Matisyahu's Blog

Firefox 130 has been released (link) and everything is going well – responsive, uBlock Origin extension working wonderfully (looking forward to the release of uBlock Origin which appears to be packed with lots of bug fixes and enhancements). For me I’m not really interested in chatbots but my focus is mainly on standards compliance to ensure smooth interoperability along with extensions that aren’t crippled in any sort of way. What I do hope is that as web browsers improve interoperability and standards compliance that it will translate to web developers writing for the standard rather than picking Chrome as their browser of choice and if it fails to work on Firefox or Safari then who cares.

Looking forward to the Apple event on 10 September (9 September US time) – there are rumours that Apple are going to announce the release date of macOS and iOS to be repeated at the same time but part of me is sceptical of that rumour based on how they made their platform upgrade available in the past. Although I keep saying to myself, “Oh, I’ll wait for the x.1 version to be release before upgrading” but I have feeling I’ll jump straight into the new platform – being able to try the new Safari to see how the improvements will translate to improved performance.

Edit: The Apple event has been and Apple have confirmed that their new platforms will be released 17 September 2024 (16 September 2024 US time) (link) (link) and the updated phones will entice those with older iPhones but I don’t see anyone with a recent iPhone upgrading unless they’ve got money burning a hole in their pocket. As others have noted, we’ve hit peak iPhone, growth has slowed with people keeping their phones for longer. It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple will expand their services – the benefit of services they tend to have high margins and are a nice reoccurring revenue stream.

I’ve been following New Zealand politics this week and it is amazing how so many in the media cannot see the whole ‘Treaty Principles’ for what it is – this is bill that they’ll keep pushing out each election to get the terminally online culture warriors to keep voting for the Act Party. This year will be the writing up the bill but it won’t get passed (National and NZ First only promised to support it through it’s first reading then sending it to select committee), the next election they’ll run on it in a hope that it’ll win voters over from New Zealand First to Act – each election they’ll trot it out to win the votes but eventually it’ll lead no where but it’ll mean that National will only have to deal with Act rather than both New Zealand First and Act which is why National is all good with it being in the coalition agreement because ultimately in the long run they benefit from it too. Keeping in mind that is all speculation on my part – I could be (and most likely) am 100% wrong with my analysis in attributing some sort of over arching plan when there may be a simple and straight forward explaination.

It’s a couple of weeks away from the Google TV Streamer from being made available at third party resellers – you can preorder it from Amazon but I’m going to wait to see what the reviewers end up saying because so far the YouTubers that have covered it have gone into it in a very limited way. The part that I am interested in is how it’ll be used as a home hub which makes use of Matter and Threads to glue everything together – something that Apple has done a really good job at with their own Apple TV acting as a home hub. It’ll be interesting to see what the changes are with Android TV 14 and whether the release of a set top box with decent specifications will result in support long term for newer versions of Android TV rather than perpetually stuck on older versions of Android TV.