I have felt like a perennial browser refugee for a while. For about 20 years now (since OG Firefox was at peak and Chrome was not yet launched), every new browser promises the same things, gets popular enough, then does a full or partial 180.
While I like the pitch of this browser, I find it a little difficult to take it at the face value, especially given there is no info on the founders, or whether it is run as a company or a non-profit etc.
Perhaps someone in this thread could answer: which company/org structure provides best guarantees against gradual, slow, multi-year rot that seems to take over everything?
I would happily pay a small monthly subscription fee for a browser if it has strong legally protected privacy guarantees.
> which company/org structure provides best guarantees against gradual, slow, multi-year rot that seems to take over everything?
I don't think any such guarantees exist, unfortunately.
1. Crowdsourced word weighting: your keyboard's stochastic predictions are no longer mostly based on your typing, but rather on what 'everyone' is typing as their next word. This makes the word replacements it does often suboptimal to downright nonsensical.
2. Aggressive lookbehind correction: these days you have to be seriously on your guard for your keyboard to not sneak-edit something you typed 5 words back, because autocorrect suddenly decided that the probability is high you meant to say something else there (which it clearly isn't, as your eyes and brain exist)
The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1. Basically your keyboard thinks due to the way most people construct a particular sentence, you're gonna want to type "bold" next, despite "hold" clearly clearly making more sense. So it'll force "b" on you 4 times in a row until it realizes you really want to type "h".
Going back to the old style of doing keyboards (mostly user-learned dictionaries and probability weighting, and little lookbehind autocorrrect) could be done, but within Google and Apple there are probably people who got promoted by switching to the current shitty system. They'll block off any attempt at someone messing with their pride.
(There is a third 'problem' where your visual keys do not correspond to the touchmap at all. Swiftkey has a feature where it can show you what your touchmap and heatmap look like versus the actual layout and it its often staggeringly different, with many keys vastly tilted. When you try to desperately type "h" after 4 misses, you're doing that with your index finger in "hunt and peck" mode, which does correspond to the visual layout but not with your usual typing on the touchmap layout. There is no way for your keyboard to know you're in "hunt and peck" accuracy mode.)