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Firefox Friday: net neutrality and free speech edition
I'm back! Back from the cold, grey, barren wastes of the North. It seems, while I've been away, that people have busy been pissing around with things that really should be left well alone. First, you surely heard about the crazy Appeals Court decision that Comcast could do whatever it likes to the users of its network. I could try to describe this lunacy in words, but a guttural noise says it better: gnrugleghh!Next up we have the UK's rushed-through-dying-parliament Digital Economy Bill. I know Americans find it hard to get worked up by things happening outside their border, but please, just think about it: the Internet is only as free as its most restrictive point. Consider the Internet from a Chinese or North Korean point of view -- do you think they see the Internet in the same light as Americans or Europeans?
The United Kingdom's passing of the Digital Economy Bill, along with the gradual tightening of copyright and censorship laws throughout the EU to satisfy European Directives, is the beginning of the end for the English-language Internet. In a few weeks, months or years, the British -- or Comcast's customers -- might simply disappear from the Internet.
All it takes is the decision of an ill-informed, lobbied or whipped judge or lawmaker to sign on the dotted line. I urge you, wherever you live, that next time such a court case or bill comes up for review, please write to your local representative. In most cases, the representatives simply don't know enough about the Internet to make an informed decision -- you can change that!
With that out of the way, let's get stuck into some Firefox-specific news!
If you haven't been following the 'meta' development of Firefox add-ons, take a look at Jetpack. While, outwardly, things have been very quiet at Mozilla, there are some very cool projects like Jetpack going on behind the scenes. Jetpack is Firefox's next extension paltform -- and the Single UI Element is simply the latest development. Rather than having to hunt-and-peck for add-on configuration, developers are given the option of putting a single button in the extension bar (as you see above). You'd be forgiven for thinking it looks like Chrome.
In other Jetpack news, there's a neat article on Mozilla Labs comparing Jetpack Page Mods to (Greasemonkey) User Scripts. It looks like Jetpack will be able to execute both, and they'll each have different primary uses. There's definitely been a lot of movement away from on-every-page-load extensions towards on-demand user scripts, and Jetpack definitely looks set to cover the whole gamut of necessary functionality.
This is all developer stuff tho' -- so let me move onto something for the end-user!
It's definitely not flawless -- and it's labelled 'experimental' for a reason! -- but PixelZoomer is a fantastic, time-saving tool for all web-designers. Ultimately, it takes a screenshot of the site you're currently on, and lets you zoom in. Once zoomed in, you check the Hex colour of a given pixel, or work out the pixel width of a given element.
Basically, it saves you having to copy/paste a screenshot into Photoshop before performing your analysis -- hooray!
Despite only turning their focus towards stability at the tail-end of 2009, Mozilla has already squeezed out a 40% improvement in Firefox's stability. Improvements have been made in three active branches -- 3, 3.5 and 3.6 -- but the changes are most pronounced with the newest release.
As to why Firefox itself is 'more crashy' than other browsers, Firefox product lead Mike Beltzner comments: "A funny thing happened between Firefox 3 and Firefox3.5. We climbed over 20% market share, and all of a sudden a bunch of 3rd party software started building on top of Firefox. They were calling deep within our APIs, and when we changed the code in Firefox 3.5, that resulted in crashes. We had taken our eyes off the statistics, and didn't see this happening early enough."
The 40% reduction came from the Firefox team taking a long, hard look at where in the codebase 3rd party apps were causing crashes... and fixing them! Voila. There are bonus points if you can work out what caused the huge spikes, though.
Has the community at large noticed the huge reduction in Firefox crashes? Let us know in the comments -- and I wonder if anyone's produced similar 'crash graphs' for other browsers. Maybe Firefox doesn't deserve its moniker of the least stable browser...!
Comments
15
Subscribe to commentsDr. Blight [Team SEGA!]Apr 9th 2010 2:42PM
It's a lot better. Now if they can ship the OoO processes in 3.6.4 and fix the memory leaks, it'll be the best browser by a wide margin.
Sebastian AnthonyApr 9th 2010 5:06PM
Ya! I forgot that OoP was finally coming in to the main branch -- we could be on to a good thing :)
DynamoApr 9th 2010 2:57PM
Regarding Net Neutrality, you're completely wrong. Thank goodness those judges understand the law.
Have you ever considered that Comcast was working in its customers' best interests when it throttled back bit torrents during peak hours? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer getting a decent ping on my game, or be able to have a video chat with grandma without disconnecting than have the idiot completionist down the hall be able to get all the episodes of Golden Girls in four hour rather than five.
All traffic does not have the same priority, and being able to set prices for different customers' needs is important for any business. Businesses depending on a VoIP network will be willing to pay for the reliability they need. If the government gets in the way and says they can't do that, all bits have to be treated the same, then everyone will get the same lousy service -- which will continue to degrade because there will no longer be a financial incentive to improve networks.
The push for Net Neutrality baffles me. The drive to ration a man-made, and essentially limitless resource to prevent a largely mythical limitation on a tiny minority's 'right' to suck as much bandwidth as they possibly can is senseless. There are more dangerous threats the panic-mongers could be devoting their energies to. Like unicorn attacks, for instance.
Dr. Blight [Planeteer | Power of Blast Processing]Apr 9th 2010 3:01PM
Yeah, people shouldn't be in favor of regulation. The Internet has done as well as it has without shackles.
AnthonyApr 9th 2010 3:52PM
Just curious, but, do you work for Comcast? I can tell you plenty of times where I've been working on a Comcast connection and have been downthrottled for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON! Same with Cox (who seems to be a carbon-copy of Comcast). No, it's NOT Comcastic, and Cox is not my friend in the digital age. The networks suck! Fix them! Maybe it's time to extend "Hybrid Fiber-Coax" to the point where customers are connected by coax to a more capable hub with larger fiber connections. Or, maybe it's time to ditch HFC all together and bring Fiber-to-the-Home with the terminating point in the home being coax. Plus, I'm tired of seeing this 50 Mbps limit on the DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems for the same price I could get the full 100 Mbps from Cablevision.
Sebastian AnthonyApr 9th 2010 5:06PM
I think some regulation is good -- it's only natural, when something gets big and gnarly -- but you have to draw a very fine line between what the provider can and cannot do.
It's especially problematic in countries where there are monopolies -- or, in this case, where Comcast is the only ISP in a given region. Yes, Comcast CAN bitchslap its users but SHOULD it?
I guess I just believe that people come before faceless corporations...
Dr. Blight [Planeteer | Power of Blast Processing]Apr 9th 2010 5:35PM
Yeah, but the problem is that once you allow some regulation, you can't stop them from getting more. What's to stop them from banning all torrent downloads? And regulating the content on the internet?
Sebastian AnthonyApr 10th 2010 6:37AM
Well, due to its decentralized nature, I don't think regulation will exactly sneak up on us -- first there's China, North Korea... and France is sneaking in that direction...
The lynch pin is, as always, the USA -- as long as they have free 'nets, we should be OK :)
Praveen PremchandranApr 9th 2010 11:12PM
Totally Off-topic... Well not entirely..
Anyone notice Seb's Firefox Friday *Five* is missing Five in its title, and also 2 sub-topics, making it plain old Firefox Friday?
LOLz...
Sebastian AnthonyApr 10th 2010 6:35AM
Dude, two sub-topics plus three add-ons makes FIVE!
Praveen PremchandranApr 10th 2010 9:01AM
nice save there ;)
mahApr 10th 2010 4:09AM
The US appeals court wasn't so "crazy", they simply determined that the FCC hadn't been given the authority to mandate net neutrality. If congress decided to make that part of the FCC's mission, all would be kosher.
Of course, this would be yet another example of congress tell companies how to work instead of nurturing an environment in which other companies can compete and provide what the consumer is looking for. Competition breeds success, regulation stifles innovation.
enerGIApr 10th 2010 7:31AM
Im running Firefox 3.6.3, and if i leave the laptop ticking over on a site, say downloadsquad, i cop a "Firefox is not responding" error and the whole system freezes up. Its only started doing this since the last Firefox update. My laptop is only used to check out the net and keep upto date with the news, i don't use it for work. Its starting to drive me nuts when it freezes up, though i think Norton 360 could be a part of the problem too. Of course it could have something to do with me running Vista on it :p, time for Windows 7 me thinks, and to give Norton the ass lol
laeroApr 10th 2010 11:53AM
With the Digital Economy [sic] Bill and the Comcast affair I'm glad I live in a country where at least a dozen or so different ISPs want my money and the only one snooping the net is a bureau that needs a court to enforce their decisions to actually do something.
AntonyApr 10th 2010 8:36PM
I am a uk citizen, and im outraged at this bullplop of a law
this law allows for websites that might in the future have illegal content on to be blocked (censorship)
it allows basically for us to be spied on to get even the faintest idea of what is illegal and what isn't
tens of thousands are writing to their mp's in disgust at this bill me included,
their was only 189 mp's who voted for this bill they didn't even listen to the debate they strolel din after and voted in favor like headless chickens, 49 against they didn't stand a chance, out of out of 600+ mp's the rest didn't even bother to show up, they have all lost their votes in many peoples eyes
there is only one news paper covering this story the gaurdian props to them
the mainstream media over here is ignoring our plight, it's not been shown once on tv, effectively silenced our opposition to this disgusting act,
we need all the help we can get to campaign against these china style censorship laws and its just not happening in the theater of mainstream news...