- Going back 2 versions, only ~50% of Chrome users are on v140 or newer. If you go back another 2 versions, that number increases to around ~66%. Going back another 2 versions only increases that to 68%, with no huge gains from each further 2 step jump. That you think your target gives you 98% coverage is concerning for the state of web developers, to say the least.
After checking further, almost 20% of Chrome users are on a 2+ year old version. If you handle that gracefully by polyfilling etc., fine. If you "simply ignore" and shut out 20% of users (or 50% of users per your own admission of support target), as I have encountered in the wild countless times, you are actively detrimental to your business and would probably be fired if the people in charge of your salary knew what you were doing, especially since these new browser features are very rarely mission-critical.
- I don't know about "most". For various reasons, I use a 2-year-old browser on a daily basis (alongside an up-to-date browser), and I routinely run into websites that are completely broken on the 2-year-old browser. Unrelated to outdatedness, I recently ran into a local government website that e-mailed me my password in plaintext upon account creation. I have no way of accurately quantifying whether "most" web developers fall into the competent or incompetent bucket, but regardless of which there are more of, there are a significant enough number of incompetent ones.
- You mentioned a used model that is over 5 years old as an example of "a new computer", and "1k" as "not expensive for consumers". It is honestly impressive how well you undermined your own point.
> If enough consumers aren't able to use the website, then business wouldn't use it.
I sincerely doubt any business owner would approve of losing even 10% of their potential users/customers if they knew that was the trade-off for their web developer choosing to use this feature, but there are disconnects in communication about these kinds of things -- if the web developer even knows about compatibility issues themselves, which you would expect from any competent web developer, but there are a whole lot of incompetent web developers in the wild who won't even think about things like this.
- As someone on the browsing end, I love Anubis. I've only seen it a couple of times, but it sparks joy. It's rather refreshing compared to Cloudfare, which will usually make me immediately close the page and not bother with whatever content was behind it.
- There is. I have observed it in both Chinese and Japanese.
This statement could not be further from the truth. Your organization itself is completely incompetent if one ignorant employee can compromise it. The "swiss cheese" safety memetic is widely understood and basically common sense; in an actually competent organization, no single person has sole responsibility for success or failure of a process, and it takes individual failures at multiple levels to result in process failure.The challenge with security, as you know, is it's only as strong as it's weakest link. It only takes one ignorant/incompetent person in an entire organization to jeopordize the org.
This is a horrifying thought to be reading on this site of all places, and I can't help but feel that humanity is well and truly screwed if this mentality has seeped this far into the culture. *Communicating secretly is a human right*. A legal right under international law (ICCPR article 17, ECHR article 8), and a constitutional right in any country worth living in. There can not possibly be such a thing as "too simple to exercise your human right to privacy". It's like asserting that it is too simple to choose your line of work, or that it is too simple to live in the city of your choosing.But the reality is that it is too simple to communicate secretly
The government has more than an interest, it has a legal obligation to protecting the human rights of its citizens.and the government has an interest in protecting its citizens- You'll never guess what letter dang's last name starts with.
- It's even worse on desktop. You have to scroll the entire screen (with mousewheel or arrow keys) to move the selection. I spent 30 seconds thinking it was bugged because the intuitive solution would be to click once, then simply click where you want to place it, but the "place" button only showed up on the one you already "picked". Fine idea, worst conceivable execution of UX I have ever seen.
- To be clear, I found the dry quip about the 4th of July amusing, and specifically pointed out that I thought that specific parenthesised line was inserted by the author. I don't think a British author would naturally reach for "4th of July" as their frame of reference for bombastic celebrations in the first place, though. My point was that seemed to be something the LLM generated and the author riffed off of.
I'm not about to go into a deep dive analysing the author's past writing style, but there is a clear difference just from glancing at the headers alone. Looking at older articles, such as this "featured" one[1], they all share a commonality: the headers are boring. Matter-of-fact. Plainly descriptive. "The reasoning". "The background". "The research".
[1] https://drobinin.com/posts/what-ive-learnt-after-sending-147...
Then a sudden spate of activity in late 2025 after years of not having written anything other than yearly recaps, and all of the new posts share a different commonality: the headers are 'creative'. "The Childhood Trauma". "Teaching a circle to care". "47 seconds: a villain origin story"[2]. "The uncomfortable engineering truth".
[2] https://drobinin.com/posts/how-i-accidentally-became-puregym...
It is quite a noticeable shift to go from always writing useful headers that clearly communicate the purpose of the following text, to always writing clickbait headers that try to hook the reader's emotional attention.
- Funny, that was around the point in the article where I was beginning to get irritated reading it because it felt like reading LLM output. LLMs love melodramatic headers ("THE CHILDHOOD TRAUMA"), outlandish and not particularly coherent metaphors ("hostage negotiator"), the overly terse arrow constructions that I've never seen a human write in my life ("something that feels less like “open app → consume lesson” and more like “tap creature → it looks at you → you do a small thing together”"), the segue into a redundant list of bullet points, the pointless not x but y ("The blob wasn’t a mascot here, it was the interface") which poorly establishes a contrast where it doesn't make sense to.
The funniest part to me is that I suspect the LLM generated the line about the 4th of July, and the suspected prompter being British, felt the need to insert an explanation for why "they" would reference it, in a voice/cadence that doesn't really match the rest of the article:
> "Confetti, fireworks, the whole 4th of July experience (I've seen it only in movies though, not sure why but it's not celebrated in the UK)"
I can't definitively say this is LLM-generated, but it resembled it enough so that I still came away annoyed for having read it.
- > Simon and GGP combined do own an overwhelming percentage of all retail square footage in the US
This is factually incorrect, and not only incorrect, but so wildly far from being correct that one wonders if this statement was made in bad faith. They only have around 300 million sqft out of an estimated 12 billion sqft, around 2.5%. That is not an overwhelming percentage, nor is it "99.9999% of all retail square footage in the world", which was not a hyperbolic statement. Competitors in retail can obtain their own shelf space. You cannot obtain your own shelf space for mobile software. The network effects of hardware+OS centralization are too strong, so there are and never will be any viable competitors to iOS and Android.
> Apple's "shelf space" is not free. There are constant R&D expenses involved in introducing new sensors and screens that make the underlying apps better.
The R&D expenses do not change regardless of whether there are 1 million or 10 million apps available for iOS. Allowing people to distribute their own software comes at no cost to Apple.
> They take on the support load of on-boarding users, managing the relationship, and dealing with any problems.
Apple absolutely does not do any of this as it pertains to individual apps.
> Epic wants to sidestep all of the costs of building a platform, and offload support costs onto Apple
Nobody is asking for Apple's support; really, what the world needs is less of Apple's involvement in the hardware the people own, not more. Epic is clearly willing to spend money on building platforms, since it has a documented $600 million in losses in its effort to build a competitor to Steam. This, however, is not a case where it is possible to build a platform.
- For this analogy to be comparable, you would first have to consider that Best Buy, together with Walmart, owns 99.9999% of all store real estate in the world. You would also have to consider that the "shelf space" in this case is free and comes at zero cost to Best Buy; in fact, giving you virtual shelf space increases the amount of traffic that comes into their stores, resulting in a benefit to themselves.
Your analogy as presented was so lacking in merit you might as well have been talking about cats and leprechauns for how completely nonsensical it was to bring it up in the context of Apple.
- In other words, this isn't even a cost-saving measure. They are now paying money to deny claims. Instead of paying money to provide healthcare, they instead pay money to third-party administrators who promise they won't actually do administrative work but instead outsource life-ruining decisions to an automated script. It is hard to come away from this without thinking that humanity is fundamentally evil, and that everyone involved in this should be treated like French royalty.
- This is a terrible overview. The actual primary benefit of toasts is that they provide feedback on low-importance events without requiring the user to interact with them and without permanently taking up UI space. The web application I use most frequently would be infuriating if I had to deal with a modal window every time a toast would have been used, and UI space is at a premium for useful functionality, so occupying a permanent spot to relay those messages isn't a good solution either.
I wish software developers could drop this dogmatism. Same as the old Goto considered harmful trope outliving its usefulness and all that. It's always black and white - "people can misuse this tool, so this tool is inherently bad and should be eliminated from usage completely" - rather than acknowledging that many tools have great use cases even if they can also be abused.
[1]https://safebooru.donmai.us/ (note: this is a "safe" subset of danbooru for reference, but it is still not safe for work)