I hope you had a great week. This week, I pre wrote a couple of posts which have to do with dark mode. The first is out next week and the other next month. I should start releasing posts early as a Patreon perk.
Firefox 89’s Proton
I got the much anticipated Firefox Proton UI update and while I love the modern look, I just can’t with the tabs that have such low contrast.
I hope to fix it properly but for now I disabled it in about:config with the property browser.proton.enabled set to false. Amit goes into how to customize tabs and I also discovered Firefox Color though it doesn’t quite do what I need it to do.
Again I really like the refresh and the tabs are my only hangup with it.
YouTube X RSS
I’ve also been working on a site which extracts RSS feeds from YouTube called YouTube X RSS. I made it last year but much like the other projects I made at the time I didn’t like it. So far I’ve managed to handle the basic cases though more complex ones require API access which will need some time. I did this as an iOS Shortcut which uses a similar technique.
I might start working on other projects since I really need a portfolio.
More Problems With The Not Using GIFs Project
As I was working on the bonus post where I was trying to evaluate how bad my flawed comparisons were. Just as I was going to run the vmaf comparison tool, I got this:
PS C:\Users\fg\Desktop\initial-comparison-fairness> vmaf -r .\majima-holy-shit.y4m -d .\majima-holy-shit.gif.y4m VMAF version 2.1.1 Loss of framing in YUV input data Loss of framing in YUV input data 1 frame  0.00 FPS
I compared it to an older ffmpeg build I had and it ran with no problems. Comparing the files I noticed that they had different headers.
#Newer Build YUV4MPEG2 W320 H180 F25:1 Ip A1:1 C420mpeg2 XYSCSS=420MPEG2 XCOLORRANGE=LIMITED #Older Build YUV4MPEG2 W320 H180 F25:1 Ip A1:1 C420mpeg2 XYSCSS=420MPEG2
The newer build specified XCOLORRANGE=LIMITED which wasn’t in the older one. A bit of searching later I came across issue #825 on vmaf’s repo and it looks like vmaf can’t handle it at the moment. For now, I’ll add color_range 0 to turn it off which should be fine for my comparisons.
Sadly, I thought it was a bug in ffmpeg so I had started recompiling it which takes 8 hours so I can actually the compiling excuse (by xkcd). See Explaining XKCD for a transcript.
On this note, I noticed that yuv images aren’t working with vmaf properly. I’ve got time to figure it out but I thought this would take less time you know?
Safari 15
At WWDC, Apple introduced Safari 15. I like the UI refresh, especially having the address bar at the bottom. Might have padding/margin issues but CSS environment variables can fix that. I also like how the <meta name="theme-color"> and fills the UI with it’s color. It’s like Firefox’s proton without the shit contrast tabs though I wonder how it’ll handle color contrast in the UI.
There’s the live text thing which is neat as it extracts text from images which isn’t as good as actually posting the damn text instead of an image is a good step towards accessibility.
Extensions really suprised me as they managed to do it before Google on mobile (though Firefox on Android has it). Thing is, I doubt many devs will pick it up because it costs $100 a year for code signing and it insists that you use Xcode for no good reason (though they include a migration tool.
There’s also webauthn which uses public key infrastructure instead of passwords for authentication which will really reduce phishing though it doesn’t have much adoption.
As for what’s missing, PWA like features though that would probably never happen. Also AVIF images which is in WebKit but aren’t pushing for some reason. Apple really like making things difficult for no reason don’t they?
690 (Nice) Words Later
Thanks for reading. Next week I hope to actually do some work, publish the one post on dark mode, finish YouTube X RSS, start other projects and get somewhere with the Don’t Use GIFs series.
See you next time!
FG
P.S. I got a new newsletter for my personal site called Farai’s Fuzzy Thoughts. Check it out! It’s amazing how I cam from guy who hates newsletters to having two of them. Also as I was writing this I wondered why this one image didn’t load. Turns out I don’t load images by default. I might do that if iOS 15 comes out since it proxy’s images. Also, this email is now 800 words long. Nice!