This is now officially the third highest yearly output for Newsonaut, having surpassed my 64 posts in 2014. The only years when I did better were 2012 with 135 and 2011 with 169.
Yes, this is my 66th post of 2026. There has been a resurgence lately in the indie web, and I’m happy to be a part of it.
I was a little bit sad, though, to read Bryce Wray’s last post. He basically doesn’t feel like he has anything left to say that would be of interest to readers.
It hits close to home because it appears he is only a few years older than me. I know the down sides of growing old. Health issues you never knew existed suddenly become part of your everyday life. It’s not as easy to summon the energy you once took for granted.
I can’t predict where I’ll be in a couple of years. I never would have predicted where I am now. But I’m pretty sure this blog will last for a few more years, and I’m optimistic that it will last many more years.
Firefox 157 has a slick new interface. And the internet is losing its shit.
The updated interface has been dismissed as “round” and already you can find instructions on how to roll back to the old look. And that’s a mild insult compared with “needless and ugly.”
Such drama!
At first the only difference I noticed was the tabs. They are more of a pill shape now and have an outline around them. The background has a subtle gradient that you can customize.
After clicking around a bit, I discovered that some of the menus have more-pronounced round corners. I was disappointed that the bookmark manager hadn’t been similarly updated. Oh, and the search box at the bottom has a pill shape similar to the tabs.
I’m no power user, so maybe there are other design changes that I missed. And honestly, if I hadn’t been told there were changes, I might not even have spotted them — at least not right away.
If you watch the accompanying video, it’s obvious that Firefox is reaching out to new users. A shiny new interface might seem useless to crusty old-timers, but marketing has shown time and again that many people respond to this. A thing can’t just be new, it has to look new.
It remains to be seen whether these efforts will do anything for the Firefox market share, but I’m glad to see them at least making an effort.
I’ve said in the past that I find posts written all in lower case to be hard to read, and I stand by that. I need a few capital letters here and there to get my bearings.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t have an appreciation for lower case. In fact I downright prefer it.
Capital letters have a boring lack of variety. They’re all the same height and they’re all kind of blocky. Sure they should be used, but sparingly.
Lower case letters have so much more diversity: half height (like a, c or e), three-quarters height (like t), or full height (with an ascender like b or d). Or a descender that takes them below the line: g, j, p, q, y.
There’s a reason you never see an entire sentence written in all caps. It’s even harder to read than all lower case. Radio announcers write their copy in all caps for this very reason. It forces them slow down and enunciate.
Let’s check out some particularly appealing lower case letters. If you’re not using serifs, you should switch so you can see how beautiful letters can be.
Two of my favourites are the ones with a tittle: i and j. You won’t find any capital letters with dots over them — at least not in English.
Another favourite is g: I love the loop on the bottom and the stem poking out the top.
And look at this a: See how nicely it curves on the top and leaves a bowl underneath — all in the space of half a capital.
Then there are the ligatures. Two f’s join as ff. An f and an i become fi. This is artistry you won’t see among the upper case.
The only real competitor among the capitals is Q with its swooping tail.
But what about headings? Write them like you would a sentence, but without a period at the end — no capitals unless necessary. And that includes what is known as title case.
With title case, pretty much every word is capitalized with the exception of some shorter words. The trouble with writing a heading as if it were a title is that real titles get lost in them. Suppose you want to put the title of book in your heading. If all the words are capitalized, it’s hard to know where the book title begins and ends.
A great use of lower case is Apple’s naming of some of its products with lower case letters at the beginning. For example, I’m writing this on an iMac, which runs on macOS. Do not be one of those pedants who insist on writing “MacOS.” I have no idea what they are trying to prove.
When the comics character Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” he was referring to pollution. He might have said the same thing about the dreaded algorithm.
In a recent post at Skuthus, Skyler points out that the Bear Discover “trending list is full of naysayers, warnings, dire laments, and gripes.”
For those of taking us refuge in the indie web to get away from all that, Skyler’s conclusion hits hard.
“I just think the mudslinging should be minimized or the big guys will win, having proven that it's not them who are spreading the hate and negativity — it's US.”
The algorithm tries to feed us what we want. And if it’s feeding us negativity, we might want to reflect on that.
I looked at some trending posts on Bear Discover, and came up with positive alternatives. Would you have upvoted these, or would you have preferred the originals? I have to admit the negative versions do seem more compelling.
Original: F*ck Omarchy and right wing populism Alternative: Check out this awesome alternative to Omarchy
Original: For the last time I’m not downloading your stupid app Alternative: Use these browser extensions to avoid app requests from social media
Original: How to endure Instagram Alternative: How to enjoy Instagram
You’re driving along the information superhighway when suddenly you hear a siren, so you pull over. It’s the internet police.
The officer gets out and comes over to your window.
“What seems to be the problem, officer?”
“I had to pull you over because I noticed you used the word ‘lay’ incorrectly in one of your blog posts.
“You wrote that you were going to ‘lay low over the weekend’ when you should have written ‘lie low.’ Lay is a transitive verb, which means you’re doing something to something else. Examples would be ‘lay some bricks’ or ‘lay an egg.’ If you’re doing something on your own, you need an intransitive verb — in this case ‘lie.’ You can ‘lie on the couch,’ for example, or ‘lie low.’
“Every time I see someone write ‘lay’ when they mean ‘lie,’ I wonder what it is they are laying. So when you wrote ‘lay low,’ I had crazy thoughts about you laying some low bricks.
“When Bob Dylan sings, ‘Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big, brass bed,’ I ask myself what she could possibly be laying.
“It makes no sense.”
“Sorry, officer. It’s tricky trying to remember the difference between ‘lay’ and ‘lie,’ but I’ll try to do better in the future.”
“OK, I’ll let you off with a warning this time, but if it happens again you might get a ticket.”
WHO – An author you would love to have a ‘one to one’ with?
The author who comes to mind is Corey Doctorow. I mostly like his science fiction and I resonate with his essays on modern technology. My main fear is that I would not be able to hold my own, and he would soon be bored. The only well-known author I have spoken to was Timothy Findley, and I do believe he was bored though too polite to say so. I once exchanged emails with Andy Weir, who somehow seemed like just a regular guy.
WHAT – What genre do you most gravitate to?
If you go by sheer volume, the answer would have to be science fiction. But it’s the realm of speculative fiction that has the most power to pull me in. I’m fascinated by books like Piranesi, The Memory Police and The Other Valley. They take me to an impossible place and make me believe it’s real.
WHERE – Where do you prefer to read?
I mostly like to lounge on the couch and it needs to be quiet.
WHEN – What time of day do you prefer to read?
It seems to happen more in the afternoon and evening. It’s almost like I have to work my way up to reading because it feels like a commitment.
WHY – Why is your favourite book your favourite book?
I appreciate the way The Lord of the Rings takes me into another world complete with its own history, languages and peoples. It’s an epic where good wins but at a cost. That would be the one book I would take to a desert island because I would never tire of reading it.
BONUS — How do you go about selecting what you will read next?
I follow a lot of RSS feeds about books or where books are likely to be mentioned. If one of them catches my interest, I see if it’s in Libby and go from there. I’ve been gravitating toward Canadian writers because I like the feeling of stories in familiar places involving familiar people. Here are a bunch I have read in recent years.
The top comment (as of this writing) summed things up well: “It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users . . .”
Overall, the passion for Firefox was on full display. I hope Mozilla staffers take this thread as feedback and use it to improve Firefox in ways that boost market share.
I kind of regret my reference to “over thinkers on Hacker News” because it could be taken as an insult. A casual glance around this site, though, will show that I do plenty of overthinking myself.
I recall one time when someone accused me of overthinking something, I shot back that he was underthinking it. Ah, those were the days.
A comment about the moving background being “nauseating” caught my attention. It didn’t exactly move, but the stars fading in and out for a twinkling effect could give that impression.
I myself found the twinkling stars distracting, not just because of the twinkles but also because it is improbable that stars would appear this way in outer space, which is what this is supposed to depict.
So I’ve commented out a couple of lines of CSS and stopped the twinkling. I also stopped the barely perceptible wisps of cloud from blowing by.
The stars are based, by the way, on a video by Carla Notarobot. This was from six years ago, so chances are Carla really was not a robot.
Finally, it’s comments like these that make me love Hacker News:
“wait, is this a thing? firefox is the only mainstream browser with an rcfile, that alone gives you incredible powers. I hope one day it also grows something like chrome's CDP. What is everyone so upset about?”
I checked the Wikipedia article, and still only have a vague idea of what an rcfile is.
