zerosleeps

I am dismayed with the state of dominant desktop web browsers at the moment, by which I mean the big 4: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple’s Safari.

I don’t know how or why serious people use Safari. It fits into macOS nicely and is scarily energy efficient compared to anything else, but way too many sites don’t work properly with it. It frequently just… doesn’t load anything until I close the tab and try again, and it’s extension story is a joke. I can’t use it at work because of that last one, since extensions can only be installed via Apple’s App Store.

And look at what happened when I gave it a chance yesterday - within minutes it was painting content on top of it’s own tabs:

Google Chrome is a great browser - everything works all the time. Is that because it’s better than everything else, or because it is by far the most used desktop browser? I suspect a bit of both - it certainly got to it’s market position because when it was new it really was so much better than anything else. But the “Google” part just doesn’t sit well with me. They’re an advertising company.

Microsoft Edge is also excellent but let’s face it, it’s Chrome re-skinned and Microsoft are even creepier than Google. And desperate - the last time I looked at Edge it begged me to use Bing and Copilot and some shopping shit and coupon shit and and and. Ew.

And then we get to Firefox. I don’t know how to express my feelings about my beloved Firefox. It just feels like it’s always a few steps behind everyone else. Always playing catch up. Constantly vying for everyone’s attention by trying flashy new things rather than concentrating on stuff that I care about, like bugs that are decades old and still have a status of “new”. There’s just always something about it that’s annoying me at any moment in time.

Firefox is also humiliatingly inefficient on Apple silicone, especially when watching full-screen video. As in over 12 hours of battery life when using Safari versus 3 hours when using Firefox. I can’t help them with that.

And look, Mozilla have to make money somehow but I would pay for a version of Firefox that doesn’t come with all the “sponsored” stuff. I’d pay even more if my money bought me one bug fix per year.

I am encouraged by the number of “other” browser projects that are gaining traction, but I need something that gets out of the way and just works. The Opera’s and Orion’s aren’t there yet, for me anyway.

Ibrahim Diallo:

We prefer using websites, and we know most apps are oversized wrappers around a website. But I have to remember that the people with a thousand apps are not the minority. We are. We are the few who would rather use a progressive web app than download a 300 MB wrapper.

Good post by Marcin Wichary at Unsung, riffing on a segment of The Talk Show.

This is one of the most baffling things about Apple software to me. For each application, or piece of an application, or component of their operating systems, why don’t they find one of their 150,000 employees who actually uses that piece of software every day, and give them ownership of it.

About a quarter of the stuff I do in my day job is implementing fixes and tweaks that I or one of my developer colleagues have found. Not stuff that our customers have reported. And that is because we own our output and are embarrassed by bugs of all sizes.

Software quality driven by pride. What’s wrong with that?

I received this piece of dystopian literature in my inbox today from a company that manages some of our toll roads here in Australia:

Our records indicate you have recently travelled through the Burnley Tunnel. If you have time, we’d really appreciate your feedback on the on-road experience of this trip.

…

Based on your recent trip, how likely are you to recommend travelling on the Burnley Tunnel to friends and family?

How likely am I to recommend a highway? That goes through a tunnel? To my friends and family?

Not very fucking likely, strangely enough.

Email is, and always has been, my preferred method of written communication for two reasons, both of which are topics of this post from Zachary Kai.

The first is it’s openness, stability, and ubiquity:

Social media platforms rise and fall like ancient empires sped up a thousand times. Yet email endures. Like the postal service or the printed book. Is it any coincidence these technologies remain my great loves? They share a quality I struggle to name. Perhaps it’s permanence in an ephemeral world. You can tuck a letter in a drawer, discovering it decades later. A book can outlive its author by centuries. One can archive, search, and treasure an email. They’re all vessels that honor my beloved words.

And in their longevity is their flexibility. You can read a book anywhere, anytime. You can send a letter to the farthest-flung corners of the earth imaginable. And you can email anyone.

The second is in it’s user interface:

You can choose to engage with it in human time, and so can the recipient: compose when you have something to say, respond when you have space to think.