>A interesting question would be, if the degrading google search is responsible that it is harder nowdays to find them
I was going to comment on this. Forums are probably cropping up at a faster pace than ever (its never been easier to host a forum, and we have modern forum software like discourse readily available), its just near impossible to discover them through modern search. Forums, for example, often have long running threads that may span over multiple years with rich sources of useful information, but modern search heavily downranks old (read: less than 1 week) pages unless its a niche query and hosted on $TOP_10K_SITES.
>And its still the most private consumer grade browser out there
>All other browsers require tweaks and changes, while with brave from your first click you are more private, I can give it to my grandma and she would be more private by just using it.
100% false. Ungoogled Chromium and Librewolf have zero telemetry. Brave has telemetry built in. Librewolf also comes with adblock built in, no tweaks required at all. Why should I use Brave over Ungoogled Chromium or Librewolf? Why are you defending a browser that is _not private by default_ when community-driven, conflict of interest free browsers exist?
>Since we're indulging in conspiracy theories here
Are you Brave's native marketing arm at work? When I open up wireshark and I see telemetry sent back to Brave after I open the browser, must be a conspiracy right?
I find it funny that you did not even try to refute the points about them impersonating people to sell their products or the telemetry in their browser. You instead deflected into a combination of "whatabout-ism" and then say the same vague positive statements "Brave is a good browser and a decent search engine."
I think Brave is shady, explain to me why they are not using technical merit. I will fully admit that I may not know all the facts, and I'm willing to hear you out, so explain why they impersonate people to sell their product.
>Do you apply this standard to everything?
Yes, if a company markets one thing, I expect them to deliver on that marketing promise. Brave markets privacy, and they do not deliver.
>I'll just throw out that mine is that you have ideological motives to dislike Brave and those motivate your criticism.
Explain further. What is my motivation here? That I'm tired of the Brave spam? That I want a browser that is actually private, like Librewolf or Ungoogled Chromium?
>Does anybody find the constant promotion of Brave on HN annoying?
Yes, its extremely annoying, and I do not trust anyone saying positive things about Brave or its other product offerings. Brave is a shady company that:
>puts profits over privacy
>impersonates well known influencers to sell their products without their knowledge
>constantly pushes their cryptocurrency, functionality completely unrelated to web browsing and of negative value to anyone caring about their privacy
>their search results appear to be based off of google, despite claiming an independent index. all of your queries may just be going to google anyways
>the browser frequently sends telemetry to their servers
>they have consistently added more spyware to the browser unless users en masse call them out, which only happens some of the time
I don't think for a second you are being downvoted by real hacker news users. Brave has created some sort of native marketing arm or something that drowns out any criticisms with vague positive comments like "I've been using brave search, more privacy and better search results than google!". Something is truly fishy about Brave, and I refuse to go anywhere near their products.
There are still ways to prod out good content from the SEO spam on search engines. I wrote a google search front end that does this [0], using search operators to remove some common SEO spam.
I'm actually optimistic on the programming language research that can come out of it. One implementation bug can collapse a whole blockchain or series of smart contracts, and I've seen some more research going into language design because of these issues.
Other than that, I think the technologies will always be niche. At the end of the day its cheaper to have a single mutable source than many different immutable sources with a resolution mechanism, and economics tends to move towards the cheaper substitute (also cheaper in terms of complexity, many decisions are made out seeking simplicity, even if the more complex option is the optimal choice).
Literally people like you and all these "marketers" (read: scumbags) are the reason I wont scan a single QR code ever.
>For an extra few milliseconds of load time, why not find out things like # of scans, location, browser
Wow, so I get both worse performance and a bunch of trackers to get to my menu, why isn't that just fantastic. Do you even read the things you type?
>We originally built https://autonix.io as a visitor management platform
So your whole post was a thinly veiled marketing scheme to try to sell your tracking product? Good job throwing the "small business" buzzword in there.
>I deleted Facebook some time around 08... I've abstained from almost all social media, and suffered the consequent damage to my social life.
You're not alone, I deleted my Facebook roughly around that same time (in 09 IIRC), and haven't joined any other major social media since (only social media I have left is hacker news and a tiny mastodon instance, and only started using these recently).
I had the same outcome, its a pretty massive blow to one's social life, and looking back it probably was not worth it to leave, but I stand by my decision. My miscalculation was the assumption that social media was a bit of a fad that people would "grow out of". Turned out to be completely the opposite, people I thought would never ever have been on social media are now some of the same people that are on it constantly.
The timeline of web browsers on wikipedia [0] has a good list of browsers. Some notable browsers that are not just copies of Chromium or Firefox:
* Palemoon (Goanna engine, derived from Gecko but forked a while ago)
* Netsurf (Independent engine, mostly good for basic HTML pages)
* Pre-2013 Opera (Proprietary Presto engine, no longer maintained, never open sourced)
* IE11 and before (Proprietary Trident engine, going EOL this year, never open sourced)
* Text/terminal browsers (lynx, w3m, etc, independent but only support text in the terminal)
Of those, Palemoon is probably the only contender as an independent browser with open source code that can support at least parts of the modern web (although the experience is rough, Palemoon was forked when Firefox still ran as a single process, meaning a bad tab can crash the whole browser, and web components don't work).
I run a mastodon instance [0] (themed to look like Windows XP). Overall I really enjoy mastodon (and the fediverse in general), it gives the user an opportunity to carve out their own niche through their own instance, while still being able to interact with the overall system.
There are still some challenges with setting up your own instance (I couldn't get the docker image working, the documentation for setting up a dev environment could use some improvement, and email confirmation is difficult without using an external service), but think this will improve over time, and there are managed services you can use to run your own instance.
>What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days?
IIRC a few years ago W3C essentially handed over web standards to WHATWG, with the thinking being that it wasn't helpful to have 2 competing standards.
Check out both Ruffle[0] and Flashpoint[1]. Ruffle is an open source flash player emulator that compiles to WASM and has a browser plugin you can add that will allow you to run embedded flash content on a web page (although its not needed if the server serves up a copy of Ruffle). Flashpoint is a collection of thousands of flash games with an easy interface to play them through flash player.
Actually it has a good use case for videos and animation. Flash animation uses vector graphics, saving huge amounts of space for basic animations and allowing the animation to scale to any screen size without degrading resolution. Part of the reason Flash took off on the web was due to small size (useful when network throughput was more limited).
Hello HN, sharing a forked Mastodon instance I set up themed in a Windows XP style with a focus on retro tech.
Brief overview if you haven't used Mastodon before, Mastodon[0] is a Twitter-like, federated social network with an open source code base[1] that uses the W3C standardized ActivityPub[2] protocol to create an interoperable social network.
This is a beta, so expect some theming issues here an there. Source code for this instance is available at github[3], and please open issues if you find any bugs or style issues.
Nice project! This project, and a similar project called Monolith[0], was a bit of an inspiration for making my own single HTML file tool called Humble[1] to solve a few edges cases I was having with bundling pages (and since I wanted a TypeScript API for making page bundles).
Great implementation, looks identical to HN and is very responsive! HN is a great website for trying out web frameworks, given how simple it is in terms of features and design. I made an alternative front end for HN not too long ago that was styled like the Windows XP desktop[0], was good fun. I wonder how many HN clones and front ends have been written for HN at this point, I'm guessing at least several hundred.
One thing missed when talking about Firefox's market share is desktop versus mobile market share.
If you look at Wikimedia's metrics, Firefox still has ~10% market share of the desktop browser market[0], not too bad considering Firefox is not the default browser on any platform outside of linux systems for the most part, and that Mozilla is much smaller entity than competing browser vendors. Still down from the ~30%[0] desktop share they had, but now they have 2 large competing entities offering default browsers so the decline is somewhat expected.
Also, contrast this with Firefox's ~0.7% share on mobile[0] where Mozilla has never been able to get a good foothold.
As long as Firefox isn't available as a default on mobile and as the share of mobile device web browsing increases, Firefox will keep losing total market share as a percentage.
Strategy wise, refocusing efforts on retaining that 10% desktop share might be a good idea. From there, work on building up more of the desktop share and then try marketing the mobile browser to the desktop browser community to build up mobile browser share.
I was going to comment on this. Forums are probably cropping up at a faster pace than ever (its never been easier to host a forum, and we have modern forum software like discourse readily available), its just near impossible to discover them through modern search. Forums, for example, often have long running threads that may span over multiple years with rich sources of useful information, but modern search heavily downranks old (read: less than 1 week) pages unless its a niche query and hosted on $TOP_10K_SITES.