Bonum Certa Men Certa

Newer Is Not Always Better and It Tends to be More Malicious



Video download link | md5sum 7fb9ae52129fe8c649d162eaec393ee9 Hype and Fake Novelty Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: The "modern" Web, the "modern" phones and supposedly 'better' servers (clown computing, "digital transformation", "modernisation"... i.e. typically many containers) create more complexity, lower security, and leave us worse off

"I

finally got around to submitting a Web Compatibility problem report on ComEd (the Illinois electric company) to Pale Moon Forum," Ryan noted having experimented with Pale Moon lately. Ryan partly blames Microsoft for it.

His latest post, which we put in Daily Links yesterday, says: "According to Mozilla documents, it would seem at least one of these problems is occurring because Microsoft is using -webkit-autofill when there’s been an unprefixed version of this for years and “For the best browser compatibility use both” the Webkit prefixed version and the unprefixed version of “autofill”.

"Free software is under threat from this mindset.""Microsoft’s sites are usually very poorly coded (like Outlook WebMail) and when the Illinois electric company, ComEd, switched to Microsoft Azure, they got this mess.

"It’s amusing that Mozilla took Microsoft and Google bailouts to keep MDN going and then it points out that Microsoft’s behavior defies “best practices” when it comes to Web development. Of course it does. This is the company that brought you Windows."

He mentioned this yesterday in IRC at just around the same time I became aware of similarly awkward news where I work. People are meant to assume "clown computing" (whatever that actually is) would be great, they adopt so-called 'phones' and 'apps' (productivity sinks that lack security), and some were fooled into thinking that gadgets and fancy widgets in sites would be a step forward, even if those hobble accessibility, waste energy, and complicate maintenance. This is what the above video talks about. Free software is under threat from this mindset.

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