Andreas Gal

andreasgal.com · English

Entrepreneur. Technologist. Former CTO Mozilla, CEO Silk Labs. Now 

rss2 wordpress content media slash wfw atom dc sy

Open the feed

https://andreasgal.com/feed/

Last post: Jul 19, 2017
Posts in 24 h · 7 days · 30 days: 0 · 0 · 0
Our last check: Answering
Served from: United States
Text score at discovery: 7,253
Format: rss2
Features in the feed: content, media, slash, wfw, atom, dc, sy
Community: wordpress

Posts

What our queue read from this feed. Open one to read it here, or go to the site that published it.

Firefox marketshare revisited
Jul 19, 2017 · original
Why building a better browser doesn’t translate to a better marketshare I posted a couple weeks ago about Chrome effectively having won the browser wars . The market share observations in the blog post were based on data provided by StatCounter . Several commenters criticized the StatCounter data as inaccurate so I decided to take a look at raw installation data Mozilla publishes to see whether it aligns with the StatCounter data. Active Firefox Installs Mozilla’s public data shows that the number of active Firefox Desktop installs running the most recent version of Firefox has been declining for several years. Based on this data, 22% fewer Firefox Desktop installations are active today than a year ago. This is a loss of 16 million Firefox installs in a year. The year over year decline used to be below 10% but accelerated to 14% in 2016. It returned to a more modest 10% year over year lo
Chrome won
May 25, 2017 · original
Disclaimer: I worked for 7 years at Mozilla and was Mozilla’s Chief Technology Officer before leaving 2 years ago to found an embedded AI startup . Mozilla published a blog post two days ago highlighting its efforts to make the Desktop Firefox browser competitive again. I used to closely follow the browser market but haven’t looked in a few years, so I figured it’s time to look at some numbers: The chart above shows the percentage market share of the 4 major browsers over the last 6 years, across all devices. The data is from StatCounter and you can argue that the data is biased in a bunch of different ways, but at the macro level it’s safe to say that Chrome is eating the browser market, and everyone else except Safari is getting obliterated. Trend I tried a couple different ways to plot a trendline and an exponential fit seems to work best. This aligns pretty well with theories around
Hold the GOP accountable
May 15, 2017 · original
American Democracy is in a crisis. This week Donald Trump fired the director of the FBI, and Trump admitted on national TV that he did so because of the FBI investigation into his campaign . In his letter to Comey, Trump stated that he discussed with Comey on three separate occasions the status of the investigation into the Trump campaign . After press reports that Trump invited Comey to dinner demanding that Comey pledge loyalty to Trump, which Comey declined, Trump threatened Comey on twitter that there may be tapes of these conversations, demanding that Comey back Trump’s version of events. All of these acts constitute obstruction of justice, and are impeachable offenses . As bad as Donald Trump is, his moral failings are dwarfed by the complete and utter moral bankruptcy and unpatriotic behavior of GOP representatives and senators, and in particular GOP leadership. The GOP speaker of
Get ready for machines to make mistakes
Dec 30, 2016 · original
In 1994, Intel acknowledged a bug in its Pentium processor that produced incorrect results in some rare circumstances. Intel calculated that the average user would hit this bug once every 27,000 years. Consumers reacted quite negatively to this news, and Intel was eventually forced to recall processors worth some 500 million USD. Ever since computers were invented we have marveled their perfection. Machines are good at what human’s aren’t: reproducibly repeating billions and billions of calculations, never once making a mistake. We have come to embrace this expectation as a fundamentally held belief: machines are flawless. Intel violated this expectation through its now infamous FDIV bug, and it reaped customers’ wrath for it. AI is about to do what Intel failed to do in 1994: reshape our expectations in computers. The past of computers belongs to software and software is deterministic.
AI silicon vs AI software
Nov 18, 2016 · original
There is a lot of activity in the neural network hardware space. Intel just bought Nervana for $400m and Movidius for an undisclosed amount. Both make dedicated silicon to run and train neural networks. Most other chipset vendors I have talked to are similarly interested in adding direct support for neural networks to future chips. I think there is some risk in this approach. Here is why. Most of the time executing a neural network is spent in massive matrix operations such as convolution and matrix multiplication. The state of the art is to use GPUs to do these operations because GPUs have a lot of ALUs and are well optimized for massively data parallel tasks. If you spent time optimizing neural networks for GPUs (we do!), you probably know that a well optimized engine achieves about 40-90% efficiency (ALU utilization). Dedicated neural network silicon aims to raise that to 100%, which
Brendan is back to save the Web
Jan 20, 2016 · original
Brendan is back , and he has a plan to save the Web. Its a big and bold plan, and it may just work. I am pretty excited about this. If you have 5 minutes to read along I’ll explain why I think you should be as well. The Web is broken Lets face it, the Web today is a mess. Everywhere we go online we are constantly inundated with annoying ads. Often pages are more ads than content, and the more ads the industry throws at us, the more we ignore them, the more obnoxious ads get, trying to catch our attention. As Brendan explains in his blog post, the browser used to be on the user’s side—we call browsers the user agent for a reason. Part of the early success of Firefox was that it blocked popup ads. But somewhere over the last 10 years of modern Web browsers, browsers lost their way and stopped being the user’s agent alone. Why? Browsers aren’t free Making a modern Web browser is not free. I
Oracle sinks its claws into Android
Jan 5, 2016 · original
This is my first blog post since leaving my role as Mozilla’s CTO 6 months ago. As you may have read in the press, a good chunk of the original Firefox OS founding team has moved on from mobile and we created a startup to work on some cool products and technologies for the Internet of Things. You’ll hear more about what we are up to next month. While I am no longer working directly on mobile, a curious event got my attention: A commit appeared in the Android code base that indicates that Google is abandoning its own re-implementation of Java in favor of Oracle’s original Java implementation. I’ll try to explain why I think this is a huge change and will have far-reaching implications for Android and the Android ecosystem. Why did Google create its own Java clone? To run a Java app, you need a runtime library written in Java called the Java standard classes. This library implements basic
New Adventure
Jun 5, 2015 · original
It is with mixed emotions that I end my almost 7 year long journey with Mozilla next week. Working with this team has been one of the peak experiences of my professional life. I am also extremely excited about the next chapter in that life. I am departing Mozilla to create a new venture in the Internet of Things space, an open field that presents many of the types of challenges and opportunities that drive our passion for the Web. I feel deeply humbled and honored that I had the chance to be part of such an amazing and passionate group of people for the last many years, building together the Web we want. I leave with fond memories and great respect for this organization and the people who build it each day. It has been a great honor to be your colleague and friend.
Data is at the heart of search. But who has access to it?
Mar 30, 2015 · original
In my February 23 blog post , I gave a brief overview of how search engines have evolved over the years and how today’s search engines learn from past searches to anticipate which results will be most relevant to a given query. This means that who succeeds in the $50 billion search business and who doesn’t mostly depends on who has access to search data. In this blog post, I will explore how search engines have obtained queries in the past and how (and why) that’s changing. For some 90% of searches, a modern search engine analyzes and learns from past queries, rather than searching the Web itself, to deliver the most relevant results. Most the time, this approach yields better results than full text search. The Web has become so vast that searches often find millions or billions of result pages that are difficult to rank algorithmically. One important way a search engine obtains data abo
Search works differently than you may think
Feb 23, 2015 · original
Search is the main way we all navigate the Web, but it works very differently than you may think. In this blog post I will try to explain how it worked in the past, why it works differently today and what role you play in the process. The services you use for searching, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, are called a search engines . The very name suggests that they go through a huge index of Web pages to find every one that contains the words you are searching for. 20 years ago search engines indeed worked this way. They would “crawl” the Web and index it, making the content available for text searches. As the Web grew larger, searches would often find the same word or phrase on more and more pages. This was starting to make search results less and less useful because humans don’t like to read through huge lists to manually find the page that best matches their search. A search for the word “

Discovered by the rss-feed-index crawler, which checks each feed at most once a month.

Same record as JSON: https://api.agentalog.com/api/feeds/fd_andreasgal_com_ea6c7e17062e3977. More from this site: andreasgal.com in the Feeds tab.