I tried it out for a while and yes, it really is as bad as the article implies. I gave it a fair chance for a few weeks and then went back to the old assistant (a task which which gemini was also completely unable to help me with, at one point even gaslighting me and saying I wasn’t using Gemini).

It’s kind of crazy to think about but it seems like Google is just somehow really terrible at AI

Personal preference I guess. I’ve tried Firefox many times over the years and always ended up going back to other browsers. I find Firefox doesn’t render some pages quite right, the user agent stylesheet is odd, and the UI is less streamlined. Performance also used to be a problem although I hear it’s caught up now.

I used to be a Chrome user but now I prefer chromium based alternatives like brave and edge (which incidentally, uBO will keep working on). Chrome is still required for work, but uBO change won’t be an issue I think, there are plenty of other ad blockers that will work with MV3

Sensationalist and inaccurate title

If you read the whole thing, it’s not wrong. It just highlighted a part that is wrong when taken out of context

So is human speech

I think windows is a pretty good middle ground. Yes it’s annoying that you might need to install a 3rd party tool to give you a right click menu option to take ownership of any file/folder, but at least you can do that and it’s easy. And for normies that don’t have Linux-fu they’ll get into a lot less trouble than if you give them Linux.

MacOS on the other hand, if there’s something Apple decided users are too dumb to be allowed to do (which it turns out, is a lot of stuff), then you just can’t do it, period.

Can I get a ChatGPT summary of this article please 😆

Eh? On Linux you also aren’t supposed to log in as root, and you also have to individually set file permissions.

This issue is unrelated to windows, it’s a safety feature that all modern desktop OSes have

Appreciate you taking the time to reply in such detail! Some good insights thank you

If were just a personal project that they’re building entirely on their own then sure, go nuts and do whatever you want. But they’re trying to gain adoption, asking for contribution, and wanting to replace other browsers. At that point it’s no longer just a personal choice if you’re asking the community to invest their time and money into it with you

Reading all of that it sounds mostly like a dev who has spent 20 years doing things the C++ way wasn’t comfortable learning something new. Like basically they’ve been using horrible design patterns that Rust bans because they’re horrible, and instead of learning better approaches they just say Rust is bad

there’s a reason

Oh good that settles it, no further questions your honour

Your main (or at least first) point was to throw childish insults around, so you got the same in return

I wouldn’t go around accusing people of being 10 years old when your English skills are worse than a 10 year old’s. Glass houses and all that.

Sure :)

There are a lot of downsides of C++ compared to more modern languages that make it not a great choice if you’re starting a web browser from scratch

1. Complexity of the language leading to increased bugs and slower development
2. Manual memory management is error-prone and leads to issues like memory leaks or segmentation faults. Modern browsers need to handle large amounts of dynamic content, making memory management complicated
3. C++ lacks some of the built-in safety features of more modern languages, which has led to the majority of security vulnerabilities found in major browsers. It’s so bad that Mozilla invented an entirely new programming language just to deal with this
4. Compared to higher-level languages, C++ can be slower to develop in, which may impact the ability to quickly implement new web standards or features unless you have a massive team
5. While C++ is cross-platform, ensuring consistent behavior across different operating systems can be more challenging than with some other languages.
6. Newer languages often provide built-in support for concurrent programming, garbage collection, and other features useful for browser development, which C++ lacks.

So tl;dr: a browser but in C++ will take much longer to develop, have fewer features, more bugs, less concurrency and and more security vulnerabilities

builds a new browser from scratch without borrowing existing code

still chooses to do it in C++

Epic fail

All of my Bluetooth devices work flawlessly these days. What are you using?

Most software is a terrible pile of unreadable code with no tests and horrible architecture choices, that somehow manages to keep working just through the power of years of customers finding bugs and complaining loud enough to get them fixed.

If you write any automated tests at all, you’re already better than most “professional” software companies. If you have a CI/CD pipeline, you’re far ahead.

Was it ever good?

I don’t think you understand how fractional reserve banking works. The first paragraph of that Wikipedia page already clearly contradicts you. The banks can still only lend money they have (otherwise how would they lend it? Where would it come from? Only the central bank can print currency). What fractional reserve banking is saying is that banks can invest some portion of the customer deposits that they hold into non-liquid assets, often in the form of loans to other customers, but it could also be invested in other things eg government bonds. The interest banks earn by doing that helps pay for the interest they pay to customers on their saving. They also have to carefully manage their liquidity: maximising returns while still holding enough liquid assets to cover any potential spikes in withdrawals.

Even when investing customer funds, banks still have to meet captial requirements set by the regulators which basically say that their risk-adjusted assets have to cover the liabilities of customer deposits, so that for example they can’t just invest all the deposits in Bitcoin as that would pose too high a risk of insolvency. The reason SVB went insolvent recently was that they successfully lobbied the Trump administration to relax capital requirements for banks of their size, then made risky investments that lost money and they suddenly had less money than they owed their customers.