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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Thing is, ME as an idea made sense. Win2K wasn’t targeted to consumers, XP was in the pipeline for that, but they needed an interim version until it was ready. It looked like Win2K, but ostensibly compatible with the Win9x line. They just fucked up the execution on the internals, so it was terribly unstable.

    Windows 8 had the opposite problem: it improved on Win7 internals, so it was solid, but had a terrible UI that no one asked for.

    One could argue that the reason ME failed was very possibly because it was rushed. Win8, on the other hand, looks very much like designed by comitee with either very misguided designers or marketing people at the helm. Because of that, Win8 feels like a much worse failure to me.


  • and do you think there were repercussions before?

    For X? Sure, that’s why they’re leaving in the first place - by not complying to the judge’s orders, they’d surely get slapped with fines and such. As a company, it makes sense to leave and avoid being accountable, but given the influence they (sadly) still have in the media, avoiding those repercussions and letting bad actors do their thing, they’re adding gasoline to the burning world.

    The fact that Whatsapp is more popular in Brazil than X is beside the point.



  • I don’t actually care about the drama per se at this point either. I mentioned it because, along with the fact that:

    • development is not very open (in that only that one guy commits and releases stuff)
    • release cadence is very erratic and often lags behind upstream chromium, which is a direct consequence of the previous point
    • you mentioned about the guys absence - the first time was some time ago and he was inpatient in the hospital for (IIRC) alcohol abuse, and this absence actually coincided with the drama over the furry and the other stuff, so it took awhile for it to be addressed, which only added more fuel to the fire. The second was just this last couple of months were he was house sitting for his parents (mentioned on the release notes I linked before)

    All of this paints a bleak outlook for the long term health of this project, IMO. Which is too bad , because I still think it’s one of the better forks of chromium.








  • This sounds like dev sour grapes but what the company was asking them to do seems better from the customer pov and for cyber security I’m general.

    As a developer myself (though not on the level of these guys): sorry, but just, no.

    The key point is this:

    […] we did not issue CVEs for experimental features and instead would patch the relevant code and release it as part of a standard release.

    Emphasis mine. In software, features marked as “experimental” usually are not meant to be used in a production environment, and if they are, it’s in a “do it at your own risk” understanding. Software features in an experimental state are expected to be less tested and have bugs - it’s essentially a “beta” feature. It has a security bug? Though - you weren’t supposed to be using it in a security-sensitive environment in the first place, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me that it should be addressed in a normal release as opposed to an out-of-band one.

    We can argue if forking the project is or isn’t extreme, but the devs absolutely have good reason to be pissed. This is typical management making decisions without understanding technical nuances and - from what is being told by the devs - not talking it through before doing it.



  • Why don’t you want to go back to Firefox? If you hate Mozilla just use a fork like Waterfox

    Nothing specifically against Mozilla. As far as big techs go, they all have their hands covered in mud in some way. If anyhing, Mozilla would be one of the less dirty of them. As most everything else these days, rallying behind a big tech (as if that made any sense at all) is a matter of picking your poison.

    My peeve with Firefox is that I think that it’s just an overall worse browser, in terms of design and architecture, than Chromium, and it shows as it being mostly behind it in performance. As a software developer myself, this is important to me for an application that is a central part of my everyday life. I do use it sometimes as an alternate browser, and I realize that Firefox got a lot of improvement in the last few years, and that it’s performance nowadays is really close to Chromium, but it all feel like lipstick on a pig kind of thing. I also quite dislike Mozilla’s choices in UI design - every time they change it, it seems to be for the worse, as opposed to Chromium that has kept pretty much the same since its inception, with just relatively subtle changes since then.

    I know I’ll eventually get used to it, I guess I just dislike being forced to change.


  • There are a few more layers to this problem that no one seems to acknowledge.

    What if someone DID come out of the woods and provided a Chromium fork that put Mv2 support back in. Then what? How do you install those extensions? Google won’t be allowing Mv2 extensions in their store anymore. Supposedly you’d need to download it directly from the developer and install it manually. That’s not great UX.

    Maybe if the dev community came up with an alternative web store implementation that allowed Mv2 extensions, but that comes with a lot of other problems, to name a few: dev effort, costs for hosting the web app for the store and hosting the extensions themselves (which wouldn’t necessarily be expensive, but wouldn’t be free either), approval workflows for the extensions, etc. Thing is, though, all of that would require from devs a clear roadmap and a level of coordination that from my seat here, I don’t see a hint of it happening.

    All of the above: either having a Chromium fork that allows installing Mv2 extensions manually, or implementing an alternative web store, is not a trivial effort, and then how many people will actually benefit from it? Those really concerned with effective adblocking, like us, are a tiny minority of the user base. Would the effort of maintaining a Chromium fork and/or a free(dom) webstore be worth it if very few people will actually use it?

    I hate to say it, but yeah, Mv2 is doomed. I didn’t want to go back to Firefox, but I guess I’ll have to.





  • If Signal didn’t alienate a large number of users by removing SMS maybe switching would be more viable.

    This. I hate Whatsapp, but I have to use it because that’s what everybody else (where I live) uses, so either I cave, or be Incommunicable by everyone and get used to explaining why while sounding like a dork.

    I used Signal because, although a very small set of friends used it, I had an excuse to keep it because it handled SMS, and so I could keep it in the hopes that eventually WA would shoot itself in the foot and people would finally migrate, but since they removed SMS, why the hell would I hold on to it if I’d have no reason to other that I like it?


  • fernandofig@reddthat.comtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy Mastodon?
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    1 year ago

    Yeah, but then we’re not talking about social media anymore, but brand and company names in general.

    When you want a brand name to be part of people’s everyday vocabulary, as is the case with social media, it needs to be succint and easily referred to. Hell, sometimes people even turn those names into verbs (tweeeting, facebooking, etc.), how do you do that with Mastodon without compounding the problem? (E: I know about “toots”, but now that’s coming up with unintuitive jargon for the platform - which is fine, but shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place if more thought had been put into the brand)