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abhibeckert

@ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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509
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • "Best" Mac browser: Your view

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  • don’t put all your eggs in one basket

    That's a good approach - but there's a better one. If at all possible stick to software that uses standard data formats and is able to interact with other software. For example Lemmy uses Markdown (a standard) and it can interact with other software (on the fediverse).

    If we ever decide to stop using Lemmy, there's a good chance all of the valuable content we're writing — like this discussion — will live on in whatever other software we decide to switch to instead of Lemmy. Because being Markdown, it's easy to import, and being on the fediverse, it will be easy to transition to a replacement gradually over time with the new software and lemmy both being used at the same time during a potentially years long transition period.

    Unfortunately I don't know of any (good) web browser that does that. It's certainly possible for bookmarks/tabs/settings/etc to be synced between browsers, but in general browsers only ever support once off imports, they never actively maintain a shared set of data between browsers.

    But there's an out — extensions. For example I don't use the password manager built into my browser. I use a browser extension for passwords and my password manager has an extension for all browsers. Obviously as locked down as passwords need to be, I don't want my passwords accessible outside that app/those extensions, but it does have a good import/export feature and I have used it to test other password managers. I should really look for a good extension that manages bookmarks well and syncs them between browsers.

    I were on Apple, I would be using Firefox

    I dunno if that's true. There are some really good browsers on the Mac that I suspect don't run (or don't run well) on whatever operating system you do use. Access to awesome Mac only software is the reason I use a Mac, even though I don't particularly like the company Apple has become (they were a wonderful company 20 years ago in my opinion).

  • "Best" Mac browser: Your view

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  • I've done iOS/Mac app development — Apple doesn't "sell" data to me, but they absolutely provide me with extensive user tracking data for free (well, for $99 per year, but that's effectively free). As far as I know they also provide data to other third parties, such as in the news app But app developers is the big one.

    The data is anonymised, but I assure you it's very detailed. Detailed enough that some companies probably cross reference it with other tracking and are able to link the data they get from Apple to real people.

    Thankfully the tracking is opt-in, but users are forced to make a choice and encouraged to enable tracking and I'd argue they really aren't being educated properly on what they're handing over before making a decision. I can't really blame Apple for that, who wants to spend hours learning how Apple's tracking methods work? But it is a fact that Apple does collect a lot of data and they do share it.

    Personally I have spent hours doing that research and I'm not OK with what they track — I opt out. And while my own software does have some tracking, it's a lot less detailed than the tracking Apple does. It's just basic analytics (roughly how many users do I have and what country are they from?) and crash reporting which is (thankfully) rare with my software and therefore useless for any invasive tracking. The vast majority of people using my apps never experience a crash (and that's only possible because I track crashes).

  • "Best" Mac browser: Your view

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  • Google might be the primary maintainer of Chromium, but they don't really control it. Literally hundreds of other companies and thousands if individual developers contribute to Chromium every day and if Google did something they don't like the engine would be forked in a heartbeat.

    In fact it has been forked — thousands of times (according to GitHub). It's just none of those forks have gained much traction. If Google really messes things up, such as if they actually go ahead and remove cookies as they've threatened to do for years, then one or two of those forks will gain traction. Likely enough traction that Google themselves would struggle to keep up and could end up killing Blink and basing Chrome off one of the forks.

    If you don't trust Google (I don't), then don't use Chrome. But I wouldn't write off all Chromium based browsers, some of them are awesome. And the main problem it used to have (battery life) isn't an issue anymore. My M1 MacBook Air lasts forever on battery power and I always have a chromium based browser running.

  • "Best" Mac browser: Your view

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  • With respect, I disagree. Rendering pages quickly and reliably is table stakes and all modern browsers do a great job of that. It doesn't really matter at all what rendering engine is under the hood as long as it works well.

    I'm glad we have three rendering engines, especially since the largest two are backed by companies who don't always do what's right for the web... but three is enough. More than that would honestly be a waste of effort, I prefer the current situation with hundreds of browsers who pool resources and work together on a rendering engine that is shared by other browsers.

    What really separates one browser from another is the toolbars and other user interface elements around the webpage. And Blink/WebKit/Gecko don't provide any of that.

  • "Best" Mac browser: Your view

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  • Way back in the day, the best browser was OmniWeb. It was truly awesome but quite expensive (I think a license was about $60?). Unfortunately they didn't have the resources to keep up as CSS/JavaScript became more complex. It still worked for the vast majority of websites when they gave up on development, but the writing was on the wall and they weren't selling enough licenses to hire a large team. Also back then the only open source browser was FireFox and it's always been a really complex rendering engine to work with (there's a reason everybody uses Blink or WebKit as the foundation for their browser).

    As far as I know, OmniWeb is the only (major) browser that was exclusively designed for the Mac (and NeXT before that). Even Safari historically ran on Windows and the current version borrows quite a lot of UI conventions from the iOS version. OmniWeb was a proper Mac browser. In fact back in the early days of Mac OS X OmniWeb wasn't just the best Mac Browser, it was arguably the best Mac App in general. They'd been working on it for decades when other Mac apps were either brand Cocoa apps or else still using Carbon (the compatibility layer between MacOS 9 and MacOS X).

    OmniWeb is kinda-sorta-alive as a side project, using WebKit now instead of their proprietary engine, and the latest "test build" was released just a couple months ago. But the last stable/officially supported version of OmniWeb 5 shipped twelve years ago. It's somewhat dated now, for example the URL bar is the full width of the window and you can't change that - a hold back from the days when even desktop computer screens were only 800 pixels wide or even less. https://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/

    One of the early developers of OmniWeb (retired a long time ago) once claimed OmniWeb is older than World Wide Web (generally recognised as the first ever web browser) but given the internet didn't exist back then he wasn't able to point to any strong evidence. Wikipedia lists 1995 as the release date for OmniWeb, however he said that date is wrong and it was distributed years earlier (obviously not on the web — there was no other web browser so you had to get it some other way).

    These days, I think the best web browser (and therefore also the best Mac browser) is Arc. It's not exclusively a Mac app, but it is written in SwiftUI and the iOS/Windows versions are quite different - Arc respects platform specific UI conventions and different use cases (especially on a phone).

    Hers's a link to download it: https://arc.net/gift/70d85b6 (unfortunately you do need to sign up with an email account, since Arc is "software as a service" and (like OmniWeb did) they eventually plan to start charging for certain features. I'm OK with that personally, you do need an account to sync tabs between devices which I see as a must have feature).

  • TikTok is a Cyberweapon and Needs to be Stopped.

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  • A couple corrections:

    1. China also blocks TikTok (I shit you not)
    2. The US isn't "blocking" TikTok, they are forcing the parent company to sell it

    If they refuse to sell, then sure the US will follow through with a block... but that's not the intention. I guess the question is how much does Bytedance care about their US market? The US is TikTok's largest market, but it's still only about 5% of TikTok users. There are almost as many Indonesian users, and Brazil isn't far behind. Plus Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, Phillipines...

    And some of those countries might not want a US company to control TikTok.

    Zuckerberg has said he doesn't think it's possible for any social network to operate (with significant marketshare) in every country, which is why he's interested in the Fediverse. If there has to be a wide ecosystem of social networks, then users should be able to access content posted to other networks.

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  • Uh, no they're not. They have the core operating system.

    The only real difference is the security model (as you say, tightly locked down), but MacOS has been gradually adopting a lot of that over time. For example / used to be an ordinary volume - these days it's mounted read only and can't be written to even with sudo. iOS has always been like that.

    They are different operating systems, but only because it's easier to make a change on one of them, then port that change to the other one later. Possibly years later. In general, they're pretty close. The main difference is the hardware, not the operating system.

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  • The APIs are similar but the hardware requires a different appraoch.

    For example touch screen input is very different to mouse input - you need to decifer imprecise user input... and then provide precise input to webpages that are designed assuming the user has a mouse. There are touch APIs on the web, but developers tend not to use those APIs because dealing with imprecise input sucks. For example press a link with your thumb, it will highlight. Lift your thumb, it will go to the link. But if you press, then move your thumb, then release... instead of clicking the link it scrolls the page. Unless you move only a little bit - then it does click...

    And the only way to get "all day" battery life out of a 10Wh battery is by keeping the CPU powered off most of the day. Figuring out how to maintain the current state of the webpage, so it can be restored if the CPU is powered off and back on again, without breaking things like JavaScript timers/etc.

    FireFox has solved those issues (and others) on Android. But while Android has similar hardware, that operating system is nothing like iOS.

    All the work to get Gecko working on Android made sense back int he day, when Android didn't have a good rendering engine. It would have also made sense back in the early days of the iPhone when WebKit was nowhere near as good as it is now. But today, when someone else has already figured out solutions to every problem? Is it worth reinventing all those wheels?

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  • Apple does allow other engines in Europe. Wether or not FireFox chooses to create one remains to be seen.

    There's nothing wrong with WebKit, so not much incentive for FireFox to do all that work.

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  • 30% of increase in daily installs ≠ 30% increase in users.

    Yeah the lemmy headline is poorly written (the source article is pretty clear).

    Still 30% is a substantial jump and will eventually turn into a bunch more money for FireFox - a good thing if you ask me.

    If I my sandwich shop sells 30% more sandwiches one day, that doesn’t mean I’m certain to make 30% more money at the end of the year. I might make more, I might make less.

    It costs money to make sandwiches. Mozilla doesn't even pay for bandwidth (Apple has that covered) - so the FireFox iOS app essentially only has overheads. Which means more users will be pure profit.

  • Tech Titans Are the Robber Barons of Our Gilded Age

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  • If your taxes for the rich are too high, they will all take their ball and go home - to one of their many homes in a country that doesn't have high taxes. Or just declare their superyaught anchored in international waters as their "home". With "business travel" as their reason to spend time (maybe all of the time) on US soil.

    When you have that much money, there's not really much society can do to touch you.

  • Finland detects more GPS jammers as drivers increasingly try to hide their tracks | Yle News | Yle

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  • It doesn't work like that.

    They broadcast a powerful radio signal on the GPS frequency. You might have to be within 10 feet for it to completely drown out the real GPS frequency, but the waves don't stop they just spread out and get "thinner" with distance. If it completely blocks the signal at 10 feet, it will severely reduce accuracy further out than that. Likely everyone within line of sight of your car will lose accuracy on their GPS.

    And that would include airplanes, line of sight is a really long distance up above your car. Airplanes use GPS for critical functions including making sure they don't crash into the ground when they're flying through clouds / rain / fog so you could potentially cause serious problems. Most likely force the airplane to land in a different city — because they will not land if their altitude equipment isn't working... yes they have other ways of measuring altitude but all of them are unreliable, which is why they have GPS. You're taking away one layer of their patchwork system of landing safely and if too many layers are gone then they abandon the landing and fly elsewhere - happened to a friend of mine recently, turned a quick 2 hour flight home into an 18 hour trip.

  • Finland detects more GPS jammers as drivers increasingly try to hide their tracks | Yle News | Yle

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  • My comment was about the low power models which only works for few feet

    There's no such thing.

  • The DMA already having an impact. Brave Browser installs surge after introduction of browser choice splash screen on iOS.

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  • Generally there are few privacy friendly/Foss browsers on IOS.

    Um, Safari is so privacy friendly that Google regularly asks me if I'm human. For example it has "private relay" which is similar to TOR* so trackers don't even know your IP address — combine that with blocking third party cookies (and even some first party cookies) by default and providing false data to fight fingerprinting even if you don't block trackers entirely - and blocking them entirely is as simple as installing an extension. Private Relay also adds a layer of encryption on top of DNS queries and otherwise unencrypted http traffic.... so your ISP/Cellular provider/Work/School/abusive husband/etc can't track you

    99.99% of the Safari's code is FOSS — dual licensed under LGPL and BSD.

    It's not the browser I use - pretty lacking in the feature department, but it's definitely more pro-privacy than Brave or FireFox. I've never had to jump through a captcha to use Google in those browsers.

    (* if anything, it's better than TOR... with that service there's a risk your entry/exit nodes are tracking you. With Private Relay it's always one of Apple's servers for the entry node and a reputable cloud company like Akamai for the exit node. Both would have to be compromised in order to identify you... maybe a nation state can do that, but a big data tracking company definitely can't)

  • The DMA already having an impact. Brave Browser installs surge after introduction of browser choice splash screen on iOS.

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  • A jump from 8k to 11k installs is nothing.

    It's about a third. Imagine if your income went up by 30% in 24 hours, I reckon you'd be pretty happy about that.

    Also - it tends to take months for a new version of iOS to reach a large number of users, and years to reach everyone. So a rapid growth rate (probably not 30%, but still fast) is likely to be sustained over quite a while.

  • The DMA already having an impact. Brave Browser installs surge after introduction of browser choice splash screen on iOS.

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  • I wonder how they’ll enforce it.

    AFAIK if a customer has a serious complaint, AirBnb will do everything they can to find somewhere else for the customer to stay. And of course, they'll kick the host off the platform.

    It's pretty common these days for guests to look for cameras.

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  • It was banned with an exception for common rooms and the entry door/hallway. Now those are banned too.

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  • Yeah I agree pretty confusing - talk about moving the goal posts.

    Having said that, I do think dustyData highlighted the two defining flaws in the US government:

    Money has too much influence over politicians. Many other countries have laws that limit how much funding a politician can receive from the private sector. Some countries that don't have those limits are adopting them.

    The critical difference between "Congress" and "Parliament" is the separation between Congress and the President does not exist under a typical parliamentary system. Under that system the Prime Minister is just the person parliament voted to be in charge and make individual decisions where you can't afford to wait for hundreds of people to get involved. I think your presidential system is the reason your government can't pass any laws lately.

    It's quite rare for a parliamentary government to struggle to pass laws - it does happen, because there are checks and balances, but it tends to be more functional than the current US government. Under a parliamentary system, if the parliament isn't happy with the prime minister... they just vote to kick them out and put someone new in charge. They don't shut down the government by refusing to let anything get done until the next election (which might leave everyone in the same position).