Post #842282

2026-03-28 17:54 UTC

When I was a teen and starting at university, I remember the browser wars seemed lost in the 1990s. Microsoft and Internet Explorer seemed to dominate. Nowadays I&#39;m on Linux and there are other options. That&#39;s thanks to folks not accepting the status quo and being unreasonable. It&#39;s thanks to the folks who built the software we use and who supported them. Things can change, but it takes people and community. It takes will and intention. You need to be honest about where you stand.

Replies (7)

@onepict@chaos.social 2026-03-28 17:59

Where we are at, isn't just down to the politics of who built our tech. Organisations have a memory. Our institutions have a memory which was encoded into us by society. We do live in a society. Where we are came out of colonialism and before that feudalism. So no wonder so many of us jumped on to using LLMs, no wonder so many of us don't look closely at the cost to the environment or the exploitation of folks in the Global South. We never wanted to question how we got here.

Open ##2302926
@zenid@techhub.social 2026-03-28 19:05

@onepict@chaos.social All change starts with people uneasy with status quo, all change starts with people who held their ground and inspire others to do so. I know this is a post about software, but a lot could be applied to life at the moment.

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@sstrader@masto.ai 2026-03-28 19:14

@onepict@chaos.social I've been thinking a lot about Internet Explorer trying to kill/own the web with its IE-only HTML dialect that triggered OCXs back in the day, breaking websites for non-IE browsers. Devs could do so much more if they fell in line, so they did. It's a constant battle.

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@luc0x61@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-03-28 20:24

@onepict@chaos.social Even though... See what happened to Netscape (I used it since version 0.7) then now to Firefox with AI, that luckily left us with LibreWolf and WaterFox...

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@jago@mementomori.social 2026-03-28 20:52

@onepict@chaos.social Fun times. Everything says it requires IE 4/5/6 (and 1024x768 resolution) and I'm hopping between Mozilla, Dillo, Konqueror and Epiphany (and in a pinch even Amaya) trying to find something where the page doesn't _completely break down_ on my 1280x1024 monitor so I could get whatever I was doing done. Imagine if ended up in that same situation in 2026... Oh. Crap. :meow_grimace:

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@MaQuest@mastodon.green 2026-03-28 22:01

@onepict@chaos.social Tagging for #SolarPunkSunday!

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@deane@contenttechtodon.org 2026-03-30 02:19

@onepict@chaos.social I remember in the late 90s when the USA Today would literally do an infobox every Friday with user counts for the various browsers.

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