longrod

I don't think features such as Web USB, Web Bluetooth are privacy invasive. Chrome's huge market share is the very reason Firefox isn't trying very hard here. They are playing catch up. Take Manifest v3 for example; Chrome introduced it quite a while ago and made it mandatory for new extensions in 2022. Firefox just started catching up.

This is bad for Firefox because developers will eventually (and some still do) will simply stop supporting Firefox due it being so slow to catch up. Chrome already has such a huge market that a lot of web devs already don't care (e.g. Microsoft Teams).

What does this signify? It's the death of Firefox unless Firefox pulls a miracle here. Chrome is leading, all the devs are following, and they leading by leaps and bounds. Firefox is forced to catch up which causes frustration among users.

How long before Firefox gets tired of playing catch up and simply becomes irrelevant?

I am not happy about this. This is clearly bad but inevitable. The only other real competitor is WebKit which is restricted to Apple only. A huge market still. But Google's monopoly over the browsing market will only cause harm in the long run. Even though it will make devs jobs a lot easier.

Brave is a way better choice. As for plugin support on mobile, yes that's missing but I use extensions mainly on desktop. Brave comes with an adblocker built in and if that doesn't work, you could use something like Adguard.

A full detailed list: https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+101,chrome+102&compareC...

If there was one product where Mozilla could have really shined, it was Thunderbird. There's nothing like it in the FOSS world. Sadly they deprioritized it over Firefox resulting in the death of both.

Firefox is a dying horse on its last throes before Hades claims it for its own. Mythology aside, I find it truly sad to see the state Firefox is in. A browser is an incredibly complex piece of software and what Mozilla did with Firefox is nothing short of brilliant. Alas, they have been left too far behind [0] I am afraid they'll no longer be relevant in a few years.

Every few months Mozilla tries to overhaul it's UI and succeeds only to try again later. What are they trying to do? What's the real reason behind their slow descent into irrelevance?

Last time I tried Firefox on Android, it was a mess. Crashing every few minutes, unpredictable. I hear its a lot better now which is great! But why did they ditch the old one?

[0] https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+101,chrome+102&compareC...

edit: added link to caniuse.com

Here's how I use workspaces (I am on KDE by the way):

I have 1 workspace dedicated to programming. It has all the terminals, the code editor, and everything else.

The 2nd workspace is for browsing. Incidentally this also includes web app preview (if I am working on a web app).

I have mapped the Ctrl + ` for easy switching between the 2. So I make a change in the editor, press a key and see the preview. Nice and easy. My code editor is never minimized or in the background so all good.

I have to do all this when I am working on a small laptop screen where switching between windows is too annoying. I am aware that there are other ways to accomplish somewhat the same functionality but workspaces work for me.

This makes a lot of sense. I use Notesnook [0] which also encrypts everything client side. It also doesn't export attachments in the automatic backups. I asked the devs and this is done to save user's bandwidth and also to make everything more reliable. Suppose the user's internet is slow or metered, what should be done then? Would the backup never be taken? That's obviously a bad idea since the notes are too important not to backup.

So it makes a sacrifice on the attachments to make sure backup of the more important stuff keeps working even when there's no internet. Moreover downloading all the attachments takes a lot of time and doing it every day (or whatever interval) wouldn't be a good user experience.

I think the Notesnook guys were thinking of adding cloud-to-cloud backups for attachments to work around this reliably.

[0] https://notesnook.com

I think journaling can be a great funnel to collect everything of interest during your day. Like anything general a lot of it is just noise but the few gems inside can really be worth the effort.

Last version I tried (5.4 or something), it took >10 seconds to open. I didn't have too many extensions either. My PC is far from slow since Chrome/Brave open in <2 seconds.

I don't see how this is any better than opening a browser tab with a mail client in it? But putting that aside here were a few problems with Vivaldi and their Mail client the last time I tried it.

1. Vivaldi is slow. It's so slow that you could open 2 tabs on Brave/Chrome before it opens.

2. Side loading speed, memory and CPU usage is a lot more compared to other chromium based browsers. Don't know why.

3. And UI. There are so many options in settings. So many options and yet very few of them are something I'd want to change or adjust. I can't skin Vivaldi like Firefox. There are a few toggles and sliders but their overall effect to the UI is minimal.

4. Not to mention that the UI is in no way fancy or unique. But that's just personal preference. I like Chrome's simplicity. It gets out of the way. Vivaldi makes sure you notice the chrome.

5. And then the mailing client. I was really excited to try it out so I logged in via Gmail. As email accounts are these days, it contained thousands of emails. The surprising thing was Vivaldi started syncing all of them. Literally downloading thousands of emails. For no reason other than offline search? Is that really a good enough reason to make the user wait centuries while you index all their emails? Maybe they have added some option to specify which folders you want synced.

6. Aside from that, it was really buggy. Opening emails, composing, etc. Now that it's out of beta I hope those are fixed.

I went to Vivaldi for the UI. I had heard it was customizable. I left Vivaldi while it was still loading...

Can you share the links if possible?

Would it be possible to migrate from IdentityServer4 & ASP.NET Identity Core? I currently have a SaaS running those 2 and would love to eventually migrate all users to Kratos.

I think what changed over the years in the "product discussions" space/is that the sentiment has shifted from "users will come to us" to "we must go to our users". Platforms like Twitter (surprising as it is), Discord, Reddit etc. where a user already is dissuades a lot of products from hosting their own forums.

It's just quicker for a user to join a Discord community or tweet/DM a question where they already have an account. Even with things like OAuth2, the mental burden of creating a new account is there. Not to mention learning how to use the new platform. And the total gain after all the effort is trivial.

I think at this point in time, it's not reasonable to ask users to sign up to your own private platform unless you have a huge and loyal following. Users have become lazy due to the abundance of alternatives.

When I get an issue/bug/question, the first thing I check is if they have an issue tracker. Preferably GitHub. After that comes their various social accounts; Discord, Twitter, Reddit etc. If none of those work out I would most probably ditch the software. Reaching out via custom channels is cumbersome.

With that being said, this looks really cool although "delightfully simple" won't be an objective feeling among your users. Good job none the less! I wish you the best.

> Fast gigabit internet is cheap and everywhere (5G or mesh wifi)

Right. Most of the world doesn't even have 5G yet. Besides no matter how fast you get with internet, its still internet. There is still latency which makes for a frustrating UX.

I wouldn't want to be fully cloud based even if I had free internet for life. That's a recipe for disaster. The best thing about local stuff is...that it's local. I don't need an internet to access it. That's extremely convenient.

But putting that aside there's still cost of running things live (outside the internet cost). And why would I want to pay extra for something I can easily run on my machine locally? Live is for production code that multiple people will access. Local is good enough for me.

I would even prefer to self host most of the stuff locally on a Raspberry Pi or something instead of a cloud hosting. It's just so reliable.

I think we are way past the stage of "files as an offline singular entity" thing. Most everything these days is meant to be synced, shared, collaborated on, copied, sent etc. We are in sort of a transition stage between files and "pure data" (or whatever you wanna call it).

In these days of interconnectivity something like modifying metadata or storing metadata inside a file is a deprecated concept. This is a good thing but it takes away the simplicity of files.

I have worked with MP3 files (built 2 audio players for Windows) and while it's fun, its very cumbersome as well. For example the metadata is not consistent across files. Not to mention how slow IO is. Furthermore it's not synced with the file. If another program changes a file, everything else stays behind. You can resync but that's slow.

This is a sacrifice we made for owning the music we bought. Today you pay a couple of dollars for a Spotify subscription and get access to millions of albums. Is that a good thing? It's certainly an evolution. You don't have to copy files around anymore if you want to share a song. You can just send a link. You don't have to manage metadata, sync lyrics, deal with quality etc. anymore. That's all done for you.

It's certainly convenient but it takes away the novel feeling of owning something.

I wish this was made impossible by browsers. It's like making a user chase their tail; they won't ever catch it. They just keep going in circles until they explode with frustration. You can't even cancel the requests to load more data.

I have come across a couple of these (I think blogs & news sites do this) and it is so annoying.

Do they actually? I would be interested in reading some literature about this. How have they used/exposed/sold user's data?

Haha. Auto correct working its magic. Unfortunately, can't edit it out since its too late.

This is a very interesting situation for privacy respecting products.

Say you want to advertise to your potential audience, what do you do? You have very few privacy respecting methods.

1. You go with passive advertising like billboards, TV ads, blog ads etc. Not particularly effective since you can't do it across the world.

2. You go with something like Google with a huge ad network. But if you go with Google...you are tapping into and making use of personal data of your very own privacy respecting people. In a way, you are feeding the beast.

Which method should such a product go with? Which method would conform with their privacy respecting model best? Which would bring in a lot of users?

Not all ads are bad. Not all ad networks are bad. Some, very few, do it ethically. I think Brave itself is one of those. But these networks are very, very small compared to Google.

At all time the temptation is there to go with targeted ads because it's the most effective & affordable way to get potential users. The moment you do, are you still privacy respecting?

Edit: as to your question about banner ads. It depends. If you are using Google's banner ads they aren't static by any means. Google targets and rotates based on their huge database of user data. But if you just put a banner ad somewhere on a blog etc, that comes under the category of passive/non-targeted marketing.

The fact that they have to explain themselves with an article speaks a lot. Was this specific method necessary? I am sure it cost them quite a bit and were the results worth it?

How many people would read the article? How many people would simply run away from Brave due to this? How many people would care to research it a bit more?

Privacy is such a sensitive topic for privacy-respecting people that most of the time even a little doubt blows up the ship. This was a huge risk taken by Brave and unnecessarily so because they didn't do anything extraordinary by sending people mail.

Moreover, can this one article stop the negative sentiment from spreading? I don't think so.

This little stunt by Brave was clearly not the right move. Marketing is a necessity but if you sacrifice one of the core principals of your product i.e. privacy & security, what's the point?

The scenario is something like this:

Random person: recieves a physical mail right after installing Brave.

Brave: we are so so private and don't ever sell or use your data.

Random person: how did you get my address then right after I literally installed Brave?

Brave: you see, it's very private because we can't see the address or who the mail is going to go to. We just contracted a mailer who sent this marketing newsletter to everyone in their database.

Random person: ...

Brave: maybe you didn't understand but we, the brave company, didn't see who the mail would go to. That's privacy right?

Random person: deletes Brave

The problem here is that a privacy oriented company is accepting and making use of a very non-private method to spread privacy and Brave. Contradictory in it's core.

I still like Brave and what they represent. I am a fan. They do a lot of things right but this was baffling. I don't know how they could allow something like this to pass through the filter...

In those days the channels of discovery were so few and privileged that a common man couldn't even imagine something like publishing. You didn't have social networks with huge number of followers. You didn't have blogs or dedicated platforms where you could go and broadcast your discoveries. Whatever there was required genuine struggle for years and years.

This changed the important & value of time. Nowadays, we are running after things and very few here could say they worked over a thing for years and years. For us things are fleeting, our attention spans are ridiculous, and we don't have patience.

Moreover, getting fame and recognition is relatively easier in today's world that we can't even imagine doing something just for the sake of doing something because it is so easy to be materialistic about everything, and measure it on the money-made-fame-earned scale.

Even when we are working on that secret project, in our minds we can't help but think about it's materialistic value. I wonder how many of us will leave this world with truly groundbreaking projects behind...

You don't realize what's required for all that to work properly. Webpack + Babel at the least. Expecting that a beginner developer will have to learn these to write even simple programs is absurd.

Typescript doesn't solve any of the mentioned issues. You can't use CommonJS modules if you are targeting ES6+. And you can't use ES6 modules if you are targeting CommonJS. The only thing really useful about Typescript is types + generics (to some extent).

If you install any library that's either only ESM or CommonJS, you can't run your program. It simply doesn't work.

Looks really polished. Will have to try this for a few projects. The full text search looks really good!

It's still mostly the same. Nothing much has happened in the JS space in the last 2 years that would make all this easier.

The JS ecosystem suffers from a huge issue of duplication. There's multiple module systems, multiple ways to make a function, multiple ways to make a class, multiple ways to make a variable, multiple ways to loop over the array. Some of those exist in other languages as well but it's pretty bad in JS.

The problem is a language where you can do anything but where every day something has changed and the new something is the new cool. Now you have to ditch what you learned + the libraries to migrate to this. Or you have to use babel.

The module system fragmentation is the worst thing that can happen to a language. Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything remotely close to a bridge between CommonJS & ESM so both can coexist peacefully. If you turn towards one, node starts screaming about how ESM modules can't contain require and if you go the other way, well then CommonJS doesn't have import.

Aside from that JS is a great language. No, just kidding it's a mess.

This looks really neat and handy especially the type annotations part. I always got frustrated when accidentally putting the wrong type into a column.

How's the Language Server support for this? Last time I tried ZLS, it was quite well rounded so I am curious to know if this type annotations would work with it or not. Would be really cool if they do.

I have never been able to fully adopt zig due to how frustrating working with strings is but I absolutely loved the comptime functionality.

Looks like I am installing Windows.

One thing that has kept me away from getting into .NET terminal & desktop apps is the binary size. Even a hello world app is quite big compared to Go, Rust etc.

The most interesting thing here is that all of the 6 million articles on Wikipedia have been seen by 1 person at least once. So if we take all humans and ask them to search 1 unique thing on Wikipedia, would there be any articles that would get 0 hits?

SQLite is one of the most underrated databases around and it's sometimes baffling to know how much software actually relies on it.