atomicfiredoll

I don't mean that it was literally named for the dropdown, just that generally Helvetica was the cause and Arial was the effect. From what I know, it goes back earlier to when Monotype was providing fonts for IBM printers.

From what I know, Monotype was responsible for the name Arial (although IBM called the family Sonoran Sans Serif.) But, even at that point, the intent was to create something that would stand in for Helvetica.

I don't know that the name was selected deliberately to be ahead of Helvetica. But, it's not unheard of in branding to put your product ahead of or near the competition alphabetically. (It was especially important then because people were manually looking up things in phone books and libraries.) I wouldn't be surprised to hear that aspect was considered during naming.

The general public was often using Times New Roman or whatever their system's default sans serif font was.

But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles.

Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and Arial--almost fever pitch at times. iirc, Arial exists do to the popularity of Helvetica and the background of this goes back to the 1950s. It wasn't just where it was placed in the font selection menu, it was given top billing in that menu deliberately (in Windows.) If you're interested, I think the Wikipedia page for Helvetica (Font)[2] covers it fairly deeply.

That all said, I haven't heard it hotly debated for some time now. The explosion of freely available fonts; popularity of new font families like Open Sans, Noto Sans, etc; and the ability to add custom fonts on the web seems to have slowly killed off the discourse in the last decade or so. I'm not in those design circles as often anymore, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica

I don't know anything about Adguard, but good on the team for doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim. Even better that they're sharing what they've found with everyone else.

Thanks for the input. The keyboard control piece is a good call-out.

Personally, I don't have my access to my normal computer/environment at the moment, so I've just been trying to go by the spec when necessary and hope for the best until I do.

Thanks! Sorry if I came off as brash, time has been tight recently. You've already put a lot of work into a very informative article, and it's appreciated. The outlook is solid. I'd like to find an opportunity to revisit some of my own code with your writing in mind.

Part of the reason for mentioning the radio-tabs is because I was working on my own implementation for a personal project a few weeks ago. My goal was specifically using the role="tab"/role="tabpanel" pattern, but my read of the guidance left me feeling like I was trapped with using JS to set those. Since it was timeboxed, I bailed out to augmenting it with JS for and moved on.

My hope was maybe somebody on HN with more of a background on accessibility could interject some thoughts here.

Okay, but are those radio tabs accessible?

I think that if you want to follow WAI-ARIA practices, the aria-selected, tabindex and aria-controls need to be updated via JS when the active tab changes? I'd love to be wrong about that.

Accessibility is often an afterthought. And, sometimes there's an assumption that by working with HTML/CSS directly, accessibility comes built in. Just Something to keep in mind when choosing an approach.

Looking at what's been going on in the E.U. vs. the U.S., it seems pretty clear that one of the only things companies this big, with this much control over the markets fear is regulation.

Maybe people live in a country where adding new regulations is difficult at the moment. In that case, push at for it at the state or province level. Push for it wherever you can. Suddenly these companies have to figure out how to work around 50 different state level laws? Painful. Good. Make it hurt to be evil.

People need to come together and push for regulatory roadblocks to things like this at every level. I think that's part of how you keep control of your own property and stand up against it.

My understanding from folks outside the U.S. is that they desire U.S. products because they trust the safety more. I'm not sure everyone quite understands that by gutting [regulations], they trash part of their international advantage.

I'm no expert, but even if they somehow managed to get manufacturing back, slashing your competitive advantages and just taking the market position of "China 2: This time it's more expensive" doesn't strike me as a winner for exports.

Lots of us have had to implement changes we've disagreed with or pushed back on, but this one looks so obviously wrong, it's particularly mind boggling.

I'm almost inclined to think maybe the process/tech isn't designed to do this and there's a bug, or somebody tasked with a manual verification made an outright mistake, or something else went off the rails. Any number of this could have gone wrong.

Then I think of the number of sites and services that have started asking for phone numbers, as if they believe doing it over and over will somehow change the nature of telephony--it would probably be a mistake for me to give Google or any of these other companies the benefit of the doubt.

> A few days ago, I was prompted to verify my phone number by Google. Immediately after completing the verification, I received an email notifying me that Google had overwritten all my personal information. It turns out that because my mom is the one paying the phone bill, they automatically "verified" the name on my account to be hers and updated everything on my account without my consent.

It sounds like someone at Google (not necessarily a programmer) needs to read "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers:"

> 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual

What a bureaucratic nightmare.

It feels to me that insightful details about what's going on have been coming out of tech/startup publications like TechCrunch and Wired instead of some more traditional news media. These stories feel relevant to the communities and interests here in a way that other political ones don't.

[Edit: That said, there's a risk some lower quality, less substantial, and more sensationalist articles or publications will be submitted as a result, so it's extra important to not just vote based on headlines.]

My point is: when looking for the "root cause" of these problems, people shouldn't stop asking when they get to the rent being high, that's a symptom.

Additionally, if people care about helping younger generations, it's within reach to jump in and help shape the communities they'll be living in. E.g. If an issue is zoning, go to zoning meetings.

My thoughts are similar, but I think the cost of commercial space is also driving costs up for everyone, so I classify it as "rent." I'd love to see data, but small businesses (at least in certain sectors) seem bare able to survive--opening and closing constantly.

But, to get to a root cause, I think we have to keep asking why. Why are rents high? One reason is that cities seem unwilling to rezone. Okay, why is city council/the mayor unwilling to rezone (sometimes vast swaths of single family homes?) Voters? Corruption? Something else?

There are several root causes we can potentially drill further down to, but making headway will likely require hard work and involvement in our communities. You could always try running for something and becoming a politician.

Ah. I never had Inbox, so now it makes some sense to me (at least from a historical perspective.)

Turning off tabbed inbox was huge in helping me get down to zero emails. It got me back to one stream of data to watch and manage. Something comes in, I see it and process it. It also made the number of unread easier to reason about.

I do use filters now, but haven't always because I was always looking for a "move to label" option in the "Create Filter" dialog. Instead, Gmail calls that "Archive," which I assumed sent it to the Negative Zone of some special compressed archive. I'm an idiot, for years I just assumed Google didn't build a move feature into it's filters.

[That said, I do find Gmail (and other Google UIs) to be full of little points of frustration like this. Maybe others have had better luck with it, but Tabbed Inbox almost feels like it's designed to make me ineffective.]

It's a story about a different company and being a public benefit corporation is different than being a non-profit.

It's simply not that relevant. It's not that strange.

[TL;DR: Hindsight is 20/20, but if you did a good job with your requirements and you had good information about if a product meets each one, then it doesn't always matter that other products which didn't meet the requirements as completely eventually win out.]

I may be one of these types, but at least in many of my cases, I don't really know that it mattered in the end?

Maybe after a review I pick something that didn't win in the long term or even eventually exited the market because it wasn't popular enough. But, my requirements are almost never strictly that it's popular. What I end up with does typically do the job very well for the time I have it, and after few years the requirements may change or the need may go away completely. If one of my requirements is that a device is built with metal instead of plastic, maybe I never have to replace it.

Another example: Your friend had a Zune, but then I'm guessing they moved on to a phone, [because phones eventually] became better music players. If the Zune did all the things they wanted while they had it, especially if they had a unique need, maybe were happy with it. (Although, that isn't necessarily always the case.)

This doesn't seem quite as applicable for selecting software, though. Popularity often is part of what I look at there, because I want to know dependencies won't need replacing and support will be available. Additionally, you can potentially work with the developers so the selection iterates and grows into your requirements.

That's an assumption and not necessarily true. Some users may read it, some may skim, some may come to the page already convinced. For those latter groups, having a fast lane/shortcut call-to-action visible someplace like the top gives them a way to get started before they get overwhelmed/distracted and potentially leave.

In some U.S. states there's a direct democratic processes that allow citizens to create and vote for legislation, apparently including California.

I'm not fully up to speed with politics in California or many of the states, but I wonder if there are groups working to create citizen driven legislation around consumer and privacy protections.

I didn't say anything about DDG. Plus, the internet is full of influence campaigns and "organic marketing," so there's plenty of reason to be mindful and question what you're seeing/reading.

A suspiciously large number of people seem to "share their experiences" whenever anything tangentially related comes up. Authentic or not, it's raising spam flags.

The amount of Brave and Kagi spam in this thread is nutso. I can't be convinced it's not coordinated marketing by either or both of them.

I'm not saying that there aren't some satisfied customers, but at some point a normal human being says: "Hey, 30 other people posted this. Maybe I shouldn't."

I've lost 2 different gmail accounts, apparently due to Google deciding to change or not respect my security settings. It's hard to say for sure. Meanwhile I still have a Hotmail email address. (This isn't me saying Microsoft couldn't cause similar issues, but I've at least been able to get things fixed through support in the past.)

I'm of the same mind that providers can be underrated risks, because it doesn't always cross people's minds that the provider could be that seemingly incompetent. It's certainly a potential situation to consider when dealing with companies that have poor support. And unfortunately, not all of them have great support or self-service tools like account recovery codes.

Only time will tell, but I don't think I've ever had that issue with Firefox so far.

Just a shortcut for anybody trying to find it.

"Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox. Here’s a step-by-step guide [0] on how to adjust your settings."

---

1. Click the [hamburger menu button] and select Settings.

2. Select the Privacy & Security panel.

3. Scroll down to the Firefox Data Collection and Use section.

4. Check or uncheck the box next to Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla.

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-data-mozilla-help...

I've heard a similar complaint from my dentist, who said practices are being sold to private equity instead of dentists coming out of school. My understanding is that her field, it's happening through Dental Support Organizations and Orthodontic Support Organizations.

I'm not claiming that review bombing doesn't exist, if it didn't Steam wouldn't need systems to counter it. I'm saying that certain companies try to save face by falsely claiming that legitimate negative reviews, sometimes left in mass, are part of a coordinated campaign or stem from illegitimate intent/sources. Often the root cause of mass negative reviews is that the business legitimately prioritized the wrong thing, made some bad/anti-customer decision, or communicated poorly with their community.

In regards to Epic, I'm not sure which game you're referencing. I don't really get the sense that the sentiment has changed and last I saw the Epic Games store still wasn't profitable after 5 years [0]. Anecdotally, the people I know using the Epic Store either do it for Fortnite/Rocket League or just to claim the free games (and some of those people never go back to play them.)

As an aside, I think the Fortnite store may have some dark patterns, but overall Epic actually does a good job of knowing who the customers are and giving them what they want, to great success. (Apologies if I'm not using the correct terms for the Epic stuff, but I just don't use it.)

[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/the-epic-games-store-still-isnt...

They should mention inconveniences in the review, those are relevant.

My take is that while reviews can be weaponized (and Steam does attempt to flag that,) companies are throwing the phrase "review bombing" around to try and undermine legitimate reviews and concerns from paying customers.

Epic's choice to avoid reviews, despite the resources they have at hand, is pretty squarely anti-consumer and part of why they struggle to gain consumer trust with their store.

I'm not a lawyer, but in general I think it would come down to the laws where this took place, the nature of the work, and the impact on the employee's ability to fulfill their job duties.

My understanding is there could be a common law duty to the employer at play, even when the employee didn't sign a noncompete and there's nothing specifically called out in the employment agreement.

It's also my understanding that if the employee acted to the detriment of the employer, such as compromising their own ability to perform job duties (as happened here) or competed against that employer, they may be in breach of that duty and could be terminated for cause depending on the specific laws.

So, if anybody is thinking about trying this, it's probably worth checking into local laws and potentially keeping records such as the hours worked for each employer. I would assume it's slightly more cut and dry when an hourly employee is in breach, since the hours are normally already tracked.

Thanks, I was sure I was missing something obvious like that when trying to simplify the explanation.

The chart can differ in different companies or sectors. In my mind, it comes back to what you want to be able to report on.

Some companies may have a larger and more detailed chart of accounts so that they can have very specific breakdowns of things. I've heard of big charts where each of a company's departments have specific accounts and all departmental transactions go there while the rest are lumped into a "Sales, General, and Admin" bucket. (Although I think it's more common to tag transactions with a department code these days?)

That said, categories can be broken down into sub-types beyond Assets/Liabilities/Equity/Income/Expenses. For example, assets are categorized based on how quickly they can be converted to liquid money and if they physically exist. So, under the assets account you may have accounts for current, fixed, and intangible (e.g. trademark or domain name) assets and you would record those appropriately.

Edit: To answer the question more directly, it depends on the company and how they've customized their accounts or guidelines. But, there are general accounting practices that mandate the need for specific things and common questions to be answered, so a lot similar structures and guidance emerge that a company's finance team could use to tell you where something belongs.