Monthly Archive:: August 2023

For the past several years, more than 90% of Chrome users’ navigations have been to HTTPS sites, across all major platforms. Thankfully, that means that most traffic is encrypted and authenticated, and thus safe from network attackers. However, a stubborn 5-10% of traffic has remained on HTTP, allowing attackers to eavesdrop on or change that data. Chrome shows a warning in the address bar when a connection to a site is not secure, but we believe this is insufficient: not only do many people not notice that warning, but by the time someone notices the warning, the damage may already have been done. We believe that the web should be secure by default. HTTPS-First Mode lets Chrome deliver on exactly that promise, by getting explicit permission from you before connecting to a site insecurely. Our goal is to eventually enable this mode for everyone by default. While the web isn’t quite ready to universally enable HTTPS-First Mode today, we’re announcing several important stepping stones towards that goal. It’s definitely going to be tough to get those last few percentages converted to HTTPS, and due to Chrome’s monopolistic influence on the web, any steps it takes will be felt by everyone.

FreeBSD is a compelling and cutting-edge operating system that provides a wealth of features and advantages. FreeBSD’s deep OpenZFS integration, completely customizable packaging, and the ability to manage a huge fleet with a small team make it a clear contender for consideration in your next infrastructure build. This one’s written by a company that, among other things, sells FreeBSD and OpenZFS support, so take that into account when reading the article.

Debate continues to rage over the federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which seeks to hold platforms liable for feeding harmful content to minors. KOSA is lawmakers’ answer to whistleblower Frances Haugen’s shocking revelations to Congress. In 2021, Haugen leaked documents and provided testimony alleging that Facebook knew that its platform was addictive and was harming teens—but blinded by its pursuit of profits, it chose to ignore the harms. But when Blumenthal introduced KOSA last year, the bill faced immediate and massive blowback from more than 90 organizations—including tech groups, digital rights advocates, legal experts, child safety organizations, and civil rights groups. These critics warned lawmakers of KOSA’s many flaws, but they were most concerned that the bill imposed a vague “duty of care” on platforms that was “effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content.” The fear was that the duty of care provision would likely lead platforms to over-moderate and imprecisely filter content deemed controversial—things like information on LGBTQ+ issues, drug addiction, eating disorders, mental health issues, or escape from abusive situations. Since then, Ars Technica reports in this detailed article, the law does seem to have been amended in positive, constructive ways – but not nearly far enough to make it workable and not prone to massive abuse. Sadly, it seems the bill is poised to pass, so we’ll have to see what the eventual, final version will look like.

There’s no denying that the browser is the single-most important application on any operating system, whether that be on desktops and laptops or on mobile devices. Without a capable, fast, and solid browser, the usefulness of an operating system decreases exponentially, to the point where I’m quite sure virtually nobody’s going to use an operating system for regular, normal use if it doesn’t have a browser. Having an at least somewhat useable browser is what elevates an operating system from a hobby toy to something you could use for more than 10 minutes as a fun novelty. The problem here is that making a capable browser is actually incredibly hard, as the browser has become a hugely capable platform all of its own. Undertaking the mammoth task of building a browser from scratch is not something a lot of people are interested in – save for the crazy ones – made worse by the fact that competing with the three remaining browser engines is basically futile due to market consolidation and monopolisation. Chrome and its various derivatives are vastly dominant, followed by Safari on iOS, if only because you can’t use anything else on iOS. And then there’s Firefox, trailing far behind as a distant third – and falling. This is the environment desktop Linux distributions find themselves in. For the longest time now, desktop Linux has relied virtually exclusively on shipping Firefox – and the Mozilla suite before that – as their browser, with some users opting to download Chrome post-install. While both GNOME and KDE nominally invest in their own two browsers, GNOME Web and Falkon, their uptake is limited and releases few and far between. For instance, none of the major Linux distributions ship GNOME Web as their default browser, and it lacks many of the features users come to expect from a browser. Falkon, meanwhile, is updated only sporadically, often going years between releases. Worse yet, Falkon uses Chromium through QtWebEngine, and GNOME Web uses WebKit (which are updated separately from the browser, so browser releases are not always a solid metric!), so both are dependent on the goodwill of two of the most ruthless corporations in the world, Google and Apple respectively. Even Firefox itself, even though it’s clearly the browser of choice of distributions and Linux users alike, does not consider Linux a first-tier platform. Firefox is first and foremost a Windows browser, followed by macOS second, and Linux third. The love the Linux world has for Firefox is not reciprocated by Mozilla in the same way, and this shows in various places where issues fixed and addressed on the Windows side are ignored on the Linux side for years or longer. The best and most visible example of that is hardware video acceleration. This feature has been a default part of the Windows version since forever, but it wasn’t enabled by default for Linux until Firefox 115, released only in early July 2023. Even then, the feature is only enabled by default for users of Intel graphics – AMD and Nvidia users need not apply. This lack of video acceleration was – and for AMD and Nvidia users, still is – a major contributing factor to Linux battery life on laptops taking a serious hit compared to their Windows counterparts. The road to even getting here has been a long, hard, and bumpy one. For years and years now, getting video acceleration to work on Firefox for Linux was complicated and unreliable, with every release of the browser possibly changing what flags you needed to set, and sometimes it would just stop working for several releases in a row altogether, no matter what you did. There’s a venerable encyclopaedia of forum messages, blog posts, and website articles with outdated instructions and Hail Mary-like suggestions for users trying to get it to work. Conventional wisdom would change with every release, and keeping track of it all was a nightmare. It’s not just hardware accelerated video decoding. Gesture support has taken much longer to arrive on the Linux version than it did on the Windows version – things like using swipes to go back and forward, or pinch to zoom on images. Similarly, touchscreen support took a longer time to arrive on the Linux version of Firefox, too. Often, such features could be enabled with about:config incantations for years before becoming enabled by default, at least, but that’s far from an ideal situation. With desktop Linux trailing both Windows and macOS in popularity, there’s nothing unexpected or inherently malicious about this, and the point of the previous few paragraphs is not to complain about the state of Firefox for Linux or to suggest Mozilla transfers precious resources from the Windows and macOS versions to the Linux version. While I obviously wouldn’t complain if they did so, it wouldn’t make much sense. The real reason I’m highlighting these issues is that if Firefox for Linux is already treated as a third wheel today, with Mozilla’s current financial means and resources, what would happen if Mozilla saw a drastic reduction in its financial means and resources? Firefox is not doing well. Its market share has dropped radically over the years, and now sits at a meagre 3% on desktops and laptops, and a negligible 0.5% on mobile. Chrome and to a lesser extent Safari have trampled all over the venerable browser, to a point where it’s effectively an also-ran for Linux/BSD users, and a few more nerds on other platforms. I’m not saying this to disparage those who use Firefox – I’m one of them – but to underline just how dire Firefox’ current market position really is. This shrinking market share must already be harming the development and future prospects of Firefox, especially if the slide continues. The declining market share is far from the biggest problem, however. The giant sword of Damocles dangling above Firefox’ head are Mozilla’s really odd and lopsided revenue sources. As most of us are probably aware, Mozilla makes most of

It’s Back to School season, so grab yourself a brand new discounted computer and let’s get back to COSMIC class! Our new, not yet released Rust-based desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros is filling out with some essential systems that cater the DE to both users and developers alike. Customization is one of our main focuses for COSMIC, and was a huge focus for us in August, too. There’s a lot of cool stuff in this update about COSMIC. First and foremost, customisation is important, so they’ve effectively implemented something similar to Android’s Material You theming engine, where the desktop environment will automatically determine derived colours that match the colour you’ve chosen as to maintain readability, contrast, and so on. You can also set the density of the interface, and how ’rounded’ everything looks. Sadly, there’s no word on actual theming in there, but they do mention that “nothing in the components of the design system is meant to be hard-coded”, so hopefully this means custom themes that radically alter the look of the UI are possible. There’s also a new API for application developers. We added an application API to the libcosmic widget library to provide a framework for developing applications and applets in COSMIC DE. It automates integration with COSMIC theme support, along with Wayland protocols, COSMIC’s configuration back-end, and common application elements like header bars and navigation. For application developers, this means convenient development without having to worry about managing the low-level desktop and window manager integrations. For us, this ensures consistency across COSMIC applications and applets. COSMIC is shaping up nicely, and I can’t wait to try it out.

ARM Ltd has been dominating the Android world for the better part of the last decade, with their 7-series cores at the forefront of their success. Throughout the late 2010s, the Cortex A73, A75, and A76 steadily iterated on performance while maintaining excellent energy efficiency. Qualcomm, and then Samsung decided licensing ARM’s cores would be easier than trying to outdo them. Apple remained a notable rival, but their core designs were not available outside a closed-off ecosystem. By the time Cortex A78 came around, ARM had no real competition. ARM’s Cortex A710 continues that dominance. It takes A78’s successful formula and tweaks it to improve performance and efficiency. Efficiency is especially prioritized, with the core seeing cuts in some areas as ARM tries to get more done with less power. A710 claims to provide a 30% uplift in power efficiency or a 10% performance increase within a fixed power envelope when compared to a A78 core with half as much L3 cache. Alongside these improvements, A710 gains Armv9-A and SVE support. A deep dive into ARM’s latest core.