Doesn’t AI work great for this, what with those AIs that turn Reddit mods into anime cosplayer girls?
Also, what’s with the pushing of the football world championship?
I don’t care for it.
I also want a browser that lets me browse the web and do what I want. Not what it decides to shill next.
In someone’s eyes it might seem a small issue, but they add up.
All the resources spent on designing, implementing and testing this one-off feature that’ll be scrapped in a few weeks because it’ll outlive its usefullness is an epic waste of time and resources.
What I want is a chrome-style history page with good UX and not the history sidebar and modal from 20+ years ago.
That is a much higher ask. But do it well and it’ll serve its purpose for another 20+ years. Not a few weeks.
And it’ll actually be reasonably useful to users.
Sure.
Using community-vetted software doesn’t have any security or privacy benefits over proprietary.
Neither will proprietary software arbitrarily be able to remove features, lock out certain users or raise prices dramatically.
Would you rather buy vetted cruelty-free foods or not?
There’s surely no benefits in doing so.
What about clothing?
Would you rather buy a shirt that has some guarantee of not using underpaid or child labor?
What about energy?
Would you rather your electricity comes from a local coal plant poisoning you and others with its toxic fumes, or from a solar+hydro mix?
What about furniture?
Woukd you rather get an item made from recycled materials and with well-paid labour, made locally and to high quality or get the not-so-cheap alternative from IKEA?
All the options above are morally superior. And so is FOSS software.
And there is a multitude of reasons.
But there’s two things I’d like to point out right away, regardless of FOSS specificalky
Hell, oftentimes they’re cheaper (for example, storebrand is vastly more moral than Nestle and it’s cheaper).
First standards don’t exist formally and any “standard” (quality or otherwise) is pure coincidence. Pay is high because the market said so. Quality is high because machines are good enough. Privacy of our maiking list is high because our director chose to use a free (FOSS) local app instead of a paid cloud service.
Then ad-hoc (informal) standards form. Companies voluntarily do things in order to stay competitive. For example most every site uses hashing and salting, meaning your passwords are pretty safe.
Then real standards form. Still voluntary, but formal. They’re still voluntary, but you can’t half-ass things anymore abd say you did them. You’ve gotta meet real demands.
Then these standards get made a requirement by the legislature, so Nestle actually has to do some ethics now.
This exact same progression is present in multiple otherwise disjunct domains. Labor rights, pollution, quality standards. And yes, software freedom is one of them.
But what even is software freedom?
It’s the ability to vett code. The ability to switch providers. The ability to play a game after servers shut down. The ability to export data. The ability to not pay an hourly rate of $15 for your dial-up use. Interoperability. And a lot of other things.
Free as in freedom is much more than gratis (free as in no need for money).
Free software is the one that pushes this feedback loop forward the most.
And that’s why it’s a moral imperative.
Ironically, it’s free software that often times creates competition (and therefore lowers the price of) proprietary software.
It sets quality standards. Proprietary can’t be that worse than free - people’d find out soon enough.
It acts as competition (albeit oftebtimes unequal).
It expands accessibility by giving a gratis alterbative.
It drives change. Much more so than proprietary bullshit.
Using FOSS software isn’t easy in this day and age. But without it, using proprietary software would be way, way harder than the FOSS from decades ago.
No Internet/WorldWideWeb. No networking. No encryption.
Most of the infrastructure is FOSS. It’s too expensive to make well even for the big players - some 25% of Windows (as in the bloated mess) is made up of free software. 90% of Edge is.
You’re using free software even if you’re not trying to much more than you realize.
And that’s the result of small victories from ages ago. Victories which set standards and expectations.
Maximizing your use of FOSS software maximizes the amount of these victories. It speeds them up.
And it makes a difference way bigger than you may realize.
Great suggestion!
I’m a refugee from Reddit back from the API apocalypse days, so I might be suppsed to be an experienced Lemming, but I’m not.
Nor here or on reddit do I know “how” to post. What community, what to say, how to say it. I only know how to hijack others’ comments and add in my own shitty take.
I would very much like to up my browser game. I remember trying to get a userchrome that emulates the 2016-era Chrome tabs, but I had little luck. I managed to make something myself by splicing together some github repos I found, but that was a long time ago and that install is long gone.
Oh, and to avoid any ambiguity: I switched completely from Reddit onto here in protest during the apocalypse.