Skip to content

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Technology
92 57 0
  • 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

  • This post did not contain any content.

    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.

  • This post did not contain any content.

    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!

  • 116 Stimmen
    12 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    L
    The Palantirs werent technically evil, they were just stones that let you see the truth, it's just the strong holders could manipulate what was seen through them by the weak holders to bend the truth seen. In that respect the company is pretty aptly named, the owners (strong in the rights of the admin) can warp the insights to fit their narrative and feed those to the clients (weak in the rights of the admin). The problem being that the clients are also feeding huge amounts of data (truth) to owners to allow them to do their work. That data is ours. Arguably, the naming of the company should at least give any government pause for thought about the reliability of the information provided to them and the true cost of feeding information to them. It's not like the company isn't broadcasting the issues with their system by using that specific name .. surely there's no in depth discussion of how a system like this could possibly end badly for someone who doesn't have completed control over it?!
  • China bans uncertified and recalled power banks on planes

    Technology technology
    7
    97 Stimmen
    7 Beiträge
    42 Aufrufe
    I
    Not sure how to go about marketing that in our current disposable society, though. Ditto. The most likely solution would be EU regulations forcing longer battery life/better battery safety. Maybe the new law for replaceable batteries in smartphones could be enough, it includes a rating on charging cycles which could be the new "muh number is bigger!"
  • 84 Stimmen
    13 Beiträge
    33 Aufrufe
    M
    It's a bit of a sticking point in Australia which is becoming more and more of a 'two-speed' society. Foxtel is for the rich classes, it caters to the right wing. Sky News is on Foxtel. These eSafety directives killing access to youtube won't affect those rich kids so much, but for everyone else it's going to be a nightmare. My only possible hope out of this is that maybe, Parliament and ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority, TV standards) decide that since we need a greater media landscape for kids and they can't be allowed to have it online, that maybe more than 3 major broadcasters could be allowed. It's not a lack of will that stops anyone else making a new free-to-air network, it's legislation, there are only allowed to be 3 commercial FTA broadcasters in any area. I don't love Youtube or the kids watching it, it's that the alternatives are almost objectively worse. 10 and 7 and garbage 24/7 and 9 is basically a right-wing hugbox too.
  • Tough, Tiny, and Totally Repairable: Inside the Framework 12

    Technology technology
    109
    1
    549 Stimmen
    109 Beiträge
    371 Aufrufe
    P
    What? No, the framework 12 is the thing the had before the 13 one. Nowadays, they call that model always 13 it seems. I think you're confusing something, I've got mine since a few years now.
  • 781 Stimmen
    144 Beiträge
    217 Aufrufe
    D
    They can be LED I just want the aesthetic.
  • 4 Stimmen
    1 Beiträge
    3 Aufrufe
    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • Google is Using AI to Censor Independent Websites

    Technology technology
    40
    1
    147 Stimmen
    40 Beiträge
    140 Aufrufe
    demonsword@lemmy.worldD
    You can go to communism Island if you want Despite all the propaganda, there is no place right now on the face of our planet that is under communism. bit [sic] I’d rather have capitalism, thank you Well, aren't you fortunate, you already have all the capitalism you want, anywhere you go. Choke on it.
  • 0 Stimmen
    7 Beiträge
    33 Aufrufe
    V
    Just downloaded it, thanks for the info!