Yeah, this should definitely not be allowed. Google should not be allowed to dictate which operating systems people are allowed to use. And no doubt that this is harmful to many European companies and prevents competition in the space of mobile operating systems.

That said, it remains to be seen if anything will get done about it.

Ease of adoption, if I’m not mistaken (so I was told 20-ish years ago when I started learning C++). Think back to the early/mid '90s - there was a lot of existing C code out there back then, people really didn’t want to throw it away but had few options if they wanted to use something else. C compatibility offered a way for large companies to incrementally adopt C++. All you had to do was change your compiler and your existing C code would compile, and you could write new stuff in C++. In the mean time, other languages could only leverage that existing code by using message passing or FFI-like frameworks. For example, you would have to use JNI if you were writing Java I think - maybe there were other options, but it was a big pain to deal with at the time, especially since tooling was probably not as polished back then.

Maybe it’s not as much of an issue today, but they have to maintain compatibility with earlier versions, so while it helped adoption a lot, it also is a big challenge for the language and its ability to move forward.

If you go back a few decades, you would see how companies would produce technological innovations with the mindset of, “If we design the best, most useful device possible, customers will come to us and buy our product”.

Today, that has flipped into a mindset of, “We will create this technology, force users into adoption, and exploit them as hard as possible once we have them under our control.”

The technology has become a means to control users, not to enable them.

At least it’s good to see that people are catching on though.

Sure, I’m familiar with the conditions under which Javascript was created, but those are all political issues, not technical ones.

If you had to go back and recreate another C++, you would be forgiven for creating a bad language, because making a good, usable language without a garbage collector is really hard, and even moreso when it has to be compatible with C. If you had to recreate Javascript… I would think it would be expected that you don’t make a language with the same kinds of flaws JS has today. There were plenty of examples of languages Javascript could have been based off of when it was written (like Java).

Case in point: it took decades for Rust to come around which was the first real challenge to C++. In the same period of time, we saw several GC languages appear (Java, C#, Go, PHP, Swift, Ruby, Python, all younger than C++), all competing against each other. Javascript would have been abandoned if it didn’t have a monopoly on web programming.

It may not be perfectly compatible, but being mostly compatible with C was a large part of its selling point when it was originally announced. Without that, it probably wouldn’t have seen as much adoption. However, that choice also led to a lot of difficult design decisions which have become a liability today.

I’m not trying to goad you into an argument, though I could have admittedly phrased things better. I just can’t think of any reason why someone would want adopt Javascript as it is with all of its problems. A slice of pie is better than nothing at all. On the other hand, using Javascript when a much better alternative exists (namely Typescript) would be a significant liability in my opinion.

In fact, pretty much everyone on our front-end team at work would agree too - they’re pretty much unanimous in saying that Javascript should basically never be used.

I also agree that Javascript is worse. C++ has two excuses for being bad:

1. It has to be compatible with C, a language that’s multiple decades older than it, and
2. It is not garbage collected.

Javascript has neither of those two excuses. People only use it today because of the ubiquity of web programming. In fairness, it did kill off a few other technologies, like Flash and Java applets, but that was more Webkit and Chrome picking it as the winner than anything else.

Maybe these arguments are a bit hand-wavy, but the way I see it, it’s like the C of the web programming era.

C++ and JS are objectively shit languages from the pool of used languages.

This is a great point. There are a lot of even worse languages that are dead/dying and deserve to do so.

But personally, I see a lot of people who continue to defend JS. And I have worked in C++ for about 5 years now and nobody I have worked with praises the language - most want to ditch it entirely and switch to Rust. I can think of maybe one person who claims that C++ is good enough, which is hardly any praise.

This is all anecdotal stuff, so maybe we don’t see eye-to-eye though. I personally love C++, because it’s a really fun language to write, but I simultaneously think it’s an awful language, and the people who write/standardize it keep making the same kinds of bad mistakes over and over again.

It’s perfectly possible for a slice of pie to be pleasant, and a slice of pie with ice cream to be more pleasant.

In my personal opinion though, that’s not how I would describe Javascript vs. Typescript. Javascript was basically replaced overnight, to the point where you should be very harshly criticized for ever using it these days unless you’re maintaining a legacy project.

As a bit of an aside, I learned recently why Mozilla has the weird Corporate/Foundation structure that it does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47701441

Basically the IRS is highly skeptical of the idea that free software development fits the legal definition of a 501©(3), and tends to reject such applications [1][2]. That is why Mozilla Foundation cannot use donations for Firefox development, and instead uses them for activism.

Someone claiming to be the CEO of one of these foundations appears to confirm it. Just thought people might be interested to know since this comes up in pretty much every thread about Mozilla.

Even the early internet didn’t have content of this high quality

I don’t know much about Sun, but they seemed like a cool company - Java, Solaris, Sparc. A lot of people sounded pretty upset when they got acquired.

So far! Don’t worry, Silicon Valley will think of another new, even bigger scam in no time!

Why are root privileges needed to move and search for files in the home directory?

Yes, of course the codemopolitan directory could be owned by root, but why??

The user is able to install new certificates.

That’s true today, but there’s no guarantee it will be true in the future. Google is already pushing for all software running on Android to be cryptographically verified and they (Google) are the only ones that control the signing keys. This means that they intend to kill off F-droid and all other software delivered outside the Google store.

If Google is able to pull it off on Android, everyone else will try to do it on desktop OSes too - Linux included.

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I just don’t want see the garbage that is the Android Play Store where apps refuse to run because we run an OS that isn’t profitable to Google.

I think the possibility that this could happen is dangerously high.

Everything starts with good intentions. Everything ultimately leads to locking end users out of their personal freedoms.

I’ve made other comments before about how we used to cheer for Google back in the 00’s because they were the upstart that took on the entrenched competitors (Microsoft primarily). Look what Google has become today - the very thing we hoped they would destroy, and they are so much worse about it.

Red Hat/IBM ultimately owned by the same people as Google: shareholders. Nothing will ever stand in the way of their greed. If this technology is allowed to exist, there’s no reason to think that it too will be used against our interests.

He was there for a brief period. According to Wikipedia he was there from 2022-2026 and seems to have left to create his new company in early 2026.

Btw, i’m stealing your summary of browser monoculture, alright?

Of course! The EEE pattern is crystal clear at this point. The loss of the WWW to the current browser monoculture we’re experiencing is the biggest technological tragedy of our times. I would hate to see it happen with our open source revolution as well.