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1
DnD Central / Re: Putin the Magnificent: Series 2 - Putin's Russia
Last post by ersi -
Remember Putin's lessons from WWII? It is now official history in Russia. The foreign ministries of Russia and Germany are currently Twitter-flaming each other over their versions of history.

Quote from: https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-mocks-russia-defending-1939-invasion-poland-protect-ukrainian-population-pseudo-historical-theory/
“On September 17, 1939, the Red Army launched a military operation in Poland’s eastern regions, preventing the genocide of the population of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine,” Russia’s foreign ministry wrote on X.

Germany’s foreign ministry replied to Russia’s post Thursday with a single word: “Seriously?”

It [Germany] also posted a map of Poland, signed by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and Nazi Germany’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, showing how the country would be divided between them, with the hashtags “#MolotovRibbentropPact” and “#HitlerStalinPact.”
Debates over WWII are not over. Westerners should not think that they have it sorted out or that it can/should be forgotten because it was a very long time ago. As I have explained the mid-European point of view (i.e. the point of view of most countries between Germany and Russia), the Yalta Conference and the Potsdam Conference updated the Nazi-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact for the worse, not for the better, and this fact is still going unrecognised in the West.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f7N09kLFD4
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DnD Central / Re: Tripe about Ukraine
Last post by ersi -
Re-reading my previous post in this thread, I must say I failed again in my predictions. I was not harsh enough against the West. The EU, Germany in particular, deserves to be outright condemned, far more so than Hungary, because Germany sets the policy in the EU. But let's put somebody else's opinion here for now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7H0hxe_SbY

What stands in the way of doing all that's needed? One big thing is US elections. An incapacitating problem with US elections is that they are eternal, never-stopping. It's always elections season. And literally anybody can become president, as Trump has proven. You can be totally incompetent criminally convicted immoral lying bastard from outside the political establishment, you can hijack a major party, arrange a coup while in office, throw a wrench in the judicial system, and after all that you can still run again openly promising dictatorship. Amazing.
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Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
Last post by ersi -
Oh yes, compatibility with old corporate websites can be a thing. In my previous job the main tool had been built to work specifically (and only) with IE 5.5. In the end it hung on the thread of a later IE's compatibility mode. If they kept the tool in use even after IE's demise, they must be running it in Windows XP virtual machines in an actual IE, and keep constant guard of network settings.

While this scenario is quite real (because corporations are infinitely stupid), it cannot serve as a business model for a new/alternative webbrowser to have a compatibility layer for this. Webscraping has far more use cases and versatile potential.

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Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
Last post by Frenzie -
Quote from: ersi on
What's this itch for multiple rendering engines?
I'm not entirely sure what that's referring to. In Maxthon's case I suspect the reason was to provide compatibility with old corporate websites, or maybe just because maintaining support simply meant not removing it. I don't believe switching them out has ever been popular, but embedding a simple webview was and is. Chromium Edge provides extensive tooling for it in Windows the same way IE once did.
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Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
Last post by ersi -
What's this itch for multiple rendering engines? Does it make it more convenient to test out what your website looks like in several engines? But do all devtools in the browser work equally well with all the engines? Is there still a continuing itch to make multiple rendering engines load in a single browser?

Instead of multiple rendering engines showing the same styles, colours and font sizes, I prefer one rendering engine that helps me navigate webpages more conveniently. In old Opera there were keybinds to navigate to next HTML heading and to next HTML element and I could switch to outline view (i.e. see only headings for a moment). Currently I know only Edbrowse that makes headings supernavigable, while all console/text browsers make at least links easy to find and navigate, but they should do it with all HTML elements.

It may be time for a new webbrowsing concept. Data analysts scrape the web and they sort and filter and list the results in various ways. Webscraping should become a more common way of browsing the web, something built on curl perhaps. I can see how the eyecandy aspect of the web matters when you think of yourself as a visual publisher on the web, but the reader who primarily seeks information cares more about the ability to have own control over all aspects of formatting.
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Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
Last post by Frenzie -
Closer to Vivaldi and like Vivaldi are two different things. :) Vivaldi is a spiritual successor that appeals to Opera users, and I switched from Thunderbird to M3 the second the preview came out, but it has never been a successor as such. I don't think that would necessarily include all that you mention or in any particular form,[1] but I do think it would include more of it.

The way it's phrased in the blogpost certainly implies something a lot closer to how MyIE2 could switch between Trident and Gecko, I think even with WebKit as well for a bit, and eventually in Maxthon between Trident and Blink, which might even be supported — or at least not removed yet — to this very day.

Perhaps mostly in hindsight, we also know the Maxthon approach is technically infeasible for twice the same reason.[2] First of all, while WebKit allowed for embedding a website rendering view easily as part of an app, Blink stripped out all of that functionality as being bloat not necessary for Chrome(ium), as one of the first major steps of its fork. Secondly Opera's UI was tightly coupled to Presto, not unlike Chrome(ium). So a porting effort would certainly be much more involved than a relatively simple engine swap, and one would assume there would be at least some victims. What stings isn't that they didn't succeed, but that contrary to that blogpost it seems that besides a few minor aspects like implementing FlipBack/FlipForward they didn't even try.

One almost wonders if internally they also had a completely different functional UI prototype that it was decided would need too much time to polish into a stable product.
1 For example, one might import keyboard shortcuts without supporting the old INI format. But before you say anything, I agree as a user that Opera's INI format is superior to possibly all alternatives.↵
2 All the while keeping in mind that Maxthon seems to have done it.↵
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DnD Central / Re: Is this interesting enough?
Last post by ersi -
Police minister's purse stolen at police conference
Quote from: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx6xvvn25xo
Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson had her purse stolen from the hotel where she gave a speech at a conference for senior police officers on Tuesday.

Thieves struck while Dame Diana was giving a speech blaming the Conservatives for an “epidemic of antisocial behaviour, theft and shoplifting,” at the annual Police Superintendents' Association (PSA) conference at a hotel in Kenilworth.
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Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
Last post by ersi -
No, it does not unmistakably say that you get something like Vivaldi. There is a very straightforward lie on the page, "Opera Extensions that you've built aren't obsolete." Lawson's post fails to be open about that you would lose your widgets, skins and setups, access to INI config, email and IRC components. The new product still cannot do e.g tiling, from what I can glean from user questions. (Not that I am expecting anything from Chropera ever...)

It was a lie to say, "Consumers will initially notice better site compatibilty..." Instead, consumers would initially notice that they have, unwarned, started up Chrome instead of Opera and everything that defined Opera is irrecoverably lost.

I held on to old Opera as long as my main email addresses in it worked. When that email service was closed a few years ago, I finally gave up old Opera and I no longer install it on my machines.