For over 10 years now I've been a satisfied Firefox user.

Today I finally got fed up with its extreme slowness, and tried to 
install another browser.

I think the thing that really drove it home was that the other day I 
happened to fire up an old VM that's running Firefox 5. It was *so much* 
faster! I could actually look at Google Maps in *realtime*! Not with a 
30-second pause every time I scroll or zoom.

Anyway, I tried Google Chrome, but it *insists* that you have to "log 
in" to allow them to track your movements - er, I mean, synchronise your 
devices. Yeah, that. But more to the point, Hotmail became 
*catastrophically slow*. (I presume this is perfectly intentional.)

So I installed Opera, and I've just spent about an hour trying to force 
it to work the way *I* want it to work, not how it tells me I should 
work. I still haven't found a way to get rid of the annoying Speed Dial 
feature, but at least I managed to force it to give me the Home button 
back. It was trivial to import my bookmarks, but obnoxiously hard to put 
them back on the bookmarks toolbar where they belong. (Assuming you can 
get that to display in the first place.)

I couldn't help noticing how the Opera settings pane looks almost 
pixel-for-pixel *identical* to the Chrome settings window. That seems 
highly suspicious. I also couldn't help noticing that, like Chrome, it's 
extremely anaemic in terms of options and settings. (Indeed, I tried 
Chrome several years ago, and promptly uninstalled it due to the 
complete lack of configurability and features.)

This seems to be a worrying trend. GNOME 2.x had a sea of configuration 
options. GNOME 3.x has almost *nothing*. In order to change anything, 
you have to install user-supplied "extensions". (Oh, did I mention? 
There's no documentation for how to write these extensions. You just 
have to read the source code. Because that's trivial...) It seems 
software producers have somehow got the idea that it's OK to produce a 
product with no configurability, and let a dozen different 3rd parties 
write a dozen mutually-incompatible "extensions" each of which solves a 
different 30% of the problem.

Seriously, you managed to implement a standards-compliant rendering 
engine! That's nearly impossible!! How hard can it be to add a trivial 
GUI for editing the frigging settings?!

(Indeed, judging my various Internet searches, it seems Opera used to 
have a magic URL that leads to a low-level settings dialog, similar to 
what Firefox has. So they removed it. Now the URL just redirects to 
their dumbed-down configuration GUI that won't let you configure 
anything. Good work, guys.)

Having said all that, browsing the Internet is now *drastically faster*! 
Like, I clicked the satellite view on Google Maps and *didn't* have to 
wait 5 minutes for all the bitmaps to load. You can literally scroll 
around the entire planet, zooming in and out, in actual *realtime*. Even 
in satellite view!! And don't get me started on how much faster 
scrolling is in Facebook...

The first time I logged into Hotmail, it was spectacularly broken. (As 
in, none of the CSS loaded, rendering [hah!] the page almost unusable.) 
I have no idea why. It seems to work fine now.

Not completely sure how I'm still logged in to Stack Exchange, even 
though I'm using a completely unrelated web browser...

Who knows? Maybe with another week or so of tinkering, I can force Opera 
to work *almost* the way I want it to...

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Am 16.03.2015 um 21:08 schrieb Orchid Win7 v1:

> This seems to be a worrying trend. GNOME 2.x had a sea of configuration
> options. GNOME 3.x has almost *nothing*. In order to change anything,
> you have to install user-supplied "extensions". (Oh, did I mention?
> There's no documentation for how to write these extensions. You just
> have to read the source code. Because that's trivial...) It seems
> software producers have somehow got the idea that it's OK to produce a
> product with no configurability, and let a dozen different 3rd parties
> write a dozen mutually-incompatible "extensions" each of which solves a
> different 30% of the problem.

Judging from some stuff you posted about Haskell libraries a while ago, 
shouldn't you be familiar with this? :P

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On 16/03/2015 08:18 PM, clipka wrote:
> Am 16.03.2015 um 21:08 schrieb Orchid Win7 v1:
>
>> This seems to be a worrying trend. GNOME 2.x had a sea of configuration
>> options. GNOME 3.x has almost *nothing*. In order to change anything,
>> you have to install user-supplied "extensions". (Oh, did I mention?
>> There's no documentation for how to write these extensions. You just
>> have to read the source code. Because that's trivial...) It seems
>> software producers have somehow got the idea that it's OK to produce a
>> product with no configurability, and let a dozen different 3rd parties
>> write a dozen mutually-incompatible "extensions" each of which solves a
>> different 30% of the problem.
>
> Judging from some stuff you posted about Haskell libraries a while ago,
> shouldn't you be familiar with this? :P

I'm not sure I follow...

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On Mon, 16 Mar 2015 20:08:35 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> Anyway, I tried Google Chrome, but it *insists* that you have to "log
> in" to allow them to track your movements - er, I mean, synchronise your
> devices. Yeah, that. But more to the point, Hotmail became
> *catastrophically slow*. (I presume this is perfectly intentional.)

Chrome doesn't need you to login.  I know people who don't have gmail 
accounts even who use it, so obviously they don't have a password to even 
use.

> This seems to be a worrying trend. GNOME 2.x had a sea of configuration
> options. GNOME 3.x has almost *nothing*. In order to change anything,
> you have to install user-supplied "extensions". (Oh, did I mention?
> There's no documentation for how to write these extensions. You just
> have to read the source code. Because that's trivial...) It seems
> software producers have somehow got the idea that it's OK to produce a
> product with no configurability, and let a dozen different 3rd parties
> write a dozen mutually-incompatible "extensions" each of which solves a
> different 30% of the problem.

GNOME3 has plenty of configuration options, set using dconf-editor.

> Seriously, you managed to implement a standards-compliant rendering
> engine! That's nearly impossible!! How hard can it be to add a trivial
> GUI for editing the frigging settings?!

It isn't, because dconf-editor exists. ;)

Jim

-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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On Mon, 16 Mar 2015 19:44:31 -0400, Jim Henderson wrote:

>> This seems to be a worrying trend. GNOME 2.x had a sea of configuration
>> options. GNOME 3.x has almost *nothing*. In order to change anything,
>> you have to install user-supplied "extensions". (Oh, did I mention?
>> There's no documentation for how to write these extensions. You just
>> have to read the source code. Because that's trivial...) It seems
>> software producers have somehow got the idea that it's OK to produce a
>> product with no configurability, and let a dozen different 3rd parties
>> write a dozen mutually-incompatible "extensions" each of which solves a
>> different 30% of the problem.
> 
> GNOME3 has plenty of configuration options, set using dconf-editor.

Oh, and for creating gnome-shell extensions?

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Extensions

Google with search terms "writing gnome 3 shell extensions".

First hit.

Jim
-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

Post a reply to this message

On 3/16/2015 1:08 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> For over 10 years now I've been a satisfied Firefox user.
>
> Today I finally got fed up with its extreme slowness, and tried to
> install another browser.
>

Firefox's biggest problem seems to be how to threads things. It works 
nicely, if you have NoScript, and leave everything you don't absolutely 
need in the pages scripts "disabled". Its does vastly worse with a lot 
of active scripts, animated gifs, or anything that has to simultaneously 
load as the page does.

But, apparently... they know the problem, but fixing it... would require 
a complete rewrite of the engine it uses... :(

Hotmail... is broken in everything, imho, since they changed things 
there. lol

-- 
Commander Vimes: "You take a bunch of people who don't seem any 
different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get 
this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem."

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On 16/03/2015 11:55 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> GNOME3 has plenty of configuration options, set using dconf-editor.

GNOME 3 uses the gsettings system to hold its configuration settings. 
It's something like the Windows Registry, but harder to use. (E.g., it 
seems to be impossible to access when X11 isn't running. It's 
nightmarishly hard to configure settings for a user who isn't you. It's 
really hard to navigate without a GUI tool. And so on.)

Since OpenSUSE 13.1, gsettings likes to randomly revert certain settings 
every 103 reboots, for no defined reason. This is extremely unhelpful.

But the *most* unhelpful thing is that half the things you want to 
change DON'T HAVE SETTINGS! For example, there is no setting to bring 
back the minimise and maximise buttons; you have to install an extension.

But I guess that's a symptom of another worryingly common problem: GNOME 
3 is *clearly* designed to run on a tablet or a phone. Because nobody 
uses desktop PCs anymore, right? Right?? >_<

> Oh, and for creating gnome-shell extensions?
>
> https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Extensions
>
> Google with search terms "writing gnome 3 shell extensions".
>
> First hit.

Riiiight. Because I haven't already read that page 65,536 times. :-P

Basically, you write a shell extension by writing a JavaScript file that 
contains [at least] three functions with specific names. These functions 
work by MONKEY-PATCHING THE LIVE RUNNING CODE to make it do something 
different. The extension itself is responsible for reverting these 
changes when you disable the extension. (In particular, there are 
extensions that cannot be disabled, or don't disable properly.) Leaving 
this critical detail up to people who don't really know what they're 
doing and have no documentation to go by is... not optimal.

This, then, is how you write a shell extension. And how do you work out 
which part of THE ENTIRE SHELL CODEBASE you need to monkey-patch to make 
the changes you want?

You read the source code.

For the entire shell.

Because there's no documentation. Indeed, one Stack Overflow commenter 
helpfully commented that "there SHOULD be no documentation, because the 
source code is the documentation". No, random Internet user, the source 
code is not and will never be the documentation. Because the source code 
gives you the *implementation* not the *interface*.

Then again, when your entire extensibility platform is fundamentally 
based on purposely breaking encapsulation to start with...

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On 17/03/2015 02:20 PM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Firefox's biggest problem seems to be how to threads things.

That would seem to be the case. Load any moderately complex page, and 
the CPU usage goes sky-high.

Does anybody else remember when everybody started switching to Firefox 
because it was so much faster than IE? People used Firefox even though 
dozens of high-profile web pages only worked with IE. (Like I said, 
running a dated version of Firefox was *so much faster*!) Now, it seems, 
the boot is on the other foot.

It's a shame, because Firefox seems to have some really lovely developer 
tools, if you want to build crazy web-stuff...

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Le 17/03/2015 20:00, Orchid Win7 v1 a écrit :

> But I guess that's a symptom of another worryingly common problem: GNOME
> 3 is *clearly* designed to run on a tablet or a phone. Because nobody
> uses desktop PCs anymore, right? Right?? >_<
> 

Well, I do not use gnome anymore on PC. xfce rules now.
I enjoyed gnome2 and its applets. They lost me with unity & gnome3.

>> Oh, and for creating gnome-shell extensions?
>>
>> https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Extensions
>>
>> Google with search terms "writing gnome 3 shell extensions".
>>
>> First hit.
> 
> Riiiight. Because I haven't already read that page 65,536 times. :-P
> 
> Basically, you write a shell extension by writing a JavaScript file that
> contains [at least] three functions with specific names. These functions
> work by MONKEY-PATCHING THE LIVE RUNNING CODE to make it do something
> different. The extension itself is responsible for reverting these
> changes when you disable the extension. (In particular, there are
> extensions that cannot be disabled, or don't disable properly.) Leaving
> this critical detail up to people who don't really know what they're
> doing and have no documentation to go by is... not optimal.
> 
> This, then, is how you write a shell extension. And how do you work out
> which part of THE ENTIRE SHELL CODEBASE you need to monkey-patch to make
> the changes you want?
> 
> You read the source code.
> 
> For the entire shell.
> 

That's why I now prefer the xfce's run a shell widget (generic monitor):
the output for logo and text is not so fancy, but for periodical
scanning of a resource, it's easy enough to allow me to have want I
wanted (and easy testing), without problem. I could even have the shell
to launch a binary, if I dare to not be portable (and a bit slow for a
double fork)

> Because there's no documentation. Indeed, one Stack Overflow commenter
> helpfully commented that "there SHOULD be no documentation, because the
> source code is the documentation". No, random Internet user, the source
> code is not and will never be the documentation. Because the source code
> gives you the *implementation* not the *interface*.

Right. At best: the documentation is in the source code, for doxygen to
extract. But "Source is all you need" is just bad. Code never explains
the concepts.

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>> But I guess that's a symptom of another worryingly common problem: GNOME
>> 3 is *clearly* designed to run on a tablet or a phone. Because nobody
>> uses desktop PCs anymore, right? Right??>_<
>
> Well, I do not use gnome anymore on PC. xfce rules now.
> I enjoyed gnome2 and its applets. They lost me with unity&  gnome3.

Sadly, this seems to be the way of the world. At work I'm forced to use 
Windows 8, which keeps insisting that my desktop is actually a tablet. 
Complete with low-detail fonts, and an ugly, blocky colour scheme that a 
tablet can handle. Because why would you pay £1,000 for a developer 
workstation and then expect to use it like a developer workstation?

>> Because there's no documentation. Indeed, one Stack Overflow commenter
>> helpfully commented that "there SHOULD be no documentation, because the
>> source code is the documentation". No, random Internet user, the source
>> code is not and will never be the documentation. Because the source code
>> gives you the *implementation* not the *interface*.
>
> Right. At best: the documentation is in the source code, for doxygen to
> extract. But "Source is all you need" is just bad. Code never explains
> the concepts.

Indeed.

All the source code for the Linux kernel is freely available. Yet no 
sane person expects you to actually read the source code to figure out 
how you open a file!

(Then again, the Linux kernel obeys POSIX and similar, so...)

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