In circa 2003-2004, it was as close to on par with browsers at the time as it would get. I think the WebKit fork did damage to the momentum. By 2008 with KDE4, the rework that split it and Dolphin into to products was basically the final nail I think, as development work effectively stopped.

Likely old accounts are an exploit vector for hackers. That would be the only reasonable excuse. However someone in the business unit will use this as their lever to make other bad decisions.

Sounds like you want the EU to collapse like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The history of vetoes is very interesting.

$4M is nothing. That’s like 50 bloggers in western Europe, or one regional rag with no readers. Or a Twitter troll farm in Hungary with 100 totally real humans and their handlers getting rich siphoning most of it off for themselves. A literal drop in the bucket.

The US has been funding foreign media for a century at least, steering narratives. It was part of their soft power strategy. This isn’t surprising. Where people are freaking out is due to the shift in alignment.

The irony is that Chrome’s rendering engine was a fork of WebKit, which was a fork of KHTML, a free and open source rendering engine created by KDE for Konqueror. They basically took something free, used Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics on it. Now KHTML is vestigial, only found in the UserAgent string.

But we could have had a truly free open source cross platform browser with Konqueror.

Best we have now is Firefox, but the bulk of Mozilla’s development funding comes from setting Google as the default search. So it is also hijackable.

I think it was still called Phoenix when I originally dropped it. Before it got renamed Firefox. Came back around last year after adblock stuff in chrome finally chased me away.

Do you have a program to help you count sheep to fall asleep? Asking for a friend

Ugh. This is going to take centuries, isn’t it…

Prediction: this will be considered Apple’s biggest product flop in decades, and may even unseat the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_5300 for worst in company history. The whole product line will be scrapped before 2027.

Fortunately they have the cash to burn on projects like this to see what takes.

I’ll post this in [email protected] so someone can call me on it one day ;)