bhaugen @bhaugen@social.coop

Thing is, I think you can be a browser also-ran with a comfortable <5% of market share if you don't also maintain your own engine. Otherwise you're in a constant compat war, and you're losing because web developers just look at the cost-benefit ratio and don't bother testing your browser as much as the other ones.

Safari can get away with it because it's the only rendering engine on iOS, and the CEO of your company has an iPhone in their pocket.

I'm sure if you browsed https://webcompat.com and managed to root-cause every bug, you'd probably find equally dumb bugs that web developers just can't be bothered to care about because the browser in question has <5% market share. This is what happened to Opera (Presto) and Edge (EdgeHTML). I would hate to see it happen to Firefox (Gecko) but I wouldn't be surprised.

Just to give you an idea of how hard and expensive it is to maintain compat, here's a story from the trenches:

Once when I was on the MS Edge team (pre-Chromium), I was debugging a "perf" bug in a site. It showed an infinite loading bar; the site never loaded. Turned out the loading bar was fake – it was hard-coded to expect very precise timing for some JS timer function (requestAnimationFrame or setTimeout, idr) so it worked on Chrome but not Edge. The user was convinced Edge was just "slow."

@alcinnz @cadadr @robby
I'm not here for idealogical snobs. I'm not rich and I grew up on the breadline. You work with the hardware you get, or the passed on hardware folks give you. It's the same with phones, poor folks get what phones are cheap in store. Their privacy is screwed, they use apps that give them money off, that tracks them. If you scoff at that, then there's a phrase that mentions privilege you can think about. Then have a think about it a little more.

@alcinnz @cadadr @robby
Yes wherever possible we should buy our gear from manufacturers who provide open hardware. But we are little better than Amazon (threw away computers etc as overstock) if we cannot consider using other hardware on idealogical purity. If we cannot welcome people to the community and help them to use Linux because of our ideals, then we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. To grow movements need people.

RT @visakanv
it's tempting to assume that human progress happened in a sort of slow and steady way, but that wasn't really the case afaict. it happens in tremendous leaps and bounds. athens gave us philosophy. the guptas invented zero. the baghdad golden age gave us algebra

An exclusive focus on freedom is atomizing and obscures the necessity of community. An absolutist freedom that puts tech monopolies and individual consumers on equal footing can only give more power to the former. Congratulations, megacorporations have taken millions of hours of free developer hours to build a surveillance infrastructure the likes of which the world has never seen! A triumph of freedom, yay! 🎉 </sarcasm>

RT @NewRiverInvest
@SarahTaber_bww “There’s no way we can take care of our facilities, our roads, our ditches, if we didn’t have inmate labor,” .... “We could not tax our citizens enough to replace the value that the inmate labor contributes to our community.” https://twitter.com/newriverinvest/status/1337843566635171840

RT @DavidPaisley
Probably a good day to listen to the opinions of women athletes competing in weightlifting at the #Olympics