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The Browser Monopoly

blairreeves.me

11–20 of 197 posts

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FF is fantastic, but the uncomfortable question is, will it always be, given Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well? Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and developer incentives. Looks like they've got a plan in place to handle this. I also secretly wish Mozilla would offer up a paid email service that only scans emails to filter our…

I have to believe that spam filtering is a solved problem that could be cheaply self-hosted. Is that not true?

I suppose this is true as well. Would just be a nice to have.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#12
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FF is fantastic, but the uncomfortable question is, will it always be, given Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well? Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and developer incentives. Looks like they've got a plan in place to handle this. I also secretly wish Mozilla would offer up a paid email service that only scans emails to filter our…

I have to believe that spam filtering is a solved problem that could be cheaply self-hosted. Is that not true?

Its a perpetual arms race, if the spammers have access to the blocking software they can work around it. Anti-evil works best when the evil cant see the inner workings.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#13
post #5

I was shocked to see the browser market share graph. Chrome appears to be collapsing on itself, dropping from from an all-time high of 65.4% to 55.4% in just 16 months, effectively losing all share gains since 2016. But then I looked closer at the data, noticing that only net 120 basis points of the change can be explained by share changes in the other browsers. The rest of the data seems to be missing, as the number…

60% of the time charts are wrong every time.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#14
post #3

>Chrome introduced a lot of neat new features (Porn “Incognito Mode,” multithreaded memory changes, tabs and more). Now chrome is getting credit for in private browsing and tabs? (Safari and Opera respectively. Phoenix/Firefox popularized them long before Chrome was a twinkle.) >It is mind-boggling that basic tools like these are not yet standard features in browsers. How long have browsers offered to save passwords?…

Regarding saving password in browser, the author probably means an encrypted password manager such as KeePass or 1Password, and not the current implementation which does not have a master password

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#15
post #3

>Chrome introduced a lot of neat new features (Porn “Incognito Mode,” multithreaded memory changes, tabs and more). Now chrome is getting credit for in private browsing and tabs? (Safari and Opera respectively. Phoenix/Firefox popularized them long before Chrome was a twinkle.) >It is mind-boggling that basic tools like these are not yet standard features in browsers. How long have browsers offered to save passwords?…

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_browsing Safari came first, but Chrome was before Opera or Firefox.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#16
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FF is fantastic, but the uncomfortable question is, will it always be, given Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well? Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and developer incentives. Looks like they've got a plan in place to handle this. I also secretly wish Mozilla would offer up a paid email service that only scans emails to filter our…

I have to believe that spam filtering is a solved problem that could be cheaply self-hosted. Is that not true?

Spam filtering is a horrendous problem which can never be "solved" because people continue to innovate around the filters. It only looks "solved" because gmail have enough data to do an amazing job of it.

I have a gmail account and a non-gmail account, and the non-gmail privately hosted one gets considerable spam, some of which even makes it through my manually curated filters.

I used to self-host email but the minimum time and expertise investment is now too high for me - I got fed up of having to fix breakages or losing email from random other sources.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#17
post #5

I was shocked to see the browser market share graph. Chrome appears to be collapsing on itself, dropping from from an all-time high of 65.4% to 55.4% in just 16 months, effectively losing all share gains since 2016. But then I looked closer at the data, noticing that only net 120 basis points of the change can be explained by share changes in the other browsers. The rest of the data seems to be missing, as the number…

Maybe fewer people using web browsers to access Internet content? That could be explained by social networks like Reddit pushing users toward single-purpose apps.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#19
post #3

>Chrome introduced a lot of neat new features (Porn “Incognito Mode,” multithreaded memory changes, tabs and more). Now chrome is getting credit for in private browsing and tabs? (Safari and Opera respectively. Phoenix/Firefox popularized them long before Chrome was a twinkle.) >It is mind-boggling that basic tools like these are not yet standard features in browsers. How long have browsers offered to save passwords?…

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_browsing Safari came first, but Chrome was before Opera or Firefox.

I credited it to Safari

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#20
I recently ditched Chrome and switched back to Firefox, at home and on my mobile, only to discover that a surprising number of sites don't work in Firefox. In particular: Twitter doesn't work on Firefox Mobile.

Most work fine, but still, I ended up switching to Safari, to discover that it's just not quite as good an experience as Firefox or Chrome.

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