I’m back to using Chrome after giving Safari another try – I really want to see Safari as a solid alternative to Chrome but what I keep finding aren’t the major problems but rather a columination of a whole lot of small problems in much the same way that a product needn’t be completely flawed for a customer not to be happy with in. In the case of Safari there is the benefit of being able to select text within images but that doesn’t offset websites either not loading or throwing the ‘Webpage is using Significant Memory’ error even though I have 24GB of RAM on my MacBook Air or 32GB of RAM on my Mac Studio (the error mainly appears on feature rich web apps). There is also the fact that the extension framework is limited resulting in the lack of low level access to extension developers which enable content blockers to intercept content and fully block rather than the situation with AdGuard where even with the same filters that are enabled on uBlock there is content that makes it way through.

Side note: If you follow the Webextensions API meeting minutes it is clear that there is still a lot that needs to be done before Google and many of the other parties involved are not ready to make a public announcement regarding when MV2 will be phased out in favour of MV3. For me I would sooner those parties involved take their time and get it right rather than placing some arbitrary time line resulting in third party developers finding that their extensions laeck the APIs for them to be able to deliver their product. At the moment I’m fairly happy with the status quo and I cannot fathom why reason to change it – if you choose to install extensions from dodgy third parties with no established reputation.

It appears that the Google Cloud division has turned a profit (link) (putting aside questions in regards to how the segment business units when reporting financials) which makes me whether Google is trying to push harder in terms of making itself less dependent on advertising revenue. I don’t ever seeing the percentage of their ad revenue reducing quickly in terms of it’s overall contribution but in the long term if they can make it one component in a wide portfolio of services and physical products (hardware) which will insulate them from the increasingly stronger regulation coming down the pipe from both the European Union as well as the United States.

There was an interesting discussion over on Pod Save America particularly when talking about how some people treat politics as performative instead of being interested in politics as a vehicle that can transform society for the better. Unfortunately a good amount of the scolding going online, at least on social media, is about moral posturing for clout and social capital rather than using the platform to build a coalition to push for systemic changes – the regular drama and call out culture being an example of how oxygen is thieved out of the room when someone didn’t say the right thing or had a hot take but not providing context as to the reason why they made that hot take results in energy wasted on something that isn’t particularly important in the grand scheme of things.