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?

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.

What? Macos Sonoma is compatible with MacBooks from 2017. Hackintoshes are absolutely still possible on Intel, and from a cursory googling it appears they’re out there. Apple will eventually cut off support for Intel Macs on some future (major) release, sure, but there’s probably a few more years until that happens.

With that said, hackintoshes are a suboptimal solution to OPs problem. Ideally they should really move to other applications properly supported on multiple platforms.

Have you read past that screenshot of the code, though? It says the problem was not limited to Firefox, it seems Edge users reported problems as well. Anecdotally, I did experience that delay problem on Thorium this weekend as well. I have seen a variation of this problem almost a month ago, where sometimes the video would take a long time (like, over a minute, sometimes) to load, or often just not load at all. So I just chalked it up to Youtube having done something stupid on their end.

Not the guy you’re replying to, but I have been using Thorium for the past couple of weeks. It’s pretty nice, kinda like what Edge was before going to shit for the past year or so. But being a Chromium browser, it eventually will be hit with the ManifestV2-no-more hammer. The maintainer said the best he’ll be able to do is use some patches to keep ManifestV2 active through enterprise group policies, but it’s expected google will eventually remove the ManifestV2 code entirely, at which point he said he’s not going to be able to maintain a fork to keep ManifestV2 in.

I dislike Brave for some of its sketchyness in the past, and the other Chromium forks haven’t made clear guidelines on what they’re going to do when ManifestV3 is made the default, so I’m bracing because I think I’m going to be forced to go back to Firefox because of AdBlock shenanigans.

I mean, it was groundbreaking for its time and it redefined the genre and a lot of moviemaking in general, but it really didn’t age well as far as moviemaking goes. Yeah, it has severe pacing issues, is undeservedly way too long and it got way too trippy and abstract by the end. Frankly a whole lot of it feels like Kubrick masturbating over how great he is, with a lot of scenes being way too long and serving no real or useful purpose on on the movie.

I could say pretty much the same about Solaris too (the original Tarkovsky version which cinephiles always rave about, not Soderbergh"s, which I actually prefer), and if rumors are true, apparently Kubrick took a lot of ideas from it.

And I say all that as an avid sci-fi fan. The books from Arthur C. Clarke are more enjoyable.

If Signal didn’t alienate a large number of users by removing SMS maybe switching would be more viable.

This. I hate Whatsapp, but I have to use it because that’s what everybody else (where I live) uses, so either I cave, or be Incommunicable by everyone and get used to explaining why while sounding like a dork.

I used Signal because, although a very small set of friends used it, I had an excuse to keep it because it handled SMS, and so I could keep it in the hopes that eventually WA would shoot itself in the foot and people would finally migrate, but since they removed SMS, why the hell would I hold on to it if I’d have no reason to other that I like it?