MudMan

This may be a regional concern. Google has very outdated information where I am, too. You definitely don’t want to default to Google Maps to know if something is open here unless you want to show up to a closed business, and for learning where a place is so you can go look it up on their site they are all mostly interchangeable.

I mean… Organic sorta works, although apparently there’s a new fork and some drama around it? If you’re less hardcore DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps instead.

I’m not sure I understand the question.

Heh, what can I say, nerding out about UI design is definitely part of my general dysfunction.

But yeah, if you’re already in a 19:10 display you generally won’t want the sidebar as much because you already have a naturally taller display, so your workspace is shaped the same as mine when you use horizontal and I use vertical. It’s probably more a problem of proportions that sizes.

Which, hey, is why being able to have a vertical and horizontal tabs option is good. We’re in a world where browsers need to fit not just horizontal and vertical displays on PCs and phones, but a whole bunch of screen aspect ratios.

You made me count, because I could have sworn it was thinner than the top bar, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. On a 4K display the single-icon vertical tabs on Firefox are 75 pixels wide. The horizontal tabs bar is a sliver narrower, at 65 pixels tall. Of course that stacks on top of the address bar, which itself is 60 pixels tall, so you end up with 125 pixels of top bar.

I don’t know if I could notice the 10 px difference between the two, given that they’re in different orientations and 10 pixels is 0.5% of the horizontal pixel count and 0.3% of the vertical, but human perception is weird. Like I said, I keep the bar much wider to read the titles and just… hide it when I’m not tabbing, so it’s not an issue at all for me. Although I’ll say that even with the wide sidebar deployed you get a pretty comfy square-ish space to work with that turns a 16:9 display to 16:10 in a satisfying way. And on ultrawide 21:9 it’s a no-brainer, just like having a side-aligned taskbar (hear that, Windows 11?).

I should add that none of that changes that Firefox is… quite ugly in general. Zen is definitely sleeker at a glance, regardless of your setup.

Hah. Well, that and a good fullscreen browser for OLED displays were my main motivations. Both of those are addressed by FF now.

Also, the vertical bar can be set to whatever width you want on both, I think. On FF (which is what I’m typing this in, so I can check) you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.

The idea is to hide it altogether when you’re not using it, in any case, but you can definitely make it as skinny or skinnier than tthe top bar.

It’s been a while and I forget the details of exactly what flow or set of steps led to me impotently clicking on things that were unresponsive because a Glance popup was on. I remember being annoyed by it relatively frequently. The memory I have of it was that Glance was cool to have going into it, but almost always frustrating to have to close again.

To be clear, I have no horse in this race. I encourage people to try Zen and Firefox and pick either of them over any of the Chromium hordes. I’m just explaining why I went into Zen, used it primarily for a while, side-by-side with Firefox when vertical tabs came in and then phased it out because FF was a better fit for me. There is no us vs them here at all.

It works, though. And the UX is basically Win10 with a modern big data business coat of paint.

Even if I buy that the brain drain in a company with a staff the size of a mid-tier city can’t sort out the tech side, which is debatable, that is still a functional OS.

One can make excuses for Vista, but it had absurd compatibility and performance issues in the hardware it was targetting. 95 and Me were barely stable enough to run software. Windows 8 was a (bad) tablet OS crammed into a desktop environment.

I’m not saying Windows 11 is good, I’m saying the bottom of this particular barrel is in the Mariana trench.

I mean, who wasn’t in on the crypto hate? It was such an obvious scam.

I do agree on the characterization of why they are different, but I’d still say a lot of the hate train rolled right from one to the other. It’s not a 100% overlap, but… it’s up there.

Yep. And in turn the haters are 100% willing to buy this framing where AI will kill all jobs and sap all energy and data on the planet immediately, because that both helps sell the product and makes opposing it all the more appealing.

I suspect they are both extremely optimistic about what the tech will be able to do, at least in the short term.

My hypothesis from the start is that people were on a roll with the crypto hate (which was a lot less ambiguous, since there were fewer legitimate applications there).

Then the AI gold rush hit and both investors and haters smoothly rolled onto that and transferred over a lot of the same discourse. It helps that AIbros overhyped the crap out of the tech, but the carryover hate was also entirely unwilling to acknowledge any kind of nuance from the go.

So now you have a bunch of people with significant emotional capital baked into the idea that genAI is fundamentally a scam and/or a world-destroying misstep that have a LOT of face to lose by conceding even a sliver of usefulness or legitimacy to the thing. They are not entirely right… but not entirely wrong, either, so there you go, the perfect recipe for an eternal culture war.

Welcome to discourse and public opinion in the online age. It kinda sucks.

See, we disagree. You and I agree they’re both shitty. The rest of this social network does not, and the larger world ABSOLUTELY does not.

I’d argue once you get into normie land entirely maybe MS starts losing some of the stink, too, but for a lot of that middle space the perception is absolutely not the same, which is why this thread exists in the first place.

Right. But the reaction they get to their shittiness is very different, which is the thing I keep wondering about. Everybody keeps telling me why Microsoft is shitty and how Apple isn’t shitty in those ways specifically while conceding they are in others.

I want to know why Apple’s shitty doesn’t make them the poster boy for shittiness but MS’s shitty does. And it does. As far back as Windows 95, Windows is the thing you use that you hate to use and love to hate. That takes work and luck. I want to know how you can dig that hole so effectively while your competition can be just as overtly crappy and still come across as sleek and all the way above good and evil. There’s a fundamental truth about branding and squishy human brains buried in that phenomenon.

Apple locked down their shit way after home computers were a necessity. I’d argue it was the rollout of handheld devices that needed a home computer to fully work that made their walled garden viable.

And Windows is the main player in home computer OSs. You can take issue with their choices, but it’s certainly functional. I’d argue Win11 is annoying, but not even in the top 3 least functional versions of Windows. I mean, I was there for Me, 8.0 and Vista.

But yes, Apple successfully deployed a locked-down, closed space, and I’m curious about why people are ok with it. That they did it early is… a solid hypothesis, I suppose.

You absolutely do have pinned tabs on FF. They go double column when you shrink down the sidebar, too, which I like. And they work with tab groups. Can’t believe those took so long to steal from Chrome. Did support for groups get integrated into Zen as well? That’s probably my line in the sand these days.

I was interested in the Glance concept, but I did not love the implementation. It was hard to tell when you were inside a Glance tab and I ended up struggling to deploy those into a persistent tab if I wanted to keep them for later. The idea was intriguing, but I never clicked with the details of the UX. It always took a little bit more thinking to work around than just… right clicking into new tab, I guess.

Oh, so it never made it out of the Insider branch? I don’t know if I’m curious enough to flip this machine over. I guess we can revisit this if/when they actually roll it out.

Ah, so Apple just happens to be one of the good massive megacorps routinely deploying anti-consumer practices. Gotcha.

See, it’s that gap in perception I’m interested in. Microsoft wants nothing more than having the closed ecosystem Apple has. From their Surface line to their much maligned store to their subscription-forward, always signed-in account environment.

Why they suck so much at selling that where Apple can get away with murder is much more interesting to me than the perceived differences between the implementations, which I would argue in a number of cases are worked backwards from the brand perception anyway. Part of it is the implementation and the execution rakes Apple chooses not to step on, but certainly not all of it, and that’s fascinating.

Really? Huh. I only stuck with it as a daily driver for maybe a couple of months just before FF rolled out vertical tabs, but it was quite rough for me.

You can set them up so they only deploy when tapping the sidebar icon and stay hidden otherwise, which is my compromise for that. I thought it’d take me longer to adapt to that when moving back from Zen, but since the top bar does deploy on proximity when using fullscreen I find it’s pretty intuitive to deploy and hide them both on mouse and touch, and I have to admit that not having them deploy accidentally when hidden is actually nice.

I do like the vertical tab pins better on Firefox, and with the new tab grouping being supported on vertical tabs I am quite happy with the setup. It takes longer to set up the way I want it compared to Zen, but honestly, I’m quite happy with it now. I’d have considered going back because more alternatives is better, but frankly Zen just had too many significant bugs in my time with it, and since it doesn’t just use the engine, but it’s also hooked up to Firefox’s account system for a bunch of stuff it just didn’t seem worth the hassle. Have they polished it up any in the past few months?

Yeah, and that didn’t change the perception people have of it. That’s the point I’m making.

And I’ll get back to you on how easy it is to specifically remove specific data entries (and whether or not the prompts are handled locally or remotely) if and when I can get a hold of this mythical unicorn, because by how much people ignores my questions I’m assuming nobody here has actually tried it?

I’d argue that this is way more nuance than the public in general puts into the issue. In fact, the goalposts have moved quite a bit. “The big difference” used to be the local encription of the data, but it became not it once Recall implemented that. Or the opt-in, which went the same way.

That’s not to say I don’t think it’s a better idea to have per-app support (which is incidentally how Microsoft implemented the feature in Windows 8 the first time), but I will say that’s not why people are mad at one and not the other.

I don’t actually know if you can selectively erase specific screenshots from the database because I, again, can’t find any traces of Recall on my supported PCs for the life of me. Coverage had made it seem that they could, since presumably the much criticised side effect of having a local, freely accessible database with just a bunch of pictures is that you could… you know, access those. Did they obscure it further in the reimplementation?

And also, I think people believe I’m being argumentative, but I’m not. Can somebody point me at the Recall opt-in and/or some explanation why my Copilot + device running 24H2 would not seem to have it available anywhere? I’m confused about the rollout here. I don’t want it on, but I’d like to try it and see what the practical implementation is for myself (and be double sure I have it turned off once I’m done with that).