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How do you manage your windows on macOS?

What wouldn't work cross-platform?

The 13" M2 Air feels decently light compared to most things I've daily driven. In part helped by its charger being very light.

Apart from MS's obsessive Bing pushing, I'd say Windows is easily better than macOS. Explorer beats Finder, PWA/Chrome profile support is nicer, window manager is better, archives are handled natively, touchpad gestures for eg. virtual desktops on small laptops are competitive. With a normal mouse, middle click for eg. hold to drag just isn't supported. The natural scroll settings for mouse and trackpad are bound, when you'd usually want them to be the opposite of each other.

As far as I know, iCloud is less well-featured than OneDrive.

As a recent MBA owner, the only thing I think Apple nails is hardware. The battery life and low power use are amazing and there's something to be said for Apple's ability to force-move devs to ARM.

The rest, not really. The OS is aggressively mid, as the kids would say.

...okay. Apple still makes native apps. That counts for something.

Apple problems get solved by buying more Apple products, working as intended :)

The natural scroll setting of the mouse and the trackpad are bound. You can't have one setting for one device and a different one for the other. It's maddening. Both Windows and Linux handle that easily.

Apple is quite fine with their OS being an embarassment that needs 3rd party apps to fix, people will still hail it as the best thing ever.

For example, window management on macOS is trash, and the shortcuts are command+arrows which is fine if you have both hands on the keyboard. Not so much when you have a separate mouse. The OS is built expecting you are on a laptop or using a trackpad of some kind.

Brave did that already. Blocked the tracking ads and built an altcoin-backed tipping service whose coins they regularly buy off the market with real money.

The monstrous battery life is a big draw.

I mean, it's true. If you don't care about privacy, and are fine with using Bing for search, Edge is actually a pretty pleasant experience. The problem is that it isn't great for privacy and tries to force Bing with all manner of dark patterns.

Actually huge. Sadly, it's still Edge, but proper uBO has to be better than whatever tampered version of Adblock they offer.

Microsoft has a growing ads business, and it's the ads division in charge of Windows and Edge nowadays, as far as I understand. The dev tools are for internal use and B2B, so the motivation is different.

One genuine performance edge Firefox has is that it can handle giant YouTube comments sections better than Chromium browsers in part because it accepts larger maximum page size.

Better in some ways, worse in others. It's less insistent on bothering you with things, but the App Store is a worse blowup than Microsoft Store, macOS's native window management is trash, the OS can't have separate natural scroll settings for the mouse and the trackpad, etc.

I generally feel like Windows is a better OS with more active annoyances, while macOS is aggressively mid as the kids would say, but doesn't actively bother you as much.

It's "interesting" to see the same old lies keep on being proffered, like Brave "rewriting affiliate links".

As someone living in one of those countries, it's not a concentration camp, except maybe during COVID lockdowns.

There was a XULRunner-based media player too, I used it for a good while:

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

Brave actually started out as a Gecko-based project - they were using some Gecko-based Electron equivalent, if memory serves. It was such a PITA to work with that they switched to a Chromium base.

Doesn't. Brave's adblockers are not an extension, they're integrated directly into the browser so they don't care what happens with extension APIs. Same reason they can do CNAME unmasking, which uBO can't on Chromium but can do on Firefox.

The issue with those recommendations is that they are worded to sound reasonable, and that they sound more reasonable when they target people you already dislike. For example, "promote factual voices" is in principle amazing, if it could be pulled off.

The problem is that it's hard to pull that off: One of the chief challenges of current day is that people have a hard time even agreeing what the facts are, and what some people hold to be factual aren't necessarily so.

The "factual voices" promoted by Facebook in the linked NYT article, for example, are just mainstream media which shares Mozilla's political slant and which have a built-up reservoir of respectability from earlier days when they were higher quality, but which aren't exactly paragons of factuality or careful reporting today, having spread outright misinformation and been quiet about important events. To put it another way, should we promote say, Fox News, because they're mainstream? That's probably not wise, if you ask just about anyone here.

The thing is, Fox may have been first, but every news outlet has drifted in a Foxified direction of catering to an audience and telling them what they want to hear instead of challenging their preconceptions, which ends up with many outlets made a killing hyperventilating about Trump, for example.

So the issue ends up being that Mozilla's just fine boosting that hyperventilation, which is part and parcel of the polarization and "we can't even agree what the facts are" problem. The issue of people lacking trust isn't solved by browbeating, but by earning their trust. It's presently really, really hard, but still in principle possible.

In the end, I don't want my browser maker to have that attitude. Brave and Vivaldi don't: They just make browsers and other services and give me more and more options. Brave even lets me judge sources and adjust my search engine should I want to. Supporting these teams that focus on giving me control and making better and better tools for me is an easy choice.

Some of the other bullet points have genuine upside that would be wonderful, but they also have costs and downsides that aren't immediately apparent.

Why use Chrome when Brave is pretty much the same but with better privacy?

One of the more interesting options they provide the user is the ability to pay for an ad-free Brave Search.

It's worth noting that PrivacyTests tests default configurations. If a browser has a good suite of privacy features but doesn't have them on by default, they'll score low on the benchmark.

Firefox, for example, can be hardened very well with options and extensions, but has many bad defaults (like Google default search with search suggestions on).

The site is all baseline, not potential. Not peak potential, not press a couple buttons potential.

Brave. Seriously. Turn off a few things at first boot, it won't bother you after and is just nice and clean:

https://i.imgur.com/tuMGc3c.png

It's so bloated: https://i.imgur.com/tuMGc3c.png

People here have a major hateboner against Brave. Some of it is crypto, some of it is Eich, relatively little the product itself.

Nope. No thanks.

First, Firefox literally makes their money from Google ads, and has Google search suggestions on by default. So much for privacy.

Second, the Foundation. A bunch of people more interested in leftist activism than in building a aolid tool for the user. Or just trying to score coolness points by having a sneaker designer make time-limited themes - sorry, colorways with names like "Activist" and "Expressionist".

But the politics. In "We need more than deplatforming", the organization in no uncertain terms said they were a-ok with others deciding what I should see on the Internet. Not okay, sorry. Why would I support an organization that hates me while the competition are doing things like allowing me to tune my own search results, or have options menus like Vivaldi's with more customization than is reasonable?

And lastly, it's just not a great product. Security on Android is trash and there are no PWAs or tab groups among other things. There's just no case when I could use competition that's better and either doesn't hate me or can at least manage to not be emotionally incontinent with their hostility because the browser is what matters?

Firefox's actual, non-replicable killer feature is somewhat questionable, but: Chromium has a lower limit on how much RAM a page can consume. Now, YouTube comments sections get huge, and huge web pages are huge. Turns out, Firefox can give the page more RAM and keep it nice and functional for longer.

The questionable part is spending your limited lifetime on reading huge YouTube comment sections.

They lost a lot of their userbase back in the day when they started getting slower and Chrome was way faster. Now, Chrome is default on Android devices and people are used to it on desktop. Edge is default on Windows, Safari on Mac and iDevices. The only place Firefox is the default is desktop Linux.

Nowadays they've caught up on speed pretty well on desktop, but are still behind on security, and years behind on security on Android.

Personally, I just like features like tab groups, and hate the Foundation's politics, so it was easy to drop it back when they said we need more than deplatforming. The competition has better features, is actually developing new features, and is focused on toolmaking instead of activism. Funnily enough, it shows up in the products.

It's definitely suboptimal.