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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • The difference is how you interact with the browser engine. Blink is very easy to embed into a new browser project. I’ve seen it done - if you’re familiar with the tools, you can build a whole new browser built around the Blink engine in a few hours. You can write pretty much whatever you want around it and it doesn’t really change how you interact with the engine, which also makes updates very simple to do.

    With Firefox, it’s practically impossible to build a new browser around Gecko. The “forks” that you see are mostly just reskins that change a few settings here and there. They still follow upstream Firefox very closely and cannot diverge too much from it because it would be a huge maintenance burden.

    Pale Moon and Waterfox are closer to forks of Firefox than Librewolf for example, but they’ve had to maintain the engine themselves and keep up with standards and from what I’ve read, they’re struggling pretty hard to do so. Not a problem that Blink-based browsers have to deal with because it’s pretty easy and straightforward to update and embed the engine without having to rewrite your whole browser.

    Unfortunately, since Google controls the engine, this means that they can control the extensions that are allowed to plug into it. If you don’t have the hooks to properly support an extension (ie. ublock), then you can’t really implement it… unless you want to take on the burden of maintaining that forked engine again.

    That said, Webkit is still open source and developed actively (to the best of my knowledge - I could be completely wrong here). Why don’t forks build around Webkit instead of Blink? Not really sure to be honest.


  • I chuckled a bit while reading this, because what you wrote is exactly where Blink came from. It was a fork of webkit, which in turn was derived from KHTML. Then again, the fact KHTML was discontinued does support your point to an extent too, I guess.

    But the point is, Chrome is doing exactly this - providing the engine free as in beer and letting people embed it however they like. And yet, what you’re predicting, ie. not using the original but just using forks instead, doesn’t seem to be happening with Chrome - they still enjoy a massive fraction of the market share. There’s no reason to believe that this couldn’t happen at Mozilla as well. People usually want the original product, and it’s only a small fraction of people that are really interested in using the derivatives.


  • I actually agree (more or less) with everything you’re saying. But the problem is, I don’t think it really matters to anyone. I think there’s still one point that people still don’t seem to be understanding:

    Inflation and economic issues trump (pun not intended) all of the things you listed. We have to eat every day. And when you’re living on the edge, every meal, every time you eat, you’re constantly reminded of how precarious your life is. All the things you mentioned are great, but frankly they don’t matter when you’re just worried about whether you’re still going to be able to afford food at the end of the week.

    Revolutions are not started by people who don’t have healthcare or education, or any of those other abstract things that may affect them in the future. They come from people who are hungry. And stressed. Stress and hunger really start eating your brain after a while, and people experiencing that start doing very nasty, desperate things like resorting to the kinds of demagoguery that the far-right is pushing. And this is what I mean when I say nothing is getting better under liberals - more and more people are falling into the cracks day by day, and if you don’t address this, then none of the other things don’t matter. Yes, in theory, all the economic policies that liberals propose should help with that, but if the effect is not immediate, then it’s not happening fast enough and people will continue to revolt.

    I really think people who keep bringing up how this will ultimately hurt their voters need to understand this better. They’re not wrong, but I do think they’re missing the point. The standard of living in the west has been declining for a long time as I alluded above, and that’s why people are starting to do desperate things - because they’ve run out of patience and have seen the status quo for long enough, they’ll take any alternative and have no choice left but to overlook all of the criminal things these despots say and do. Maybe they do care about all those criminal things, or maybe they don’t, but what really matters is that they want drastic action to take place. They don’t want policies - they want results and they want it fast.

    And I don’t think liberals understand or care to understand this. That’s what I mean when I say that liberals are making things worse. Until you stop the tide of more and more people falling behind economically, none of the things you pointed out are ever going to matter to people. You’re not going to win elections that way - even against the likes of Donald Trump.


  • Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.

    People are quick to assume this, and there’s a very good chance that they’re right, but I don’t think we should take it as a given. It’s always possible that there could be some sort of court decision that allows Google to keep funding Mozilla after the “breakup” is complete.

    In any case, we don’t yet know what the outcome of the antitrust case will be, so I think it might be best to avoid making statements of certainty like this until we see how things really shake out.

    We should definitely take the possibility of this happening very seriously though.


  • You’re right about the fact that building an engine is hard, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.

    If Mozilla really wants to take back the web (and I honestly don’t think they actually do), then what they should really be doing is making gecko as easy to embed in a new browser as blink is. They don’t do this, and I suspect that they have ulterior motives for doing so, but if they did, I think we would be much closer to breaking chrome’s grasp on the web.

    Because let’s face it: Mozilla makes a pretty damn good browser engine. But they don’t really make a compelling browser based off it. Ever noticed how Mozilla has been declining ever since they deprecated XPCOM extensions? It’s because when they provided XPCOM, it enabled users to actually build cool and interesting new features. And now that they’ve taken it away, all innovation in browser development has stagnated (save for the madlads making Vivaldi).

    They need to empower others to build the browser that they can’t. That’s what would really resurrect the glory days of Firefox in my opinion.



  • A lot has been said about how shocking and awful the results are, and I do agree with them. I definitely do not condone any of the far-right parties, their representatives, or their policies.

    But what hasn’t been said (and might be a bit controversial) is the fact that liberal parties are the biggest problem that the world is facing right now. It’s the parties that pretend to be an opposition force, but in reality they just keep shitting on voters, making broken promises, and saying “it’ll be better next time, just one more term!” They keep trying to convince people that the system works and that iterative changes will make things better. But in reality, things have actually been getting worse for 10, 15, maybe even 20 years… (the exact number depends on where you live and what you do for a living).

    After a while, people stop believing in those broken promises. And the longer they refuse to put up any real opposition, the more and more they empower the far right.

    In Canada, Trudeau needs to implement proportional representation NOW. If he doesn’t want to do that, he might as well just come out and endorse Poilievre, because he damn well knows what will happen if he doesn’t give people a real alternative (even he can’t pretend it’s any other way at this point). And no, ranked choice voting is not the answer here.

    In the US, I have to be honest: it’s not a country anymore. It’s several countries, all jammed into one, and half of whom hate each other with no limit. And to be honest, this is how it’s supposed to work!!! This is how the constitution is framed! Federal government is supposed to be weak and state governments are supposed to fill that void, but the States refuse to actually work that way and keep looking to control a Federal government in a way that they’ll never be able to.

    The USA really ought to break into constituent countries. The West Coast is a country. The Northeast is at least one country, maybe 3-4. And you can slice up the red states however you like - I honestly don’t care. Maybe this way, they can finally actually get shit done in a way that starts making people happy, because there’s far too much animosity between different and disparate parts of the “country” in its current form. It’s definitely not going to come from the Federal government.

    I know that none of these things are going to happen, so things will just continue getting worse and worse over the next decade or two. Fair warning to everyone: we’re not even close to rock bottom yet.


  • You’re doing amazing work here. Not enough people are trying to make an effort to understand far right voters. You don’t have to agree with the policies, but you do still have to make an effort to understand why they appeal to people and makes them want to vote that way.

    Liberal parties (Democrats, LPC, etc.) have been ignoring this for far too long and in my opinion, that’s why they keep losing. They lose and blame the voters for not seeing the world the way they do, but they don’t have any understanding or perspective of what the world looks like through the eyes of these voters. That’s why they don’t have any appeal and things are just going to continue getting worse as long as they continue ignoring the real issues that affects voters.

    (Unless a real alternative party emerges, I suppose…)


  • This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

    This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they’re all at the mercy of Poettering’s Next Stupid Idea.

    Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.


  • Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they’re being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

    The takeaway here is: don’t focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you’re on the side of the street with too many people, you don’t have any personal leverage on your own. It’s in your best interests to get out of that relationship.



  • But part of the appeal of Linux is the fact that you can repurpose existing computers running other OSes to run Linux instead. This is a great way to lower the barrier to entry for Linux, because it’s easy to test it on a Live USB or a dual boot. It’s much harder to do this on phones because they have locked bootloaders.

    Another problem is that phones are not productivity devices - they’re consumption devices. Maybe this is just my personal bias, but I don’t think people will be as passionate about liberating their phones because they’re inherently less useful than computers. Convenient, yes, but useful? Not as much.

    That said, I would love to be proven wrong. I would definitely consider a Linux phone if they become more popular/useful, but I can’t really justify spending hundreds of euros/dollars on something for which I don’t see any particular use.





  • I agree, I don’t think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they’re still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don’t care at all. They’ll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there’s no evidence to suggest that they’ll ever stop.

    One of the biggest “mistakes” Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there’s a good chance that it’s not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.

    It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.




  • It was always obvious to me that as long as I was using closed source software that any day could come when the vendor would screw me over. In fact, it could have been running it with bundles and bundles of spyware already and I had no way of knowing it. So I pledged to start using open source software only, to make sure that wouldn’t happen. First, I migrated all my desktop applications to open source alternatives. Then I finally made the switch.