The hell is with all these comments?

Mozilla is far from perfect but god damn the degree of hatred and mirth some people have is entirely disproportionate to anything they've actually done, and completely irrespective of the good they actually do.

It's got the same energy as leftist purity testing, where there is no "net good", only perfection and villains to be spat on.

You don't have to post to LinkedIn to have your data on it. Unfortunately it's almost a prerequisite to any serious job seeking in many fields.

The point is the client presumably paid for it for their users, who are their customers, but they have no idea what those users want.

Yeah, I was gonna say, holding Chrome OS above Windows because its Linux based is bizarre. That's getting more true about Android, too. For all its faults, I can still say I'm the admin of my Windows OS (for now), and not Google.

I was gonna say, clients aren't the only ones.

Feels like a lot of developers and especially UX designers have a bad habit of disappearing up their own asshole nowadays.

That's generally what you hear from people who have basic use cases and simply can't fathom other people may want or need different things from their devices.

Which is fine, they don't have to understand. If stock is good enough for them nowadays, more power to them.

What I'm sick of is the condescension. This bizarre thing where they somehow think a person wanting control over a device they paid for is worthy of derision or shame.

It's like if someone who only checks their email on their laptop laughing at someone using a desktop for heavier work, for no real reason other than thinking using technology differently than themselves is silly.

That other comment is a perfect example, and indictive of this weird subculture in Android spaces that hates Google but seems to be drinking from the same user-hostile Kool aid.

Personally, I'm an odd case, in that I didn't used to root or use custom ROMs at all until recent years. Basically since Android 10, simply to get around the needless roadblocks and restore the functions I want. I was fine with stock for a long time, until Google started becoming Apple.

Is that real? That legitimately sounds like an Onion article itself.

People seriously need to start pushing back on the word "secure" being used as a blanket excuse for every restriction.

It feels like every time that word is used, no one is willing to call out the fact that user freedom is equally as important and it's a lazy, disrespectful developer who won't take that into account by finding ways to maintain both.

if you fuck it up, you go to jail

No, no you don't. This is an actual child's understanding of how it works.

If you fuck up they often don't even notice unless it's substantial, otherwise they just send you a notice. You have to be willfully refusing to pay taxes for a while, repeatedly, before you're in trouble (tax evasion) or commiting actual tax fraud.

Why would the IRS send you to jail for making mistakes on your taxes? Where taxes are now paying for your incarceration, and you can't work to make the income to pay taxes.

Vote for people who will increase funding to the IRS so they can manage all this.

The reason it's been like this for so long is because they don't have the manpower or (until recently) the technology to handle the sheer numbers. Lobbying from TurboTax and shit also played a big part, but even without that, they straight up can't afford to do all this when they've been strangled of funding from decades of conservative legislation.

The fact that an entire generation thinks the only proper way to install software is through an app store is absolutely terrible. Talk about a boon for the gatekeepers, Apple and Google did a bang up job training them to trust no one else.

At this point, even that would be preferable.

Your right, any open platform will be bastardized eventually, but that doesn't mean there isn't still a need for "resets".

There is no perfect platform for escaping it, because the market forces will always adapt and assimilate. The only true escape is to keep moving.

That's why it's important for users to be hermit crabs, and move to the next thing, no matter how janky, because they will at least be able to influence it positively and have a relatively open platform for a number of years. Then the cycle repeats.

If propping up Linux phones will get us the open platform we need, even if only temporarily, we should do it.

The issue I think is that the current trends in all consumer software are increasingly user hostile, and the major platforms are creating ecosystems to support this. It's become the norm now to be able to directly control the usage of the software on consumer devices. Apple has normalized this, Google and Microsoft followed.

At what point will developers refuse to even create software for a system that doesn't allow them that control?

Look at how many developers out there absolutely jerk themselves raw at the idea they should be able to compel users to update to continue using their software. Look at how many believe the modern security culture fallacy that handcuffing users and throwing away the key is the only way to protect them.

It's a development culture issue. Respecting user control of their own device is no longer in vogue.