IMHO, 2.5 good engines are enough (webkit, blink, gecko - in the sense that webkit and blink are very similar). We just need more really good browsers which use gecko.
We certainly need more really good browsers which use gecko.
But for that to happen, Mozilla needs to up their effort to pull apart the components, decouple them from their own integration (firefox, thunderbird) and treat them as first-class projects, whose sole focus is to provide browser-builders and such with the components and tools to integrate the pieces.
Purely technical, it's still easier to build around "chrome" components. Which is why everything from electron, via "webviews" to the oculus browser or that webview-thing in your fridge, uses chrome tech and not mozilla. Edit: in an ideal world, it would be a no-brainer for e.g. Meta to pick Mozilla components to build a browser for their VR headset. Or for VW when they develop an in-car screen. Or for an app-builder to add some web-rendering of their in-app help.
But IMO this stems from a fundamental problem with Mozilla. Their cash-cow is firefox. So if they spend time and money making tech that then makes competing with firefox easier, they lose twice. So they will never truly commit to this.
Even if that would, IMO, be one of the most impactful things for Mozillas' manifesto of a "free internet".
It's notable that there's no real nodejs equivalent running on Mozilla tech. I'd love for someone closer to the tech to explain why there's not a rich ecosystem behind spidermonkey, etc.
I remember the good old times when Mozilla had a project named Chrome (yes) to (if my memory serves me correct) make building apps with gecko easier.
edit: Probably misremembering, now that I searched for it. Yes "chrome" was (and still is?) used to describe the non-webview parts of the FF but apparently I totally made up the project part.
Oh, thanks for the update. I assumed it'd be an incremental departure and that things couldn't have changed so much in 12 years (given the complexity of the browser engines). Now that I've read more about the fork, I learned that the codebases were already significantly different at the time they declared it officially as a fork. Interesting, because it feels like they are very compatible when I'm testing stuff as a developer (apart from their support of new stuff obviously).
Very interesting. For my use cases, Gemini's responses beat Sonnet 3.7's like 80% of the time (gut feeling, didn't collect actual data). It beats Sonnet 100% of the time when the context gets above 120k.
As usual with LLMs. In my experience, all those metrics are useful mainly to tell which models are definitely bad, but doesn't tell you much about which ones are good, and especially not how the good ones stack against each other in real world use cases.
Andrej Karpathy famously quipped that he only trusts two LLM evals: Chatbot Arena (which has humans blindly compare and score responses), and the r/LocalLLaMA comment section.
What's written in the article would have been a good summary of my feelings when WhatsApp, an application I cannot switch away from because of the network effects, decided to add an AI icon and then integrated AI in its search.
Last week, I switched to a Mac for the first time in my life after using Windows and Linux for around 30 years. Naturally, I hate a lot of things due to old habits, and the shortcuts constantly confuse me. But what really surprises me is the number of obvious bugs in common workflows. At least five times a day, I catch myself thinking, "There's no way this is actually broken." I didn't expect macOS to be even buggier than Windows.
That said, the hardware and the absence of Windows' user-hostile nonsense bring me endless joy. I don't think I'll go back to a PC (the Mac feels like a different class of quality) but to be honest, I expected more.
Off the top of my head I'm mainly thinking about `cut and paste` in Finder, that's a very common one people complain about, but other than that I'm curious what you're referring to if it's happening five times a day with new things, any chance you could outline some examples?
Examples just from today: Window snapping (or whatever it's called on mac) stops working until restart, keyboard type detection gets broken because it thinks my mouse is a keyboard so suddenly " and > are replaced, title bar disappears then the apple logo is halfway off screen when it randomly comes back.
I took a Mac at my current job since I really don't like Windows and I figured I would probably be able to hack it. I use Linux for all my personal stuff, all I need is bash and a browser, yeah?
Pfft. Nothing works, and a patronizing, laggy OS that actively tries to fight me at every step because it knows better than me.
What a joy. I'm sticking with Ubuntu/Fedora and having to figure out a driver issue every once in a while.
Iran has been investing in low-frequency radars that are better at detecting stealth aircraft. Aldo the areas around Tehran and key nuclear facilities (like Fordow or Natanz) have particularly dense air defense coverage. Iran also has a good number of S-300/Bavar launchers which can saturate the air space when radar is ineffective. Not to mention that they have an untouched air force (though they are probably not in the best shape).
Defending against missiles is much harder than defending against planes (be it normal ones or stealth ones). But you're not wrong, as they were supposed to be good at both, and they failed miserably against missiles.
Low frequency radar cannot be used to target the B2. The famous incident in Serbia is because the payload bay was open and that's what the missile was locked on to. Moments before, when the payload bay was closed, the Serbian radar saw nothing, despite being pointed directly at the F-117.
It is an inherent property of low frequency radar that it is not precise enough for weapons targeting. You can't engineer that away.
That being said, these aircraft aren't invincible. If you could visually see the B2, you might be able to essentially hip-fire a SAM at it and hope it eventually picks up some signal as it gets close, but that would be pretty unlikely to work and some missiles might not be capable of doing that at all. There are some soviet systems that are optically guided, and those would probably work fine. In the day at least. Heat seeking A2A missiles would probably also work, though the B2 has some mitigations there. All these options are a significantly limited engagement range though, and I would hope B2s aren't sent alone. A few F35s with the strike would fix all problems. SEAD is way easier when the enemy's radars can barely detect you at 60km. US anti-radiation weapons can reach out to over 100km easily, though even basic SAM doctrine can limit their "Reach out and ruin someone's day" ability.
Meanwhile this entire situation is pathetic. The signal leak demonstrates that even Trump's admin knows that Europe and Israel can handle this themselves, which they insist we shouldn't pay for, and then burn money doing. We couldn't afford $100 billion a year in old, explicitly deprecated systems like Gulf War era Bradleys and weapon systems we stopped using because they aren't that great but are definitely better than nothing and CERTAINLY better than the trucks and golf carts Russia is using, but we can afford $150k per B2 flight hour to turn yet more of the desert into craters.
I have something similar as a simple PHP script on a shared hosting service. I can't PHP well anymore so it's probably the worst and most insecure code I've produced by a big margin. Does it do the job? Yes.
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