Thing is, ME as an idea made sense. Win2K wasn’t targeted to consumers, XP was in the pipeline for that, but they needed an interim version until it was ready. It looked like Win2K, but ostensibly compatible with the Win9x line. They just fucked up the execution on the internals, so it was terribly unstable.

Windows 8 had the opposite problem: it improved on Win7 internals, so it was solid, but had a terrible UI that no one asked for.

One could argue that the reason ME failed was very possibly because it was rushed. Win8, on the other hand, looks very much like designed by comitee with either very misguided designers or marketing people at the helm. Because of that, Win8 feels like a much worse failure to me.

and do you think there were repercussions before?

For X? Sure, that’s why they’re leaving in the first place - by not complying to the judge’s orders, they’d surely get slapped with fines and such. As a company, it makes sense to leave and avoid being accountable, but given the influence they (sadly) still have in the media, avoiding those repercussions and letting bad actors do their thing, they’re adding gasoline to the burning world.

The fact that Whatsapp is more popular in Brazil than X is beside the point.

But it isn’t. Now people get to spread misinformation to Brazilians with no repercussions.

I don’t actually care about the drama per se at this point either. I mentioned it because, along with the fact that:

• development is not very open (in that only that one guy commits and releases stuff)
• release cadence is very erratic and often lags behind upstream chromium, which is a direct consequence of the previous point
• you mentioned about the guys absence - the first time was some time ago and he was inpatient in the hospital for (IIRC) alcohol abuse, and this absence actually coincided with the drama over the furry and the other stuff, so it took awhile for it to be addressed, which only added more fuel to the fire. The second was just this last couple of months were he was house sitting for his parents (mentioned on the release notes I linked before)

All of this paints a bleak outlook for the long term health of this project, IMO. Which is too bad , because I still think it’s one of the better forks of chromium.

Well, Thorium developer stated he intends to support Mv2 past the 2025 deadline. Whether he’ll make it, we’ll see. It’s a one man show, there was some drama involving it in the past, and there’s the question of what’s the point in maintaining Mv2 extensions support if you won’t be able to install them from the store after they’re cut off?

Sorry to slightly derail the thread, but I’ll probably be on the market for a vertical mouse soon as well, which one do you use / recommend? I’ve been using Logitech mice for decades now, so I’ve naturally looked into their options and I’m not quite convinced on the ergonomics of the ones I’ve seen.

Thanks for this write up. I still can’t say I condone some of Russia’s decisions and posturing even in light of the data you presented, but these data certainly paints a more nuanced picture than people are usually led to believe, I think.

Ukraine should grant the people they’ve been oppressing their right to self determination.

Not sure I understand this. You mean people on Crimea and maybe east Ukraine that would be in majority ethnically Russian, or is it something else? Sorry if it’s daft question, I don’t really know the geopolitics in this region.

Ok OP, I’ve been seeing your posts here and they almost always seem to have an anti-west take on things. I try to read news from both sides of the aisle and make my own conclusions, so I’m genuinely curious: why do you think Ukraine should roll over and hand over their lands to Russia, or alternately, why is Russia justified in this war (that apparently they did provoke)?

I’m very torn on disco. Season 2 is probably the best (due in no small part that it sets up SNW), but the rest are a chore to watch. Most of them have some neat ideas, but they’re badly executed more often than not. They also were too heavy handed with each season arcs serialization, most episodes don’t stand on their own, and the writing and consistency is just bad. I just finished the final season, and I’m glad they’re done with it so they can put more money on good Trek like SNW - hopefully they don’t screw it up eventually.

Not really new. It’s basically LCD without backlight. So, higher resolution GBC / GBA alike screen.

France has a big, big problem with overemphasizing individual politicians over policies.

I think that’s a “humans” problem, really, specially in the last few decades.

To the extent that a boss demanding sex in exchange for career advancement, I agree that makes them sex offenders. But those women still have a choice. They making the wrong choice doesn’t mean they aren’t the victim, but they still should be accountable for their choice.

Apparently it’s not that the software is broken, it’s that the software being installed breaks Windows Update. There are reports from people that uninstalling StartAllBack, updating the OS, then reinstalling it back (renaming the install executable first) works fine.

As much as being affected by this is frustrating to me (though this is all happening still on the dev channel, so for me it’ll be a problem for the future), I understand Microsoft’s rationale here. They can’t be expected to support every third-party tool that can break the OS, and it’s known that both ExplorerPatcher and StartAllBack relies on many hacks using undocumented APIs to work.

In the last few decades that I’ve been using Windows, I never felt compelled to use shell replacements or customizations - the default experience always worked fine for me with a few tweaks. So, if anything I’m more frustrated at Microsoft that I’m forced to use StartAllBack, because MS went and removed options from the shell that existed forever and always took for granted, and then some.

Not to take Reddit’s / spez side, but to clarify, that’s not actually what he got in cash - what he got in cash on 2023 was something around 600k.

Those 193mil was in stock. Which kind of explains his drive to monetize users and kick out third-party apps: that piece of paper is only worth that much as long as he can keep the stock value afloat.

Good. We think alike 👍

Yeah, and it’s not Mozilla either.

Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here. I don’t disagree with on most of what you said - I find the simping for Mozilla (and sneering towards chromium) here in Lemmy rather annoying. Mozilla and its browser both have shortcomings as well, and choosing a web browser these days is, as most things in life, choosing the lesser of evils vs. one’s own needs.

I did it all using this. Took me about half an hour to migrate all my 15-something accounts to KeepassXC.

Why don’t you want to go back to Firefox? If you hate Mozilla just use a fork like Waterfox

Nothing specifically against Mozilla. As far as big techs go, they all have their hands covered in mud in some way. If anyhing, Mozilla would be one of the less dirty of them. As most everything else these days, rallying behind a big tech (as if that made any sense at all) is a matter of picking your poison.

My peeve with Firefox is that I think that it’s just an overall worse browser, in terms of design and architecture, than Chromium, and it shows as it being mostly behind it in performance. As a software developer myself, this is important to me for an application that is a central part of my everyday life. I do use it sometimes as an alternate browser, and I realize that Firefox got a lot of improvement in the last few years, and that it’s performance nowadays is really close to Chromium, but it all feel like lipstick on a pig kind of thing. I also quite dislike Mozilla’s choices in UI design - every time they change it, it seems to be for the worse, as opposed to Chromium that has kept pretty much the same since its inception, with just relatively subtle changes since then.

I know I’ll eventually get used to it, I guess I just dislike being forced to change.

There are a few more layers to this problem that no one seems to acknowledge.

What if someone DID come out of the woods and provided a Chromium fork that put Mv2 support back in. Then what? How do you install those extensions? Google won’t be allowing Mv2 extensions in their store anymore. Supposedly you’d need to download it directly from the developer and install it manually. That’s not great UX.

Maybe if the dev community came up with an alternative web store implementation that allowed Mv2 extensions, but that comes with a lot of other problems, to name a few: dev effort, costs for hosting the web app for the store and hosting the extensions themselves (which wouldn’t necessarily be expensive, but wouldn’t be free either), approval workflows for the extensions, etc. Thing is, though, all of that would require from devs a clear roadmap and a level of coordination that from my seat here, I don’t see a hint of it happening.

All of the above: either having a Chromium fork that allows installing Mv2 extensions manually, or implementing an alternative web store, is not a trivial effort, and then how many people will actually benefit from it? Those really concerned with effective adblocking, like us, are a tiny minority of the user base. Would the effort of maintaining a Chromium fork and/or a free(dom) webstore be worth it if very few people will actually use it?

I hate to say it, but yeah, Mv2 is doomed. I didn’t want to go back to Firefox, but I guess I’ll have to.