Matisyahu's Blog

Chrome 118 was released this morning (NZ Time) with quite a number of changes (link), many of the changes involve removing non compliant implementations such as webkit prefixed APIs that have been superseded by APIs that have been officially stabilised and standardised. I guess a good portion of the removals have to do with pushing web developers away from their dependency on non standards based web technologies in favour of using the ones that are now standardised which is part of the larger Interop drive (link). Safari and Firefox are also doing the same – removing the non standard implementations in favour of the standardised or closed to standardised implementations. It is going to be long uphill slog but in the end it’ll hopefully mean that web developers can write their code according to the open standards and as a consequence it’ll work regardless of which browser the end user is running.

I finally got myself sorted out and voted yesterday down at the local voting location – same vote I make every election, Labour for my constituent vote and Greens for my party vote. For me I see the Greens play the same role that ACT plays when it comes to forming a coalition with National – the Greens provide Labour with a backbone to do the left wing policies that they secretly want to do but are too risk adverse to actually carry out. It’ll be interesting to see what the outcome of the election is given the number of undecided voters that are being picked up in the polling. I have to admit, the whole election this year has been thoroughly unappealing – no long term vision for New Zealand. If one were to explain what it is like as a flavour then ‘dust’ would be the best description. Labour throwing unworkable ideas at the wall such as no GST on fruit and vegetables (both frozen and fresh), National offering tax cuts but when examined the numbers just don’t add up, NZ First is doing it’s reactionary anti-woke shtick to get the blue haired rinse brigade enraged, ACT is doing their reheating of Rogernomics with Greens and Te Pāti Māori the only ones advocating interesting ideas that push back against the neoliberal orthodoxy.

Regarding the whole conflict in Israel/Gaza Strip, I’m not going to touch it with a forty foot barge pole because I’m not an expert in it, I don’t have even enough knowledge as a lay person and thus my input won’t add any value to the discourse other than showing how ignorant I am regarding the situation over there.

I’ve been watching a few iPhone to Samsung switch videos for a while and the one thing I notice is that a lot of time is spent on the hardware and software but little spent on talking about migrating from one ecosystem to another ecosystem. When I mean ecosystem I am referring to moving from the ‘default’ on the iPhone being iCloud to that of Google (maybe even Microsoft) on Android or if they aren’t using iCloud exclusively what else are they using in concert with it – iCloud plus Google Workspace or Office 365 with custom domain? If they used both services what did they utilise iCloud for – bookmarks, passwords etc. or only for ‘find my’ then use Microsoft or Google for the rest?

The reason why I bring that up is because if you’re heavily integrated with iCloud – everything from passwords through email, calendering, contacts, custom domain (through iCloud+) then what you need to do when moving to an Android phone is going to be completely different than someone who is 99% using Microsoft or Google but use iCloud solely for device tracking, buying apps on the Mac etc. which is where I am. For me, I am 99% in the Google Workspace with my iCloud being used for ‘Find my’ and buying stuff on the App Store for my Mac.

The other part of the equation that is also left out is this, are you on a Mac, Windows or Linux desktop/laptop? If you’re a Windows device then you maybe more open to using Samsung’s own home grown bespoke applications which only have support for synchronising to Windows whereas if you’re on iCloud then there is support in Windows for CardDAV and CalDAV support along side IMAP for email but on Android there is no CardDAV and CalDAV out of the box support.

For me, the process is relatively simple because what ever existed on iCloud exists in Google Workspace but for others it’s a bit tricker. Looping back to the start of this post, the reason for posting this is because reviewers and switchers seem to overlook these issues because in some cases a switch isn’t merely moving from one platform to another but also rethinking who is going to be their email provider, who do are they going to synchronise their bookmarks and passwords to – should they use a paid service like 1Password? Maybe sign up for Office 365 for custom domain hosting and use Microsoft Edge?

It’s that time of the year and Google has announced a laundry list of updates – the biggest IMHO is the 7 year software support which will hopefully push other Android handset OEMs to step up along with Qualcomm and other SoC vendors to provide support long term. Although it hasn’t launched in New Zealand they have added support for Spark, Skinny, One NZ and 2 Degrees so if you hop across the ditch to Aussie and pick on up then you’ll be able to have all the functionality in New Zealand – remember to claim the GST on your way out of Australia.

I’ve talked about Safari and Webextensions API in the past but never really went into good detail as to the current situation of Safari and why it lags behind Firefox and Chrome when it comes to the functionality that web extension developers need to make their extensions work. At the moment there is the Webextensions API group which is made up of Apple, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft along with several high profile extension developers such as AdGuard, who contribute to regular meetings about standardising the MV3 Webextensions API standard. My impression of what is taking place is that much of Webextension API is being rethought from the ground up with a greater focus security and privacy in mind not to mention improving in interoperability so it is then possible to write an extension according to the standard then have it run on different browsers without any headaches.

In the case of where Safari sits, Chrome and Firefox have the added luxury of the pre-MV3 legacy APIs that are still included as part of the browser where as it appears Safari is implementing MV3 but without any of the legacy that Chrome and Firefox have. What is the net result? many of the features that exist in Firefox and Chrome don’t exist in Safari – for example, at the moment there is a discussion about standardising how does one standardise cosmetic rules, should it be part of the declarative network request or should it be seperate API in its own right? (link) So there is a process that it’ll go through so that all the stakeholders involved can, at the end of an exhaustive process, will come up with something that they can all live with, is standardised which will then Apple engineers something stable that they can implement knowing that any work being done isn’t going be thrown out if one tried to write code while the standard is still being developed.

But for me, I can’t use Safari because I need to be able to use uBlock Origin so the choices I have left are either Chrome or Firefox but unfortunately due to the nature of the internet some websites don’t work smoothly with Firefox. Long story short, I would love to use Safari but until MV3 is fully standardised and implemented on Safari then unfortunately the experience content blocking experience is going to continue lagging behind what can be achieved on Firefox and Chrome. For those wondering, the content blockers in Safari either fail to fully block ads or if they block popups the window is still created but a message appears in the browser that the connection was blocked which kind of undermines the whole idea of having a content blocker if the window ends opening regardless of whether it says inside the window – be it content or a message that says the connection has been blocked.

I’m looking forward to the release of the Pixel 8 because it will now officially support carriers in New Zealand – VoLTE, 5G, VoWiFi and much more. It’ll be interesting to see whether Google expands support officially to New Zealand in terms of selling it either directly or through a reseller such as one of the three major carriers but either way I’m happy to buy it through a retailer like Mighty Ape, PB Tech or buying it off Amazon from the US then getting it delivered via YouShop (a NZ Post remailing service).

It is interesting to see the number of articles spelling the doom and gloom regarding Google and how ‘they’re late to the game’ when it comes to AI (or any laundry list of things the tech talking heads wish to throw at the wall) while they ignore that Google is going through the same teething pains that Microsoft went through before they eventually transitioned into the form they are today. While in the case of Microsoft it was embracing the cloud and having it permeate every aspect of their product line up, Google on the other hand is pushing to expand it’s ‘paid for’ services, it’s move into Podcasts where they’ll probably start to offer a ‘paid service’ that end users can subscribe to podcasts with Google handling the payment processing etc. Advertising is quite profitable but it comes with a whole lot of headaches particularly in the regulatory space around privacy when compared to selling a good or a service.

Being at the end of my tether I have decided to throw in the towel and give up on MTP in favour of setting up an SMB server on my Mac and simply download to my Android phone over the network. The process of copying around 45GB of files has reduced from over 24 hours along with persisting disconnecting to now it’s transferring it at around 10MBs (so far it is around hal way through).

Oh, and in a fit of optimism I posted the following on the YouTube Music feedback:

1) When I choose the artist I would like a list of the albums then click on the albums to get a list of tracks rather than having a massive list of all the tracks from every album.

2) Either the ability to choose for YouTube Music not to re-encode my music when I upload it and/or the ability to upload a flac file larger than 300MB so that one avoids the reduction in quality due to a loss to loss conversion.

I’m not hopeful that anything will come of it but I might as well throw in my five cents worth but at least I can say I tried something because YouTube Music has a lot of potential but the people who are running it can’t seem to get their act together.