Doom Emacs and Spacemacs are the most popular two. I recommend Doom Emacs although Spacemacs is what I started with and I find it to be more user friendly.
There will be tons of people who will rightly rake Mozilla over the coals for this so I don't need to do it.
That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure. They will get dragged through the mud no matter what they try. People still rag on them for accepting money from Google to be the default search engine.
> Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure.
Then why can I not purchase Mozilla merch? They shutdown or abandoned some of their most interesting services (MDN and Send, for example), but kept developing unneeded products : (1) VPN, which is just a layer over Mullvad that makes it worse and (2) Lockwise which is much better replaced with almost any alternative password manager (like KeePassXC and the browser add-on if you really need it).
Of course, they weren't wrong for at least trying, but then why not make it part of a pool of products that only premium users can access? For example, make it so that only Premium users can upload to Send. But no, all we get is just a sh*t VPN.
Mozilla doesn't want your money, and they're going to die for it.
I find it disappointing. For whatever reason, Mozilla VPN is not available in my country. And they don't support anonymous cash payments, like Mullvad does. It's more expensive than Mullvad, except at the 12 month plan. So what's the point? It's strictly inferior to Mullvad.
It would be plenty profitable without their organizational bloat, especially if they refocused on what their actual users want instead of other initiatives.
How? donations. Look how much money Wikipedia generates in donations every year without selling out their users. Even a small fraction of this amount should be plenty to pay competitive salaries to the Firefox dev team, but the Firefox development team is a small fraction of their org.
Exactly, Firefox development should not be run like a for-profit corporation. Besides individual donations, they should try to get funding from pro-privacy governments.
I mean, there are tons of massively successful free (beer and liberty) software that have been around for decades. Why does Mozilla need Meta's or Google's money? Why have other free software products (thinking of OSes like FreeBSD and OpenBSD here) had active, high-quality development for decades without resorting to harvesting user data for profit? Isn't Mozilla a non-profit corporation? Hell, their website's title is "Internet for people, not profit", so what's happening here? And like someone else raised, why isn't there Mozilla and Firefox official swag?!
Mozilla can follow FreeBSD and OpenBSD's example and achieve a marketshare just as negligible as theirs. And just like FreeBSD and OpenBSD, Mozilla can wave goodbye to official support by any major consumer service or software.
Mozilla doesn't have normal swag but they sell Mozilla VPN. You can also donate directly to the foundation. The lack of gear is a little weird though because they used to have a gear store but they shut it down. I suspect not enough gear was being sold to be worth the trouble of selling official gear.
Those projects are funded by engineers from Netflix and Netapp who do make plenty of money off that software.
Nobody does the same with Firefox. Really the only prominent external contributor (that I know of at least) is Martin Stransky of Red Hat who does a lot of the Linux maintainence.
> That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure.
Why does it need to be profitable? Firefox is owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it. If the corp can't work without making the browser work then the foundation should reconsider if the corp is a good idea. Unfortunately, the leadership of the foundation and the corp are not separate enough so they cannot effectively push for the interests of the foundation.
Rubbish. Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who would pay $100/year for it. Of course it would mean that it will have to become a product company rather than another bored housewives club masquerading as a software company with some software engineers working for it.
If there were a way to directly fund Firefox (and only Firefox, not any other Mozilla stuff), I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I imagine I'm in the minority.
The fact that it’s not even an option really makes me scratch my head. There’s a decent amount of people who would like to throw some money their way to support Firefox specifically. Maybe not a ton, but certainly enough to warrant the option for people to do so.
I definitely would if it meant I wouldn't have to see a single ad ever again. I'm at the point in my life where trading money for not seeing ads is very appealing to me. Between Hulu, Youtube Premium, Spotify, etc. I pay an absurd amount of money every year to not see ads. I'd definitely do the same if a browser could hide any and all ads from me, and the sum I'd pay is a lot more than $100 year.
Sure, but you may as well save that money up as a down payment on a unicorn.
If it were possible to suppress all ads, then many people would happily sell you that solution. And the sites pushing those ads will see the money flowing to those people and not them, and so will grudgingly refuse to serve you any content.
As ad blockers get more popular and more effective, it's already happening more and more.
You can have a magical "don't show me ads" button only as long as it doesn't work very well. (And I have mine: Firefox + µBlock Origin.)
> Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who would pay $100/year for it
Call me a pessimist but I doubt this. Most people don't mind ads, and when you couple that with the vast number of free browser alternatives, I doubt so many people would pay (and even if they got some, I'd expect churn to be high too).
Quite literally every single company with aspirations would immediately subscribe to it because absolutely no one wants their company information being leaked out to Google or Facebook or anyone else if they do not absolutely have to. Right now there is no such option.
This is our bias seeping in. On HN, I’m willing to bet a substantial proportion of people are willing to pay for an anti-ad/tracking browser for privacy reasons. But there will be no value for the outside world.
I think us “nerds” dramatically overvalue how important privacy is to the general public right now. Even ignoring the developing world, most people will agree that tracking is bad, but most will continue to use legacy browsers because they don’t think it’s 100/year bad. And the growing population of young and tech savvy people who are one Google away from installing uBlock Origin will not pay for your product either.
Not to mention —- even the proportion of HN readers can take other measures to approximate anti tracking anyways. uBlock Origin + Pihole + a good VPN is enough for even most of us (personally, it is enough for me).
Exactly the opposite. Companies would be lining up buying licenses for a competent and supported browser blocking ads for Suzi from accounting to use without needing to tinker around with a uBlock Origin and pihole and a good VPN.
uBlock Origin author specifically states he does not want donations or to sell licenses because he does not want to support the product at all - he wants to do what he wants and not what the "customers" or "donors" might want.
It has a product that people pay for. It finds the market for its product and features for its product not based on "we are Chrome alternative don't pay attention to us sending all the stuff to Google and others who would give us money" but on what its paying customers want to see.
I've done both and I'm indifferent.I recognize this is probably a very pro WFH crowd but there are pros and cons to both of them. I find collaboration is just easier in person and most of the big "aha!" moments I've had came during water cooler talk.I've also had co-workers whose quality of work completely shit the bed when we went WFH and some of them were let go by management because of it. On the other hand, being able to just get up and go to the kitchen whenever I have down time or get some chores done whenever I have a moment is pretty great.
I think what's really happening here is that most people, especially older men, are realizing how much of their social life is tied to work and going to the office. My advice is to get some hobbies, make some friends, join some groups. Even if you aren't willing to go out, finding groups and chatting online in a voice or video call is probably better than just sitting in your home alone.
Yeah - I have been pretty slack with my social life over the past two years with the pandemic and a lot of friends moving away as well.
But I still wouldn't trade remote work for the world. I can get a climb in at my local gym in the morning and a swim in the afternoon - with plenty of time left to cook n clean and some quality time with the missus.
edit - also my home desktop is just awesome... 12k of total pixels across three monitors... An awesome omnidesk standing desk... can eat from the fridge the food that I need n want. Aint no office offering me this...
Am hoping with the Omicron abating can finally get out a bit more and re-establishing some connections.
I suspect there's a good chance you're going to wake up one day and find that you're an older man, so you might want to prepare yourself for the kind of social change that often comes with that.
That said, I'm actually dreading return-to-work to a certain extent, because it's optional at my company right now, so I've been able to make my office into a nice little interruption-free cocoon. I spent the summer outside with a laptop and 5G hotspot, but the weather right now isn't really conducive to that.
I wish we'd stop calling it "return-to-work" - I've been working for years. We should call it something closer to what it is. "Return-to-burning-hours-every-day-on-the-interstate" maybe?
This is where a lot of my friends split on remote work, albeit for a different reason. They often moved to new cities, so they built a life entirely around work.
I went back to my hometown, so I had a large social network there already. Co-worker events intruded on my time with them.
I think you are right. I've been fully remote for about 13 years. I love it, but I also have other things to keep me busy. I am a member of the local tennis club, and have many friends and acquaintances there, as well as year-round activities.
We also have many church friends in the area, and my wife and I do gardening and other outdoor activities, so, any "free time" that we end up with is easily filled.
Don't just be remote and a total couch potato, enjoy the freedom, and make the best of it.
It's harder to make friends once you get past a certain age. We become too set in our ways to be able to make friends.
Even if you have a hobby, it needs to be something that needs to be pursued in a group setting. Thus, hobbies such as singing in a choir will be much more effective at stimulating social contact than solo pursuits.
Why older men? All through my career, it was the younger folks who tended to treat the office as a social hub as well as the place they worked. As they got older, they'd develop more contacts in their communities through spouses, children, etc. and "fade" from the social swirl at work. At the very top of the age distribution you might find empty-nesters who have trouble connecting online, but those people were already leaving of the workforce (voluntarily plus ageism) so statistically I think they're outweighed by the youngsters who never knew any other way to meet people. What experience have you had that's different?
This is the solution but the pandemic crippled it's practicality as a huge census shifted to WFH. It's been 2 years now and even in Texas, which has aggressively "reopened", most social stuff has been slow to come back and quick to be paused. I dine out a lot but pretty much with a small family circle these days, minimal work meals & entertainment.
> But it'd really not be that big a deal compared to stuff like saying "healthy 20 year olds in their prime at near zero risk from this virus are now legally forbidden from dating".
This idea that young people are at near zero risk is not true. Pro athletes in their prime have gotten covid and suffered terrible side effects. Jayson Tatum is 23 and needed an inhaler after getting covid because he couldn't keep his wind. Tom Sweeney got myocarditis and had to end his football season early. Several young MMA fighters and pro wrestlers have nearly died. These are all people in their fitness prime.
More young people die or are horribly injured in the years of "normal" living than would have died or suffered long term consequences from covid. Indeed the typical death spike in young people from normal risk taking was essentially removed by keeping them locked away.
Covid can and does have consequences for everyone. Look at the charts for actual rates and tell me with a straight face any healthy 20 year old needed to have their freedoms removed for that level of risk.
Given that we all live together and can be carriers and spreaders even if we are not ourselves individually impacted, it should be acceptable that regardless of age a person/family stay isolated or take measures to distance themselves and reduce the chances of inhaling or exhaling a virus. Jointly taking such measures for the greater good - ending the spread of a virus - is not a "taking away of freedom".
> Jointly taking such measures for the greater good - ending the spread of a virus - is not a "taking away of freedom".
It absolutely is taking away freedom. It is also taking away opportunity, damaging mental health, and stunting progression.
The trade off being made is that young people suffered so the old would die slightly later. I was fine, I had it easy, I am not young. The pretence that we are all doing this for the "greater good" is wild. The Quality Adjusted Life Year outcome from most lockdowns was negative imo. It is just coincidence that the active voting population was the segment of society being prioritised eh?
Ah, I should have pointed out that I’m neither a US citizen nor a current resident. In many other parts of the world, we tend to have a different view of collaboration.
I am also not from the US, my views are not merely a representation of a weird pocket of the world you can just dismiss with a smug self satisfaction...
I enjoy this series quite a bit and read more than a few but these books are far denser than people realize. After each manga section there are several pages of an afterword of sorts that feature some of the densest textbook level explanations you'll ever see simply because they can't give the needed depth in the manga parts of the story if their goal is to actually teach something.
Plaid and the like now have API agreements with many of the major US banks, and are cutting down on their scraping usage (because its obviously unsustainable).
I would like to know who "the like" include because as far as I know it's just Plaid and maybe Intuit doing this. Until banks provide APIs directly to developers this just gives Plaid a monopoly. All devs who want to make finance apps securely have to go through Plaid.
Yes, KaiOS users are pretty much all in India. KaiOS is basically a step up from a feature phone but not quite at the level of something like Android or iOS so the phones it runs on are very cheap.
Whether you agree or disagree with it, ISPs have the right to fire you as a customer. However, I don't usually see that exercising that right unless it's for piracy.
