13 ms·

The end of TenFourFox and what I've learned from it

172 points by foodstances 6y ago

muterad_murilax 6y ago
I hope someday a similar endeavour will be attempted for macOS Mojave (which I intend to stay on because of its support for 32-bit applications, removed in later versions of the OS).
- timw4mail 6y ago
  Has any browser been discontinued for Mojave yet?
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  We've got one going back to Lion. :) https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy
sfink 6y ago
I found this to be very well stated: Write "thank you" and mean it. Acknowledge the costs in time and money to bring it to you. Tell me what's good about it and what you use it for. That's how you create a relationship where I can see you as a person and not a demand request, and where you can see me as a maintainer and not a vending machine. Value my work so that I can value your insights into it.
birdyrooster 6y ago
Congratulations on such a long and successful run for TenFourFox. It’s a great project and losing TenFourFox will certainly spell the end of 10.4 daily driving and the many G4 machines which cannot be upgraded further. To me it is a testament to TenFourFox’s capability.
- classichasclass 6y ago
  Author here. Thanks for the kind word. It's not a post I wanted to make, but I think it's the post I should be making, for all the reasons I wrote.
  - psim1 6y ago
    I've got a G4 "arm-lamp" Mac that I occasionally boot up for fun, and it runs TenFourFox quite nicely. I have appreciated the project and had no idea it was the effort of a single developer/maintainer. Thank you.
    - classichasclass 6y ago
      There certainly are other contributors, but it's largely me. Thanks for the kind word. I have a 1.25GHz 15" iMac G4 myself. A beautiful form factor which deserves to be revived.
  - visiblink 6y ago
    I just wanted to chirp a "Thanks" here for all the work you've done to keep gopher going. I'm a daily user, have a small presence, and your work as an ambassador and steward of the protocol is greatly appreciated.
    - classichasclass 6y ago
      I never intended to be the de facto BDFL for Gopher, but it sort of ended up that way. Still, I'm glad to see others appreciate its unique qualities and find it useful.
      - skyfaller 6y ago
        I want to thank you as well. I've been really enjoying Gemini, and I don't think it would have happened without the resurgence of interest in Gopher. I want to make sure Gopher survives for retrocomputing, so that Gemini doesn't feel compelled to support the full weight of backwards compatibility for computers pre-dating the Web, and Gopher doesn't feel pressure to extend and update for modern needs (like privacy in a world of total surveillance). We need both, I think.
nonbirithm 6y ago
This is pretty indicative of the ability of anyone besides a fully staffed dev organization to maintain a web browser that can browse modern sites. I hope that the only people who are able to put in the effort to implement the ever growing web standards have good intentions and will not muck up what is quickly becoming too important of a communications medium for all of humanity.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- thesuitonym 6y ago
  The nice thing about the Internet is that if the web becomes too unwieldy, we can always throw it away and start something new. The great thing is that you don't have to throw it away to start working on something new.
jamespo 6y ago
What a great post, the dev can write as well as they can code.
tedunangst 6y ago
Modern browsers seem to be somewhat over their technological skis, so to speak. Next gen browser requires next gen runtime requires next gen library requires next gen compiler requires next gen system, etc.
kccqzy 6y ago
> Nowadays front ends have become impossible to debug by outsiders and the liberties taken by JavaScript minifiers are demonstrably not portable. I'm very surprised. What are the ways these JS minifiers are producing unportable JS? Do minifiers just remove white space, shorten variable names, and some may do some dead-code-elimination and inlining? How can JavaScript be non-portable?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Perhaps the Chromium / V8 monoculture is reinforced by mini-fied code?
nerdponx 6y ago
> Writing and maintaining a browser engine is fricking hard and everything moves far too quickly for a single developer now. However, JavaScript is what probably killed TenFourFox quickest. For better or for worse, web browsers' primary role is no longer to view documents; it is to view applications that, by sheer coincidence, sometimes resemble documents. You can make workarounds to gracefully degrade where we have missing HTML or DOM features, but JavaScript is pretty much run or don't, and more and more sites just plain collapse if any portion of it doesn't. Nowadays front ends have become impossible to debug by outsiders and the liberties taken by JavaScript minifiers are demonstrably not portable. No one cares because it works okay on the subset of browsers they want to support, but someone bringing up the rear like we are has no chance because you can't look at the source map and no one on the dev side has interest in or time for helping out the little guy. Making test cases from minified JavaScript is an exercise in untangling spaghetti that has welded itself together with superglue all over your chest hair, worsened by the fact that stepping through JavaScript on geriatic hardware with a million event handlers like waiting mousetraps is absolute agony. With that in mind, who's surprised there are fewer and fewer minority browser engines? Are you shocked that attempts like NetSurf, despite its best intentions and my undying affection for it, are really just toys if they lack full script runtimes? Trying and failing to keep up with the scripting treadmill is what makes them infeasible to use. If you're a front-end engineer and you throw in a dependency on Sexy Framework just because you can, don't complain when you only have a minority of browser choices because you're a big part of the problem.
- anthk 6y ago
  QuickJS would work fine in both Edbrowse and Netsurf.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
skyfaller 6y ago
As someone rooting for [NetSurf](https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ https://www.netsurf-browser.org/) (and any other remaining independent browser engines) to survive, I wonder if they'd be better off not supporting Javascript at all and simply focusing on good support for modern HTML and CSS, so it can at least be used to read documents. If Javascript is what finished TenFourFox, maybe attempting to support the full weight of modern Javascript and web apps is a trap. Let the big browsers try to be an entire operating system. Ultimately I'm coming to think that Gemini may be the best hope for a simpler internet that individuals can contribute and manage. - https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol-internet https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol... - https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.htm... Personally I love the Lagrange client on desktop, and the Ariane Android client. - https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ - https://oppen.digital/software/ariane/ https://oppen.digital/software/ariane/
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Gemini’s standard is missing several important means of semantic tagging that screenreaders need to properly deal with content. I feel that if we are going to replace HTML, we still need to ensure that the disabled are first-class citizens from day one of whatever new standard we use.
  - skyfaller 6y ago
    Yes, I agree accessibility is a vital concern that needs to be fully addressed before Gemini is finalized. Here are some posts I found using this Gemini search engine: gemini://geminispace.info/ - gemini://tilde.team/~tomasino/journal/20200601-accessibility.gmi - gemini://gemini.marmaladefoo.com/blog/7-Sep-2020_Parsing_preformatted_alt_text.gmi - gemini://ebc.li/posts/alt-text-proposal.gmi You can run them through the Gemini web portal if you don't have a Gemini client yet: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/
  - nonbirithm 6y ago
    I think this is an interesting point. Now that nearly everyone uses the Internet, the bar for accessibility and the accompanying workload for implementing it is considerably higher than what it was in the 90's. There probably weren't as many accessibility advocates back then. But accessibility is still crucial to have from a modern standpoint.
anticristi 6y ago
> What should you do? Phrase it better. Post your reports with the attitude that you are just one user, using free software, from the humility of your own personal experience on your own system. Make it clear you don't expect anything from the report, you are grateful the software exists, you intend to keep using it and this is your small way of giving back. Say this in words because I can't see your face or hear your voice. Write "thank you" and mean it. Acknowledge the costs in time and money to bring it to you. Tell me what's good about it and what you use it for. That's how you create a relationship where I can see you as a person and not a demand request, and where you can see me as a maintainer and not a vending machine. Value my work so that I can value your insights into it. Politeness, courtesy and understanding didn't go out the window just because we're interacting through a computer screen. This should be part of bug reporting training.
- pwdisswordfish6 6y ago
  Strong disagreement from here. I don't want that kind of stuff in bug reports for the same reason that I don't want to have to deal with "hello", "good morning", from coworkers in messenger applications, and I will assume that for your sake you don't want to deal with it either, unless you explicitly say so. So if this is a requirement for writing and responding to bugs, then you should "say it in words" that that's what you want.
  - eropple 6y ago
    The baseline expectation of social niceties is the lubricant upon which our human systems run. That you don't personally find them necessary, or even perhaps find them aggravating, does not mean that they should not be by-default valued in the recognition that the person at the other end of the line is a fellow human being with feelings and needs. It does not take much effort to be nice in the general case. Your desire for efficiency does not supersede respect for others' humanity. And, frankly--resentment at a coworker for saying "good morning"? Yikes.
    - pwdisswordfish6 6y ago
imwillofficial 6y ago
This was such a wonderful project. It kept my 12 inch PowerBook G4 alive for far longer than expected.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
This is a great project. My ex still relies on it on my old 2007 MacBook. I know she should upgrade. But for some people a computer is just something you use once a year to update your CV or something. But I understand it can't be supported forever. Thanks for supporting it as long as you could! PS: I know many people that would be interested in old computers would also block tracking. I certainly do. So you won't see the entire userbase in the stats.
- classichasclass 6y ago
  Thanks. Yes, I'm sure there are more than ping the server for updates, and a lot more machines that just come out occasionally. It's fun seeing others rework it to support old Intel machines even though it was never built for that. At this point, though, it's just a matter of acknowledging the wall is approaching even if we haven't hit it yet.
shrubble 6y ago
I remember sending off a particular weird DIMM that fit one of the floodgap machines, suprised that TFF has lasted as long as it has. It still mostly works with Archive.org and I was listening to some old radio shows using it and reading pdfs on the 12" MacBook G4.
cassepipe 6y ago
There is still hope for old ppc macs. Void Linux ppc is being actively developed and gives you access to up to date software while still being lightweight. https://voidlinux-ppc.org/ https://voidlinux-ppc.org/
cellularmitosis 6y ago
> and because there is no Rust support for 32-bit PowerPC on OS X It's kind of a bummer how little support there is for 32-bit PowerPC / OS X. Golang as well has no support (though they do support 64-bit PPC). To be honest, I didn't even realize his Javascript port had JIT support (the modern web is so slow on my eMac that I just assumed it was all interpreted). At any rate, I greatly appreciate TenFourFox!
gwillen 6y ago
> The bug reports I liked least were the ones that complained about some pervasive, completely disabling flaw permeating the entire browser from top to bottom. Invariably this was that the browser "was slow," but startup crashes were probably a distant second place. The bug report would inevitably add something along the lines of this should be obvious, or talk about the symptom(s) as if everyone must be experiencing it (them). > I'm not doubting what people say they're seeing. But you should also consider that asserting the software has such a grave fault effectively alleges I either don't use the software or care about it, or I would have noticed. It sucks to get these kinds of reports when you are a solo dev who uses your own project, and you really do actively use the software and care about it. But I feel like I've been trained over the years that the devs very often do _not_ seem to use their own software or care about it. So if a major showstopping problem happens on my machine, and it repros on my other machine, and then again on a randomly-selected friend's machine, I tend to assume it's widespread and the devs just don't care that much. (I still try to clearly state the repro conditions as best I am able. But if I can't find a system it _doesn't_ repro on, then it's hard to be specific.) Sadly, this is probably a case where lots of otherwise-good users have been let down by shitty devs, and lots of otherwise-good devs have been let down by shitty users, and nobody trusts anybody anymore. (Most recent irritating example: Google Sheets for Android has a 'remove' menu item in the 'Last opened by me' view, which claims (when I select a document owned by another user) that it will remove the document from view, but "Collaborators will still have access." At least the last two times I checked, this isn't true; it will effectively delete the document, for everyone but the owner. This has been the case for months at least; I believe it may have started when Google Drive switched their model to disallow "hard links" of documents. I'm suspicious about whether anybody on the Google Drive team has a very clear mental picture of what their sharing/containment model even _is_ anymore, at least for free users who don't have a "workspace". I reported this using the 'feedback' tool in the app, but I'm well aware that it will not reach anybody who cares.)
nachtigall 6y ago
I really liked reading this. I never used TenFourFox (no Mac user at all) but occasionally came across its blog posts because it is in the planet.mozilla.org RSS feed. I really liked how the motivation and problems for a (hobbyist) OSS project of this scale are written out. This made it an interesting read for me - I'd say for actually almost anybody somewhat related to unpaid FOSS. On a second note it is a shame that there are no harder governmental restrictions that hardware has to be supported by its software for a certain time. So much (forced!) waste on resources because the manufacturer wants to sell its next-generation... There are a lot of phones - still good enough hardware - but you cannot get updates for it after 3 years...

172 points by foodstances 6y ago

I hope someday a similar endeavour will be attempted for macOS Mojave (which I intend to stay on because of its support for 32-bit applications, removed in later versions of the OS).

timw4mail 6y ago
Has any browser been discontinued for Mojave yet?
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
We've got one going back to Lion. :) https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy

sfink 6y ago

I found this to be very well stated: Write "thank you" and mean it. Acknowledge the costs in time and money to bring it to you. Tell me what's good about it and what you use it for. That's how you create a relationship where I can see you as a person and not a demand request, and where you can see me as a maintainer and not a vending machine. Value my work so that I can value your insights into it.

birdyrooster 6y ago

Congratulations on such a long and successful run for TenFourFox. It’s a great project and losing TenFourFox will certainly spell the end of 10.4 daily driving and the many G4 machines which cannot be upgraded further. To me it is a testament to TenFourFox’s capability.

classichasclass 6y ago
Author here. Thanks for the kind word. It's not a post I wanted to make, but I think it's the post I should be making, for all the reasons I wrote.
- psim1 6y ago
  I've got a G4 "arm-lamp" Mac that I occasionally boot up for fun, and it runs TenFourFox quite nicely. I have appreciated the project and had no idea it was the effort of a single developer/maintainer. Thank you.
  - classichasclass 6y ago
    There certainly are other contributors, but it's largely me. Thanks for the kind word. I have a 1.25GHz 15" iMac G4 myself. A beautiful form factor which deserves to be revived.
- visiblink 6y ago
  I just wanted to chirp a "Thanks" here for all the work you've done to keep gopher going. I'm a daily user, have a small presence, and your work as an ambassador and steward of the protocol is greatly appreciated.
  - classichasclass 6y ago
    I never intended to be the de facto BDFL for Gopher, but it sort of ended up that way. Still, I'm glad to see others appreciate its unique qualities and find it useful.
    - skyfaller 6y ago
      I want to thank you as well. I've been really enjoying Gemini, and I don't think it would have happened without the resurgence of interest in Gopher. I want to make sure Gopher survives for retrocomputing, so that Gemini doesn't feel compelled to support the full weight of backwards compatibility for computers pre-dating the Web, and Gopher doesn't feel pressure to extend and update for modern needs (like privacy in a world of total surveillance). We need both, I think.

nonbirithm 6y ago

This is pretty indicative of the ability of anyone besides a fully staffed dev organization to maintain a web browser that can browse modern sites. I hope that the only people who are able to put in the effort to implement the ever growing web standards have good intentions and will not muck up what is quickly becoming too important of a communications medium for all of humanity.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thesuitonym 6y ago
The nice thing about the Internet is that if the web becomes too unwieldy, we can always throw it away and start something new. The great thing is that you don't have to throw it away to start working on something new.

jamespo 6y ago

What a great post, the dev can write as well as they can code.

tedunangst 6y ago

Modern browsers seem to be somewhat over their technological skis, so to speak. Next gen browser requires next gen runtime requires next gen library requires next gen compiler requires next gen system, etc.

kccqzy 6y ago

> Nowadays front ends have become impossible to debug by outsiders and the liberties taken by JavaScript minifiers are demonstrably not portable. I'm very surprised. What are the ways these JS minifiers are producing unportable JS? Do minifiers just remove white space, shorten variable names, and some may do some dead-code-elimination and inlining? How can JavaScript be non-portable?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
paulryanrogers 6y ago
Perhaps the Chromium / V8 monoculture is reinforced by mini-fied code?

nerdponx 6y ago

> Writing and maintaining a browser engine is fricking hard and everything moves far too quickly for a single developer now. However, JavaScript is what probably killed TenFourFox quickest. For better or for worse, web browsers' primary role is no longer to view documents; it is to view applications that, by sheer coincidence, sometimes resemble documents. You can make workarounds to gracefully degrade where we have missing HTML or DOM features, but JavaScript is pretty much run or don't, and more and more sites just plain collapse if any portion of it doesn't. Nowadays front ends have become impossible to debug by outsiders and the liberties taken by JavaScript minifiers are demonstrably not portable. No one cares because it works okay on the subset of browsers they want to support, but someone bringing up the rear like we are has no chance because you can't look at the source map and no one on the dev side has interest in or time for helping out the little guy. Making test cases from minified JavaScript is an exercise in untangling spaghetti that has welded itself together with superglue all over your chest hair, worsened by the fact that stepping through JavaScript on geriatic hardware with a million event handlers like waiting mousetraps is absolute agony. With that in mind, who's surprised there are fewer and fewer minority browser engines? Are you shocked that attempts like NetSurf, despite its best intentions and my undying affection for it, are really just toys if they lack full script runtimes? Trying and failing to keep up with the scripting treadmill is what makes them infeasible to use. If you're a front-end engineer and you throw in a dependency on Sexy Framework just because you can, don't complain when you only have a minority of browser choices because you're a big part of the problem.

anthk 6y ago
QuickJS would work fine in both Edbrowse and Netsurf.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

skyfaller 6y ago

As someone rooting for [NetSurf](https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ https://www.netsurf-browser.org/) (and any other remaining independent browser engines) to survive, I wonder if they'd be better off not supporting Javascript at all and simply focusing on good support for modern HTML and CSS, so it can at least be used to read documents. If Javascript is what finished TenFourFox, maybe attempting to support the full weight of modern Javascript and web apps is a trap. Let the big browsers try to be an entire operating system. Ultimately I'm coming to think that Gemini may be the best hope for a simpler internet that individuals can contribute and manage. - https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol-internet https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol... - https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.htm... Personally I love the Lagrange client on desktop, and the Ariane Android client. - https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ - https://oppen.digital/software/ariane/ https://oppen.digital/software/ariane/

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Gemini’s standard is missing several important means of semantic tagging that screenreaders need to properly deal with content. I feel that if we are going to replace HTML, we still need to ensure that the disabled are first-class citizens from day one of whatever new standard we use.
- skyfaller 6y ago
  Yes, I agree accessibility is a vital concern that needs to be fully addressed before Gemini is finalized. Here are some posts I found using this Gemini search engine: gemini://geminispace.info/ - gemini://tilde.team/~tomasino/journal/20200601-accessibility.gmi - gemini://gemini.marmaladefoo.com/blog/7-Sep-2020_Parsing_preformatted_alt_text.gmi - gemini://ebc.li/posts/alt-text-proposal.gmi You can run them through the Gemini web portal if you don't have a Gemini client yet: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/
- nonbirithm 6y ago
  I think this is an interesting point. Now that nearly everyone uses the Internet, the bar for accessibility and the accompanying workload for implementing it is considerably higher than what it was in the 90's. There probably weren't as many accessibility advocates back then. But accessibility is still crucial to have from a modern standpoint.

anticristi 6y ago

> What should you do? Phrase it better. Post your reports with the attitude that you are just one user, using free software, from the humility of your own personal experience on your own system. Make it clear you don't expect anything from the report, you are grateful the software exists, you intend to keep using it and this is your small way of giving back. Say this in words because I can't see your face or hear your voice. Write "thank you" and mean it. Acknowledge the costs in time and money to bring it to you. Tell me what's good about it and what you use it for. That's how you create a relationship where I can see you as a person and not a demand request, and where you can see me as a maintainer and not a vending machine. Value my work so that I can value your insights into it. Politeness, courtesy and understanding didn't go out the window just because we're interacting through a computer screen. This should be part of bug reporting training.

pwdisswordfish6 6y ago
Strong disagreement from here. I don't want that kind of stuff in bug reports for the same reason that I don't want to have to deal with "hello", "good morning", from coworkers in messenger applications, and I will assume that for your sake you don't want to deal with it either, unless you explicitly say so. So if this is a requirement for writing and responding to bugs, then you should "say it in words" that that's what you want.
- eropple 6y ago
  The baseline expectation of social niceties is the lubricant upon which our human systems run. That you don't personally find them necessary, or even perhaps find them aggravating, does not mean that they should not be by-default valued in the recognition that the person at the other end of the line is a fellow human being with feelings and needs. It does not take much effort to be nice in the general case. Your desire for efficiency does not supersede respect for others' humanity. And, frankly--resentment at a coworker for saying "good morning"? Yikes.
  - pwdisswordfish6 6y ago

imwillofficial 6y ago

This was such a wonderful project. It kept my 12 inch PowerBook G4 alive for far longer than expected.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

This is a great project. My ex still relies on it on my old 2007 MacBook. I know she should upgrade. But for some people a computer is just something you use once a year to update your CV or something. But I understand it can't be supported forever. Thanks for supporting it as long as you could! PS: I know many people that would be interested in old computers would also block tracking. I certainly do. So you won't see the entire userbase in the stats.

classichasclass 6y ago
Thanks. Yes, I'm sure there are more than ping the server for updates, and a lot more machines that just come out occasionally. It's fun seeing others rework it to support old Intel machines even though it was never built for that. At this point, though, it's just a matter of acknowledging the wall is approaching even if we haven't hit it yet.

shrubble 6y ago

I remember sending off a particular weird DIMM that fit one of the floodgap machines, suprised that TFF has lasted as long as it has. It still mostly works with Archive.org and I was listening to some old radio shows using it and reading pdfs on the 12" MacBook G4.

cassepipe 6y ago

There is still hope for old ppc macs. Void Linux ppc is being actively developed and gives you access to up to date software while still being lightweight. https://voidlinux-ppc.org/ https://voidlinux-ppc.org/

cellularmitosis 6y ago

> and because there is no Rust support for 32-bit PowerPC on OS X It's kind of a bummer how little support there is for 32-bit PowerPC / OS X. Golang as well has no support (though they do support 64-bit PPC). To be honest, I didn't even realize his Javascript port had JIT support (the modern web is so slow on my eMac that I just assumed it was all interpreted). At any rate, I greatly appreciate TenFourFox!

gwillen 6y ago

> The bug reports I liked least were the ones that complained about some pervasive, completely disabling flaw permeating the entire browser from top to bottom. Invariably this was that the browser "was slow," but startup crashes were probably a distant second place. The bug report would inevitably add something along the lines of this should be obvious, or talk about the symptom(s) as if everyone must be experiencing it (them). > I'm not doubting what people say they're seeing. But you should also consider that asserting the software has such a grave fault effectively alleges I either don't use the software or care about it, or I would have noticed. It sucks to get these kinds of reports when you are a solo dev who uses your own project, and you really do actively use the software and care about it. But I feel like I've been trained over the years that the devs very often do _not_ seem to use their own software or care about it. So if a major showstopping problem happens on my machine, and it repros on my other machine, and then again on a randomly-selected friend's machine, I tend to assume it's widespread and the devs just don't care that much. (I still try to clearly state the repro conditions as best I am able. But if I can't find a system it _doesn't_ repro on, then it's hard to be specific.) Sadly, this is probably a case where lots of otherwise-good users have been let down by shitty devs, and lots of otherwise-good devs have been let down by shitty users, and nobody trusts anybody anymore. (Most recent irritating example: Google Sheets for Android has a 'remove' menu item in the 'Last opened by me' view, which claims (when I select a document owned by another user) that it will remove the document from view, but "Collaborators will still have access." At least the last two times I checked, this isn't true; it will effectively delete the document, for everyone but the owner. This has been the case for months at least; I believe it may have started when Google Drive switched their model to disallow "hard links" of documents. I'm suspicious about whether anybody on the Google Drive team has a very clear mental picture of what their sharing/containment model even _is_ anymore, at least for free users who don't have a "workspace". I reported this using the 'feedback' tool in the app, but I'm well aware that it will not reach anybody who cares.)

nachtigall 6y ago

I really liked reading this. I never used TenFourFox (no Mac user at all) but occasionally came across its blog posts because it is in the planet.mozilla.org RSS feed. I really liked how the motivation and problems for a (hobbyist) OSS project of this scale are written out. This made it an interesting read for me - I'd say for actually almost anybody somewhat related to unpaid FOSS. On a second note it is a shame that there are no harder governmental restrictions that hardware has to be supported by its software for a certain time. So much (forced!) waste on resources because the manufacturer wants to sell its next-generation... There are a lot of phones - still good enough hardware - but you cannot get updates for it after 3 years...