> Why folks continue to use them

Because there's no working alternative.

unwall.app works for at least some sites.

No, but they are limited. Longer tweets are cut off, and you don't get to see replies.

They might need regulations, if they are for-profit companies with a responsibility to shareholders to maximize profit while sacrificing all other values.

> responsibility to shareholders to maximize profit while sacrificing all other values

This is not required to meet fiduciary duty, although it is a common misconception. The company officers and board have pretty broad leeway to run the company as they see fit as long as there is no fraud, illegal activity, or conflict of interests.

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

They are not. This is why OpenAI and Anthropic are Public Benefit Corporations, which gives them the ability to prioritize the public over profit. The issue is that an agreement between them to mutually slow down is an antitrust concern.

It is telling that most aggressive forms of “capitalism” plead for government involvement to permanently limit new competition. I own something and I don’t want anyone else to have a chance. The marginal cost of bribing a senator is tiny tiny tiny compared to the value.

I used "Override colors" under Settings -> Accessibility to set nice dark colors.

Then I used userChrome.js from https://github.com/AlexVallat/firefox-scripts/ to add a button which toggles the browser preferences "browser.display.use_system_colors" and "browser.display.document_color_use", so I can still access bright mode if needed.

He's is running GitLab, a rather inefficient webserver.

Could've used some more Cloudflare.

> We also download over four parallel connections where possible.

I hope you can turn that off. It fragments the file and puts unnecessary load on the server.

You never used a download manager like DownThemAll or GetBot back in the day?

As far as fragmentation goes, I think both Firefox and Chrome derivatives figure out the final file size in advance, pre-allocate a temporary file that long and put data in it as it arrives. Completing the download is a rename operation or a no-op.

GetRight was a fucking lifesaver when I was stuck on a 28.8k dial up connection that loved to drop at the worst possible time.

I haven't thought of that name in decades, but you're right, it really was. :-)

GetRight, then DownThemAll, and now, Multithreaded Download Manager:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multithreaded...

Speed Download on early OS X releases was a lifesaver back when I was still on 56k dialup. Its multiplexing was the only way I could get decent speeds half the time (browsers would often drift down to single digits) and being able to resume when connections were dropped (at least when servers supported it).

> unnecessary load

In some situations it's the only way to get a decent download speed.

Disk fragmentation isn't a thing for ssd's

It's still a thing.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast24/presentation/jun

PureDarwin doesn't work on any of the M-series machines, and according to the Github commit log, hasn't been updated since 2024.

> What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this?

They never cared.

Mozilla has had a lot of funding over the years. They wasted most of it on useless side-projects. If, instead, they had saved up into a foundation, they could have been financially independent like a decade ago. Do not try to pay for Firefox; they'll just waste that too.