Google cripples ad and tracking blockers: In January, Chromium will switch to Manifest V3 which removes an essential API in favour of an inferior one. As usually, Google is being deceitful and touts security concerns as pretext.

That hits all Chromium based browser, such as my beloved Vivaldi. The team argues with their own browser internal blocker, but that's far worse than uBlock Origin. One of Vivaldi's core promises was privacy, and that will go out of the window. The team simply doesn't react to people pointing that out. They're fucked, and they know it.

So what now? Well, going back to Firefox because that will include the crippled new API for extension compatibility, but also keep the powerful old one specifically so that ad and tracking blockers will keep working. Google has just handed Mozilla a major unique selling point, and miraculously, Mozilla didn't fuck it up.

God was able to create an entire world in just 6 days for the sole reason that he had no previous versions and no compatibility issues.🌍

Damn I hate Apple… I have a macOS app written in SwiftUI which worked perfectly fine. And then Apple released MacOS Ventura, which broke the app to the point that it’s unusable. Release notes, obviously, doesn’t mention a thing that could give a slightest hint of what is causing the issues. And the worst part is that there’s no way to set up backwards compatibility, because stupid SwiftUI SceneBuilder doesn’t support damn conditional flows.

Add a random string (like "AnyBrowser/1.2.3") to your user agent string, and get warnings about unsupported browsers, reduced functionality, and Google drive completely refusing to start at all.

It's the very same browser, just another user agent string. Ever heard of feature detection? Ever heard of usability, accessibility, progressive enhancement? How can developers be so lost in 2022?

I just tried to reproduce the reason why Vivaldi stopped adding their brand to user agent strings but sails under false flag pretending to be Google chrome. So it doesn't show up in browser statistics either and Google people can keep thinking everyone is using their shitware.

The joys of using overpriced enterprise software...

Me: Hey, I tried connect to the server, but I'm getting a "connection refused" error. Is it really running.
Other: hmm, I'll check
Other: The host restarted, but I'll get the software up again, no problemo
Other: I started the server again, but there's, but it's throwing errors while initializing. Time to write customer support

And then you get that premium customer support that think we don't know how to use their software at times. And once they realize we do, they don't know much better either. And once they realize we know how to use it there are 3 possibilities:
* They need our help to debug stuff before knowing what is going on
* They need to release a new version and accidentally break backwards compatibility and create enough work for us to burn through the clients contact hours
* They provide helpful advice (secret ending)

These fuck don't even release a proper changelog for their software nor their manuals.

Have any JabbaScripters ever heard of backwards compatibility?

Nope. Because all the shit on NPM is written by 15-year olds who don't know how to code properly, not to say maintain their packages.

Fuck you.

Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".

Static HTML pages are more lightweight and destroy "web apps" in performance, and also have superior compatibility. I see pretty much no benefit in a "web app" over a static HTML page. "Web apps" appear like an overhyped trend that is empty inside.

During my web browsing experience, static HTML pages have consistently loaded faster and more reliably, since the browser is immediately served with content useful for consumption, whereas on JavaScript-based web "apps", the useful content comes in **last**, after the browser has worked its way through a pile of script.

For example, an average-sized Wikipedia article (30 KB wikitext) appears on screen in roughly two seconds, since MediaWiki uses static HTML. Everipedia, in comparison, is a ReactJS app. Guess how long that one needs. Upwards of three times as long!

Making a page JavaScript-based also makes it fragile. If an exception occurs in the JavaScript, the user might end up with a blank page or an endless splash screen, whereas static HTML-based pages still show useful content.

The legacy (2014-2020) HTML-based Twitter.com loaded a user profile in under four seconds. The new react-based web app not only takes twice as long, but sometimes fails to load at all, showing the error "Oops something went wrong! But don't fret – it's not your fault." to be displayed. This could not happen on a static HTML page.

The new JavaScript-based "polymer" YouTube front end that is default since August 2017 also loads slower. While the earlier HTML-based one was already playing the video, the new one has just reached its oh-so-fancy skeleton screen.

It would once have been unthinkable to have a website that does not work at all without JavaScript, but now, pretty much all popular social media sites are JavaScript-dependent. The last time one could view Twitter without JavaScript and tweet from devices with non-sophisticated browsers like Nintendo 3DS was December 2020, when they got rid of the lightweight "M2" mobile website.

Sometimes, web developers break a site in older browser versions by using a JavaScript feature that they do not support, or using a dependency (like Plyr.js) that breaks the site. Static HTML is immune against this failure.

Static HTML pages also let users maximize speed and battery life by deactivating JavaScript. This obviously will disable more sophisticated site features, but the core part, the text, is ready for consumption.

Not to mention, single-page sites and fancy animations can be implemented with JavaScript on top of static HTML, as GitHub.com and the 2018 Reddit redesign do, and Twitter's 2014-2020 desktop front end did.

From the beginning, JavaScript was intended as a tool to complement, not to replace HTML and CSS. It appears to me that the sole "benefit" of having a "web app" is that it appears slightly more "modern" and distinguished from classic web sites due to use of splash screens and lack of the browser's loading animation when navigating, while having oh-so-fancy loading animations and skeleton screens inside the website. Sorry, I prefer seeing content quickly over the app-like appearance of fancy loading screens.

Arguably, another supposed benefit of "web apps" is that there is no blank page when navigating between pages, but in pretty much all major browsers of the last five years, the last page observably remains on screen until the next navigated page is rendered sufficiently for viewing. This is also known as "paint holding".

On any site, whenever I am greeted with content, I feel pleased. Whenever I am greeted with a loading animation, splash screen, or skeleton screen, be it ever so fancy (e.g. fading in an out, moving gradient waves), I think "do they really believe they make me like their site more due to their fancy loading screens?! I am not here for the loading screens!".

To make a page dependent on JavaScript and sacrifice lots of performance for a slight visual benefit does not seem worthed it.

Quote:

> "Yeah, but I'm building a webapp, not a website" - I hear this a lot and it isn't an excuse. I challenge you to define the difference between a webapp and a website that isn't just a vague list of best practices that "apps" are for some reason allowed to disregard. Jeremy Keith makes this point brilliantly.
>
> For example, is Wikipedia an app? What about when I edit an article? What about when I search for an article?
>
> Whether you label your web page as a "site", "app", "microsite", whatever, it doesn't make it exempt from accessibility, performance, browser support and so on.
>
> If you need to excuse yourself from progressive enhancement, you need a better excuse.

– Jake Archibald, 2013

I despise it when software developers remove features because "too few people use them".

Is this what those shady telemetry features are for? So they can pick which useful features to get rid of because some computer rookies whined that it is "feature creep" rather than just ignoring it?

Now I have to fear losing useful (or at least occasionally convenient) features each time I upgrade, such as Firefox ditching RSS, FTP, and the ability to view individual cookies. The third can be done with an extension, but compatibility for it might be broken at some point, so we have to wait for someone to come up with a replacement.
Also, the performance analysis tool in the developer tools has been moved to an online service ("Firefox profiler"). I hope I don't need to explain the problems with that.

But perhaps the biggest plunge in functionality in web browser history was Opera version 15. That was when they ditched their native "Presto" browsing engine for Chromium/Blink, and in the process removed many features including the integrated session manager and page element counter.

The same applies to products such as smartphones. In the early 2010s, it was a given that a new smartphone should cover all the capabilities of its predecessors in its series, so users can upgrade without worrying a second that anything will be missing. But that blissful image was completely destroyed with the Galaxy S6. (There have been some minor feature removals before that, such as the radio and the three-level video recording bitrate adjustment on the S4, but that's nothing compared to what was removed with the S6.).

Whenever I update software to a new version or upgrade my smartphone, I would like it to become MORE capable, not LESS (and to hell with that "less is more" nonsense).

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.

On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.

At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.

And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.

Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:

> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed

I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.

Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.

I can work with Angular, even though it's pain in the but.
My current Angular job is actually the job with the first manager that had decent human values and ethics, I like my team, and yeah, what we building is shit. But it's only 30% shit because of Angular, another 30% are due to SAFe, and the rest is the usual stuff.
Still enjoy my job and respect my team.

But please do not expect me to pretend Angular is on a comparable level to React. Angular hasn't brought any actual innovation in most major versions but releases those breaking major updates still at least twice a year.
Ivy might be awesome, but only because Angular told the world 3 years ago also to have Ivy compatible compile targets for their libs/packages doesn't mean everybody cared.
And the ngcc, the awesome compatibility compiler, mutates node modules in place. So ne parallel stuff, no using yarn2 or pnpm.
At the same time, React brought so many innovations into the frontend world but is basically backwards compatible.

Not sure how the Angular partial compilation and whatever needs to go on works, but it seems like there's hardly anyone that really knows, so you can't use Vite or whatever other new tool.
And sure, if you're really good, you can write Angular without producing memory leaks.
But it's really hard. Do you know what's also quite hard: Producing memory leaks with React!

And for sure, Angular Universal, which isn't used by anyone, it feels like, will still be on a comparable level to an open source product that's used all over the world, builds the basis for an open source company, and is improved by thousand of issues day by day.

And sure, two kinds of change detection are a great idea. And yeah, pretending Angular comes with all included makes it worth it that the API is fucking huge and you're better of knowing nothing, because you have to read up things, than knowing quite a lot, since making assumptions and believing apis work in a similar way and follow similar contentions...

Whatever... I work with it. Like the time. Like the company, even my poss. But please don't expect my lying to you this was a good idea, or Angular is even remotely the same level of React.

What's the point of buying a macbook if it's going to retire after few years due to macOS compatibility with apps from appstore when you can get a good brand laptop and run linux on it forever?

I hate python.

Who thought that creating a language that doesn't provide any backwards compatibility whatsoever without a way of managing versions is a good idea?

Should I change my Job?

# Pro current job
- extremly convinient in terms of family compatibility
- low stress
- awesome boss
- I worked on this software for years and can see it gaining maturity
- can not complain about salary

# Contra current job
- always the same boring tech stack, little development as programmer and none beyond that
- I can't see any greater good or social added value in what I do!
- small team and very little opportunities to meat new poeple from other departements or what
- colleagues are okay but conservative and boring, also they do a lot of wfh (take in consideration i am rather extrovert so this is an issue)
- no work trips (see above)

Can PMs still reasonably require web apps to be compatible with Internet Explorer? Does the "you gotta to tailor to everyone’s needs" argument still stand nowadays? I ask this because I’ve been working on a client project for about two years now and last time they asked for IE compatibility was about a year ago. I’m preparing for the next time it absolutely stops functioning with IE to debunk their desire to remain stuck in the year 2003.
I know Microsoft simply isn’t supporting it anymore and are discouraging anyone from using it. I feel like it should be enough of an argument. However, often times enough isn’t enough. Anybody have any arguments or examples of why it’s a terrible idea to stick with it?

Dev goals for 2022? Best and worst DX in the past?

Wish to prioritize customers with useful business goals who are open to sustainable web dev, usability and accessibility.
Want to use even more CSS and find a way to use new features like parent selectors without sacrificing compatibility.

Continue learning and using Symfony, but also continue with my full-stack side project using JS or even better TypeScript for the backend also for the backend.

Best developer experience: getting new customers for my own business after leaving a company last winter.

Worst developer experiences:

Corporate customers with large budgets and design agencies seem to fancy all the antipatterns I thought bad and obsolete, like carousel content, animations everywhere, and autoplay videos on the home page. Poorly written, poorly thought, and sometimes contradictory, requirements. Customers and agencies changing their mind halfway through a project.

"Agile" daily meetings, not giving devops necessary repository permissions, and making Webpack mandatory for no real reason.

This got me wondering...

Was shown a product today, doesn't matter what it was, because that part is irrelevant for question. Just out of unsubstantiated curiosity, I'm curious to hear other opinions .

How do you judge a product during first impressions period? Doesn't matter if it's a piece of software, gadget, food product, or all of the aforementioned at the same time.

As I just said - I was shown a product today, well, okay ... not in-person, and not actually shown, rather, made aware of a product. And after looking at it, I realized, that I can no longer look at a product and not focus on "red flags" or look for "where's the catch?". This product, that I'll just keep referring to as "the product" for the sake of keeping it neutral, was unfamiliar to me - I know nothing of it's manufacturer, so any trust to the brand is non-existant, the product brief on the website only made me question every marketing bulletpoint claim they had listed, aņd it didn't make me interested enough to go look up feedback from other users. This drew my attention to the realization that I do this with everything - I only look for whatever i'm looking for... I no longer pay any attention to discovery or suggestions. If I'm looking for HW, I'll focus on what it can and cannot do for the price and the actual first impression will form from using it, if it's SW - same deal, but actual first impression will form based on cross-platform compatibility, state/quality of documentation. Oppose to me, back in the day, where I'd just pick it up irregardless and "flubbed it" along somehow until it worked out.

I hate the fucking Spring WebFlux and the goddamn Project Reactor on which it depends!
Even debugging a simple CRUD microservice with simple business logic is such a pain in the ass, exception handling has a lot of "magic" implicit stuff which makes me waste hours in fucking trial & error and I have to use very little breakpoints because if a request is paused for more than few seconds it gets terminated.
I love functional programming but why shove it in fucking Java making me waste 90% of my time in trying to guessing what the fucking framework is doing, why not just use Scala which runs in the JVM? We don't even need compatibility with legacy code since it's a greenfield project!

And before you ask yes, I read a fucking book about Project Reactor and Java reactive programming and a lot of docs on Spring, Spring Boot and Spring Web Flux.

I only just realized today that htop has mouse compatibility and I'm not sure if I should be proud of myself of disappointed but there it is.

Python 3.9:
Cool New Features for You to Try
String Prefix and Suffix.
Type Hint Lists and Dictionaries Directly.
Topological Sort.
Greatest Common Divisor (GCD) and Least Common Multiple (LCM)
New HTTP Status Codes.
Removal of Deprecated Compatibility Code.

Developers celebrate new Safari browser features. Nice! Good work! But when will Apple ship the new Safari to older macOS and iOS versions?
That would increase compatibility and reduce planned obsolescence, Apple! 🍏🍎👿

I'm going to be making a table library (think DataTables)

So for those web dev gurus, should I render the data to a basic <table> or should I use CSS grids?

IE compatibility is not a consideration.

The table will also support grouping (pivot table) so something like rowspan will be a must

ant.design selectors are bogus garbage.

The drop-down selector that replaces the browser's native one does not allow typing to select an entry, meaning to select a language from a long list, one needs to manually scroll to it. If the scroll wheel of the mouse does not work properly, one needs to use the scroll bar, which is far too short to be able to conveniently scroll a long language list.

Sure, ant.design might look pretty (as advertised), and has oh-so-fancy features like fade in/out animations, but from an interaction point of view, that's as useless as the skeleton screens popularly used by JavaScript-based websites (which are anyway inferior in performance and compatibility compared to static HTML pages with JavaScript on top).

Not only can I not type-to-select, but the date selector on Dailymotion, which uses this utter garbage, sends "[object Object]" to the server, so the user is forced to edit the HTTP request manually. Complete utter garbage.

Don't use that shit. Use the browser's native feature. Or use something progressively enhancing like the drop-down menus used by MediaWiki on pages such as Special:Contributions, where it actually is properly implemented.

Many people in this world are worthy of being hated, but few are as irritating as the mongrels pushing for import\export to be used in backend projects. Breaking compatibility and bothering developers just because you can. Worst thing, they'll also probably win.

Can a React.JS expert help me to understand something?

In short, I would like to know what are the main differences between react version 15.6 and 17, in terms of browser issues, and component compatibility?

We have a legacy code base that is in version 15.6 and the team wants to upgrade it and I am attempting to argue with my dumb CTO to upgrade to version 17. However, I’m not versed in react, I'm just a PO and the CTO doesn't know anything but for some odd reason is adamant about staying on an older version. The developers gave me their opinion but I'm interested in an outside opinion.

It's these individually tiny annoyances in products and software that together form a huge annoyance.

For example, it's 2022 and Chromium-based web browsers still interrupt an upload when hitting CTRL+S. This is why competition is important. If there was no Firefox, the only major web browsers would, without exception, have this annoyance, since they're all based on Chrmoium.

I remember Chromium for mobile formerly locking scrolling and zooming of the currently viewed page while the next page was loading. Thankfully, this annoyance was removed.

In 2016, the Samsung camera software was updated to show a "camera has been opened via quick launch" pop-up window when both front and rear sensors of the smartphone were covered while the camera was launched by pressing the home button twice, on the camera software Samsung bundled with their custom version of Android 6. What's more, if that pointless pop-up was closed by tapping the background instead of the tiny "OK" button or not responded to within five seconds, the camera software would exit itself. Needless to say, this defeats the purpose of a quick launch. It denies quick-launching while the phone is in the pocket, and the time necessary to get the phone out could cause moments to be missed.

Another bad camera behaviour Samsung introduced with the camera software bundled with their customized Android 6 was that if it was launched again shortly after exiting or switching to stand-by mode, it would also exit itself again within a few seconds. It could be that the camera app was initially designed around Android 5.0 in 2015 and then not properly adapted to Android 6.0, and some process management behaviour of Android 6.0 causes this behaviour. But whatever causes it, it is annoying and results in moments to not be captured.

Another such annoyance is that some home screen software for smartphones only allows access to its settings by holding a blank spot not occupied by a shortcut. However, if all home screen pages are full, one either needs to create a new page if allowed by the app, or temporarily remove a shortcut to be able to access the settings.

More examples are: Forced smartphone restart when replacing the SIM card, the minimum window size being far too large in some smartphones with multi-windowing functionality, accidental triggering of burst shot mode that can't be deactivated in the camera software, only showing the estimated number of remaining photos if less than 300 and thus a late warning, transition animations that are too slow, screenshots only being captured when holding a button combination for a second rather than immediately, the terminal emulator being inaccessible for the first three minutes after the smartphone has booted, and the sound from an online advertisement video causing pain from being much louder than the playing video.

Any of these annoyances might appear minor individually, but together, they form a major burden on everyday use. Therefore, developers should eliminate annoyances, no matter how minor they might seem.

The same also applies for missing features. The individual removal of a feature might not seem like a big of a deal, but removing dozens of small features accumulates to a significant lack of functionality, undermining the sense of being able to get work done with that product or software when that feature is unexpectedly needed. Examples for a products that pruned lots of functionality from its predecessor is the Samsung Galaxy S6, and newer laptops featuring very few USB ports. Web browsers have removed lots of features as well. Some features can be retrofitted with extensions, but they rely on a third-party developer maintaining compatibility. If many minor-seeming features are removed, users will repeatedly hit "sorry, this product/software can not do that anymore" moments.

Why has nobody at Microsoft thought of implementing optional parameters for functions in SQL Server? I guess backward compatibility is something they haven't heard of. I mean hell, Postgres can do it easily.