1
point
rsoto
Joined 741 karma
Box Factura founder
- With the manifest v3 debacle they have a golden opportunity in their hands. They can promoting the fact that they work for you rather than advertisers, they could explain what true privacy looks like, regardless of what device you're using.
Firefox on Android used to be a really good product--it supported basically every popular extension there was for desktop, then in 2018-2019 they appeared to start a new revamped project for some reason. I downloaded the beta for it--it was rough around the corners, it had a quite short whitelist of extensions, most of the functionalities were absent, but there were a few improvements here and there. And out of nowhere, a few weeks later they made it the default.
It's been way too long and the app still feels unfinished. It crashes way too much and I can't even move around the icons for the websites in the start page. They've enabled the list of extensions recently but it's a mess. I only use it since it's where I can have uBlock origin.
It feels that every couple of years they have a golden opportunity, but somehow they never seem to know what to do.
- I have a quite big userscript that fixes all the little annoyances I've been finding on the sites I often visit. Is the click area too small? I fixed it. Is there a really big form that when I select a specific value some other elements need to be at a specific state? It's fixed now. Did we get a new business lead and we need to enter all their information to our CRM? I can now paste that info and the form will be automatically filled.
I find usescripts way more easy to update than an extension, so that's what I've been sticking with for quite a few years now.
- Best tool I've found is Testi@[1]. It's really affordable and it supports basically everything out there.
* Disclaimer: Not affiliated, just a happy customer.
- [1] https://testi.at/
- IMO MutationObserver's API is a bit difficult to grasp. For simpler cases for getting a callback when an element is created, I use spect[1] or sentinel[2].
1: https://github.com/dy/spect 2: https://github.com/kubetail-org/sentineljs
- I'm on the fence. While I think some of these features should be absolutely not part of a browser's scope, I think there will always be legitimate use cases.
What I'm absolutely convinced of is for better controls. A little more than a year ago, our government required the banking industry to know their users' locations for some reason. So now the banks ask for my location, otherwise I can't login.
While on a mobile device it would be quite hard to give them a fake location without rooting/jailbreaking, in my browser I could find a reputable, open source extension [1] that helps me protect my privacy.
These kind of controls should be part of each of these features, without risking installing an extension with nefarious intent.
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- SEEKING WORK | Mexico | Remote Only
4-person team comprised of multidisciplinary roles in development, design, UI/UX and marketing that can bring an MVP to production in just a few weeks. Most of the team has worked in startups for +10 years.
Languages: English and Spanish.
Hourly rates: $54-$64 USD
Our services: https://osom.so/development
Technologies:
- Ruby on Rails
- PHP, Laravel
- JS, Node, Vue, React, Svelte
Services:
- MVP/Prototype development
- Startup rescue mission/scaling up
- UX consulting
- Branding and marketing strategy
Email: development [at] osom [dot] so
- I've been blogging for 20+ years on my personal website [1] (disclaimer: it's in spanish). I started it when I was a teenager as a way to teach myself discipline. I used to write every single day. Now it's a bit of a monthly occurrance but it has done quite a few things for me.
1. Landed me a job, and a few gigs 2. Started new friendships 3. Inadvertently taught me SEO 4. Did a bunch of side projects 5. Gave me my 15 minutes of fame
I only wished I could write more often, but it's been a great journey. I want it to keep going.
- I wish something like this existed for TVs. Since I got my eyesight procedure 10+ years ago, I soon noticed I was quite sensitive to lights that didn't affect me at all (maybe my vision was too bad to even notice, don't know). That extreme sensitivity faded off in the first six months, but I still get annoyed by some lights and the first thing I do with a new PC/Phone is setting up Redshift[1] or Twilight[2], and although I'm not a big TV consumer, the times I do watch it, I wonder if there's a market for this kind of features.
1: https://github.com/jonls/redshift
2: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...
- I remember back in late 2018, early 2019 I downloaded the Nightly version, Mozilla had been hinting on a rewrite for a while and I wanted to see what they were up to. This version seemed solid, although a work in progress: you could not customize the listed sites in the home screen, addons were disabled and the settings seemed lacking compared to what we had in the stable release, but work was solid.
Then, out of nowhere, they phase out what we currently have with this half-baked Nightly version. The app updated itself overnight and now all the addons are no longer supported (Violentmonkey was a big one for me as I could customize some websites with a user script), the home page icons can't be rearranged, the history can't be deleted and overall this updated app seems like a worse deal that we previously had.
Mozilla has stopped caring about their products. It seems that nobody in there is dogfooding Firefox, and it shows. They have a big advantage because of Google still not allowing addons on Mobile Chrome, and instead of opening up the whole ecosystem (which previously most of the desktop addons were compatible with the mobile app), they double down on allowing only a very short list of preapproved addons.
- https://www.therror.com/
It's my personal blog I've been writing on since 2002.
- Have you heard of AdonisJS[1]? A couple of years ago we had JS as a hard requirement for a new project, and coming from a Rails background, Adoins was really good.
- Twitter has been an absolute mess over the last few years. Through the explore tab, they aggressively promote topics that I have no interest in: k-pop, fashion, reality TV, telenovelas and birthdays. And there's no way to tell them that I don't really care about those topics, you can't even hide them.
The trending topics used to be a very good way to know what's happening. Being the pulse of the planet was achieved. Nowadays, the trending topics are heavily abused. When a streamer or an influencer does something, there's usually 6 or 7 trending topics all related to that person.
And then there are the spoilers. Every major movie release has the name of the characters or actors right in your home page the very same day of the premiere. I had to permanently hide them in my browser, and I've been reducing the usage of Twitter in my phone. I'm very tempted to uninstall it from it and use it only in a PC, although I don't see myself closing my account.
And even though they're alienating a big part of their user base by promoting topics that clearly drive their numbers, they're still not reaching their goals. I wonder what they'll do next.
- One thing I really liked about Firefox was that it used to do two different types of searches. The search bar acts as it does today, but the nav bar used to redirect to the first result. This was very useful because sometimes you just know what you're looking for (as per the OP's example, "tom hanks imdb"), while other times you are going to do some digging.
Now that I'm using Kagi as my main search engine, I wish I could tell Firefox to use another search engine in my nav bar, and when I'm incognito. Mozilla used to let us modify a lot of things (via the UI, or the about:config panel), but from a few years it has been removing lots of customization options.
- Same story here, but being a Sendgrid customer for 6+ years, suddenly the shared IP is blocked as well. After opening a lot of support tickets and getting no response, I had to nag someone here in HN who mentioned working for Sendgrid, he escalated but the response was the same: pay a lot more to get what you used to have.
Migrated to Postmark right away and we've been a happy customer for 2+ years now.
- We had to migrate from Mailchimp when they started bumping up their plans. We did our research and Mailerlite[1] was our choice, and we've been a customer for a couple of years now.
- SEEKING WORK | Mexico | Remote Only
4-person team comprised of multidisciplinary roles in development, design, UI/UX and marketing that can bring an MVP to production in just a few weeks. Most of the team has worked in startups for +10 years.
Languages: English and Spanish.
Hourly rates: $54-$64 USD
Our services: https://osom.so/development
Technologies:
- Ruby on Rails
- PHP, Laravel
- JS, Node, Vue, React, Svelte
Services:
- MVP/Prototype development
- Startup rescue mission/scaling up
- UX consulting
- Branding and marketing strategy
Email: development [at] osom [dot] so
I ran away from Mailchimp more than 5 years ago when they started with their shenanigans and arrived at the same conclusion: Mailerlite is great. I used to have lots of respect for Mailchimp for being a bootstrapped business and never taking investor money but once they sold their soul, it was game over. One thing the article doesn't mention is the fact that Mailchimp has been moving from an email marketing SaaS to a marketing platform SaaS. From a quick glance at their services, they now offer a website builder, a CRM, ads retargeting, social media integrations---and as a customer, you end up paying for every single feature, regardless of if you want it or not.