I dunno, Mozilla developers have had 10 releases in the past 4 months alone, with many bug fixes in every release, and 3 of those releases being minor versions each containing multiple new features. I certainly consider bug fixes and new features to be improvements happening to the browser.

Internet Archive to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/20240923091701/https://peabee.substack.com/p/whats-inside-the-qr-code-menu-at

Edit: oops, @ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org beat me to it!

Right! It’s definitely fulfilling the purpose OP stated here in this post, as long as that’s what you’re using it for. I’m just pointing out that it doesn’t do the other things it claims to do in the readme for the repo, so that’s something to be aware of.

This seems like a valuable utility for concealing writing style, though I feel like the provided example fails to illustrate the rest of the stated goal of the project, which is to “prevent biases, ensuring that the content is judged solely on its merits rather than on preconceived notions about the writer” and “enhance objectivity, allowing ideas to be received more universally”.

The example given is:

You: This is a demo of TextCloak!!!

Model: “Hey, I just wanted to share something cool with you guys. Check out this thing called TextCloak - it’s pretty neat!”

The model here is injecting bias that wasn’t present in the input (claims it is cool and neat) and adds pointlessly gendered words (you guys) and changes the tone drastically (from a more technical tone to a playful social-media style). These kinds of changes and additions are actually increasing the likelihood that a reader will form preconceived notions about the writer. (In this case, the writer ends up sounding socially frivolous and oblivious compared to the already neutral input text.)

This tool would be significantly more useful if it detected and preserved the tone and informational intent of input text.

Next up: Discord!

Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly “very popular” means, though I don’t see how popularity is a useful metric when we’re talking about free software which doesn’t rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.

However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I’m not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I’ll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:

• Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation together have roughly 840 employees as of 2020 (the latest numbers available on Wikipedia). I’m not sure how they split up who does what for developing the software, but I seriously doubt the vast majority of those 840 employees are developers.
• Blender Foundation has a team of 31 people (as of 2022). Most of them are developers/engineers/designers directly involved with improving the software.

For purposes of discussion, I’ll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can’t have 0.8 of a person).

In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it’s funding strategy.

Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender’s funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla’s at paying developers to work on their software.

Again, I don’t agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it’s clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.

it’s simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation

Please don’t excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it’s unavoidable.

There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards… it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.

No idea if this is a useful suggestion, but I saw it spoken of in another thread about CAD software: there’s a free and open source plugin called BlenderBIM that is apparently a decent option.

I think you need to take a break and get some perspective.

Besides, the Twitter link was already posted by the OP, why would it need to be posted again?

I don’t even have an EV and I have to see the ads on the chargers because they’re in front of the store I’m walking into. So far, I’ve only noticed that at grocery stores, but it’s annoying.

You don’t see how a corporate entity like Google is related to capitalism? What exactly do you think capitalism means?

Something like this would be cool for ublock origin too, with a sound pinging whenever an ad is blocked; could be fun.

There are other instances for both piped and invidious aside from the ones linked above. I believe the intended usage involves you finding the instance closest to you in terms of network, which may not be those specific instances linked above.

Mouse gestures, synchronising my settings across 2 PCs and an android phone, shortcuts to different searchers etc. Plus it would need to be visually customisable

It sounds like perhaps you haven’t looked into Firefox for a while, because out of the box it does all of the things you listed, except for gestures. There are multiple popular plugins that provide Firefox gestures easily. I’m not sure what visual customizations you’re referring to, but Firefox also has had support for themes for ages now.

FYI, bots and crawlers can simply ignore your robots.txt entirely. This is probably common knowledge around these parts, but I’ve run into clients at work who thought it was a law or something.

I do like the idea of intentionally polluting the data robots will see, as suggested by this comment. There’s no reliable way to block them without also blocking humans, so making the crawled data as useless as possible is a good option.

Just be careful not to also confuse screen readers with that tactic, so that accessibility is maintained for humans. It should be easy enough if you keep your aria attributes filled out appropriately, I imagine.

Isn’t that kind of the nature of open source though? Waiting until something is “finished” before making it open source would cut off a lot of innovation and contribution possibilities. Some software would never be seen because the original author didn’t get to “finish” it and nobody else could pick it up.

Unfinished open source software releases are a good thing.

I don’t understand; how would a potential mugger or murderer know ahead of time that you don’t have a banking app installed on your phone?