Web Browsers/Web Servers/Web Sites Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 20, 2025

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • PC World ☛ A reopened lawsuit might make ad blockers illegal in Germany

    The lawsuit was filed by publisher Axel Springer SE against ad-filtering software company Eyeo and it mainly concerns the browser extension Adblock Plus, which calls itself the “world’s #1 free ad blocker” and is used by millions to block ads on websites—including those owned by Axel Springer, like Politico and Business Insider.

    The lawsuit was originally dismissed by a Hamburg court, but according to the report, it’s now being reopened to examine whether the initial judgement was incorrect. After a detailed review, another court could even rule in favor of Axel Springer this time.

  • MJ Fransen ☛ Moving the feed from index.rss to index.xml

    Unfortunately, web browsers won't open a file with the extension "rss", but just offer to download it. Therefor I have to rename my RSS feed.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Why I'm all-in on Zen Browser

    I tried to love Dia, but I’m not bullish about it. It really has lost the power user features that made Arc special: the excellent tab sidebar is gone and profile switching is nowhere near as fluid. But it also has far more competition: Perplexity has introduced Comet, its own AI browser, and Chrome itself has built-in Gemini features. It’s not clear why Dia would do better. And ironically, The Browser Company now charges $20/month, the same amount I would gladly have paid for Arc. Unless The Browser Company has something amazing up its sleeve, I think it’s destined for an acquisition that might see features from its own products incorporated into someone else’s.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Joel Chrono ☛ On changing blogging platforms and tools

    Jekyll is one of the more traditional static site generators around, popularized because of its integration with GitHub pages and other hosting services, and because it’s simply really good at what it does.

    It’s not the only option of course, and people adopt and switch around from one place to another. There are other SSGs like Hugo, Eleventy, Pelican, or Zola, and even CMS software like Kirby. There are also blogging platforms that take away the hosting and maintenance and let you just write, such as Bearblog, Pika or Pagecord, for example.

  • MWL ☛ Web Site Reorg

    This organization doesn’t thrill me, but at my scale maintainability is paramount.

    For the curious, the page-building script is at https://cdn.mwl.io/detritus/book-page-rebuild.pl . Why put it there and not on, say, github? One, github takes ICE money1. Two, github is increasingly poo. Third, if I put it in a more public place some daft bastard would try to use it. I would get demands for assistance and, worse, pull requests. Some even dafter bastard would claim that I had written a Static Site Generator and request co-maintainership for MWLSSG. (I understand that SSGs are trendy, but this is not an SSG. This is an ugly hack and, at best, a Static Page Generator.)