Friendly reminder that Mozilla has decided to abandon IRC and the Rust community has therefore moved to Discord, a platform that is abusive regarding data and requires you to use a closed source javascript application to access the service.
Mozilla is a bad example because their leadership is simply pathetic, but you get the point. This trend is very, very dangerous. But well the writing was on the wall when many open source projects started moving to github.
While Mozilla seems to be a large open source/web advocate, I always have a hard time with the fact that, as an organization, most of their revenue comes directly from Google buying the top spot in default search engines.
7zip from both a UX and feature perspective is awful compared to something like WinRAR, it is popular mainly because it provides good compression and is free, but beyond that it is eclipsed by WinRAR in almost every other front (outside of compression, the only other thing that i find 7zip good at is archive support - it supports a ton of formats including even disk images with support for various filesystems, although only for reading).
Even PeaZip has a (slightly) better UI than 7zip (and that one is also crossplatform, if you care about that stuff).
There is nothing wrong with 7zip's UI (and a program cannot be only "perfect" or "garbage", there are in-between, e.g. "mediocre" or "good enough" or other things) but WinRAR's UX is simply better.
One example, which for me is one of the most annoying aspects of using 7zip, is double clicking on an .exe file or .html file or anything in an archive that relies on other files in the archive (dlls, images, data files, whatever): 7zip extracts only the file i double clicked on, ignoring everything else whereas WinRAR extracts all files since chances are if an executable is part of an archive, it'll need the other files in the archive to work too. This means that with 7zip i have to manually unzip the archive somewhere first, usually drag and dropping the top folder in the archive (assuming it has one, many donts) in the desktop or a temp folder, then open that temp folder, run it and then delete the folder. With WinRAR i just double click the executable and WinRAR does the rest. This is very useful when i want to run some game from a gamejam, run an installer which for whatever reason isn't part of an executable, test an archived build of a project that is made up of exe+data, check an archived webpage that is made up of several html and image files, etc.
As a sidenote (and another source of frustration), 7zip also has the annoying behavior of deleting that temp file almost right after it extracts it (i'm not sure exactly how it decides that) which means that unless the associated program is fast enough to open it, it'll get deleted under its feet, creating a race condition between the associated program and 7zip.
There are other issues with 7zip as well as a lack of features (practically zero features in the self-extracting archive generator, as an example). The main reason i have it installed is because it can open more formats than WinRAR, especially useful when dealing with disk images from VirtualBox since i can simply open it with 7zip and extract files from there directly without booting the VM. But when it comes to working with zip, rar and even 7z archives, i stick with WinRAR.
BTW, the "terrible nag screens" go away from WinRAR once you buy it. It has been a while since i saw any of those.
You misunderstand, I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything, I'm merely conveying information.
The leadership of the Mozilla corporation is pathetic, toothless, and either useless or ill-intentioned. This is a comment and I'm not trying to convince you of these things, I'm stating my opinion. Readers of this comment should feel free to look at the decisions taken by those people these past years and agree or disagree with me.
>requires you to use a closed source javascript application to access the service
Closed source in the legal sense, I guess, but there's nothing stopping you from popping a devtools inspector inside of Discord and reading through everything. It is an Electron app after all.
«While we still use it heavily, IRC is an ongoing source of abuse and harassment for many of our colleagues and getting connected to this now-obscure forum is an unnecessary technical barrier for anyone finding their way to Mozilla via the web. Available interfaces really haven’t kept up with modern expectations, spambots and harassment are endemic to the platform, and in light of that it’s no coincidence that people trying to get in touch with us from inside schools, colleges or corporate networks are finding that often as not IRC traffic isn’t allowed past institutional firewalls at all.»
Oh, I thought you just needed a source on the harassment claims. I do not believe there was an explicit rejection, however at the bottom of the blog post, we have...
* We are not rolling our own. Whether we host it ourselves or pay for a service, we’re getting something off the shelf that best meets our needs.
* We are evaluating products, not protocols.
* We aren’t picking an outlier; whatever stack we choose needs to be a modern, proven service that seems to have a solid provenance and a good life ahead of it. We’re not moving from one idiosyncratic outlier stack to another idiosyncratic outlier stack.
Given other language such as "modern expectations" in regard to interfaces and being "spoiled for good options" as well as Rust's move to Discord possibly setting a precedent within Mozilla, the posters in the HN thread above don't have a lot of hope Matrix will be selected even via Riot.
Mozilla is a bad example because their leadership is simply pathetic, but you get the point. This trend is very, very dangerous. But well the writing was on the wall when many open source projects started moving to github.