Matisyahu's Blog

A couple of days before the official release of Firefox 128 I wanted to give it a try to see how much it has improved over 127.0.2 – what surprised me was the improvement in performance in both rendering pages as well as retrieving pages (both latency/responsiveness and speed of the download). It appears that each release developers are really focusing in on addressing performance issues – yes, even those performance issues that appear on macOS are being addressed too rather than my past experience many years ago where such issues were dismissed with a hand wave and a “yeah, yeah, sure, we’ll get to it…”.

Related to the Firefox 128.0 – at the moment I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max however I am looking at what is happening in the world of Android still, particularly the Pixel 9 Pro. Although the iPhone has the edge in terms of the Apple ecosystem the downside is the lack of a truly native Firefox on iOS that includes extension support. It it is the one strength that Android has going for it – the fact that you can install software through the Play Store that that Apple doesn’t allow, for example, browsers that use their own web engine rather than being forced to use the Webkit engine that Apple provides as part of iOS.

I’ve been following the election the United Kingdom I saw people complaining about how Sir Keir Starmer is ‘boring’ and ’50 shades of beige’ because they’ve completely ignored what happened when ever there was a Labour leader who showed the smallest amount of personality – the media outlets in the UK ripped them to threads. Anyone remember the UK media attack Edward Miliband like vultures over how he ate a bacon butty sandwich? I’m not surprised that Labour didn’t make massive announcements, big promises, grand visions given how the Tory aligned press will attack them.

It appears that Sir Keir has done what I expected – one of the first things he did was dispatch the Foreign Secretary David Lammy to Europe. If Sir Keir wishes to achieve the goal of boosting British economic growth then that will require his government to repair the relationship with the United Kingdom’s largest trading partner which has been damaged by not only Brexit but the decision by the previous Tory government who decided to break from European standards which had a cascading effect in term of trade – both importing and exporting. If they bring the United Kingdom back into alignment and start building up from there then I could see things getting better – the European Union don’t want to be undermined and if it means that the United Kingdom get back into alignment with European Union standards then you may see dividends being paid in the form of increased growth which will allow them to deal with fixing up NHS, infrastructure etc. etc.

Regarding the photos, I am still working on that but on a good side I am feeling a whole lot better than I did at the beginning of the week. The big question is whether I use something like Google Photo or Apple’s iCloud to upload and share the photos or do I open up an Instagram account then link to that once I’ve uploaded all the photos. Just a heads up, none of the photos have me in them – I don’t like taking photos of myself with the focus being in the location in the photo.

Edit: I decided to change the theme of my blog back to something subdued – it was a theme I had used a while ago so I thought I might as well move back to it. A nice, simple, minimalist design.