Cool post, and definitely a concept devs should consider. I've only experienced the garden variety of offline (hiking out if cell service, not having a phone data plan, etc - not a government in chaos), but I still find offline capability super handy.
Especially even basic stuff, I know Google Maps used to 'expire' offline maps every 30 days. Like, I have a 40 day old map and no service, but it won't tell me where to go (dunno if they still do that or not - ditched G Maps a long while back). Some more thought into "hey, what if people are offline" would be nice.
Edit: Also, shout out to paper too. I've got a bit of reference books (maps in my car, a copy if the survival medicine handbook at home, etc). Necessity might be the only way to get my Gen Z self to read a paper map, but could be handy to have.
I pretty much never use Facebook, but a while back I got restricted front the marketplace after listing a car. A boring list detailing the state of a car has to be the least offensive thing possible, so I assume some bot had an aneurism, but my appeals got denied and I was never able to find out what I supposedly did wrong. Something like this does sound like a good middle finger to them had I actually had any interest in getting it back.
I don't necessarily disagree that there's a lot of people being sold a VPN that probably don't need it, but VPNs still can be a legitimate tool. Even outside of the "well known" VPN uses like piracy, privacy (in a 'I trust it more then my ISP' fashion), and getting around geo-fences there's still uses for them. A couple of quick examples:
Getting around blocks or monitoring on networks like work WiFi. No need to tell my work I'm on Indeed, and for a little while they seemed to block my email provider (Proton) and reading my email is handy to be able to do.
For use as a network tool. For example, I was recently helping my brother set up a website, and with port forwarding he was able to really easily VNC into my VM I was working on it with.
VPNs can also be handy for the 'slightly suspicious stuff' that's not illegal. You know, things like an internet search about something you saw on TV or were just curious about that's not illegal to research, but you're worried it could be a suspicious search. Or maybe I want to use wget to grab an offline archive of a website, but don't want to raise alarms and get my IP banned.
I know this isn't exactly the answer to your question, but it's sorta adjacent and might be useful.
Pixel devices can run a number of Roms that go much longer than Google's support period (DivestOS, PostMarketOS, Lineage, etc). Older models can probably be found on sale from Google for ~$200 occasionally or even cheaper used, and with Lineage offer a really long support period on an OS that resembles AOSP with or without G Services.
Now if they only allowed you to unlock the bootloader. Samsung makes great hardware* but it's disappointing see locked down and bloated devices that only gets security updates for a few years IF you pay full price when they come out.
Long support periods are great, with that fixed it probably brings Samsung phones to Apple levels of quality, but I've enjoyed using my phone like a real computer instead of a locked down smart device that's disposable after a few (or 5-7) years.
Maybe I'm not the target audience of these manufacturers, but man has having a phone that let's me use it like a tiny ARM desktop (pixel) been really nice.
* At least they did, no experience with recent hardware. Last time I bought a Samsung device was a tablet in 2016. It's still a great device, but I don't use it a lot given it ran out of support ages ago despite still being a great priece of hardware.
Oh, cool, for some reason I thought they didn't let you unlock the bootloader. Did they stop you from doing it for a while and then re-enable it at some point or am I just misremembering?
Either way, always good to be wrong about something when I'm complaining about the state of tech.
It'll all render the same using Chrome/Blink, but forks might take out tracking by Google (and potentially add other tracking), add adblock outside of plugins, or re-add support for Manifest V2 to name a few. Chromium forks can actually be pretty different.
Chromium is over 20 million lines of code. No Chromium fork is meaningfully different. Come back with that BS when Blink has 25% of its contributions coming from one of these Chrome skins.
Not the worst idea to avoid a website for breaking in FF (or take a chance to touch grass), but unfortunately when you can't pay your credit card bill or need something for your work and it only works in Chromium it can't be avoided.
It doesn't ban a blockers outright but does severely hamper them. It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin, and also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves and forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store.
Both of those will seriously hamper a more advanced adblock like UBlock Origin
>It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin
The limits are 30,000 static rules and 30,000 dynamic rules. Running tens of thousands of regexs for each request can lead to a performance impact. Allowing for even higher limits may result in people having a worse experience from the browser becoming slower. The API was designed such that these limits can be increased in the future as available computation and user needs change over time. Getting extension developers to design their extensions in a way where they have to think about not slowing down the browser too much I think is a good thing and I would not call these current limits severe.
>also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves
declarativeNetRequest lets rules be added and removed dynamically by the extension.
>forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store
The Chrome team has said that configuration can be updated outside of a store update. What the Chrome web store does not want are extensions that download and run code. This policy does not related to mv3.
I have had sites that are definitely broken in Firefox even after a stock install with every last toggle/extension/script blocker turned off. It's fairly rare, but there are a slowly growing list of sites that don't behave properly under Firefox but work in Chromium.
I use a home video appliance called camect which is accessed through a web interface which explicitly only works in chromium browsers. Oddly, I often find that the bbc news page doesn't load images on the first attempt in Firefox, but always does in Chrome.
Was reading the switch to Firefox thread and wanted to share a set of complaints which have been building up for years that I finally put together. By all means switch to Firefox (& forks), but I'm worried we're at a crossroads and would like to advocate for improvement by laying on the complaints a little thick.
Especially even basic stuff, I know Google Maps used to 'expire' offline maps every 30 days. Like, I have a 40 day old map and no service, but it won't tell me where to go (dunno if they still do that or not - ditched G Maps a long while back). Some more thought into "hey, what if people are offline" would be nice.
Edit: Also, shout out to paper too. I've got a bit of reference books (maps in my car, a copy if the survival medicine handbook at home, etc). Necessity might be the only way to get my Gen Z self to read a paper map, but could be handy to have.