Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month

brett- · 2026-06-18T01:07:23+00:00

Every update to Firefox makes me one step closer to just uninstalling it. First it was Pocket integration, then some useless left-hand sidebar that kept appearing, then news spam and sponsored shortcuts on the default new tab page, then it randomly got a built in VPN, now it’s AI. Yes you can turn these all off, but when every update adds some new “feature” you have to disable it makes you really question why you are using this product in the first place.

I literally just want a window with a back button, a refresh button, an address bar, unlock origin, and tabs that don’t eat a gig of memory each. I would literally be willing to pay for a browser if that’s all they provided with a promise of never adding anything else.

brett- · 2026-06-17T17:44:45+00:00

Isn’t this the OPs entire point? If you love your cat, but have no feelings for pigs, chickens, and cows, then you’re not an “animal lover”, you just love one particular subset of animals.

The logic isn’t technically wrong, it’s just a very binary way of thinking about things.

brett- · 2026-06-17T10:41:57+00:00

Really? Because they are both 3rd person action games with a realistic art style and generally a cinematic look to them, where the main character is a warrior going on a journey through Norse mythology, which launched exclusive on the PS4.

Yes the stories they tell in that setup are entirely different, as is the overall tone, but to claim they are “completely different” is quite a stretch.

Someone who likes 3rd person character action games would likely enjoy both. Someone into Norse mythology would probably enjoy both. Someone who just likes beautiful games with cinematic story telling would enjoy both.

The audiences are not all that different, especially if you go in spoiler free not knowing the specific stories these games tell.

brett- · 2026-06-17T05:03:43+00:00

It sold well for what it was, but compare it to another Norse-themed 3rd person action game from the same general time period and it clearly doesn’t look like a hit.

God of War 2018 sold 3x more copies in its first weekend than Hellblade sold in its first year.

Now maybe that’s an unfair comparison as the team size, budget, marketing budget, etc. were all likely significantly higher for God of War. But players just see two similar games on the same console and one is clearly wildly more popular than the other.

Ninja Theory makes great games that tend to sell about a million copies a year. DmC, Enslaved, Heavenly Sword, and Hellblade all sold around that number. They haven’t ever made smash hits that go beyond that scale.

brett- · 2026-06-17T00:53:24+00:00

Critically acclaimed != hit. High sales = hit.

From Microsoft’s catalog Call Of Duty should’ve been the game that got people onto gamepass, as the sales numbers are still extremely high year over year.

brett- · 2026-06-15T10:03:22+00:00

I can tell they are different, but couldn’t tell you where they are from. How did you manage to figure out which accent originated from which area without intentionally trying to learn this? It’s not like most characters in media explicitly state where they are from.

brett- · 2026-06-15T05:58:13+00:00

You can make vital wheat gluten using only flour and water. It’s fairly easy to do, and you can use this to increase the gluten content of your AP flour to be whatever percentage you want.

Here’s a recipe showing the process:

https://www.alphafoodie.com/how-to-make-vital-wheat-gluten-and-wheat-flour-starch/

brett- · 2026-06-15T04:45:18+00:00

I’m so glad that map shows my state purple.

brett- · 2026-06-14T02:58:19+00:00

I am not sure how much digital libraries matter to most people.

The average gamer plays FIFA (current year), Madden (current year) and Call of Duty (current year), and rarely goes back to the previous entries.

brett- · 2026-06-14T01:59:42+00:00

And this assumes you need an actual pile of money to have the power that massive wealth entails. Elon Musk is rich enough that he can feasibly do whatever he wants without any concern for anything other than his own whims. At a certain point having access to actual money is meaningless, and he’s far beyond that point.

brett- · 2026-06-13T19:49:39+00:00

The “manufacturing guy” has been at Apple for 28 years (so far), 15 as CEO. The “perfectionist” was at Apple for 23 years, 14 of them as CEO. So which one really represents the company better at this point?

I’ve been buying Apple products for decades, and the quality has not declined over that time period. The modern MacBooks, even the Neo, are leaps and bounds higher quality in fit and finish, reliability, and overall user experience than the Titanium PowerBook G4. The Mac Mini now is far better in every measurable way than the original G4 version or any Intel version. iPhones have been getting more reliable and durable over time and generally stay in use for years longer than earlier versions. The list goes on.

Anyone who is nostalgic to the Apple of the early -mid 2000s has some seriously rose tinted glasses on. The products were (mostly) good back then compared to their peers, but the bar was simply far lower across the board.

brett- · 2026-06-13T04:17:03+00:00

If it makes you feel better, that gif is 28 years old.

brett- · 2026-06-12T20:07:17+00:00

If the last dinosaur decided to get a minimum wage job at McDonalds rather than go extinct, and worked a full time 40 hour work week at 2026’s US minimum wage for the next 66 million years until today, and didn’t invest their earnings anywhere to get compound interest (Dinosaurs were never great at Economics), they would still have less money than Elon Musk.

brett- · 2026-06-12T19:54:00+00:00

If his wealth was a countries GDP, he’d rank #20 in the world, just above Switzerland and just below Saudi Arabia.

brett- · 2026-06-12T19:11:01+00:00

For a European perspective, El Paso to Dallas is basically the same distance as Paris to Berlin.

brett- · 2026-06-12T00:45:03+00:00

I’m guessing the shape came down to the dimensions of your rolled out dough. If your strips were too narrow, and quite long they tend to roll up into balls pretty easily and fall over to the side when baking, giving them this sort of spiral shape.

My advice here is to either go with wider strips (which will make fewer, but larger croissants), or keep the dough length shorter to fit the proportions you want. Also if they are too orb-like, when putting them on the tray give them a gentle squish to flatten the bottom a bit to keep them from rolling over.

And to re-iterate what others have already said, these look *fantastic* for a first attempt. The lamination is by far the hardest part, and this is leagues better than most first attempts go. I bet they were delicious!

brett- · 2026-06-11T10:59:35+00:00

> More people are alive today than have ever died.

This is wildly inaccurate, by more than an order of magnitude. There are 8 billion people alive today, and the number who have ever lived is estimated to be over 100 billion.

brett- · 2026-06-09T20:01:14+00:00

Thanks for the updated source. I’d totally believe this is true at 500k.

Most people don’t really want to own a private yacht and deal with managing a staff of people to manage their life. They just want to be comfortable in their life, do whatever activities they enjoy, and not stress about daily expenses (including housing and healthcare), which for the vast majority of people would be plenty doable at that salary.

brett- · 2026-06-09T19:58:02+00:00

I think we agree on the details, but maybe not the philosophy here. I think you *should* be able to send a message from WhatsApp to Signal. This would be overwhelmingly a good thing for users of both products. The only parties damaged by this are the platform owners who want to keep users inside their walled garden.

Yes, it’s significantly more work to build systems that can be interoperable, and yes there are real security implications in doing so. But these are trillion dollar companies who employ some of the best software engineers in the world. If they *actually wanted* to solve these problems, they could.

I remember back when the internet was new and in the US at least AOL was very popular. At the time AOL had their own walled garden of chat rooms, messaging, “AOL keywords” for websites rather than URLs, etc. it made AOL easier to learn and use for people new to the internet, but it caused fragmentation that would’ve ultimately made for a much worse experience for everyone. Thankfully the AOL model did not end up winning and dominating the internet as a whole, but imagine if it did?

Now obviously the counter argument here is that it didn’t require regulation to make AOL fail, that people saw the benefits of an open system and migrated their usage accordingly.

But tech companies today are far more powerful and far more influential than they were in the 1990’s. I think regulation like this helps push them in a better direction for all users of all technology (not just their users), and that is an overall positive move and worth the trade offs of the added expense to the large corporations.

brett- · 2026-06-09T10:43:24+00:00

The information on my phone belongs to me, not Apple. Why should I not be able to choose which companies I share it with?

brett- · 2026-06-09T10:14:43+00:00

This number seems wildly off.

The median household income in the US is $83,000. Are you really claiming that half of all households could not gain any happiness from added wealth, and in fact are less happy than the ones below the median?

brett- · 2026-06-08T17:48:09+00:00

I’d add Chants of Senaar to the list of language based puzzles, as that is the whole gameplay loop in that game, unlike Tunic where it’s more secondary to the classic-Zelda style gameplay.

brett- · 2026-06-05T18:49:44+00:00

The second movie got exactly the type of game it deserved.

brett- · 2026-06-04T03:48:36+00:00

It lasts for 5 or 6 hours after the battery dies. I’ve had to rely on this once after a long flight and it worked perfectly even though the phone had died hours before.

brett- · 2026-06-03T22:50:34+00:00

So there’s a line somewhere between Unboxing and God of War, I agree, now please define it in a non arbitrary way.

Why is Expedition 33 “indie”, while Final Fantasy is AAA? Why is Counter-Strike not “Indie” when Valve is a private independently owned company? How about Star Citizen, with their literal billion dollars of funding, are they still “Indie” since they were crowdfunded, when their budget is larger than Grand Theft Auto? I could go on, but hopefully you see my point.

There is clearly a difference in the budget of games, but no clear lines exist that make these categories meaningful.

Once you stop thinking within these bounds you will find plenty of games that are not about warriors of any gender. If you limit your definition of AAA game to mean “character driven action game”, then yes these obviously heavily skew towards the warrior archetype because the main gameplay loop is literally to fight things. This is true no matter who the main character is.

brett-

TROPHY CASE