Gecko itself is almost impossible to use outside of firefox at this point so I don't think it would work well in this kind of a browser unfortunately. I'm not sure about servo though other than it just not being ready for normal browsing.
at the moment I plan on continuing using firefox so I'm not leaving but you can't keep using a browser with a worse experience because of some futile moral cause. Firefox has to earn their place and be a browser people to use. I think firefox going after the general public makes sense but when it comes at an expense to generally more advanced users they've probably gone a step too far though to be fair they don't have nearly as many devs as other browsers like chrome and edge.
Characterizing early Firefox as only gaining traction because people had more warm fuzzy feelings for it seems off to me, although I wasn't around at the time personally.
I started using Firefox in the late 2000s mostly because I switched to Linux, and Chrome wasn't a thing yet. The web dev tools were better (firebug, anyone?), there were extensions like pentydactyl and whichever predecessor it had back in the day, and overall I just preferred the UI.
Pretty much every reason I originally used Firefox is gone now. I used it out of habit now and because it's less memory intensive still, but that's it. There's just not much going for Firefox except being backed by "the good guys" in a fight against the Empire. Even the cross platform support has withered with all the Chrome components like Skia and dependencies on tools like node.js (ironic that Firefox needs chrome's javascript engine to compile) limiting it to mainstream target triplets.
Firefox is trying to stay usable and I applaud that, but now they're just perpetually stuck trying to play catch up with Chrome's features and performance, always lagging behind, either a little or a lot. Chrome sets the web standards -- I think Firefox has simply lost.
Actually not Firefox, but Konqueror. From conqueror came KHTML which was later the base for webkit which evolved in chrome and the rest is history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
Uh, no? That argument would only make sense if IE were better than every alternative but died because people merely chose to not use it... in fact, it wasn't until the big lawsuits against Microsoft caused IE to stagnate and then better browsers existed that people switched to--first Firefox targeting developers / power users and then (later) Chrome laying waste to the entire field on performance--that IE was dethroned. We thereby need the same thing today: an arrow in the leg of Chrome (though I sadly don't know if we could even pull off an anti-competition suit against them with the current landscape... I am bullish always on such and I am not even seeing the argument :/) and some game-changing competition (which is hard to predict, but doesn't seem to be coming from Firefox the more they try to just emulate Chrome).
Konqueror was worse than most popular browsers of the era but users and developers did not gave up on it. It was enough for KHTML eventually evolve in webkit which eventually powered most popular browsers these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML .
People sticking to their principles and willing to use a less advanced browser just to guarantee its improvement is what gave us the fast browsers we have today.
Man, I remember the Mozilla days, and then Phoenix and Firebird... so many issues, so many problems. But there was a sense of belonging to "the good web" which would have inevitably triumphed. And then Google showed us that anything can be corrupted.
I've deployed a number of web services and I have to say...Lemmy was incredibly streamlined and easy to deploy. Deployment is entirely automated with docker and an ansible script, and updating requires just 1 command.
Really looking forward to them completing the ActivityPub integration.
Does lemmy still do the thing where they censor certain words and don't include a way to configure the censorship to try and discourage certain groups from using it?
I would seriously question why you would want to attract anybody that used any of the regex statements words, but is as easy as changing it in the code.
Really? You can't go 10 minutes in many LGBT spaces without hearing someone using the f-slur in an affectionate way. Also banned is "b!tch", which is not really considered that offensive in most of the US between female friends, as well as "pu!sy", which is maybe vulgar but not an offensive term at all (I notice "dick" didn't make cut). Maybe for a site like Hacker News those terms aren't usually appropriate, but I see Lemmy \more as a replacement for Reddit and I'd hoped it would be inclusive to everyone, not just to those in their bubble.
I don't know how their system works, if using these words just means the comment won't be shared or if it flags it for a moderator's attention, but I don't think so. Here's a direct quote from a developer:
> I'll have to think about this. Hard-coding it means I don't have to do a database migration every time someone comes up with a new slur. And putting it in a DB table means someone could very easily remove it by deleting every row of that table, which isn't good. I want to make it very difficult for racist trolls to use the most updated version of Lemmy.
In my view this goes against the core point of the fediverse. The whole reason I like the fediverse is because it democratizes control by giving it to the users instead of a small-group of potentially self-interested owners.
(After googling I found out "n!ps" can be used as a racial slur but I associate it with a funny slang for "nipples". I wondered how the AI conference dealt with this but apparently they changed their name a couple years back to avoid connotations with the slur so maybe it's more widespread/well known than I thought.)
(edit: censored slurs. asterisk didn't work because it triggered the markdown so I used !)
I wasn't aware of this element of Lemmy...thanks for bringing it up. Philosophically speaking, I detest the idea of software limiting a user's speech in such a way...maybe such a filter would be needed, or maybe not, but I would prefer to see the need demonstrated over time through practice instead of bluntly imposed by software by default.
Reminds me of how Mastodon doesn't allow quote-toots...but quote-tweets can be highly effective when used correctly. Should be up to instance owners to regulate such behavior.
