...It used to be FF was a dog to load but ran fine once up. Now it can take 3 minutes just to open on email in Hotmail.
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-MilesAhead
Yes, eggsaggerly. My take on this is that, to have arrived arrived at this point with such a successfully
screwed-up product as Firefox currently is (QED) cannot be
assumed to have been due purely to a mixture of simple incompetence, stupidity, or negligent accident. No. The possibility needs to be considered that it has to have been planned and
deliberate.If this is true, then the objective would presumably have been to destroy Firefox.
This would seem to be already happening by degrees. For example, the developers of addons are being forced to jump through so many bureaucratic hoops with the obligatory "signature" of addons that life has become intolerable for them and they are simply abandoning their addons. A recent case in point would be the
NoSquint addon - see
RIP NoSquint.
Similarly, users are finding themselves unwillingly forced to accept this monoculture approach by the product being made irreversibly programmatically intolerant of anything that does not meet the artificial signing standard.
A sort of negative cultural diversity.This is a deliberate approach, and the likely consequences - the loss of a user and developer base for Firefox - would have been predictable by anyone with a grain of sense.
If the annoying Mozilla had simply been bought out by Google or Microsoft and then Firefox shut down, then there would have been a humungus public outcry and backlash from an enraged base of supporters, users and developers, and antitrust actions would likely have ensued. So, you avoid this by progressively driving away and eroding that support base, ending up with a product that has been made incrementally defective/unusable - by design - and that nobody therefore wants to use or support, and so they abandon it in their droves. Then you have to shut it down because, well, "it's already dead, isn't it?"
But you probably wouldn't do this for purely destructive purposes. No, there would likely be profit-driven method involved. As the disenchanted Firefox users were being driven away, they would be coincidentally presented with a fledgling
New Thing that offered
promise.I only started to wonder about this when I reread what I had written above:
...Yers, FF releases (I'm on the Beta channel) seem to have been getting incrementally and progressively more sluggish over the last couple of years. It's bloatware now and has got to the point where I am seriously considering dumping FF and going to another browser.
...So far trialled:
...
- MS Edge: Bloody fast, but then it's not been loaded up with the inevitable bloatware yet...
-IainB
True story:It reminded me of years back, when I had been working as a systems analyst in developing a new IBM-mainframe based stock control and ordering system for a central Lucas-CAV factory warehouse depot that would support several factory sites around the country (UK). In preliminary systems testing, the transaction response time at the IBM 3270 terminals was sub-second - blindingly fast - as one would expect when the system was under a negligible transaction load.
One of the analysts had an economics major, and he pointed out that there was a potential demand-and-supply problem here.
He calculated what the estimated max response time would likely be under potential peak transaction loads when the system was fully operational - the estimate was 3 seconds. This system was being implemented across a user base that had not previously experienced using computer terminals, and the experience would set their expectations.
So, before putting it out for user testing, we implemented an artificial 5-second response delay.
Users reported that the system was "very fast" and were delighted with it.
At the end of user testing, we rolled out the system to each factory in turn - a total of 8 sites - with the artificial 5-second response delay still in place.
Users reported that the system was "very fast" and were delighted with it.
When the system had bedded-in to a normal production state, we circulated the sites with a memo saying that we were modifying the system response time to speed it up, but that it would then probably vary typically between 1.5 to 3.0 seconds at the most, which was still better than the current 5 second response time they were experiencing.
The users were ecstatic about the system, and reported that it was now "incredibly fast" and were delighted with it.
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