Opera 10 was getting into some wild stuff. 9 was obviously just winning. But I loved how 10 literally gave you the user your own endpoints on the web. The browser is the server (by way of proxy)! Massively inspirational decentralization. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/opera-unite.html
* They came with a mail and chat (IRC) clients, a download manager, a set of browser dev tools, and in the age of limited internet traffic all of that was smaller than a single download of Firefox.
* Their dev tools were the first that allowed remote debugging. You could run Opera on your phone (Symbian, Windows Mobile, early Android) and debug your website from a computer.
* They were the first browser to sync your bookmarks, settings, history, extensions across devices.
* They were the first to add process isolation, albeit initially on Linux only. If an extension crashed your page it didn't take the whole browser down with it. This was later added first by Microsoft in IE8 and then by Google in Chrome.
Their browser was a brilliant piece of tech and a brilliant product. Too bad that the product couldn't survive under pressure.
I've been writing HTML for at least 20 years professionally and this has absolutely not been my experience. Yes, I've encountered some people using divs for everything but in the vast majority of cases people have used semantically correct HTML, at least when it comes to buttons.
> Yes, I've encountered some people using divs for everything but in the vast majority of cases people have used semantically correct HTML, at least when it comes to buttons.
I dunno; ISTR that the materializecss library used `<a>` for buttons.
"use strict" has been around since 2009. That being said, this is not a TypeScript or React feature but yet another black box magic NextJS feature to try to lock you into the Vercel ecosystem.
The only people losing faith in Google (search) are power users such as us. Regular users haven't noticed the decline, and search may even have improved for them. We are not Google Search's target audience. We need to stop pretending all products are built for the power user niche.
My wife is an opposite of power user and she now uses mostly chatgpt for anything more complex. The ease with fluent sentence search compared to trying to fit those few right terms that google search would understand, not overdo it, avoid over-SEO-ed pages... google search has been gamed for so long it became victim of its own success. It just has momentum but thats waning.
Plus often first results are pure ads, fuck that and fuck them. Maybe LLMs will one be gamed similarly, then we move to something else but right now its night and day even for common folks. Who cares knows it.
Just recent case - we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner. Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search like nytimes with their paid very selective biased reviews, went over quite a few reliable ones, user reviews etc and came to my wife with list of preference vs cost vs reliability vs other aspects. She puts a short sentence in chatgpt and its the same freakin' list, in 20s.
For this kind of product search, may I suggest Consumer Reports. It's one of the very few sites I'd consider unbiased since they (a) do testing with actual technicians and extensive laboratories, (b) anonymously buy all the products they test and they don't take gifts or manufacturers' sponsorships, (c) don't take advertising. They are funded by subscriptions, donations, and grants, and have been in existence for 89 years.
Specifically for robot vacuums, I looked just now and Consumer Reports has reviewed 46 different models from 14 manufacturers. (I knew about Roomba but had no idea that robot vacuums had become such a big category.) I'm putting the robot vacuum link below to give an overview. It's worth subscribing to evaluate options for a big purchase.
+1 for Consumer Reports. They're not expensive either, something like $5 per month. If they keep you from buying a bad fridge, it pays for itself!
Their recentish coverage of lead in foods is a bit embarrassing though, since they used a California standard for dosage limits that even the EU would blush at.
I love this response, and I agree 100% with your suggestion, but, isn't it obvious? They didn't want to pay for high quality information. Instead, they needed to wade through rubbish "unpaid"/"free" search results. Or in their own words: "Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search".
Regular users have absolutely noticed the decline. A number of people I know have mentioned it to me unprompted. None of them are power users or even particularly tech-oriented.
I'm a so called power user and don't really understand why everyone says it's worse. Google is better than ever. The problem I've seen is folks using older techniques for searching that don't really make sense anymore.
I don't see how exact search string can lose its sense. But it does yield "no results", more often than before even if the string has to be publicly available somewhere, in a source I could make sense of.
I can see how google can be seen as better in some ways, but brushing all case where it's worse as irrelevant looks like an easy shortcut to shut down complains without caring if they might be legit.
A lot of non-power users are complementing Google search with ChatGPT. The main reason is that it will give an answer to more specific questions. Like “what are some quotes famous athletes have said about Usain Bolt”.
I thought they were talking about the traditional blue links Google search results, not the AI returned results. Then sure -- ChatGPT, Gemini, etc... I put them all in the same bucket as complementary. Interestingtly though, I don't get the AI Overview on mobile, so there I'd have to explicitly go to an LLM focused interface.
I just tried the same search from my mobile phone. I see the same AI generated response.
Real question: Do you think normies distinguish between traditional Google search results and AI Overview? To me, normies use Google to find an answer. They don't care too much where the answer comes from.
Beyond that--most non-technical people associate "web search" or search engines with Google. There's nothing else to them, even those old enough to remember the 90s/2000s before dominance was established.
Most people I know are now using deepseek. I don't even have to show them a filtered ad-free web, anymore (that most didn't even notice the lack of cruft).
I think it may add a bit of security, but containers are better thought of as mechanism to deploy and manage applications/services.
They can be useful as part of a security posture, but you kinda have to wrap everything up in SELinux or as part of some other system. Which is a lot easier to do with containers then it is to do with normal applications.
Also for most purposes:
If you want to integrate container applications into your desktop you'd be better off with something like Flatpak or distrobox/toolbx.
there are lots of things that these applications do to setup the environment and integrate into your home directory that isn't going to be done with simple scripts like this.
That doesn't mean that these scripts are useless, of course. I you want to run a application with more isolation and less integration then it is a lot easier to do it this way then with something like distrobox.
Like if you don't want to give a application access to your home directory. Or want to emulate a container environment for the cloud locally so you can hack on it.
Even if it did, if you end up connecting your GPU, display manager, dbus, pipewire and a bunch of other devices to the untrusted application, you would kind of lose out on it anyways.
Only benefit I can see here is the separation of the filesystems, but there are easier and simpler ways than docker to do that.
I'll agree that "Docker" has a history of "interesting" security practices.
But the core technologies underlying containers: Namespaces, cgroups, POSIX Capabilties, and SELinux. "Should" provide a level of isolation equivalent to a virtual machine[1].
If you're using a decent container platform like Podman, you should feel relatively good about the application's security and isolation.
