I wonder what will Vivaldi do. They say that their built-in content blocker is "good enough" that you supposedly don't need uBO (I very much disagree) but they also keep MV2 extensions working to this day.
How is it half of HN is convinced Firefox can compete with Chrome in its entirety and the other half is convinced nobody can possibly maintain a single additional API version on Chromium?
It's about the tech stack, IMO. Chromium is a moving target to maintain compatibility with, which is difficult for a team that doesn't have much C++ experience.
As a counter example, Brave is heavily invested in C++ and Rust, and I believe they could handle that work much better.
Sure but even Vivaldi has a few C++ folks on the dev team, how many more is it to maintain an existing API to changes in the codebase, especially when any of the hard parts of that work only need be done once among all of the forks.
Even if they don't want to handle it directly, this is the kind of thing a single sponsor can pay Igalia for, who have shown the ability to make entire new Chromium subsystems like MathML. There is no shortage of C++ browser developers in the world to do maintenance work.
TSPU isn't for spying, it's for censorship enforcement and everything else that makes the experience of using the internet here miserable without a VPN. It's SORM that's for spying. And Roskomnadzor is very much part of the government.
As a Russian: huh, you guys could still just buy a sim card without any kind of identification? Impressive. We had that ID requirement introduced way back in the 00s.
Even EU countries seem to require an ID now. When I traveled to France and Belgium in 2024, I bought a French tourist sim card, and the carrier kept sending me some rather insistent messages that my line would get disconnected if I don't upload my passport in 30 days.
It seems to depend a lot. It's kind of hard in Germany - they wanted my permanent address. I didn't find France as difficult. Iceland didn't care. Italy wanted my passport. Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
> Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).
Yes, that's another law they have. Can't access the internet anonymously, basically. And yes, foreign phone numbers do work.
Though I've seen, plenty of times, smaller places have a "public" wifi with a password, and the password is just written on a piece of paper somewhere. That must technically violate that law. But you know, laws in Russia...
The first and last time I was in Russia was in 2019, passing by Moscow airport, and you already required a phone number to use the public WiFi, but any foreign number was OK.
Btw you can still buy an anonymous SIM card with cash in the Netherlands in pretty much any supermarket/kiosk/whatever. And if you just need Internet, I haven't had any eSIM provider try to verify my ID so far. Although those can't easily be paid in cash.
Are there services in the EU similar to Privacy.com? They along with US arm of Revolut lets you use disposable digital cards to buy things, but I don't know if such functionality is legal in the EU.
i use revolut in the eu and disposable cards work. its legal because kyc is only between you and your bank (revolut is a bank operating out of latvia), they are not required or allowed to give your personal info to anyone other than payment processors and police.
Situation circa 2019 at least was that foreign tourists in Chile could purchase a SIM card, but it would be automatically disconnected after some amount of time without registering the phone in a way few foreign tourists would do.
Not quite, the requirement is that phones not bought locally need to be registered after 30 days, regardless if someone is a tourist or a Chilean citizen. It's a mix of deterring tax evasion, importing stolen phones, and regulatory homologation. The government delegates responsibility to various telecom companies to have portals to self-register the IMEI with ID, which can be a foreign passport.
I'm sure the cops can get that info, but its mostly to enforce the "only one free register per year". Anyone can buy a phone with cash and use a prepaid sim with zero ID needed.
Different EU countries seem to heavily vary on this point. I’ve seen everything from requirements for id scans and addresses to esims that accept cryptocurrency as payment.
In Bulgaria the ID requirement was introduced in recent years as it has been abused to run scam networks. It was big problem in Turkey, as Bulgarian scam networks were pulling the bride scam to such an extent that the scammers started scamming classes for wannabe scammers.
yeah I think in Italy this was introduced in the security push after 9/11, and in other EU countries I also had to provide an id to get a sim card, tho I'm not sure it's all of them.
In the US it gets fought hard because Wall St uses it to dodge state income taxes. Everyone thinks it's drug dealer related for us, but it's actually Finance bros driving into NYC from out of state (NJ or CT) but trying to hide it.
So weird to me to realize that for some people, email providers have a UX, and enough of it that they could consider switching.
I've been using email through a client for decades. My primary email is Gmail, but I have no idea what Gmail is like on the web these days. Save for providers like hey.com, whose entire selling point is their unique web UX, I never understood why would someone use email in their web browser.
I always enjoy it when someone makes "obsolete" hardware natively talk to modern network services that it was never meant to talk to. And bringing an entire browser to a system this old is a serious achievement. I don't own any hardware that can run classic Mac OS, but I'm gonna try it on an emulator later, really curious how it handles several of my own websites.
Though the fact that the author uses AI is kinda meh.
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