Separately: is it just me or has Apple lost its innovative edge? Widgets and app drawer, that's the huge new update? Android has had these for, like, 5+ years.
Not that android has had anything super exciting lately, either. Maybe phone OSes have kind of implemented most of the obvious great features, I guess.
I haven't tried iOS 14 yet but historically Apple is almost never the first to release a feature. Their supporters will say that Apple prefers to wait until they can release a more fully baked version. iPhone was not the first smartphone, but it was the "best" (for most people) when it was released, etc.
Apple continues to invest in the user experience and potential privacy. Unlike Android, the features that require data processing and ML are not offset into the cloud. This means that if Apple finally moves to encrypting the iCloud storage, users won't loose semantic search over their photo library, health data, and other similar features.
(I particularly like the new option to pre-select the photos that you want an app to see, rather than giving complete access to my photo library)
Serving a 301 redirect from an outdated page to a new one the way they are doing with the iOS 13 page is the exact way you're supposed to do it, and is part of Google's guidelines. It's not an SEO trick, it's how you get rid of old pages without creating a poor user experience.
They introduced widgets via the Dashboard on Mac long before Android was a thing. They’ve had widgets in iOS for years as well - what’s new is that they’re not confined to the notifications slide-down any more.
> They were doing fine until Chrome ate up all the market share.
Like, 10+ years ago...?
> Google is destroying Mozilla. Their monopoly is making the web worse.
What in the heck are you talking about. Google doesn't directly make money from Chrome - it's free!
In fact, Mozilla's bills are being paid in large by Google paying for them to use google.com as the default browser.
Mozilla has always struggled to make money. This is not some new phenomenon with the company, and certainly is not because of Google making a good browser.
> Google shouldn't have been allowed to do that. It's very anti-competitive for them to have a browser that defaults to Google search and disables plugins that support adblocking.
I mean... what? They shouldn't have been allowed to do that... because why? Because a browser defaults to a specific search engine?
C'mon now. Google built a great browser that users loved, and they flocked to it. It was faster than all the competitors at the time - including firefox - and had much better word-of-mouth traction. Firefox always had a "techie expert" connotation back in the day, and it bit them in the butt when it came to the average joe deciding which browser to use.
End of story.
There's no sinister anti-competition plot here. For heaven's sake, Google pays loads of Mozilla's bills, and collaborates with them on loooooads of projects!
> What in the heck are you talking about. Google doesn't directly make money from Chrome - it's free!
I appreciate the breath of fresh air Chrome brought in when it entered the market but: every percentage point Chrome takes in the market is a dollar Google doesn't have to pay for search traffic acquisition. Google absolutely profits from the chrome userbase. In the same manner, Android is valuable as a means of avoiding paying Apple for defaults on iOS.
Chrome has always represented a threat to Mozilla's business model, even though it was seemingly more and more profitable with less and less market share (shades of "The Producers"). It'll be interesting to see how 2021 shakes out; Yahoo! outbidding Google for default search engine momentarily put to rest the idea that Mozilla was an antimonopoly figleaf funded by Google. However, the minute Mozilla legally could, they flipped back to Google, and, frankly, that undercuts their bargaining position with Google. And with Yahoo.
> It was faster than all the competitors at the time - including firefox - and had much better word-of-mouth traction. Firefox always had a "techie expert" connotation back in the day, and it bit them in the butt when it came to the average joe deciding which browser to use.
Given how strongly Mozilla's fate is tied to market share, it seems like they should be leaning harder on advertising. I'm told Mozilla has a huge marketing department but IDK what they do TBH.
You're changing tenses from "was" to "is". Yes, firefox is good today. But, back in the day when people had to think hard about which browser to use, it wasn't as good.
ALSO, it's mostly that people switched from IE to chrome, as opposed to switching from firefox to chrome.
There's a distinction between technical truth and being candid. It's like saying that Hitler was a war hero who managed to kill a key nazi leader - technically true, but deliberately misleading.
Not that this is a good faith summary, but I've updated the article to point out that it's not just "this random 7-star library", but in fact, 266 publicly-available Go packages.
Your rant largely has to do with a library someone wrote that did not handle dependencies well. A few years ago you would have complained about lack of module support at all. I have a toy project that's relatively simple, and the Javascript frontend has a lockfile that is literally over 10000 lines long.
I was already shipping Go code a few years ago, and the various vendoring tools gave me a lot less grief the new module system has. Besides, it still had all the same limitations, the same standard library choices, the same sloppy abstractions. The rant applied then and it applies now - and focuses not on any specific problem outlined in the article, but the general philosophy of the language, its standard library, and its ecosystem.
> Your rant largely has to do with a library someone wrote that did not handle dependencies well
I am rather curious about how you concluded that "lots of dependencies bad" was the point of that section of the article and not, perhaps, the absurdity of having to compile an empty file to get around the solution to a bug being hidden from end developers.
Separately: is it just me or has Apple lost its innovative edge? Widgets and app drawer, that's the huge new update? Android has had these for, like, 5+ years.
Not that android has had anything super exciting lately, either. Maybe phone OSes have kind of implemented most of the obvious great features, I guess.