Episode: 3583
Title: HPR3583: takov751 and dnt talk about browsers
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3583/hpr3583.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:45:23

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,583 from Wednesday the 27th of April 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Take of End to Talk About Browsers.
It is hosted by Dint and is about 8 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, after Episode 3,543, some messages were exchanged.
Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
This is your host, Dint.
A few weeks ago, I posted an episode in which I complained about web browsers for a bit.
In the past, listeners to go to a certain matrix channel and drop voice messages with
what they thought about web browsers.
If you use Element, there is a way to quickly record a voice message, much like in other
messengers like Signal and WhatsApp, but some other matrix clients don't do this.
Later, I would go in and download everything and make an HBR episode out of it.
Only one person responded, although some lurkers joined the channel as well.
I guess this means browsers aren't really something anyone feels much of a need to talk
about.
While I waited, another idea that occurred was that there could be a matrix channel with
something like a monthly topic and then someone who knows how to do it.
So not me would automate downloading all the voice messages people leave over the entire
month and then make that into an episode of HBR.
Maybe that would be interesting.
And to announce the speaker, maybe a robot voice could be useful if we could agree on
which one to use.
Anyway, enough of this, let's listen to the talk of 751 and I talk about web browsers.
Hello, I'm on talk of 751 speaking.
My take on the boxes is I'm using five folks mainly, but I have at least five profiles
for different use cases.
I have a fortified secure solution for general usage.
I have one for using GitHub, which is less secure because I mostly use it for GitHub and
all the other websites which uses the wealth solution of GitHub.
So basically I don't need to sign in with any other website, just have to sign in with
GitHub.
And I've got one more for banking and so on.
But there are some websites which have a mandatory chrome moon based need, I would say.
So there are websites which are not working if you're not using chrome.
So I have at least two modes, chrome moon profiles as well.
So I just basically added these as menu entries in my workspace.
So whenever I need to use them and just pop up the menu and choose the right icon, go
from there.
So in my opinion, I do love Firefox and I used to use, for example, Midori for profsing
on a Raspberry Pi because at the time the Raspberry had no proper hardware acceleration.
So it was a midori, profs with disabled JavaScript and basically using a mobile user agent
and that way it was kind of all right to serve the internet from there.
But my take on profs are sadly that of course you need to use what you love and what you
comfortable with.
But at the end of the day, you might have to be at profiles and use different browsers
for different use cases.
Hey, talk of, thanks for your message.
That's an interesting idea.
I guess you could create desktop entries if you use desktop entries to open a browser
in a certain profile for a specific task.
I guess in a way, it's like you're challenging the idea that people should just use one browser,
which I think, you know, I put the blame on browsers themselves because they're all begging
us to, well, not all of them, but many of them are frequently asking us to set themselves
as the default browser.
And also, I guess, maybe the idea that we would have to use multiple browsers is a little
bit annoying because the web is just so annoying that it just seems annoying to have multiple
browsers to use it.
Then as an example, it's kind of funny to me that a lot of sites don't work on cube
browser, or they tell me that I'm using an unsupported browser or asked me to update
my browser, all that nonsense.
But then, for example, the website where I have to go to pay my water bill, it doesn't
work on Firefox because of Firefox's security features, I guess.
It just keeps giving me a warning about how the site is framed.
And I'm just unable to log in, and no such thing on cube browser just works perfectly.
So, in some way, it's not that Firefox is better supported in general, I guess, to some
extent because of all the security features and stuff.
Indeed.
The other thing I noticed recently, that, for example, on the UK, what are from websites?
The forms are designed to work on in Chromium-based browsers, and there are other government websites
as well, which are designed to work on in Chromium-based browsers because some of the endpoint
functions are only available in the browser.
And the other annoying thing, for example, with the Apple devices, the iOS and iPad OS,
that all the web browsers are based on Safari at the back.
So, under the hood, any browser on iOS and iPad devices are basically Safari in a code.
So nothing works, well, at least most websites which are near the Chromium-based, even if
you installed the Chrome on iOS, it won't work because it's not a Chrome, which is really
annoying.
And the biggest issue is that every website now is trying to meet the standards of the
Chromium-based web browsers, and when there are no functions in the other web browsers,
web engines, then it just won't meet itself.
So the bigger issue here is that the one who's creating the websites doesn't use the
common standards, they use functions that only exist in a specific browser, which is the
most outrageous things of all on the wide web.
And these are not specifically the web developers fault, because what I realized at most of
the time, it is the framework, the developer framework, which they're using, that's the
issue, because those framework were designed to use those functions which are only exposed
in Chrome or Chromium-based browsers.
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