The Web, Web Browsers, and Mozilla Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 13, 2025

• Peter Rukavina ☛ Bots Are Eating My Blog for Lunch

  I got curious about what might be causing this, and, because I suspected web traffic bumps, I started by looking at the 20 most popular user-agents in my Apache logfiles, with: [...]

• Kev Quirk ☛ Bots Are Eating My Blog for Lunch

  So unlike Peter, I'm not getting hammered by bots. But assuming that the 34.3% of traffic that has no user agent assigned are also bots, that's still around 65% of my total traffic.

• University of Toronto ☛ What would a multi-user web server look like? (A thought experiment)

  Every so often my thoughts turn to absurd ideas. Today's absurd idea is sparked by my silly systemd wish for moving processes between systemd units, which in turn was sparked by a local issue with Apache CGIs (and suexec). This got me thinking about what a modern 'multi-user' web server would look like, where by multi-user I mean a web server that's intended to serve content operated by many different people (such as many different people's CGIs). Today you can sort of do this for CGIs through Apache suexec, but as noted this has limits.

• Ars Technica ☛ A history of the Internet, part 2: The high-tech gold rush begins

  Hypertext was so big that conferences were held just to discuss it in 1987 and 1988. Even Ted Nelson had finally found a sponsor for his personal dream: Autodesk founder John Walker had agreed to spin up a subsidiary to create a commercial version of Xanadu.

  It was in this environment that CERN fellow Tim Berners-Lee drew up his own proposal in March 1989 for a new hypertext environment. His goal was to make it easier for researchers at CERN to collaborate and share information about new projects.

  [...]

  Because NeXT only sold 50,000 computers in total, that intersection did not represent a lot of people. Eight months later, Berners-Lee posted a reply to a question about interesting projects on the alt.hypertext Usenet newsgroup. He described the World Wide Web project and included links to all the software and documentation.

  That one post changed the world forever.

• Mozilla

  • [Old] Ludovic Hirlimann ☛ Firefox OS's story from a mozilla insider not working on the project

    As I said above, Mozilla's management was really afraid to miss the mobile revolution. They hired someone from the mobile industry to run the company, this led to some culture changes : no more a flat org, but a pyramidal one with middle managers. Culture became way less engineering centric, and started being a bit more top -> down. Focus was now solely on B2G. This impacted my work, because it was decided that Thunderbird had no future (and no business model to support its development). That meant I changed roles in Mozilla and joined the IT organization, as I wanted to see the server side of Email (this was long before Mozilla switched to Google workplace for email). I always felt that B2G to be renamed Firefox OS, killed the team I was part of, that was working on TB. I have no insight on who made the decision and why, but that how I felt. This made me not liking B2G.

  • Mozilla ☛ One-time permissions are here to stay! - Advancing WebRTC

    One-time camera and microphone permissions are now in Chrome (since M116), joining Firefox and Safari. This means that per-session permissions are now available to use cross-browser. Chrome calls the option “Allow this time”, where “this time” (as in “one-time”) refers to the scope of the grant, which the browser forgets once the user closes the page. This is the default in Firefox and Safari.