Photo: Robyn Beck, Getty Images
For a company that’s staring down three separate antitrust cases from several dozen states and the Department of Justice, Google sure seems pretty comfortable issuing update after update that is nothing less than despotic. The latest example comes courtesy of a Google Docs tweak that on one hand makes the program speedier and smoother, but comes at the cost of an accessible, open internet.
Midas Nouwens, a Denmark-based professor who specialises in finding flaws in data protection laws like Europe’s GDPR, first flagged the Docs update in a Twitter thread Thursday morning. As he pointed out, the actual update looks, well, pretty boring: Over the next few months, Google said it plans to swap out the static HTML backbone currently supporting its Docs product for one that’s built using a code called canvas.
Hi HN!
I m Archa, one of the cofounders of Insight Browser (https://insightbrowser.com/). We let you deeply customize your search and browsing experience on iOS. You can create extensions on the phone itself, using simple if-then conditions and often without writing any code. For more advanced extensions, you can use JS.
14 years after iOS Safari brought the mobile browser to near-parity with desktop, most mobile browsers are still one-size-fits-all, but the internet isn t one-size-fits-all. It s very long tailed, both in content and in how differently people use it. There is now a generation of users growing up with iOS who still crave the power that s available on desktop. Some mobile browsers come bundled with ad-blocking, and there is a limited way to do extensions in Safari, but extensibility on mobile has been nowhere near desktop. Apple has restricted what developers can do with WKWebView, so we started to look into whether there s ways to work with that but preserve most of