According to https://lobste.rs/about, this site is about programming, not living in a society.
Some rules of thumb for great stories to submit: Will this improve the reader’s next program? Will it deepen their understanding of their last program? Will it be more interesting in five or ten years?
Some things that are off-topic here but popular on larger, similar sites: entrepreneurship, management, news about companies that employ a lot of programmers, investing, world events, anthropology, self-help, personal productivity systems, last-resort customer service requests via public shaming, “I wanted to see what this site’s amazing users think about this off-topic thing”, and defining the single morally correct economic and political system for the entire world when we can’t even settle tabs vs. spaces.
I would hope there are some key takeaways from the discussion. I see lots of things here that I definitely wouldn’t want to do in my “next program”. I don’t love that this is a link to a biased post on another discussion forum instead of a well-written blog post about the same, but I think the topic itself is sparking some useful discussion about what not to do if you want people to trust your software.
Even if half of the things I have heard about Brave are wrong, why even bother when so many other great, free alternatives exist. The first and last time I tried it was the home page ad fiasco… uninstalled and went back to Chrome.
These days I try to use Firefox, but escape hatch to Chrome when things don’t work. I know there are better alternatives to both Firefox and Chrome, I’ll start exploring them… maybe? It’s hard for me to care about them since most of them are just Chrome/Firefox anyway. I’ll definitely give Ladybird a go when it’s ready. On paper, at least, it sounds like the escape from Google/Mozilla that is desperately needed.
Kagi bringing Orion to Linux feels promising. It’s OK on Mac, though after using it for 6 months I switched back to Safari. It looks like they’re using Webkit for that on Linux, not blink, which is a happy surprise IMO. That feels like a good development. (I’m also looking forward to Ladybird, though. Every so often I build myself a binary and kick the tires. Their progress feels simultaneously impossibly fast and excruciatingly slow.
If I understand correctly, Orion is not open source. That feels like a huge step backward and not a solution to a browser being controlled by a company with user-hostile incentives. I think Ladybird is more in line with what we really need: a browser that isn’t a product but rather a public good that may be funded in part by corporations but isn’t strongly influenced by any one commercial entity.
they have stated that open sourcing is in the works
That help page has said Kagi is “working on it” since 2023-09 or earlier. Since Kagi hasn’t finished that work after 1.5 years, I don’t believe Kagi is actually working on open sourcing Orion.
Their business model is, at the minimum, less user hostile than others due to users paying them money directly to keep them alive.
If US DoJ has their way, google won’t be able to fund chrome any more the way it was doing so far. That also means apple and firefox lose money too. So Kagi’s stuff might work out long term if breakup happens.
That’s totally valid, and I’d strongly prefer to use an open source UA as well!
In the context of browsers, though, where almost all traffic comes from either webkit-based browsers (chiefly if not only Safari on Mac/iPad/iPhone), blink-based browsers (chrome/edge/vivaldi/opera/other even smaller ones) or gecko-based browsers (Firefox/LibreWolf/Waterfox/IceCat/Seamonkey/Zen/other even smaller ones) two things stand out to me:
Only the gecko-based ones are mostly FOSS.
One of the 3 engines is practically Apple-exclusive.
I thought that Orion moving Webkit into a Linux browser was a promising development just from an ecosystem diversity perspective. And I thought having a browser that’s not ad-funded on Linux (because even those FOSS ones are, indirectly ad-funded) was also a promising development.
I’d also be happier with a production ready Ladybird. But that doesn’t diminish the notion that, in my eye, a new option that’s not beholden to advertisers feels like a really good step.
Of the blink-based pure FOSS browsers, I use Ungoogled Chromium, which tracks the Chromium project and removes all binary blobs and Google services. There is also Debian Chromium; Iridium; Falkon from KDE; and Qute (keyboard driven UI with vim-style key bindings). Probably many others.
The best Webkit based browser I’m aware of on Linux is Epiphany, aka Gnome Web. It has built-in ad blocking and “experimental” support for chrome/firefox extensions. A hypothetical Orion port to Linux would presumably have non-experimental extension support. (I found some browsers based on the deprecated QtWebKit, but these should not be used due to unfixed security flaws.)
I wasn’t sure Ungoogled Chromium was fully FOSS, and I completely forgot about Debian Chromium. I tried to use Qute for a while and it was broken enough for me at the time that I assumed it was not actively developed.
When did Epiphany switch from Gecko to Webkit? Last time I was aware of what it used, it was like “Camino for Linux” and was good, but I still had it on the Gecko pile.
According to Wikipedia, Epiphany switched from Gecko to Webkit in 2008, because the Gecko API was too difficult to interface to / caused too much maintenance burden. Using Gecko as a library and wrapping your own UI around it is apparently quite different from soft forking the entire Firefox project and applying patches.
Webkit.org endorses Epiphany as the Linux browser that uses Webkit.
There used to be a QtWebKit wrapper in the Qt project, but it was abandoned in favour of QtWebEngine based on Blink. The QtWebEngine announcement in 2013 gives the rationale: https://www.qt.io/blog/2013/09/12/introducing-the-qt-webengine. At the time, the Qt project was doing all the work of making WebKit into a cross-platform API, and it was too much work. Google had recently forked Webkit to create Blink as a cross-platform library. Switching to Blink gave the Qt project better features and compatibility at a lower development cost.
The FOSS world needs a high quality, cross-platform browser engine that you can wrap your own UI around. It seems that Blink is the best implementation of such a library. WebKit is focused on macOS and iOS, and Firefox develops Gecko as an internal API for Firefox.
EDIT: I see that https://webkitgtk.org/ exists for the Gnome platform, and is reported to be easy to use.
I see Servo as the future, since it is written in Rust, not C++, and since it is developed as a cross platform API, to which you must bring your own UI. There is also Ladybird, and it’s also cross-platform, but it’s written in C++, which is less popular for new projects, and its web engine is not developed as a separate project. Servo isn’t ready yet, but they project it will be ready this year: https://servo.org/blog/2025/02/19/this-month-in-servo/.
I used to contribute to Camino on OS X, and I knew that most appetite for embedding gecko in anything that’s not firefox died a while back, about the time Mozilla deprecated the embedding library, but I’d lost track of Epiphany. As an aside: I’m still sorry that Mozilla deprecated the embedding interface for gecko, and I wish I could find a way to make it practical to maintain that. Embedded Gecko was really nice to work with in its time.
The FOSS world needs a high quality, cross-platform browser engine that you can wrap your own UI around.
I strongly agree with this. I’d really like a non-blink thing to be an option for this. Not because there’s anything wrong with blink, but because that feels like a rug pull waiting to happen. I like that servo update, and hope that the momentum holds.
Wikipedia suggests the WebKit backend was added to Epiphany in 2007 and they removed the Gecko backend in 2009. Wow, time flies! GNOME Web is one I would like to try out more, if only because I enjoy GNOME and it seems to be a decent option for mobile Linux.
I have not encountered any website that doesn’t work on firefox (one corporate app said it required Chrome for some undisclosed reason, but I changed the useragent and had no issue at all to use their sinple CRUD).
What kind of issues do you find?
I’ve wondered the same thing in these recent discussions. I’ve used Firefox exclusively at home for over 15 years, and I’ve used it at my different jobs as much as possible. While my last two employers had maybe one thing that only worked in IE or Chrome/Edge, everything else worked fine (and often better than my coworkers’ Chrome) in Firefox. At home, the last time I remember installing Chrome was to try some demo of Web MIDI before Firefox had support. That was probably five years ago, and I uninstalled Chrome after playing with the demo for a few minutes.
I had to install Chromium a couple of times in the last years to join meetings and podcast recording that were done with software using Chrome-only API.
When it happens, I bless flattpak as I install Chromium then permanently delete it afterward without any trace on my system.
If you are an heavy user of such web apps, I guess that it makes sense to use Chrome as your main browser.
I can’t get launcher.keychron.com to work on LibreWolf but that’s pretty much it. I also have chrome just in case I’m too lazy to figure out what specifically is breaking a site
Thanks, yeah, that’s it. I knew it was some specific thing that wasn’t supported I just couldn’t remember and was writing that previous comment on my phone so I was too lazy to check. But yeah, it’s literally the only site I could think of that doesn’t work on Firefox (for me).
It’s pretty rare to be fair, so much so that I don’t have an example of the top off my head. I know, classic internet comment un-cited source bullshit, sorry. It was probably awful gov or company intranet pages over the years.
Some intensive browser based games run noticeably better on Chrome too, but I know this isn’t exactly a common use case for browsers that others care about.
For some reason, trying to log in to the CRA (Canadian equivalent of the IRS) always fails for me with firefox and I need to use chrome to pay my taxes.
I run into small stuff fairly regularly. Visual glitches are common. Every once in a while, I’ll run into a site that won’t let me login. (Redirects fail, can’t solve a CAPTCHA, etc.)
Some google workspace features at least used to be annoying enough that I just devote a chrome profile to running those workspace apps. I haven’t retried them in Firefox recently because I kind of feel that it’s google’s just deserts that they get a profile on me that has nothing but their own properties, while I use other browsers for the real web.
I should start keeping a list of specific sites. Because I do care about this, but usually when it comes up I’m trying to get something done quickly and a work-around like “use chrome for that site” carries the day, then I forget to return to it and dig into why it was broken.
There’s something about Redox that feels special to me, like it might really become something significant someday. That said, I don’t know enough about the technical ins and outs for it to be more than a feeling. Can any of you speak to that, either to confirm or dispel? Does Redox stand a chance of growing into something big? I guess it’s worth looking at it not only from a technical standpoint but also human/community. Do the people working on it seem like folks who can keep momentum for five, ten, or twenty more years of Redox?
Whenever I’m at home or at the office, I greatly prefer the barrel style chargers over USB-C; it’s just so much more sturdy and being circular it really does work in every orientation. But I do admit that when I’m traveling it would be nice to bring along one less adapter.
My current laptop is a refurbished HP EliteBook (745 G6) that still has the barrel plug but can also charge with USB-C. It’s nice to have both for sure.
Not as an OSS maintainer, but I have been asked to do something pretty ridiculous by a nonprofit in their interview process: fix an actual reported bug in their OSS codebase. Bug got fixed, test passed, my code lives in their project forever, I did not get hired.
My father worked for Guinness for about 25 years. When I was growing up we had prints of the John Ireland calendar “the gentle art of making Guinness”, a splendid series of cartoons in the tradition of Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg. Guinness advertising art was great.
But, it’s a mass-produced factory beer. I occasionally like a stout or other dark beer, but Guinness is boring.
Guinness was relatively early in the use of statistical quality control over large scale biochemical processes – that is where Student’s t-distribution was discovered.
I visited a brewery for one of the top 5 beer producers worldwide and the effort and care going into producing a consistent, safe product is impressive. The fact that the product itself is rather bland and boring is incidental :D
I like boring beer. Incoming long defense of Guinness:
I didn’t always used to be like, I used to like hoppy IPAs. But as I’ve gotten older my desire to drink beers higher than 5% has diminished so thoroughly that I can count the number of times I drink one per year on one hand.
I certainly would like to drink more complex stouts, but there are barely any brewed in America with the same ABV. For an example, I went to my favorite local brewery’s website, and Stout was always prefixed with imperial https://grimmales.com/menu/
I can’t drink these! They taste like syrup and instantly give me a headache.
Frankly, my go to beer these days is Asahi. I’m tired of complexity. Beer is less for me about complex flavors and more about refreshment and the desire to relax. In the cases when I want something more complex, I go for a cocktail. I make myself a Negroni or a Campari soda (depending on which side of refreshment and flavor I want).
Anyway. I love Guinness. It tastes good (that is to say it doesn’t taste like piss water), has a low ABV, and is served in basically every bar in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It fits my need
Thanks for saying that. I like it fine if it’s what’s available, but it tastes watered down to me compared to other stouts I’ve grown accustomed to. I’ll take it over something lighter, but it’s fairly plain.
If you’re in the US, be aware that the Guinness product sold as Extra Stout 20 years ago is now known as Foreign Extra Stout. Today’s Extra Stout is watered down in comparison (and undoubtedly cheaper to produce).
As bait-and-switches go, this is mild compared to Newcastle Ale…
I’m with you but would add that it genuinely does taste better in Ireland! To the point that I know some Irish people who will not drink Guinness abroad.
The story goes that this is due to the water but I suspect the truth is that Guinness have a lot of control over how it’s stored and served in pubs (temperature etc). Whether that should matter is an exercise left to personal taste.
I had an Irish colleague in France that spun the theory that French Guiness is a lot less bitter, because locals don’t like it.
He refused it.
My personal take on Guiness: I rarely drink and then I only rarely drink Guiness, so I enjoy it as an easy stout that comes with an expected taste. Sometimes, that’s just what I want.
(Fun fact about me: I do, however, have a taste for alcohol, my first job was sysadmin on a wineyard)
When I visited the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin the advertising floor was definitely the most interesting part. The rest was over the top displays or sections for social media tourism. I have to agree about it being boring, although I’ll often order it if there’s no other stout or porters served.
Also, their book of world records was endlessly entertaining when I was in primary school.
Many years after I tried Guinness (which I still occasionally enjoy, because it is boring in quite a pleasant way) I learned that the thing I really liked about it was that it was always a nitro pour. Seeking out interesting beers (mostly, but not all stouts) served on nitro taps has been fun.
I’m a big fan of nitro coffee! In the before times, I worked once or twice a week in an office that had a nitro cold brew tap in the kitchen, and that was enough to make me look forward to those office days. Come to think of it, everyone (of those who didn’t dislike coffee in general) really loved that perk.
Someone commented on youtube that this could be used as a form of mechanical cryptography. It would be fun to do a cryptoanalysis on this, I’m sure its easy enough to break as pixels near the center if the screen should be more commonly used in text.
This movie caught my eye when it won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and I was delighted to see it was made using Blender. This interview highlights how Blender offered a unique set of features that opened up new approaches for the filmmaker to create something truly special, and the fact it’s free open-source software was a key part of the journey. I’m excited to see something made with FOSS gain this kind of recognition, and it is so cool to see how Blender specifically offers something unique in this space.
I do not like the author’s misrepresentations in this article. You can be technically not lying, but when you write things that most people who aren’t highly technical would believe to mean one thing, and that thing is clearly not the case, you don’t get points for technically not lying. You’re being disingenuous.
An example: I do not like Google, and I do not like Chrome, and I make no apologies for them, but when someone writes, “When you log into Chrome, it automatically logs you into your Google account on the web.”
Non- and less-technical people do not make a distinction between using a web browser and “log(ging) into Chrome” - if someone were to say, “log in to Chrome, please”, many, if not most people, would assume that what’s meant is for someone to simply launch Chrome. They wouldn’t think, “I’ll launch the browser, then go in to settings or whatever, then I’ll log in to my Google account inside of Chrome because I was asked to log in to Chrome”.
We (technical people) can tell others all we want that they should use another browser, but most people aren’t going to care and aren’t going to listen. But should people know that they can use Chrome and don’t need to be logged in to Google? Absolutely. Is the author implying by their choice of wording that this isn’t the case? Yes. This is deceptive, and it weakens the case the author is trying to make.
As we learned from South Park, we’re asked to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. We really don’t need to trick people to make the case that they suck.
Non- and less-technical people do not make a distinction between using a web browser and “log(ging) into Chrome”
That’s only because Google made it so, and less-technical people don’t understand the amount of data that Google collects on them, via searches, maps, or Google Analytics, or what damage that can do.
I am pretty sure that the linking happened because they noticed that many people don’t really want or need to log into a Google account, so they wanted more people to share more data. It is my opinion that less-technical people aren’t stupid, and get confused by the web when their mental model is deliberately flawed, more often than not.
I strongly disagree with the example given, only because I know that when I say to log in I always mean to enter identification information (like username and password). It wouldn’t have crossed my mind before reading your comment that someone would equate logging into an application with simply opening an application. Logging in should only mean that you’ve chosen to enter identifying information in order to gain access to something. They shouldn’t need to address whether you can use Chrome without logging in if all they’re talking about is the logged-in behavior. (We also shouldn’t ignore Google’s dark patterns that make it seem like you do need to log in to use it, though the article doesn’t go into that.)
You can’t really expect every piece of technical content to pander to people who don’t understand the difference between launching a program and logging in to an account. What makes you think that this post is directed at people who are 100% technologically illiterate to that degree?
It shouldn’t be targeted at people who are 100% technically illiterate, but just as much it shouldn’t be targeted at people who are 0% technically illiterate.
A good example is when technical people talk about computer viruses and conflate them with Trojans. If you don’t know any better, you learn only from usage like this and you have no real awareness of the difference between them (meaning we’re shirking our responsibility to teach correct things). But when technical people, who really should know better, refer to a Trojan as a virus, that can cause real confusion and miscommunication. Someone tasked with cleanup after an infection can easily end up with very different work by this misuse. Additionally, there’s no good reason for a technical person to not use the correct term.
So when I, a technical person, sees someone, also ostensibly a technical person, describing things to others, particularly to non-technical people, incorrectly or in ways that we know will be misunderstood, it’d really bugs me. There’s no good reason for it.
This is a bold assumption to make, and it’s not reasonable to expect an author to imagine every possible way a reader might be confused. Words have meaning, and it should be enough for an author of a more-technical-than-not article to use words accurately. Audience analysis matters, but I really don’t think this author expected their article to be read by someone with so little knowledge that they would confuse “log in” with “open application”. As I shared earlier I wouldn’t have even imagined that scenario until you presented it, so if I were to have written this same article I could say confidently that it was not written with the expectation of it being misunderstood.
“Think of Chrome. When you log into Chrome, it automatically logs you into your Google account on the web.”
How many non-technical people wouldn’t realize the difference between logging in to Google and simply using Chrome? How many technical people wouldn’t be certain that the author is referring specifically to logging in to Google, and would require context to be sure?
The term “log in” has been in use in computing since at least the ‘60s and in common home usage since at least the late ‘90s. Additionally, it is not unique to computing. If I told someone to log in or sign in at the bank, I would have no expectation that they would think I simply meant for them to walk into the bank. They’d be expected to sign a log book or check in with someone. If they don’t know what “log into” means, I expect them to ask the question, “What does that mean?” and look it up. I never expect my reader to simply a) make a misinformed assumption, and b) take what I said at face value without question. If what I said strikes them as odd, they should look it up. That is what we should expect of ourselves and each other. We can’t expect an author to imagine every possible way that a reader might be misinformed.
That’s what I’ve been talking about, yes. Who is this mythical “common person” and why do you feel the author needed to write with them in mind instead of another imagined audience? I have certainly known people who were that confused (not about that specifically), but I wouldn’t write a blog post aimed at catching every possible misunderstanding that type of person might have. I think it’s pretty clear that type of extra-confused user was not the audience this author had in mind, and I don’t think we can demand they reinagine their audience like that.
I want to plainly say that I don’t believe there was anything incorrect about what they said about logging into Chrome and I don’t believe that the absence of qualifying language for an unintended imagined audience means they’re being in any way disingenuous. Maybe you have another example from the article that makes your point, but I contend the example you gave does not.
Really sad to watch the video, I’m still using Firefox Focus on mobile and migrated to Zen couple weeks ago, recently found more Mozilla controversies like Excessive Executive Pay and Anonym acquisition.
In light of recent news I switched to F-Droid’s Fennec build on Android, but I haven’t yet decided what I want to switch to on desktop (I currently use the official Mozilla flatpak from Flathub). I’m leaning toward LibreWolf from what I’ve seen so far.
Thanks for that; I’ll take a look. I hadn’t seen it because it’s not in F-Droid yet, but I knew about their Fennec build after DivestOS went away leaving Mull users wondering what they should use (even though I wasn’t a DivestOS or Mull user at the time). I’m partial to things packaged by the F-Droid team, but of course I was getting Firefox from Mozilla so I’m not opposed to getting IronFox from their repo. I see IronFox is carrying on the Mull legacy, so that’s cool.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
That’s… wow. Thank you for highlighting that. I am seriously considering using something other than Firefox for the first time in… ever. Regardless of how one might choose to interpret that statement, it’s frightening that they would even write it. This is not the Mozilla I knew or want. I’d love to know what alternatives people might suggest that are more community focused and completely FOSS, ideally still non-Chromium.
Isn’t it? Most GDPR consent screens have an easy “accept to everything” button and requires going through multiple steps to “not accept”, and many many more steps to “object” to their “legitimate interest” in tracking for the purposes of advertising. As long as these screens remain allowed and aren’t cracked down on (which I don’t foresee happening, ever), that’s the de facto meaning of “consent” in GDPR as far as I’m concerned: something that’s assumed given unless you actively go out of your way to revoke it.
It’s not what the text of the GDPR defines it as, but the text isn’t relevant; only its effect on the real world is.
Yes, definitely. Consent in GDPR is opt-in not opt-out. If it’s opt-out, that’s not consensual. And the law is the law.
Furthermore, for interstitials, to reject everything should be at least as easy as it is to accept everything, without dark patterns. Interstitials (e.g., from IAB and co.) first tried to make it hard to reject everything, but now you usually get a clear button for rejecting everything on most websites.
As I mentioned in another comment, the DPAs are understaffed and overworked. But they do move. A real-world example of a company affected by the GDPR, and that tries testing its limits, is Meta with Facebook. For user profiling, first they tried the Terms of Service, then they tried claiming a legitimate interest, then they introduced expensive subscriptions for those that tried to decline, now they introduced a UI degradation, delaying the user scrolling, which is illegal as well.
Many complain, on one hand, that the EU is too regulated, suffocating inovation, and with US’s tech oligarhs now sucking up to Trump to force the EU into allowing US companies to break the law. On the other hand, there are people who believe that the GDPR isn’t enforced enough. I wish people would make up their mind.
Many complain, on one hand, that the EU is too regulated, suffocating inovation, and with US’s tech oligarhs now sucking up to Trump to force the EU into allowing US companies to break the law. On the other hand, there are people who believe that the GDPR isn’t enforced enough. I wish people would make up their mind.
Those are different people, all who have made up their mind.
I thought I made it reasonably clear that I don’t care that much about what the text of the law is, I care about what material impact it has on the world.
To be fair, @mort’s feeling may come from non-actually-GDPR-compliant cookie consent forms. I have certainly seen where I couldn’t find the “reject all” button, and felt obligated to manually click up to 15 “legitimate interest” boxes. (And dammit could they please stop with their sliding buttons and use actual square check boxes instead?)
The facts you provided aren’t relevant. I’m talking about the de facto situation as it applies to 99% of companies, you’re talking about the text of the law and enforcement against one particular company. These are different things which don’t have much to do with each other.
You even acknowledge that DPAs are understaffed and overworked, which results in the lacking enforcement which is exactly what I’m complaining about. For what I can tell, we don’t disagree about any facts here.
I’m talking about GDPR as well, focusing about what impact it has in practice. I have been 100% consistent on that, since my first message in this sub-thread (https://lobste.rs/s/de2ab1/firefox_adds_terms_use#c_3sxqe1) which explicitly talks about what it means de facto. I don’t know where you got the impression that I’m talking about something else.
But there is enforcement, it’s just slower than we’d like. For example, screens making it harder to not opt in rather than opt in have gotten much rarer than they used to be. IME now they mostly come from American companies that don’t have much of a presence in the EU. So enforcement is causing things to move in the right direction, even if it is at a slow pace.
There is a website tracking fines against companies for GDPR violations [1] and as you can see, there are lots of fines against companies big and small every single month. “Insufficient legal basis for data processing” isn’t close to being the most common violation, but it’s pretty common, and has also been lobbed against companies big and small. It is not the case that there is only enforcement against a few high profile companies.
it’s the other way around - most of the time you have to actively revoke “legitimate interest”, consent should be off by default. Unfortunately, oftentimes “legitimate interest” is just “consent, but on by default” and they take exactly the same data for the same purpose (IIRC there are NGOs (such as NOYB, Panoptykon) fighting against IAB and other companies in those terms)
“Legitimate interest” is the GDPR loophole that ad tech companies use to spy on us without an easy opt-out option, right? I don’t know what this means in this context but I don’t trust it.
It is not, ad tech has been considered not a legitimate interest for… Ever… By the Europeans DPAs. Report to your DPA the one that abuse this. There have been enforcement.
Every website with a consent screen has a ton of ad stuff under “legitimate interest”, most ask you to “object” to each individually. The continued existence of this patterns means it’s de facto legal under the GDPR in my book. “Legitimate interest” is a tool to continue forced ad tracking.
I don’t think you’re disagreeing with me. It’s de jure illegal but de facto legal. I don’t care much what the text of the GDPR says, I care about its material effect on the real world; and the material effect is one where websites put up consent screens where the user has to “object” individually to every ad tech company’s “legitimate interest” in tracking the user for ad targeting purposes.
I used to be optimistic about the GDPR because there’s a lot of good stuff in the text of the law, but it has been long enough that we can clearly see that most of its actual effect is pretty underwhelming. Good law without enforcement is worthless.
De facto illegal for entities at Facebook’s scale? Maybe. But it’s certainly de facto legal for everyone else. It has been 7 years since it was implemented; if it was going to have a positive effect we’d have seen it by now. My patience has run out. GDPR failed.
I just gave you a concrete example of a powerful Big Tech company, with infinite resources for political lobbying, that was blasted for their practices. They first tried hiding behind their Terms of Use, then they tried claiming a legitimate interest, then they offered the choice of a paid subscription, and now they’ve introduced delays in scrolling for people that don’t consent to being profiled, which will be deemed illegal as well.
Your patience isn’t important. This is the legal system in action. Just because, for example, tax evasion happens, that doesn’t mean that anti tax evasion laws don’t work. Similarly with data protection laws. I used to work in the adtech industry. I know for a fact that there have been companies leaving the EU because of GDPR. I also know some of the legwork that IAB tried pulling off, but it won’t last.
Just the fact that you’re getting those interstitials is a win. Microsoft’s Edge browser, for example, gives EU citizens that IAB dialog on the first run, thus informing them that they are going to share their data with the entire advertising industry. That is in itself valuable for me, because it informs me that Edge is spyware.
I agree that the “we’re spying on you” pop-ups is a win in itself. I’m just complaining that it’s so toothless as to in practice allow websites to put up modals where each ad tech company’s “legitimate interest” in tracking me has to be individually disabled. If the goal of the GDPR was to in any way make it reasonably easy for users to opt out of tracking, it failed.
I agree that the “we’re spying on you” pop-ups is a win in itself.
I’m not so sure. I’ve even seen this used as an argument against the GDPR: The spin they give it is “this is the law that forces us to put up annoying cookie popups”. See for example this article on the Dutch public broadcasting agency (which is typically more left-leaning and not prone to give a platform to liberals).
“Alle AI-innovaties werken hier slechter dan in de VS. En waarom moet je op elke website op cookies klikken?”, zegt Van der Voort.
Roughly translated “all innovations in AI don’t work as well here as in the US. And why do you have to click on cookies (sic) on every single website?”
I’ve even seen this used as an argument against the GDPR: The spin they give it is “this is the law that forces us to put up annoying cookie popups”.
I have seen that as well, and I think it’s bullshit. The GDPR doesn’t force anyone to make any form of pop-up, nobody is forced to track users in a way which requires consent. The GDPR only requires disclosure and an opt-out mechanism if you do decide to spy on your users, which I consider good..
The GDPR only requires disclosure and an opt-out mechanism if you do decide to spy on your users, which I consider good..
I agree, but at the same time I think the average user just sees it as a nuisance, especially because in most cases there’s no other place to go where they don’t have a cookie popup. The web development/advertising industry knowingly and willfully “complied” in the most malicious and obnoxious way possible, resulting in this shitty situation. That’s 1 for the industry, 0 for the lawgivers.
I agree that it didn’t have the desired effect (which, incidentally, I have spent a lot of this thread complaining about, hehe). I think everyone was surprised about just how far everyone is willing to go in destroying their website’s user experience in order to keep tracking people.
has to “object” individually to every ad tech company’s “legitimate interest” in tracking the user
I’m not sure if you’re deep in grumpy posting or didn’t understand the idea here, but for legitimate interest you don’t need to agree and companies normally don’t give you the option. If you’re talking about the extra options you unset manually, they’re a different thing. The “legitimate interest” part is for example validating your identity through a third party before paying out money. Things you typically can’t opt out of without also refusing to use the service.
If you get a switch for “tracking” or “ads” that you can turn off, that’s not a part of the “legitimate interest” group of data.
I’m sorry but this isn’t true. I have encountered plenty consent screens with two tabs, “consent” and “legitimate interest”, and where the stuff under “consent” are default off while the stuff under “legitimate interest” is on by default and must be “objected to” individually. Some have an “object to all” button to “object” to all ad tracking in the “legitimate interest” category.
Here’s one example: https://i.imgur.com/J4dnptX.png, the Financial Times is clearly of the opinion that tracking for the purpose of advertising counts as “legitimate interest”.
I’m not saying that there’s any relationship between this pattern and what’s actually required by the GDPR, my understanding of the actual text of the law reflects yours. I’m saying that this is how it works in practice.
Mozilla updated the article with a clarifying statement:
UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.
the problem is it doesn’t clarify anything. “basic functionality” is not defined. my guess is they want to be able to feed anything we type or upload to a site, to also be able to feed that into an LLM. “anything other than what is described” doesnt help because what is described is so vague as to mean anything “help you experience and interact with online content”
Mozilla updated the article with a clarifying statement:
UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.
That is… not clarifying. And not comforting. “What is described” in the ToS is “to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content.” That’s absurdly vague. And what is described in the Privacy Notice is absurdly broad:
To provide you with the Firefox browser
To adapt Firefox to your needs
To provide and improve search functionality
To serve relevant content and advertising on Firefox New Tab
To provide Mozilla Accounts
To provide AI Chatbots
To provide Review Checker, including serving sponsored content
To enable add-ons (addons.mozilla.org, “AMO”), including offering personalized suggestions
To maintain and improve features, performance and stability
To improve security
To understand usage of Firefox
To market our services.
To pseudonymize, de-identify, aggregate or anonymize data.
To communicate with you.
To comply with applicable laws, and identify and prevent harmful, unauthorized or illegal activity.
I’m glad we have this contextless legalese to clarify things. I wonder if there’s some kind of opt-in data collection in Firefox that Mozilla might have legal obligations to clarify their rights to? Couldn’t be that… No, let’s put a pause on critical thinking and post stupid TOS excerpts as if Mozilla are going to steal our Deviantart uploads and sell them as AI training data.
I’m glad we have this contextless legalese to clarify things. I wonder if there’s some kind of opt-in data collection in Firefox that Mozilla might have legal obligations to clarify their rights to? Couldn’t be that… No, let’s put a pause on critical thinking and post stupid TOS excerpts as if Mozilla are going to steal our Deviantart uploads and sell them as AI training data.
If they need a ToS for a particular feature, then that “contextless legalese” should be scoped to that feature, not to Firefox as a whole.
This is precisely why the same organization should not do all of these things. If they want to do non-tool stuff to continue funding their mission they should start up independently managed companies that can establish these consents for a narrow band of services. They can give the existing organization control as a majority shareholder, with dividends flowing back to the main organization. That is the way to ensure that incentives don’t become misaligned with the mission.
There is so much about this story that disgusts me, and that’s before getting to the security issues. Please, if you’re in a financial position to spend money on a product like this: don’t. The “willing to overlook” list should be a blueprint for exactly the kinds of things none of us should ever overlook when considering a purchase in this day and age. As long as people keep overlooking those huge red flags, products like this will continue to create e-waste.
at the beginning: “willing to overlook […] It won’t function if the internet goes down”, and later “Personally, I don’t want my bed data accessible to anyone”.
I have no idea what’s going on in these people’s head. How can these two beliefs be held at the same time?
There’s a difference between those two though. I can self host and isolate the first one, if the internet goes down I won’t be able to access it, but it’s not in the cloud and it’s not accessible by everyone.
I think the point is that if your bed (or any other IoT) doesn’t work if it’s not internet connected, you aren’t going to be able to self host (failing some clever rev-eng) and that’s a fair indicator that your ‘bed data’ is already accessible by someone else. So subsequently claiming “I want privacy” is profoundly tone deaf. And in this case, yes, the data is indeed in the cloud (it’s what AWS Kinesis is for). It might not be available to “anyone”, but it is available for “someone” who isn’t sleeping in the bed, and personally, that’s probably too many.
Personally, I still can’t get my head past the simple idea of “I can’t control my bed if the internet isn’t up, and I’m good with that”.
I would like to represent the delegation of broke people in their 20s whose tech salaries are efficiently absorbed by their student loans:
You don’t need a smart bed. My mattress cost $200 and my bedframe cost <50. I sleep fine. I know as people age they need more back support but you do NOT need this. $250 worth of bed is FINE. You will survive!!
I’m not sure I agree. Like if you are living paycheck-to-paycheck then yeah, probably don’t drop $2k on a mattress. But I believe pretty strongly in spending good money on things you use every day.
The way it was explained to me that aligned with my frugal-by-nature mindset was basically an amortization argument. You (hopefully) use a bed every single day. So even if you only keep your bed for a single year (maybe these newfangled cloud-powered beds will also have planned obsolescence built-in, but the beds I know of should last at least a decade), that’s like 5 bucks a day. Which is like, a coffee or something in this economy. I know my colleagues and I will sometimes take an extra coffee break some days, which could be a get up and walk break instead.
You might be young now, but in your situation I would rather save for my old age than borrow against my youth. And for what it’s worth I have friends in their 20s with back problems.
(of course, do your own research to figure out what sort of benefits a mattress will give to your sleep, back, etc. my point is more that even if the perceived benefits feel minimal, so too do the costs when you consider the usage you get)
Mattresses are known to have a rather high markup, and the salesmen have honed the arguments you just re-iterated to perfection. There are plenty of items I’ve used nearly daily for a decade or more. Cutlery, pots, my wallet, certain bags, my bike, etc. None of them cost anywhere near $2000. Yes, amortized on a daily basis, their cost comes to pennies, which is why life is affordable.
Yes, there are bad mattresses that will exacerbate bad sleep and back problems. I’ve slept on some of them. When you have one of those, you’ll feel it. If you wake up rested, without pains or muscle aches in the morning, you’re fine.
I too lament that there are things we buy which have unreasonable markups, possibly without any benefits from the markups at all. I guess my point is more that I believe – for the important things in life – erring on the side of “too much” is fine. I personally have not been grifted by a $2k temperature-controlled mattress, but if it legitimately helped my sleep I wouldn’t feel bad about the spend. So long as I’m not buying one every month.
I think one point you’re glossing over is that sometimes you have to pay an ignorance tax. I know about PCs, so I can tell you that the RGB tower with gaming branding plastered all over it is a grift [1]. And I know enough about the purpose my kitchen knife serves to know that while it looks cool, the most that the $1k chef’s knife could get me is faster and more cleanly cut veggies [2].
You sound confident in your understanding of mattresses, and that’s a confidence I don’t know if I share. But if I think of a field I am confident in, like buying PCs, I would rather end the guy who buys the overly marked-up PC that works well for him than the one who walks a way with a steal that doesn’t meet his needs. Obviously we want to always live in the sweet spot of matching spend to necessity, but I don’t know if it’s always so easy.
[1] except for when companies are unloading their old stock and it’s actually cheap.
[2] but maybe, amortized, that is worth it to you. I won’t pretend to always be making the right decisions.
I personally have not been grifted by a $2k temperature-controlled mattress, but if it legitimately helped my sleep I wouldn’t feel bad about the spend.
Note, because it’s not super obvious from the article: the $2k (or up to about 5k EUR for the newest version) is only the temperature-control, the mattress is extra.
All that said: having suffered from severe sleep issues for a stretch of years, I can totally understand how any amount of thousands feels like a steal to make them go away.
One of the big virtues of the age of the internet is that you can pay your ignorance tax with a few hours of research.
In any case, framing it as ‘$5 a day’ doesn’t make it seem like a lot until you calculate your daily take-home pay. For most people, $5 is like 10% of their daily income. You can probably afford being ignorant about a few purchases, but not about all of them.
One of the big virtues of the age of the internet is that you can pay your ignorance tax with a few hours of research.
Maybe I would have agreed with you five years ago, but I don’t feel the same way today. Even for simple factual things I feel like the amount of misinformation and slop has gone up, much less things for which we don’t have straight answers.
For most people, $5 is like 10% of their daily income. You can probably afford being ignorant about a few purchases, but not about all of them.
Your point is valid. I agree that we can’t 5-bucks-of-coffee-a-day away every purchase we make. Hopefully the ignorance tax we pay is much less than 10% of our daily income.
I think smart features and good quality are completely separate issues. When I was young, I also had a cheap bed, cheap keyboard, cheap desk, cheap chair, etc. Now that I’m older, I kinda regret that I didn’t get better stuff at a younger age (though I couldn’t really afford it, junior/medior Dutch/German IT jobs don’t pay that well + also a sizable student loan). More ergonomic is better long-term and generally more expensive.
Smart features on the other hand, are totally useless. But unfortunately, they go together a bit. E.g. a lot of good Miele washing machines (which do last longer if you look at statistics of repair shops) or things like the non-basic Oral-B toothbrushes have Bluetooth smart features. We just ignore them, but I’d rather have these otherwise good products without she smart crap.
Also, while I’m on a soapbox – Smart TVs are the worst thing to happen. I have my own streaming box, thank you. Many of them make screenshots to spy on you (the samba.tv crap, etc).
Also, while I’m on a soapbox – Smart TVs are the worst thing to happen. I have my own streaming box, thank you. Many of them make screenshots to spy on you (the samba.tv crap, etc).
Yes, absolutely! Although it would be cool to be able to run a mainline kernel and some sort of Kodi, cutting all the crap…
You don’t need a smart bed. My mattress cost $200 and my bedframe cost <50. I sleep fine. I know as people age they need more back support but you do NOT need this. $250 worth of bed is FINE. You will survive!!
I guess you never experienced a period with serious insomnia. It can make you desperate. Your whole life falls in to shambles, you’ll become a complete wreck, and you can’t resolve the problem while everybody else around seems to be able to just go to bed, close their eyes and sleep.
There is so much more to sleep than whether your mattress can support your back. While I don’t think I would ever buy such a ludicrous product, I have sympathy for the people who try this out of sheer desperation. At the end of the day, having Jeff Bezos in your bed and some sleep is actually better than having no sleep at all.
You make some good points why this kind of product shouldn’t exist and anything but a standard mattress should be a matter of medical professionals and sleep studies. When people are delirious from a lack of sleep and desperate, these options shouldn’t be there to take advantage of them. I’m surprised at the crazy number of mattress stores out there in the age of really-very-good sub-$1,000 mattresses you can have delivered to your door. I think we could do more to protect people from their worn out selves.
None of the old people in my family feel the need for an internet connected bed (that stops working during an internet or power outage). Also, I imagine that knowing you are being spied on in your sleep by some creepy amoral tech company does not improve sleep quality.
I do know that creepy amoral tech companies collect tons of personal data so that they can monetize it on the market (grey or otherwise). Knowing that you didn’t use your bed last night would be valuable information for some grey market data consumers I imagine. This seems like a ripe opportunity for organized crime to coordinate house breakins using an app.
I believe the people who buy this want to basically experience the most technological “advanced” thing they can pay for. They don’t “need” it. It’s more about the experience and the bragging rights, but I could be wrong.
I’m sorry to somewhat disagree. The reason I would buy this (not at that price tag, I had actually looked into this product) is because I am a wildly hot person/sleeper. I have just a flat sheet on and I am still sweating. I have ceiling fans running additional fans added. This is not only about the experience unless a good night sleep is now considered “an experience”. I legitimately wear shorts even in up to a foot of snow.
Ouch… Please do not follow this piece of advice. A lot of cheap mattresses contain “cancer dust”[1] that you just breath in when you sleep. You most likely don’t want to buy the most expensive mattress either, because many of the very expensive mattresses are just cheap mattresses made overseas with expensive marketing.
The best thing to do is to look at your independent consumer test results for your local market. (In Germany where I live it’s “Stiftugn Warentest” and in France where I’m from it’s “60 millions de consommateurs (fr).” I don’t know what it is in the US.)
A good mattress is not expensive, but it’s not cheap either. I spend 8 hours sleeping on this every day, I don’t want to cheap out.
[1] I don’t mean literal cancer dust. It’s usually just foam dust created when the mattress foam was cut, or when it rubs against the cover. People jokingly call it “cancer dust”
The headline is incredibly clickbaity and misleading. Bezos and Amazon don’t really have anything to do with the real problems outlined in the article.
It is misleading because the issue is almost completely unrelated to Amazon (that just happens to be the cloud provider being used; the issue would be the same with another provider). The implication of the hyperbolic headline is that Bezos or Amazon have anything to do with the the startup that made the mistake, but clearly that’s not the case. It leads one to expect more Amazon involvement than there is.
The generally accepted definition of “hit piece” includes an attempt to sway public opinion by publishing false information. Leaving aside the fact that the user who linked this story did not publish it, and deferring the discussion of who may or may not pay them to post, that is a significant claim that requires significant evidence.
So, please share your evidence… what’s the false information here, and how exactly is @freddyb attempting to sway public opinion? To what end? Be very specific, please.
That’s a fair point. I should have said “false or misleading.”
So I’ll amend my question, which I doubt will get answered at any rate:
@ecksdee: So, please share your evidence… what’s the false or misleading information here, and how exactly is @freddyb attempting to sway public opinion? To what end? Be very specific, please.
If you look at the history of soatoks blog on lobsters it is pretty obvious that sooner or later anyone from this community would post this entry.
Now you have to show me how mozilla is related to signal in any positive or negative way. You yourself seem to have a strong feeling towards mozilla at least.
I do feel like Windows 7 was the last bearable release of Windows. There wasn’t anything completely infuriating about it, and it was good as far as Windows goes. Then came 10 which just felt like a mess with no benefits over 7 and a lot of half-finished parts. Windows 11 is by far the worst thing I’ve ever used, not just Windows. From 10 onward I really started cursing the need to use Windows in my day job, and I am so thankful that I can now use Linux and FOSS for both work and play. At least with Windows 7 I could sort of forget I was using Windows from 9-5.
You know, I was so preoccupied with giving faint praise to Windows 7 and cursing Windows 10 and 11 that I forgot to comment on this article in particular: notice how much of what makes legacy Windows usable is FOSS. Firefox, LibreOffice, etc. Think about your less technical friends and family who are fretting about replacing perfectly good computers because they can’t upgrade to the latest version of Windows. Help them migrate to the more sustainable FOSS options like [insert your distro of choice; mine’s Fedora]. Honestly, hardware support is great and all the software they need is right there.
I haven’t used it much but I’m under the impression they added these kind of things but new features were mostly not horrible and (almost?) everything could be disabled.
However, adoption was abysmal (maybe even worse than Vista) and after that they started not allowing to disable features, UIs and made away with actual versions so that people had to update. There are good reasons to do that but it also looks like they’ve been burnt and have been doing that for bad marketing reasons too.
i used Windows 8/8.1 daily for their entire commercial lifetime and honestly i really just remember it to be more ‘annoying’ than outright ‘bad’. at least for 8.1. the metro UI stuff was half baked garbage, but with 8.1 you could at least forget about its existence for the most part.
Also i think 8.1 had the best search feature in a Windows ever, up there with MacOS’s spotlight search, in terms of snappiness and being able to give me as the first result the specific thing that I want. Never really got it to work quite right in the little i’ve used Win10/11, even disabling web results it just usually gives me some completely unrelated file. Add to that some of the improvements 8/8.1 had over 7 (which i can’t really name off the top of my head, it’s been a while) and it was pretty good as long as you were willing to overlook some of the annoyances and what ultimately kept me from just downgrading back to 7.
Ha, so right! Admittedly, I was Windows-free at home before 7 even came out so my Windows experience has been in office environments. I never encountered 8 on any machines I used at work, and I only had a couple brief interactions with it on other folks’ home machines. Just enough to learn how to turn off the new Start screen.
I think that pretty much everyone avoided windows 8. I remember seeing browser stats and it was a very very minor OS that disappeared from the charts maybe even before XP.
It is the last version of Windows I will run, and indeed every computer I have acquired since 2016 is running a FOSS OS. I never really thought I’d see things this way, but I’m pretty done with proprietary software as (among other things) it enables extremely asymmetric power between vendor and “user”, and, well, that coincides pretty well with power asymmetry in other parts of life (like, say, government-mandated backdoors that you can’t escape because you can’t run any OS other than what the vendor provides – with mandatory “upgrades” of course).
I’m confused… Does it matter? AFAIK, formats like Vorbis and Opus always had smaller file size for a higher quality than the MP3, and have always been royalty-free.
Only is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. MP3 was and is ubiquitous. Every other format has friction. That matters a lot when you’re talking about a huge audience where most of the users are non-techies and don’t know anything about these formats.
I know my car system understands MP3. My Roku player understands it. Pretty much any device that plays music from files understands it. Any other format is questionable. Most devices may support this or that, but it’s a question mark.
“Today, Opus is the de-facto standard format for audio in web browsers.”
Not sure what that graph is supposed to prove. When you say “de-facto standard format” – MP3 seems to have 97.74% support, Opus has 97.16% support … but browser support in the audio tag does not translate to ubiquity of use, does it? Are people primarily encoding and listening to content in Opus, or is it simply widely implemented and ready for use if people choose to do so?
Does it matter? Kinda, I think. We’re going to have MP3s around as long as I’m alive, probably longer. Whether it remains (or currently is) the most popular way for encoding music / audio - there’s so much encoded in MP3 (and only MP3) that having playback functionality for it without having to convert it to another format (and thus lose some sound quality) is important.
“Today, Opus is the de-facto standard format for audio in web browsers.”
Not sure what that graph is supposed to prove. When you say “de-facto standard format” – MP3 seems to have 97.74% support, Opus has 97.16% support … but browser support in the audio tag does not translate to ubiquity of use, does it? Are people primarily encoding and listening to content in Opus, or is it simply widely implemented and ready for use if people choose to do so?
Opus is widely used in real time streaming applications. It and Vorbis are the only audio formats allowed in WebM, so if you ever see a WebM file, it’s almost certainly Opus. Most on the time on Youtube, audio is Opus. So I would say that a lot of people are listening to Opus encoded audio when they use the web.
You can also look at the AAC vs MP3 battle another way. When file storage became cheap enough and home internet connection speed became fast enough to make FLAC storage as convenient as MP3, it also made MP3 a reasonable alternative to AAC.
“Today, Opus is the de-facto standard format for audio in web browsers.”
Not sure what that graph is supposed to prove. When you say “de-facto standard format” – MP3 seems to have 97.74% support, Opus has 97.16% support … but browser support in the audio tag does not translate to ubiquity of use, does it? Are people primarily encoding and listening to content in Opus, or is it simply widely implemented and ready for use if people choose to do so?
TIL. I didn’t know that MP3 has native support in most browser. Last time I checked (a long time ago apparently) Firefox was only natively supporting royalty-free open formats, MP3 support depended on the codecs installed on the OS. I see that it’s now built-in Firefox. My bad. I guess that’s good news :)
In terms of use, if you count WebM which uses Opus for its audio track, Opus definitely has to be ahead in terms of usage. (This is my gut-feeling with no statistical data)
As the link you provided shows, an <audio ... opus> element doesn’t work in Safari, or any browser on iOS.
Like it or not, but there are enough iPhone/iPad users that you can’t really ignore that, and mp3 works totally fine on all browsers, including those on iOS, so it looks like opus still has bad support.
Audio elements let you have multiple sources so you don’t have to choose. You can save your bandwidth & your users’ bandwidth by also storing/serving Opus files for modern systems while also keeping a legacy format like MP3s for a legacy OS like iOS.
You are confusing container formats with audio formats. The link you are citing has footnotes clarifying this. The OGG container format is not widely supported, but WEBM is. Every mainstream browser supports opus in webm, including iOS Safari (this is what YouTube uses, among others). The caniuse website shows an estimate of total global user support in browsers, which is about 97%.
In this case it’s a distinction without a difference. Sure, I can use opus in a video container, but we’re talking about audio, and you can’t use the opus codec in safari irrelevant of the container.
For example, this site has an audio element like this at the bottom:
It’s .opus not .ogg, and safari obviously has an .opus decoder for webm, but it still doesn’t play on iOS because it’s not a container problem, it’s that iOS is intentionally not supporting the codec for audio.
Some history: in the early 2000’s, when proprietary audio formats ruled the earth, two competing open-source general-purpose multi-media container formats gained popularity: “Ogg” and “Matroska”. One of them (Ogg) saw some success in open-source software and some hardware, but never gained traction on the web. The other (Matroska) won the favor of browser makers including Google who standardized a subset of Matroska called WebM.
The website you linked contains an Ogg file, so it’s not going to work broadly across web browsers since Ogg is not a popular cross-browser format the way WebM is.
What if you swapped the Ogg container for a WebM container (without touching the opus audio stream within)? Here you go:
Legacy systems. There are still plenty of car head units and similar devices that can play MP3 and nothing else (maybe WMA) from a CD or USB stick. It’s nice to know you can encode audio for those situations using completely free software. Of course that’s been true for a long time now, but not everyone follows patent expiration closely. And for the home user, I don’t know if there was ever a legitimate legal concern with installing the necessary freeworld packages in your distro of choice.
I have a small/cheap Chinese digital audio player from 4 or 5 years ago & it supports Vorbis + Opus on a proprietary Linux OS. Folks still use dedicated device, but those devices support all sort of lossy/lossless codecs.
An odd piece, because either people knew about MP3 not being free in the first place (then they probably heard about it going free) or people didn’t knew it in the first place because it just worked[tm] on all platforms.
Enough people still use mp3 (those of us who still buy CDs and rip them for example) or never cared anyway - the streamers.
Enough people still use mp3 (those of us who still buy CDs and rip them for example)
I mean, I still buy CDs and rip them, but storage got very cheap in the last couple of decades, so I rip them as perfect FLACs* and then when I’m mobile I get whatever Plex wants to give me, which is probably more modern than MP3.
* I don’t think it matters much and I certainly can’t hear the difference between lossless and good-quality lossy compression, but it makes me feel better knowing that I have copies with no generational loss.
Yeah, I like FLAC solely because I have the space for it. Half the time I’m listening over Bluetooth in my car, anyways, so it’s not like it sounds perfect, but I have the space so I’m not going to bother with mp3
Is there any generational loss in MP3 beyond the first generation? I’m not sure but I thought that lossy digital compression meant that the encoder had choices but the playback engine didn’t.
You can copy the bits of the MP3 without loss as much as you like, so in that respect no, not really. But if you want to convert it to any other lossy format (including MP3 with different settings, although some other lossy formats can do quality reduction without re-encoding) then there is. So IMO it’s best to keep the lossless version around unless you’re completely certain you will never want your music in a different format.
I was in the same group as the author: I knew it was non-free and have needed to download a separate encoder from time to time; while also not even noticing that it had changed. I guess the news went past me :)
I guess my criticism was with the “loaded” headline, because it does not match my bubble - neither the nerds nor the non-nerds. Maybe I should have clarified that of course I can imagine some people knowing it was non-free and not knowing it’s been free for a while
I wrote an app 20 years(!) ago that had to load ffmpeg as a plug-in because of MP3 encumberment. I of course knew the patents would expire someday but didn’t know it had occurred.
At the nudging of some friends who I share my albums with, I actually rip FLAC and MP3 now - but for me mp3 is fine, it’s what I put on my mobile. But of course I listen to FLAC, when I have it. Just feels like a waste of disk space to me :P
This is what I do, I rip to FLAC and Opus (at just 96 kbps, it sounds great!) using cyanrip and it really is the best of both worlds. Opus for my phone and other constrained devices, FLAC on my home network and for times when I want to reencode an album to some other format.
I feel like OpenWrt is one of the most important things I sort of take for granted. On supported hardware, it Just Works™ and almost always better than stock firmware. It has allowed me to upgrade my networking hardware less frequently, often using cheaper refurbished options. If you don’t already do this, I encourage you to: find hardware on the supported devices list that meets your needs, buy it used/refurbished, and be amazed at how much OpenWrt can do. Then take some of the money you saved and donate it to the project. Or buy the new OpenWrt One. Projects like OpenWrt (and postmarketOS) are vital to a more sustainable future with less e-waste.
If you need a jumping off point for hardware suggestions, my main home router is a WRT1900ACS v2 and I’m very happy with it.
EDIT: To speak to the topic at hand, I’ve been running the 24.10 release since rc4 and it’s been great. Uneventful in the best way.
How does this make us better programmers? Really feels like all of this is business stuff.
Some days I wish that the submit page had a prompt like “explain how this is on topic for lobsters”
There’s more to living in a society than just programming.
According to https://lobste.rs/about, this site is about programming, not living in a society.
I would hope there are some key takeaways from the discussion. I see lots of things here that I definitely wouldn’t want to do in my “next program”. I don’t love that this is a link to a biased post on another discussion forum instead of a well-written blog post about the same, but I think the topic itself is sparking some useful discussion about what not to do if you want people to trust your software.
Don’t program this kind of crap and you’ll become better.
Even if half of the things I have heard about Brave are wrong, why even bother when so many other great, free alternatives exist. The first and last time I tried it was the home page ad fiasco… uninstalled and went back to Chrome.
These days I try to use Firefox, but escape hatch to Chrome when things don’t work. I know there are better alternatives to both Firefox and Chrome, I’ll start exploring them… maybe? It’s hard for me to care about them since most of them are just Chrome/Firefox anyway. I’ll definitely give Ladybird a go when it’s ready. On paper, at least, it sounds like the escape from Google/Mozilla that is desperately needed.
Kagi bringing Orion to Linux feels promising. It’s OK on Mac, though after using it for 6 months I switched back to Safari. It looks like they’re using Webkit for that on Linux, not blink, which is a happy surprise IMO. That feels like a good development. (I’m also looking forward to Ladybird, though. Every so often I build myself a binary and kick the tires. Their progress feels simultaneously impossibly fast and excruciatingly slow.
If I understand correctly, Orion is not open source. That feels like a huge step backward and not a solution to a browser being controlled by a company with user-hostile incentives. I think Ladybird is more in line with what we really need: a browser that isn’t a product but rather a public good that may be funded in part by corporations but isn’t strongly influenced by any one commercial entity.
I believe they have stated that open sourcing is in the works1
Their business model is, at the minimum, less user hostile than others due to users paying them money directly to keep them alive.
Disclaimer: Paid Kagi user.
That help page has said Kagi is “working on it” since 2023-09 or earlier. Since Kagi hasn’t finished that work after 1.5 years, I don’t believe Kagi is actually working on open sourcing Orion.
If US DoJ has their way, google won’t be able to fund chrome any more the way it was doing so far. That also means apple and firefox lose money too. So Kagi’s stuff might work out long term if breakup happens.
That’s totally valid, and I’d strongly prefer to use an open source UA as well!
In the context of browsers, though, where almost all traffic comes from either webkit-based browsers (chiefly if not only Safari on Mac/iPad/iPhone), blink-based browsers (chrome/edge/vivaldi/opera/other even smaller ones) or gecko-based browsers (Firefox/LibreWolf/Waterfox/IceCat/Seamonkey/Zen/other even smaller ones) two things stand out to me:
I thought that Orion moving Webkit into a Linux browser was a promising development just from an ecosystem diversity perspective. And I thought having a browser that’s not ad-funded on Linux (because even those FOSS ones are, indirectly ad-funded) was also a promising development.
I’d also be happier with a production ready Ladybird. But that doesn’t diminish the notion that, in my eye, a new option that’s not beholden to advertisers feels like a really good step.
There are non-gecko pure FOSS browsers on Linux.
Of the blink-based pure FOSS browsers, I use Ungoogled Chromium, which tracks the Chromium project and removes all binary blobs and Google services. There is also Debian Chromium; Iridium; Falkon from KDE; and Qute (keyboard driven UI with vim-style key bindings). Probably many others.
The best Webkit based browser I’m aware of on Linux is Epiphany, aka Gnome Web. It has built-in ad blocking and “experimental” support for chrome/firefox extensions. A hypothetical Orion port to Linux would presumably have non-experimental extension support. (I found some browsers based on the deprecated QtWebKit, but these should not be used due to unfixed security flaws.)
I wasn’t sure Ungoogled Chromium was fully FOSS, and I completely forgot about Debian Chromium. I tried to use Qute for a while and it was broken enough for me at the time that I assumed it was not actively developed.
When did Epiphany switch from Gecko to Webkit? Last time I was aware of what it used, it was like “Camino for Linux” and was good, but I still had it on the Gecko pile.
According to Wikipedia, Epiphany switched from Gecko to Webkit in 2008, because the Gecko API was too difficult to interface to / caused too much maintenance burden. Using Gecko as a library and wrapping your own UI around it is apparently quite different from soft forking the entire Firefox project and applying patches.
Webkit.org endorses Epiphany as the Linux browser that uses Webkit.
There used to be a QtWebKit wrapper in the Qt project, but it was abandoned in favour of QtWebEngine based on Blink. The QtWebEngine announcement in 2013 gives the rationale: https://www.qt.io/blog/2013/09/12/introducing-the-qt-webengine. At the time, the Qt project was doing all the work of making WebKit into a cross-platform API, and it was too much work. Google had recently forked Webkit to create Blink as a cross-platform library. Switching to Blink gave the Qt project better features and compatibility at a lower development cost.
The FOSS world needs a high quality, cross-platform browser engine that you can wrap your own UI around. It seems that Blink is the best implementation of such a library. WebKit is focused on macOS and iOS, and Firefox develops Gecko as an internal API for Firefox.
EDIT: I see that https://webkitgtk.org/ exists for the Gnome platform, and is reported to be easy to use.
I see Servo as the future, since it is written in Rust, not C++, and since it is developed as a cross platform API, to which you must bring your own UI. There is also Ladybird, and it’s also cross-platform, but it’s written in C++, which is less popular for new projects, and its web engine is not developed as a separate project. Servo isn’t ready yet, but they project it will be ready this year: https://servo.org/blog/2025/02/19/this-month-in-servo/.
I used to contribute to Camino on OS X, and I knew that most appetite for embedding gecko in anything that’s not firefox died a while back, about the time Mozilla deprecated the embedding library, but I’d lost track of Epiphany. As an aside: I’m still sorry that Mozilla deprecated the embedding interface for gecko, and I wish I could find a way to make it practical to maintain that. Embedded Gecko was really nice to work with in its time.
I strongly agree with this. I’d really like a non-blink thing to be an option for this. Not because there’s anything wrong with blink, but because that feels like a rug pull waiting to happen. I like that servo update, and hope that the momentum holds.
Wikipedia suggests the WebKit backend was added to Epiphany in 2007 and they removed the Gecko backend in 2009. Wow, time flies! GNOME Web is one I would like to try out more, if only because I enjoy GNOME and it seems to be a decent option for mobile Linux.
I have not encountered any website that doesn’t work on firefox (one corporate app said it required Chrome for some undisclosed reason, but I changed the useragent and had no issue at all to use their sinple CRUD). What kind of issues do you find?
I’ve wondered the same thing in these recent discussions. I’ve used Firefox exclusively at home for over 15 years, and I’ve used it at my different jobs as much as possible. While my last two employers had maybe one thing that only worked in IE or Chrome/Edge, everything else worked fine (and often better than my coworkers’ Chrome) in Firefox. At home, the last time I remember installing Chrome was to try some demo of Web MIDI before Firefox had support. That was probably five years ago, and I uninstalled Chrome after playing with the demo for a few minutes.
I had to install Chromium a couple of times in the last years to join meetings and podcast recording that were done with software using Chrome-only API.
When it happens, I bless flattpak as I install Chromium then permanently delete it afterward without any trace on my system.
If you are an heavy user of such web apps, I guess that it makes sense to use Chrome as your main browser.
I can’t get launcher.keychron.com to work on LibreWolf but that’s pretty much it. I also have chrome just in case I’m too lazy to figure out what specifically is breaking a site
Firefox doesn’t support WebUSB, so that’s probably the issue.
Thanks, yeah, that’s it. I knew it was some specific thing that wasn’t supported I just couldn’t remember and was writing that previous comment on my phone so I was too lazy to check. But yeah, it’s literally the only site I could think of that doesn’t work on Firefox (for me).
It’s pretty rare to be fair, so much so that I don’t have an example of the top off my head. I know, classic internet comment un-cited source bullshit, sorry. It was probably awful gov or company intranet pages over the years.
Some intensive browser based games run noticeably better on Chrome too, but I know this isn’t exactly a common use case for browsers that others care about.
Probably not a satisfying reply, apologies.
For some reason, trying to log in to the CRA (Canadian equivalent of the IRS) always fails for me with firefox and I need to use chrome to pay my taxes.
I run into small stuff fairly regularly. Visual glitches are common. Every once in a while, I’ll run into a site that won’t let me login. (Redirects fail, can’t solve a CAPTCHA, etc.)
Some google workspace features at least used to be annoying enough that I just devote a chrome profile to running those workspace apps. I haven’t retried them in Firefox recently because I kind of feel that it’s google’s just deserts that they get a profile on me that has nothing but their own properties, while I use other browsers for the real web.
I should start keeping a list of specific sites. Because I do care about this, but usually when it comes up I’m trying to get something done quickly and a work-around like “use chrome for that site” carries the day, then I forget to return to it and dig into why it was broken.
There’s something about Redox that feels special to me, like it might really become something significant someday. That said, I don’t know enough about the technical ins and outs for it to be more than a feeling. Can any of you speak to that, either to confirm or dispel? Does Redox stand a chance of growing into something big? I guess it’s worth looking at it not only from a technical standpoint but also human/community. Do the people working on it seem like folks who can keep momentum for five, ten, or twenty more years of Redox?
There is also a mod that adds USB-C charging to a x230 seems like the author would like to add that.
One can also use a small adapter cable - a lot cheaper and works really well.
https://aliexpress.com/item/1005005596423970.html
Whenever I’m at home or at the office, I greatly prefer the barrel style chargers over USB-C; it’s just so much more sturdy and being circular it really does work in every orientation. But I do admit that when I’m traveling it would be nice to bring along one less adapter.
My current laptop is a refurbished HP EliteBook (745 G6) that still has the barrel plug but can also charge with USB-C. It’s nice to have both for sure.
Not as an OSS maintainer, but I have been asked to do something pretty ridiculous by a nonprofit in their interview process: fix an actual reported bug in their OSS codebase. Bug got fixed, test passed, my code lives in their project forever, I did not get hired.
Well, thank you for your service.
Oh sheesh.
My father worked for Guinness for about 25 years. When I was growing up we had prints of the John Ireland calendar “the gentle art of making Guinness”, a splendid series of cartoons in the tradition of Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg. Guinness advertising art was great.
But, it’s a mass-produced factory beer. I occasionally like a stout or other dark beer, but Guinness is boring.
Guinness was relatively early in the use of statistical quality control over large scale biochemical processes – that is where Student’s t-distribution was discovered.
I visited a brewery for one of the top 5 beer producers worldwide and the effort and care going into producing a consistent, safe product is impressive. The fact that the product itself is rather bland and boring is incidental :D
I like boring beer. Incoming long defense of Guinness:
I didn’t always used to be like, I used to like hoppy IPAs. But as I’ve gotten older my desire to drink beers higher than 5% has diminished so thoroughly that I can count the number of times I drink one per year on one hand.
I certainly would like to drink more complex stouts, but there are barely any brewed in America with the same ABV. For an example, I went to my favorite local brewery’s website, and Stout was always prefixed with imperial https://grimmales.com/menu/
I can’t drink these! They taste like syrup and instantly give me a headache.
Frankly, my go to beer these days is Asahi. I’m tired of complexity. Beer is less for me about complex flavors and more about refreshment and the desire to relax. In the cases when I want something more complex, I go for a cocktail. I make myself a Negroni or a Campari soda (depending on which side of refreshment and flavor I want).
Anyway. I love Guinness. It tastes good (that is to say it doesn’t taste like piss water), has a low ABV, and is served in basically every bar in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It fits my need
Thanks for saying that. I like it fine if it’s what’s available, but it tastes watered down to me compared to other stouts I’ve grown accustomed to. I’ll take it over something lighter, but it’s fairly plain.
Completely agree about the watered down flavor. The Extra Stout, however, is quite tasty…
If you’re in the US, be aware that the Guinness product sold as Extra Stout 20 years ago is now known as Foreign Extra Stout. Today’s Extra Stout is watered down in comparison (and undoubtedly cheaper to produce).
As bait-and-switches go, this is mild compared to Newcastle Ale…
I still find it funny, that the main UK production plant for Newcastle Brown Ale is on Sunderland.
That was a notorious bit of management fuckery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_indications_and_traditional_specialities_in_the_European_Union#Within_the_European_Union
I’m with you but would add that it genuinely does taste better in Ireland! To the point that I know some Irish people who will not drink Guinness abroad.
The story goes that this is due to the water but I suspect the truth is that Guinness have a lot of control over how it’s stored and served in pubs (temperature etc). Whether that should matter is an exercise left to personal taste.
I hope to put that theory to the test one day!
I had an Irish colleague in France that spun the theory that French Guiness is a lot less bitter, because locals don’t like it.
He refused it.
My personal take on Guiness: I rarely drink and then I only rarely drink Guiness, so I enjoy it as an easy stout that comes with an expected taste. Sometimes, that’s just what I want.
(Fun fact about me: I do, however, have a taste for alcohol, my first job was sysadmin on a wineyard)
When I visited the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin the advertising floor was definitely the most interesting part. The rest was over the top displays or sections for social media tourism. I have to agree about it being boring, although I’ll often order it if there’s no other stout or porters served.
Nothing wrong with mass-produced factory beer. Writing this from Germany and I’m always up for a good Maß of Augustiner.
Also, their book of world records was endlessly entertaining when I was in primary school.
Many years after I tried Guinness (which I still occasionally enjoy, because it is boring in quite a pleasant way) I learned that the thing I really liked about it was that it was always a nitro pour. Seeking out interesting beers (mostly, but not all stouts) served on nitro taps has been fun.
I had never made the connection between the beer and the books before. Thanks!
You should also try nitro (cold brew) coffee. It has that same silky mouthfeel and bitterness. Plus, you can drink it any time of day guilt-free :)
I’m a big fan of nitro coffee! In the before times, I worked once or twice a week in an office that had a nitro cold brew tap in the kitchen, and that was enough to make me look forward to those office days. Come to think of it, everyone (of those who didn’t dislike coffee in general) really loved that perk.
Someone commented on youtube that this could be used as a form of mechanical cryptography. It would be fun to do a cryptoanalysis on this, I’m sure its easy enough to break as pixels near the center if the screen should be more commonly used in text.
Ooh, but what if you used it to display QR codes? How else could we abuse this fun toy? :-D
This movie caught my eye when it won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and I was delighted to see it was made using Blender. This interview highlights how Blender offered a unique set of features that opened up new approaches for the filmmaker to create something truly special, and the fact it’s free open-source software was a key part of the journey. I’m excited to see something made with FOSS gain this kind of recognition, and it is so cool to see how Blender specifically offers something unique in this space.
I do not like the author’s misrepresentations in this article. You can be technically not lying, but when you write things that most people who aren’t highly technical would believe to mean one thing, and that thing is clearly not the case, you don’t get points for technically not lying. You’re being disingenuous.
An example: I do not like Google, and I do not like Chrome, and I make no apologies for them, but when someone writes, “When you log into Chrome, it automatically logs you into your Google account on the web.”
Non- and less-technical people do not make a distinction between using a web browser and “log(ging) into Chrome” - if someone were to say, “log in to Chrome, please”, many, if not most people, would assume that what’s meant is for someone to simply launch Chrome. They wouldn’t think, “I’ll launch the browser, then go in to settings or whatever, then I’ll log in to my Google account inside of Chrome because I was asked to log in to Chrome”.
We (technical people) can tell others all we want that they should use another browser, but most people aren’t going to care and aren’t going to listen. But should people know that they can use Chrome and don’t need to be logged in to Google? Absolutely. Is the author implying by their choice of wording that this isn’t the case? Yes. This is deceptive, and it weakens the case the author is trying to make.
As we learned from South Park, we’re asked to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. We really don’t need to trick people to make the case that they suck.
That’s only because Google made it so, and less-technical people don’t understand the amount of data that Google collects on them, via searches, maps, or Google Analytics, or what damage that can do.
I am pretty sure that the linking happened because they noticed that many people don’t really want or need to log into a Google account, so they wanted more people to share more data. It is my opinion that less-technical people aren’t stupid, and get confused by the web when their mental model is deliberately flawed, more often than not.
I strongly disagree with the example given, only because I know that when I say to log in I always mean to enter identification information (like username and password). It wouldn’t have crossed my mind before reading your comment that someone would equate logging into an application with simply opening an application. Logging in should only mean that you’ve chosen to enter identifying information in order to gain access to something. They shouldn’t need to address whether you can use Chrome without logging in if all they’re talking about is the logged-in behavior. (We also shouldn’t ignore Google’s dark patterns that make it seem like you do need to log in to use it, though the article doesn’t go into that.)
You can’t really expect every piece of technical content to pander to people who don’t understand the difference between launching a program and logging in to an account. What makes you think that this post is directed at people who are 100% technologically illiterate to that degree?
It shouldn’t be targeted at people who are 100% technically illiterate, but just as much it shouldn’t be targeted at people who are 0% technically illiterate.
A good example is when technical people talk about computer viruses and conflate them with Trojans. If you don’t know any better, you learn only from usage like this and you have no real awareness of the difference between them (meaning we’re shirking our responsibility to teach correct things). But when technical people, who really should know better, refer to a Trojan as a virus, that can cause real confusion and miscommunication. Someone tasked with cleanup after an infection can easily end up with very different work by this misuse. Additionally, there’s no good reason for a technical person to not use the correct term.
So when I, a technical person, sees someone, also ostensibly a technical person, describing things to others, particularly to non-technical people, incorrectly or in ways that we know will be misunderstood, it’d really bugs me. There’s no good reason for it.
This is a bold assumption to make, and it’s not reasonable to expect an author to imagine every possible way a reader might be confused. Words have meaning, and it should be enough for an author of a more-technical-than-not article to use words accurately. Audience analysis matters, but I really don’t think this author expected their article to be read by someone with so little knowledge that they would confuse “log in” with “open application”. As I shared earlier I wouldn’t have even imagined that scenario until you presented it, so if I were to have written this same article I could say confidently that it was not written with the expectation of it being misunderstood.
“Think of Chrome. When you log into Chrome, it automatically logs you into your Google account on the web.”
How many non-technical people wouldn’t realize the difference between logging in to Google and simply using Chrome? How many technical people wouldn’t be certain that the author is referring specifically to logging in to Google, and would require context to be sure?
The term “log in” has been in use in computing since at least the ‘60s and in common home usage since at least the late ‘90s. Additionally, it is not unique to computing. If I told someone to log in or sign in at the bank, I would have no expectation that they would think I simply meant for them to walk into the bank. They’d be expected to sign a log book or check in with someone. If they don’t know what “log into” means, I expect them to ask the question, “What does that mean?” and look it up. I never expect my reader to simply a) make a misinformed assumption, and b) take what I said at face value without question. If what I said strikes them as odd, they should look it up. That is what we should expect of ourselves and each other. We can’t expect an author to imagine every possible way that a reader might be misinformed.
But is this what we’re talking about? What would the common person do if someone asked them to “log in to Chrome”?
That’s what I’ve been talking about, yes. Who is this mythical “common person” and why do you feel the author needed to write with them in mind instead of another imagined audience? I have certainly known people who were that confused (not about that specifically), but I wouldn’t write a blog post aimed at catching every possible misunderstanding that type of person might have. I think it’s pretty clear that type of extra-confused user was not the audience this author had in mind, and I don’t think we can demand they reinagine their audience like that.
I want to plainly say that I don’t believe there was anything incorrect about what they said about logging into Chrome and I don’t believe that the absence of qualifying language for an unintended imagined audience means they’re being in any way disingenuous. Maybe you have another example from the article that makes your point, but I contend the example you gave does not.
Really sad to watch the video, I’m still using Firefox Focus on mobile and migrated to Zen couple weeks ago, recently found more Mozilla controversies like Excessive Executive Pay and Anonym acquisition.
In light of recent news I switched to F-Droid’s Fennec build on Android, but I haven’t yet decided what I want to switch to on desktop (I currently use the official Mozilla flatpak from Flathub). I’m leaning toward LibreWolf from what I’ve seen so far.
Have you tried IronFox recommended by them? I’m considering migrate from iOS to LineageOS and use it or Fennec.
Thanks for that; I’ll take a look. I hadn’t seen it because it’s not in F-Droid yet, but I knew about their Fennec build after DivestOS went away leaving Mull users wondering what they should use (even though I wasn’t a DivestOS or Mull user at the time). I’m partial to things packaged by the F-Droid team, but of course I was getting Firefox from Mozilla so I’m not opposed to getting IronFox from their repo. I see IronFox is carrying on the Mull legacy, so that’s cool.
That article is misrepresenting Google compensation to a hilarious degree. Pichai regularly gets $200M+ bonuses.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/22/economy/alphabet-ceo-pay/index.html
Okay but why? I know people do all sorts of porting projects for fun but this is a combo I would not have thought of
I think you answered the why yourself: since they did think of it, how could they not? :-)
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
:)
That’s… wow. Thank you for highlighting that. I am seriously considering using something other than Firefox for the first time in… ever. Regardless of how one might choose to interpret that statement, it’s frightening that they would even write it. This is not the Mozilla I knew or want. I’d love to know what alternatives people might suggest that are more community focused and completely FOSS, ideally still non-Chromium.
Thankfully, the lawful base for data use is spelled out in their privacy policy:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#lawful-bases
e.g. Browsing, Interaction and Search data are “Legitimate interest” and “Consent”-based.
Consent being the kind that I haven’t given, but I’m supposed to actively revoke? Until the next update?
That unfortunately seems to be the current usage of the term “consent” in the tech industry.
Fortunately, that’s not consent as the GDPR defines it
Isn’t it? Most GDPR consent screens have an easy “accept to everything” button and requires going through multiple steps to “not accept”, and many many more steps to “object” to their “legitimate interest” in tracking for the purposes of advertising. As long as these screens remain allowed and aren’t cracked down on (which I don’t foresee happening, ever), that’s the de facto meaning of “consent” in GDPR as far as I’m concerned: something that’s assumed given unless you actively go out of your way to revoke it.
It’s not what the text of the GDPR defines it as, but the text isn’t relevant; only its effect on the real world is.
Yes, definitely. Consent in GDPR is opt-in not opt-out. If it’s opt-out, that’s not consensual. And the law is the law.
Furthermore, for interstitials, to reject everything should be at least as easy as it is to accept everything, without dark patterns. Interstitials (e.g., from IAB and co.) first tried to make it hard to reject everything, but now you usually get a clear button for rejecting everything on most websites.
As I mentioned in another comment, the DPAs are understaffed and overworked. But they do move. A real-world example of a company affected by the GDPR, and that tries testing its limits, is Meta with Facebook. For user profiling, first they tried the Terms of Service, then they tried claiming a legitimate interest, then they introduced expensive subscriptions for those that tried to decline, now they introduced a UI degradation, delaying the user scrolling, which is illegal as well.
Many complain, on one hand, that the EU is too regulated, suffocating inovation, and with US’s tech oligarhs now sucking up to Trump to force the EU into allowing US companies to break the law. On the other hand, there are people who believe that the GDPR isn’t enforced enough. I wish people would make up their mind.
Those are different people, all who have made up their mind.
I thought I made it reasonably clear that I don’t care that much about what the text of the law is, I care about what material impact it has on the world.
I corrected you with facts, and you’re replying with your feelings. Fair enough.
To be fair, @mort’s feeling may come from non-actually-GDPR-compliant cookie consent forms. I have certainly seen where I couldn’t find the “reject all” button, and felt obligated to manually click up to 15 “legitimate interest” boxes. (And dammit could they please stop with their sliding buttons and use actual square check boxes instead?)
I think the worse case is you click “reject all”, but you don’t actually reject all, and the legitimate interests are still checked.
The facts you provided aren’t relevant. I’m talking about the de facto situation as it applies to 99% of companies, you’re talking about the text of the law and enforcement against one particular company. These are different things which don’t have much to do with each other.
You even acknowledge that DPAs are understaffed and overworked, which results in the lacking enforcement which is exactly what I’m complaining about. For what I can tell, we don’t disagree about any facts here.
Well, other people in this sub-thread are talking about GDPR. You might have switched the topic, but that isn’t alexelcu’s fault.
I’m talking about GDPR as well, focusing about what impact it has in practice. I have been 100% consistent on that, since my first message in this sub-thread (https://lobste.rs/s/de2ab1/firefox_adds_terms_use#c_3sxqe1) which explicitly talks about what it means de facto. I don’t know where you got the impression that I’m talking about something else.
But there is enforcement, it’s just slower than we’d like. For example, screens making it harder to not opt in rather than opt in have gotten much rarer than they used to be. IME now they mostly come from American companies that don’t have much of a presence in the EU. So enforcement is causing things to move in the right direction, even if it is at a slow pace.
There is a website tracking fines against companies for GDPR violations [1] and as you can see, there are lots of fines against companies big and small every single month. “Insufficient legal basis for data processing” isn’t close to being the most common violation, but it’s pretty common, and has also been lobbed against companies big and small. It is not the case that there is only enforcement against a few high profile companies.
[1] https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
Why do you lay this at the feet of GDPR?
it’s the other way around - most of the time you have to actively revoke “legitimate interest”, consent should be off by default. Unfortunately, oftentimes “legitimate interest” is just “consent, but on by default” and they take exactly the same data for the same purpose (IIRC there are NGOs (such as NOYB, Panoptykon) fighting against IAB and other companies in those terms)
“Legitimate interest” is the GDPR loophole that ad tech companies use to spy on us without an easy opt-out option, right? I don’t know what this means in this context but I don’t trust it.
It is not, ad tech has been considered not a legitimate interest for… Ever… By the Europeans DPAs. Report to your DPA the one that abuse this. There have been enforcement.
Every website with a consent screen has a ton of ad stuff under “legitimate interest”, most ask you to “object” to each individually. The continued existence of this patterns means it’s de facto legal under the GDPR in my book. “Legitimate interest” is a tool to continue forced ad tracking.
Yes, all of that is illegal under GDPR.
The problem has been that DPAs are understaffed and overworked.
I don’t think you’re disagreeing with me. It’s de jure illegal but de facto legal. I don’t care much what the text of the GDPR says, I care about its material effect on the real world; and the material effect is one where websites put up consent screens where the user has to “object” individually to every ad tech company’s “legitimate interest” in tracking the user for ad targeting purposes.
I used to be optimistic about the GDPR because there’s a lot of good stuff in the text of the law, but it has been long enough that we can clearly see that most of its actual effect is pretty underwhelming. Good law without enforcement is worthless.
No, it’s de facto illegal a well, law enforcement is just slower that we’d like. Ask, for example, Facebook.
De facto illegal for entities at Facebook’s scale? Maybe. But it’s certainly de facto legal for everyone else. It has been 7 years since it was implemented; if it was going to have a positive effect we’d have seen it by now. My patience has run out. GDPR failed.
I just gave you a concrete example of a powerful Big Tech company, with infinite resources for political lobbying, that was blasted for their practices. They first tried hiding behind their Terms of Use, then they tried claiming a legitimate interest, then they offered the choice of a paid subscription, and now they’ve introduced delays in scrolling for people that don’t consent to being profiled, which will be deemed illegal as well.
Your patience isn’t important. This is the legal system in action. Just because, for example, tax evasion happens, that doesn’t mean that anti tax evasion laws don’t work. Similarly with data protection laws. I used to work in the adtech industry. I know for a fact that there have been companies leaving the EU because of GDPR. I also know some of the legwork that IAB tried pulling off, but it won’t last.
Just the fact that you’re getting those interstitials is a win. Microsoft’s Edge browser, for example, gives EU citizens that IAB dialog on the first run, thus informing them that they are going to share their data with the entire advertising industry. That is in itself valuable for me, because it informs me that Edge is spyware.
I agree that the “we’re spying on you” pop-ups is a win in itself. I’m just complaining that it’s so toothless as to in practice allow websites to put up modals where each ad tech company’s “legitimate interest” in tracking me has to be individually disabled. If the goal of the GDPR was to in any way make it reasonably easy for users to opt out of tracking, it failed.
I’m not so sure. I’ve even seen this used as an argument against the GDPR: The spin they give it is “this is the law that forces us to put up annoying cookie popups”. See for example this article on the Dutch public broadcasting agency (which is typically more left-leaning and not prone to give a platform to liberals).
Roughly translated “all innovations in AI don’t work as well here as in the US. And why do you have to click on cookies (sic) on every single website?”
I have seen that as well, and I think it’s bullshit. The GDPR doesn’t force anyone to make any form of pop-up, nobody is forced to track users in a way which requires consent. The GDPR only requires disclosure and an opt-out mechanism if you do decide to spy on your users, which I consider good..
I agree, but at the same time I think the average user just sees it as a nuisance, especially because in most cases there’s no other place to go where they don’t have a cookie popup. The web development/advertising industry knowingly and willfully “complied” in the most malicious and obnoxious way possible, resulting in this shitty situation. That’s 1 for the industry, 0 for the lawgivers.
I agree that it didn’t have the desired effect (which, incidentally, I have spent a lot of this thread complaining about, hehe). I think everyone was surprised about just how far everyone is willing to go in destroying their website’s user experience in order to keep tracking people.
I’m not sure if you’re deep in grumpy posting or didn’t understand the idea here, but for legitimate interest you don’t need to agree and companies normally don’t give you the option. If you’re talking about the extra options you unset manually, they’re a different thing. The “legitimate interest” part is for example validating your identity through a third party before paying out money. Things you typically can’t opt out of without also refusing to use the service.
If you get a switch for “tracking” or “ads” that you can turn off, that’s not a part of the “legitimate interest” group of data.
I’m sorry but this isn’t true. I have encountered plenty consent screens with two tabs, “consent” and “legitimate interest”, and where the stuff under “consent” are default off while the stuff under “legitimate interest” is on by default and must be “objected to” individually. Some have an “object to all” button to “object” to all ad tracking in the “legitimate interest” category.
Here’s one example: https://i.imgur.com/J4dnptX.png, the Financial Times is clearly of the opinion that tracking for the purpose of advertising counts as “legitimate interest”.
I’m not saying that there’s any relationship between this pattern and what’s actually required by the GDPR, my understanding of the actual text of the law reflects yours. I’m saying that this is how it works in practice.
So when I login to lobste.rs (or any other important website) do I grant them the permission to use my credentials? ;-)
Pretty much
this comment remains property of the Mozilla Foundation and is presented here with their kind permission
Mozilla updated the article with a clarifying statement:
the problem is it doesn’t clarify anything. “basic functionality” is not defined. my guess is they want to be able to feed anything we type or upload to a site, to also be able to feed that into an LLM. “anything other than what is described” doesnt help because what is described is so vague as to mean anything “help you experience and interact with online content”
That is… not clarifying. And not comforting. “What is described” in the ToS is “to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content.” That’s absurdly vague. And what is described in the Privacy Notice is absurdly broad:
Yes. That’s the fucking point.
I’m glad we have this contextless legalese to clarify things. I wonder if there’s some kind of opt-in data collection in Firefox that Mozilla might have legal obligations to clarify their rights to? Couldn’t be that… No, let’s put a pause on critical thinking and post stupid TOS excerpts as if Mozilla are going to steal our Deviantart uploads and sell them as AI training data.
If they need a ToS for a particular feature, then that “contextless legalese” should be scoped to that feature, not to Firefox as a whole.
This is precisely why the same organization should not do all of these things. If they want to do non-tool stuff to continue funding their mission they should start up independently managed companies that can establish these consents for a narrow band of services. They can give the existing organization control as a majority shareholder, with dividends flowing back to the main organization. That is the way to ensure that incentives don’t become misaligned with the mission.
They’re future-proofing their terms of service. That’s even worse than future-proofing one’s code, Though for different reasons.
That language comes off a bit … onerous
But what does it mean? To “navigate”.
That’s it I guess. Thanks for the find! Firefox is dead to me now. What’s the non-evil browser to go to nowadays?
librewolf seems to be the rage now: https://librewolf.net/
On MacOS/iOS there is the Kagi browser Orion: https://kagi.com/orion/
There is so much about this story that disgusts me, and that’s before getting to the security issues. Please, if you’re in a financial position to spend money on a product like this: don’t. The “willing to overlook” list should be a blueprint for exactly the kinds of things none of us should ever overlook when considering a purchase in this day and age. As long as people keep overlooking those huge red flags, products like this will continue to create e-waste.
at the beginning: “willing to overlook […] It won’t function if the internet goes down”, and later “Personally, I don’t want my bed data accessible to anyone”. I have no idea what’s going on in these people’s head. How can these two beliefs be held at the same time?
There’s a difference between those two though. I can self host and isolate the first one, if the internet goes down I won’t be able to access it, but it’s not in the cloud and it’s not accessible by everyone.
I think the point is that if your bed (or any other IoT) doesn’t work if it’s not internet connected, you aren’t going to be able to self host (failing some clever rev-eng) and that’s a fair indicator that your ‘bed data’ is already accessible by someone else. So subsequently claiming “I want privacy” is profoundly tone deaf. And in this case, yes, the data is indeed in the cloud (it’s what AWS Kinesis is for). It might not be available to “anyone”, but it is available for “someone” who isn’t sleeping in the bed, and personally, that’s probably too many.
Personally, I still can’t get my head past the simple idea of “I can’t control my bed if the internet isn’t up, and I’m good with that”.
The data could be end-to-end encrypted. (Though of course, usually it isn’t.)
Usually done by having the same private key for every device, which inevitably gets leaked. We can’t have nice things. :-)
I would like to represent the delegation of broke people in their 20s whose tech salaries are efficiently absorbed by their student loans:
You don’t need a smart bed. My mattress cost $200 and my bedframe cost <50. I sleep fine. I know as people age they need more back support but you do NOT need this. $250 worth of bed is FINE. You will survive!!
I’m not sure I agree. Like if you are living paycheck-to-paycheck then yeah, probably don’t drop $2k on a mattress. But I believe pretty strongly in spending good money on things you use every day.
The way it was explained to me that aligned with my frugal-by-nature mindset was basically an amortization argument. You (hopefully) use a bed every single day. So even if you only keep your bed for a single year (maybe these newfangled cloud-powered beds will also have planned obsolescence built-in, but the beds I know of should last at least a decade), that’s like 5 bucks a day. Which is like, a coffee or something in this economy. I know my colleagues and I will sometimes take an extra coffee break some days, which could be a get up and walk break instead.
You might be young now, but in your situation I would rather save for my old age than borrow against my youth. And for what it’s worth I have friends in their 20s with back problems.
(of course, do your own research to figure out what sort of benefits a mattress will give to your sleep, back, etc. my point is more that even if the perceived benefits feel minimal, so too do the costs when you consider the usage you get)
Mattresses are known to have a rather high markup, and the salesmen have honed the arguments you just re-iterated to perfection. There are plenty of items I’ve used nearly daily for a decade or more. Cutlery, pots, my wallet, certain bags, my bike, etc. None of them cost anywhere near $2000. Yes, amortized on a daily basis, their cost comes to pennies, which is why life is affordable.
Yes, there are bad mattresses that will exacerbate bad sleep and back problems. I’ve slept on some of them. When you have one of those, you’ll feel it. If you wake up rested, without pains or muscle aches in the morning, you’re fine.
I too lament that there are things we buy which have unreasonable markups, possibly without any benefits from the markups at all. I guess my point is more that I believe – for the important things in life – erring on the side of “too much” is fine. I personally have not been grifted by a $2k temperature-controlled mattress, but if it legitimately helped my sleep I wouldn’t feel bad about the spend. So long as I’m not buying one every month.
I think one point you’re glossing over is that sometimes you have to pay an ignorance tax. I know about PCs, so I can tell you that the RGB tower with gaming branding plastered all over it is a grift [1]. And I know enough about the purpose my kitchen knife serves to know that while it looks cool, the most that the $1k chef’s knife could get me is faster and more cleanly cut veggies [2].
You sound confident in your understanding of mattresses, and that’s a confidence I don’t know if I share. But if I think of a field I am confident in, like buying PCs, I would rather end the guy who buys the overly marked-up PC that works well for him than the one who walks a way with a steal that doesn’t meet his needs. Obviously we want to always live in the sweet spot of matching spend to necessity, but I don’t know if it’s always so easy.
[1] except for when companies are unloading their old stock and it’s actually cheap.
[2] but maybe, amortized, that is worth it to you. I won’t pretend to always be making the right decisions.
Note, because it’s not super obvious from the article: the $2k (or up to about 5k EUR for the newest version) is only the temperature-control, the mattress is extra.
All that said: having suffered from severe sleep issues for a stretch of years, I can totally understand how any amount of thousands feels like a steal to make them go away.
One of the big virtues of the age of the internet is that you can pay your ignorance tax with a few hours of research.
In any case, framing it as ‘$5 a day’ doesn’t make it seem like a lot until you calculate your daily take-home pay. For most people, $5 is like 10% of their daily income. You can probably afford being ignorant about a few purchases, but not about all of them.
Maybe I would have agreed with you five years ago, but I don’t feel the same way today. Even for simple factual things I feel like the amount of misinformation and slop has gone up, much less things for which we don’t have straight answers.
Your point is valid. I agree that we can’t 5-bucks-of-coffee-a-day away every purchase we make. Hopefully the ignorance tax we pay is much less than 10% of our daily income.
I think smart features and good quality are completely separate issues. When I was young, I also had a cheap bed, cheap keyboard, cheap desk, cheap chair, etc. Now that I’m older, I kinda regret that I didn’t get better stuff at a younger age (though I couldn’t really afford it, junior/medior Dutch/German IT jobs don’t pay that well + also a sizable student loan). More ergonomic is better long-term and generally more expensive.
Smart features on the other hand, are totally useless. But unfortunately, they go together a bit. E.g. a lot of good Miele washing machines (which do last longer if you look at statistics of repair shops) or things like the non-basic Oral-B toothbrushes have Bluetooth smart features. We just ignore them, but I’d rather have these otherwise good products without she smart crap.
Also, while I’m on a soapbox – Smart TVs are the worst thing to happen. I have my own streaming box, thank you. Many of them make screenshots to spy on you (the samba.tv crap, etc).
Yes, absolutely! Although it would be cool to be able to run a mainline kernel and some sort of Kodi, cutting all the crap…
I guess you never experienced a period with serious insomnia. It can make you desperate. Your whole life falls in to shambles, you’ll become a complete wreck, and you can’t resolve the problem while everybody else around seems to be able to just go to bed, close their eyes and sleep.
There is so much more to sleep than whether your mattress can support your back. While I don’t think I would ever buy such a ludicrous product, I have sympathy for the people who try this out of sheer desperation. At the end of the day, having Jeff Bezos in your bed and some sleep is actually better than having no sleep at all.
You make some good points why this kind of product shouldn’t exist and anything but a standard mattress should be a matter of medical professionals and sleep studies. When people are delirious from a lack of sleep and desperate, these options shouldn’t be there to take advantage of them. I’m surprised at the crazy number of mattress stores out there in the age of really-very-good sub-$1,000 mattresses you can have delivered to your door. I think we could do more to protect people from their worn out selves.
None of the old people in my family feel the need for an internet connected bed (that stops working during an internet or power outage). Also, I imagine that knowing you are being spied on in your sleep by some creepy amoral tech company does not improve sleep quality.
I do know that creepy amoral tech companies collect tons of personal data so that they can monetize it on the market (grey or otherwise). Knowing that you didn’t use your bed last night would be valuable information for some grey market data consumers I imagine. This seems like a ripe opportunity for organized crime to coordinate house breakins using an app.
I believe the people who buy this want to basically experience the most technological “advanced” thing they can pay for. They don’t “need” it. It’s more about the experience and the bragging rights, but I could be wrong.
I’m sorry to somewhat disagree. The reason I would buy this (not at that price tag, I had actually looked into this product) is because I am a wildly hot person/sleeper. I have just a flat sheet on and I am still sweating. I have ceiling fans running additional fans added. This is not only about the experience unless a good night sleep is now considered “an experience”. I legitimately wear shorts even in up to a foot of snow.
As the article says, you can get the same cooling effect with an aquarium chiller for that purpose. You don’t need a cloud-only bed cooler.
Ouch… Please do not follow this piece of advice. A lot of cheap mattresses contain “cancer dust”[1] that you just breath in when you sleep. You most likely don’t want to buy the most expensive mattress either, because many of the very expensive mattresses are just cheap mattresses made overseas with expensive marketing.
The best thing to do is to look at your independent consumer test results for your local market. (In Germany where I live it’s “Stiftugn Warentest” and in France where I’m from it’s “60 millions de consommateurs (fr).” I don’t know what it is in the US.)
A good mattress is not expensive, but it’s not cheap either. I spend 8 hours sleeping on this every day, I don’t want to cheap out.
[1] I don’t mean literal cancer dust. It’s usually just foam dust created when the mattress foam was cut, or when it rubs against the cover. People jokingly call it “cancer dust”
source?
https://www.everydayhealth.com/healthy-home/does-your-mattress-contain-fiberglass-how-to-know-and-why-its-dangerous/
wait… is it carcinogenic? Now I’m concerned lol
I wouldn’t know. Because it depends on what the “dust” is. It just lead most reviewer to say “this can’t be healthy”
This article claims that it just lead to lung irritation. But again, I’m just paranoid, with asbestos we started having concerns way too late.
There won’t be a better headline in 2025 anymore. We can skip the year.
The headline is incredibly clickbaity and misleading. Bezos and Amazon don’t really have anything to do with the real problems outlined in the article.
I found it so over-the-top obviously click-bait in such a way that it didn’t bother me. Almost click-bait to be ironic.
Gosh, it’s quite obvious hyperbole. I can’t imagine it actually misleading any reasonable person.
It is misleading because the issue is almost completely unrelated to Amazon (that just happens to be the cloud provider being used; the issue would be the same with another provider). The implication of the hyperbolic headline is that Bezos or Amazon have anything to do with the the startup that made the mistake, but clearly that’s not the case. It leads one to expect more Amazon involvement than there is.
That title is a work of art. I didn’t even know they make IoT beds, this is a ridiculous story all in all and the title is perfectly appropriate.
The generally accepted definition of “hit piece” includes an attempt to sway public opinion by publishing false information. Leaving aside the fact that the user who linked this story did not publish it, and deferring the discussion of who may or may not pay them to post, that is a significant claim that requires significant evidence.
So, please share your evidence… what’s the false information here, and how exactly is @freddyb attempting to sway public opinion? To what end? Be very specific, please.
I don’t think “hit piece” implies false information, just a lopsided sample of the information available.
That’s a fair point. I should have said “false or misleading.”
So I’ll amend my question, which I doubt will get answered at any rate:
@ecksdee: So, please share your evidence… what’s the false or misleading information here, and how exactly is @freddyb attempting to sway public opinion? To what end? Be very specific, please.
If you look at the history of soatoks blog on lobsters it is pretty obvious that sooner or later anyone from this community would post this entry.
Now you have to show me how mozilla is related to signal in any positive or negative way. You yourself seem to have a strong feeling towards mozilla at least.
I do feel like Windows 7 was the last bearable release of Windows. There wasn’t anything completely infuriating about it, and it was good as far as Windows goes. Then came 10 which just felt like a mess with no benefits over 7 and a lot of half-finished parts. Windows 11 is by far the worst thing I’ve ever used, not just Windows. From 10 onward I really started cursing the need to use Windows in my day job, and I am so thankful that I can now use Linux and FOSS for both work and play. At least with Windows 7 I could sort of forget I was using Windows from 9-5.
You know, I was so preoccupied with giving faint praise to Windows 7 and cursing Windows 10 and 11 that I forgot to comment on this article in particular: notice how much of what makes legacy Windows usable is FOSS. Firefox, LibreOffice, etc. Think about your less technical friends and family who are fretting about replacing perfectly good computers because they can’t upgrade to the latest version of Windows. Help them migrate to the more sustainable FOSS options like [insert your distro of choice; mine’s Fedora]. Honestly, hardware support is great and all the software they need is right there.
You forgot 8 and apparently not many people noticed. That probably says enough about that version.
8 is when they introduced the new wave of bullshit - metro ui, full-screen start menu shit.
I haven’t used it much but I’m under the impression they added these kind of things but new features were mostly not horrible and (almost?) everything could be disabled.
However, adoption was abysmal (maybe even worse than Vista) and after that they started not allowing to disable features, UIs and made away with actual versions so that people had to update. There are good reasons to do that but it also looks like they’ve been burnt and have been doing that for bad marketing reasons too.
i used Windows 8/8.1 daily for their entire commercial lifetime and honestly i really just remember it to be more ‘annoying’ than outright ‘bad’. at least for 8.1. the metro UI stuff was half baked garbage, but with 8.1 you could at least forget about its existence for the most part.
Also i think 8.1 had the best search feature in a Windows ever, up there with MacOS’s spotlight search, in terms of snappiness and being able to give me as the first result the specific thing that I want. Never really got it to work quite right in the little i’ve used Win10/11, even disabling web results it just usually gives me some completely unrelated file. Add to that some of the improvements 8/8.1 had over 7 (which i can’t really name off the top of my head, it’s been a while) and it was pretty good as long as you were willing to overlook some of the annoyances and what ultimately kept me from just downgrading back to 7.
Ha, so right! Admittedly, I was Windows-free at home before 7 even came out so my Windows experience has been in office environments. I never encountered 8 on any machines I used at work, and I only had a couple brief interactions with it on other folks’ home machines. Just enough to learn how to turn off the new Start screen.
I think that pretty much everyone avoided windows 8. I remember seeing browser stats and it was a very very minor OS that disappeared from the charts maybe even before XP.
It is the last version of Windows I will run, and indeed every computer I have acquired since 2016 is running a FOSS OS. I never really thought I’d see things this way, but I’m pretty done with proprietary software as (among other things) it enables extremely asymmetric power between vendor and “user”, and, well, that coincides pretty well with power asymmetry in other parts of life (like, say, government-mandated backdoors that you can’t escape because you can’t run any OS other than what the vendor provides – with mandatory “upgrades” of course).
I’m confused… Does it matter? AFAIK, formats like Vorbis and Opus always had smaller file size for a higher quality than the MP3, and have always been royalty-free.
They only suffered from bad support. However, as “MP3 players” got replaced by smartphones, supports for these better and royalty-free formats became more and more wide-spread. Heck… Today, Opus is the de-facto standard format for audio in web browsers.
What am I missing here?
“They only suffered from bad support.”
Only is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. MP3 was and is ubiquitous. Every other format has friction. That matters a lot when you’re talking about a huge audience where most of the users are non-techies and don’t know anything about these formats.
I know my car system understands MP3. My Roku player understands it. Pretty much any device that plays music from files understands it. Any other format is questionable. Most devices may support this or that, but it’s a question mark.
“Today, Opus is the de-facto standard format for audio in web browsers.”
Not sure what that graph is supposed to prove. When you say “de-facto standard format” – MP3 seems to have 97.74% support, Opus has 97.16% support … but browser support in the audio tag does not translate to ubiquity of use, does it? Are people primarily encoding and listening to content in Opus, or is it simply widely implemented and ready for use if people choose to do so?
Does it matter? Kinda, I think. We’re going to have MP3s around as long as I’m alive, probably longer. Whether it remains (or currently is) the most popular way for encoding music / audio - there’s so much encoded in MP3 (and only MP3) that having playback functionality for it without having to convert it to another format (and thus lose some sound quality) is important.
Opus is widely used in real time streaming applications. It and Vorbis are the only audio formats allowed in WebM, so if you ever see a WebM file, it’s almost certainly Opus. Most on the time on Youtube, audio is Opus. So I would say that a lot of people are listening to Opus encoded audio when they use the web.
You can also look at the AAC vs MP3 battle another way. When file storage became cheap enough and home internet connection speed became fast enough to make FLAC storage as convenient as MP3, it also made MP3 a reasonable alternative to AAC.
TIL. I didn’t know that MP3 has native support in most browser. Last time I checked (a long time ago apparently) Firefox was only natively supporting royalty-free open formats, MP3 support depended on the codecs installed on the OS. I see that it’s now built-in Firefox. My bad. I guess that’s good news :)
In terms of use, if you count WebM which uses Opus for its audio track, Opus definitely has to be ahead in terms of usage. (This is my gut-feeling with no statistical data)
IIRC, Spotify and YouTube both heavily use Opus so Opus support in browsers is absolutely being used frequently
EDIT: I was mistaken, Spotify still uses Vorbis
As the link you provided shows, an
<audio ... opus>element doesn’t work in Safari, or any browser on iOS.Like it or not, but there are enough iPhone/iPad users that you can’t really ignore that, and mp3 works totally fine on all browsers, including those on iOS, so it looks like opus still has bad support.
Audio elements let you have multiple sources so you don’t have to choose. You can save your bandwidth & your users’ bandwidth by also storing/serving Opus files for modern systems while also keeping a legacy format like MP3s for a legacy OS like iOS.
You are confusing container formats with audio formats. The link you are citing has footnotes clarifying this. The OGG container format is not widely supported, but WEBM is. Every mainstream browser supports opus in webm, including iOS Safari (this is what YouTube uses, among others). The caniuse website shows an estimate of total global user support in browsers, which is about 97%.
In this case it’s a distinction without a difference. Sure, I can use opus in a video container, but we’re talking about audio, and you can’t use the opus codec in safari irrelevant of the container.
For example, this site has an audio element like this at the bottom:
It’s
.opusnot.ogg, and safari obviously has an.opusdecoder for webm, but it still doesn’t play on iOS because it’s not a container problem, it’s that iOS is intentionally not supporting the codec for audio.Oh, but the distinction is critical!
Some history: in the early 2000’s, when proprietary audio formats ruled the earth, two competing open-source general-purpose multi-media container formats gained popularity: “Ogg” and “Matroska”. One of them (Ogg) saw some success in open-source software and some hardware, but never gained traction on the web. The other (Matroska) won the favor of browser makers including Google who standardized a subset of Matroska called WebM.
The website you linked contains an Ogg file, so it’s not going to work broadly across web browsers since Ogg is not a popular cross-browser format the way WebM is.
What if you swapped the Ogg container for a WebM container (without touching the opus audio stream within)? Here you go:
https://tstearns.com/tmp/opus.html
That audio tag with opus audio works just fine in Safari on iOS and macOS. For a matrix of html audio tag compatibilty, you can reference this wikipedia chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_audio#Supported_audio_coding_formats
Thank you for correcting my misconception and summarizing the history so cleanly, appreciated!
Legacy systems. There are still plenty of car head units and similar devices that can play MP3 and nothing else (maybe WMA) from a CD or USB stick. It’s nice to know you can encode audio for those situations using completely free software. Of course that’s been true for a long time now, but not everyone follows patent expiration closely. And for the home user, I don’t know if there was ever a legitimate legal concern with installing the necessary freeworld packages in your distro of choice.
I have a small/cheap Chinese digital audio player from 4 or 5 years ago & it supports Vorbis + Opus on a proprietary Linux OS. Folks still use dedicated device, but those devices support all sort of lossy/lossless codecs.
An odd piece, because either people knew about MP3 not being free in the first place (then they probably heard about it going free) or people didn’t knew it in the first place because it just worked[tm] on all platforms.
Enough people still use mp3 (those of us who still buy CDs and rip them for example) or never cared anyway - the streamers.
I mean, I still buy CDs and rip them, but storage got very cheap in the last couple of decades, so I rip them as perfect FLACs* and then when I’m mobile I get whatever Plex wants to give me, which is probably more modern than MP3.
* I don’t think it matters much and I certainly can’t hear the difference between lossless and good-quality lossy compression, but it makes me feel better knowing that I have copies with no generational loss.
Yeah, I like FLAC solely because I have the space for it. Half the time I’m listening over Bluetooth in my car, anyways, so it’s not like it sounds perfect, but I have the space so I’m not going to bother with mp3
Is there any generational loss in MP3 beyond the first generation? I’m not sure but I thought that lossy digital compression meant that the encoder had choices but the playback engine didn’t.
You can copy the bits of the MP3 without loss as much as you like, so in that respect no, not really. But if you want to convert it to any other lossy format (including MP3 with different settings, although some other lossy formats can do quality reduction without re-encoding) then there is. So IMO it’s best to keep the lossless version around unless you’re completely certain you will never want your music in a different format.
I was in the same group as the author: I knew it was non-free and have needed to download a separate encoder from time to time; while also not even noticing that it had changed. I guess the news went past me :)
I guess my criticism was with the “loaded” headline, because it does not match my bubble - neither the nerds nor the non-nerds. Maybe I should have clarified that of course I can imagine some people knowing it was non-free and not knowing it’s been free for a while
I wrote an app 20 years(!) ago that had to load ffmpeg as a plug-in because of MP3 encumberment. I of course knew the patents would expire someday but didn’t know it had occurred.
Surely you’re not still ripping CDs to MP3? 😱
When opus and flac (or even lesser but still better) formats have been well established for so long …
At the nudging of some friends who I share my albums with, I actually rip FLAC and MP3 now - but for me mp3 is fine, it’s what I put on my mobile. But of course I listen to FLAC, when I have it. Just feels like a waste of disk space to me :P
Opus will save you even more disk space :)
This is what I do, I rip to FLAC and Opus (at just 96 kbps, it sounds great!) using cyanrip and it really is the best of both worlds. Opus for my phone and other constrained devices, FLAC on my home network and for times when I want to reencode an album to some other format.
I feel like OpenWrt is one of the most important things I sort of take for granted. On supported hardware, it Just Works™ and almost always better than stock firmware. It has allowed me to upgrade my networking hardware less frequently, often using cheaper refurbished options. If you don’t already do this, I encourage you to: find hardware on the supported devices list that meets your needs, buy it used/refurbished, and be amazed at how much OpenWrt can do. Then take some of the money you saved and donate it to the project. Or buy the new OpenWrt One. Projects like OpenWrt (and postmarketOS) are vital to a more sustainable future with less e-waste.
If you need a jumping off point for hardware suggestions, my main home router is a WRT1900ACS v2 and I’m very happy with it.
EDIT: To speak to the topic at hand, I’ve been running the 24.10 release since rc4 and it’s been great. Uneventful in the best way.