Working on the blog rewrite today! So if anyone happens to visit, you can pretend I’m doing the «Naked CSS Naked Day" thing a bit late. ☺️
Anyone Else Feel Like They Should Use Firefox
… but Still Struggle With It?
This post was originally (and still is) a forum post on the MPU forums. I have two concrete question blocks I’d love feedback on, which I will present during the post. I would love to hear from you, either over at MPU, as a comment to this post on Micro.blog, via Mastodon, or email. 🙂
I’d like to talk about browsers! And people are of course welcome to comment whatever they want — but some notes on what my intentions for this discussion are:
- For reasons, I’ll touch on later, this is mostly about desktop browsers.
- In terms of privacy and security, I’m approaching this from a reality where 65% of people use Chrome. So in this context, vastly improving the privacy from that, is more interesting than saying someone is a gullible idiot if they don’t use a Tor browser. 😛 So while I’m not saying those things shouldn’t be part of the discussion at all, I’d like to talk more about user experience and features than hardening if you catch my drift. 1
OK, let’s go!
Ethics are always difficult to discuss. Because while I think everyone should be mindful of the small things we should do to improve things, people have different priorities and possibilities. And where should we draw the line while consumers in a problematic system? Like, I should probably use a Fairphone over an iPhone even though it’s worse, right? How much worse should I accept? How hard should I pull away from things like Facebook or X?
Still, I’m at least trying to try — and as the browser is perhaps the most used app, the choice of it is among the things I’m thinking about.
And here’s why I feel like I should use Firefox:
The Case for Soulver, and an App Between a Calculator and a Spreadsheet
The iOS counterpart of Soulver 3 just released — and is being discussed a bit over at the (excellent) Mac Power Users forum.
This post is (mostly) an answer to the following post there:
Soulver is a fun app to do simple math, but it is no substitute for a spreadsheet. Can it do any of this Numbers - Function list - Apple (AU)?
Can it graph data?
So I would buy it again if it was cheaper, but $35 for the Mac app plus another $34 for the iOS apps is definitely not worth it to me. I’ll keep using my free, constantly improving Numbers app.
Plus it took 5 years to finally recreate the iOS apps? Seriously? Why would I trust this developer after borking a perfectly good iOS app and taking so long to finally add it back to the App Store.
I think you’re misunderstanding
… what Soulver is trying to be,
even though you mention “a fun app to do simple math”.
When discussing solving math problems, different complexity levels make us turn to different tools. I’d say it usually looks something like this:
- Very simple → In your head
- Simple → A calculator (app)
- Medium to complex → A spreadsheet app
A Way To Get a Fancy Link Hover Effect
Jarrod, of (the great blog) HeyDingus.net, wanted to do something about the way his links appear on his website. He asked:
Since the first design of my site, I’ve stuck with blue text for my hyperlinks because that always seemed canonical with the web. Links = blue text, blue underline. But I’ve grown less certain with its readability with all that blue text interspersed. I’m considering a change. What do y’all think?
One thing he didn’t mention there, is that he also has a nice hover effect, that changes the underline to a gradient (that matches his logo and more) on hover.
My first idea for how to solve it sacrificed the gradient — but that just wouldn’t do. But I think I found a pretty good solution in the end!
The solution and how to implement it
Advice for How To Make Sure You Never Create Anything
Are you sometimes at risk of creating? Personally I, from time to time, come very close to writing something, so my advice here is geared towards that. However, it can hopefully be extrapolated to help you if you’re tempted by other creative endeavours as well.
- If you get an idea while writing a post, you should always finish this new idea before finishing the original one. This, of course, cascades to new ideas you get while working on the second one, etc.
- This also applies to expansions within an idea. You can always increase the scope of a project!
- Let every piece of work be your Magnum Opus.
- However, if as much as a single piece of your idea doesn’t materialise quite like how you wanted it to, scrap the entire thing. No matter how much work you’ve put into it, and no matter how much value there’s still left.
- Don’t post anything, unless you’ve covered every nuance, use case and possible objection. Don’t post ideas or thoughts — post rigorous conclusions.
- You can’t mention a concept/item without also explaining everything about it, in case someone isn’t familiar.
A Shortcut for lite-youtube-embed
YouTube embeds take up way too much on a site - so luckily someone has made lite-youtube-embed.
“Renders faster than a sneeze.”
Provide videos with a supercharged focus on visual performance. This custom element renders just like the real thing but approximately 224× faster.
First you have to include some CSS and JS on your site. 1 And then when you want to embed a video, you could just add this piece to your post/page:
<lite-youtube videoid="CItvhGl__Mk" playlabel="Play: Beatenberg - Wheelbarrow (Official Music Video)"></lite-youtube>
This will embed the video, but over 200x faster - nice!
However, you have to manually add the videoid and the video title.
And they’ve also made a variant named “Pro-usage: load w/ JS deferred (aka progressive enhancement)”, which I think is even more optimised. But then you have to add all of this:
<lite-youtube videoid="CItvhGl__Mk" params="controls=0&rel=0&enablejsapi=1" style="background-image: url('https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CItvhGl__Mk/sddefault.jpg');">
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CItvhGl__Mk" class="lty-playbtn" title="Play Beatenberg - Wheelbarrow (Official Music Video)">
<span class="lyt-visually-hidden">Play Video: Beatenberg - Wheelbarrow (Official Music Video)</span>
</a>
</lite-youtube>
Why I Don’t Love Web Apps
And a call for help
I absolutely get why companies make web apps instead of native apps. Why juggle tons of platforms and languages if you don’t have to? Furthermore, being on the web makes you free from platform gatekeepers!
It can also benefit users, by giving the same experience everywhere, making more software cross-platform and accessible on more niche platforms, and more.
And if a developer has 100 hours to develop a client for their service, the user experience very well might be better if they spent all of it on a web app, instead of spending 25 hours on four different native clients.
There’s also a bunch of terrible native (or “native”) apps. One example is phone apps that simply are terrible web wrappers that just want to be able to track and notify you more than they can in a web browser. 1
When I say that I prefer native apps, I don’t mean that there are no great web apps (like Figma) or bad native apps. My point is that the ceiling of the latter is higher, and that all the best apps I’ve tried are native.
Chromium and Nested Backdrop-Filters
If you’re like me, you sometimes get these small (often technical) problems, that you work on for so long — and you refuse to surrender.
I had this with CSS a couple of months ago:
I had a menu, that had transparency and blur, and then I also had a submenu that I wanted to have the same. But the submenu just. wouldn’t. blur!
It works perfectly in Gecko and WebKit — but after countless hours, I found the problem: If an element has a backdrop-filter, Chromium won’t let its children have it as well. 1
I had to design around it, and moved on with my life.
A few moments later…
I recently moved to Micro.blog. And one day I was scrolling down my timeline…
Then I opened the submenu:
There it was — the same bug! I’m not alone!
The fix
✉️ To SigmaOS’ CEO: This Is What I Don’t Like About Arc’s Direction
I really, really like the Arc browser. But as I alluded to in this post, I have some reservations regarding it, and don’t feel like it’s going in a direction that I like. In the post, I said that I might try SigmaOS again — and I am. 1
I mentioned this in their community Slack, and their CEO, Mahyad, asked me what about Arc’s direction I don’t like. I must say, the dev team seems very active, nice, and open to input! So this post is my reply to his question.
(And here’s a link straight to the TL;DR at the bottom.)
Hi, Mahyad — and thanks for asking! I wrote a blog post called «I Just Want A Nice Browser!», which might give you a hint, heh.
And let me also say that I’m a bit worried about your direction as well — but I’ll come back to that. 😉
Two fundamentals I don’t love, but that I don’t need to go too much into
- I don’t love that Arc is built on Chromium — as I think Google has more than enough power over the web as it is.
- I’m not against supporting any VC funded company — but in combination with an unclear business model, I become more skeptical and worried if our incentives align. 2