I was involved in KDE during the 1.x to 2.0 transition period. Hell, it's when I got my commit rights. We had a mailing list called the KDE-HIG list -- human interface guidelines, to borrow from Apple's terminology. The SNR was terrible -- there were a bunch of people with great ideas (myself included), but very few of them were coding. So the list would endlessly debate things like consistent button orders in dialog boxes, but couldn't agree (most of the time), and since most of them weren't coding, they'd just continue to recycle the debate.
The coders, between KDE 1.x (which was very much a Win95 knockoff at the time, even poking fun at themselves and Microsoft in the process), consciously decided to allow KDE to evolve organically. Konsole got transparent backgrounds but the text editor did not, based on whatever people thought was cool. And it was cool! Hell, there were development forks where the branches had names like "make_it_kool". KDE was almost entirely volunteer run, unlike Gnome which had Redhat sponsored devs and such, so the lack of direction led to meritocracy, darwinism, and a great and welcoming sense of community. Alas, UI consistency suffered :)
Tangents: two specific jokes at Microsoft's expense.
In Win95, there was a slogan "Where do you want to go today?" that flew in on the taskbar and pointed at the Start Menu. When KDE 1.0 was out, it did the same thing, except it said "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" Haha, one-upmanship! It was dumb.
The first popular web browser was call Navigator (Netscape). Microsoft riffed on this with Internet Explorer. In KDE 2.0, the file manager/browser combo app was called Konqueror. It was like the progression of a 4X strategy game or something.
Minor irony. Konqueror created its own HTML rendering engine, KHTML. Which was forked by Apple to create WebKit for Safari. Which was forked by Google to create Chrome. Which is now the underlying engine in the modern Internet Explorer. Check your user agent string -- maybe KDE did konquer after all...
So, I keep meaning to look into this but I come from the wrong background to have an intuitive grasp of the pieces at play here. My work is primarily in back end systems development for data driven models and I have very little understanding of how networking elements interact or even what they are, for the most part. If someone with that background is reading these comments and willing to take the time, would you be able to provide an explanation for the differences between Manifest V2/V3 and how V3 prevents ad blockers from working?
With manifest v2, extensions could block the content however they wanted, reading and modifying DOM as they see fit.
Google claims that it is a security risk, so with manifest v3, extensions can only create and give the browser rules and the browser itself will block content based on them. The rules have a limit in size and capabilities.
If that was still not clear, try thinking of unrestricted SQL access vs a UI for modifying a database.
The webRequest API allowed intercepting any network request in v2. Firefox also has an api for dns resolving. Lastly chrome now has a limited size for content blocking rules. All adding up to more limited blocking.
But Google search has gotten so much more interesting these days. Glue in pizza, spaghetti in gasoline sauce, jumping off bridges when feeling depressed.
Unfortunately, in mobile phones, there is little choice. It is almost 100% Android or iOS. Even a lot of "flip" phones are now Android. I'd love to have a KDE based phone, but the options are slim, and the functionality is missing.
Companies and communities should just pull support for Chrome. It would mean a loss in market share but at the end of the day it would get some attention if everyone did it.
I use Firefox as my daily browser, but I tried the manifest v3 based uBlock experiment in Chrome and honestly I couldn't tell the difference between it and the regular uBlock.
I welcome people switching over, but I don't think this is anywhere near the killing blow to adblocking people think it is.
it is. it wont be updated as often, and ads will slip in between them. it also won't be able to block as many trackers because the api is more limited.
OK, so ambivalence. I'm lazy, I can get behind that. Also, I appreciate the work you're doing. I gave up years ago and am still labeled by my family as "the one who cares too much about things that don't matter."
I usually tie it into a discussion about password managers and show them Bitwarden too. Like with my in-laws I did a dark web scan and showed them their own passwords were basically public knowledge. Could they use it with Chrome? Sure. But they want to know they're secure and they trust me, so I get them on Firefox with a password manager.
I use it and I like it. Also have a Chromebook which I love for the Android integration and ability to stream apps from my phone. Thus, I'd appreciate a more in-depth discussion here what this means for me, but all you see on Lemmy is circle jerk and hate. 🤦♀️
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