As I mentioned in a comment below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297617 ), Firefox does not rely only on sponsors. There are a few ways to pay money that goes directly towards Firefox.
That link is for Mozilla Foundation, which is a non-profit and donations to it do not go to the development of Firefox. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity, owns and manages Firefox. The way to support Firefox monetarily is by buying Mozilla VPN where available (this is Mullvad in the backend) and buying some Firefox merchandise (like stickers, t-shirts, etc.). I think an MDN Plus subscription also helps.
I agree it's counter-evidence right now, and I think there has been a way to donate for a long time now (just to "mozilla", not "firefox" or setting any restrictions), but I'm not sure what the historical option has been...
That seems reasonable, but they seem to be suffering their own problem with UI and UX design by not making that inherently clearer.
I was getting a bit disappointed about Proton based on this evaluation even though the only problem I’ve had is their really lacking client UI/UX. They should make that visualization clearer. I don’t know the answer, but maybe offering a toggle or expansion for virtualized servers, might be a step in the right direction.
The design issues seems to be a common challenge with proton. The VPN client functions, but it is really grating how basic it is. You can’t even sort, let alone filter servers by load, let alone performance; so you’re scrolling through hundreds of servers. You can’t add regions or even several servers to create a profile with a priority, you have to pick a single server, among hundreds if not thousands in some countries. Oh, and as you’re scrolling through hundreds of servers for a single country, it’s a view of something like 10 lines high.
> The unification energy between the graviton and quantum field theory is on the order of 10^19 GeV, over a dozen orders of magnitude beyond anything we can generate.
Of course it’s stupid and it’s never going to work. The same is true for Carbon Capture and Storage, blue hydrogen, etc. It’s nonsense from the start, but it didn’t stop governments around the world to spend billions on it.
It works like this: companies spend a few millions on PR to market a sci-fi project that’s barely plausible. Governments who really want to preserve the status quo but are pressured to “do something” can just announce that they’re sinking billions in it and voila! They’re green, they’re going to save the world.
I live in a EU country in an apartment and 5GHz is completely crowded and pretty much unusable because of DFS (making your WiFi AP unexpectedly stop to do a complete scan and choose a new channel), so 6GHz is the only stable, high bandwidth option here, and we need more channels so that most peopole chan switch to it.
The cellular networks operators can have that shitty 5GHz part of the spectrum if they want it!
Agreed. I live the USA in a 100 year old apartment building, and can see a zillion ISP provided routers, all squabbling over the same handful of 5GHz channels. 6E is a game changer.
5Ghz is stuttery and laggy and makes it pretty much impossible to have a clean video call. I don't game, but gaming on it would be miserable. I've measured latency, and it regularly spikes above 1s.
6E is far, far better. Rock solid video calls. Latency testing sites show low, steady latency. The only real problem is signal attenuation seems to be far worse with 6E. Getting a signal 2 walls away from the router is nearly impossible. Though this is also a strength, as it limits the number of devices competing for spectrum.
> I live the USA in a 100 year old apartment building, and can see a zillion ISP provided routers, all squabbling over the same handful of 5GHz channels. 6E is a game changer.
What channel width (20/40/80/other) are you typically seeing?
Even a few sheets of drywall greatly attenuates 5 GHz. Your scenario simply seems impossible unless you have a weird router that can only utilize a tiny portion of the channels.
> And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?
Wi-Fi 6E and later standards that unlock 6 GHz are designed to mitigate contention through several dynamic power management and multiplexing capabilities: TWT, MLO, OFDMA, improved TPC, etc. While these things aren't somehow inherent to 6 GHz, the 6 GHz band isn't crowded with legacy devices mindlessly blasting the spectrum at max power, so it is plausible that 6 GHz Wi-Fi will perform better in dense urban environments. The higher frequency also contributes because attenuation is substantially greater, although in really dense, thin-walled warrens that attenuation won't solve every problem.
I know if I had noisy Wi-Fi neighbors interfering with me, the few important Wi-Fi only devices I have would all be on at least 6E 6 GHz by now, not only because 6 GHz has fewer users, but also in the hope that ultimately, when the users do appear, their devices will be better neighbors by design. I don't actually have that problem, however. The nearest 5 GHz AP I can actually see (that isn't mine,) in Kismet (using rather high gain antennas) is -96 dB, and my actual APs hardly ever see those at all. I've yet to actually detect a 6 GHz device that isn't mine. I known there are a few because the manufacturers and model numbers of many APs are visible, but between the inherent attenuation and the power level controls, I don't see them.
There is significantly more spectrum available for wifi in the 6ghz band than in the 5ghz band, so even if we moved everything off of 5ghz and ignored the attenuation benefits of 6ghz, we'd still have significantly less congestion on 6ghz than 5ghz wifi. In my apartment, my laptop can see ~50 wifi networks, we need some spectrum elbow-room to spread that out.
Even if you halve that, how many online activities are going to make use of that bandwidth? And if you have a 2x2 client, you double it anyways. A 1x1 40Mhz using 802.11ax will give you a max PHY of 287Mbps. How many activities use >100 Mbps, especially continuously?
Off the top of my head: certainly downloading a new game or software updates can eat up those bits, and photo/video editing or creation (local NAS or uploading) it might be useful; are there any other activities that use that?
As I commented elsewhere: it would be great if residential Wifi devices defaulted to 40 MHz.
Completely independent of bandwidth, higher frequencies also fall off faster. That's bad if you are trying to cover max space but good if you are trying to avoid noisy neighbors.
They are if they're in an urban environment (which is 80% of the population of the United States). Maximizing your channel width only makes sense in suburban/rural areas. You can get a much more reliable connection by using a smaller channel width.
> And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?
Yes.
5 Ghz has 12x 40MHz channels, 6 Ghz has (in the US/CA where it is basically 'fully unlocked' for Wifi) 29x 40Mhz channels. It's the difference between 500Mhz worth of total bandwidth and 1200Mhz: over double.
And given attenuation increases as frequencies goes up, your neighbours' signals won't travel as far as the lower frequency bands, which helps with localization.
We just have to hope that vendors don't ship 80 or 160Mhz channels by default for residential devices, which will potentially eat up bandwidth (though Wifi 7 makes Punctured Transmission / Preamble Puncturing mandatory, where previously it was optional). Though even if they do, 6Ghz has more 160Mhz channels than 5Ghz has 80Mhz ones (7 vs. 6).
A 1x1 40Mhz using 802.11ax will give you a max PHY of 287Mbps:
1x1 40Mhz = 287Mbps PHY ~ 143Mbps realistic ~ 100Mbps probable. Double that for 2x2 40Mhz: 200 Mbps.
Certainly some connections may need more, and is the reason for >40 Mhz options, but I'm not entirely convinced one of those should be the out-of-box default.
This less of a concern in 6 Ghz because there are many more channels, but this is what the story is all about: how is that frequency band going to be allocated? In US/CA all of it basically went to Wifi, and that gives folks more options, even in more densely populated areas.
I guess the problem is if you default it low, people will end up with slower internet for no reason. While most areas would be perfectly fine at 80mhz. Maybe routers could run their own speed test and self configure to the right bandwidth.
>And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?
Yes. Probably because they have some basic grasp of electromagnetic reality, which perhaps you might consider studying a bit before forming strong opinions?
>It will be as crowded as 5
Physically impossible. 6 GHz simply does not have the material penetration, that's the point. Having way more raw bandwidth on tap, all available all the time without DFS plopped in the middle too, is also extremely helpful of course too. But the signal just not traveling as far and not going through walls well is the core thing. You don't need special effort EM shielding for it so much, bulk material will do it. And WAPs are cheap now. Having a higher number of smaller cells has been best practice for awhile already, and 6 GHz takes that much further.
We said this about 5Ghz when that came out. I'm sorry to say it's not true, there's more than enough spectrum in 5Ghz if properly managed and co-ordinated. I would rather fix that first. Why is it we can run WiFi for thousands of developers in one room/venue just fine but people living in apartment blocks are apparently struggling with a dozen devices per 60sqm apartment?
APs using 160MHZ channel widths with 1 or 2 spatial streams because it's cheaper than 80MHZ channels and 3 or 4 spatial streams. Absolutely crap 'auto' channel selection, too high a power (because cheaper than a second AP), poor AP placement and inappropriate channel width (in an apartment block 40Mhz per AP might be optimal).
To the extent "we" said this, we were absolutely, 100% correct. 5 GHz was and remains a massive improvement over 2.4 GHz, exactly as hoped. But in the decade and half since demands have gone up a lot. 6 GHz will be even better as it propagates even worse and has even more bandwidth available, while human population density won't change.
>I'm sorry to say it's not true, there's more than enough spectrum in 5Ghz if properly managed and co-ordinated
I'm sorry to say you're wrong, there is not remotely enough usable spectrum, and that's regardless of "proper management" which in reality is completely contrary to the practical reality local networks in a setting with a high density of independent people/organizations.
>I would rather fix that first.
That's nice. Most fortunately you are not in charge.
>Why is it we can run WiFi for thousands of developers in one room/venue just fine
That's a low demand situation under the control of a single entity where people are going to be understanding of compromise given the special circumstances, unlike in home or business.
>but people living in apartment blocks are apparently struggling with a dozen devices per 60sqm apartment?
You're wondering why might want their own independent LANs in their own homes? Well, I'm sure you can think of one or two reasons if you put your mind to it.
Most of 5Ghz is unusable because of DFS. In Australia, only 2 out of the 6 80mhz channels are usable. 6 Ghz has 6 of them completely usable today, with possibly more on the upper end usable in the future.
> 6 GHz simply does not have the material penetration, that's the point.
Really? Is there something special about 6 GHz absorption through common construction materials? Otherwise, why would a 20% higher frequency be that much worse?
But perhaps all that matters is, does a band support more connections than there would be apartments or businesses in range? For some people in dense apartment complexes, 5Ghz evidently does not. But if 6Ghz supports twice as many, that might be a limit that gets hit by vastly fewer "localities" like that.
(Student wifi hotspots in a large lecture theatre, that's another problem entirely!)
Hmm, I'm in a 60-apartments block and we don't have this problem at all. Heck, even my shitty Meross devices manage despite all the 2.4 and 2.4+5 GHz connections around. What I struggle with is reliable 4G, and even 5G is so shabby I might as well keep it disabled. More spectrum for network signal sounds like it would help much more than improving Wi-Fi, which is already very reliable and plenty fast. My 2 cents…
Same, if a wireless device needs more than 54Mbps (802.11g, what the ancient Linksys WRT54G already offered) then I feel I'm doing something wrong and I'd better off just plugging it to my USB-C dock to get ethernet and power.
It's enough to stream 4k video (though barely, and I'd be better off moving to a TV), has better wall penetration and is fast enough for browsing and updating software.
I don't have to deal with congestion though. I think I've only seen a neighbour's AP once and I doubt they started hiding their SSID. My guess is that congestion is an issue because transmission power isn't low enough and there's little you can do to fix someone else's AP other than be increasingly louder than them.
Isn't 2.4GHz too congested already, esp considering a lot of wifi-connected devices still work at that range? I typically go the other way around to avoid congestion.
This is Europe where we have concrete or masonry walls and good insulation, I see maybe 2 other APs in the worst days in the apartment. On the good days I have no other APs.
I don't know about other areas but any apartment buildings post like 1990s are just absolute junk when it comes to separation. Before then it was just concrete or structural brick and now somehow it's often 'fireproof magicboard'.
I wonder if delegating LiFi to do downstream and very narrow bands of Wifi for upstream would solve congestion problems. As example if existing smartphones could receive LiFi signal with current front facing sensors.
It's not even that, it's just build apartment blocks out of real materials like concrete and brick not wood and plasterboard.
I have lived in the centre of a city in a victorian apartment block and looking back it was a dream. About a foot of brick wall between me and the next flat either side. Never heard a peep, excellent WiFi.
A way to solve this would be to switch to a hyperbolic space. We should have evolved from Euclidean geometry long ago. R'lyeh has no problem with wireless networking, you never drop a call.
This would come at the expense of lowering density and multiplying infrastructure costs by a few orders of magnitude, making everything less accessible in doing so.
Or, if you are not being sarcastic, the solution to wireless networking issues is to… rebuild cities in which billions of people live and spread those people over… where? Never mind the fact that cities are the best way of arranging lots of people, where would you build those "houses not so close to each other" that is not a desert, a cliff, or an ocean?
Whether they’re joking or not, it’s a good example of the sort of reasoning you see in those town hall meetings where a bunch of ancient home owners come up with straight faced reasons for why an apartment complex shouldn’t get built.
“They’ll have congested internet!” would go well alongside “It will block the sun on my daily walk on that part of the street!”
While I truly admire how much progress they’ve made, and respect that everyone should pursue whatever they feel like doing with their time, it still feels to me like such a waste that it’s not written in a modern memory safe language.
I fear it’s ultimately going to be the most promising, least safe browser to use.
But hey, I want to be proven wrong, so I still gave them some money…
I really don’t think this has anything to do with pressure from the 10% of the public that can afford to care about this.
Politicians, and more importantly influential people, also rely on the same tech as we do and they have infinitely more to lose if their communications leak.
If you think about it this is truly absurd reasoning - they say they want to protect children by introducing this scanning, of course not spy on people, but then politicians are excempt? Why, what could possibly be the reason?
They already openly reveal their true intentions by this excemption.
Well, statistically speaking like 1% to 2% of EU politicians will be pedos, so my guess is they don't want that to come to light and undermine trust in the government.
Von der Leyen's phone was convenintly erased before it could be used as evidence in a court case against her. So no. Maybe stuff will leak but this isn't South Korea with two presidents in jail and thd last one on his way to jail.
I don't think its dumb from a business point of view. You've got to make promises to the editors that the platform is going to drive the sales up, not down.
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