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Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

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  • For those holding out for a hero: https://ladybird.org/

    Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.

    Why not just run a community build of Firefox, like IceCat?

  • That's a weird way of saying firefox is not fine.

  • Can we use it for godot and openness instead?

    Only if you want to be left waiting

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    I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!

  • let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000

    That feels like a dangerous argument;

    • 2000 = NT 5.0
    • XP = NT 5.1
    • XP x64 = NT 5.2
    • Vista = NT 6.0
    • 7 = NT 6.1
    • 8 = NT 6.2
    • 8.1 = NT 6.3
    • 10 = NT 6.4
      (Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)

    Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.

    What might be a valid argument in 5.x might not be an argument for 6.x.

    But IMO, Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11 have more in common with vista than vista has with XP.

  • You don't consider it rather exclusionary to imply that only men use computers?

    at one point or another we all have a penis in us.

  • the ladybird devs have a history of major transphobia though

    I truly couldn't give a single solitary fuck what opinions the devs of software I use have, no matter what that opinion is. As long as they're not trying to shove that opinion down my throat via their software, their opinions literally have no effect on me whatsoever. You either, whether you want to believe that or not.

  • mozilla and firefox need to learn more away from ai and more towards ethical not for profit governance. be the opposite of big tech and stand for the internet as a public utility and force or good and decency. instead of going ai bro, y'all need to stand up against racism and discrimination while pushing internet for everybody, free of profits.

    stand up against racism and discrimination

    What does this mean for a browser company? I understand this being an important company value, but I don't want them filtering the internet or anything. Their primary goal should be to foster a privacy respecting web and a high performance, standards based browser.

    I don't think eliminating profit from the web should be a goal. I don't care if websites make money, I just care they don't profit from my data without me agreeing to it explicitly.

    I think Firefox needs to become financially independent, and that means finding a privacy respecting business model. My personal preference is a micro payment system where I can pay websites for content in exchange for no ads. That provides value to me and websites that I'd otherwise block ads on.

    If AI is part of that, sure, just make it opt-in and very obvious when it's working.

  • I'm not looking for a hero, I'm looking for stability.

    Did you read the thing?

  • I truly couldn't give a single solitary fuck what opinions the devs of software I use have, no matter what that opinion is. As long as they're not trying to shove that opinion down my throat via their software, their opinions literally have no effect on me whatsoever. You either, whether you want to believe that or not.

    Exactly. How FOSS devs spend their time and money isn't my business, what is my business is foundation financials and whether the software is reliable and safe to use.

    I strongly disagree with Lemmy devs on politics and how they run their instances, but that doesn't impact me so whatever.

    As long as ladybird devs don't go out of their way to be jerks to trans people, I'm good. The worst I've seen is rejecting pronoun changes in code comments and docs, which isn't a big deal.

  • with a project named ladybird you'd think otherwise.

    I suppose, unless you've watched King of the Hill.

  • I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

    Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

    Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

  • Thanks for the context - I still intensely dislike the "political" reaction, but people can learn and change. I also don't like that Canadian arch-jackass Tobi Lutke is a major supporter of the project; he's a bit like Brendan Eich. I'll reserve judgment until the browser launches. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.

    Brendan Eich

    I honestly don't understand the hate here. I get that he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that's terrible, but I've also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla. I honestly think he would've been a better CEO at Mozilla because he's interested in the tech. His largest problem was making a personal contribution with his own money to an unpopular cause, and someone dug it up looking for dirt.

    Isn't that exactly how people should act? Leave your politics at home and work well with others. I work in a diverse group with a mix of immigrants, likely gay people, atheists and religious types, Trump supporters and critics, and even a couple furries. None of that matters and we work well together. In fact, most of the turnover we've had has been over compensation because our company has been stingy recently, and they all say they wouldn't have considered leaving otherwise.

    You can disagree on very important things and still work well together, it's called professionalism. I dislike Eich's views, but I believe he had way more professionalism than his loudest critics.

  • i can offer some context to that, but first let's clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.

    the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by "code of conduct" PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it's not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they're not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.

    anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn't show each change, it just shows "n files changed, +n lines -n lines", and a description talking about "gender-neutral language". now, kling is not a "typical" developer. he's a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don't know what that's like, but i imagine it means you don't have a lot of mental overhead for things you don't want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn't want to deal with it.

    it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.

    This is very valuable context.

    For citations, the only references I see to "pronouns" in their github project is in a section called "Human language policy" in CONTRIBUTING.md (link). Here's the relevant part:

    In Ladybird, we treat human language as seriously as we do programming language. The following applies to all user-facing strings, code, comments, and commit messages: ... Use gender-neutral pronouns, except when referring to a specific person.

    That sounds pretty cash-money to me.

    There's one additional reference in a pull request discussing whether or not to use "we" when referring to recommendations of the engineering team (as in "we recommend" vs "it is recommended"). Minutia.

    I'm not as interested in litigating this matter than I am in putting it to bed (along with any and all definitive citations and evidence such that I can refer back to this comment thread in the future when the question inevitably comes up again.)

  • the ladybird devs have a history of major transphobia though

    Right, so what does that have to do with ladybird

  • the ladybird devs have a history of major transphobia though

    If that's true, shame on them. But it doesn't mean their browser isn't good.

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    Excuse you, I don't have a problem.

  • Why not just run a community build of Firefox, like IceCat?

    If Firefox doesn't keep up with web standards, neither will any of the forks

  • I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

    Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

    Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

    This article appears to be pretty even-handed.

    My assessment? Get fucked, Ladybird. I don't want to trust my web security to people who think like this, especially since web security is very political and will only become more so as the Trump administration continues.

  • i can offer some context to that, but first let's clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.

    the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by "code of conduct" PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it's not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they're not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.

    anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn't show each change, it just shows "n files changed, +n lines -n lines", and a description talking about "gender-neutral language". now, kling is not a "typical" developer. he's a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don't know what that's like, but i imagine it means you don't have a lot of mental overhead for things you don't want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn't want to deal with it.

    it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.

    Thanks so much for this layout of everything. I wasn't even aware of what was going on, and your comment put it all together. Cheers!

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    I wouldn't go quite as far. This is just breacrumbs falling of the corporate table.
  • How could AI escape human control?

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    Don't mix up country bosses with technology bosses - even if they have the same brain damages.
  • Uber, Lyft oppose some bills that aim to prevent assaults during rides

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    California is not Colorado nor is it federal No shit, did you even read my comment? Regulations already exist in every state that ride share companies operate in, including any state where taxis operate. People are already not supposed to sexually assault their passengers. Will adding another regulation saying they shouldn’t do that, even when one already exists, suddenly stop it from happening? No. Have you even looked at the regulations in Colorado for ride share drivers and companies? I’m guessing not. Here are the ones that were made in 2014: https://law.justia.com/codes/colorado/2021/title-40/article-10-1/part-6/section-40-10-1-605/#%3A~%3Atext=§+40-10.1-605.+Operational+Requirements+A+driver+shall+not%2Ca+ride%2C+otherwise+known+as+a+“street+hail”. Here’s just one little but relevant section: Before a person is permitted to act as a driver through use of a transportation network company's digital network, the person shall: Obtain a criminal history record check pursuant to the procedures set forth in section 40-10.1-110 as supplemented by the commission's rules promulgated under section 40-10.1-110 or through a privately administered national criminal history record check, including the national sex offender database; and If a privately administered national criminal history record check is used, provide a copy of the criminal history record check to the transportation network company. A driver shall obtain a criminal history record check in accordance with subparagraph (I) of paragraph (a) of this subsection (3) every five years while serving as a driver. A person who has been convicted of or pled guilty or nolo contendere to driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol in the previous seven years before applying to become a driver shall not serve as a driver. If the criminal history record check reveals that the person has ever been convicted of or pled guilty or nolo contendere to any of the following felony offenses, the person shall not serve as a driver: (c) (I) A person who has been convicted of or pled guilty or nolo contendere to driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol in the previous seven years before applying to become a driver shall not serve as a driver. If the criminal history record check reveals that the person has ever been convicted of or pled guilty or nolo contendere to any of the following felony offenses, the person shall not serve as a driver: An offense involving fraud, as described in article 5 of title 18, C.R.S.; An offense involving unlawful sexual behavior, as defined in section 16-22-102 (9), C.R.S.; An offense against property, as described in article 4 of title 18, C.R.S.; or A crime of violence, as described in section 18-1.3-406, C.R.S. A person who has been convicted of a comparable offense to the offenses listed in subparagraph (I) of this paragraph (c) in another state or in the United States shall not serve as a driver. A transportation network company or a third party shall retain true and accurate results of the criminal history record check for each driver that provides services for the transportation network company for at least five years after the criminal history record check was conducted. A person who has, within the immediately preceding five years, been convicted of or pled guilty or nolo contendere to a felony shall not serve as a driver. Before permitting an individual to act as a driver on its digital network, a transportation network company shall obtain and review a driving history research report for the individual. An individual with the following moving violations shall not serve as a driver: More than three moving violations in the three-year period preceding the individual's application to serve as a driver; or A major moving violation in the three-year period preceding the individual's application to serve as a driver, whether committed in this state, another state, or the United States, including vehicular eluding, as described in section 18-9-116.5, C.R.S., reckless driving, as described in section 42-4-1401, C.R.S., and driving under restraint, as described in section 42-2-138, C.R.S. A transportation network company or a third party shall retain true and accurate results of the driving history research report for each driver that provides services for the transportation network company for at least three years. So all sorts of criminal history, driving record, etc checks have been required since 2014. Colorado were actually the first state in the USA to implement rules like this for ride share companies lol.
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    Niemand hat geantwortet
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    I didn't care much about arc because it was chromium, but damn this is just bland and uninteresting compared to it
  • WhatsApp is working on video and voice calls on the web

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    Worked well for me. Although all the people I care about had already Signal, Element or Threema installed, so I am not a great pull factor. And those everyday moms from child care or from wherever can reach me via SMS, for the two messages/year.
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    How are they going to make money off of these projects if people can legally copy and redistribute them for free? The same reasons everyone doesn't already do this via pirating. You mean copy, not steal. When something is stolen from you, you no longer have it. Wow you are just a troll, thanks for showing me so I don't waste anymore time with you.
  • Apple Eyes Move to AI Search, Ending Era Defined by Google

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    ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksO
    It’s infuriating that Safari/Apple only allows me to choose from five different search engines. I self-host my own SearXNG instance and have to use a third-party extension to redirect my queries.