Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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  • 167 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I don’t even think that’s remotely true.

    I’ve seen two cases that actually directly impacted my ability to use Firefox. I can only presume there are many more. Those being supporting the column-span CSS property (available since 2010 in other browsers with vendor prefix, and early 2016 without, while being late 2019 for FF) and supporting iPad OS’s multi-window functionality (introduced mid 2019, Firefox has had it for just a handful of months now). I have first hand experience telling me very directly that this is true.

    There’s also been a lot of talk about Firefox’s lack of support for PWAs. I’ve not experienced that myself to be able to comment more than to say I’ve noted others have complaints.


  • The point is that with open source you can effectively leech off of Google for now, while still retaining the flexibility to nope out and do your own thing at any point you decide.

    Considering just how severely behind they are already (as I mentioned in my other comment, they’re often 3–5 years behind other browsers in implementing new web standards or operating system features), I see anything they can do to reduce how much they need to maintain independently as a good thing. In an ideal world where they had all the funding and development power they could want I might say sticking with the completely independent Firefox would be great. But that just isn’t where they’re at today.


  • They wouldn’t be at the mercy of anything. That’s…how open source works. If it changes in a way that breaks things for you, don’t pull that change. At that point, if the change is drastic enough to require it, you can turn that soft fork into a hard fork and hope that Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc. join you; something that would significantly hamper Google’s ability to maintain their dominance of the browser engine market. That’s a choice that they simply don’t have today when being based on Firefox and Gecko means using an inferior browser platform.


  • Honestly I’ve been saying for some time that Mozilla’s resources would be much better spent making Firefox a soft fork of Chromium. Primarily: use the Blink browser engine and V8 JS engine, with only the changes to those that they deem absolutely necessary, and maintain a privacy-forward Chromium-based browser. Maybe try and enlist the help of Brave, Vivaldi, and other browsers that are currently Chromium but which prefer more privacy than Google offers.

    It’s not zero effort, and especially as Google continues to develop Chromium with assumptions like the removal of Manifest V2 it might take some effort to maintain, but it cannot possibly be as much effort as maintaining an entire browser.





  • I just want to point out that “the solstice marks the start of the season” is not a universal fact. Here in Aus, we mark the start of summer as 1 December, and so if I were to take my perspective and apply it to the northern hemisphere, I would say that for you, Christmas is about a third of the way through winter.

    The difference here is technically referred to as “meteorological” vs “astronomical” seasons. I’ve always thought meteorological seasons make far more sense because they much better reflect reality. Winter is defined by cold weather and short days. The winter solstice is already very cold and it has the shortest day. It is absurd to put the shortest day at the very beginning of winter. If you wanted to have an astronomically-based calendar, the solstice should mark the very midpoint of winter, with the season starting precisely halfway between then and the autumnal equinox.

    But also, as the other user mentioned, some places have entirely different season systems. Seasons are, fundamentally, a human creation. The notion that weather patterns change throughout the year is a universal fact, but what we call those changes and how many categories we separate it into is human. Many cultures have their own systems with more or different seasons. Many tropical areas have traditionally only observed “wet” (or monsoon) and “dry” seasons. In ancient Egypt, the flooding of the Nile marked an important seasonal change. And South Asia uses a variety of different 6-season systems, such as the Hindu, Bengali, and Tamil calendars.







  • Oh I see, interesting. I guess they’re named after the fact that normally they’re at a restaurant?

    The Wikipedia article was…interesting. The first paragraph of the “history” section seemed like someone had removed a sentence at random. “After that initial meeting”, without ever having described any first meeting, but having set the stage where such a first meeting might take place. If someone has knowledge & sources about that first meeting, that’d be a great opportunity to improve Wikipedia.