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I’ve been with Porkbun since Gandi got acquired. No complaints.

A larger phone is nicer to sit down and use with both hands, and while that is a primary use case for many people, it isn’t for me. I want my phone to emphasize portability and one-handed use.

I think there’s a viable market niche for a small phone, bi but I wonder if small phone customers might be unprofitable for other reasons.

I don’t see any reason to sell any of that data to advertisement corporations

You don’t see the reason? I see the reason. I just don’t like it.

I liked Mozilla better when it was a pure nonprofit narrowly focused on its core competency.

Fakespot and Firefox are different products. They should stay that way.

It’s fine that Fakespot needs to collect some data from users to do the thing it does, and probably necessary for it to monetize that data to have a sustainable funding model. I don’t want it to sell a profile about me to advertising partners, so I don’t use it.

Firefox can function as a web browser without transferring any information about me off my local machine except that which I explicitly tell it to send to specific websites.

Same here, though it really doesn’t fit my vision of a small phone. I still see a screen over 5" as large and 6" as extra-large.

I’m not surprised that small phones aren’t a big market segment, but I am surprised there’s not a single maker trying to dominate that niche.

Sony used to, as the article mentions. I suspect their sales were low in large part because their prices weren’t competitive. Some other niche player could easily have that market, especially if they did a little better on the value proposition. Alternately, Samsung launched 29 phones in 2024 or 2025; it’s surprising that they don’t include a single small model to address a market segment that, while not the largest, seems very devoted to that preference.

My best guess is that we’re an unprofitable segment for other reasons. I, for one am not going to regularly buy new phones just because they’re new. I’m also not going to use any bundled bloatware; I’ll change defaults; I won’t subscribe to many, if any services; I’ll block ads aggressively. I’ll even try to pay developers for apps outside of the built-in store, though that’s rarely possible. Anybody who sells me a phone is probably not going to make any profit from me other than the margin on the purchase price, and while I’m willing to pay a little extra for the phone I want (5" screen, headphone jack, unlockable bootloader), I’ll balk at an extreme premium.

The risk with anything involving a defective lithium-ion battery is fire/explosion.

I’ve been the person people came to (and paid money to) when they installed something stupid on Windows XP in 2003. Quite a few people do need their hand held to use a computer effectively.

Until that era, app developers were generally considered trustworthy. Malware existed, but anything that openly advertised itself, that users would install intentionally was unlikely to work against their interests. “Spyware” was a new category. App permissions in smartphones represent a recognition that app developers do not necessarily share the users’ interests.

I certainly don’t want knowledgeable users locked out of making decisions for themselves (even bad ones), but arranging the UI so that someone with a limited understanding will have a hard time finding the dangerous settings isn’t a bad thing.

I’m not at all sure what the author wants, except for wanting to roll back time to something less secure.

I’m not sure what the author wants either because the article is written in such a both sides style.

I know what I want though, and it definitely includes access to “dangerous” permissions; I’ve had root on my smartphone pretty much as long as I’ve been using one. I don’t mind making those a bit awkward to turn on though, and it seems like that’s what’s going on here. If anything, I’d like to see that broadened to all apps rather than just installs outside app stores.

What I don’t want, and what I’m concerned about is that this is a stepping stone to is a system where some permissions are only available to apps from Google-approved app stores, or a scenario like iOS where apps can only be installed from stores or with Google-approved developer credentials.

That’s a good overview, yes.

The restriction can prevent any abuses of the unlock system in making mass customizations to sell.

That’s a value-add, not abuse.

Zero. It seems like software is increasingly expecting to be deployed in a container though, so that probably won’t last forever.

When Microsoft first proposed this sort of crap, it was widely seen as a nightmare scenario. Now, it seems as if only a few of us open source nerds care.

This seems like a perfect use case for extensions. You want a UI feature that the developers seem to have decided is too niche to include in the app.

I’ve been using Maddy for about a year. It’s easy to set up and has been trouble free.

We have discovered a revolutionary shape: the rectangle!

You can’t middle-click them because they aren’t links. That is to say, they are not a elements but div elements with an added click event handler that navigates to another page. There’s a case to be made for doing things like that on a website that’s trying to behave like a native application, but Ebay fundamentally behaves like a website and building its navigation this way is bad design.

It seems to me software designed to facilitate discussion shouldn’t have a downvote buttton. There should be a UI for marking comments as inappropriate, but it should require a second step saying why. Perhaps one of the reasons should even be “I disagree”, but that option should have no effect.

It’s not impossible to abuse of course, but it nudges people in the right direction. Those UI nudges can be pretty effective.

I use Firefox almost all the time, but I’ve run into a few sites that act up, and the rate seems to be increasing. Sometimes I complain.

When Firefox had a tiny set of permitted extensions, I used Kiwi most of the time.