Can someone enlighten me on why does literally everyone use Chromium as the engine for their browser? Why does Firefox not have anything comparable to Chromium/Node/Electron? Is Chrome's JS engine that superior or what?
Mozilla had an Electron alternative before Electron even existed. It stopped being a viable option several years ago, though. The reason is the same as for every other problem that Mozilla is afflicted with: incompetent leadership.
(Note also that the choice is not a dichotomy between Blink and Gecko. WebKit exists.)
To say "it's diverging" has to be the understatement of season. Two simple questions for you: what was the purpose of your comment, and how is it relevant in this context?
I know there are browser fans who have a preference of UI or companies etc etc, but the answer to the question of why so many people choose to fork Chromium to make their browser distro is solely based on the fact that it's technically the best browser engine out there and to fork anything else would be putting you at an immediate disadvantage compared to forking Chromium, so you'd start with the best and then extend it from there.
The last time I looked into this (about 3 years ago), it was ridiculously difficult to embed Gecko into anything, almost to the point of being impossible. Chromium in comparison is relatively easy to embed (via CEF or LibChromiumContent).
I don't have a real answer for you, more just shades of understanding. I believe it's the case that Chromium is just more extensible and designed for reuse. Whereas Firefox is more monolithic and less able to be extended.
I don't think it has anything to do with the javascript engine per se, but more the general API surface that Chromium gives you. There might be some additional benefit that Chrome is the most used browser (currently) and so there might be some developer sentiment or familiarity with it; Chrome's popularity might push adoption for Chromium.
Because the people calling the shots don't understand the "market". They've been coasting on their (predecessors') early success for years. Their numbers with respect to audience size is dependent on the same factors that OpenOffice depends on: people with a faint awareness of what the project is / once was but no real exposure to the ins and outs of what has changed about the projects in the last several years.
I can see a lot of value in having their technology more widely distributed.
The same could be said of the browser tech itself. They could just switch to a webkit engine, have the same market share, and still "gain" whatever it is they are gaining now.
Well, at least in NYC, I tend to narrowly avoid crashing into them on the sidewalk.
Perhaps it doesn't apply to you, but I don't think 90% of people who read books while walking are as good at navigating around obstacles as they think they are.
I do this regularly when I walk around our neighborhood or to a nearby park. I usually make sure to hold the book up to help my posture, and look around frequently. Haven't ran into anyone yet, and often saw them before they looked up from their phone and saw me (most people, I've learned, don't walk on the proper side of the road). Allows me to get a lot more reading in, really, and helps me focus and digest what I'm reading a bit more when I want to.
I'm concerned about it as well, but I've read about people getting their accounts banned for getting flagged as fake when set up freshly and solely for the Quest. Facebook is supposedly working on that. I'd like to create a separate account for oculus, but do I want to risk losing my purchases if they flag me? Even if I can get an appeal, all of this feels like a hassle. I've got a quest 2 arriving in a week, so I gotta decide.
Your sentiment reminded me of a very niche game that I got once, but couldn't get people to actually play. You're supposed to just go about your day, observe the life around you and sorta daydream / imagine stuff on top of that and then write physical letters about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Profundis_(role-playing_gam...
Yeah, I'm wondering from time to time, what's going on with the strange cult of the small head. I've seen that illustrators call this trend 'big limbs', but I call it 'small head'. As in 'Let's not focus on this big head of yours, shrink your head, just go with the flow'. Get rid of your brain, your thoughts, your personality, everyone is OK.
Looks like it's the millenial's equivalent of the boomers' large nose cartoony characters (or maybe a shitty pastel family-friendly castrated version of Robert Crumb's body fantasies) and it will pass. However, I think this one's still in its prime time and gonna keep pissing me off for quite a long time. Maybe I should try harder to propagate the style I enjoy- giant head, no body, tiny limbs.
It seems that a good chunk of the web design community went bananas on Humaaans[0], probably because Facebook started using similar small-headed, monstrous-limbed, absurdly deformed human caricatures. I absolutely abhore this trend, and feel the same way you do: it deemphasizes what's truly unique about humans - our brains, our minds, our personalities.
Cool to see someone that shares my view. Of course it's not all black and white. There are some illustrators who have established a name for themselves, like Karol Banach. People like him incorporate this template for human proportions into their trademark style, but the body elements are neatly composed into a larger picture. It's mostly mimicking 20th century fine painting styles. Decidedly more Picasso than Matisse.
And then there are all those poor schmucks pumping out commodity illustration. Aside from Humaans, I think I've also seen some official guidelines for Illustration by Facebook. This is sad. This is how the Internet got corporate.
Also, there's this thing to make process faster for the more ambitious ones: https://galshir.com/posea
That's an interesting app, thanks! I'm actually looking for tools for generating properly-sized vector human figures, or even doing skeletal animation on vector graphics.
Speaking of art style of human figures on the web, my favourite one is https://undraw.co/illustrations. These are the kind of images I'd like to see more on the web, instead of Humaaans lookalikes.
The way these things tend to go is more that some illustrator does something a little different, others see it and like it, it spreads, and it’s now the new mainstream, until it all repeats again.
The ideological bent you choose to read into it is... interesting.
FWIW “large heads tiny limbs” has been a thing many times in the history of art, look at eg late 1800s caricatures
