• 2 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 11th, 2023

help-circle














  • Use the system webview, you cowards!

    Developers bundle all of Chromium, because they’re afraid the OS webview will have a different browser engine. Testing is too hard…

    This is such a terrible excuse — usually the same app runs in browsers too, so it already has to deal with even wider variety of browser engines.


  • The annoying popups are an act of malicious compliance from data harvesting companies. The tracking industry wants people to associate the right to privacy with stupid annoyance, so that people will stop demanding privacy.

    The legislation does not say anything about cookies. It’s about rights and responsibilities in data collection (no matter how it’s done technically). The “consent” part of it exists as a compromise, because there has been heavy lobbying against the legislation.

    This is not a technical problem — we’ve had many technologies for it, and the industry has sabotaged all of them. There was the P3P spec in 2002! It has been implemented in IE that had 90%+ market share back then. And Google has been actively exploiting a loophole in IE’s implementation to bypass it and have unlimited tracking. Google has paid fines for actively subverting Safari’s early anti-tracking measures. Then browsers tried DNT spec as the simplest possible opt-out, and even that has been totally rejected by the data harvesting industry. There are easy technical solutions, but there are also literally trillions of dollars at stake, and ad companies will viciously sabotage all of it.



  • Generally yes.

    GIF’s ancient LZW compression is remarkably ill-suited for modern CPUs, and more expensive than modern algorithms. Combined with significantly larger file sizes, it costs much more to decode, on top of increased costs of transfer and caching.

    GIF might have an edge if the animation is very small (<16px, few frames).

    It also gets messy if you need to play hundreds of animations. GIF will be terribly inefficient, but also browsers aren’t designed to have hundreds of video elements, so both will eat memory in their own way, and it will vary which is worse.