Technology

There's been investment bubbles, overshooting and disingenuous rent seeking in many economies before. It was temporarily reduced in many western economies by various FDR type policies in the '30s-'60s. The '70s and '80s were just the banks wresting back their freedom to implement market "rationality". And we get the benefits ever since.

People do keep voting for it though so it is hard to argue they're not satisfied. Even the ones who protest vote don't seem to see the "investment" markets as any part of the problem; or as important at all. That's either some pretty effective demagoguery, or some dumb fucking electorate.

Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big.

That's not entirely correct. Black and white stones used in voting in someplace antique also have no actual value, but they substitute a vote.

BTC is used as a mechanism of exchange, like a decentralized bank.

Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.

Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?

Or would you doubt that the person talking has good idea of the problem and the solutions, offering the bluntest one?

"Regulation" of the "property rights protection" kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn't work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it's theft. Providing a "communication platform" augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that's not heavy regulation, that's an update to pretty light regulation.

Maybe also obligation for every big service on the Internet to have global identifiers and provide a global API exposing all its inner entities, be that posts or users or comments or reactions, with those global identifiers. So that you could export all of Facebook to a decentralized cache, for example. That's heavy regulation, but also pretty reasonable, in line with old approaches to libraries, press and freedom of speech.

How viscous is the cycle

I'ld like to vote Cryptonimics as term, because it encompasses both the cryptic nature of the product, and the clear example of cryptocurrency.

That assumes though that the definition of web browser and its needed stack stays static.

What happens if we all browse the net primarily via VR then? The line is blurry, so is Mozilla org.

Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.

Unfortunately others are deciding on web standards mostly. Which makes it hard for it to keep up even if it were trying to be such.

Also Mozilla was kinda that, until it wasn't - because they decided to go the other way and because apparently they lacked money (doesn't look like that from their spending, but).

There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile.

And the reason is monopoly abuse by the big tech companies. Apple is banning other browser engines from the app store and does not allow Firefox onto iPhones. Google is shipping its own Chrome with every Android device and they are breaking their own sites like YouTube or Gmail on purpose for Firefox users and push them to install Chrome. Microsoft is bundling Edge with Windows as a default browser and will aggressively enable it as a default browser during updates.

I use Firefox on mobile all the time. Works fine for me. The fact that I get adblock on mobile makes it a no-brainer to use over chrome.

I have never encountered that bug, seems like an issue with the duck duck go not doing proper url encoding. I daily Firefox on mobile and its the best option by far with all the available extensions and of course working adblock

I use it on mobile. It's mostly OK tbh, and the addition of a working ad blocker means it's far better than Chrome for me.

In fairness that is an invalid URL in my book, but it should at least be consistent across desktop and mobile, or at least tucked behind an option.

Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently.

I recall how South Korea literally painted itself into a corner for becoming too dependent on Internet Explorer after years of using it with a security implementation based entirely on ActiveX.

I'm currently using a user-agent switcher plugin. Allows me to spoof servers into believing I'm running a different browser.

If a site I have to use doesn't work for no apparent reason, I e-mail the company's Support. Let them sort it out, or provide another way I can do what I'm trying to do. Personally, I think a lot of the problems are from more and more websites integrating privacy-invading "features", and FF interfering with their operation.

When I asked a couple of developers who work on websites/webapps with a lot of moving parts, they said it was easiest to just test for chrome, since that's what most people use.

It's turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.