FWIW, I find Zen on macOS to have much less of that uncanny clunky foreign feel that Firefox and its brethren such as Thunderbird on macOS have never been able to shake. It’s no Camino[0], but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen since to a Gecko browser that feels like it actually belongs on macOS.
I’d rather see Orion continue to be developed alongside Zen though, because goodness knows we need more non-Chromium browsers.
Exactly. Third party software must be to some degree treated adversarially. Yes, even FLOSS software, as that can become subject to things like supply chain attacks. Giving any random program one downloads carte blanche access is as insane as leaving one's doors unlocked and open 24/7. It's inviting serious trouble.
As an end user it’s difficult to not be bitter about the situation, particularly when you have execs coming out and saying, “yep these prices sure are terrible, better buy now before they get even worse!”
I’ve seen people say, “well that’s just the free market, there’s a customer that’s willing to pay more than you,” but that argument doesn’t hold water when industry incumbents are actively obstructing entrance of new competitors into their primary markets. Micron, etc can’t both refuse to carve off more of their capacity for consumer-destined NAND and also refuse to allow others to fill the vacuum they’ve so conveniently created. Either you’re serving the market or you’re not; you don’t get to have your cake and eat it too under properly functioning, healthy capitalism.
I daily drive multiple Apple products, but this is one of those things where I disagree with Cupertino. I find that pill-tabs are bad design and that the way they mesh with Liquid Glass is strange. Tabs should look like tabs.
I don’t use split view much, but I can understand the appeal.
It makes a lot of sense if one uses subject-based browser windows (e.g. 1 window == 1 subject); it keeps all tab organization within the browser and makes it easy to minimize it, move it to different screens/desktops, save/restore it, etc consistently with less overhead (no secondary organization system [such as that of the window manager] involved).
This becomes even more valuable for cross-platform users who sync and can’t rely on their favorite uberleet-haxor-wm package being available everywhere.
In my family they’ve always been known as “those apples that look pretty on the shelf at the supermarket but taste like cardboard and aren’t even good for cooking”. We’ll all opt for just about any other cultivar if given the choice.
Part of it I think is that old-school forums tended to have tighter-knit communities that weren’t as prone to shifting around. People had to find the forum in the first place and then register a new account to post, which may sound trivial but presents enough friction to filter a lot of people (including many low-quality posters) out.
Contrast this to Reddit: its search and web searches instantly surface subreddits and one account gets you access to the majority of the site. Friction is nearly nonexistent.
I think forums were also less prone to power-tripping moderation. It was still a problem, but there’s not but so big-headed somebody can get about being a mod for some backwoods niche topic forum that will never get all that big.
Finally, some of it is owed to how forums were dominant during a time when the internet was primarily populated by the sorts of people who owned computers then: academics, nerds, and open-minded early adopters. The dynamic was just different. It’s also the part that’d be most difficult to reproduce today.
I've only barely skimmed the surface of the preservation world, but the irreverent attitude taken by the industry towards audiovisual media releases frustrates me greatly. That more accurate older releases are made unobtainable in favor of newer botched versions just adds insult to injury.
I'm grateful that diminishing returns were hit earlier with audio, though, which limits the blast radius for music releases. Most classic albums have a range of different masterings available on audio CD, many of which are available cheaply secondhand, which makes getting ahold of a good/accurate release considerably less daunting.
Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
> Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
TV shows are even worse because of the soundtrack.
Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even video games are not exempt from that. GTA games has tons of music removed from the radios with later digital re-releases so currently the original console disc versions are the only way to play the games as they were released back then https://www.reddit.com/r/GTATrilogy/comments/1gsqdc5/what_so...
This isn't even the worst outcome. There are hundreds of video games that are never re-released at all and have never been available for sale digitally, entirely because of soundtrack licensing.
There is a similar case with Top Gear. Aside from the popularity of Clarkson/May/Hammond and the fantastic cinematography, the show had great editors with an ear for soundtracks. Unfortunately it seems a lot of the tracks were only licensed for broadcast TV and the DVDs have some stock music where the rights were no longer available. There are also some gags which don't work any more because the audio doesn't make sense.
I believe the only place you can watch them as originally produced is iPlayer, but at least the BBC has copies somewhere.
It's a shame they never released the full series on DVD (or blu-ray). Most of it is available if you consult a chart of all the releases, but they've been cut and rearranged to fit on discs, and the soundtrack is as you say. I imagine they didn't due to problems like this at the time, but after the scandal and with how much time has passed, they'll never actually bother, unless someone straight up steals/copies the broadcast tapes from the archives and do us all a favour.
I think it’s true for a lot of BBC shows, many had great music, but the BBC also ran hugely popular radio stations and i think it was through that they were able to license a large amount of music.
And TV shows too. If they don't have the soundtrack-free version available, they have to do surgery to remove the music in postproduction somehow, or just not re-release at all.
> Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.
Yup. Daria is one of the most tragic ones, given how it was an MTV show and thus featured music iconic to the era and familiar to the audience. Replaced with muzak in the DVD releases, and a bunch of pirates have cobbled together best-effort mash-ups based on audio from TV rips, which sometimes were of very low quality, but for some episodes, all that had survived in the piracy scene was like, a RealVideo file with a 64kbps audio stream.
I loved the show Tour of Duty on CBS from 1987-90 about the Vietnam War. It used a lot of 1960's music including the Rolling Stones Paint It Black as the opening theme.
When it was released on DVD all the music was replaced with generic stuff. Then it was released on DVD in the UK with all the original music. The music licensing laws and prices are very different. It's region 2 and PAL but plays fine on a computer.
I also really enjoyed this show and rewatched it a few years ago on DVD. But I certainly noticed the main title music was different. I don't recall noticing in-episode music though, and wouldn't have remembered it from the show.
I went looking for the PAL DVDs after seeing your comment, and found one season but not a full set. After looking a little online it seems like the PAL release might have been cropped down a bit from the NTSC release? If that's the case it seems pretty disappointing.
Scrubs was another one with pretty obvious music changes, because some were part of the dialogue or a joke that just doesn't make sense after the change.
Daria is another example - being on MTV they used a lot of popular music from the time which clearly did not cost them much extra at the time of TV broadcast but was replaced with generic music for the DVD release.
Some anime on Netflix is affected. Off the top of my head, the iconic first ending theme for Naoki Urusawa's Monster had its haunting vocals removed leaving only the backing track, and Neon Genesis Evangelion had its similarly iconic ending theme covers of Fly Me to the Moon sung by its voice actresses removed.
Interview With the Vampire theatrically ends with the rolling stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” playing over the final scene and end credits. When the movie was on Netflix, that was cut from the soundtrack and replaced with an acoustic cover of the song.
Yeah, I'm in agreement with the blog post in that I don't advocate for dismantling of copyright, but there are absurdities within the system like this that are in dire need of attention.
Shortening of copyright would fix many of these issues. Games and movies make almost all of their lifetime earnings in the first few years, and the dribble that's left afterwards is less important than preservation and public access.
It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced.
> Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later.
Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up.
Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode.
The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us.
Honestly I think it's fine. If corps are going to make poor decisions with their IP, oh well, their choice and their loss. There's plenty to go around.
Video games sign terrible licenses even for their most core parts. Many of the millions selling Forza games disappeared from the digital stores because they couldn't use the cars anymore.[0]
It's almost unbelievable since cars and their makers are actually getting a big marketing push from those games, but studios cannot get better conditions.
It was bound to happen with Star Wars, given how big a series it is. I wish we could have the same with more, but the amount of effort is huge in many cases, and literally impossible in others.
> Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
Star Trek: TNG was a bit of a special case though, because it had to be re-cut and new digital special effects created and edited into scenes.
I think this perspective holds more true for things that were broadcast in HD but only got commercial DVD releases. That's a disappointing lapse in high quality availability where HD content was distributed, just not in a persistent form for home use. In those cases the best quality available is an HD TV or satellite recording which might not have been preserved even in online media sharing communities.
And on top of all that, sales were not what they hoped, and with that we lost any chance of an official remaster of DS9 or Voyager, since the same work would have to be done as for TNG.
> It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
Don’t get your hopes up. That release is very special. It happened at just the right time: discs were still selling and streaming had not yet taken over.
There is simply not sufficient market for such restorations any longer. They probably didn’t make back the cost of the remaster.
>It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
The miracle was supposedly $1.2 million per season. On a back catalog item where they apparently never made their money back (maybe we shouldn't believe them on that, dunno).
But in other cases, it's not about the money at all, but about everyone cockblocking it at every step of the way long enough that the assets themselves wither and die. Babylon 5 comes to mind.
It's funny too, how they all pat themselves on the backs at the awards ceremonies and talk about the artistry and vision, but they clearly don't give a shit about it.
That isn't really true. It's different people involved - the artists really do care about the art, but they are joined at the hip to business people who don't care at all and just want to make more money.
I too was fascinated by VCDs for a stint during my younger years.
For me, the attraction was the potential of breeching the then-seemingly impenetrable wall between my computer and TVs. I had recently come into the possession of a CD burner (DVD burners were not yet available, at least not cheaply) and when my family picked up a dedicated DVD player that was advertised as also handling VCDs, I saw an opportunity.
The associated software ecosystem was quite flaky, though. I tried burning them with Roxio Toast and Nero among other utilities, but producing VCDs that player would actually play was hit or miss. I burned several coasters and eventually gave up.
Dude you and me both. My parents bought a combo VHS/DVD player that as it turned out could also handle VCDs, and I was able to watch a pirated version of AI with it. Eventually I got hold of a PowerMac 8500 with RCA in/out and really got cooking.
Seeing content created on my computer actually play on a TV really felt like a miracle in the 90s.
In 1997 there was the Pure3D graphics card, it was a 3DFX Voodoo 1 that could do TV output. Of course it could only do it on games as it still needed the 2D pass through for VGA output, but it was neat to see the PC doing what consoles could do.
Credit to HDMI, it finally standardized the IO systems that means PC to TV is trivial nowadays.
exactly. i too remember getting into vcd and svcd as a way to get video to my tv. I remember making some sort of Matrox to SCART lead and later I eventually got a TV (sony tritron) with s-vid that also helped the transition. it wasn’t until I got a plasma (px80) and popcorn hour a110 that i freed myself up from hacky cds and trailing wires. this was early 2000’s
Yeah it was pretty rough up until the late 2000s. I had been running iMacs so video output add-in cards weren't an option so I had to resort to a variety of different tricks to achieve the desired result. One of the last ones I remember trying involved some sort of hijinks with my TiVo box to get it to pull stuff from my computer.
I eventually just gave up and watched things on my iMac G5 since its 20" screen wasn't all that much smaller than my CRT TV, and then later in college I upgraded to a 27" Intel iMac which had a nice IPS panel display and was better to watch things on than most flat panel TVs from that era around that size.
I’d rather see Orion continue to be developed alongside Zen though, because goodness knows we need more non-Chromium browsers.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_(web_browser)
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