@glyph Did you quote post something?
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@aeva @mcc @seanlinsley yep, $99/year to make a binary that can be double-clicked upon. it sucks.
but I do already pay that rent, and I have an open offer to mutuals that if you ever have a side-project or open source thing that would probably work on a mac but needs the pixie dust, let me know and I will bless it appropriately and maybe write a build script. obviously not offering infinite free porting work but if it’s just to dismiss the toll troll I am happy to help
@aeva @mcc @seanlinsley (*I* need the source to do this but for moots it does not need to *be* open source, as long as you trust my discretion)
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@aeva @seanlinsley the nomenclature was absolutely correct at the time! and technically you are correct that they referred to it as some version of “OS X” for “most” of the last 20 years. but only because it was current for the 11 years preceding 2016. also it’s fine to call it that, it’s just indicative of apple’s own somewhat confused meandering around on the branding for this. I was reacting to the fact that your AAA anecdote used the label, not the flashback
@glyph @seanlinsley ah. last time i regularly used Apple OS(i can't be bothered to find the unicode tm symbol you'll just have to imagine it) was my previous job, which i got fired from in early 2016 iirc. i wasn't kidding when i said "a friend" worked on a AAA port
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@aeva @mcc @seanlinsley yep, $99/year to make a binary that can be double-clicked upon. it sucks.
but I do already pay that rent, and I have an open offer to mutuals that if you ever have a side-project or open source thing that would probably work on a mac but needs the pixie dust, let me know and I will bless it appropriately and maybe write a build script. obviously not offering infinite free porting work but if it’s just to dismiss the toll troll I am happy to help
@glyph @mcc @seanlinsley oh cool. that's not against the rules?
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@glyph @mcc @seanlinsley oh cool. that's not against the rules?
@aeva @mcc @seanlinsley I can’t imagine how it would be. maybe if we lived in different jurisdictions and there were app store revenue involved or something? but the only “getting in trouble” I could imagine for 3rd-party download mac stuff would be if you put some malware in there it might burn my account if it got caught
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@aeva @mcc @seanlinsley I can’t imagine how it would be. maybe if we lived in different jurisdictions and there were app store revenue involved or something? but the only “getting in trouble” I could imagine for 3rd-party download mac stuff would be if you put some malware in there it might burn my account if it got caught
@aeva @mcc @seanlinsley to be clear please don’t put any malware in there
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@aeva @mcc @seanlinsley to be clear please don’t put any malware in there
@glyph @mcc @seanlinsley if malware ends up in any of my projects i'll be just as surprised as you
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@glyph @mcc @seanlinsley if malware ends up in any of my projects i'll be just as surprised as you
@glyph @mcc @seanlinsley anyway, I'll keep your offer in mind should the stars align for it. i don't have any hardware to port on, so it probably won't be for a while. ironically i am somewhat interested in doing a retro osx port, but i also don't have hardware for that handy either. the next actual planned port is "webpage"
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@glyph I tried switching to Safari and made it about two months before I got angry and came back to Firefox, simply because the Firefox feature set is too damn good: tab containers for sandboxing certain domains, tab sending (push and pull) between multiple devices, and proper ad block extensions and privacy features.
Every time they make me angry with their ai nonsense I just remember that no other browser gets even one of those right, let alone all three.
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@glyph I tried switching to Safari and made it about two months before I got angry and came back to Firefox, simply because the Firefox feature set is too damn good: tab containers for sandboxing certain domains, tab sending (push and pull) between multiple devices, and proper ad block extensions and privacy features.
Every time they make me angry with their ai nonsense I just remember that no other browser gets even one of those right, let alone all three.
@amethyst Trend lines suggest that at least half of Firefox users have stopped using it in the last 5 years or so, so I'm curious to hear from them — I was very surprised when I saw the public numbers because some version of the story you just related is the one I hear the most often *socially* from people who talk about Firefox at all, and I kinda assumed that their user population was holding steady as a result.
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@amethyst Trend lines suggest that at least half of Firefox users have stopped using it in the last 5 years or so, so I'm curious to hear from them — I was very surprised when I saw the public numbers because some version of the story you just related is the one I hear the most often *socially* from people who talk about Firefox at all, and I kinda assumed that their user population was holding steady as a result.
@amethyst it *also* halved in usage from 2015-2020, so the people still using it in 2020 were almost certainly aware of some of its benefits and yet attrition continued, which is what I'm curious about.
I guess a better question for you might be: what made you want to *try* switching to Safari in the first place?
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@glyph Do you have a link to the data? (FWIW I'm not in the group, Firefox has been my secondary browser since around a decade ago, with Safari as primary due to the large performance difference historically and now mostly inertia.)
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@glyph Do you have a link to the data? (FWIW I'm not in the group, Firefox has been my secondary browser since around a decade ago, with Safari as primary due to the large performance difference historically and now mostly inertia.)
@mirth click around on https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2015 for various years, but you can look at other reports like https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2025-q3 . Different absolute numbers by a few percent depending on where you source your data, but similar trends all around
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@amethyst it *also* halved in usage from 2015-2020, so the people still using it in 2020 were almost certainly aware of some of its benefits and yet attrition continued, which is what I'm curious about.
I guess a better question for you might be: what made you want to *try* switching to Safari in the first place?
@glyph Most recently was because Apple Pay stopped working in Firefox on macOS (after working fine for a couple years), along with being tempted by some nifty-looking Safari extensions that—because iOS jail—would actually work on both the desktop and the phone browser, while my Firefox extensions only work on the desktop.
In the background, I've had growing concerns about Mozilla Foundation being stupid, doing/saying shitty things around crypto/ai/etc, along with repeated rollout of features I absolutely do not want in my browser, that were enabled by default, or the concern that Mozilla itself might be turning into enablers of various sorts and me losing trust in the foundation to follow its mission. Their most recent CEO announcement is adding an awful lot to that feeling.
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@mirth click around on https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2015 for various years, but you can look at other reports like https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2025-q3 . Different absolute numbers by a few percent depending on where you source your data, but similar trends all around
@glyph Interesting. Their self-reported data shows a slow decline in absolute usage [1] while ITU data [2] shows a big increase in total usage, consistent with the reports of rapidly dropping share.
1. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
2. https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-internet-use/ -
@glyph Interesting. Their self-reported data shows a slow decline in absolute usage [1] while ITU data [2] shows a big increase in total usage, consistent with the reports of rapidly dropping share.
1. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
2. https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-internet-use/@mirth interesting! the idea that the total internet population was increasing had not occurred to me but I guess if we are looking over a decade that makes sense!
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@mirth interesting! the idea that the total internet population was increasing had not occurred to me but I guess if we are looking over a decade that makes sense!
@glyph I have observed but not followed closely the conversations about Firefox direction, "AI" features, etc. I'm not well-informed enough to have any strong opinions but one thing that's certainly different vs a decade ago is all of the major browsers work well in terms of compatibility, performance, stability, etc. There are differences, but they're all plenty usable. At the same time there a lot of smaller hurdles to switching (bookmarks, device sync, G acct sign-in).
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@glyph I have observed but not followed closely the conversations about Firefox direction, "AI" features, etc. I'm not well-informed enough to have any strong opinions but one thing that's certainly different vs a decade ago is all of the major browsers work well in terms of compatibility, performance, stability, etc. There are differences, but they're all plenty usable. At the same time there a lot of smaller hurdles to switching (bookmarks, device sync, G acct sign-in).
@glyph What that suggests to me is the usage dynamics are more like soft drinks, an inexpensive product where choices are driven by habit, brand perception, and distribution more than anything in the product itself. Not much different from how Coca-Cola and Pepsi are more or less interchangeable and equally bad for you.
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@glyph I recently (= after summer vacay or so) stopped using Firefox altogether in favor of Librewolf. However I've been using Vivaldi for a long time now for the webpages that don't work well enough in Firefox. The list is depressingly long. Librewolf is so uptight that I now have to use Vivaldi ever more often. I can foresee a time when it will only work on old sites.
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@glyph What that suggests to me is the usage dynamics are more like soft drinks, an inexpensive product where choices are driven by habit, brand perception, and distribution more than anything in the product itself. Not much different from how Coca-Cola and Pepsi are more or less interchangeable and equally bad for you.
@glyph @glyph On the one hand this is an uninspiring possibility because it implies that without an external stabilizing force the browser world will stabilize with just a few dominant brands. On the other, it suggests that succeeding with a new browser doesn't necessarily entail a massive technical effort, more a cultural, packaging, and marketing project.
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@glyph I am using https://duckduckgo.com/ more than firefox these days. Reason: more private. Or so they promise.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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The support for #MathML in browser is often poor. The fact that instead of improving it the developers seem to be instead pressuring the standard bodies to impoverish the language only makes this worse.
(I am aware of #MathJax. We shouldn't need a heavy-duty #JavaScript library to solve typesetting problems. That's exactly what browser engines are there fore.)
I weep for the status of scientific publishing in the modern world.
(This rant is offered by my experience looking for options to make the SPHERIC newsletter available both in PDF and in HTML form. I don't even need complex math usually,, we try to avoid it in contributions because it's hard to typeset math outside of the TeX world. But the fact that in 2026 online the only safe way seems to be to typeset everything manually or rely on huge JavaScript libraries is a little depressing.)
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Parasocial media
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TerminalPhone
Encrypted push-to-talk voice communication over Tor hidden services.
TerminalPhone is a single, self-contained Bash script that provides anonymous, end-to-end encrypted voice and text communication between two parties over the Tor network. It operates as a walkie-talkie: you record a voice message, and it is compressed, encrypted, and transmitted to the remote party as a single unit. You can also send encrypted text messages during a call. No server infrastructure, no accounts, no phone numbers. Your Tor hidden service .onion address is your identity.
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Buona pubblicitá cucina-zanzariera-auto-profumo-fs a tutti!
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Figured out how to make little train tracks. 🚋
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@dalias
Come on guys, we sit on mastodon lamenting the sorry state of the world, and then everyone signs into an amazon account??? If our actions are to give money to an organization that aggressively works to destroy the middle class and liberal democracies world wide, then our words are meaningless... :-/Quoting The Disposable Heroes of Hip-Hopricy: hypocrisy is the greatest luxury....
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"CARTWHEEL" Tower, Fort Reno, Washington, DC, 2020.
All the pixels, none of the microwave radiation, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/49576247768
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And also: let's keep showing that WE embrace trans rights. Keep putting trans representation in art. Keep showing that it is a lie that abandoning trans rights is being driven by "the culture." WE make the culture. Let's make it super fucking trans.
We will get more & more pushback. The fash are going to try to silence us. It won't be easy, but we don't let them reshape OUR world.
