Oh shit my bad! Leaving the info up anyway, in case anyone else is wondering why only two major engines is a bad thing for the open internet.

I do, in fact. I get that they are typically open-source, and I also understand how ridiculously difficult it is to create one from scratch. If LibreWolf or whoever want to make privacy focused browsers based on mozilla foundation or google’s work then that’s fine and I support it, but I’m personally curious if there are any mainstream browsers that don’t have any (or minimal) reliance on google and mozilla foundation. Someone else was actually helpful and pointed me towards an engine in development Servo which looks quite interesting! Hopefully there will be a browser based on it soon.

https://www.spacebar.news/servo-undercover-web-browser-engine/

At the start of the millennium, Internet Explorer used its own Trident engine on Windows and Tasman on Mac, Opera used Presto, some embedded devices used NetFront, Netscape had Gecko, and KDE made KHTML for its Konqueror browser. Those browsers eventually faded away or adopted a competing engine to simplify development. KHTML was the basis for Safari’s WebKit, which in turn became Chromium’s Blink engine, and Netscape’s Gecko engine became the foundation for Firefox. Opera ditched its custom Presto engine in 2013 and switched to Chromium, and Microsoft Edge made the same move in 2020.

This is a danger to the open web in more ways than one. If there is only one functioning implementation of a standard, the implementation becomes the standard. The web becomes to Google what Java is to Oracle. It also means the limitations and security flaws in Chromium affect most other browsers, which became a topic of conversation with Google’s recent Manifest V3 transition.

lol if it ever gets to that point i’m just gonna go straight Lynx.

Oh good, more rust! (j/k i don’t have the feverish hatred of rust that some people seem to)

That’s still a fork of Firefox, isn’t it? I was hoping to find a reasonably modern browser that doesn’t rely on gecko or blink. I’d be okay with a WebKit browser but I don’t have a Mac.

If anyone has any suggestions for browsers hook me up, I’m running out of browsers with thier own engines to try. I don’t see much point in using, say, LibreWolf if the engine is still the same as Firefox (Gecko in this case). Maybe I’ll give NetSurf a try and pretend like it’s 1996 again.

Right, that’s what I’m saying. We have cheap gas/petrol but food prices here are skyrocketing.

Might not be able to buy groceries but at least we have $3.00/gallon, or $0.80/liter, fuel for our planet destroying pickup trucks!

I wonder what causes that. The only time I’ve had customization reset is if I wiped the metadata during a server migration on accident, or decided to clear it intentionally.

The writer claims that plex drives people towards recommendations even after disabling the recommended tab, that’s the part I’m trying to figure out.

From their blog post about it:

An unauthorized third party accessed a limited subset of customer data from one of our databases. While we quickly contained the incident, information that was accessed included emails, usernames, securely hashed passwords and authentication data. Any account passwords that may have been accessed were securely hashed, in accordance with best practices, meaning they cannot be read by a third party.

The passwords were hashed and, I’m inferring from their language, salted per-user as well. Assuming a reasonable length password (complexity doesn’t matter much here, what we want is entropy) it would take a conventional (i.e. not quantum) computer tens to hundreds of millions of years to crack one user’s password.

They’ve taken other measures as well. Nobody knows the details besides them, but they blocked an entire cloud provider called Hetzner because too many people were using it for pirate Plex servers. They absolutely have to maintain the image of being legitimate like you said.

Sure, you can disable a lot of features from the home page, but even the remaining bits push you toward Plex’s ecosystem with things like recommendations. And I’ve even seen people complaining about needing to re-disable promotional content after updates. It’s simply a shady business.

Edit: It’s just occurred to me that he might literally be referring to the Recommended tab on your home page - which you only have to interact with by choice.

If anyone would care to tell me where I’m being pushed towards Plex’s ecosystem I’d love to understand what the flying fuck he’s talkin about. The only thing I could find that could generously be called part of the Plex “ecosystem” are the social features. Does it give more “ads” if you have a free account or something? Also I’ve had a server for 15 years and I’ve never had to re-do my customization from an update.

seriously. it sucks that plex had to increase their price to $250 but they resisted that increase for like 10 years. nobody is forcing anyone to rent plex lol. its still worth it during sales.

Yeah, im talking about the 207 BILLION US dollars they need to raise. That’s an absolutely insane amount of currency if it had to be backed by real things and not “Hey buddy, its the U.S.! nothing could go catastrophically wrong and make this all valueless overnight”

Oh yeah for sure.

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At least some part of this is related to aging. Our sense of taste seems to diminish as we age, but also we get exposed to more and more complex flavor profiles as we go through life. Canned soups dont even taste salty to me anymore, they just taste bland.

But it’s what the article is comparing to when they say “market prices”. This particular store is based out of California.

At restaurants here you would ask the host/waiter the market price before deciding to order.