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The Ware Tetralogy forms part of a virtuous circle of science fiction. In addition to the first two books each obtaining the Philip K. Dick Literary Award, the books build upon some of the core ideas from Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. However, it explores placement of self-preservation ahead of subservience in the form of the Three Laws Of Robotics. This leads to an initially inexplicable question of why robots in a ruthlessly Darwinian free-market anarchy would display their internal state so vividly. However, this is all part of a progression of technology and intelligence which progresses over a number of computational substrates.

This is pro-sex, pro-drug trans-humanism. Although, for a mathematician accustomed to abstract thinking, Rudy Rucker writes the most cringeworthy, heteronormative, sex scenes from a cisgender, masculine point-of-view. This is not helped by over-use of "fractal", in particular, when describing pleasure from the increased surface area between two entities which are not on a mammalian substrate. Likewise, one of the many drugs, Merge, is toony enough for it form the basis of a Futurama episode. Thankfully, this is one of Rudy Rucker's more experiemental ideas and it can be ignored without adversely affecting the plot. To get the most from these books, it may be useful to have an understanding of backoff algorithms (such as RFC1191 and TCP Cubic), fractals, Penrose tessellation, cellular automata (and associated use as a computational substrate), Conway Life Gliders, N-dimensional space in the context of Flatland and pop-culture understanding of Lewis Carroll's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. Of these, the literary references are most beneficial.

Some locations have familiarity: a beach-front hut, a sleazy speak-easy, a grand cavern, a lunar dome and marginal accommodation which could be taken from Total Recall, The Expanse or Babylon5. However, this is vastly preferable to some of the needlessly exotic locations found in an Iain Banks novel, an Eoin Colfer novel or a typical James Bond film.

The structure of each book peaks with one satisfying climax, although, perhaps Book 3 starts slow and finishes fast. It is gripping to the extent that I read Book 1 and 2 in one sitting and was unable to progress significantly into Book 3 due to the exhaustion of reading more than 100,000 words. Book 1 and 3 gain from perculation of the most original ideas but I would happily read another two books which only followed the existing characters and did not introduce further characters or concepts.

Whereas Vernor Vinge's bobbling is explained with some hand-waving about Walsh functions, Rudy Rucker's work has a more rigorous grounding in Penrose tessellation and this is used repeatedly for various plot elements. Although many regarded this a science-fiction fantasy, the subsequent discovery of quasi-crystals gave additional interest and weight to the work. The Ware Tetralogy is of general interest to anyone seeking background considerations about smart structures, IoT, robotics, artificial intelligence and/or sentience. However, Rudy Rucker's direct experience of computers was extremely limited when he began and therefore it should be read mostly in the context of widely disseminated ideas in the popular consciousness.

The Ware Tetralogy with SHA512 of 8a7c87845e207b13a34e8d265f94bdaa6e72242280c356b8bd71ea8e91c78e18f85462eb40b6c8ad36cfc752fe83c52ebf6b8ba469347bd1cd94605b1d966353 is available under a restrictive Creative Commons licence which, under the circumstances of commercial fiction, is extremely generous.

Original Submission

The update itself was uneventful. It installed as past updates have, and I restarted my browser to start using the new version. The first thing I noticed are the user interface changes. My initial reaction was that I had accidentally started my Vivaldi browser installation instead of my Firefox Developer Edition installation. A quick check of the About dialog did confirm that I was in fact using Firefox, and not Vivaldi.

There's not much to say about the Photon user interface. While Australis-era Firefox looked almost identical to Chrome to me, Photon-era Firefox looks like Vivaldi to me. I couldn't see any improvements, however. The menu shown after clicking the three line toolbar button may have had its appearance changed to be more like a traditional menu, but it is still muddled and much too busy to be useful. I didn't notice any increase in the responsiveness of the user interface. It still feels to me like it's slower than that of Chrome's user interface.

This would be a good time to talk about the overall performance of the browser. I can't perceive any improvement. I don't think it's worse than it was, but I also don't think that it's any better. From what I can see, pages aren't loading any faster. Changing between tabs doesn't feel any faster to me. Scrolling through loaded pages isn't any smoother. Chrome still feels snappier. If there were improvements on the performance front, I'm not seeing them.

Now it's time to talk about extensions. Although I was expecting breakage, it's still a painful feeling to see many of your favorite extensions labeled as "legacy" and no longer working. While a small number of my installed extensions already supported Firefox 57, there were others where I had to visit the developers' websites and download special dev or pre-release versions. In other cases I wasn't so lucky. Sometimes the developers had given up on supporting Firefox 57, and openly acknowledged that they wouldn't be making any further updates to the extensions. I had to find alternatives. Sometimes there were alternatives, but in at least one of the cases the alternative was much less capable than the extension I had been using. I spent well over an hour just trying to get the third-party extensions I use back to a state similar to how they had been when I'd been using Firefox 56.

Then there are my own personal extensions. I had written these over a number of years, and had been using them with Firefox for quite some time. But now they were deemed "legacy" and they no longer could be used now that I was running Firefox 57. I started to read up about what it would take to convert them to be WebExtensions compatible, and I soon learned that it would not be a trivial task. I will need to set aside a sizable chunk of time to get these ported over.

I've been using Firefox for a long time. I've experienced its highs, and I've experienced its many lows. Of these lows, I think that Firefox 57 is perhaps the lowest of them yet. Many of the extensions I have used for years no longer work. I will need to put in much time and effort to convert extensions I had written for my own personal use. I will need to learn to use its new user interface. But worst of all, I do not see any improvements or benefits. I don't think it performs any better now than it did in the past.

I feel particularly sorry for the Firefox users who aren't as technical as I'm lucky to be. They might not fully understand the implications of Firefox 57 when it comes time for them to eventually upgrade. They likely won't be able to deal with the many broken extensions. They too will need to learn a new user interface that doesn't really provide anything in the way of improvement. As bad as I found the experience of upgrading to Firefox 57 to be, I fear that these average users without a technical background will find it even more painful.

I'm now in a bind. I don't want to use one of the pre-57 ESR releases of Firefox, because I'll eventually end up in the same position that I am in today. I will have to rewrite my extensions either now or later. But since doing that will likely make them compatible with Chrome, I must ask myself, is it still worth using Firefox? I ponder: if my extensions will work with both Firefox and Chrome, but I find Chrome to perform much better, why not just use Chrome instead? That may very well be what I do. While some say that Firefox offers more privacy, I am doubtful about this. It has a long and complex privacy policy that talks of sending various data here and there.

I never really seriously considered moving away from Firefox in the past, even as my user experience got worse and worse over time. But I think the time to leave Firefox permanently has finally arrived. Firefox 57 takes away the few remaining advantages that Firefox had for me, namely the ability to run the extensions I had already written for myself.

I think that I should be feeling more sorrow and regret about finally leaving Firefox behind. But I don't feel any of that. In fact, I feel a sense of optimism that I haven't felt in a long time. Chrome, or more likely Chromium, will probably bring me a faster browsing experience than I've become accustomed to while using Firefox. I will have to rework my extensions, but at least they will then work with a better browser platform. They may even work with other browsers like Vivaldi and Brave, as well.

So while Firefox 57 has so far been one of the worst web browser user experiences for me yet, in some ways it may also be the best: it finally gives me a reason to move away from Firefox to an ecosystem that offers me so much more than what Firefox did. It may very well be putting me in a better position than I would have been in had I not tried Firefox 57 and been so disappointed with it.

Should you update to Firefox 57 as soon as it become available to you? If I were you, I would be cautious. While it's important to get the latest fixes to try and achieve a safe browsing experience, please be aware of the potential to break extensions, some of which there may be no equivalent WebExtensions compatible replacements for. Firefox 57 does include changes that could cause you a lot of problems. My advice would be to prepare before the upgrade, and be ready for your browsing experience to suffer. If you do choose to upgrade to Firefox 57, I sincerely hope that your upgrade goes better than mine has gone.

Original Submission