In India, most government offices keep separate summer and winter timings, and an official date for the start of winter/summer (Usually Nov 1 to April 1), just that it isn't universally mandatory. I don't see why this isn't a better solution than literally changing all the clocks.
The earlier version of their sync protocol, Weave, only had local encryption. If you forgot the encryption password you lost your sync data with no possibility of recovery. Pale Moon remains the only browser sticking to the older version of sync, although it doesn't have a mobile version anymore and syncing would only make sense between 2 or more PCs.
This should be obvious - a chatroom is no substitute for a forum. It doesn't help that IM services like Whatsapp/Telegram are also trying to muscle into what should be a forum with their groups and communities features.
What worked was the decline of home PC users in favor of smartphones; Microsoft was never able to do well in this space despite buying Nokia's phone business (let alone dominating it as they still do on the desktop). Modern Microsoft has entirely switched to being cloud focused from just an OS vendor - their big money spinner these days is Azure, followed by Office 365 and then only Windows. It's also why Windows 10 and 11 are so user hostile compared to earlier versions; Microsoft doesn't have to care about a good user experience and will inevitably push the OS itself to a subscription model.
>You can go to the store and buy an entire PC with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Edge. Then you can install Firefox on it, or remove Windows entirely and install Linux. The trouble comes when you can't separate them anymore.
If you don't want Windows why would you buy a PC that has it pre-installed and the license price thus included in the total? The fact that you couldn't get a PC without Windows on it was one of the points made in the Microsoft antitrust case of the late 90s.
Would help a lot if they stopped obsessing over the search engine and focused more on their browser engine and HTML standards as good as monopoly, while pointing out that Firefox exists as controlled opposition, given Mozilla is massively dependent on Google search engine revenue for their finances.
Time for another round of 'I told you so' for expecting any different from a browser made by a company that runs on selling user data to advertisers for fun and profit. I've shunned Chrome and its various Blink based bastard spawn (including Firefox for the last 12 years, they may as well have dumped Gecko for Blink at this point) like the plague right from 2008 for precisely this reason.
At the time Mozilla claimed that according to their telemetry, not many people used RSS and live bookmarks, so they trashed the feature altogether. They could've at least kept feed detection and then let the user decide what feed reader app/service to use.
Anyhow - Pale Moon retains both features and for the weirdos who hate RSS for some reason, there's an about:config toggle to hide the feed detection icon altogether.
Using Pale Moon with 110 extensions (the original powerful XUL kind, not the lame Web Extensions that modern Firefox copied from Chrome), memory usage rarely crosses a gigabyte on a 12 GB Linux laptop from 2015 with 11 tabs open; currently at 800 MB.
Meanwhile, Floorp - a rebuild of contemporary Firefox - with 9 extensions and 4 open tabs - takes more than double that.
What do I do?
Been blocking ads since I discovered it was possible in 1999, while on a shitty dialup and observing that banner ads loaded before the page itself. Back then I used a network level adblocker/firewall combo called AtGuard, which Symantec acquired later.
Then moved onto AdMuncher on Windows for the next 15 years or so. Now I use Pale Moon as my primary browser - unlike Firefox that pretends to care about privacy while doing the opposite, this one, forked from Firefox 24 and maintained independently, does not have a shred of telemetry or analytics or 3rd party Pocket like bullshit that requires 50 different 'hardening' about:config tweaks to remove.
uBlock Origin and eMatrix (a current fork of the discontinued uMatrix), both with an aggressive set of filter lists keep the web spanking clean for me.
On Android, I've always rooted my phone to install AdAway, as a next level now I use AppManager (get it from muntashirakon.github.io) to disable advertising/tracking components within apps, and Google Play Services itself. Youtube being a special case, I use ReVanced Extended.
Took some doing, but now I've managed to happily use whatever the corporate web throws up minus every piece of track advertising/analytics/tracking crap that they throw at me on either laptop or phone/tablet. Occasionally I look at the uBlock Origin logs and shudder to see all the crap that got blocked.
Tl;dr - I don't have to turn hermit and seek out indie websites exclusively when I'm able to extract exactly what I want from the mainstream web. Ultimately, your devices belong to you; you have to take back control over what gets sent to it.
The solution to such problems isn't just technical - if you see a mail from someone that sounds out of character like in your case, best is to contact them directly or via a fresh mail composed to their address to confirm what was sent.
Other examples are receiving an attachment from a known person with just a one line 'check this out' or sometimes nothing.
Social engineering attacks always trump technical hacking and tend to be more successful.
It may well be too late, given Google has absolute control over web standards and their policy of introducing draft features in Chrome and then making them part of the standard. Unless an anti-trust case is brought against them which explicitly mentions their browser engine and standards monopoly, and correctly points out that every other browser today is just a skin around Chrome while Firefox is controlled opposition. Every case against them seems to obsess on the search engine monopoly.
Or just use Pale Moon, which is privacy respecting out of the box and doesn't need any hardening bullshit because it doesn't have any analytics, telemetry, third party crap like Pocket or anything else built in. It is what Firefox would've been if they didn't discard their original powerful XUL extension system and epic customization that doesn't need you to only dick around with userChrome.css (though you can if you want).
And with Firefox, the point is not that you can disable these features in about:config (until they remove that ability a few versions later) - the point is why the hell should you have to do any of this for a browser that keeps claiming to be privacy respecting?
You're describing the old Firefox before they became Google's controlled opposition. Since 2011 all they have done is continuously stripped out every useful power user feature in a bid to turn into a shitty copy of Chrome; the last straw was gutting their powerful XUL/XPCOM extension system in favor of Chrome's far limited web extensions because muh security (and since then there's been more, not less cross browser malware). Today you can't even write your own extension for use on the main build thanks to forced extension signing (which ended up disabling everyone's extensions a few years ago due to an invalid certificate).
And that's before all their unethical tracking, in browser advertising and privacy violation over the years, that requires various 'hardening' about:config changes out of the box, or the erosion of configurable features with almost every release. Mozilla are woke hypocrites today, financially dependent on Google while claiming to be privacy champions and squandering their money on multiple other projects instead of focusing on Firefox.
The only browser that continues to be the old Firefox in spirit - the one that upended Microsoft's IE monopoly - is its hard fork, Pale Moon (which gets derided as oLd aNd iNSeCuRe by Mozilla fanboys). Doesn't need any 'hardening' because it doesn't snoop on you to begin with, and the latest versions have massively improved web compatibility while retaining support for the original powerful XUL extension system.
Google+ was dead on arrival; Mozilla removed RSS support from Firefox long after Google+ was shut down. But of course, they have to dance to the tune of their biggest funder.
Correction, Firefox is controlled opposition for Google to deflect from being accused of having a browser and browser engine monopoly. Mozilla post 2011 is a very different beast; they decided that copying Chrome was the way to go, stripping out all useful features culminating in the removal of the powerful XUL addon system citing security problems (while ironically the amount of malware extensions shot up AFTER they switched to the Chrome originated Web Extensions format, which are far less limited in capability). Meanwhile, the simple minded continue to fall for their claims of respecting privacy and user choice.
The DRM fight died the day the EFF, Cory Doctorow, Mozilla and other supposed champions of open data formats kept mum while DRM was being added to the HTML5 spec, this also killed off the idea of NPAPI browser plugins.
Plugins were originally meant for exactly this sort of use - to display proprietary data within a browser by handing it off to another application - Flash and Java were the most popular but there were also media player plugins for DRMed media (both VLC & Windows Media Player for example, had browser plugins).
Take a seat. The US was the most primitive mobile market in the world before the iPhone, with people drooling over the frigging Moto RAZR - a feature phone FFS - just because it was thin and flipped open. And imagine paying for incoming calls, or buying your phone from the operator with all useful features like copying your own ringtones disabled so that you were forced to buy whatever lame ones the operator offered. Symbian in the meanwhile was a full featured, multitasking OS with apps, themes, video calling and other features that took their time to reach iOS and Android.
Nokia already knew that Symbian was on the way out, and they bought Qt to act as a bridge for developers between Symbian and Meego - it was to be the default app toolkit for Meego. Around 2009 onwards, Qt versions of popular Symbian apps started to appear. The first Meego device, the N9, had rave reviews but was intentionally hobbled by Elop choosing to go with dead in the water Windows Mobile and refusing to allow more production.
This piece from back in the day is a detailed analysis of the fiasco -
https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/09/the-fu...
Ah yes, communism. This time we will surely get it right because of our arrogance and hubris combined with total cluelessness about human nature and how spectacularly communism and its sibling socialism failed everywhere they were tried (And no, Scandinavian countries aren't 'socialist' just because of running a welfare program that happens to be funded by much heavier taxes on all their citizens than Americans could imagine)
Fixed pie fallacy of wealth strikes again. Amazing how common this view of x% people holding 'the wealth' is. Nothing similar existed before Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and the 2 Steves built their offerings; they got massively rich thanks to people worldwide choosing to pay them for their products & services (or voluntarily shunning the open internet with multiple anonymous fora like this one for Facebook's walled privacy screwing garden).
It has nothing to do with 'capitalism', in case you think the alternative is socialism where everything will be perfect (you'll be lucky to get any service at all when salary is not tied to customer satisfaction, as Russians used to their country's culture found to their pleasant surprise when they crowded up at the first McDonald's just before the USSR broke up).
And nothing prevents 'workers' from pooling their resources to run a business of their own as a cooperative and split the profits..as well as the losses.
Australia has some of the highest minimum wages in the world (with its own negative effect on small business owners) and you pay exactly the sum total of what you ordered on the menu as all prices are quoted inclusive of applicable taxes. Tipping is your prerogative if you feel the service was exemplary.
The US needs to get rid of the idea that it is the customer's responsibility to pay servers' wages over and above what they're already paying for the food.
Assuming they are paying customers and not users. There's long been the attitude that the developer is doing people a favor by not charging for using the software and therefore 'if you find a problem, fix it yourself using the source code'.
He said this in 1981, there was no Windows let alone MS Office at the time. The average simple text mode DOS application was barely 50-100kb in total, so 640k was quite a comfortable limit for several years more.