>What's more, because the barrier for entry as well as people's own expectations were that much lower it meant you saw a hell of a lot more individuality in the content posted. People would literally put a website up about their favourite designs of bridges, the shapes of snail shells, cartoon trivia no normal person should care about, or some local landmark
You can still find those types of sites if you want.
>These days the signal to noise ratio is so far tilted the other way with people obsessing too much about contributing what they think people want read or boasting about stuff they feel is boast-worthy that it almost completely drains out the purist content from people who just post stuff that genuinely interests themselves.
With more people joining the web, that will be a side effect of it. On the flip side, there has been so much massive positive change on the web too. Online transactions, many government services becoming online (many times reducing corruption), email and IM connecting people around the world in a way never before, and many many more things. Just focussing on the negatives by commenting a few types of sites like fb, insta, twitter etc is fainting a very one-dimensional picture.
>The only good thing about the modern web is that while the barrier for entry writing a website has gone up, inversely the barrier for entry publishing content has gone down dramatically
I actually think that is a bad thing, not good. What made the web the web was the low barrier to entry. Also, if you think that is the only good thing about the modern web, then I really don't think you truly realize the scale in which most people take the web for granted nowadays in their everyday lives, which affects them in a positive way.
> And now, random websites can grab control of my radios? With JavaScript?
No. Only the user allows it.
>FFS. This is like the battery api. Too much time spent on "can we", too little time spent on "should we".
The battery API can be tremendously useful on mobile if used effectively. For example, disabling certain animations and high end GPU intensive effects if the battery is less.
I disagree. You have games like The Last of Us, The Uncharted Series, Yakuza 0, and even the latest Wolfenstein game having very well made and engaging stories which I think can translate well on film.
Think more from the inference angle. There are a lot of use cases for ML and many are using native apps or desktop apps. This allows you to run it on the browser on the web, which significantly broadens the amount of people who can use it.
So can you think of use cases for using ML in an app (native or desktop?) Many of those would be good to have in the browser as part of a web app too.
With the growing use of Whatsapp in India, SMS is actually quickly dying as a medium of communication between humans here. Poeple who have whatsapp (there's a lot of them in india) seem to use that to communicate instead of SMS (which is then used mostly for messages from companies, or stuff like 2-factor authentication etc).
Also, I see a lot of people use Whatapp to send/share actual hindi (written in devnagari) instead of hindi written in roman alphabet. I would say the latter is still more popular, but the former growing quite a lot.
Another thing I see is people use whatsapp to bypass typing altogether. Since you can share pretty much any media easily on whatsapp and other messaging serivices, I've seen some people leave short voice messages instead of typing text.
Opera does still contribute quite a lot to blink/chromium (check out https://operasoftware.github.io/upstreamtools/ which lists them), though the gist of what you've said still stands.
In Opera, you can right click on any tab in the tab menu, and click 'save tabs as speed dial folder'. All open tabs will be saved in a folder on your speed dial. If you wan to open them again, you can right-click the speed dial folder and select to open them all at once.
If you haven't, I would recommend you look into m-Pesa. In some countries (not all countries), M-Pesa uses USSD (like Tanzania I think).
Overall, some of the solutions for payments and banking being implemented in some developing countries is quite different than what most people in the west are used to. M-Pesa is one of them, but in countries like India, online wallets are starting to gain traction too.
Most people in developing countries don't have credit cards, let alone being comfortable using them online. So a lot of people in India still use the 'Cash on Delivery' model, which isn't very much prevelant in the west, and other solutions like 'Netbanking' (in which the shopping site redirects you to your bank provider's site, you log in, and through the bank provider's site you do the payment, and then it redirects to the shopping site's payment confirmation page ; In other words, you haven't used a card, you've just paid directly through the bank) are also there.
With the [Opera addons catalog](https://addons.opera.com), every update goes through a moderation process to prevent this kind of situation from happening (which is one of the reasons why we encourage everyone to install extensions from the official addons catalog site rather than from other sources).
Extensions in Opera based on the chromium model, but have a few unique APIs too, like the ones for speed dial and the sidebar, which are not there in chrome.
We at Opera have called on for a single (or at leat a shared) API for making browser extensions, which I think will benefit the developer community immensely (instead of making one set for each browser).
The article links to that page. I don't think its absolutely necessery for the article itself to have a play button, as long as it links to a page which does.