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> browser checks of yore

The same shit is happening today, except it's Chrome instead of IE6. We have an entire generation of webdevs who learned fuck-all from the previous round of the browser wars.

TBF 1/2 of them weren't even born...

Not sure why your comment is being downvoted, most of my friends think I am paranoid when I say we shouldn't only support chrome. To them it's the browser that always works whereas the others are a PITA to support.

Which is why the current situation is stable and the IE6 situation got fixed. Nobody liked developing for IE6, it was a pain in the ass since it was so shit. But people are perfectly happy developing for chrome.

So what? We've had writing for thousands of years, and it's a perfect way to preserve historical lessons for the future ~losslessly.

I'm a fairly young person but I've had a bit of interest in the history of computing from Unix onwards. It's all documented and out there in public archives, accessible by anyone. It ignited an interest and let me identify more deeply with my profession, plus it highlighted just how much the history of computing is cyclical (especially the mainframe->thin client->mainf^Wcloud cycle), and therefore shown me how much of the old history we can dust off and put into good use again in the modern times.

History is context. One is doing themselves a disservice by not doing some cursory reading around it.

IE6 was far behind the curve on features, Chrome is way ahead. The situation isn't comparable at all.

That's not the whole story. IE was innovative (albeit through embrace and extend) until they won and stagnated.

IE could stagnate since they bundled it with their OS, meaning people on an old OS used the old IE meaning IE6 lived on for over a decade. Chrome is dominant since people download it and people receive free updates, so the situation isn't comparable there either.

The situation when every webdev was forced to support IE6 would be like if developers today had to support Chrome from 2011.

Chrome is bundled with Android (billions of devices) and when you install a lot of software on Windows like antivirus they bundle Chrome unless you opt-out.

Not the same but pretty close.

Weird I never see chrome preinstalled. It's always a generic "internet" app

I do feel if canonical were to attempt another crowd-funding attempt at an Ubuntu phone, they might well be successful this time. That phone was a terrific concept. I feel the market has changed since then, with carriers accepting less control over our phones, and the fad of installing every random app has somewhat distilled itself to a smaller number that is widely used.

Development does continue as a community effort, so hopefully it can break through!: https://ubports.com/

> Carriers were just not interested in phones from smaller manufacturers, and it's not entirely clear that there is no backflow of cash involved at higher levels.

I really doubt it’s something sinister in enterprise sized logistics. Mainly because the big guys don’t need to be al 90’ies Microsoft about it in the modern world of leaned up Enterprise. The service the big global brands come with do save the carriers a lot of money, but it’s done perfectly legal.

First there is the logistics. As a smaller carrier, you won’t really have to worry about doing BI on sales projections and what not, because Apple, Samsung and so on will simply tell you how many phones you can expect to sell, which is basically how many they’ve already produced for your region. They’ll handle everything from warehousing to shipping to your local stores pretty much without you having to do anything but sign the extremely “take it or leave it” sort of B2B contract, that also includes the big companies not charging you for products that don’t sell. What this translates to is that you can basically run your company without a logistics department or any BI related to the actual phone hardware. This saves you money both on manpower but also on not having too much inventory.

Then there the support side of things. By carrying big well known brands with a very low degree of user freedom for modifications you cut the non-carrier related support you need to offer to almost nothing. You could probably offer good money to get carriers to sell, even a well known brand like the fairphone, and they’d still turn you down because it would cost them too much money to do so.

> Many people get a free or heavily subsidized phone from their carrier

Is this really the case anymore? Why would you buy a phone from a third party like that?

Most people I know buy their phone direct from Apple or an Android device from Amazon retail.

Most people you know are wealthy then.

The phones are the same price, you know. The carriers don’t literally ‘subsidise’ or give you a ‘free’ phone - it’s built into the contract price. It’s nothing to do with how wealthy you are because it’s the same price!

Yes, and wealthy people are in the position to plunk down that money up front. People who are less privileged frequently have to take advantage of that form of "financing" offered by the carrier.

Remember, by being wealthy, we frequently have to pay a lot less than people who get by month to month. There should be no shock here.

Yes, to your point I was at T Mobile a month or so ago waiting to buy a SIM card in line behind someone who was evaluating their “free” (i.e., carrier-financed) options. They had a choice of a number of Android handsets I’d never heard of.

On the other end of the scale, though, are the subsidies carriers pay to anyone who switches and trades in a quality device. When my partner joined my plan T Mobile paid a $700+ subsidy for his iPhone 11 in exchange for an iPhone 8.

So customers across the entire income scale finance. It’s just a matter of how lucrative that financing is for the customer. At the higher end of the scale where the customer has more choice it’s usually a much better deal.

It absolutely has to do with being wealthy. Where a wealthy person can afford to spend $500 on a phone, someone not as financially comfortable has no other options than to go the "financing" route. Yes, the price ends up being similar, but it is much more possible for modest people to spend $20/mo for 2 years than $500 on the first day.

This is a well studied phenomenon that wealthy people who can afford to pay everything on day 1, buy in bulk and all end up paying less than poorer people.

$500? Top of the line devices in the last few years have crept above $1,000 USD. Not trying to nitpick but the difference there is a sizable chunk of the average person’s annual income.

Nobody over the age of ~20 I know in low income brackets even think about buying a flagship phone. It’s barely on their radar.

Chiming in as a low-income person, yes these Flagship phones have been off of our radar for a very very long time. If I wanted to, I could go into Walmart and buy a perfectly capable locked simple mobile phone for $20 or maybe a bit more than that. There is no possible way that I consider spending multiple weeks worth of paycheck on something that could be broken or stolen easily. If I was going to treat myself to a nicer phone there are tons of great options for me to choose in the 100 or $200 range.

That's an unreasonably low standard for wealth. I do that and I'm below the median salary for my country (western Europe).

You can buy a nice unlocked octo-core on Amazon for like $70.

No, not really. A reasonable phone can be had for $200 or less, if you're willing to compromise on features. Carriers haven't been carrying good value-for-money phones on good value-for-money plans for at least 10 years in my country, so cutting out the middle man by buying SIM-only with your own phone is the natural thing to do.

I think Apple is already on its way for a convergent device with the Apple silicone. They've already unveiled an iPad with an M1 chip and in the near future we would get iPhones with powerful chips which is able to act as a fully functional MacBook once the phone is connected to an external monitor/TV, of course with a bluetooth keyboard and a mouse.

I bought an ubuntu phone. The phone was nice, but it lacked apps, and the apps were pretty much all web based - so the map app wouldn't even load without an internet connection - pretty useless in a foreign country. And the version that was released to the public didn't have the option to plug in a keyboard and screen for a full desktop.

This comment is predicated on a lack of differentiation between a Linux phone and Android/iOS.

‘It runs Linux’ is not sufficient differentiation for people to be interested outside of hobbyists and highly specified niches.

If we can change that, then a low end disruption strategy could work.

Unfortunately the work on Linux desktops and phones mostly seems to be about making an iOS-alike experience.

Is the UBPorts community continuing the Ubuntu Phone convergence vision, or did the code get thrown away?

From my limited perspective as a former user who still keeps up with some of it: they seem to be continuing down that path, just slower as they don't have Canonical's paid dev team to work on it.

AFAIK PostMarketOS seems to be working on something similar - my PostMarketOS edition PinePhone even shipped with a convergence hub:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/07/buy-pinephone-postmarket...

BTW, I think the convergence concept is totally valid and actually available now (although in a proprietary form) as Dex on Samsung Galaxy series devices.

Just plug the thing into a USB-C HDMI dongle and it shows a desktop interface on the display & has decent mouse and keyboard support.

Really nice for simple stuff like looking at photos you just took outside but on a big screen. And also a killer combo with the Wacom One pen display as you have your Clip Studio or Krita files all available on the big Wacom One screen yet can work on them on the regular device screen while on the go. :)

So now we just need that, but open source. :)

It could be a separate wayland session outputting to the external display with app GUI getting data from a backend via DBus. That way you could run the same up on both device and external screen at the same time while keeping the data model consistent. :)

> So now we just need that, but open source. :)

That's the whole idea behind Librem 5 and PureOS and it already works well. All the phone apps there are just regular desktop apps made convergent to fit and work well on the phone.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onxBw5Pd45w and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qB_5g2ZJYk