The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites.
Now I know what to blame for every single US government website being so poorly put together they they barely function, if they function at all.
Here are a few names you can blame in addition to the USWDS:
- Deloitte
- Accenture
- Ernst & Young
- KPMG
- PwC
The four corporations other Accenture constitute the US’ “Big 4 accounting firms”, and they get a shitload of money from local, state, and the Federal government to develop software for them at taxpayer expense – and none of this publicly-funded code is FOSS.
The Free Software Foundation Europe has an awesome initiative called Public Money Public Code where they try to convince lawmakers to use as much open source software as possible when using public funds. I really hope they succeed.
What about security? If it’s open source, anyone can poke around in the code and find vulnerabilities to exploit way easier.
Security through obscurity doesn’t, work the vulnerabilities are still there. Also if the vulnerabilities are visible they’re also easier to close.
More eyeballs are from people wanting those flaws fixed that wanting to exploit them.
Proprietary source code has much fewer eyeballs, none of which you can verify belong to competent or trustworthy people.
If it’s open source, anyone can poke around in the code and find vulnerabilities to
exploit way easierpatchFTFY. Open source software is more secure than closed source, not less
That’s the opposite of most UK government websites. I’ve always found them very well designed and easy to use. I think they’re well regarded by web designers
That’s because the US government outsources a lot of software development to consulting firms who bill hourly for developer time while paying the developers a fixed salary. Even though these developers have to do at least 40 billable hours a week, they don’t get time and a half for overtime.
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Mozilla hasn’t been putting any effort into making firefox a proper competitor despite their 400M+/year from Google.
They haven’t pushed the envelope in any way, haven’t invested in a Rust browser engine, haven’t moved away from XUL, haven’t fixed their oldest bugs, haven’t made Gecko more easily embeddable, haven’t added added better documentation to Gecko, haven’t improved speed or memory use, haven’t invested heavily in their android version (it’s slow af on older devices), only just now are starting to enable extensions in firefox on android, …
Their biggest changes are buying up a few useless startups (Pocket, some analytics company?), multiprocess firefox, manifest, containers, looking more chrome-like, firing 400 developers or something during COVID and paying their CEO 5M (?).
All they do is exist. The only reason people switch is because other browsers fuck up. IMO, that’s not a strategy to get more users, but a strategy to collect the Google cheque.
Pretty sure those Edge numbers are from using it under duress…
Horrific but strategically inevitable, switch to chromium engine, and do your own privacy related fork . Like all the other browsers.
fork
what if google chrome decided to close the fork by changing the license to something restructive, i mean the fork can goes on for a little while but we are still depending on the resources of a Big $$ corporation…
firefox is the only way for a free web…
Then they’d be alienating the open source community that makes a lot of contributions (though much of chromium is still essentially built internally). They also wouldn’t be able to lock down the code that’s already been released under the more permissive BSD license.
Now, a fork of Chromium is its own beast. Some searching shows that just to build it takes 30 minutes on a decent workstation. It’s huge, which makes me think it’s the kind of project that could only really be maintained by a large company. Not necessarily a Google sized company, but a large one nonetheless if you seriously want to remove the dependency on Google.
EDIT: turns out it’s Chrome that takes that long to build, which includes things not in Chromium like Widevine, licensed codecs, telemetry, sync, that kind of thing.
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I took the liberty of reading the article but I’m gonna say the title is quite… tendentious. Makes it sound like it’s yet another one of those FUD / nutjob clickbait that have been coming at the privacy community for a few days with sensationalist titles such as “The CIA will stop funding Signal” (never has been) or “FBI wants to sell Wikipedia” (never has been).
What is going on?
EDIT: Cosmic Cleric has provided the definition of “tendentious”, which I have linked.
Your adroit incorporation of the term “tendentious” exemplifies lexical virtuosity. Impressive articulation. Truly seamless weaving of a sesquipedalian polysyllabic term.
Someone call 911, I think I’m having some kind of medical issue with how this post looks.
Some of you need to stop spoofing browsing agents. We need to show people that Firefox is used. This telemetry can help Firefox support and become a big competitor to Chrome and other Chromium based browsers.













