The slow death of the open web

I don't like Google. They're the technology equivalent of Coles, Woolies, and Rupert Murdoch rolled into one. Despite their cute and cuddly image, they're every bit as nefarious as Amazon and Facebook. They dominate in one field, and then use that dominance to leverage their way into an adjacent field, absorbing or extinguishing established players in the process.

At this point, they're a hairsbreadth away from capturing the world wide web. Note that this is not the same as capturing the internet (the physical hardware layer that the web runs on). They made a play for that, but Amazon beat them to the punch.

The only things keeping them at bay are China, which understands the threat that unchecked foreign mega-corps can pose, and Facebook, which still controls the world's most used family of websites, and a sizeable portion of the web's advertising infrastructure. Needless to say, I'm not a huge fan of either of these two entities either.

And then there's Mozilla. Makers of the Firefox web browser. The last viable web browser in existence that isn't just a re-skin of Google's Chrome. I'm one of the last people I know who still uses Firefox, and I so badly want to say that I'm in love with it … but by god, they're not making it easy for me.

Just recently, Mozilla released a major update to Firefox for Android … and it's fuckin' shithouse. The "opened tabs" window has been redesigned in such a way that you can only read the first few letters of each page title, meaning it's effectively impossible to tell what's actually in a tab without opening it. To make matters worse, the tabs automatically order themselves according to some sort of black-magic formula that I don't understand—and before you ask—yes, they also took away the user's ability to drag the tabs around and manually reorder them.

Downloading an image now pops up a giant notification that can only be dismissed by opening said image.

It's now possible to place the navigation bar either at the top or bottom of the screen. Both options are fucked. Place the nav-bar at the bottom, and it becomes inaccessible any time you have the "find in page" tool open; place it at the top, and any time you open a web page that has a floating header section, it becomes utterly inaccessible regardless of what you do. Yes, that means you can become completely trapped on a webpage, with no choice but to force close the browser and hope that the nav-bar reappears when you reopen it.

In theory, you can still speed up the playback of video and audio content, only now it sounds like you're listening to a robot having a stroke.

The ability to view the source code of a webpage has been stripped out, making the app far less useful for development purposes.

Oh, and if you use browser extensions, forget it. This update breaks compatibility with older versions, so you'll have to wait for your extensions to be updated as well. Joy.

I don't think Mozilla are a malicious company, and I don't think they have contempt for their users like some of their contemporaries do; but it's becoming impossible to pretend that the circus isn't being run by clowns.

Last year, they released an update to the desktop app, which broke things so badly that they had to hijack a little-known browser telemetry feature in order to push out the fix.

And after years of pouring money into retarded community outreach initiatives that have produced nothing in the way of tangible benefits, this year Mozilla laid off a bunch of employees, citing budgetary issues. And whom did they lay off, you might ask? Why, the engineers who work on the foundational technology that their products are built on, of course. The one group you could point to and say unequivocally that they were producing useful, high-quality output. Whom did you think it was going to be, silly?

It's hard to look at Mozilla's recent history and not get dejected. There's an obvious trajectory emerging, and nothing about it looks positive. And that's even before you take into consideration the fact that the bulk of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google paying to be the default search option in Firefox. As Firefox's market share shrinks, which is happening precipitously, so to does Google's need to prop up its competitor.

I do so hope they can turn things around. I just have no idea how they could possibly manage it from this point.

NINA (all caps)

I'm assuming everybody knows what BandCamp is. If not, it's basically YouTube but with music rather than videos. The idea is that instead of trying to wrangle a contract with a record label, artists can sell (or give away) their wares, directly to the public, with the site taking a %15 cut.

There's a lot of crap on BandCamp, but if you're willing to dig around, you can find a fair amount of quality stuff too. I think my all-time favourite find is "NINA". I checked in on her page the other day and noticed she's got a new album out, so I thought I might as well plug it on here. I'm sure it'll help her sales immensely.

Yeah, Definitely Wouldn't Wanna Be A Yank

So, my rellies came and went, more or less without incident. Then I had a severe, prolonged bout of hay-fever. First one for a couple of months. Hope this doesn't turn into a regular thing again, like it was at the start of the year.

Anyway, I check in on overseas affairs the other day, and I see that the Yanks are now shooting each other in the streets over political affiliation. In the run up to the 2016 election, I said that if things followed their (then) current trajectory, this result would be inevitable. I think I likened it to the mini-civil wars that flare up every time the Thais go to the polls. To be honest though, I dunno if I predicted it was going to happen quite this quickly.

But here's something I find even more interesting: It has now become a common belief on both the far left and far right, that both the Democrats and Republicans are trying to lose the election on purpose. Allow me to give this theory some air …

Trump and Biden both want to be president, but they'd like to be a lame-duck president with a hostile senate and house of reps. Likewise, everyone in congress wants to keep their own seat, but would prefer to be in opposition rather than holding the reins of power. "Why's that?", you may well ask. Let me explain.

It's generally considered common knowledge that the American government has no interest in serving the masses. They exist solely to serve the interests of the wealthy donor class. There have even been a number of academic studies on this topic that you hear referenced whenever this theory comes up. Since a handful of billionaires has effectively bought up both of the major parties, from a policy standpoint it doesn't much matter which mob gets voted into office—the same neo-liberal agenda is going to get pushed through regardless. So, why would most elected representatives want to be in the minority party?

Well, why wouldn't they? When you're in opposition, nobody can hold you accountable for anything. You get to pretend you're against all the horrible policies you're secretly in favour of, and you get to make all kinds of grandiose speeches about all the things you'd do differently if you were in power. On top of that, it's where you get to make the big bucks. Republicans were raking in the dough, when they could fool their supporters into thinking Obama was a communist Muslim who was planning to abolish the constitution, and now the Dems are shaking down their base with a similar narrative of Trump being a Kremlin-backed Nazi who will refuse to leave office when he loses the election. Nothing gets a true-believer to empty their pockets faster than telling them they're in existential peril—just ask any evangelical preacher.

If this theory is correct, it doesn't bode well for our Yankee mates. If their political bodies have actually become that cynical and corrupt, then neither side has any incentive to try to rein in the violence we're seeing at the moment. In fact, the exact opposite is true, and this might just be the start of something much much worse.