Oh, wow, I just installed it on my server, and it's great (づ ◕‿◕ )づ
29,995 karma · joined September 15, 2008
The author is playing with his own bookmarklets and extensions that will never be part of the browser, as it serves his own needs, not someone else’s.
For the browser to act as the user agent, it needs to be scriptable.
China, BTW, is censoring or blocking all Western social media platforms and online publications. Why should we accept their online services when they are blocking ours?
Say what you will of USA, but they are allies and Europe needs to grow the f* up and stop being so tolerant of despotic countries, because our money and resources are fuelling their wars.
I understand that you're afraid of the US yielding so much power online, but then propose a European alternative, not a Chinese one. Let's innovate instead of complaining about US's tech hegemony, as right now all I'm seeing are complaints and regulations for tech we aren't building.
Blacklist is a word that stands out, an interesting combination like other English words or phrases and I had no issues with learning it. It's also a word with a rich history that doesn't seem to have had a racist origin. And because it was used since 17th century and is still in use, non-native English speakers have to learn it anyway.
"Master" was more legitimate as a target for change, but again, I don't think anyone had issues with understanding it. This is like when mother-father or male-female is used to describe electrical connectors.
And also, the bigger problem with changing "master" to "main" is that "master" was a standard and the change was painful. At work our branch is still called "master", any change won't happen soon, as people have better things to do (needing to reconfigure CI, plus red tape due to policies and ACL policies) . So now people have to be aware that the default can be both "master" and "main", increasing the knowledge one has to possess for no good reason. It's not like the change from "master" increased the quality of life for anyone.
Note that I have no issues with changes that are made for clarification. For example, in database replication, maybe it's better to talk of a primary database and of replicas, which seems more descriptive and aids learning. But I don't think many such changes were motivated primarily by the need to clarify, but by the need to sanitize the language and I disagree with such a motivation.
You can have alternative app stores, you can download torrents on it and then play them with VLC, you can have the actual Firefox browser and even Chrome clones (e.g., Brave) are more capable than iOS Safari web views. You can have an email client that works locally (K-9 Mail). Android has had usable PWA support for years. The most popular chat app, WhatsApp, is not Google's app. Samsung phones don't even push people into many of Google's apps, shipping with Samsung's own launcher, Calendar, Notes, Camera, Gallery, etc., and it even has their own apps store in addition to Google Play. And AOSP, the open-source distribution, is actually usable even without Google's Play Services, which has spawned distributions such as LineageOS breathing life into old devices.
I'm an Android user, and except for the Play App Store and Google Maps, I don't use any other apps from Google and that hasn't happened due to some attempt for "degoogling". Even the app that syncs my CalDAV/CardDAV accounts is not developed by Google (on Android this isn't native, but that's completely fine).
I don't understand why many iPhone users resort to such mental gymnastics to justify an expensive device that's being rented from Apple.
And yes, as an app developer, you want Android users because Android (and its allies, like WhatsApp) are actually winning in the marketplace. Providing clients for all people is how WhatsApp came to dominate the landscape. This is why Apple is so reluctant to give up on their nefarious practices related to their App Store or the restrictions they place on developers, continuously trying to undermine the EU's DMA because they know they only have a short window during which they can milk the user base.
Personally, I don't understand why people buy iPhones. If you're in the US, I can understand the texting and video calls lock-in, but even then, I'd buy an Android just because I'd refuse to be a hostage to Apple's services, and I'd wear that green badge with pride.
Furthermore, paying the price of the latest iPhone Pro (or Samsung S Ultra for that matter) is ridiculous and is only acceptable to people with high prices on their contracts. Much like what US people are going through — i.e., if you're paying $100+ on a mobile plan, might as well throw an iPhone in the mix to sweeten the deal. But on my 5 EUR unlimited data plan, me and others do not want an expensive phone included and prefer to pay for that phone up front.
You can't change the license of the code, even if that license is permissive enough for the code to be incorporated in proprietary works.
I mean, often this doesn't really matter because, unlike with GPL, publishers are not required to give you the source-code. But it matters when that source-code gets republished, say, under a source-available license, after having been under MIT/BSD/APL2, in which case, that's illegal, unless the company owns the copyright to do so.
As an example — if you have a file with a copyright header saying the code is licensed under a permissive license, you can't just change that header to a different license. There's even a famous case about it: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070913014315
It all comes down to copyright. If you copy a piece of code that's not trivial, even if the license allows you to copy and reuse that piece of code, you're not suddenly the copyright owner of that code. Permissive licenses are permissive, but they do have restrictions, and most importantly, with copyrighted works, excluding the fair use cases that depend on legislation, you can only do what the license allows you to.
So, no, code licensed under permissive licenses can't be re-licensed as proprietary, even if it can be incorporated in proprietary works. And this is often a useful distinction to make, as I can think of several re-licensed projects under source-available licenses that couldn't have been re-licensed without copyright assignments.
And while they are "moulding the web for their own profit", at least they are interested in keeping the web alive, and I don't think anyone interested in the health of the web will like the alternatives, which are actually winning right now (closed app stores delivering native apps with spyware and unblockable ads).
By doing this, the DOJ may invalidate one business model that keeps certain FOSS projects alive — commoditized complements to proprietary products and services. You can hate Google, and still see why this will be a huge problem, especially for projects as complex as browsers are.
That's one way of putting it. The other perspective is that those are necessary features and that Safari and Firefox are now holding the web back. When IExplorer 6 was the most popular browser, with Firefox being the underdog, I don't remember people complaining that Firefox was implementing non-standard features.
Let's also remember that by standards, we mean W3C standards, that organization that was once deemed so slow and irrelevant that Mozilla, Apple, and Opera decided to just initiate WHATWG (back when Opera still existed and Apple still wanted a better web).
The irony of the backlash against Chrome's Privacy Sandbox is that Firefox has started shipping similar features, too: https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/
And it's understandable why because the alternative is a web centralized in closed gardens (Facebook), locked behind paywalls, or a dead web.
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I mean no disrespect, but the people advocating for a slower web progress sound just like the people advocating for degrowth, all being a bunch of nonsense that only a tiny elite minority actually wants.
As for what Google has done historically with Chrome, it's trivially easy to point to developments that have improved the web.
You can start with the fact that it's the most secure browser, see for instance: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
You can also read their original marketing material, in which they describe the isolation of plugins, extensions, or tabs, i.e., a crashing Flash movie or a crashing website no longer crashed the browser — then count the years it took for their competition to catch up: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
On “speed”, not sure what you mean, but Chrome has been demonstrably the fastest browser. It always was, with V8 being the fastest JS engine since launch, but also in benchmarks testing more “real” experiences, like Speedometer 3. The only area where it needs improvement is battery efficiency on macOS machines, where Safari has the lead, but even there it made great strides.
Speaking of PWAs, Chrome was also the first to deliver a good PWA experience on mobile devices and on the desktop. For mobile devices, the first one was Apple's Safari, but then Apple crippled the experience by not implementing much needed functionality, such as notifications. Firefox, BTW, still has unfixed bugs on Android and provides no SSB support for the desktop.
The fact of the matter is that the web has been dying because people have moved to mobile devices, where they prefer native apps.
If you're advocating for slower development of browsers, you're also advocating for the death of the open web.
The fact of the matter is that the web has been losing to native mobile apps and closed ecosystems. For many people, Facebook's mobile app is the Internet, and they're installing it from a closed app store. The web is an open application platform, whether you like it or not, and it either evolves to compete with mobile apps, or it's going to die.
For this reason, Google does more to preserve the open web than its competition in the browser space. And yes, I find these stats worrying when opened in Firefox:
https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/
And look, if you want to use a text-based browser like it's the 90s, go for it, but I'm pretty sure that most people are glad to see apps running in their full-fledged browser; because the browser is cross-platform, it's the perfect sandbox, and opening a web page isn't gated. YMMV.
Are these nazis in the room with us?
https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-plugin-no-long...
People woke up to their website being updated to “Secure Custom Fields”, an alternative (or a fork) that's not fully compatible. Here's one such report from HN:
All the projects doing that will soon discover that they were popular mostly because of the Open-Source licensing. Once that changes, the popularity, and goodwill go down, for the simple reason that trust gets breached and forks happen. Open-Source is essentially about the freedom to fork, and that's precisely what happens when governance fails.
Some of them will backtrack on that decision, but it will be too late; like ElasticSearch recently changing again to AGPL, except now the question is why would people choose it over the more trustworthy, open and secure OpenSearch.
There's nothing wrong with building proprietary software, but there is something wrong with pulling a bait-and-switch, betraying your community that invested in your product because of its Open-Source nature.
Matt surely knows that, and also, changing the license of WordPress is probably not possible due to them not having the full copyright. WordPress is not really theirs, despite all their contributions. Which is why this will not end well for Automattic.
This isn't opinionated, this is theft.
If the project had been run like this since the beginning, it wouldn't be where it is today. Automattic is a rich company partially due to the community around WordPress, and the trust that community has had in the governance of the project.
Furthermore, Microsoft's Edge is sharing your data with the entire advertising industry.
It can't block ads coming from 1st party domains, it can't do cosmetic filtering, it can't work with shims to prevent the breakage of websites, and it's easily detected and circumvented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox
How about more recently, when they enabled “privacy-preserving attribution” without user consent?
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/
It's like them, after all, they also include a unique ID with each download, that then they send in their opt-out telemetry.
How about Firefox's sponsored links in the New Tab page?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
I am asking because this community has a serious double-standard. This isn't about any “shady crypto” or affiliate codes being inserted, issues which were promptly fixed. It's about something else entirely, and people are being disingenuous about it.
Go here, download and install the APK: https://f-droid.org/en/
You now have a third party app repository on your phone. And actually every Samsung device comes with their own app store installed in addition to Google Play. It's not perfect, Play having the privilege to automatically install updates, but good enough.
Also, AOSP is completely usable even without Google's apps or Play Services, and one proof of that is that Amazon forked it for their Kindle Fire.
The arguments from Apple fans are truly bizarre.
Take a look at this paper: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/mtgn7
The truth is, there was no more room left for a no. 3. The writing was on the wall for those able to see, Nokia's alternatives were out, much like Blackberry, regardless of what they did.
I, too, was unhappy with Nokia's move to producing Windows Phones. But Microsoft, compared to other companies, knows how to build operating systems and create developer ecosystems around them. If Microsoft failed, IMO, Nokia did not stand a chance.
Many believe that AGI will happen in robots, and not in online services, simply because interacting with the environment might be a prerequisite for developing consciousness.
You mentioned boredom, which is interesting, as boredom may also be a trait of intelligence. An interesting question is if it will want to live at all. Humans have all these pleasure sensors and programming for staying alive and reproducing. The unburdened AGI in your description might not have good reasons to live. Marvin, the depressed robot, might become real.
And also, it's unreasonable to expect all software projects to need updates, forever. My hammer doesn't need updates.
It's been mentioned time and time again, but it's worth mentioning again — Windows maintaining backwards compatibility is what maintained its hegemony, as compared to it, Linux and macOS look like hobby projects. For the young as well, because games still run on it, without worrying that Apple will invalidate their library due to not being in the mood to maintain 32-bits APIs.