The most interesting takeaway from this project and the Mac touchpad actually measuring it's pressure in grams[1] is how Apple seems to prioritise it's ability to deliver new features in later software releases rather than their BOM.
I work in the automotive industry, and for volume products the price-cutting is really brutal. If you can save a cent somewhere you will, because that cent multiplied by 8 million cars a year is a sizeable amount of money.
This seems to be generally true for most OEMs of hardware products, but not for Apple. Apple could have cut costs by just using a magnet and a reed switch/hall effect sensor, because it is not using the exact angle of the screen anyway (afaik?), but they chose not to.
They could have implemented their "3d Touch" by using a simpler circuit which just indicates if the press was really hard or soft. But again they chose not too.
And they sell over 20 million Macs per year, so they really sacrifice a sizeable amount of profit
I was working on something similiar, using ReVanced(1) Framework, which allows you to distribute fuzzy tweaks to regular APKs with their ReVanced Manager(2) which can persist multiple version updates.
They have their own DSL (3), kinda.
My target was Instagram Reels, I did not come that far with JADX in finding the appropriate methods/attributes to overwrite because I kept getting stuck scrolling reels on my Android Emulator.
I dislike tech monopolies but Chrome leaving Google would be most terrible thing ever, security wise.
Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3).
Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
What's wrong with Firefox? I've used it as my main browser for the best part of 20 years now and have no issues.
The last time I used Chrome there were ads all over the place because the ad blockers don't work properly anymore (I'm guessing because of manifest v3)
as a long time user of firefox (also around 20years). it still has many pain points especially if you're a tab hoarder.
try closing a window with 400 mid to heavy tabs and see how long it takes, you can select the tabs individually and they will close way faster. (even on the best PC you can find)
this is niche but I wish there was a watered down /minimalist version that dropped, bookmarks, history, sqlite (I know HN likes sqlite a lot, but in this context chromes usage of levelDB beats it by a lot but you lose the advantage of running SQL queries directly to the file), basically everything besides extensions, containers, profiles.
- can't control it from the command line, only open urls and can't have them open in a specific container because the implementation is this weird mix of internal browser code + extension. (tools like brotab are limited, wish I could have a better flexibility to integrate into my i3/sway workflow, with things like the ability to merge all windows in a workspace into a single one)
- you can't run separate profiles on separate processes, so having a different network namespace for each profile is a pain
(my use case, each profile is routed through a different VPN).
there are many mores minor grievances I forgot with time, but I still wouldn't go back to chrome.
I currently have 8260 tabs open across 9 windows, and that's just on my main laptop, across all devices I probably have over 20k tabs, and I don't really have any issues regarding tab management.
I used to have issues with Firefox randomly nuking my state on load and having to restore backups, but now I use Tab Session Manager for that and never think twice about it.
Not who you're talking to, but there is none. Browsers have had "Bookmark all tabs" functionality for ages, which completely replaces tab hoarding. Especially now that the content of the page you visited 5 months ago isn't actually loaded in memory. It's basically a bookmark, switch to the tab and the content is reloaded.
Yes, I am aware of bookmarks, and as someone who used to use them quite a lot, I'm aware of their limitations. Some things are just ephemeral and should remain so. Browser search is great. As you mentioned, tabs lazy load so the main functionality is the same, so it's presumptuous to assume I get no value out of my organizational strategy.
I don't meant to sound evasive, and your clarified question here is easier to understand and answer appropriately.
The benefit is that I went from thousands of bookmarks, which were difficult and time-consuming to organize and navigate, to contextual pages each filling specific roles and containing ephemeral links to what I need. It works very well for my ADHD and allows me to basically have a messy desk across several domains and contexts, while still having file cabinets for things I do want organized and stashed away.
This has let me vastly simplify my bookmarks, which I typically arrange as unlabeled favicons ordered by color on my bookmarks toolbar, with some others stashed away in a folder.
I keep what I really need, and I'm always ready to drop things I don't need, and it helps me keep a better long-term working memory of ongoing tasks, interests and hobbies.
Thanks for the info—it’s interesting. I am glad you have a working system for you. At face value it would be difficult for me. I am probably the exact opposite—-I rarely go beyond two browser instances and if I get beyond 4-5 tabs in them, I’m closing something. However, it’s not just browser tabs, I am kind of a orderly minimalist freak about all things.
Do you have FF's higher levels of privacy protection enabled? With fingerprinting protection enabled, image uploading breaks. oAuth doesn't seem to work properly on some sites. Enabling encrypted DNS breaks captive portals or private VPNs.
its really easy to configure FF to break the internet.
FF for Linux will have a different team from FF for MacOS or FF for Windows.
Given how different each OS is, they will have different internals.
You don't see the same kind of performance degradation on other browsers on MacOS like Chrome, Safari, Orion, Brave, Arc, or even Edge.
It's a uniquely FF issue, but I'll deal with it as long as uBO is blocked on Chrome.
And saying "migrate to $myFlavorOfLinux" is an unrealistic answer for most users, because even though Linux has progressed leaps and bounds, it's user experience still requires a fairly technical background so that limits personal usage, and isn't offered as a default OS option by most IT teams who give corporate laptops.
Linux as a personal OS will be limited as long as a Linux project that is actually lead by an actual UX Designer instead of an OS enthusiast doesn't arise. Elementary OS shows some promise, but it still has UX and workflow issues that deserve attention from a professional UX designer instead of OS devs alone.
The various Android flavors are a great example of how if you put UX minds to work on an OSS project, you can end up with a quality user experience, but most Android projects also enforce a common design language and support non-CLI based user workflows, whereas most Linux oriented projects overindex on technical users, leading to the chicken-and-egg situation for Linux adoption.
I personally don't think having the world's most popular web browser being in the hands of an advertising and surveillance company is all that great. One big reason being that they control captchas and lock content behind them, and they grant leniency to people using their browser, which is more permissive with dangerous ads and allow the company to make more money and further their dominance.
Lol it's more like a death grip since nobody can compete with their ad business model.
There is almost no innovation in the browser space outside of more and more tracking ...
I'd argue that depends on what you mean by "innovation" -- Google has been pretty busy, meaning specifically developers on their payroll, churning out more or less useful Web API implementations, certainly at a far more frantic pace than people traditionally _blamed_ browsers of yester-decade for. Nevermind that some of these APIs are more haphazardly designed than others, truth be told most of them are okay and are aptly designed so it's not a critical issue (for Web developers or Chrome's market share). Google co-authors most Web standards and implement them often _before_ the "standard" is published (for better and for worse; anti-trust allegations, I am looking at you). But they're not idle, one thing's for sure. Markedly different than how I remember Microsoft resting for months if not years on their IE laurels, like a CO2 blanket in a room that evacuated all the air.
So yeah, how would you describe this lack of innovation you're referring to?
There can always be more innovation that isn't of the sort I described above, but Web _is_ made of Web APIs -- if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it, is my crude opinion. But I'd love to hear examples to the contrary, illustrating innovation that isn't Web APIs.
Removing tab-based browsing (an anti-pattern if you ask me)? Optimizations (speed, size, etc)?
Web browsers from 90s can render html perfectly well.
> if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it
Ever heard of native applications? Those could always do the thing, there is not only no reason for web browsers to implement "web apis", but every one of those is actively harmful.
When "web developers" can finally implement a page where focus does not jump around and layouts do not shift around we can start talking about being allowed access to more than plain html.
Native applications is a relatively fragmented market of different hardware and OS for platform, made more complicated by relative lack of interest (which is because the market is fragmented, a catch-22), and factors like needing to learn another programming language when you already know JavaScript and how it works on the Web, which is taught to more people every year for obvious reasons. Which is all why Github Electron, essentially a Google Chrome married to Node.js, both _JavaScript_ platforms, made such an impact when it was released. There's zero-install on the Web, too -- just follow a link and you're surfing applications. Python+Qt applications have to be installed, even if that means downloading these -- there's plenty of hosts configured to deny the user the privileges of running software they downloaded, no matter how native and how well mannered it is otherwise. There's fewer pairs of hands on the job (part of catch-22), and there's more standards and APIs to deal with, due to the fragmentation, even for all the cross-platform offerings. All this no doubt contributes to the market staying behind the juggernaut that the Web has become.
Before you roll your eyes and label me a millennial who's not seen anything but the absolutely appalling Web applications of yesteryear, fresh off inexperienced hands of developers who think they invented caching and what not -- I started off with x86 assembler and C then C++ in early 90's, and I hold genuine interest in everything we learned since before Intel made 8088 -- but I am simply describing the reality I see, not necessarily reality I want.
You're drawing a border on water -- there's no need to "separate" the Web from native. The Web is an application platform developed from a hypertext network (the old Web I re-label for comparison's sake), and the platform has tremendous value. You need to have tunnel vision to want to put genie back into the bottle, but again -- I absolutely hear and understand your argument. Do you have realistic suggestions?
Drew DeVault suggested another protocol, Gemini, a while back, having become frustrated with much the same observation you did. Just text mark-up served with efficient text-based protocol -- essentially a regression back to HTTP and HTML anno 1995 (possibly with more semantic elements). I think it's not only a fantasy but also a poor idea -- not because it's a bad idea in itself but because it assumes there's no possibility to do any of it with today's Web, but there is -- it's just that everyone's reaching for the fancy and the flashy once they start coding. What you were referring to with "focus jump around" and "shifting layout". We're sacks of flesh driven by hormones -- that's the best reason I can give you why the same platform that allows you to slap [a HTML that's worth reading](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/), possibly [with a simple stylesheet that does the bare minimum to improve user's experience](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com) -- is _not enough_ for authors. I'd call it "author's prerogative" -- the person who pays for the domain and the hosting, wants to exercise their authoring power and gets carried away with all the bells and whistles they slap on their pages. Users pull their hair out, in silence (or mostly ignored because "do I paint the walls in your house?").
Anyway, this is getting long -- the gist of my argument is that technically the Web is capable of supporting all the static HTML without an ounce of "shitty" scripting that makes everything border on "unconsumable". You're making a "dictatorship" argument along "if you can't make good readable sites, we're going to neuter the platform". But the platform _is_ what drives adoption of the Web, I say, albeit now nearing some cancerous growth from a skeptic's perspective. And yet: fix the _content_, not the _platform_. "Native" is just a word -- there's no native, everything is translated or compiled one way or another, including JavaScript (which _I_ consider a relatively bad general purpose programming language, even under ECMA oversight which fixed a lot of its warts, admittedly). Unless you're one of those ["real programmers"](https://xkcd.com/378/).
I mean in term of user facing change. Vertical tabs is still presented as an innovation ...
Tabs groups are barely explored, and let's not dream too much of isolation Firefox containers are probably over ten years old and still almost unused :(.
More recently Arc and Zen are trying to innovate (I’m not using either), but they probably have almost no chance as long Chrome stay as dominant and financed by ad tracking.
Using Firefox on linux I’m facing more and more capchas and broken or innacessible websites. Ladybird is making great progress but unless they start posing as chrome they’ll face the same challenges :(.
Edit:
> churning out more or less useful Web API implementations
Probably part of the problem since it makes maintaining a browser engine absurdly expensive and out of reach for almost everyone ...
Maybe you misunderstood me. I was trying to say users should prioritize more important things instead of trivialities. I am a long-time Firefox user and almost never have I had any issue with it.
> Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
I don't see how - it's a more than serviceable browser. The only issues I've ever had were because a webapp detected I wasn't using a browser of choice and blocked me specifically, which isn't really firefox's fault.
I guess I prefer chromium dev tools over firefox's but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if I only was able to use the firefox ones.
"benevolent" is an interesting word choice. I wouldn't consider them having positive intentions for users, but rather focused on financial gain and market power at any cost. Though if Apple owned would be anti non Apple customers, if most other companies owned would end up monetizing it as well but without the resources of Google. Or if government owned would remain stagnant. So not sure what the right path is.
In terms of usage, maybe, in terms of service, probably not. Often the biggest dogs are not the best. They have inertia and marketing, and that's why they're the big dogs. Not because they're providing the best, or the cheapest, good or service.
Depends on how local you go, there are local alternatives that are bigger in their domain for almost every domain in most parts of Europe. Amazon is much much smaller outside of USA and there are plenty of alternatives with better and cheaper service.
Also not true in Switzerland. Amazon was ranked #4 overall, #2 in tech, based on sales in 2024, with a massive distance to the leaders. It's not that popular around here, and with current U.S. boycotts I expect it to drop further this year.
As a reverse-engineer tinkering with iOS this reminded me of some system apps.
E.g. in the app store you click a button, send a request, receive the response which contains a xml-like structure describing the UI mutation to your action.
<Alert>
<Header>iTunes Login</Header>
<Body>We could not find a user with those credentials.</Body>
My profile is largely unused, I follow no one, and like 1/3 times I open up the front page I get straight holocaust denial threads suggested. Completely insane.
I work in the automotive industry, and for volume products the price-cutting is really brutal. If you can save a cent somewhere you will, because that cent multiplied by 8 million cars a year is a sizeable amount of money.
This seems to be generally true for most OEMs of hardware products, but not for Apple. Apple could have cut costs by just using a magnet and a reed switch/hall effect sensor, because it is not using the exact angle of the screen anyway (afaik?), but they chose not to.
They could have implemented their "3d Touch" by using a simpler circuit which just indicates if the press was really hard or soft. But again they chose not too.
And they sell over 20 million Macs per year, so they really sacrifice a sizeable amount of profit
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44635808