I was a lot more careful about clicking things when it took a full minute to load. Now I know that it'll be open in less than a second and I can leave immediately if I need to, so there's WAY less thinking beforehand.
It's funny to think back, as I've just recently installed a browser extension to do the opposite (i.e. to prevent "open in new tab" tabs from doing any work until I foreground them.)
Today, my computer's memory is far more constrained than its network bandwidth. I find it very easy to accidentally open tons of tabs very quickly (esp. from the HN front page!) until suddenly the browser is swapping and everything's slowing to a crawl trying to process all those new page DOMs.
And yet, even when it doesn't choke the computer, I find no real benefit to preloading pages in the background any more. At least on my connection, the page load time after I focus a tab is almost imperceptible.
Also, tabbed browsing was still a couple years off for most people, although some browsers got there earlier than others:
> In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.[citation needed] That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by several others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although an MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on April 1st, 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[11]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
Also, Opera had a Multiple-Document Interface from the start, so 1995 or so. That's not "tabs" per se but multiple mini-windows inside the main window; much the same "Hey, I can have multiple things open!" deal
I just opened multiple copies of the browser; I'd have 5 or 10 running most of the time on my 98se box. It's where I got my habit which I still use today, of opening outlinks as I read the page, so they can load in the background, then once I finish the content of this page, I'll go skim those to fill in context.
It meant I cared _less_ about page load time, even on dialup, because they were happening in other windows. I could happily tolerate a 2-minute load time as long as the first page took more than 2 minutes to read.
Our behaviour is also responsible for China's and India emissions.
We've exported lot of our production to those countries and are importing it back. If we were to measure emissions not by the country of the producer but the country of the consumer, our numbers (USA and Europe) would look dramatically different.
As consummer we are responsible for the whole world emissions in the end. Changing those habbits, can impact things far beyond borders. But that's a political choice which goes against a constant growth based economy and it seems that not many people in our countries are ready to accept this.
We want to buy and travel as much as we always did but bear no reponsibilities for the impact it has.
I wonder what the plan is to recycle those. Without a plan to safely bring back all this hardware and recycling it, we'll deplete earth from it's mineral. The matter used to build things on earth stays within earth's ecosystem.
Moving matter out continusously at industrial scale with no plan to bring 100% of it back in the ecosystem other than burning it seems quite unsustainable and irresponsable.
Sure, in the end, we must always find a way to blame western societies while we give a blank check for China (and other bad actors) to continue doing whatever they are doing...
This was never about saving the planet, it was always about destroying our socio-economic system. Look how the tune changed in Brazil when Lula came into power: they never burned so much rainforest, but now it's fine, becasue socialists are in power.
Security is a fallacy here because, being a US company, it is technically not secured by default as it has backdoors (or one has to assume it has backdoors and those cannot even be audited).
Then it is just about the sense of security which is based on the threat model you consider threatening to you.
You do not chose who you are the enemy of though and in fascist countries with no regards to the rule of law like the USA, this becomes a fairly important threat model to take into account.
Libreoffice is used quite a bit in administrations across EU.
I would expect more stickiness to microsoft caused by legacy applications that requires windows to run rather than office.
Allowing people to own their devices and modify them can first foster creativity and competition, which can lead to the creation of standards, alternatives and businesses around that.
The current situation makes it impossible to create a business from modifying an existing product, you need to start from blank slates, making it hard to crack a walled-garden.
What the US built is already dystopian, there's nothing to lose moving away from that. Things like chat control are not a good thing neither, but adding regulation can also be beneficial and lead to interoperable standards. That's where the US failed big time. E.g. things like having standardised chargers seems like a no brainer but it required regulators to step in for it to happen.
Although, being patient was part of the experience as well
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