I have recently added thenextweb.com to my blacklist domain to make sure that I accidentally don't send them any page views. I'm indifferent about any downvotes that i'll receive as a result of this comment, but for those of you who have realised how "deserving" Zee thinks he is to plagiarise articles, here is an alternate you can read.
(Edit: I'm sure this article here isn't plagiarised. That's not why I provided a link. It's hardly an imaginative story so I'm sure TNW pulled it together themselves. However, when you try and pass yourself off as a legitamate hard working publication, and fail to give credit to someone who essentially wrote and researched your article, there is something intrinsically wrong with your ethics. As a person, I'm not even particularly opinionated, lots can pass me by without me caring: but Zee's attitude disgusted me).
So what we have to do is always find the original sources of thenextweb articles and post those instead.
There is certainly no loss in skipping over thenextweb.
This is just my opinion.
But in my experience they have proven themselves to be all but worthless time and again. It's not just plagiarism. They do not research their stories. They appear to lack any measurable insight into the subject matter. As such, they make a lousy source of news.
A lot of people are probably not aware of it, as it's hard to keep up with every drama on the Internet when you have things to do. I certainly wasn't until today.
(Yes, I realize the irony of this comment, I should be doing things right now.)
That's how nerds get controversial things accomplished without pushback. They do it while the rest of the world, which is busy with other things, isn't looking.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems like the kettle is calling the pot black.
"I used to scrape articles/content written by people. I created my own content management system that would publish entire websites for specific terms."
You mentioned this in a previous comment on another thread. I remember, because it was a fairly big comment, and wasn't long ago. Considering the discussion was on scrapping, I can only imagine you didn't have explicit permission to do so. Indeed, you go on to say:
"Anyway, content would be useful to me, because I would spin in into new content, using a very basic markov chain."
Indeed, the claim you have for not doing this anymore is:
"I don't do this any more since I'm actually working on what will hopefully be a very succesul startup..."
This doesn't grant TNW a free pass. I just found your attitude interesting.
I agree, you definitely make a good point and I make no defense for how I scraped content in the past. Perhaps that is the reason why I took such disgust to his behavior, because I learnt to move on from what I was doing.
But, just to stress one point in case it wasn't obvious from the scraping comment I made, I would never republish the scraped content. (I went out of my way to make this point in my previous comment because in spite of my somewhat "cloudy"/blackhat past, I would never rip off other peoples content. The cloest I would come would be from spinning new content using markov chains, however, when you have an ngram ranging between 3-7 and spread accross thousands of articles, there is surely no copyright infringement through republication of your fabricated content.
Anyway, I agree with what you said about my attitude being interesting.. but peoples attitudes change and the markov chain example was how I used to scrape somewhere near 4-8 years ago.
(Nice comment by the way, if there is anything I would hate to be, is a hypocrite, so a little self reflection is welcome on this subject!)
I figured you saw a lot of what you did in the past, and so for you, this hit a lot closer to home then you'd want to admit.
> The cloest I would come would be from spinning new content using markov chains, however, when you have an ngram ranging between 3-7 and spread accross thousands of articles, there is surely no copyright infringement through republication of your fabricated content.
I think you are lying to yourself. And, honestly, I think deep-down you know it. You seem like a reasonable guy. TNW didn't repeat word for word the article that blew up either. I'm not here to debate this. I think what you did could definitely be argued as copyright infringement. Just because you change a certain number of words doesn't mean you get a free pass.
That's not an issue, however. You realize you made a mistake, and you've moved on. And that, I think, is important. Should we forever shun TNW for mistakes in the past? Should we shun you?
> (Nice comment by the way, if there is anything I would hate to be, is a hypocrite, so a little self reflection is welcome on this subject!)
I'm glad you took it the right way. I was a bit apprehensive about bringing it up. I wanted to make a point, and discuss this. So thank you.
I hope Firefox gains more momentum. I don't trust Google, I don't want them to control everything. FF 13 is fast and modern browser. Installing Ghostery, AdBlock and Firebug makes it perfect.
Firefox used to be my browser of choice, but now it's the worst of all for me.
There are two main problems:
1. Sometimes I start FF and it tells me that its process is still running. It happens too often that I close FF and it fails to properly terminate its process. The result is that I can't open FF until I kill it in the task manager.
2. Firefox is the only browser in which Flash crashes. Almost every day I had to search for the "Plugin container for Firefox" in the task manager and manually kill it.
Today the browsers that "just work" are IE9 and Chrome. I can't use Chrome all the time because it doesn't open images in Twitter, probably because images use http and Twitter uses https. Every browser has its own little problems. Those of Firefox are too much for me.
Sounds like a corrupt profile. If you’re interested in trying to fix it then you could delete your profile and start again (or if you’re running a beta or newer Firefox go to about:support and click on ‘Reset Firefox’).
I know your problem from 1. but after some time on Chrome (Chromium) I realised that it's faster to kill one FF process instead of killing x chrome processes looking for the right one that is broken and still running after I "closed" the browser.
I don't know what it was that crashed my chrome that often. It must have been java or flash because it broke down on pages that are loaded with these.
In the end I came back to ff. All my good addons are there, they all work and if it breaks down it's way faster to kill then chrome.
Initially I tried chrome because I thought it may eat up less memory but the difference was not really big on all the chrome processes compared to the ff one.
Well, I also have the same problem with Firefox, where it does not shut itself down properly. But as for Flash, since recently it started consuming up to 300% of the CPU for me on 32 bit Linux. So I would not say that Chrome is all that bug free.
How is managing the development of something that is totally open source "controlling everything"? That's like claiming that you don't want to use Linux because you don't trust Linus.
The code is there. If they do something you don't like, you can always fork.
Maybe a better counter argument is, that I don't really have a big trust for corporations. I can trust Linus because he's a hacker just like I am. I can trust Mozilla because their goal is to build web as hackers. Then we have a big advertisement company who are building some nice things, but they still have the desire to sell commercials. To gather data about us and do some data mining.
That's the reason I prefer Mozilla over Google as an organization.
Same here. I had switched to Chrome a few months ago but have switched back since then. The last versions of Firefox are a great step toward the perfect browser: excellent performances and startup time, great addons, and a smaller memory footprint than Chrome.
To be fair, Google Chrome is completely open source too, expect for the integrated PDF Reader and Flash. You can compile Chromium from the source and add these two manually, if you need them.
It's a bit of both with a healthy sprinkling of Nokia, Samsung, and quite a few others. In reality, WebKit has been driving the standards process for quite some time now (especially considering its unrivaled dominance on mobile).
It's Google that decides what features and protocols are implemented into Chrome. Since they control a large share of the market, it basically gives them life or death power on new features of web languages.
Full disclosure: I work on Chrome. Accepting that, I think it's pretty clear that Iron is scamware. It's just an outdated Chromium build with some hardcoded preferences and support for a text file of blocked URLs (something far better implemented by extensions). The creator makes money from ads on the homepage, default search provider, and install page. You can read a bit more background here:
Coincidentally, I recently poked at Iron to determine if it includes the security and stability fixes we merge for stable releases. So, I tried to get the source code to make the analysis easier. It turns out there's no repository, and I had to wait eight hours pulling 1GB of archives from Rapidshare. When I finally opened it I found a tarball from Chrome 6, which is almost two years old (even though Iron is obviously using Chrome 18). So, I don't think the creator is very concerned about keeping up pretenses (like being an open source project) anymore.
My understanding was it was a 'fake' in that it offered 0 more than vanilla chromium in terms of separation from google/privacy (although chromium is a pain to update- and even somewhat difficult to find downloads for).
Agreed. Internet Explorer with TPL support is a better proposition than Chrome. Firefox as well. Both browsers are putting the user first and not the vendor.
Chrome is simply not trustworthy. Why would you get a browser from an advertising company that uses people's data to make money?
Google Chrome is completely open source and can be easily compiled from the source (expect for its integrated Flash player and PDF reader). If you don't like something about it, please change it.
People are using an open source browser + Flash Player + PDF Reader.
If you don't trust Google's Flash player and PDF reader, feel free to take them out. In fact, you don't have to, because using Chromium would be equivalent to doing this.
People arent using trademarks, they are using software. And the same is slso true for FF. The open source one is called iceweasel, because the logo and name of Firefox are protected.
A compiled chromium source is identical to Google Chrone, except for the icon and name. Just like with Firefox.
* The Firefox logo is not released under a free license
* The Firefox name and logo are trademarked, and Mozilla has strict policies you must adhere to if you want to use them
However, you can build Firefox without using the name or logo. Requiring derived works to have different branding does not mean a program is not open source or free software.
Being a web dev, I tend to keep a collection of browsers open all the time - Chrome for email, twitter, calendar, bug tracker etc. Firefox for development (Firebug FTW). Midori for state-less browsing (it empties caches and data when restarted, so I use that when I need a clean session). And Opera for social, personal, fun, feeds and reading etc.
They all have their strengths, but I'm still amazed Opera doesn't have a higher share.
Opera has been ahead of the curve for features virtually forever (currently: tab stacking, right click anywhere to add search, and 'g searchterm' syntax). It is also much more memory-efficient than chrome/FF with many tabs.
I think it has just never been seen as 'sexy' by the tech geeks, and therefore never evangelised.
Surprisingly Opera's strong showing in mobile/wii didn't impact the desktop. Does HN think it might do better if it was open-sourced?
Yes I agree that Opera has had lots of great ideas, many which have later been introduced into the 'mainstream' browsers and yet they (Opera) fail to generate any marketshare.
Perhaps it is because it's closed sourced, I don't know.
Personally I went with Firefox rather than Opera back in the day mainly due to Firefox extensions (nowadays Opera supports extensions aswell) and have stuck with it since I know it so well and it works fine.
> right click anywhere to add search, and 'g searchterm' syntax
Both of these features are available in both Firefox and Chrome by default. I don't know about tab stacking (since I have no interest in the feature), but it's probably possible in Firefox with an extension, but not in Chrome.
I wonder if it's something as simple as the name 'Opera' (why?) Having said that Firefox and Chrome are pretty lousy names too, it doesn't seem to have done them any harm.
Opera seems to face the chicken and egg problem. Many websites that are specifically optimized for some browsers don't work on Opera. They don't consider opera for its low user numbers. And users are not not easily attracted to a feature rich browser where some sites don't work. I've used Opera for many years but when they had a bit of a buggy release (I think it was around Opera 10) I switched to Chrome, albeit with some sad feelings (I miss fast forward the most).
Just some days ago I tried to sign up to Hulu on my wife's macbook and suddenly the input fields didn't work anymore. It's probably a bit of an outdated version (10.x), but still.
I had a whole host of problems with the 10.x line. My PowerPC cried when I updated from an earlier version. It certainly felt like beta software.
Looks like they are back on track. I like the renaming of the upcoming release. A little sad to see Unite go. Perhaps it wasn't the right time - it always looked like a bit of a security nightmare.
I never understood what they wanted to do with Unite. A browser might also be a good E-Mail client, but an OS? As long as you can't boot directly into it like Chrome OS, it doesn't make much sense IMO.
I really like the idea of having a server running in your browser (providing it being secure!) NAT and firewalls, and non 24/7 up time being a problem, but not a show stopper.
Open services should be easily accessible/usable in the OS layer and across networks, but I guess they currently aren't - without some skill.
If I take my laptop around someone's house and want to share a few files - how easy is this? If I want to just play some tunes, or a video from my laptop on someone else's PC or set top, how trivial is it? Not very. At least not for the mythical average user.
A decentralised web sounds good to me also. And lowering the barriers to web publishing where you have control over the content in my eyes is a good thing.
Unite though feels like a component that could live happily outside of the browser (again ideally in the OS layer). The email client could be standalone also. Unless they want to go the Chrome OS way.
Yeah Opera had a bad patch then. I think it was because they started to integrate with the native OS desktops.
I remember trying to sign up to ebay - I had to move through three different browsers - then swap Operating system and move over to Internet Explorer - because of some weird bugs!
That's not poking a hole at any of the other browsers, but it's to say that quirks can be found in all of them (even if that's through fault of the page author.) Under those circumstances it's just easier to move over to another browser.
In other news, the hemorrhage of Firefox users has been stabilized in January 2012, and it has been picking up market share for the last weeks (from 24.67% to 26.42%).
Who to trust? There is a 20% difference with StatCounter and NetApplications. And according to NetApplicaitons IE is gaining O_o. I wish Google can tell its own statistics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
According to the page you linked, the difference is because NetApplication uses unique daily users instead of page hits. NetApplications also uses some different weighting per country. StatCounter also use a much larger sample, 3 million websites vs 40k.
I would guess, this means there are still more people using IE, but those using Chrome use the internet more often?
I always find Net Applications' market share numbers misleading and inaccurate. Whatever method they are using for measuring market share, I'm sure it's flawed.
Not sure why I got a down vote for this. Probably as it's anecdotal? What I should have said: from my experience Chrome feels snappier with Javascript performance at least while playing typeracer. And I read into that, that JS games perform better under Chrome.
I wouldn't worry about random downvotes, no karma system works. 'snappiness' is a potential driving factor for Chrome use. I'll try and do some research on users at some point.
Which-is-beter aside, this seems like a very healthy mix for competition & inovation:
75% split roughly even between 3 players. The big three are all very different (Community led Open Source, Bundled with the OS & Mega Company led Open Source). Developers can still feasibly test for major browsers. Everyone will be aware they have a choice. There is room in the remaining 25% for new players to emerge.
Really, it's always struck me as odd that Microsoft hasn't thought about open sourcing IE. Presumably there's a tangled mess of proprietary code that they would have to sort out first, but it's already the case that the majority of users are browsing the web using open source browsers. There's no longer any hope of financial incentive for being closed source. In fact, it's more of a liability than anything these days...
I don't think there's any question Chrome is going to win the Second Broswer War. The question is only when we all agree it's over.
The monopoly issue seems even more troublesome this time, as compared with when Microsoft was trying to tie the browser to the desktop PC OS, because the web and search is actually Google's core business.
If I were working on Chrome I would find myself wondering, "So what happens after we become the browser that 99% of the web uses and develops for? What if ChromeOS follows a similar path? Is that going to be good for the web in the long term? What if Google's business starts to slow down? We have created a virtual strangehold over the web. We might have to use it more aggressively."
Or maybe not. All that free food. The big bonuses. The great things we achieved. In the near term, we have seriously made things better for everyone. Life's just too good to think business could ever falter. Maybe I might never have such thoughts. I'm just an engineer. I'm just doing my job. I can't worry about these things.
The amount of control one company is developing over something so essential as the web is just obscene.
Google has been the defacto gatekeeper of the web for some time now.
The nice thing is that their business model doesn't seem to revolve around locking people into any particular system.
In fact they want the opposite, as far as they are concerned everyone should be equal in terms of clicking on ads.
Google's business model does in fact involve around locking people into Google's services. To the extent that lockin into a particular system makes that easier, they are quite happy with such lockin.
Google's goal is to make sure you see their ads. To the extent that having compelling free services helps, they're doing compelling free services.
But the goal is user eyeballs, not having compelling free services. So Google is perfectly happy to do other things that help ensure users will use said services.
The difference this time is that the whole thing is open source. If it goes off the rails, we don't have to have someone start fromt the ground up fixing it. Just start building from the last good version.
I hate these type of articles. Out of all the sites I run and help with I have yet to see Chrome be the number 1 browser used.
IE still accounts for the majority of all traffic. It has always been in my experience IE, Firefox then Chrome. With IE holding roughly 40-50% of the share.
Agreed. I monitor about 100 domains, mostly small business websites here in the US and none (I repeat NONE) have Chrome anywhere even close to Firefox, let alone IE which commands the first spot on almost every site.
I don't know where or who these Chrome users are, but they certainly aren't visiting your bread and butter small biz websites.
At first you had to pay for it, then it was annoying adware. Sure, it was a snappy browser and I even used it for a while, mouse gestures etc. But there were always good enough free browsers available.
When they removed the ads in 2005 it was far too late, Firefox had changed the game.
Having just switched from Firefox to Chrome myself, this makes me happy. Chrome is definitely one of the best browsers I have ever used/developed and debugged websites in. Best of all, no memory leaks either.
Concur that a switch to either Chrome or Firefox is a win. Both have been competing with each other after Chrome raised the bar. In either case winner is the user.
Personally, I have been using Chrome and Firefox both. Firefox being the primary browser for browsing the wild web and Chrome for development and for using Google's services.
I'm a diehard Firefox user, but I'm very glad that Chrome is there to offer some real competition.
Back in the Firefox 3.6 days, Mozilla was beginning to get a little lazy, somewhat like Microsoft in the IE6 days. Then Chrome came along and Mozilla realized that they had to compete. It took them a couple of years to catch up, but now Firefox is a worthy competitor to Chrome and vice versa.
If Microsoft would have written IE versions beyond 8 to work with XP, IE might have been able to hang in at #1 longer since the later versions of IE aren't as bad.
I know I'll be happy when I see IE 8 usage drop sufficiently low in my logs to allow me to stop attending to its limitations while developing.
I use Chrome, but I really want(ed) FireFox to win this. I don't like helping Google gain another market, but FireFox ruined its browser with bad performance / memory leaks. FireFox left me no choice and I assume most web developers and technology peeps made a decision similar to mine.
Give a try to both and compare. Since you were resolute enough to make a switch out of performance concerns, you can as well switch again ;) Personally I never found Firefox to be performing bad enough to switch, even though Chrome could be better some time ago.
http://memeburn.com/2012/05/its-official-chrome-is-the-webs-...
(I'm referring to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972651 incase you missed out on how TNW's Zee just totally does not get it).
(Edit: I'm sure this article here isn't plagiarised. That's not why I provided a link. It's hardly an imaginative story so I'm sure TNW pulled it together themselves. However, when you try and pass yourself off as a legitamate hard working publication, and fail to give credit to someone who essentially wrote and researched your article, there is something intrinsically wrong with your ethics. As a person, I'm not even particularly opinionated, lots can pass me by without me caring: but Zee's attitude disgusted me).