Firefox on Fedora: No longer funny

[Matthew Miller]

On Sun, Oct 09, 2011 at 11:14:45AM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> How many multi-user systems run firefox from them? At the university

We sure do. 

> where I used to work we "had" this and it was awful because the tool
> itself isn't written for this use case. This was a problem in 2008..
> it hasn't gotten any better since then. Very few applications are
> written with the "old" world view of centralizing usage. It doesn't

Everything old is new again.

> fit either the largest use case (one user->one device) or the newer
> "centralized" usage where items are in a cloud and gotten through a
> "portal" system. I think our old way of doing things is becoming a
> corner case to be routed around.

Yes, it certainly is as developers come increasingly from the "small" world
view, and have no concern or thought for what their changes do on a larger
scale. To me, that seems to be squandering an inherent advantage of our
platform in a dubious race to compete on the desktop -- but that's tilting
at windmills. Our approach going forward is going to be personal remote
virtual machines -- the resources are still centralized, but the
applications can't tell.

-- 
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional & Research Computing Services
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences