and proven technologies.

Posted by Screwtape

It's interesting that you read that tweet as an unironic example of the world-view you're annoyed by, rather than as a joke from somebody who shares your views.

That's the old "we'll work on both systems in parallel until the new system can replace the old system" trap, which generally results in both systems running in parallel until somebody notices the new system is guzzling money and nobody's using it, so it gets canned.

Believe it or not, buying your way out of resource limits is legitimately the easier option: it's work for your administrators, so it doesn't cost you developer effort, and the money spent is effective immediately, instead of after a six-month hiring-and-interviewing effort, and another six month training effort, and another two or three years on-the-job experience

IE6+XP were products of exactly the same mindset that brings you Facebook Messenger today; if Facebook Messenger spends half its computrons on functionality and loses half through inefficiencies like "modularity" and "debuggability", IE6+XP did exactly the same thing, but they had less computrons to start with, so they were less inefficient on an absolute scale.

Posted by sureanem
Can't they at least write their shit in WebAssembly?