Which is not the case on Plan 9.

NetSurf is closer to a browser.

Sure does!

Awesome (although I never owned an Amiga myself)! Thanks for your work.

I know that this might be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t really care about whether the software I use every day is open source or not, given that I rarely need to look into the source code anyway. (Do you?) Is the webRequest API about to be phased out?

Why would your trust in Mozilla have anything to do with using this browser?

Browsers based on Firefox are at the mercy of Mozilla. If Mozilla once again delivers a new function that is directed against privacy, those who develop Firefox-based browsers must either deactivate this function or also deliver it. And this is not always clearly documented. And Mozilla has simply acted against my interests too often - I no longer even trust LibreWolf.

(Leaving this aside, I also fail to see any advantage of Zen over Vivaldi.)

If you want a keyboard centered workflow it’s hard to beat.

Easy.

based on Firefox

Ew. No, thank you. Seriously, Mozilla has completely destroyed all trust in Firefox.

and open source

So is Vivaldi.

The short answer: NetSurf, because it is the only contemporary web browser that also works under Plan 9, is extremely resource-efficient and is not based on one of the big (= commercial) browser engines.

The long answer: It depends. I like to use eww to test the accessibility of a website, but since Mozilla destroyed everything I liked about Firefox in November 2017, I’ve been using Vivaldi as my main browser. Although Vivaldi is based on Chromium, it is quite privacy-friendly, performant and extremely customisable. Unfortunately, some websites do not work very well with NetSurf. (I like to report this as a bug to the website operator. It is fatal that everyone always assumes that everyone wants to load and execute hundreds of KiB of JavaScript).

A viable alternative is Guix, which uses Scheme for its scripts and could also use the Hurd kernel instead of Linux, but works the same.

Wait until you see the Lisp community. But yes, Rust is currently in its “why are there even any other languages lol” phase. Just wait.

I understand the reluctance but it feels to me like arguing “we should just stick with COBOL because it works.”

For those depending on COBOL code that does the job and has been doing it just well for a few decades, there are approximately zero good reasons to not stick with it.

Ha, I’ll steal that! “Karen compiler” - quite fitting, to be honest.

Maybe it’s not your profession but a hobby but the point stands.

To be honest, I’ve hardly ever asked myself how I could best please a potential employer with any of my hobbies. But I recognise that you’re probably taking a different approach.

It also expands your employment potential and general usefulness.

I have already mentioned that programming is not everyone’s profession. Not everyone chooses what they do in their unpaid free time primarily based on whether it makes them a more useful person. I think the very phrase ‘my usefulness’ is dangerous.

Are we only worth something as drones?

Why? I mean, I, personally, try to be as polyglot as possible, but not everyone working on the Linux kernel is even interested in doing anything that’s not C kernel code, nor is it their profession.

even though Rust is objectively better.

In some of its characteristics, Rust is certainly a good language. The borrow checker, however, still haunts my restless dreams today.

Developers who are not willing to learn something new and not adapt are the worst.

And this is why COBOL developers are desperately needed these days: because too many people think that “old” was the same thing as “needs a replacement”.

They have not.

OpenBSD seems to be able to have branches (CURRENT and STABLE), and they seem to be able to manage them just fine.