I personally think it’s not about Mozilla. It’s about the Web.

You need to see the bigger picture always.

The Web as an application for global system of hypertext documents served from different computers is fine.

The Web wasn’t intended as a platform for platforms for global applications.

It’s used as one, because that allows a certain kind of people to gather power. Networked personal computers made the civil society too powerful. Needed a solution.

Why the Web and not just “Facebook native application” and “Google native application”? Well, it’s hard to maintain a hypertext document system made application platform. It limits competition. It also allows Facebook and Google popularity to affect web browser and web techologies popularity. If these don’t work in a browser, that browser is doomed.

While the verticals and monopolies themselves allow thieves and murderers in governments to control the Internet.

So - there weren’t that many websites, if you think about it, requiring any particular web technology when it came into existence. Those mostly started specifically for Google, Facebook etc services and/or policies. Say, HTML5 to phase out Netscape plugin API, which was presented as phasing out Flash (everybody hated Flash).

Mozilla followed those policies and appeared neutral, yes.

But in general the moment using Dillo or Netsurf or Links became plainly, completely not an option for the Web, it was decided. A world standard that has only a handful of compliant realizations is not a standard. It’s an oligopoly.

So, getting back to hypertext - Flash was hated by some because it didn’t allow to turn the whole webpage into an application, but that wasn’t its purpose. JS was a mistake, I think. Any interpreted content should have been embedded in its clear place separate from the rest of the page with its own plugin, similar to Flash applets. But - one can accept that in year 1996 they didn’t think of such consequences.

And remote big services not being standardized were also a mistake. I wrote a bit on that from time to time here, gets tiring to repeat - a lot of what the server side of many applications does is just routing to another client, computation and storage. One can devise a standard for remote services. So that local applications would be different, but would use the same pooled infrastructure, found and announced via trackers similar to torrents. With global identifiers of entities to allow interoperability, so that “post #12435324646dasgtshdryh” would be the same text on any of such storage services (having it) and at any point in time.

That, of course, is a bit late. In our current world things like Briar and other mesh are probably a better direction. One can have what I described over them too, but it will also require management of bandwidth and bottlenecks and stuff not reachable directly.

It’s just a versions list. And I’m mostly joking. Rather that the “feel” of using Windows between 2000 and XP didn’t seem to change much. (I prefer 2000)

I dunno, Firefox of 3.0 times was the shit. It itself was the browser that should be, more welcoming to customization than Windows of the time was to porn winlockers. They also had XULRunner for alternative ideas. Gecko was the FOSS browser engine that various alternative “nice” MacOS and Linux browsers used.

Though between 2004 and 2008 only four years passed. Less than between Windows 2000 and Vista (let’s ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000).

Just realized that could be read as “bit chicks”, which would explain such a name choice for an IRC client in the times when there actually were some bit chicks on popular IRC channels.

Yes, I didn’t think you were, just shared … In any case under Linuxulator with Linux JRE it swears a lot, but seems to work.

If wanting or receptive to some advice …

I have done this in the past, but I unfortunately also have BAD and sometimes abruptly drop habits, including useful ones, because they start feeling insincere. Hard to explain.

This is a very precious reminder, cause the former just means that one has to start again and again.

For their benefit and the role that they in company structures, it is one approach that pays out for some.

It’s also (hence why I’ve touched upon conditions) similar to the advice of “want to do something at all, do it badly”, sometimes given to people with those involving executive dysfunction.

Unfortunately for us, and humanity at-large, there’s also a statistically-significant increase in the incidence of anti-social personality disorder in those who pursue such positions, compared to the population average.

Yes, I’ve had a pleasure (not really) of meeting such people.

Anyway, if their common worldview is that we all live on some kind of ruins of a fallen empire, and they are going to be nobles of that society, that doesn’t account for universal machines still being universal, and the technologies they rely upon being just as applicable the other way.

I actually liked the way this particular thing works, I’ve visited the repository and it’s much like a real version of my toy of two months. (Except my toy doesn’t work for anything real)

My mobile stuff is on Android, but Briar desktop (despite being a Java application?..) swears at “unknown OS FreeBSD” and doesn’t run.

I really like this despite using nothing Apple.

From the description it seems to be rather clean. And perhaps not to be limited to Apple for too long.

“IRC vibes” -> maybe intended, see BitchX.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my life, it’s that I’m stupider than most. Maybe wiser at the same time, because being so stupid you evolve some wisdom or perish. Maybe.

(Except I’m not sure it’s wisdom that I’ve learned the girls I was too shy to talk to 5 years ago and last week live in the same building, same entrance, and yet I don’t know how to talk to them, and I feel as if that day 5 years ago was closer to my infancy than today to my death. Autistic things are sometimes truly depressing.)

People of this kind I’ve heard of seem very energetic. They may not always do the smartest thing, but they do it all the way in. Maybe that’s what’s wise.

Though then why be a corporate executive. Doesn’t seem anything desirable.

Different version, probably.

I think the way to approach this is creating a PR that a simple (plenty of people autologin on Windows) functionality is hard to find. It’s also very valuable feedback for the developers, they usually have sort of tunnel vision and see completely different things as terribly important for users, while some really important (and maybe easy to do) just skip because in their skewed view it’s not pressing.

That could be replaced with proper QA and lots of testing on focus groups and so on, but we live in 2025, nobody does things properly anymore.

I swear, such stories seem as if all these bosses really expected to become some sort of Soviet directors. There’s no way they can expect this shit to work in a market economy.

Maybe they really believe into that “replace everyone with AI” thing.

Then we’ll see evolution at work.

I don’t know why I feel that urge to compare what happens with western societies today to USSR. Probably has similarities with the moment when Soviet space dream found its’ model’s ceiling of capability.

Pretending. That’s expected to happen when they are not hard pressed to provide the actual service.

To press them anti-monopoly (first of all) laws and market (first of all) mechanisms and gossip were once used.

Never underestimate the role of gossip. The modern web took out the gossip, which is why all this shit started overflowing.

That’s because they look like “talking machines” from various sci-fi. Normies feel as if they are touching the very edge of the progress. The rest of our life and the Internet kinda don’t give that feeling anymore.

I’m not a RedHat fan (actually very explicitly not a fan), but frankly Fedora with Gnome seems as problematic as Windows at worst, and very easy to install.

What’s even the difference? Same shit, a bit JS added.

As someone from Russia, we have Ozon and Wildberries and Yandex and Mail.ru, neither of which exists in all business niches of Amazon, but in the overlapping ones seem close.

It’s not that they are really bad, but I don’t like monopolies.

I think for all of these - marketplaces with delivery, social networks, cloud hosting, - there has to emerge some standard, some global system. Similar to the Internet or maybe to the postal service. Something has to be done, because these unfortunately work in a way encouraging monopoly.

Even when I was almost unconditionally ancap, infrastructure was a special case (and it still is for most ancaps, theoretically unconditional private property applies to hypothetical things fully created by a person, and for territory, infrastructure, discovered ideas it’s closer to the other extreme). These things are infrastructure.

In the Internet one person can host their stuff on one hosting, another on another, and their email on different providers, but they’ll be able to interact. A buyer on Ozon and a seller on Amazon are not.

That’s because email and web hosting require only the Internet the functioning system to exist. A social network requires more (if we want it to be interoperable and global),

I think the missing part to make such a standard is automated payments in the Internet. The platforms’ inner management of resources is hidden from us, but for a global system computing and storage resources are necessary, and they are neither provided by governments nor pooled by enthusiasts, it’s impractical to rely on pure altruism for such. And to have a global system with monetary encouragement of providing infrastructure means that we need payment for resources as simple and general as how we pay for landline or Internet service. ISP’s no longer provide shell accounts and web hosting, but even when they did, this wasn’t quite the thing.

The platforms emerged because it’s bothersome to pay for infrastructure and maintain it, there’s not even a straightforward way. You need a humongous service with plenty of computing, someone should pay for it.

So - there was Usenet at some point solving a lot of the similar problems, except, of course, a news server would store lots and lots of stuff for each hierarchy. But that wasn’t reimagined for the new things we do in the Internet.

For twiddling and various kinds of power abuse to be impossible they should be technically impossible in the system. So:

1. Various functions of platforms should be decomposed into different pooled untrusted services (to pool anything you have to design for untrusted) in the Internet. Pooling can be done the way similar to bittorrent trackers - a service comes online, announces itself and repeats that regularly. A client needing a service requests a few trackers and picks a few services from the results. Services might be, say, storage (anything, like FTP servers even), computation (submit bytecode, receive result, or something like that), indexing (a search engine, returning results in standard machine-processable format), notification (like NOSTR relays). Maybe trade for resources can be a separate type of service. And user identity caching.

2. It should be possible to provide a paid service and pay for that service, easily enough, like MMORPG scripted marketplaces - a setting like “buy no more than 2G of storage, by price no more than N per K, stop if remaining money less than K”. Or same for selling on a service you host.

3. The history of platforms in the last 20 years shows us that the Internet is for the machines. The user representation should be in a local application, and the logic combining those non-application-specific services should work on the client machine. Say, aggregating results of a few indexing services, or aggregating trade offerings from a few trade services, or online users from among friends from a few notification services.

Shit, I wrote this again.

I would dream of coming up with a solution to existence of such monopolies, which is not exactly the same.

In any case, no. I suppose you are simply incapable of understanding it, but no, not everyone wants to be the biggest turd in the room. There are people who want there to not be turds in human habitats outside of intended compartments and environments.