coldpie

> I highly doubt the AI era is going to make it magically better.

Yeah, handing control of the entire tech industry over to a couple of proprietary, black box products built & owned by like four hyper-capitalist sociopaths is definitely not going to go well.

Just curious, what distro & DE did you choose? I'm always looking for a friendly distro to recommend to people.

I just think it's silly to focus your efforts complaining about $5B being arguably somewhat inefficiently spent, versus hundreds of billions of dollars going straight into the garbage. There's far better things to focus on if you're concerned about money going to waste.

I identified ways to save 30 times that much money in this thread. It is more productive for you to focus your efforts there.

Nah. Groups of people spending hours and hours debating whether it is smarter to buy the $1.95 or the $1.99 can of beans at the store is being silly. Just pick one. Or buy both! It's only two bucks and we spent $2,000 on flights to Europe last week.

> It's not nickles and dimes

Yes it is. So far, we've flushed enough money down the Iran war toilet to pay for ten of these, and there's no end in sight.

Trying to minmax for the most cost effective renewable energy is fretting over spending nickles and dimes, while billionaires and megacorps are setting hundred dollar bills on fire. It's just not a productive place to be focusing your energy. We can afford both types of renewable energy, easily, we're just choosing to let others waste that money on garbage instead.

Five billion is just not all that much money. One guy spent eight times that to change the moderation policies of one social media website. Microsoft spent 14 times that to buy a video game company that they've largely mismanaged. Those two purchases alone could've paid for 20 of these reactors, maybe more if economies of scale kick in. Don't even ask how much Facebook is flushing down the toilet on VR or how much we're spending every single day in Iran. We could choose to spend our money on things like clean energy, but we choose other things instead.

> almost all of them were alienated and confused by the decisions that the browser made and continues to make.

I don't think so. I've never been alienated by it. It's a browser. It does browser things. It's fine.

What decisions have confused and alienated you? People in this thread are screaming bloody murder because of a couple pixels on tab bar and a low-contrast gradient. This isn't a rational reaction to a minor graphical tweak, it's bonkers hysterics.

It turns out it's really tough to compete with one of the largest companies in the world when they are very highly motivated to capture as many users as they can (unlike Microsoft around the turn of the millennium). I think there are things Firefox could do to recapture the audience[1], but I also don't think turning the tabs into pills or whatever justifies the kind of language being used in this thread.

[1] I think implementing new popup blocking would generate some real positive conversation: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/12/31/web-browsers-have-...

Meanwhile in this thread, the current top comment is:

> OMFG! Look at the massive amount of space between the stupid pill shaped tabs ... If I wanted to use a shitty safari UI that sacrifices usability for cutesy looks, I would use Safari. ... Mozilla: why in the hell do I need to trust some extension builder to give me an amazing UI/UX?

and just a few top-level comments downthread:

> Are they forcing this? You have got to be kidding me. Why is this happening? Is this making them money or is this to cater to the ego of some product manager? ... What a fucking hostile, brazen change. Yeah, fuck you too Mozilla.

Something about Firefox makes people behave like absolute maniacs.

What kind of breakage is it? I feel like these days the devs would have to go way out of their way to create a breakage. Web standards and frameworks are so well designed & supported today that I'm baffled how they could screw things up so badly that they break it in one browser but not another. I could see it if they're getting into advanced features like direct hardware access (USB, hardware graphics acceleration), but it doesn't sound like that's what you're talking about.

Is it really 50% of the time you visit a site you have a problem? That seems crazy high for you to be encountering when my rate is approximately 0% across decades. Possibly you have an extension interfering?

Can you provide an example? I don't think I've ever encountered this, I'd be curious to see what it's like.

Firefox would probably be interested in a report if you have an example of it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/report-breakage-due-blo...

There's a lot of HN users who are just absolutely furious about Firefox and will jump into any thread to scream about how much they hate it and everyone involved in making it. The heat behind the complaints is so out of proportion it would be comical if they weren't targeting real people. It's baffling to me the scale of negativity people have to this actually pretty good piece of software existing in an unbelievably hostile product space.

Are you talking about the color scheme of the webpage, not the browser UI? The thing reported by the prefers-color-scheme hint[1]?

Building a whole user interface to declare the setting of that preference per-site seems like a pretty high cost for something that won't be used by very many people. Most people just want the site to match their current preference. Instead, websites usually provide a way to override the setting which is stored as a cookie or whatever. I think overriding that value belongs in an extension, not as a core browser feature.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...

Lol, there's enough people out there with hundreds of tabs open that there's clearly a real usecase for it, but I have just never understood this usage model. Feels to me like complaining you get bad gas mileage in your car because you're carrying around 15 years' worth of discarded McDonald's wrappers. The car isn't the problem! :)

Ha, yeah. If you really want to get rid of those almost entirely, you can tweak "ui.tooltip.delay_ms" to something really big like 10000 (10 seconds).

> or the popups if you linger for more than a moment on the tab pill

You can turn that off in the settings if you like. Settings -> Tabs and browsing -> Disable "Show an image preview you when you hover on a tab".

You can browse the Themes to try to find one you like better. But yeah it'd be nice if one of the default built-in themes was super plain. Closest they have available by default is a grayscale gradient ("Ash").

> built in dark-mode

It has built-in dark mode, check out the Themes in your settings.

Try out the Compact UI mode (Settings -> Appearance -> Window Density), which I didn't know about until I read this blog post. Tightens things up nicely.

> Personally feels insane that people find this surprising or puzzling.

Who finds this surprising or puzzling? I do not see this sentiment in the article or in the comments here. Are you making up people to get mad at?

Others have me ruined that NA beers are pretty decent these days. But I've also taken to literally watering down my beer. I'll pour half a can and fill the other half of the glass with water and ice. Then later do the same with the other half. Still tastes decent, but really cuts down on the alcohol.

Big tech controls the AIs. The solution, of course, is antitrust enforcement.

I add cool sites I find on places like HN to my RSS reader.

That sounds like a great experience. I doubt I'll ever make it there because I don't really like to travel, but the Bayeux tapestry is possibly my favorite historical artifact and I'm glad to hear they have such a good setup for showing it.

Somewhat tangential, I've watched a bunch of videos on YouTube from @deramp5113 about the Altair 8800 and other early microcomputers, which feature a similar set of front panel switches for dialing in your initial program. One thing that's interesting to me, as someone who learned computing in the late 90s, is how much is expressed in octal instead of hex on these early computers.

As shown in the linked picture, the byte pairs are divided into [4 groups of 3] instead of [3 groups of 4] switches, which I would find more comfortable as a hex-reader. I believe, maybe someone can confirm, that octal notation is easier to translate into bits than hex is. We just don't do either of those things terribly often anymore, so octal has mostly fallen out of favor, perhaps because it groups less nicely into multiples of 8.

Nowadays I almost never think in octal. The only time it seems to come up is for Unix file mode switches (chmod etc), which likely date to this time when octal was more common.

Just some interesting cultural drift.

It's a concept car. Concept cars are always full of wacky nonsense no one wants. The production model will just be a regular car.

I work in software, so no, I don't have any of those things. I want everything to be as low-tech as possible, software can only make things worse.

I'm definitely the friend in the alt-text of this comic. What do you mean you haven't read gitcore-tutorial(7)??