so, now, Firefox detects if you are on a page that has search capability

Didn’t Firefox have this years ago through OpenSearch and Mozilla removed it.

Moving the shortcuts at the bottom of the URL bar dropdown into a more prominent position

They’re moving always visible icons into a menu that takes an extra click. Years ago these used to be actual buttons that you could click to perform the search with that engine.

It’s like they’re bragging about their feature regressions.

That’s not a contradiction, it’s maybe an incomplete argument. And I was relying on my previous sentence that mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations to imply that they would do it again and were already warning about that. But none of this even matters; I’ve made a follow up comment that lays it out more explicitly.

I didn’t cherry pick a statement. I included the part where they said the very first draft.

I did fail to explain how its a power grab, but that’s was only because I thought it was a fairly obvious one-to-one point. I’ve also added another example. But lemme try again.

1. Mastodon has a history of pushing features that affect interop with other implementations without seeking feedback from other implementations or outright ignoring the feedback they do receive.
2. A member of the mastodon team wrote a FEP to formalize a setting related to search indexing. This was the right way to go about it. yey Mastodon was working with other implementations. But that FEP didn’t receive positive feedback and it seems like it was abandoned.
3. Now mastodon is trying to standardize something using the ideas from that FEP, outside of the FEP process (which is the agreed upon way to collaborate between implementers).
4. They’re warning on their site that they have deadlines and may not incorporate feedback if they can’t resolve it without breaking deadlines.
5. They are under no obligation to incorporate it after their initial draft and, historically, mastodon is unwilling to update their work to incorporate other implementers’ feedback.

A more collaborative way to do this would have been to seek feedback before making a grant proposal and making the grant proposal jointly with other projects so they weren’t the only ones getting paid for it.

Mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations.

This means we might not always be able to incorporate all the feedback we get into the very first draft of everything we publish

The site even warns that theyre on a deadline and may not incorporate feedback.

EDIT: they also mention a “setting” that determines if a user/post is searchable. theyve presented a FEP to formalize this setting but nearly everyone else had issues with their proposal. as usual for mastodon, this looks like them sidestepping external feedback and just doing what they want

It’s a cool feature, but it sucks that (once again) the mastodon team is taking control of fediverse-wide features and ignoring outside criticism.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30398

Doing an AMA on mastodon would be a horrible experience for everyone. Others have pointed out the obvious difference in reach, blocks/defederation means some ppl may not even be able to participate, participants might never receive questions, users from different instances wouldn’t be able to see sibling comments, etc.

PWAs were not liked when they came out.

By some ppl. There were also ppl who did like them. As soon as the desktop support was axed, fans of the feature started complaining immediately.

at the time, people in general did not like PWAs as a concept. Independent of the browser

Again, I think this is a sampling issue, because my experience was the complete opposite.

And one of the key parts of PWA features was the “Progressive” part. The site works without those features and you don’t have to use them so removing the support never made much sense to me.

yes exactly what sneezycat said. I was being sarcastic and pointing out that Manifest V3 was always a crackdown on ad blocking and nothing else.

It’s funny how this comes after Chrome’s switch to Manifest V3, which makes ad blocking not possible on Chrome and was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers. Now that Chrome users can’t block ads on the first-party site, they’re going after third-party clients. Such coincidental timing.

These “Aerocarts” will be pulled down the runway by the lead plane just like a recreational glider. They’ll lift off more or less together with the lead plane, then stay on the rope throughout the cruise phase of flight, autonomously surfing the lead plane’s wake for minimal drag and optimal lift

But public posts federating across the network isn’t an “experience”. It’s the basic functionality of the network.

for profit corporation being able to suck up your posts is probably what has many upset

They can already do that without a bridge. And it doesn’t “suck up your posts”. It works just like any other instance. They have to search for you and follow you. Then they receive posts going forward, but they won’t get historical posts.

I personally would block such a service

Good! You can do that and that is a perfectly reasonable solution. That’s part of what has ppl upset on the other side of this argument. All of this arguing and vitriol is happening over a service that you can block like any other fediverse actor.