Do they work if the user has disabled autoplay in browser media settings? This is one of the first things I do when setting up a browser.

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it.

Two things that I think are worth calling out:

1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms.

2. Why it's worth caring about this at all? So what if Chromium is the only engine, it would make things easier for developers after all. To this I say, go read some of the discussions in standard bodies(for example about FLoC). Engineers from Apple and Mozilla are largely our bastion against Google's harmful proposals for the web. Pushback from Apple and Mozilla are only relevant as long as they have market share to speak of. The recent lawsuit against Google(summary[0]) by many US states should be extremely worrying to anyone that cares about the open web and it should make handing over any more control to Google a terrifying prospect.

Mozilla maintains a list[1] of their positions on various standard suggestions that is also a useful resource.

0: https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205393819534131...

1: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

Slight tangent, but does anyone know of a website that acts as a decent, up-to-date clearing house for what we do/don't know about COVID?

I sometimes see articles providing new (perhaps preliminary) info about how effective masks are in different circumstances, how vaccine efficacy changes over time, potential for vaccinated persons to spread the virus, etc. I'd love to see a single website that tracks and reconciles all of those developments into a current summary.

Just for context, my personal use case is trying to estimate the riskiness of having my family participate in various social activities in the next few months.

Honestly at this point, if you trust google you’re a fool. It’s demonstrated itself to be unreliable, capricious, and absolutely willing to break the law if it thinks it can get away with it. Do business with them if you absolutely must, but under no circumstance should you actually trust them.

What an outrageously toxic and arrogant comment. There are many reasons to dislike Firefox. Just because you're not personally affected by those reasons, doesn't make people who are affected by them somehow mentally ill or lesser humans than you, your majesty.