Yet again, I’ll indulge myself in commenting on a variety of topics stemming from the nerdy stuff to which I pay attention. I’d originally intended for this latest post to be focused on just one of them — I’ll leave it to you to guess which — but, the longer I procrastinated, the greater number of happenings that I wanted to discuss. It’s not a desirable habit, but it’s Moi, folks. Let’s have at it.
I’ve spent most of this calendar year waiting to see what happened in the Google antitrust case. My expectation had been that we’d get a ruling in August, but it ended up slipping into early September. The most important effect of the ruling (PDF), at least for us ordinary web-browsing folks out here, was that Alphabet’s Google arm gets to keep Chrome and can keep paying organizations like Mozilla to promote the Google search engine. One can honestly and fairly debate the merits of both Google and Mozilla; but it’s a good thing that the incredibly important Chromium project will still have the nearly unlimited financial support that only Alphabet can give it, and it’s another good thing that there will still be financial backing for Mozilla’s Firefox browser (and, by extension, the numerous other FOSS projects that exist because Firefox’s Gecko engine can continue to exist). By the way, the ruling itself won’t go into effect for perhaps years due to the appellate process, but nearly all legal opinions I’ve seen on that particular aspect seem to agree that (what I consider to be) the good parts won’t change.
Starting in mid-2020, Netlify’s free tier allowed 300 minutes per month of website deployments. I long ago wrote about how to get around this by using an external CI/CD provider, rather than Netlify’s servers, to build a Netlify-hosted site. However, Netlify’s recently announced overhaul to its pricing plans has changed that. Now, a project on the free plan gets 300 credits per month, and each deployment — even if the build itself comes from elsewhere — costs fifteen of those, meaning you get a maximum of twenty deploys a month on the free plan. This will be problematic for some and a nothing-burger for others. Just sayin’. And, in case you’re wondering: Netlify-hosted projects that were on the previous free plan prior to this change are grandfathered with the old 300-minute limit that’s unrelated to credits; but, going forward, the 300-credit free plan is the new normal.
Those who work with anything built on npm-hosted dependencies have been reminded and re-reminded in recent weeks that the resulting supply chain can, um, have its moments. Two different supply chain attacks using especially crafty social-engineering ploys briefly made the use of numerous popular dependencies problematic. GitHub (which, like npm, is owned by Microsoft) announced a plan to improve the situation, but there inevitably will be ways of getting around even the “best laid” plans.
Apple released its latest major OS versions on September 15, and I have made peace with them for the most part. I am not a huge fan of the much-maligned Liquid Glass look but, after tweaking things here and there, have managed to live with it without a whole lot of pain. Based on some of the videos I saw from the earliest betas of these OSs a few months ago, it could’ve been a lot worse. And there are some new things I really like, such as being able to use a real Phone app on the Mac rather than an awkward interaction with the FaceTime app whenever I want to do an audio-only speakerphone call using my monitor’s audio system.
I learned only this week of yet another Chromium-based browser in the wild, called Helium. It’s fully FOSS — consider it a cooler, easier, and more updates-friendly way to use ungoogled-chromium — and is an attractive, lean, and quick performer. Helium is still in beta and the project has a few quirks that make it not yet ready for daily driving (at least mine), but it’s promising. If you can abide listening to Theo Browne on YouTube, this link will take you to the relevant part of a browsers-comparison video where he discussed Helium and explained his confidence in those behind this project, to which he apparently donated some funding. Or, for an alternative take, you can also look at the (mostly negative and, I feel, often off-topic) comments in this Hacker News thread.
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