I just want to thank SumatraPDF's creator, he literally saved my sanity from the evil that Adobe Acrobat Reader is. He probably saved millions of people thousands of hours of frustration using Acrobat Reader.

Isn't evolution great! They will be automatically filtered out from the gene pool. The only problem I see then is that because of the growing number of them, the rest of the gene pool will also disappear as birth rates go down, less and less young people WORKING, less taxes paid, social security system collapses, society collapses, AI robots takes over. ps: It just hit me, using the same Darwin, AI robots are superior to humans, so .................................... fruck ... we're doomed.

I use teddit(dot)net. Let's hope it survives these changes. I quit reddit years ago. Not worth it. An echo chamber.

Wait what?!

PhD in Physics here.

It's extremely frustrating, whenever a link like this, i.e outside of the IT and programming field, is posted, the number of people, who clearly have ZERO understanding of the subject matter, try so hard to sound smart. It's almost turning HN to another reddit!

To suggest that people like Weinberg was just researching imaginary things is so unbelievably ignorant. Not to mention suggesting that there must always be ONE theory that explains everything from the get-go with no disagreements whatsoever.

Physics/Science has always worked like that: many attempts at explaining a phenomena, after which ONE will be tested and shown to be the "closest" to the truth. And by closest, I mean closest.

I don't even want to begin to address that last abhorrently stupid and ignorant last sentence: "if you don't know the structure of glass you're not a scientist." SHUT UP. If you don't know what physics is, STAY HUMBLE when you comment on it.

> , i.e outside of the IT and programming field, is posted, the number of people, who clearly have ZERO understanding of the subject matter, try so hard to sound smart

It's the same thing with respect to IT and programming articles too, most programming articles that hit the front page have a bunch of comments explaining why the author is the problem with programming today and the technology they're discussing is not useful and all the best shit was invented in the 70s and there's no been no progress since lol.

My comment went from, like +10 votes to -1 and flagged in 1 hour.

Is this your doing or someone else?

I also have a PhD in Physics, everyone I know in my field agrees with me, including my professors. Sorry, but disagreeing with me is NOT a reason to be flagging comments. If it wasn't you then the apologies, I guess my comment is for whoever did it.

since you're in the field, what could be the cause of the "lack of progress" ? We need detector that are too hard to build to get the data/measurements we need to progress ? Or do we lack a sort of "flash" when someone figures the new physics out of the current knowledge by a change of point of view ?

Not parent, but the cause is obvious to everybody in the field: existing fundamental theory (general relativity from 1915 and Standard Model, completed by the mid-70s) while manifestly incomplete, is consistent with all available experimental data.

New accelerator experiments capable of pushing significantly beyond the explored energy range would take a decade+ to build and cost tens of billions (and up), and there is no guarantee that they would find anything new.

I use teddit. Quit reddit some time ago. Don't like my thought to be checked by 6 mods.

What makes you think there is a connection between Firefox market share and the decisions happening at Mozilla?

This is not 2005. No matter how good Firefox is—I'd argue it's still the best browser out there—Chrome, Edge, and Safari are backed by the biggest corporations in the history of the world behind them. It's not a meritocracy. The decline could be inevitable.

By analogy, we could look at the decline of film studios. The quality of major studio films has declined with the popularity of Marvel films. From the perspective of people that care about the industry from a critical perspective, it's a disaster. From the perspective of Disney, they are merely leveraging their advantages in existing market share, brand awareness, and advertising to beat everyone else.

It's hard to show causation, in general, for anything, but here's a theory.

Mozilla is making decisions to remove power-user features, which is alienating power-users (we've got a whole comment-section of them right here).

This doesn't directly kill marketshare, because there aren't that many power-users. But every time Mozilla alienates another web developer, one less website works in Firefox. When websites stop working right, that's when marketshare really drops.

Also, I'm not convinced the quality of major studio films has dropped as a result of the Marvel era. It just seems that way because 1) we tend to forget the worst films when looking back into the past and 2) Covid really is hurting studio budgets.

> I'd argue it's still the best browser out there—Chrome, Edge, and Safari are backed by the biggest corporations in the history of the world behind them

You didn't define what makes a browser 'best' so hard to argue there (although I would argue otherwise, at least on Mac, Firefox is nowhere near being the 'best' browser if by 'best' you mean fastest, most battery efficient and best native OS integrations).

Also Mozilla is 'backed' by the same corporation 'backing' Chrome (90% of its revenue coming from Google).

So I believe case could be made that there is a very real correlation between Firefox market share and the decisions happening at Mozilla.

Getting paid for ads is not "backed", Googles budget for Chrome dwarfs all competition.

So you mean it's not their fault. They are just victims. I understand now.

No; blame is a moral concept, and I did not invoke it.

You seem to think Mozilla could have competed with the likes of Google and Microsoft if only they would have made better decisions, or because Firefox once had the largest market share. This is far from obvious.

I agree, there was a perception that Mozilla was, not just a browser vendor, but a tech company and an (successful) outsider against giants like Google or Microsoft.

This image was gone the moment Mozilla via its foundation started to push partisan politics after the eviction of Eich. Using Mozilla's Firefox instead of browser XYZ was also a militant (but non partisan) act.

The removal of the Rust, Servo teams and the MDN team, abandoning Firefox OS, all avenues of possible growth, completely mismanaged since Eich's departure, didn't help either.

Management at Mozilla certainly is at fault.

People take bad decision using Chrome.

FWIW I use a greasemonkey script called "google hit hider by Domain". I used it to manually permaban all pinterest domains when they appear and now I almost never see a single pinterest result in my searches.

This comment is seemingly a reaction to the post's title and doesn't address (or even acknowledge) the contents of article. Do you disagree with the technical rationale the author has presented?

(article author) Pretty sure I didn't write that :)