Last week, I turned on my PC, installed a Windows update, and rebooted to find Microsoft Edge automatically open with the Chrome tabs I was working on before the update. I don’t use Microsoft Edge regularly, and I have Google Chrome set as my default browser. Bleary-eyed at 9AM, it took me a moment to realize that Microsoft Edge had simply taken over where I’d left off in Chrome. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I never imported my data into Microsoft Edge, nor did I confirm whether I wanted to import my tabs. But here was Edge automatically opening after a Windows update with all the Chrome tabs I’d been working on. I didn’t even realize I was using Edge at first, and I was confused why all my tabs were suddenly logged out. Tom Warren at The Verge I would never accept such disregard for users from my computer.
If you know your Windows history, you’ll know that the operating system got that name when it moved away from using pure MS-DOS and started using a graphical user interface to show things. As it turns out, you can force Windows 11 back to its legacy roots and reduce it back to a command-line interface. This is what the developer of Tiny11 has achieved, calling their new creation “Minwin.” The developer of Win11, NTDev, posted a video on YouTube about their project. There’s absolutely nothing flashy here; no Copilot, no Start menu, and definitely no UI. It’s as graphically complex as the Command Prompt, which meant that NTDev had to resort to fancy 00s-era ASCII logos to announce that Minwin was working. Simon Batt at XDA Definitely a neat proof-of-concept, and it shows just how modular Windows could be if only Microsoft allowed its users to take out the parts they don’t need. I wonder how close this is to Nano Server, an installation option for Windows Server you’ve probably never heard of. I also like the nod to MinWin, the informal codename Microsoft used internally to refer to an effort by a small number of expert Windows kernel engineers to untangle the spaghetti ball of dependencies that had sprouted between the various architectural layers of Windows. This project started around Vista, and eventually made it possible to make broader, sweeping changes to Windows without breaking things all over the place because the spaghetti ball of internal, low-level dependencies wasn’t mapped out.
Another month, another pile of improvement to Servo, the rendering engine written in Rust, originally a Mozilla project. This month the proof-of-concept browser UI got forward and backward buttons, making this bare-bones UI just a tiny bit more usable. Of course, the vast majority of changes and improvements are all focused on the actual rendering engine, which makes sense because Servo definitely isn’t ready for any prime time use – nor is anyone claiming it is. I’m incredibly curious to see where Servo goes in the future.
One of the problems with Arm-based Windows laptops has been a lack of app support, but there’s big news this week as Google Chrome has unexpectedly debuted its first Windows on Arm build. Ben Schoon at 9To5Google Now you can ruin your battery life on Windows on ARM too! We truly live in blessed times.
Six months ago, we launched Project IDX, an experimental, cloud-based workspace for full-stack, multiplatform software development. We built Project IDX to simplify and streamline the developer workflow, aiming to reduce the sea of complexities traditionally associated with app development. It certainly seems like we’ve piqued your interest, and we love seeing what IDX has helped you build. We’re bringing the iOS Simulator and Android Emulator to the browser. Whether you’re building a Flutter or web app, Project IDX now allows you to preview your applications without having to leave your workspace. When you use a Flutter or web template, Project IDX intelligently loads the right preview environment for your application — Safari mobile and Chrome for web templates, or Android, iOS, and Chrome for Flutter templates. Google’s IDX team I’ve seen some articles state that this makes it possible to develop for iOS without a Mac, but this isn’t really true – as far as I know, you must have a Mac to submit anything to the App Store or Testflight, so while you can write and test code using IDX, you can’t actually deploy is in any meaningful way without getting a Mac.
Hindenburg alleged that when the Opera browser continued losing users (due to competition from Google and Apple), the company shifted gears to building mobile apps that provided predatory short-term loans. The interest rates on those loans ranged from 365-876% per year, and loan terms from 7-29 days. Opera also falsely advertised longer loan terms and lower interest rates in the app descriptions, because the Google Play Store had rules against predatory loan services. The loan apps specifically targeted customers in Kenya, India, and Nigeria. Hindenburg also confirmed through user reports and a former employee that two of the apps, OKash and OPesa, asked for permission to the phone contacts during the setup process. The service would then start sending threatening messages to the user’s contacts when a borrower was late on their payments. The issue was also covered by local media prior to Hindenburg’s report. The money from these loan apps amounted to 42.5% of Opera’s revenue by mid-2019. Yes, almost half of Opera’s revenue came from extracting money from people in developing countries with false advertising and direct harassment. Corbin Davenport As if this wasn’t horrible enough, Opera also pushed the usual crypto and NFT scams, and is now chasing that “AI” high by adding spicy autocomplete to its Chromium skin. Much like Brave – good people don’t let friends use Brave – Opera is just a veneer around shady business practices, and you just shouldn’t use this garbage. Just use Firefox.
After three years of delays, Merced shipped as Itanium on the 29th of May in 2001. The first OEM systems from HP, IBM, and Dell were shipped in June. Itanium, whose architecture was now referred to as IA-64, was a 6-wide VLIW chip running at either 733 to 800 MHz with a 266 MT/s front side bus. It had 16K of L1 cache, 96K of L2 cache, 2 or 4 MB of L3 cache, and it was a single core chip on socket PAC418 built on a 180nm process. That this chip under performed is an understatement. Given the long development time, multi-billion-dollar development cost, significant hype, and claims that it would out-compete everything on the market… Itanium was a massive failure. The 32 bit x86 chips of the time were able to best it in most workloads. Embarrassingly, the Pentium 4 (whose own performance wasn’t that good) beat Itanium on integer performance and memory bandwidth. Those areas where the chip was strong were in transaction processing and scientific applications. John Crawford, Merced project leader at Intel, reflects: “Everything was crazy. We were taking risks everywhere. Everything was new. When you do that, you’re going to stumble.” The five hundred person team working on the chip was also relatively inexperienced, and disagreements between HP and Intel led to many compromises in design. Bradford Morgan White Itanium is the future. This entire article is anti-Itanium propaganda and misinformation. Do your own research.
The Wine project emulates the Windows API in user space. One particular part of that API, namely the NT synchronization primitives, have historically been implemented via RPC to a dedicated “kernel” process. However, more recent applications use these APIs more strenuously, and the overhead of RPC has become a bottleneck. The NT synchronization APIs are too complex to implement on top of existing primitives without sacrificing correctness. Certain operations, such as NtPulseEvent() or the “wait-for-all” mode of NtWaitForMultipleObjects(), require direct control over the underlying wait queue, and implementing a wait queue sufficiently robust for Wine in user space is not possible. This proposed driver, therefore, implements the problematic interfaces directly in the Linux kernel. Elizabeth Figura on the lkml This proposed driver would yield some serious performance results.
In order to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Apple has announced a set of sweeping changes to iOS and the App Store in the European Union. First and foremost, starting with iOS 17.4, users in the European Union will be able to download and install applications from outside of the App Store. On top of that, alternative application stores will become possible as well. When a developer submits an application to Apple, the developer can choose to distribute the application through the App Store, alternative application stores, or both. Apple will not charge a commission on installations from outside the App Store, and it will also allow alternative payment processors, over which Apple will also not charge any additional fees. Apple will, however, charge something called a “Core Technology Fee”. Under the new terms, apps distributed through the App Store which choose to use an alternative payment system will pay a 17 percent commission (rather than 30 percent) on digital goods and services. This commission rate falls to 10 percent for any apps that currently qualify for Apple’s reduced “small business” rate. The additional 3 percent fee then applies for developers who choose to use Apple’s payment processing system. The company is also introducing a new type of fee for particularly popular apps. The new Core Technology Fee will charge developers EUR0.50 (around 54 cents) per annual app install; however, this fee only kicks in after a million annual installs in the EU. Apple estimates that over 99 percent of developers will either “reduce or maintain the fees they owe to Apple” under the new business terms and that “less that 1 percent” of developers would pay a core technology fee. Jon Porter at The Verge Overall, developers in the EU will be paying a lot less to Apple than developers in the US and elsewhere, while also gaining more options of distributing their applications outside of the App Store. I’m already seeing some serious rumblings in Apple developer circles over on Mastodon, where US-based developers are not happy these serious cost reductions will only apply to EU developers. The only kink in the cable is this “Core Technology Fee”, though, as the total bill for that nebulous cost can balloon quickly. Apple will still check applications outside of the App Store for safety, security, and privacy, though, with a system very similar to how macOS handles applications outside of the Mac App Store right now through a new – to iOS – notarisation system. This notarisation will not check applications for quality (because as we all know, the App Store is a beacon of quality) or content (hello emulators!). Another major change coming to iOS is the availability of browsers other than Safari. Right now, even if you think you’re using an alternative, non-Safari browser on iOS, you’re really just using a skin on top of a hobbled version of Safari. In the EU, starting with iOS 17.4, non-WebKit browser engines like Firefox’ Gecko or Chrome’s Blink can come to iOS, and live as equal citizens on your iOS device. Furthermore, NFS on iOS will be opening up in Europe, giving European users the ability to use services other than Apple Pay and Wallet with NFC, and even set them as default. Apple is also allowing game streaming services to come to iOS, and this change happens to be available worldwide instead of being restricted to just the EU. These are sweeping changes to how iOS and the App Store works, but much to the chagrin of US-based users and developers in my Mastodon timeline and elsewhere, they’re exclusive to the European Union. It’s unclear if Americans can import EU devices to gain access to these new features, or if they need EU-based Apple IDs. Let the grey market provide.
Starting with today’s release of Chrome (M121), we’re introducing experimental generative AI features to make it even easier and more efficient to browse — all while keeping your experience personalized to you. You’ll be able to try out these new features in Chrome on Macs and Windows PCs over the next few days, starting in the U.S. Just sign into Chrome, select “Settings” from the three-dot menu and navigate to the “Experimental AI” page. Because these features are early public experiments, they’ll be disabled for enterprise and educational accounts for now. Parisa Tabriz Chrome will automatically suggest tab groups for you (a sorting algorithm, very advanced technology), you can generate themes (mashing other people’s real art togerher and picking a dominant colour from the result), and Chrome can generate text in text fields (spicy autocomplete). “AI” sure is changing the world as we know it.
Great news for Linux users, after months of testing, Mozilla released today a new package for Firefox on Linux (specifically on Ubuntu, Debian, and any Debian-based distribution). If you’ve heard about Linux, which is known for its open-source software and an alternative to traditional operating systems (OS), and are curious to learn more, here are four reasons why you should give our new Firefox on Linux package a try. Gabriel Bustamente and Johan Lorenzo It’s a ppa and .deb package straight from Mozilla itself, so you don’t have to to rely on your distribution’s maintainers (as long as you use a Debian-based distribution, that is). Do note, however, that some distributions actually make changes to the default Firefox code, such as Fedora enabling things like Wayland-by-default and hardware-accelerated video decoding long before those became default in Firefox-proper. By using Mozilla’s package, you’ll lose all of these changes. As a sidenote, Mozilla’s instructions for enabling the ppa and installing the .deb are a bit… Dubious, though.
The supermassive leak contains data from numerous previous breaches, comprising an astounding 12 terabytes of information, spanning over a mind-boggling 26 billion records. The leak, which contains LinkedIn, Twitter, Weibo, Tencent, and other platforms’ user data, is almost certainly the largest ever discovered. Vilius Petkauskas at cybernews Holy cow.
Apple yesterday released iOS and iPadOS 17.3 as well as watchOS 10.3, tvOS 17.3, and macOS Sonoma 14.3 for all supported devices. iOS 17.3 primarily adds collaborative playlists in Apple Music, and what Apple calls “Stolen Device Protection.” Collaborative playlists have been on a bit of a journey; they were promised as part of iOS 17, then added in the beta of iOS 17.2, but removed before that update went live. Now they’re finally reaching all users. When enabled, Stolen Device Protection requires Face ID or Touch ID authentication “with no passcode fallback” for some sensitive actions on the phone. Samuel Axon at Ars Technica This last feature is something you should probably turn on right away, as it serves as a reply to Joanna Stern’s investigation into an apparently common way iPhones would get stolen to gain access to users’ Apple accounts.
Winlator is an Android application that lets you to run Windows (x86_64) applications with Wine and Box86/Box64. BrunoSX That’s all you need to know. There are videos up of things like Mass Effect 2 and Fallout 3 running through this, which is incredibly neat. I’m not entirely sure what the use case is, but who cares – this is an excellent idea.
In a major move addressing European regulations, Meta will soon give users in the EU, EEA, and Switzerland significantly more control over how their data is used across Facebook and Instagram. The changes, set to begin rolling out in the coming weeks, aim to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Omer Dursun at NeoWin You’ll be able to unlink Facebook’s various services – such as Instagram and Facebook’s main social network thing – and you’ll be able to use Facebook Messenger as a standalone service without needing to have a Facebook account. Sadly, there’s no word on WhatsApp. This only applies to people in the EU/EEA. Americans need not apply.
It’s a minimalist (currently <1K lines) pure Ruby (including the X11 driver) X11 window manager. It is focused on tiling, but allows you to choose to assign a tiling layout to specific desktops or leave them floating. Currently whether or not you use tiling or floating layout there is no window decoration and windows are not draggable or resizable by pulling on borders (but you can do that with Windows key + left/right mouse button) Like bspwm, which was an inspiration, the wm supports no keyboard handling – all keyboard handling is deferred to separate tools like sxhkd. Unlike bspwm this WM has no dedicated IPC mechanism. Instead, so far, all communication happens via X11 ClientMessage events, which means any tool, like xdotool etc. that can produce those events can control the WM. Vidar Hokstad on RubyWM’s GitHub page In the blog post announcing RubyWM, the author makes it very clear that while he uses this WM full time, he is also willing to work around its bugs, and that certain tools will simply break if you use it. He considers it more of a tech demo, and that you really shouldn’t rely on this for any serious work.
Smartwatches at the turn of the century were a more motley assortment than today’s, with an even wilder range of functionality. If you had a few hundred dollars or so, there were some interesting options, even back then. But if all you had was $85 (in 2024 dollars about $150), you still weren’t left out, because in 2001 you could get the Web-@nywhere (the “Worldwide Web Watch”). Load up the software on your PC and slap it in its little docking station, and you could slurp down about 93K of precious Web data to scroll on the 59×16 screen — 10 characters by 2 characters — to read any time you wanted! That is, of course, if the remote host the watch’s Windows 9x-based client accessed were still up, on which it depended for virtually anything to download and install. Well, I want 95,488 bytes of old smartwatch tiny screen Web on my wrist, darn it. We’re going to reverse-engineer this sucker and write our own system using real live modern Web data. So there! Old Vintage Computing Research Y’all know the drill by now – I’m a sucker for these kinds of stories. What a great, extremely detailed read, with code to boot.
This tilt manifests in a variety of ways. For example: making it harder for a user to download and use a different browser, ignoring or resetting a user’s default browser preference, restricting capabilities to the first-party browser, or requiring the use of the first-party browser engine for third-party browsers. For years, Mozilla has engaged in dialog with platform vendors in an effort to address these issues. With renewed public attention and an evolving regulatory environment, we think it’s time to publish these concerns using the same transparent process and tools we use to develop positions on emerging technical standards. So today we’re publishing a new issue tracker where we intend to document the ways in which platforms put Firefox at a disadvantage and engage with the vendors of those platforms to resolve them. The official Mozilla blog Excellent initative.
Haiku developer and community member Waddlesplash shares his insights on the project’s current state, challenges ahead, and hopes for the future. Waddlesplash discusses Haiku’s transition from a niche project to a potential daily driver OS, emphasizing the importance of maintaining momentum and addressing data corruption bugs. Andrea at Desktop On Fire! Haiku is definitely in a good place at the moment, and there’s some real momentum from outside the project. Yes, it’s even possible to daily-drive Haiku – with caveats, of course – and I hope they can keep this going.
Roughly a year ago I moved into my new apartment. One of the reasons I picked this apartment was age of the building. The construction was finished in 2015, which ensured pretty good thermal isolation for winters as well as small nice things like Ethernet ports in each room. However, there was one part of my apartment that was too new and too smart for me. It is obviously a touchscreen of some sort, but there was zero indication as to what it controls. The landlord had no idea what this is. There are no buttons or labels on the thing, just a tiny yellow light to let you know it has the power. Nikita Lapkov What follows is an investigation into what it is, how to get it working, and, of course, how to hack it and make it more useful.
