Archive for March 6, 2025

Thursday, March 6, 2025

Alexa Plus

Ina Fried:

Amazon on Wednesday showed off Alexa+, a generative AI version of its digital voice assistant that draws on a variety of models and works with many of the company’s older Echo devices.

[…]

Alexa+ will be available in late March and cost $19.99 per month on its own — but it’s free for Amazon Prime customers.

[…]

In demos at a press event in New York, Amazon executives showed Alexa+ doing a variety of tasks, including ordering groceries, analyzing documents and making up stories.

Alexa+ will also be able to navigate the web on its own to handle some tasks, Amazon said.

Via Nick Heer:

These voice-controlled assistants seem like a natural fit for large language models and, if Amazon’s ad is anything to go by, this looks impressive. Something I think about a lot is an accessibility spectrum I first saw from Microsoft. I am not someone with a permanent physical disability, for example, but I cook often and do not want to touch my phone. Voice controls are a situational boon.

M.G. Siegler:

But after listening to Amazon’s head of devices and services, Panos Panay, on Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast, I’m actually even more skeptical now.

Previously:

Lightroom Classic 14.2

Adobe:

The Adaptive profiles help with image-adaptive adjustments in color, tone, and contrast of raw images.

[…]

The Lightroom Classic 14.2 update introduces substantial performance improvements for interactive editing tasks, delivering a smoother, faster, and more responsive experience.

[…]

Better manage your catalog backups with a new backup panel in Catalog Settings > Backup. You can now easily open backup locations, check backup size, or delete older backups. Additionally, you can remove single or multiple backup catalog entries from the list without deleting the actual backup files from their location. View Manage Backup Catalogs to learn more.

Previously:

Chrome Warning About Manifest V2 Extensions

Thomas Claburn:

This story starts in 2019 when Google detailed its plans to improve extensions’ security and privacy features with a project it called Manifest V3 (MV3) that changes the way extensions use various APIs. MV3 is currently being rolled out, and Google looks set to stop supporting extensions that use its predecessor MV2 this year. Back in 2019 Google insisted it was not trying to kill content blockers.

[…]

The search and ad giant’s privacy and security concerns are legitimate. Extensions written under the legacy Manifest V2 API have broad access to the browsing activities of users and have long been abused by miscreants to steal data and compromise systems.

[…]

MV3, however, appears not to be meeting Google’s stated goals.

AdGuard, a privacy service that makes an ad blocking extension for Chrome and related applications, recently complained that MV3 is making it hard to deliver its desired features.

[…]

Miagkov described an unresolved problem that means Privacy Badger is unable to strip Google tracking redirects on Google sites. “We can’t do it the correct way because when Google engineers design the [chrome.declarativeNetRequest API], they fail to think of this scenario,” he said.

Raymond Hill (via Hacker News):

uBO is a Manifest v2 extension, hence the warning in your Google Chrome browser. There is no Manifest v3 version of uBO, hence the browser will suggest alternative extensions as a replacement for uBO[…]

Zalaphyr (via Hacker News):

Ublock Origin extension got removed from my Chrome browser by force, with a message saying that it was not supported anymore.

Jeff Johnson:

Chrome version 134, which started rolling out yesterday, has added a new restriction: unpacked extensions can no longer be used while developer mode is disabled. There’s a new warning, “Turn on developer mode to use this extension, which can’t be reviewed by the Chrome Web Store.”

[…]

Thus, you’ll now need to keep developer mode enabled permanently to use StopTheMadness Pro in Chrome.

Previously:

Ladybird Browser

Joe Brockmeier (via Hacker News):

Ladybird is an open-source project aimed at building an independent web browser, rather than yet another browser based on Chrome. It is written in C++ and licensed under a two-clause BSD license. The effort began as part of the SerenityOS project, but developer Andreas Kling announced on June 3 that he was “forking” Ladybird as a separate project and stepping away from SerenityOS to focus his attention on the browser completely. Ladybird is not ready to replace Firefox or Chrome for regular use, but it is showing great promise.

Kling started working on SerenityOS in 2018 as a therapy project after completing a substance-abuse rehabilitation program. The SerenityOS name is a nod to the serenity prayer. Prior to working on the project, he had worked on WebKit-based browsers at Apple and Nokia. Eventually he made SerenityOS his full-time job, and funded the work through donations, sales of SerenityOS merchandise, and income from YouTube.

[…]

Comparing the README file in the standalone Ladybird repository against the README file in the SerenityOS repository, the goal has evolved from creating a standards-compliant, independent web browser with no third-party dependencies to developing an independent browser using a novel engine based on web standards.

Tim Anderson (Hacker News):

According to a post this week, the new 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, with initial directors being lead developer Andreas Kling and GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath, is funded entirely by sponsorships from those who “care about the open web” and will only accept “unrestricted donations.”

The software is open source on GitHub and uses the permissive BSD-2-Clause License which is means it is free software and approved by the open source initiative.

Jack Kelly (Hacker News):

Chrome is eating the web. I have wanted to help fund a serious alternative browser for quite some time, and while Firefox remains the largest potential alternative, Mozilla has never let me. Since I can’t fund Firefox, I’m going to show there’s money in user-funded web browsers by funding Ladybird instead.

Robert O’Callahan:

If you’ve done all that and implemented all the Web specs, you might still only be a less-Web-compatible Firefox or Chromium. What can you do better? My knowledge is a bit out of date, but here are a few guesses.

Go parallel from the ground up. You’ll get more and more E-cores, so you should try to use them. Parallel parsing and layout seem like endless opportunity.

Use a programming language that lets you write clean, fast, memory-safe, parallel data-race-free code — probably Rust.

Andreas Kling (Hacker News):

We’ve been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser, and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶

[…]

Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++.

The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there’s a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.

Previously:

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