For people who haven’t read the linked release notes: Mozilla is not dropping support for Windows 7-8.1 or macOS 10.12-10.14 at this time. Those users will be migrated to Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release, an LTS branch) that will receive monthly security fixes and some feature fixes for at least another 14 months.
Thanks, I did not realize that. I have one hackintosh still on 10.13.
I've actually been waiting for this release to switch to ESR. The regular release has been getting updates three or more times a month, each of which prompts daily nags to update, which gets tiresome across three or four computers with a lot of tabs open. I'm hoping for more like one per month on ESR.
Thanks, thought it was 3 dots on the Arabic "b". It really doesn't take long until you Farsi tries to sneak in some extra letters to figure out it's not Arabic.
Looking back on it, I remember feeling like I can't remember Arabic, but part of it is that this also happens during that time when I'm getting used to the script. There is always an adjustment period with every new font/handwriting that takes a sentence or two to sort out the style before I truly start reading.
The trick I've heard to use SSDs on devices without TRIM is to just leave like 15% of the drive unprovisioned (i.e. create a single partition smaller than the drive) to give the drive's built-in garbage collection plenty of slack space to work with.
If you're working with vintage machines they all have drive size limits in the 2-8 GB range anyway so you'll end up doing that anyway as you can't get SSDs that small
You can't just leave the space unprovisioned in general. It's a crapshoot weather the drive will automatically over-provision using the unprovisioned space. I've never personally seen one that does this. With samsung, crucial, and other major brands you need to use their proprietary tools to change the over-provisioning percentage (before doing any formatting/creating partition table).
So, to anyone else trying this, make sure to do it before you create the partition table.
You get lots of benefit from permanently-trimmed space that is never used, even if it isn't explicitly "over-provisioned".
The underlying storage always has lots of free space, and thus is likely to have A) lots of pre-erased pages, and thus B) doesn't need to relocate as much stuff often to make contiguous chunks to erase, and thus C) write amplification is much lower.
Do you mean that it will automatically TRIM a block of all zeros? Or that it will itself try to parse filesystem structures and TRIM blocks that it can imply are un-used?
And it is still garbage. Can it differentiate between the declaration, definition, and calls of a function Foo, versus just substrings "Foo" found anywhere in the file, such as comments? Nope.
I wish people would stop sharing LWN subscriber links for karma. They're not meant to be shared in social news websites. https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks
20 of the poster's last 30 submissions have been LWN subscriber links.
They're not meant to be shared in social news websites.
From your link:
"Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?
Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared."
Having access to nearly every paid LWN article on a news aggregator certainly feels like "a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers". But others said these links are subscriber-specific so I guess LWN is fine with it if they aren't taking the links down.
As well as LWN's declared policy, the subscriber links are also linked to the user that generated them - if LWN felt they were being abused, they could disable that user's access to them.
We did, a few times. Only because many of them had generous credits for early stage startups. GCP, Azure, SoftLayer (now IBM Cloud), DigitalOcean. We weren't relying on any particular service except managed Kubernetes, but we were happy to set it up overselves if it wasn't on offer.
Also of note is that this is the last major version of Firefox for Windows 7 and Windows 8, as well as macOS 10.12, 10.13, and 10.14.