Web Browser Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 16, 2025

• University of Toronto ☛ Doing web things with CGIs is mostly no longer a good idea

  Where CGI programs fall down today is that they're unpopular, no longer well supported in various programming environments and frameworks, and they don't integrate with various other tools because these days the tools expect to operate as HTTP (reverse) proxies in front of your HTTP service (for example, Anubis for anti-crawler protections). It's easy to write, for example, a Go HTTP based web service; you can find lots of examples of how to do it (and the pieces are part of Go's standard library). If you want to write a Go CGI, you're actually in luck because Go put that in the standard library, but you're not going to find anywhere near as many examples and of course you won't get that integration with other HTTP reverse proxy tools. Other languages are not necessarily going to be as friendly as Go (including Python, which has removed the 'cgi' standard library package in 3.13).

• FOSS Post ☛ Brave Now Has 59% as Many Users as Firefox Worldwide

  Brave is a privacy-focused web browser based on the Chromium browser, which places it in the same family of browsers as Surveillance Giant Google Chrome, Edge, and Vivaldi. Brave is open-source and available for free.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • [Old] One Happy Fellow ☛ I can't pay rent because devs just don't care

    I made that up. Not all of it, parts of it happened. And worse stuff happens, like when I needed to pay to get my visa and the website just wouldn't work if your phone was a few years old. It likely didn't have enough RAM for it to work. How is 2GB not enough to send a few numbers describing the payment through the network?

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla GFX: Shipping WebGPU on backdoored Windows in Firefox 141

    After years in development, we will be releasing WebGPU on backdoored Windows in Firefox 141! WebGPU gives web content a modern interface to the user’s graphics processor, enabling high-performance computation and rendering. We’re excited about WebGPU because we believe it will raise the ceiling for games, visualization, and local computation on the web.

    You can find a tutorial on WebGPU at webgpufundamentals.org, try out the WebGPU Samples, and read documentation for the API at MDN. WebGPU is defined in two W3C standards, WebGPU and WGSL, whose development Mozilla has participated in since it began in 2017.

    WebGPU has been available in Surveillance Giant Google Chrome since 2023, and is expected to be available in Safari 26 this fall.

    Although Firefox 141 enables WebGPU only on Windows, we plan to ship WebGPU on Mac and GNU/Linux in the coming months, and finally on Android. backdoored Windows was our first priority because that’s where the great majority of our users are, but we are looking forward to enabling it on the other platforms as soon as it is robust and our test coverage is adequate. (Your humble author is strictly a GNU/Linux user, so this concern is close to his heart.) Note that WebGPU has been available in Firefox Nightly on all platforms other than Android for quite some time.

  • Mozilla ☛ A first-party data reality check [Ed: Mozilla sinking deeper in the mud; it's not stating that it won't share users' data]

    Part I in Anonym’s Rewiring the Rules Series

  • Mozilla ☛ Let’s talk about data control [Ed: Excuses for surveillance]

    A new series exploring the connection between data protection and performance.