"A passkey is bound to the domain it was created for, so your browser simply won't use your example.com passkey on examp1e.com."
What happens if a service you use loses its domain? For example, if I run a marxist online forum, it could happen at any time that the US regime sanctions my site and seizes my domain. Would my comrades still be able to log in with their passkeys?
I wish lists like this were curated more carefully. Just because a company is European doesn't automatically make it better. For example, Gigaset is listed as one of the alternatives to the iPhone. They distributed malware to end users via their official update servers and then failed to inform them about it. Something like this should be an absolute no go for a smartphone manufacturer unless it's properly addressed.
Furthermore for Visual Studio Code it lists only IntelliJ IDEA as an alternative. There are also alternatives such as VSCodium, Neovim, or Emacs. In some cases, the alternative to an American company should not be a European company, but rather free software.
> There are also alternatives such as VSCodium, Neovim, or Emacs. In some cases, the alternative to an American company should not be a European company, but rather free software.
I agree in theory but VSCodium wouldn't be a thing without Microsoft continuing development of VS Code so you're dependent on American software nonetheless. If the goal is true sovereignty then VSCodium isn't it unless it becomes a truly independent fork aka when LibreOffice forked OpenOffice.
Agree. As an european I would go so far to say that a lot of european alternatives are not better at all. Some form of quality/trust indicator would be helpful though. No company that is distributing malware to its customers should be on any recommendation list.
At first, the handmade emulators were just as buggy and crashed all the time. That’s just normal during development. With AI tools, however, you now have the advantage of being able to theoretically create a comprehensive testing environment where, eventually, an LLM will play the games on its own and fix any bugs it finds, so that the user ends up with a nearly perfect emulator.
The Switch 2 is a completely different story than other consoles. To create an emulator for it, you'd have to be able to reverse-engineer the Switch 2, and that won't be possible until there's a jailbreak.
Good news here, someone claims to have found a userland exploit in at least one game and dumped the game via HDMI capture of visual encoded data. They might be full of it, or we might have a path for Switch2 ROMs.
I say that as a Switch 2 owner with a pretty extensive Nintendo library. I dont actually have any interest in using Switch 2 ROMs this decade, but maybe next.
Both WhatsApp and banking apps (Santander/Openbank) work perfectly for me. You really shouldn't use Google Wallet because of privacy concerns. But if you absolutely want to, there are other equally questionable alternatives, such as PayPal, that work just fine on GrapheneOS.
They work fine for me too personally, but not for everyone. Banks are ofc by institution, but with whatsapp there's some flag that can be put on an account which makes them get an "unofficial app" warning and not log in. Which gets cleared by using a stock device or something passing integrity. Definitely a weird situation, but there's plenty of proof out there that they're doing something strange
There is a guy in Denmark working on a G wallet/ A wallet alternative. He has a discord and the release of tap-to-pay is scheduled for early next year. Very enthusiastic for the app because the guy refused to compromise on app compatibility with GOS, regardless of the 2months delay this introduced.
PayPal only supports tap-to-pay in Germany. Curve Pay supports tap-to-pay on GrapheneOS in the UK and the whole European Economic Area. Many European banks have working tap-to-pay too, and the trend of those replacing their independent system with Google Pay has subsided. It's mostly a non-issue in Europe but there aren't similar alternatives for most of the world. Japan does have their own alternative which works on GrapheneOS with Japanese models of Pixels.
I've never understood what niche Orion is supposed to fill. People who value privacy would be more likely to use an open-source browser. Firefox and Brave already serve that purpose. Maybe it's less important to Mac users, but on Linux, a proprietary browser is a major deal-breaker for most people. Plus, it's less convenient if the browser isn't simply included in the repository as a result. Orion should have been developed as open source from the start, with community involvement. Kagi can still benefit from this, though, by serving as the default search engine in exchange for funding the development, and by having the Kagi Assistant directly integrated into the platform.
having written a few extensions... they are basically the same API with a few differences you need to account for. there's polyfills that can unify the experience a bit more too.
Chromium-based browsers actually have had better battery life than Safari for 2 years (!) now[0]. And perform better. Which is a real egg on Apple's face.
The only reason to use Safari is because you're knee-deep in the Apple ecosystem, otherwise something like Chrome, Edge or Brave just makes more sense.
> But this is not to tell every Safari user that they are irrational or wrong in any way for using Safari over Chrome (or any other browser, for that matter). Does Safari use more battery than Chrome? In these tasks it sure seems to, but it’s not by a massive amount, potentially costing you about 0.5% of your battery life every hour. Is that enough for you to switch browsers if you prefer Safari’s UI or reliability or privacy options? I suspect not.
The point is moreso that Chrome being a battery hog is a myth.
Safari is less private than Brave and does not have the breadth of extension that Chromium browsers (and Firefox) do. So again, the only reason to really choose Safari is if you're completely in the Apple ecosystem.
Anecdotally, the niche it solved for me for a while was "Safari for optimal performance on mac, but with proper extensions like ublock".
I used it regularly for almost a year, eventually got off because of some UI bugs that came up and because the Safari dev tools feel so clunky/need relearning compared to Chrome & FF.
I’ve been using it on iOS since it’s near inception and I can report that it is much more stable now than it was since its original release. I tried to live on the desktop browser, however, and eventually had to declare it unusable and switch back to Firefox. Mostly around things like 1Password and similar extensions being pretty broken in the Orion desktop browser.
In addition to what other have said about extensions, ad blocking, no telemetry, and some nice features like tab management, it works in the Apple ecosystem. If you use a mac and an iphone, you get the native sync services for history, bookmarks, passwords, etc. Makes sense that they're focusing on that.
Developing internally initially, as opposed to making it open source, was probably the only practical way for a small team with a specific goal to get there. I don't see any problem turning it over to community development for secondary platforms. If it gets adoption, great. If it fizzles out on linux and windows, nothing is lost.
Browser diversity is a good thing. We've seen what happens when one huge monopoly dominates the browser landscape. Twice now, first with IE and then Chrome.
I use Orion because it's not a product of Apple or Google. There's no reason the browser should be a product of the same company who made the OS.
On Mac, a non Safari browser that moves faster, allows chrome extensions and more customizability. I stopped using it because they refused to implement DNS over HTTP, handwaving it as "use what the OS already gives you".
Firefox fits that description aside obviously from Chrome extensions, is there something inherently more appealing about the Chrome API? Didn't they just sunset it and replace it with some crippled version that can't even support a decent ad-blocker anyway? I know of a few commercial products that only offer a Chrome extension I guess, but I would consider that those product's problems.
I don't use chrome either, I am using safari as the least problematic option.
I think firefox is not even trying. It feels bloated to me, there was a recent update that added some gradient, because that is exactly what users needed from the roadmap. A Gradient.
I've been paying for kagi since it came out, use linux on my laptop and lineaege on my phone, and I don't use Orion.
In other words, as you say, exactly.
I have no idea if it's a good or bad or I'd like it or not. I never even considered trying. I don't mind that it exists. I don't think kagi are doing anything bad with it. But I also just have no interest in even trying it. Presumably it's good for soneone but for me (a paying kagi customer linux user) it's almost like it's invisible. A probably benign, utterly uninteresting thing.
I don't use any of their AI features either. I hope they cost extra seperately so that I'm not paying for that stuff I'm not using but I suspect I probably am.
The AI is pretty benign, too. They offer diverse models and they make it as privacy-preserving as possible, considering you can opt to use closed models. They are very open about training and retention: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llms-privacy.html. An interesting note there on models served by OpenAI: "The Assistant does not include a unique user identifier for these requests." I don't know if you can trust OpenAI, but Kagi is at least doing its part.
Also, All the AI integration into the product is gated by a single setting.
If this was a real issue for most, people would look at Google closing up Android and shipping laptops that are locked to the Play Store and refuse to have anything to do with Chrome or Chromium.
I don't get the impression Mozilla puts much effort into Firefox on macOS - whether its performance, or fitting in UX wise. So it's nice to have another browser on macOS that can run uBo.
Afaict the niche they attempted to fill is the one Firefox already fills on desktop, a highly customizable browser with extension support. (Firefox does not support extensions on iOS, apparently has no plans to do so, and as I understand the support is somewhat limited on Android as well). I switched for about a year because they delivered what seemed like a serious effort at that with their initial release. After seeing basically zero effort at addressing very fundamental bugs in that support in that year, I switched back. As far as I’m concerned their battle is already lost.
The iOS codebase is the only one that potentially has any value to the OSS community; this kind of "enjoy our garbage!" source release really irks me.
What I don't understand is why Apple is even responding to this absurd demand. Completely banning Apple products in the UK isn't a realistic option for the government, so Apple could simply state openly that it does not cooperate with authoritarian regimes and actively prompt British users via a pop-up to enable ADP to protect themselves from the government.
If apple didn't comply with the Chinese government they'd probably be asked to pack up their suicide nets and find somewhere else with sophisticated manufacturing facilities filled with slaves to make their products.
But apple also cannot just stop selling or supporting their product in the UK either. So that card is dropped from both sides. As long as apple is beholden to a few million costumers and subscribers to their services in the UK; UK law is able to pressure them, fine them and restrict them because of those users.
We don't want it the other way around; companies placed outside the borders doing and selling whatever they want without a care. So we end up in a negotiation.
Apple choose to maliciously comply; subtly revealing the TCN, giving all UK users notices about what their government demanded of them to encourage public outrage, and push on the correct parts of the UK government that has their interest in mind.
It may actually be illegal in US law for Apple to leave the UK market for ideological reasons. Public companies are beholden to shareholders and can be sued for not acting in their interest (fiduciary duty, Delaware General Corporation Law). (I loathe these laws, but that's a separate discussion entirely.)
So sure they _can_, but at a cost that strikes the option from the cards entirely.
It seems you are suggesting that if a private corporation (a foreign one at that) is large enough it should ignore the law of the country its operating in. I don't think you will like the consequences of such a situation, and will charitably assume you have just not thought your message through for even a second before posting it.
PS: If you think the British gov is authoritarian.. well, you might not know what the term means and/or anything about the spectrum of governments operating today or in the past.
If laws aren't transparent and reasonable, you shouldn't necessarily follow them. If I were to sell encryption software that's banned in Kazakhstan, you wouldn't expect me to stop selling to customers there, would you? I see no reason why the United Kingdom should be treated any differently than Kazakhstan in this case.
The British government is certainly not as authoritarian as those in China or Russia, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still terrible and restricts people’s rights. For example, you can be detained for as long as they want if you refuse to unlock your encrypted device.
You may be confused, so I'll try to illustrate the situation.
Supose you live in USA, your chickens have a list of laws, those laws apply to USA. If you try to sell those chickens in UK or Europe you'll find that your company will not be allowed to operate, and if you continue someone will go to jail.
Maybe digital products have an easy way out, but apple is not digital and they may need to find a way to comply.
To be more charitable, I think they're more suggesting that Apple should call the UK's bluff, knowing that democracies have to be accountable to their citizens.
Can Apple afford to lose the UK market? Almost certainly yes -- it's a fairly minor global player. Can the current UK government afford to deal with the massive fallout of banning all Apple products right now? That might be, as Sir Humphrey Appleby would say, a very courageous move.
In other words, Apple could simply state that in order to protect their users they cannot and will not do this, and will withdraw from the market rather than comply. That puts the onus on the UK government to either put up or shut up.
It would be fascinating to see how this would play out. Would "think of the children" and "OMG, terrorists!!" win against, "but I still want my iProducts"?
I think they should instead just introduce a clear system for verifying that a Raspberry Pi is genuine. For example, a code printed directly on the device. If you enter that code on the website, you can see exactly which model it belongs to and how often it has been used. That way, you could determine whether a Raspberry Pi is new or used and whether it has been modified.
I saw that once at a thermal paste manufacturer. They used it to solve the problem of counterfeit thermal paste.You just have to get people to actually use the system and tell anyone else who asks for support but doesn't have an original copy to GTFO.This would allow them to avoid the increased support burden without limiting people's ability to upgrade their Raspberry Pi.
Chinese scammers have gotten good at abusing those "codes" by having a list of "known good" codes and printing them on multiple units. And because those holographic codes some companies used are printed in China, the scammers just use the same equipment during the night shift.
Just show everyone who looks up the code how often the code has already been checked. If you get a new product but the code has been checked 628 times, it’s probably a reused code.
fun fact is that some chinese electronics manufacturers do exactly that with their products (even simple ones like led night lights), holographic qr-code on box that can be scanned and verified without opening box and second code inside box to verify box wasn't swapped
