Yeah, that’s fair. I still occasionally boot up Firefox just to click the Zotero button. For the most part though the built-in ad blocker and cookie blocker do what I need.

Weirdly enough It’s FOSS wrote about support for Firefox extensions in GNOME Web several years ago, but I have no idea what became of that feature.

WebKit is not starting from scratch. It goes back to KHTML which was started by KDE for their web browser back in the 90s. Apple built Safari on top of KHTML, forking the engine and creating @[email protected]. WebKit continues as an open source project, with native web integration in GNOME running through @[email protected]. Ironically KDE and Konqueror stopped using WebKit, using Chromium these days. But WebKit is, at least to a degree, a natural choice for anyone interested in making an independent browser for GNOME or Mac OS.

Blink, the engine behind Chromium, is forked from WebKit, but it’s monopolizing the internet and is generally worth avoiding. I don’t think anyone is able to separate Gecko from Firefox, so a Gecko-based browser would just be a Firefox fork. Meanwhile @[email protected] competes directly with the KHTML family of browser engines by being more flexible, but it’s not ready for serious use yet. Once Servo is ready I suspect we will se a lot of independent browsers popping up.

Contributing to Firefox doesn’t make much sense these days. Mozilla, or at least Firefox, runs their own ship and have turned their back on the open source community. Those concerned about the open web are getting increasingly worried that Mozilla is not going to do a whole lot to counter Google’s influence, leaving it to Google to take the internet and destroy it in any way they see fit. If Mozilla does not fight for us any more the only thing we can do is to double down on independent engines such as WebKit and Servo.

I’ve started using Gnome Web as my main browser, and I’m super happy with it. I’ve been trying it occasionally for years, and only the last month or so does it feel mature enough to replace firefox.

I guess I have the advantage that I mostly avoid bloated websites, but still. For anyone looking to escape the web engine duopoly Gnome Web is very much worth checking out these days.

I keep on thinking of pmOS as PMS OS, which is also maybe not ideal. I guess it is bleeding edge.

They’re currently marketing haggling bots to both sellers and buyers for auction sites, so that two bots owned by the same company can argue each other back and forth trying to squeeze the price down. Truly brilliant.

Not to the same degree or in the same way. In the US the name of the game is to have companies run themselves into the ground to line the pockets of CEOs and investors, and then the state bailing them out every time because of jobs and national pride.

I’m sure there are other systems in place as well, but frankly I don’t care. Teslas are pretty much the only American cars you’ll see in Europe, and they’ve been subsidized by European countries to promote the electronic transition.

In short, I don’t think about American cars at all.

I love how criticizing the Chinese car industry leads people to asssume I love the American one.

The US hasn’t produced a decent car since the 60s. I don’t even factor them into the calculation.

American capitalism has rendered companies incapable of producing anything that’s not crap at a scale because they need to maximise profit at all costs, while quality doesn’t mean shit. Every company is Boeing.

Xiaomi Has a Luxury SUV for $31,000 That All Western Brands Pederstrians Should Fear

Yeah. Companies running on state subsidies competing with others who are not is not capitalism “working”, it’s just another rug pull leaving us all fucked.

Chinese cars are heavily subsidized by the state. The reason they’re so cheap is because China bets it can squeeze the competition out of the market before charging basically whatever they want.

I’ve seen Starbucks do the same thing to independent coffee shops.

Edit: This is a post about real car companies like Nissan, Volvo, Mercedes, Renault, whatever. I don’t care about America. Nobody has for decades.

Every major innovation in information technology eventually leads to some new religion. Scrolls gave us the Torah, books gave us the Bible, the printing press gave us Protestantism. We’re about to figure out what god awful religion computers are going to give us.

It’s funny to do a Ctrl+F for Lemmy in the thread linked by OP. They all collectively seem to agree that the threadiverse is a bunch of weirdos and that it’s only good for memes and brainrot.

I’m not saying they’re wrong, but it’s true that they do seem to have a culture for lengthyness.

Yeah. I don’t have the energy to read up on him too much but what I see reminds me more of socially awkward teenagers trying to be edgy than actual fascists. It seems to me it’s a person who needs guidance more than boycot and a cold shoulder. But then again I can’t be bothered to do my research and I’m sure a lot of people would be eager to tell me how wrong I am.

They sponsor a window manager called Hyprland, which is developed by some aggressively unwoke guy. When dealing with it Framework has blundered, babbling about a big tent instead of publicly asking the guy to stop being an idiot if he wants to keep receiving money.

I suspect people asking to boycot Framework tend to forget that people occasionally need to buy new laptops, and when doing so they have the choice between 1) a repairable laptop developed by a company supporting open source, and 2) a non-repairable laptop lining the pockets of people who are guaranteed to do more evil in the world than whoever develops some fucking Wayland window manager. But this is probably a dangerous take in these parts.

Edit: It seems the Framework also tweeted about Omarchy and some stuff. Not a great look, not sure if it’s boycot worthy either.

https://bird.makeup/ should allow you to follow twitter accounts from the fediverse. Obviously interactions don’t make it back to twitter, but could be useful nevertheless. See for example @[email protected]. Unfortunately twitter is full of trolls, so many instances block bird.makeup to avid spam from seeping through.

It’s not an alternative to xcancel as it doesn’t allow you to read feeds you don’t follow, but it’s good if you want to keep up to date with what users post.

Also as illustrated again and again, from ICE hunting down good people to cops stalking women because they are pigs, surveillance is not safety. It’s rather the opposite. I want privacy so that I can remain safe.

I don’t think anyone who ever lived in a totalitarian regime would describe it post fact as having made them safer.

Here we very much disagree in our understanding of American history, but that’s another debate. :)

I care more about privacy and security than I do about throwing a few bucks at Google’s hardware division.

And I’m more worried about surveillance capitalism, the rise of fascism, attacks on software freedom, the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, and modern day slavery than I am about extremely targeted local security threats. But I also respect that others have different threat models. Some journalists and community organizers in [aspiring] dictatorships need higher security standards than I do, and they are only able to meet these standards because enthusiasts choose to make it a priority.

I live in Europe, and I don’t find it very difficult to avoid overly evil shit. I wouldn’t travel to the US, and if I did I wouldn’t want to bring any personal electronics with me.

And yet they have the entire industry in the palm of their hand.

For me it’s a no-brainer. I don’t buy products from Google, Amazon, Musk, Zuckerberg, or anyone else who obviously want to do me harm. Any path towards a better world sold to me by the people who are busy destroying the current one will be treated with immense scepticism.

I don’t see much point arguing further why I wouldn’t buy my privacy respecting hardware from Google or de facto Flock. We probably have different priorities.