dRLY

Agreed. Not kidding myself into thinking it would happen. But would be cool if enough of the FF forks were able to form a collective or some body to work on shared effort to develop the main base of the browser in the event (or when) Mozilla calls it quits. The individual forks obviously have their own goals and ideologies that conflict at various levels (LibreWolf and Zen being two obvious examples). But all of them are able to do amazing work with the current base of FF.

Easy to think about, but so much harder to realistically pull off. I know donations are like drops of mist compared to the real money sources for Mozilla. Which would mean such a collective has less of a chance. Though I know a lot of FF users would be willing to donate if they knew it was going directly to the engine/core and not the non-browser stuff. Mozilla more or less seems to really want to be something more like EFF with various efforts not about the browser.

FF went from forcing some amazing demand for breaking away from the fake "standards" MS created and made extensions and tabs normal. To being overwhelmed by Google's version of modern IE, and trying to chase features that even normie Chrome users don't really care about (just really care that the sites they use work). Which aside from conflicting with stated goals, tend to not work with so many sites that now code specifically for Chromium and DRM (not even allowing sites to load if anything but Chromium is detected).

One really great thing FF has going for it is the Android version. Having my extensions (even if some of them need to be side-loaded via activating dev mode) really make browsing on my phones/tablets feel more like my desktop. Not an iPhone user, so I can't speak to the iOS versions. But at least Safari is able to have uBO Lite and other extensions.

I'm not your AI pal buddy.

I also default to Vivaldi when I need to use a Chromium browser, and I have found that I like the Feeds part of the browser better than Thunderbird. It is for sure the most customizable Chromium based option, so many tweak-able options. Aside from a couple of RSS feeds I check like once or twice a day, Zen and FF are my defaults for basically all browsing. I don't tend to do things that make use of the AI stuff in FF, but honestly don't really care if Mozilla has those options as long as they keep them as easy to disable as they currently are.

I have been using Zen as my main for over a year, and it has some random things beyond defaulting to vertical tabs (which was one of the reasons I tried it out since all of the extensions for them always felt wonky to me). Even lets you drag the window around like you do with horizontal tab bar (much easier to find free space to grab without accidentally pulling a tab into a new window for me). Some Chromium browsers also do this. So that does mess with my muscle memory when I switch over to FF and need to move the window and can't.

One kind of nice thing they have is that their version of "Peek" called "glance" kind of loads a page on top of a page without opening a whole new tab. It is kind of wonky in some links work fine, while others will just continue to the page in the original tab and need to press alt when clicking. Might be kind of a "it's just a new tab with extra steps" thing for some folks, but has been something that I have found nice to have.

Also had split tabs before they were added to FF if I remember correctly. Along with having "workspaces" that can have their own pinned tabs and and extra higher layer of pinned tabs above those. They look kind of like the boxes that are present if pinning tabs on current FF but did it first.

Outside of that, I think they managed to make the "look" of the browser better (another personal taste thing). Though FF has gotten some of the "look" closer to Zen.

Nothing "ground breaking" if you are already happy with FF. Just a pretty solid fork for people that aren't looking for something super hardened like Librewolf or even Mullvad. Early days updates had a chance of borking your GUI layout on big releases, but haven't had any issues with it in like 8 or 9 months. Overall the updates when I first started using it kind of reminded me of how early days of FF would actually excite me with obvious changes (not just GUI/UX) that felt like upgrades. This might be a non-starter for folks that prioritize GUI/UX staying more rigidly the same. Which is very valid.

GrayJay is pretty good option, it does have YT but also has plug-ins for other services. So it could be good for getting results if searching for something that will show up in YT that the creator also uploaded to other sites, while still having the option to watch if not. Also has built-in support for SponsorBlock and DeArrow for the things that are only on YT (and can opt to sign into or stay signed out of YT account). PeerTube is still a mess though. Not able (or at least I don't know how) to pick your instance to sign into and doesn't seem to allow for adding to the pool of peers to help upload while watching. But I don't think even the phone apps that specifically are for PT do that/have the option. Would be nice to be able to do that if on WiFi at least.

Looking at the Thunder app and it does look similar as far as phone screen is concerned. But does it have the multi column view on a larger screen like Sync? That is basically the one major thing I haven't found in other apps I have tried, both for reddit and Lemmy and is nice for subs that are more image based. I still use a patched version for moments where reddit is still needed (not very often these days but much nicer than the site).

I think that Snowden (and other leakers) would argue that the US is much much less transparent. Though it is best to just assume that all major govs are spying on everyone (even if it makes an ass out of u and me). Though we can agree on open source hardware.

Not really things that I can use less. But I really hate when companies that are already fully saturated (or basically have monopolies) really push ads for their shit. Example being shit like Spectrum. While there are now more options in my area for internet (AT&T did start laying fiber in my area like last summer), it really just seems like all the money put into the marketing departments could be saved. Same goes for AAA games.

We keep seeing how all the major fucking companies keep purging staff or dev studios they bought do to sales "not meeting expectations." But it seems like they should be cutting marketing first. Every "gamer" I know is already aware that something was announced with a release date via YT trailers and gaming outlets that were already going to cover it. So pushing so many more millions of dollars into shit really just looks like wasted money.

Same. I initially decided to try it to see if it was even close to as good taste wise as it is advertised. Also because it is gluten-free and might be something my dad might like since he had to switch to GF. But none of the four boxes really came close to being similar to what they would replace. And the price (that they make such a point about being "affordable") was like two or three times more expensive than better options we did find.

It really reminds me that basically everything that is called "affordable" on most social media is really pushed to tech-bro/massive city areas. Which $7~9 might be "affordable" if in super high cost of living cities. Just like how most of the "hot" tech things or trends tend to act like other places are just as "modern." Most small towns/rural areas are always like a decade behind on things. Which makes it beyond difficult to help regular people with basically everything tech-wise at my job. Which I won't make my already long reply even longer by ranting more.

Not shocking, but really wild that they claim that shit like saved lists "can't" have been carried over or exported. Giving zero heads-up is the most "fuck you" part of it for users (especially saying it to people that bothered paying). I hope that it creates even more converts to piracy in general, and that what money they were getting goes to zero. Also hoping that any FOSS projects (would be nice to see free but proprietary ones also) that use dictionary.com as defaults or in API quickly remove them.

All day, every day. Sometimes I will just delete everything and just not reply at all. Which sucks when I actually want to make use of comments and engage in the communities more. So far all the folks on here and the other instances I am on tend to not turn the focus onto my excessive use of parenthesis, and stay on the topic.

I am sure there have been some random one-offs. The only ones I can think of have been more about how I didn't break things into paragraphs vs just one huge wall. Even then, it is obvious that they at least read most of it. And I try to take those the same as telling me I have something on my face vs not. Just depends on how they say it.

I am always getting to the end of comments or really anything I write to someone (especially if more than a few sentences). Then get frustrated to see that I just ended up inserting basically a paragraph's worth of shit inside one sentence. I have like a really hard time making simple and condensed information (or other times the complete opposite and say waaaay too little).

It is like a really strong need to try an provide all the information that could lead to being taken the wrong way. Or to convey that I considered obvious arguments to save people from bringing them up needlessly. And I think that using parenthesis looks less "bad" than the super long run-on sentences. I am the worst person in my friend-groups if someone wants a TL;DR of things fast.