Subj : Big Tech Political Coveru
To : Ron L.
From : Aaron Thomas
Date : Sat Aug 09 2025 09:46 pm
RL> AT> With the latest releases of Chrome and Edge browsers for Linux/Debian
RL> AT> there's a very noticeable issue with accelerated graphics. On certain
RL> AT> websites, even gmail.com, there are weird shapes covering elements.
RL>
RL> I've heard of this, but never seen it first hand. Chrome and Edge are
RL> spyware and won't be on my Linux systems. We use Brave - and now we get
RL> political.
Some things I've figured out since I made that post are: 1) The accelerated
graphics feature in browsers uses the client machine's GPU to reduce strain
on the client machine's CPU, which should improve performance, but at what cost? 2) My GPU is 17 years old and outdated, and the new Chromium engine (used by Chrome and Edge) doesn't cater to such old GPUs.
But they literally broke web browsing for people who use old computers and I
don't believe that it's justified; web browsing has been lighting-fast for at the past 20 years or more, so who needs graphics acceleration? This is an attempt to get people to buy new computers at a time when Trump's tariffs might actually have a small impact on the price, with the logic that "the dummies will blame Trump before they blame Chrome updates."
RL> The company (Red Hat?) who controlled X11 effectively choked it by not
RL> allowing people to make bug fixes and enhancements for it. Finally it
RL> came to a head and they publically admitted they wanted to kill X11 in
RL> favor of Wayland.
I wasn't aware of this because I only began using Linux about 15 years ago. And I was going to ask you "What difference does it make when all this software is free?" But the answer to that is self-explanatory; it's not the money, it's the power.
RL> And the Wokies are, without exception, completely incompetent so
RL> something like Wayland will never be complete or feature match X11 -
RL> especially now that someone forked X11 into XLibre, applied all those
RL> bug fixes and enhancements.
Right. We're under their control (at times) even though they aren't adept at controlling things.
RL> And what's political about the Brave browser? It seems that many Wokies
RL> don't like the politics of the guy who writes it. So they bad mouth it
RL> all the time.
I'll give it a try sometime but I'm primarily a (hobbyist) web developer so I want to see things through the eyes of the average web user which I believe is via Chrome primarily and Edge alternatively.
Firefox doesn't deploy graphics acceleration by default, which is great, but it does me little good because I don't think many people actually use Firefox.
I'm content in assuming that most people (70% according to "the experts") use mobile devices for web browsing, and graphics acceleration is not an issue for most mobile users unless they are part of the minority that uses ancient android devices.
I try to adapt my web apps to work well on all devices but the browser developers can care less about that and they're even throwing curveballs to it.
