SGI: Development

mattst88 wrote: What the heck were they thinking when they started depending on technologies that our beloved IRIX doesn't have?! Don't they know how many IRIX users they have? I can't believe they'd alienate such a huge and important user-base like that. And, doing all of that over the objections of the many IRIX developers who begged and pleaded with them to just not use such a new (from the year 2000!) technology like Xrender.

To be serious for a moment, what did they accomplish by making this change ? On purpose, I keep up to date with Fireflop on Windows and use it at least half an hour a day. Version 11 here right now (Did Autodesk Disease strike Mozilla ? Straight from 3 to 10 ? Nice.)

From a user's perspective, it is not one bit better than version 2 on Irix. It doesn't crash as often but that's the only improvement. It still locks up, ignoring the user, if you load several slow sites in tabs. STILL , even though this behaviour was discouraged in 1995. Books were written about how to avoid this but our great wunderprogrammers at Mozilla apparently can't read. Are they are too busy incorporating "new technologies !" that don't achieve a damned thing to actually fix the fucking useless code ! ??

And oh ! the Javascript is 200 times faster ! That's nice. Now websites can add 200 extra javascripts to track me. That's a real improvement. Super, Mozilla. Thanks.

It's all well and good to sneer at users because we aren't current, uptodate, high-falutin' gofast groovy withit technogeeks but that voice would carry a little more weight if all this churn actually accomplished something. As it is, Firefox 11 is still shit. All the Xrender, gtk2, whizzbang lovely New Technology gimmicks in the book can't change that. Whacking one's wee-wee about how cool and groovy the latest greatest is, doesn't make the app worth spit.

Let's reposition this discussion to a different setting. I have a 150 mph race bike. The front brakes don't work very well. I come flying into turn 11 and grab a handful, get nothing, go down on my ass. Push the thing back to the pits and what does Mozilla want to do ? Install a halogen headlight and fuel injection. "It's great new technology ! You're just snivelling !"

No. I'm not snivelling. The Mozilla idiots don't fix the real problems but they do make their new versions unworkable on anything besides their own dream platform. That's why Phoenix exists - Mozilla was a loser twelve years ago and they are the same losers today. All they managed to do was destroy the product that people really wanted.

btw, Mozilla ? The Browser Wars were over fifteen years ago. You lost.

I wonder what's gonna happen when they catch up with Chrome - in terms of version numbers of course, since this seems to be how they still try to fight - by increasing them without any real improvements under the hood, I've given up on Mozilla some time ago, had to apologize only once (this morning actually) when Japanese Yahoo Auction said No to Safari and No to Chrome - their "wysiwyg" auction editor doesn't support either of my browsers, had to go to FF to shut it up, thanks Yahoo. I'm pretty sure they only meant support for IE [[vomiting]]

Oh, and Dillo, nah didn't have time, might give it a try sometime but haven't moved anywhere beyond failed attempts to compile fltk due to that XBOW messed up.

As you mention Firefox 2.0, it's a pretty accurate breakover. From all my memories (started using firefox in 0.7), 2.0 was the slowest version of firefox ever. Until 2.0 Firefox kept growing and got slower and slower, and starting at 3, they began pushing "new technologies" and the browser got faster again. And Firefox keeps getting faster in every version ever since.

I have nothing to complain about. Sure, it's pity for legacy platforms, but actually I can fully understand dropping legacy stuff for the good of a large majority of users.

PS: what's wrong with all those people arguing about version numbers? it's just naming. of course there are fewer changes between versions, but previously you had to wait >1y to get a feature, that was already developed.

kubatyszko wrote: I wonder what's gonna happen when they catch up with Chrome - in terms of version numbers of course, since this seems to be how they still try to fight - by increasing them without any real improvements under the hood, I've given up on Mozilla some time ago, had to apologize only once (this morning actually) when Japanese Yahoo Auction said No to Safari and No to Chrome - their "wysiwyg" auction editor doesn't support either of my browsers, had to go to FF to shut it up, thanks Yahoo. I'm pretty sure they only meant support for IE [[vomiting]]

It really looks like a rerun of the browser wars. I'm even back to using smartcache to get rid of all the crap that websites are trying to jam down my throat. ESAD, websites.

Oh, and Dillo, nah didn't have time, might give it a try sometime but haven't moved anywhere beyond failed attempts to compile fltk due to that XBOW messed up.

fltk was easy, even I got that to work It was the next step that caused difficulties ... anyway. As oreissig points out below us, lots of people are happy with the new browsers. If they want to do whatever they do, that's cool. I have no real complaint with friesflop 2.00.0000.00022 except that it crashes and locks up. The other options I've looked at require too much expertise, time and effort to get running. So I ordered a bigger hard drive and plan to put 2.00.000.22.000 up on cvs and start there. Strip a little crap out here, make an improvement there, fix a couple of the fatal flaws somewhere else, maybe borrow some repairs from other projects, see what can be done. The FoxTenFour project is kind of inspirational. Eventually it would be nice to rework that mess to fix the basic design flaws but even if that never happens, forward movement is better than falling behind. Even if it quit doing

on a regular basis, that would be an improvement.

oreissig wrote: PS: what's wrong with all those people arguing about version numbers? it's just naming. of course there are fewer changes between versions, but previously you had to wait >1y to get a feature, that was already developed.

There is probably quite a lot wrong with me I guess, but that's a subject for another topic....

Cheers

(Apologies to the original poster. If this were a mailing list, I'd have changed the Subject line.)

(snipped some butt-hurt trolling from your quote)

hamei wrote:

mattst88 wrote: What the heck were they thinking when they started depending on technologies that our beloved IRIX doesn't have?! Don't they know how many IRIX users they have? I can't believe they'd alienate such a huge and important user-base like that. And, doing all of that over the objections of the many IRIX developers who begged and pleaded with them to just not use such a new (from the year 2000!) technology like Xrender.

To be serious for a moment, what did they accomplish by making this change ? On purpose, I keep up to date with Fireflop on Windows and use it at least half an hour a day.

I don't know if you know what XRender is, so to make sure everyone's on the same page: it's a hardware-accelerated 2D rendering API for X dating back to XFree86 4.0.1 in 2000. So, by using it, they accelerate the rendering of webpages, specifically anti-aliased text. Of course you wouldn't see any benefits from this on Windows.

hamei wrote: From a user's perspective, it is not one bit better than version 2 on Irix. It doesn't crash as often but that's the only improvement.

Why do you think anyone upstream would care about IRIX? The people working on Firefox (and all other Free Software for that matter) are doing it because (1) they're paid by their employer to do so (ie, paid to care), or (2) because they've got a personal desire to do so.

If you expect that some employer should care about IRIX, then you're deluding yourself. But I don't think you think that. So, that leaves us with individuals who personally care about Firefox on IRIX.

Perhaps you should complain to them about how Firefox on IRIX sucks. That's only marginally more ridiculous than the current attitude that no one who works on Firefox knows what the fuck he's doing and if they'd only just listen to you (and perhaps support IRIX!) then everything would be right with the world.

hamei wrote: And oh ! the Javascript is 200 times faster ! That's nice. Now websites can add 200 extra javascripts to track me. That's a real improvement. Super, Mozilla. Thanks.

Although you may be too much of a luddite to recognize it, that is actually quite nice indeed. Maybe you don't care about sites like Gmail or any other Google site, or any of the benefits a JavaScript JIT compiler provides.

hamei wrote: It's all well and good to sneer at users because we aren't current, uptodate, high-falutin' gofast groovy withit technogeeks but that voice would carry a little more weight if all this churn actually accomplished something.

I think your view of how free software is developed is totally warped. You shouldn't expect someone to maintain something like IRIX support when they're (1) not being paid to do it, and (2) have no personal interest in it. If it's important to you, then you should help maintain Firefox on IRIX.


I wouldn't normally bother to respond to things like this, but I've noticed that this how dare they not support IRIX?! attitude around here way too much. I don't know if it comes from a weird sense of entitlement or from a lack of understanding of how the free software you're lucky to have is developed. The people who write it don't write it for you. They don't owe a thing to you and in fact you should be quite thankful that they did spend their time and effort to write something as complex as Firefox or gcc, which I often see bitched about around here), or any of the other countless free software projects that work on IRIX.

As IRIX heads into oblivion (eg, gcc 4.8 has dropped IRIX 6.5) it becomes easier to make the comparison to older operating systems like ULTRIX. Would it be reasonable for the last remaining ULTRIX user to complain loudly about how recent gcc doesn't support his DECstation 5000/240?

So, I don't know. If you care about free software continuing to run on IRIX then write some code, and if you can't write code then you could pay someone who can. If you can't do either of these, maybe ask nicely? If you can't do that, then you shouldn't talk at all.

They are? Damn.

zizban wrote: They are? Damn.

it has already been obsoleted in 4.7 , so it's the normal way to go for gcc to remove obsoleted stuff in the next version

Oh well. Go, um, away for a few years and see what you learn. I guess this will make porting software a tad harder?

zizban wrote: I guess this will make porting software a tad harder?

In the very long term, yes probably. But it will take quite some time before GCC 4.7 is too old for software to build with it. I don't think this is a serious issue for at least the next 5 years. This thread here shows, that even now GCC is not the main issue when trying to build software on IRIX.