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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2023

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  • So… why are people upset about this? I’d say it’s about damn time. Having two settings apps is pretty ridiculous and it’s honestly crazy it’s taken them this long to ditch the control panel. I still remember people making fun of Microsoft’s inability to drop control panel in the Windows 10 era. Is there anything special about the control panel or uniquely terrible about the settings app that would warrant this kind of negative reaction? Is it because of the settings that aren’t available in settings? If they’re preparing to drop control panel that probably means they’re going to add whatever settings are still stranded on it to the new settings app, unless there’s evidence that they won’t do that.


  • So you believe that Mozilla was just “cutting useless bloat” on the sole basis that “If it was good Mozilla would’ve used it more”? Yes, I think I will stick with my own take. They dropped it because making web engines is expensive and they no longer wanted to invest in making a new one in Rust. It was good, that’s the entire reason people are complaining.


  • Servo is not the old name for Gecko. Gecko existed long before Servo was started and Servo continues to be developed independently of Mozilla. It was a research project to develop a web rendering engine in Rust taking advantage of parallelization. The parallelization stuff mostly made it through the Quantum project several years ago, which did indeed help performance. That’s about it. As of right now, Gecko’s code base 55.4% C++, 22.6% JavaScript, 4.5% C, 4.3% Kotlin and a mere 3.8% Rust. If Servo had indeed been integrated into Firefox, over half of this would be Rust. 53.2%, if the current Servo repository is anything to go by.



  • This entire thing is just idealism vs pragmatism for the trillionth time. The idealists are mad because they think all ads are bad and we shouldn’t try to work with advertisers in any capacity. They do not believe reducing the harmfulness of ads is a valid approach, because that would be an acknowledgement of ads. Common talking points there are about how this is technically working with advertisers and how the internet shouldn’t have ads in the first place.

    The pragmatics also think ads are bad, but believe that an Internet without ads is very unlikely to happen, so they believe attempting to reduce the harmfulness of ads is a valid approach. Common talking points there are about how this isn’t giving advertisers anything they don’t already have and about how this doesn’t matter if you’re using an adblocker.

    Like all other debates of this type, this probably isn’t ever going to be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction and we’ve really just been seeing the same talking points over and over again since the beginning. So I hope y’all have fun duking it out, I don’t think I’m gonna bother looking at these pointless PPA threads anymore.




  • leopold@lemmy.kde.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlWhich will you choose?
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    2 months ago

    There are pros and cons. I use both, because Lemmy on its own just isn’t big enough to replace Reddit. Lemmy has a decent variety of active communities for very broad/mainstream topics, plus technology and left wing politics, reflecting the shared interests of most Lemmy users. But then for any topic that’s more niche and doesn’t have a disproportionally large overlap with the interests of Lemmy users, it kinda falls appart. A lot of the more niche subredddits I participate in have no Lemmy equivalent.

    I’m also hesitant to call Lemmy’s moderation better. One thing I’ve noticed with Lemmy mods is that they tend to be far too lenient with off-topic posts. Right now the top post for me on “All” is this post from !science_memes@mander.xyz. You might notice that it isn’t a meme in any way shape or form. You might also notice that it was literally posted by a mod from that community. This kind of thing happens a lot, communities on Lemmy are very prone to getting derailed away from their nominal topic.





  • These are known as the short scale and long scale systems respectively. Though the United States was indeed the first English-speaking country to switch to short scale, pretty much all English-speaking countries have used short scale almost exclusively for a long time, including the United Kingdom. Saying that it’s simply being influenced is an understatement. From Wikipedia:

    British usage: Billion has meant 109 in most sectors of official published writing for many years now. The UK government, the BBC, and most other broadcast or published mass media, have used the short scale in all contexts since the mid-1970s.[12][13][43][15]

    Before the widespread use of billion for 109, UK usage generally referred to thousand million rather than milliard.[16] The long scale term milliard, for 109, is obsolete in British English, though its derivative, yard, is still used as slang in the London money, foreign exchange, and bond markets.

    I’ve never actually seen the word milliard used in English outside of discussions about the long and short scale systems. However, many other languages do mainly or exclusively use long scale. For instance, my native language French.





  • There are significantly fewer Firefox-based browsers than there are Chromium-based ones, unfortunately. Out of the ones we do have:

    Floorp has much like Vivaldi gone the proprietary source-available route, so you couldn’t pay me to use it.

    Pale Moon is easily the most involved of the Firefox forks, being a fork of a much older version of Firefox, but I wouldn’t generally recommend it for security reasons. It does have its uses, though. Waterfox Classic is in a somewhat similar boat. Security-wise Pale Moon is definitely the better of the two because it uses its own fork of Gecko which is maintained about as well as you could reasonably expect given the manpower available to the project. Waterfox Classic meanwhile has kinda just been left to rot since most development is going to regular Waterfox nowadays, so it’s not maintained nearly as well as Pale Moon and it’s just been collecting CVEs. But for those same reasons if all you want is the ability to use legacy XUL extensions, then Waterfox Classic is gonna have better compatibility since it hasn’t been modified nearly as heavily as Pale Moon.

    LibreWolf is probably the most popular Firefox fork nowadays, but it isn’t much more than a Firefox equivalent to Ungoogled Chromium. Waterfox goes a little further, but not by much. Both can be good choices, but personally I haven’t had much reason to switch away from upstream Firefox. LibreWolf is tempting, but I can already disable pretty much all of the Firefox BS from about:config, so I don’t see the point. It’s pretty much just better defaults.