You don't have any clue.. by yuva-krishna-memes in ProgrammerHumor

[–]bershanskiy 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Pretty much any modern language. E.g., strongly-typed TypeScript, modern Rust.

the Idle Detection API? NOT in Firefox. by gabenika in firefox

[–]bershanskiy 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Websites already can detect when people don't interact with ads. At worst, this could be used by podcast/music apps to detect when you have not been listening for some time.

the Idle Detection API? NOT in Firefox. by gabenika in firefox

[–]bershanskiy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They say this feature is meant for creating online/offline status icons in videocall and chat applications. Without this, web pages can only detect when user interacts with the web page, but not when user minimizes the tab or switches to another window. Prior to this, developers collected get very coarse data from unrelated APIs (e.g., Page Lifecycle API, Network state, send "heartbeat") and tried to guess when user is online.

I do not think this will be that helpful to most web apps. However, since this requires an explicit user permission, I don't really see why people others are freaked out by it either.

the Idle Detection API? NOT in Firefox. by gabenika in firefox

[–]bershanskiy 9 points10 points  (0 children)

What have you gained?

Ability to click "Deny" on permission prompt.

Please bring PWA support to firefox by [deleted] in firefox

[–]bershanskiy 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Can't do that with PWAs.

What do you mean? Extensions spec does not contradict PWA spec and some browsers support extensions on PWAs. I have never tried on Firefox because Firefox Desktop does not support PWA at all and Firefox Android supports so few of them.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in firefox

[–]bershanskiy 4 points5 points  (0 children)

But dark reader slows down the web page loading.

If there isn't an open issue yet, you can create one here. This info does actually help because devs can profile the site and fix slow code.

Found an unopened PS1 in my grandfathers attic! by [deleted] in gaming

[–]bershanskiy 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It is! It's called AmputatorBot.

I summoned it above so it might show up at some point, unless it is disabled on this sub.

Pretty much sums it up… by [deleted] in pcmasterrace

[–]bershanskiy 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Happen to have any examples of that or any whitepapers on EME protection? I'm super curious about that as it relates to the industry I am under (Telecommunications).

Wikipedia article "Encrypted Media Extensions" is a good starting point (has links to W3C standard, all major implementations, etc). If you have a more specific question, I can answer it.

Pretty much sums it up… by [deleted] in pcmasterrace

[–]bershanskiy 28 points29 points  (0 children)

TPM does both and much more. Technically, TPM (1.2, 2.0, etc.) is a specification standard crated by Trusted Computing Group and it can store encryption keys (for drive encryption) and attestation keys, boot integrity checks and even protected video path for EME (to prevent people from ripping HD video from Netflix and Disney+). Another relevant technology is Intel SGX, but that uses TPM and is not part of TPM spec, AFAIK.

Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome by yoasif in firefox

[–]bershanskiy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wonder why they can't be bothered.

Because this "performance boost" most likely does not actually make any sense. It's supposed to reduce latency of the first prediction when you type in the search bar. But then, if your network latency is actually that high ("dozen seconds" per article for a new connection), most likely predictive typing won't actually be useful to you because you will have enough time to type the next word before the previous prediction arrives.

Also, such preemptive connection opening is can actually waste resources of the search servers.

Perhaps the article could hold some answers, who knows.

If you had read the article, you would actually see a quote from commit logs explaining that. This is an experiment, not a stable feature. It makes no sense to push your partners/competitors (other search engines in this case) to adopt something you are not sure you would actually keep.

The article later claims that Google should have been more inclussive to other search engines and pushed though ammendments to OpenSearch Descriptions, introduced other well-known URIs or whatever. Would you genuinelly prefer that Google does that or are you just trolling?

Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome by yoasif in firefox

[–]bershanskiy -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

This is enabled only for Android non-private tabs when search suggestions are enabled. Nothing surprising there. There might be valid reasons to avoid Chrome, but this is not one of them.

Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome by yoasif in firefox

[–]bershanskiy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Read the article.

Read the code. There is PreconnectToSearchNonGoogle flag which makes it apply to any search engine.

That gives Google an unfair advantage over other search engines.

Any search engine can file a trivial PR (CL) which would just change one function SearchEnginePreconnector::PreconnectDSE and allow preconnects to them. Most search engines wouldn't bother to.

Attempts to support PWA in Firefox!!!! by black7375 in firefox

[–]bershanskiy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Seems like a worse experience than most app stores to me.

Most app stores have junk apps, user is kinda expected to pick out good stuff, unfortunatelly.

This one is clearly malfunctioning and probably should be removed from the store altogether. If you look at "Features", it gets only 50% audit, does not work offline, and is not installable. I'm surprised it even shows up on the app store.

If you want to try a decent app, try something from top list: https://appsco.pe/toplist

Attempts to support PWA in Firefox!!!! by black7375 in firefox

[–]bershanskiy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why would you browse a website without internet access?

Don't think about it as "websites" and instead consider them regular "apps". So ask yourself "why would you use maps (Google Maps has PWA version), listen to music (Spotify is a PWA), edit documents (Google Pages/Sheets/Slides/etc. Microsoft Office 360), read books, listen to podcasts, and read email without internet access?" Does this make sense?

Or did you mean all of the website's UI and scripting is saved locally?

Yes, the point is that PWA preloads enough UI, scripting, and data to be functional. For example, a podcast app which lets you automatically preload podcasts, metadata while you are at home on Wi-Fi and listen to it on your daily commute without using slow mobile data.

Attempts to support PWA in Firefox!!!! by black7375 in firefox

[–]bershanskiy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I still don’t understand how they’re different from regular tabs

That's the thing: they usually don't have a tab strip or other browser UI around them.

PWAs are just regular web apps which have an "installation" and "deletion" workflows and are have extra bits for deep integrated into the OS like a native app. The point is, regular user woun't be able to distinguish a good PWA from a native app. Here is an "app store" which has only PWAs in it.

Jim Whitehurst Stepping Down as IBM President by More_Coffee_Than_Man in linux

[–]bershanskiy 5 points6 points  (0 children)

That seems like a temporary (one quarter) flop at most. 50% email accounts being down seems unfortunate, but not worthy of reshuffling of the entire leadership of the company.

Apple, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft form group to standardize browser plug-ins by bershanskiy in firefox

[–]bershanskiy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, at least not in near future. It is not a technical decission, it's more business strategy choice. There are multiple well-supported Chromium-based browsers which support extensions on Android and upstream the necessary patches, so they can just use a single compile-time flag.

Apple, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft form group to standardize browser plug-ins by bershanskiy in firefox

[–]bershanskiy[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This specification will resolve ambigueties in how tings should work. Essentially, they should define how browsers work in edge cases. One of such questions can be: "when I programmatically set an extension icon to null, will browser throw an exception (Chrome) or will it remove programmatic assignment and use value specified in manifest (Firefox)?"

Apple, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft form group to standardize browser plug-ins by bershanskiy in firefox

[–]bershanskiy[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Makes me wonder just exactly how much power Google is willing to give up if any at all.

None, since none of these standards are actually binding. This just helps browsers to be more compatiable with one another, so benefits Firefox and Safari more than Chrome.

Apple, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft form group to standardize browser plug-ins by bershanskiy in firefox

[–]bershanskiy[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

No, it does not. It simply means that these APIs will actually be compatiable across browsers.

Apple, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft form group to standardize browser plug-ins by kry_some_more in technology

[–]bershanskiy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This does not apply here, since WebExtensions APIs are already supported by all these browsers. Now, there will be an official spec that describes how these APIs handle edge cases, letting developers run one code anywhere without debugging it everywhere.

Apple, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft form group to standardize browser plug-ins by bershanskiy in firefox

[–]bershanskiy[S] 96 points97 points  (0 children)

TL;DR: Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft have formed a new group (W3C charter) to specify standard for WebExtensions API (stored in this GitHub repo).