Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan • Hacker News Board

Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan

#201

Post by NBPEL » Sat, Oct 14, 2023, 9:53 AM UTC

cmcaleer wrote: post #87

webmobdev wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that out of these, the PaleMoon browser ( https://www.palemoon.org ) is the only real "hard" fork of Firefox. The others are all "soft" forks of Mozilla Firefox in that they all just customise some existing settings as defaults or customise the UI or integrate their own extensions of Firefox and rebrand it. The PaleMoon team however forked even Mozilla Gecko ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) ), th…

It's really unfortunate that the Pale Moon team are also totally unlikable, which is probably among the reasons why usage has dropped off since it was in vogue in the early-mid 2010s. This[0] issue in a WIP repo for OpenBSD always reminds me of the line in The Big Lebowski "You're not wrong Walter, you're just an asshole". It's fascinatingly hostile for little cause and a non-trivial amount of reputational damage. Al…

Yeah, some of the devs and mods scared people away, say "Tobin", it got better but there's still a few left.

Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan

#202

Post by lmm » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 5:47 AM UTC

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #199

lmm wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't live in a world where any part of this holds water, at least I don't. Care to elucidate where exactly HK and Taiwan got their full set but Japan didn't? Characters from "Traditional Chinese" and "Simplified Chinese" have different codepoints even for "the same" character, whereas characters from Japanese (or old Korean) are made to share Chinese characters' codepoints even for visually different characters…

The argument relies on 'visually different' being a well-defined, binary distinction. It is not. 'Similarity' and 'dissimilarity' can at best be described for a narrow set of purposes with guiding rules. So is the exact shape of the vertical or vertically-slanted dot on top of 言 enough to trigger the dissimilarity warning, or is it only when it's written as a horizontal? How about 吉田 vs. ⿱土口田? Is that similar or diss…

> The argument relies on 'visually different' being a well-defined, binary distinction.

No it doesn't. Unicode has no problem with including multiple codepoints for characters that are (arguably) not visually distinct, and has already done so, many times over, not least for simplified vs traditional Chinese (but also for e.g. Cyrillic vs Latin). Just... not for Japanese.

> It's almost as though the Japanese standards body itself has been having slightly different opinions about their own writing system over the decades.

Slightly different, sure. Doesn't mean "just write it all in Chinese" is acceptable. I'm not asking for pixel-perfect everything, just for the ability to write the native everyday language of over 100 million people without having to use some half-assed out-of-band font setup that always has some funny edge case where it breaks.

Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan

#203

Post by lmm » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 5:51 AM UTC

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #198

lmm wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody wants to go back to a world with hundreds of relevant and thousands of legacy encodings. Japan does (assuming agreeing a unicode-like encoding that actually worked is off the table), for the simple reason that practical support for Japanese in "international" applications has regressed since those days. > Obviously much better when nobody can read anything than forcing some people to read texts where there's…

I think almost everything you said relies on seeing the old ways through rosy glasses and massively underestimating the daily problems that the multitude (technically, gazillions) of encoding standards and standards on how to encode encoding choices brought to the many people who already worked regularly with computers in the early 90s and before that. I'll just pick a single point I disagree with, and then comment o…

> I think almost everything you said relies on seeing the old ways through rosy glasses and massively underestimating the daily problems that the multitude (technically, gazillions) of encoding standards and standards on how to encode encoding choices brought to the many people who already worked regularly with computers in the early 90s and before that.

It's not rosy glasses lol, I have to deal with encoding differences every day. I'd like nothing more than to be able to forget about them if there was something like unicode that actually worked. Instead I watch support for the language I'm using degrade day by day because everyone high-fives each other that they've got unicode now so they've solved all the problems (and they have! As long as you're not using Japanese), and then they add insult to injury by trying to tell me it's better.