my feeling at the time and still going on is hardware might have survived if they did not wont their own proprietary OS instead of supporting UNIX as the OS for this platform.

I still think that should have been the driection

oops somehow switched channels ther

WG9S: Talking about IBM?

(Z systems)

well I worked for Control Data back in the day was IBM and what whas known as the BUNCH based on first letter of thier name (Burroghs, Univac, National Cash Register, Control Data ANd HOneywell) I am not sure nay fo the BUNCH are any longer in the computer business somehow IBM survived.

ooh.

NCR *might* be... I don't think any of the others are

yeah NCR still makes point of sale and ATM machines, things like that

i know honeywell isn't because i looked into that before. univac is unisys now and it looks like it migrated to x86 in 2014 (including OS 2200)

burroughs is also unisys now

CDC is basically gone from what I can tell.

i worked for cdc I know they are gone

actually my wife and i both worked for cdc and she arranged for a job with one of our customers for me so that we did not have a 2 income dependent on cdc, she was very samrt

was easier for me to move although if she could have she made more money that I did.

but, like I said, she was so much smarter than me!

thank you :-)

I've just read the release notes for the latest SeaMonkey today and the first sentence kind of gave me pause.

Let me quote it: "The Mozilla backend code SeaMonkey is based on, now usually incorporates breaking changes in every release."

So, doesn't this, in effect, mean that SeaMonkey is playing catch-up with Mozilla firing out breaking changes?

And isn't this kind of undermining the point of SeaMonkey a bit?

msiism: correct, but there's nothing we can do about it but soldier on

or give up, which I'd rather not see happen

Hm… is there really no other way?

well, not unless you want seamonkey to become a crippled shadow of its former self

(e.g. a firefox reskin)

or chromium reskin

it's similar to the problems other classic mozilla derived software faces

*face

I was wondering whether it would be possible to, maybe, reduce the dependence on Mozilla's code base, at least in the long run.

that'd be awesome, but it's also asking a lot since gecko is sort of the core of rendering anything in seamonkey

I see. So, this all mainly concerns the rendering engine?

Well, sort of?

It's not just that really, the build system and stuff is also a disaster

(for modern firefox)

and the rust dependencies, node.js dependency, etc.

disclaimer: I am not really a seamonkey developer

I do make my own builds though so I have picked up things here and there

I was wondering, for example, if there would have been a way to avoid those changes concenring the bookmarks manager and download manager.

ah, I didn't build 2.53.11 yet.

my guess is "no," not without taking on a significant maintenance burden by forking gecko again

usually these things change because mozilla upstream has removed functionality we needed

and whatever we get is "the next best thing."

I see.

If the download manager got updated, though, that makes me very sad.

"The extensive modifications were needed because of Mozilla Gecko platform API changes."

ah, yep.

so basically, if we want to keep seamonkey viable for "modern" (bad) websites we need to make tradeoffs

btw, this is mostly unrelated, but modern web development is a disaster

imo

Yeah, I'm beginning to wonder whether that's actually a reasonable goal.

things like palemoon (lol) are facing similar questions right now

I can imagine.

might be worse for them because tobin had a falling out at last

also they were on an older codebase than seamonkey currently is

I see.

seamonkey has been playing catch up for a while, while certain palemoon people tended to criticize it for trying to keep up with mozilla

I think (and it rankles me to say it) the pragmatic route that seamonkey has taken so far was a wise decision

(I'm a strong idealist when it comes to a lot of things)

Hm… I mean, I don't really mind modern web sites breaking for me. I can afford just not to use them

agreed. and often there are things you can do to make SM work

I made an addon that just adds a taskbar button to toggle webcomponents on/off through about:config

that fixes some websites that don't use it too heavily

That's nice.

there's the github/gitlab webcomponents polyfill addon too

but yeah if SM had stuck on an old version of gecko until now, it'd be in a worse situation than it already is because we'd have to do everything that's been done in the last couple years but starting now in 2022

(older, i should say)

Maybe the Web is really kind of done.

i've kind of felt that way for a long time, but honestly the web is doing fine

it's options for users that are done

But then, you can create useful sites that are not terriible.

And most browsers render them quite nicely…

that renders properly in dillo

(and thus everything else)

Good stuff. I also like grey.

;)

easier to read than white :\

I kind of want to make it colorful, but I think that the legibility is more important at the end of the day

Though color can aid readability.

yeah it can

I have done a dark green background before and it looked good with white text

but anyway.

That's one problem with the web: It wasn't made with user-side preferences in mind right from the beginning.

web developers CAN make good stuff, but it seems that things like bootstrap and extensive use of javascript have taken over for common sense

msiism: it sort of was, though. Netscape had plenty of options, and there was the whole mantra that sites should still be readable without any CSS

netscape was also expansible just like SM/old firefox

Yeah, they still should be readable wihtout CSS.

the wide reach of ad blockers is evidence that customization/preferences still matter

I mean, if a web page is not readable without CSS, then something went terribly wrong.

go to youtube

go to google

go basically anywhere on the 'modern web'

github, too

Yeah, I use w3m sometimes.

The increased commercialization of the web, prevalence of unnecessary "frameworks," and SaaS in general have contributed to the embaddening of the web imo

"They" are trying to create a bad, evil version NLS with HTML, CSS, and JS.

by NLS, you don't mean engelbart's on-line system, do you?

I do.

ah ok

:)

i sort of agree. especially with things like windows becoming "services"

will be back in ~3 minutes, taking out trash

msiism: i mean, with the exception of video conferencing, emacs basically does everything NLS did

especially paired with something like an X server

Yeah, sure. I just discussed this with someone yesterady.

haha.

:)

It's just that NLS was built the right way around, so to say.

But I've been told Emacs developers will get that fixed until about 2030.

Could be that it's nostalgia speaking (I'm 25, so I was just discovering the web in 2005 or so), but I think pre-2010 was the peak of the web (even though IE6 is a disaster... or perhaps because of it?)

heh

I know that I only use a fraction of what emacs can do, mostly because I'm too lazy to figure out SLIME

I'm not sure about peak of the Web. I've been using the Web since, maybe 2003. It just seeems to be peaking constantly.

I haven't liked the direction of the web since around 2012 or 2013

of course, that's around when firefox 4 came out/3.6 was EOLed, so that might have something to do with it

ironically, even though it's awful, flash was a boon for individual creators. It feels like the barrier to entry has gone up since it died for non-commercial uses of the web

also it kept 'rich content' constrained in most cases to a small frame on a website

ignoring some sites that were entirely flash

blame Google

seriously, we seem to be into a unwinnable war because Google rewrites the standards every single month, and every single month webdevs jump into the shiny without asking

Maybe using older standrads is one way to avoid that.

life would be easier if Google and friends hadn't deemed the web into a "living standard"

I write my web pages in HTML 4.01 because I can't make sense of HTML 5.

also doesn't help that developers these days just use frameworks which relies on transpilers and other junk that autogenerate Chromeisms™

I can make sense of (much of) html5 as long as you don't mention webcomponents

tomman: definitely. especially annoying that mozilla is using nodejs to build spidermonkey now

emberjs/ember.js #19968 Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, ExhibitA

-- Exhibit A

wtf

the Javascripts have invaded build systems too?!

yes

modern ff uses node.js to build

we're doomed

agreed

msiism: I actually like flexboxes (mostly)

although I explicitly avoided using them on my site

BTW, what exactly did happened to Tobin? Haven't seen him harassing people everywhere lately

mainly for dillo

tomman: he had a falling out

i have a link, one second, it's a fantastic thread

fuck, they require registering to read it now

but it's forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=28003

sorry, i'll watch my tongue

aww~

oh wow!

it's a real gem of insecurity and what I will dub "administrative fascism"

so it seems he finally snapped off and dropped the tactic nukes

yeah, nuked every server related to PM that he had logins for

also it makes me sad that he's from indiana

(another reason to not like my state)

ah well, that episode is finally over

now back to "us vs. Google" war

wyatt8740: Re flexboxes: I've come to realize that side-by-side placement of elements is not how web pages are supposed to work, actually.

It's all a top-down affair, as far as block elements go.

is centering stuff on a page still a PITA?

Not really.

`margin:0 auto` should take care of that.

I mean, that's for horizontal centering.

Vertical centering doesn't really make sense, I'd say.

(/me reads backlog) now if autogenerators could be at least designed to generate manageable, readable, hackable output... say, meaningful class names instead of cryptic strings...

oh, and multiline stuff

Seamonkey is the best

2.53.11.1 is real?!