ArinaS

No need to use an adblocker if you don't visit websites serving you ads.

I don't think old.reddit.com will render correctly in Netscape Navigator 4 or Internet Explorer 5.

> "At home, it is all about Windows and Android."

Well, what software to use at home is your choice, unlike what software to use at work.

> "I don't want to care"

There are many distros for people who don't want to care - Ubuntu, Mint, Elementary OS, MX Linux, etc. I don't see how NixOS not being one of them is NixOS's problem.

> "I believe that the core idea of NixOS is fundamentally opposed to the idea of what the average person wants in their desktop."

What an average person wants in their desktop is Windows - not Linux and certainly not some obscure independent distro. And this is still not a problem of that distro or Linux.

The "beauty" of websites built solely with javascript.

As if they couldn't build an absolutely identical page with just HTML and CSS. But no, javascript is the way for them because it has way more tracking and fingerprinting abilities than plain HTML and CSS.

> "It also puts of some genuine users like me who prefer to keep JS off."

Non-javascript challenges are also available[1].

> "The 97% is only accurate if you assume a zero false positive rate."

GNOME's gitlab instance is not something people visit daily like Wikipedia, so it's a negligible amount of false positives.

[1] - https://git.gammaspectra.live/git/go-away/wiki/Challenges#no...

Cloudflare is not chill because they, either ignorantly or purposefully, block everything that's not Chromium or Firefox[1].

Or sometimes everything that's not just Chromium[2].

[1] - https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_n...

[2] - https://www.techradar.com/pro/cloudflare-admits-security-too...

This thing, despite using "captcha" in its name, is not your typical captcha like hCaptcha or Google's one, because it uses a proof-of-work mechanism instead of writing answers in textboxes/clicking on images/other means of verification requiring user input.

AI bots can't solve proof-of-work challenges because browsers they use for scraping don't support features needed to solve them. This is highlighted by existence of other proof-of-work solutions designed to specifically filter out AI bots, like go-away[1] or Anubis[2].

And yes, they work - once GNOME deployed one of these proof-of-work challenges on their gitlab instance, traffic on it fell by 97%[3].

[1] - https://git.gammaspectra.live/git/go-away

[2] - https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

[3] - https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by...: "According to Bart Piotrowski, in around two hours and a half they received 81k total requests, and out of those only 3% passed Anubi's proof of work, hinting at 97% of the traffic being bots."

I wouldn't call a website automatically loading 7 scripts on your single visit "vanilla web" though.

> "If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened."

People didn't need them 20 years ago, so why do they need them now?

> "They are all FREE too, mind you."

No proprietary software is free. You either pay with your money (you do this with games, for example), or you pay with your data (and this is what you do with Google). Sometimes with both (you do this with Microsoft).

If this is the price we'll pay to break up a monopoly, then be it. Maybe we don't need these services, and maybe people will finally learn to not be dependent on a single provider for everything they have on the Internet.

They didn't "rebase" it though - just some code from Gecko was merged into it. And as I understand from https://www.palemoon.org/history.shtml, there were two merges - first with Firefox 38 ESR, and second with Firefox 52 ESR.

They're not using Mozilla's security fixes or browser engine. Pale Moon is a hard fork, so it is developed, and developed independently from Mozilla's Firefox.

Also check out this page - https://www.palemoon.org/info.shtml.

What you're looking for is Pale Moon/any other Goanna-based browser. They'll probably the only ones which will survive in this fight.

Finally, the time for independent browsers has come.

I expect rise in Goanna/Pale Moon's popularity by the end of this year.

> "Am I understanding correctly?"

Yes; a discussion board using the same frontend and backend HN uses, if it was open-source and self-hostable.

> "a completely stand alone website where I must moderate it?"

Yes, like Lemmy - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lemmy_(social_net....

On Wikipedia, every edit can be hidden so that even admins can't access it.[1]

Therefore, if legal problems arise with these pages, they probably will just delete the legally problematic info and hide every edit done before.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Oversight

On Wikipedia people like Icewhiz are called "long-term abusers", and there's a public list with more than a hundred of them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LTA.

So literally spyware. Don't get me wrong, current Chrome is also spyware, but sending every page you visit to a third-party is just a whole new level.

It doesn't need to be one. And even if it was, we'd never know as it doesn't have any built-in telemetry and doesn't use a custom useragent.

Mozilla will quite literally die if the demands of the judge get satisfied - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/mozilla-....

So I guess the last resort for people who don't want to surrender to the Big Tech will be niche hard forks of Firefox, of which there are 3 - Pale Moon, Basilisk and SeaMonkey.

Use Anubis - https://anubis.techaro.lol/.

> "So, chromium won't go away."

Sadly, it absolutely can go closed-source as it's licensed under BSD-3 clause, which is not a copyleft license.

ungoogled-chromium?

We won't.

And this is a yet another instance of Google monopolizing the web.

This is NOT a productive discussion in this thread.

It's used by 3 browsers - Pale Moon, Basilisk and K-Meleon. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goanna_(software)....