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Firefox and Cyberfox release 39.0 stable

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Curt:
I have 10 addons not yet signed, but working - maybe because I have "Nightly Tester Tools" installed. CWuestefeld's link to "Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks" may (also) be worth following.

MilesAhead:
I have 10 addons not yet signed, but working - maybe because I have "Nightly Tester Tools" installed. CWuestefeld's link to "Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks" may (also) be worth following.

-Curt (July 06, 2015, 06:37 PM)
--- End quote ---

The signing is not yet enforced.  A developer of Firefox extensions tells me he expects it to go into effect in around 60 days.  Of course you can run the old version for some time.  I stayed with Opera 8.52 for years.  But things change more quickly now. Especially with html5 stuff coming on older FF versions will become obsolete faster than ever.

It is similar to secure boot in Windows, only with no way to disable it.  If the extension hasn't been signed it won't fire up.

Edit:  Back in the day of MaxThon 2.x there were lots of MaxThon extension sites.  I used to request features and occasionally help a developer test an extension.  Now search for MaxThon extensions.  There's almost none.  They were destroyed by extension signing.  The same thing will happen to FF.  Like Yogi Berra said: "The future ain't what it used to be."  He got that right.  Sad to say.   :wallbash:

TaoPhoenix:

Meaty rant there, Iain.

I'll poke around the edges.

1. Even if you take the "anarchy" element out of it, you could restate the case in "dry business terms" as simple as the age old "provide a better cleaner alternative to something, with more options and user experience to boot". Then you can use the second vocabulary of the biz books as your choice if you didn't care for the "revolutionary" language.

But now they're scrambling their original "biz message". Who exactly among users *favors* these machine gun updates? "While you were typing this we produced a new update, so that the version you started with is out of date before you are done!"

2. In between things being made directly illegal, is another layer of "corporation games". These include MS's sinking of Nokia via Stephen Elop, the ousting via outing at Firefox, buying up the niche players and then purposely shuttering them while swiping a useful piece of tech knowhow.

3. For all the hollering about "Ed Snowden" and Julian Assange, we have surprisingly few "tell all" sources on our side with nothing to lose who can just bust open a few of these secret agendas. So exactly who benefits in each of four time era periods with the mess going on with signed extensions is far from clear, and there's lots of fun house mirrors obscuring it all, leaving "poor tech board users" (us, and your choice of twelve other boards) to thrash out theories with no definitive tie-breaking intel.

(Aka for all the govt's luv of spying, notice we don't have very many?)

IainB:
@TaoPhoenix: Yes, I reckon you put it very well, and this point in particular is familiar to me because it is tried-and-tested standard/"best" business practice, as taught in Business School 101 (Financial and Management Accounting):
...2. In between things being made directly illegal, is another layer of "corporation games". These include MS's sinking of Nokia via Stephen Elop, the ousting via outing at Firefox, buying up the niche players and then purposely shuttering them while swiping a useful piece of tech knowhow. ...
-TaoPhoenix (July 06, 2015, 08:00 PM)
--- End quote ---

It is a pragmatic 4-step asset-stripping method:

* 1. Acquisition: aquire/buy up (through hostile or friendly takeover) the desired assets and liabilities of the competitive product/producer/technology and run it as a discrete and separate function, for a while.
* 2. Stripping: progressively strip any useful productive competitive assets and IP, absorbing/reorganising them into your main business.
* 3. Preparation: shut down/mothball all residual/unwanted operations and resource costs that remain (including laying off now "non-essential" personnel), treating any losses or costs (e.g., discounted scrap sale, redundancy payouts) as "acquisition costs" or "business transformation costs" and as a charge/write-off against profits, for tax minimisation.
* 4. Disposal: sell/dispose of the remaining assets and liabilities treating any losses as "acquisition costs" and as a charge/write-off against profits, for tax minimisation.
This is what is often termed as being just "business as usual" for the average profitable and cost-efficient corporate psychopath. Any non-profit focussed distractions (e.g., image-building, "pet" projects of the CEO, or philanthropy) along the way are likely to be seriously unprofitable and if taken to excess may even eventually cause a business to collapse - a sobering example of the truth of this would be Control Data Corp.
All's fair in love and war...

TaoPhoenix:
Hmm, there's something a bit "flat" about your "4-step process" that bothers me for feeling incomplete. I feel part of the problem is that portions of the whole effect are actually "innocent", with only malicious later stage opportunistic players "poking" at it.

We're getting to a point where we can't easily "generalize" these scenarios, because they're too tied to specific companies.

So if we're talking about the Decline and Fall of Firefox, somewhere in there is this big Microsoft Internet Explorer meta-game. So Firefox started off as this big "We're SO not IE."

But even in my modest tech understanding, browsers felt like "a thing" that you can try out, or not, at basically your leisure. I think MS has actually made scads of bad business decisions, but their early brilliantly subversive strategy cemented the OS land into a Meta-Game around Windows. To me it's one of the top meta-games in all of computing. Whereas for a browser, "oh look, let's try a new one!"

The company that keeps scaring me (in a tech-amazement sense) is Google.

More in the next post.

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