The GTA Vice City in browser was also really impressive, but it seems it has been taken down. How much of an advantage has AI got on decompilation projects? Complex assembly seems to be still done to some degree by hand these days (see - ffmpeg), and I wonder how big of a training set you could provide. I have wondered if it was possible to take the re3/reVC code and the assembly and use it for training data to get GTA San Andreas on macOS.
GTA Vice City and San Andreas were released on iOS more than a decade ago. I tried installing the mobile version on my Mac with Apple Silicon. It launches fine (if I remember right), it just needs an update for the controls to work, since it was made for touch. I haven’t tried hooking a gamepad to the Mac, maybe that would solve it.
It seems like Rockstar could make a relatively minor update to officially support macOS and sell a lot of additional copies. At this point, they could simply not support Intel Macs and I don’t think anyone would mind.
The experience of re3 and reVC were dramatically better than the new remastered versions, or the iOS sandbox version (which has no clean keyboard binds).
> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google
As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.
They could partner with Kagi. Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi, so if Mozilla convinces them to get on board, Mozilla must be actually serious about being trustworthy.
I wouldn't partner with them, but if they do make a search engine they should take a page out of their book and focus on giving quality results. They can start by blacklisting any seo blogspammy site and instead try and direct you to the best results for any search first (for example, a wikipedia article or relevant docs)
...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users.
For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.
They are not VC funded afaik, and esp not YC funded.
> 250x the number of users
If you offer the service for free and serve ads in "privacy respecting way" sure you get more users. But anyway this is a mozilla's states goal too, so it would fit.
Third paragraph. They didn't go down the official YC route, they just let their initial users invest in it. How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it at every opportunity because it's in their (undisclosed) financial interest to do so? Even when it makes no sense to do so like here?
> How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it
Probably a bunch are users here, but
1. the amount of money (~2.5m) gathered in a 2-year period from 93 people seem peanuts in VC terms, if we are talking about YC itself rather than random users
2. their whole approach and strategy seems to aim towards a sustainable, long term development rather than quick profit (so far)
3. there does not seem to be any obvious link between them and YC itself in general
4. even if some of the 93 people are "pushing it" here, quite a few other users do the same without being investors (I have done/do it), and the former would probably do it without being investors anyway. There are bigger problems than some random people who invested in some company write once in a while supporting comments in some forum online.
I guess "forum run by its investors" can be interpreted as either the users of the forum are investors or the admins/owners are, so I tried to address both.
I think it is more like that users here are more prone to like kagi and want to pay for search (they spend more time online on a computer, they have jobs where web search is important to them etc), so you have people saying how great kagi is, but their experience does not necessarily extend to the general population as much because most people do not care as much about these things to think they are worth paying. Rather than most of them being actually kagi investors and trying to get people subscribe to kagi for their investment to grow. People can also just be satisfied with a product/service and talk about it.
Why is Brave getting hate? Their browsers are treating me very well on mobile and desktop. I am always horrified when I see how the web looks for other people with all ads.
This was in 2020. Brendan Eich addressed this in a blogpost iirc, with a perfectly plausible explanation. It seemed like a bad/unfortunate design decision, which happens all the time in software development and not the conspiracy theory people claimed it to be. It was fixed in a matter of days.
If this is the main reason to not use Brave then I'm genuinly interested in hearing about the other reasons. I might learn something I wasn't aware of.
I don't understand all the hate Brave gets either. It passes pretty much all privacy tests ootb and I see 0 ads, on desktop and mobile. This is what actually matters to me.
I don't think the past controversies were just unfortunate, "mistakes" or conspiracy theories, but products of their business model + opportunistic execution. I just don't trust brave and think I have better options for a browser. If I had to choose between brave and chrome, I would use brave. If you like/prefer using brave, honestly good for you.
> Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does.
This is really cool.
I'd be happy with a re-branded SearX/SearXNG, with a paid cloud hosted instance from Mozilla that uses a shared base index plus your own crawled pages or optionally contribute your crawls back to the shared index.
As a US corporation, Mozilla cannot compete on privacy focused services. If they want to focus on privacy (which I think is great), they should ship software that improves privacy, not offer services.
They can compete where the alternatives are also US based services.
They can compete in the US.
There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments. There are also people who are more concerned about privacy from their own government than a foreign government.
Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.
> There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments.
We're living in an interesting time that may (or may well not!) turn out to be a pivot point in this question. People being ICE'd based on data traces they leave in commercial products may well make this kind of question more tangible to non-technical folks.
> Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.
If that is true (which it may or may not be) then it would also mean competing on privacy isn't a winning move, whether within or outside the US.
It's not all or nothing. Depending on your threat model, Apple's services might be fine. But I guess most people don't think enough about the implications of storing many years worth of data at a US company like Apple.
Apple has actually proven itself over a long period of time on this issue. Maybe Mozilla has as well (do they encrypt telemetry logs etc for people with a Mozilla login?) but I haven't heard so much about that.
Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide? Also their phones are routinely mirrored at the border. Just to support the unconstitutional government agenda of policing thoughts and speech.
How about: Mozilla HTTPS To My Router (or printer or any other physically present local object) in a way that does not utterly suck?
Seriously, there’s a major security and usability problem, it affects individual users and corporations, and neither Google nor Apple nor Microsoft shows the slightest inclination to do anything about it, and Mozilla controls a browser that could add a nice solution. I bet one could even find a creative solution that encourages vendors, inoffensively, to pay Mozilla a bit of money to solve this problem for them.
Also:
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
Indeed. Apple’s mail app is so amazingly bad that there’s plenty of opportunity here.
When you tap one of those fields it bounces you to a contact card. If it is an existing contact (for example, yourself), you just get the full contact card. If that contact card has multiple addresses (my contact card lists ten), you get no indication of which one it was sent to.
At some point in time the actual email address used was flagged with a little “recent” badge - by itself a confusingly-worded tag - but even that doesn’t show up consistently.
It’s stupid because there’s really no reason to play hide and seek with the email address - that’s an identifier that people should generally be familiar with (since you have to use it reasonably often), and lots of people have multiple addresses that they can receive mail at.
> We’ve also seen the overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from the ground up.
> All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.
Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me.
There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad?
There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe).
What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.
A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).
Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% of most used use cases, no need to die on some corner case hill) and many many corporations will come.
This won't come from some startup, it has to be a company like Mozilla.
Are you sure of that? There have been alternatives to Microsoft Office for decades. Yet most businesses use and pay for Microsoft Office, even though their employees most likely don't need anything that doesn't exist in those alternatives.
I don't think you understand what I was writing about - none of that is MS Office. Thats another topic, but without this (and say some sort of domain propagation rules) bigger corporations will never move out of MS.
My understanding is that you say "someone could make an alternative to X and that would kill Microsoft because everybody hates Microsoft".
My answer is "there have been examples of alternatives to Microsoft products for decades, and it hasn't killed Microsoft at all, so I don't see why it would be different for another service (in your case, email)".
> A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).
Ooh, imagine if they also threw in some kind of Teams alternative, maybe based on XMPP or Matrix! That might get a lot of attention.
It is certainly not low hanging fruit in the development effort space, but they can utilise open source projects in ways that MS cannot due to licensing, and therefore have much more resources overall in terms of community dev contributions.
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
They are building Thunderbird Android over K9 Mail, which is an Android app. They would have to start from scratch on iOS, which of course is feasible but it takes more time.
Re-launch FirefoxOS -- not for smartphones, but as a privacy-focused ChromeOS competitor. Give students Mozilla/Firefox brand awareness while prying them out of Google's clutches.
I'm thinking more at an SMB level, not necessarily for secure mail, PGP and the like.
IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth for companies that want exchange-like mail solutions outside of the big two. Unfortunately MS and Google run the "spam" filters as well, so you really need an established company that they can't afford to irritate to enter the space - see Mozilla - to reliably force acceptance of enterprise mail outside the Duopoly they have.
Zoho is trying their best also in this space - not sure how successful they have been on the trusted email provider and integration front.
> That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome."
Bad comparison, but I understand your point.
> Salaries have to be paid somehow.
I would be interested in knowing how much of what Mozilla does brings money. Isn't it almost exclusively the Google contract with Firefox?
As a non-profit, Mozilla does not seem to be succeeding with Firefox. Mozilla does a lot of other things (I think?) but I can't name one off the top of my head. Is Google paying for all of that, or are the non-Firefox projects succeeding? Like would they survive if Firefox was branched off of Mozilla?
And then would enough people ever contribute to Firefox if it stopped getting life support from Google? Not clear either.
It's a difficult situation: I use Firefox but I regularly have to visit a website on Chrom(ium) because it only works there. It doesn't sound right that Google owns the web and Firefox runs behind, but if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
I'm not sure why you think so; it seems pretty close to me. Chrome and Firefox are exact competitors; both require a large amount of development investment. Neither one are being charged for, which means their development needs to be supported some other way.
The people using Chrome don't want Adwords, but it's Adwords that is paying for Chrome's development. People using Firefox don't want email or Mozilla certificates or what-not, but something needs to fund Firefox's development.
> ...if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
They'd have to figure out a different business model, wouldn't they?
I predict the next gen search engines will be a return to form of the early web-directory style of known good pages and having to be vetted to appear in results
I can't fathom why this is even possible, let alone acceptable.
You could write an equally featured text chat client in a terminal (IRC style) - no video or file sharing of course - but do those things really need to consume the remaining 2.29 GB of RAM?
Surely video calls have a native capture method in Windows/macOS now where you can overlay the controls for fairly cheap resources, and file sharing only needs to consume RAM during the upload process.
What gives with these apps? Like seriously, is it the fact that they need to load a whole browser environment just to run 100mb of JS? If so, why bother shipping an app at all? Just encourage users to allow notifications in the browser for the site and be done with it. No apps to maintain, instant patching on refresh, where's the obvious downside I'm missing?
Ex XCP-ng user here. The web management portal requires Xen Orchestra and needs to be installed as a seperate VM which can be irritating, with a seperate paid license. Proxmox has a web GUI natively on install which is super convenient and pretty much free for 90% of use cases.
Yup, I have two xen orchestras running on different vm clusters in different DCs managing about 8 pools (some on all the time, some in vehicles which are sometimes on, sometimes off), all open source, works well enough.
I don't change the pools enough to make it worth automating the management.
Just migrated from xcp-ng 7 to Proxmox 9.1 for a client this week.
Honestly the whole process was incredibly smooth, loving the web management, native ZFS. Wouldn't consider anything else as a type 1 hypervisor at this stage - and really unless I needed live VM migrations I can't see a future where I'd need anything else.
Managed to get rid of a few docker cloud VPS servers and my TrueNAS box at the same time.
I'd prefer if it was BSD based, but I'm just getting picky now.
Budget sensitive client that didn't want to pay for xcp-ng tools needed in version 8, as well as the server needed a hardware upgrade anyway from SSDs to nVME drives so just ripped the bandaid off at the same time.
We started with React because that’s what we knew best and the community we were most embedded in.
We have no dogmatic attachment to React. We hope to support Svelte and Vue soon. We’ll start on that once we feel that our data model and flow are sufficiently nailed down that we feel comfortable committing to porting our SDK to other frontend frameworks.
You should look at using Preact (4kb alternative) and supply your frontend code as fully encapsulated with embedded preact. That way you client would only have to render your widget/app into an existing DOM element:
Appreciate the response. I suppose the follow up is, why not make the library framework agnostic initially or work towards that, rather than have to maintain support for x number of frameworks into the future?
That’s a devilish engineering question. If you are truly framework agnostic you limit how much work you can do for your users, because a lot of the work happens inside of the framework. We decided we’d commit to doing the work so our customers didn’t have to.
E.g. most web apps have some endpoint that the client calls to initiate a checkout session by calling their payment processor’s server SDK.
How many times has the following code been implemented because no payment processor ships a route handler and a React hook (pardon my React-brainedness)?
Someone has to do the work to get that checkout request from your frontend to your payment provider and then back so you can redirect. In a just world, that your processor’s SDK would handle that work. Otherwise it falls on your plate.
If you can assume the framework someone is using, you can deliver a powerful, comprehensive integration.
If you instead try to build a generic one that anyone can use, then it's both hard for you to build it, and hard for everyone to integrate with it because it's generalized.
Exactly. If you’re too committed to framework agnosticism you end up leaving your users a bunch of last mile work that they have to do with every integration, and maintain through every pricing model change.
May I suggest web components? For all their warts, they are perfect for a use case like this. Even React, the IE of frameworks, supports them properly in v19.
> We are Svelte based, so it's frustrating for us to have to drag in React for libraries like this
To be fair, chosing Svelte over React explicitly means that - if the React installed/userbase is 10-50x as big, you will be frustrated with this a lot. But in the end I don't get the frustration, in the end react is not a framework and you can render any component into a single HTML node that is part of your Svelte system. If the external library is encapsulated well, you shouldn't even notice that is react based.
Of course this means importing a ton of new libs and frontend code just to render billing. It's the same with the dependency on, say, Next. It's too many moving parts, could've been done without tying yourselves down to specific ‘cultures’. That said, it's a great endeavour and my hat is off.
Appreciate the feedback. This work happens in all frontend "cultures" (a phrase I will be lovingly borrowing, thank you). But a payment provider can't really take this work off a developer's plate unless it provides an SDK that works inside of that culture. So yeah, we hope to ship the best payments experience for React. But eventually also for Svelte and Vue. Because that's what you'd have to do to solve this problem.
And the problem goes substantially beyond billing UI. There's all the unseen tedium that devs need to implement in order to derive proper app behavior based on their customers' billing state. Most of this work is transposing billing state (and its derivatives) and then lugging it to the client where it will be used to show upgrade buttons, gate feature access, show outstanding usage balances, etc.
Microsoft's holistic direction is so bad I have moved all of my on-prem Windows Server clients that will listen to Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and all desktop clients out of M365 to Office LTSC 2024.
This was after dragging many endpoint users by tooth and nail that just use Xero or web based apps to MacBook Airs (which are going down a similarly terrible direction post Tahoe).
Is there no saviour for modern software? I'm obviously technical but my adolescent quest for customisation and tinkering is behind me. I want software that works and keeps up with hardware, not degrades its margin of improvement.
Linux has terrible UX, no cohesion in design and quite frankly I can't understand how it could possibly be considered a replacement for macOS.
Expecting business users to use a terminal to install apps (yes I know AppImage exists) is so far removed from reality it's not worth entertaining the "year of the Linux desktop" joke for anyone without at least a mildly technical background.
To clarify, I'm speaking about business users not the people we commonly interact with in the IT space - although in my market they are also just as siloed in their knowledge and while they may be great at DevOps or development, good luck getting them to do anything outside of drag an app from a Disk Image to the Applications folder (which will stay mounted for the next 8 months).
> Expecting business users to use a terminal to install apps
would be akin to expecting business users to install their phones, lines, and office switches, like expecting them to assemble their desks and chairs, expecting them to stock the fridge, swap out water bottles, repair the HVAC, etc.
Who is it that expects business users that have PA's to make them a sandwich struggle to install apps rather than take a long lunch and expect it to be done upon their return?
I understand your point, and I might just be out of touch, but I don't know of any MSPs in the Australian market that support desktop Linux users. Even internal IT support teams I've come across only really deal with the Linux server environment.
Throwing GNOME/KDE/xkfc/mate/whatever flavour it is this month really starts to make things complicated for UX. I'm sure yes you could centralise it, mass deploy, have a stable config, etc, but these are low level things that when go wrong really interfere with the day-to-day of non-technical employees.
What do you do about drivers, obscure one-use PDF converters they want, Excel macros? The tools they are familiar with are lucky to have a macOS alternative these days, let alone a Linux build that is compatible with the distro they are on. Supporting most users is questions like - "where was the button that was there yesterday?", "why are my emails sorted backwards?", "whats this virus I have? (clicked allow notifications in Edge)".
Linux/BSD has incredible merit and I would love to see the duopoly in the desktop market broken up, but it requires a directed approach to fixing UX, a single opinionated distro that has enough traction to warrant developers to create turn-key apps and builds for it, and users to feel familiar with the interface without it changing for a long time. I don't see this happening due to the inherent communal aspect of Linux where everyone wants to make their mark and has their own opinions on design not just at the OS level but at the application level also.
While I've free lanced in office suport on and off across the years it's not been my main focus.
I have observed that office workers tend to get on and work with what tools they have, be that old school unix-like point of sale sytems, Wang wordprocessors, god-awful microsoft access hacks, TCL-forms on Sun workstations, cross platform ARC-GIS / ERMapper photogrammetry pipelines, etc.
Drivers, PDF conversion, et al seem to be the bug bears of all platforms I've encountered.
To advance your argument it's really the Excel Macros that serve you best - those things that have developed in-house and are peculiar to a singular anchor software suite.
Offices with no legacy ties binding them to one OS are more agile wrt change, several European countries (Germany at least, there are others) have many offices that are already long time Red Hat (and other) users.
Cloudflare runs a high demand service, and the centralisation does deserve scrutiny. I think a good middle ground I’ll adopt is self hosting critical services and then when they have an outage redirect traffic to a Cloudflare outage banner.
