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MDN has a page documenting differences in API support between major WebExtension browsers:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

In fairness to Google, it's not absurd in principle. Mozilla has dealt with this problem for years: when an extension slows the browser down, the user is more likely to blame the browser than the extension. But in this specific case of ad-blocking extensions, I have a hard time taking Google's justification seriously. Ad blockers speed up the browsing experience far more than whatever negligible processing time the filter process takes.

The stated reason for removing blocking from WebRequest is to improve performance, not privacy. If an extension can block a request, Chrome needs to wait for the extension before performing the request. See the WebRequest section in the design document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3Nzz...

> Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people better understand what’s being said in often chaotic conversations. The team thinks that if people took more time to read entire conversations, that would help improve their comprehension of them.

I had assumed that Twitter was aware of the implications of its design for conversation and had decided that the controversy boost to engagement numbers was worth creating a toxic environment. For real, consider these two basic elements of Twitter's design. First, any given post has a low maximum length, so any time you want to say more than a sentence or two it needs to be spread over multiple posts (a "tweetstorm"). Second, Twitter has two separate features that let anyone pull any part of a series of posts out of its original context: retweeting and quote-tweeting.

No worries. I really was sincere with my original question of whether I was missing useful potential applications.

Building richer cross-site interactions into web standards and browser interfaces is an intriguing idea. A more dynamic model of hypertext, where the browser intelligently displays linked-to content. Even though portals are a highly limited version of that idea, Google has a high chance of getting them standardized and implemented by competing engines, so hopefully more useful applications can be found.

Animation isn't the point of the portal element, it's to allow cross-site navigation to an embedded page without reloading.

It's true that I could be lacking imagination. Because to me the portal proposal reads like it's simply moving the implementation of Google's AMP carousel into the browser in order to solve the address-bar problem. Your suggested use cases aren't terribly convincing, I'm afraid. Zooming UIs are perfectly possible using existing web technology. It would be interesting to have a standard way to embed Twitter/Facebook-style preview cards, but portals aren't it. A portal would just display a small portion of the page, which wouldn't be terribly useful unless the page is designed to reformat itself when displayed inside a portal viewport. If you want link previews now, there's nothing stopping web application developers from fetching the Open Graph metadata themselves.

Am I reading this wrong, or is Google pushing a fairly complex element with substantial security considerations into HTML exclusively to solve their UX problems with AMP and the pre-load search carousel? Like this seems like it would be a fair amount of work for browsers to implement, and Google is the only party who would benefit.

The release notes for version 11 include a list of potentially incompatible changes: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/release-11.html#id-1.11.6...

If there's a severe security issue, Debian will quickly push an update containing a backported version of the fix, assuming you have the debian-security repository enabled (which you should). Just because the version number on the package is old doesn't mean it's insecure.

https://www.debian.org/security/faq#oldversion

The Guardian isn't a blog, and this story isn't blogspam. The linked Guardian story provides a lot of useful context about Amazon's counterfeiting problem that isn't included in Amazon's marketing post.

My money's on total ignorance of copyright law. In a world where people post videos with disclaimers of "no copyright intended," I can believe that someone could think that a work they don't own can made open source by simply declaring it so.

China has party-authorized Christian churches with exactly your goal in mind. This crackdown is on unauthorized churches.

For an example of how they frame it in propaganda: http://en.people.cn/n/2014/0807/c90882-8766262.html

Yes, a giant table filled with hundreds of rows like "network.auth.subresource-img-cross-origin-http-auth-allow default boolean false" is in fact arcane.

That doesn't seem like it would solve anything, unless I'm missing something substantial. Which specific browser engine it uses isn't as important for resource consumption as the fact that it's spinning up an entire browser engine per process.

Deleting "chronic pain" posts makes sense if Tumblr is trying to eliminate drug-related posts with as much cleverness and grace as the porn purge. (Chronic is uncommon slang for marijuana.)

Honest question: how well-lit is the area you use your computer in, and have you tried turning down your monitor's brightness? I'm as baffled by the popularity of dark themes as you are with light themes, but I'm sitting in a fairly bright room with natural light and a monitor at 35% brightness. In these conditions dark-on-light and light-on-dark text are equally pleasant to read, and I opt for light themes when given the choice simply for consistency. If you're using dark themes because you browse the web in the dark, it seems to me like changing your conditions is a better solution for your eye health.

Yes, there are programmatic ad networks for podcasts. For example: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/08/acast-programmatic-ads/

> I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models.

In the current version of Windows 10 there's a feature called "fresh start" that makes it trivial to reset to a clean OS install without vendor crap. It even automatically preserves your home directory. The only problem is that you need to know it exists, so it only benefits technical users and users with geeky friends to advise them.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-the-fresh-st...

Unless I'm misunderstanding your post, the concept of a "voting receipt" would enable vote buying. The inability to prove how you voted after the fact is a deliberate feature of voting systems.

The 2000 presidential election was a big driver. No one wanted to spend November of an election year hearing about "chads" ever again, so the Help America Vote Act was passed. Among other things it provided federal funding for states to replace problematic punch-card voting machines. Electronic voting, in theory, could be easier to use than a paper ballot and can automatically check that the ballot is filled out correctly (e.g. not voting for multiple candidates for a single office). And of course there were companies lining up to help states spend those federal dollars on overpriced touchscreen PCs running Windows XP.

In addition to the point others made about vulnerabilities, you should know that Thunderbird currently split the calendaring features into an add-on called Lightning that is included but disabled by default. If you don't want a calendar, you won't get a calendar.

Have you talked to your lawyer about that? Fair use is a lot more limited than many people believe, and marketing for a design agency certainly strikes me as commercial use.

Do you have any specific complaints about the design of the linked page? Because you seem to be assuming that the properties of Brutalist architecture that you hate would necessarily be inherited by a web design style named after it. I see no reason that should be the case. We have an example of the style directly at hand, so why not speak in specifics?

SDL identifiers start with a letter or underscore, and a key must be a valid identifier.

Work on modernizing AutoHotkey's syntax has been ongoing for years, and the v2 alpha makes huge (backwards-incompatible) steps to make the syntax simpler and more consistent.

https://autohotkey.com/v2/v2-changes.htm

Ah, and NXT has a Metal backend! Very cool.

It's important to note that NXT isn't necessarily a replacement for ANGLE. It's an experimental replacement for WebGL as a whole, with a different API. There still needs to be a way to run WebGL programs on Mac if this deprecation leads to removal a few versions down the line.

There's precedent: Chrome and Firefox both implement WebGL on Windows with ANGLE, which translates OpenGL to Direct3D.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANGLE_(software)

Every major ad-blocking browser extension blocks based on URL patterns and CSS selectors. Requests that match URL patterns on the blacklist are dropped, which is at least as fast and saves at least as much bandwidth as blocking at the DNS level. More, really, since URL patterns can block individual paths under a domain, blocking ad scripts hosted on the same domain as content you want to load.

Military-industrial complex is an older and more precise term.