Spoiler text slows site down [Firefox blur filter bug]

I am now seeing headlines that Mozilla has had layoffs, will “put more focus on financially viable products”, and various other blurbs that shake out to Firefox is dead.

(Friends who pay attention to browsers tell me that this has been obvious for years now.)

…so on non-Apple platforms, there won’t be any viable Google-free web browsing option.

This fucking year, I swear to God.

There’s Brave, which is Google Chrome’s “Chromium” open-source base with some of the Google stuff ripped out.

Yeah, but Chromium is already too prevalent for my taste. It’s not entirely about distrusting Google as a company, it’s also about wanting to avoid monoculture and the fragility that always follows it. It’s not healthy for the web for all browsers to be reduced to Chromium skins.

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I would like to politely speak up in favor of a way of disabling spoiler-redaction-via-blurring, even if only as an opt-out possibility via changing a theme setting, or selecting a different theme, and even if Firefox fixes their suboptimal implementation of CSS blurring. I think that doing so is a good move toward inclusivity.

Blurring is always going to be a more resource-intensive operation than simply replacing with a bar of black (or another solid color), because dumping black pixels onto a region doesn’t require software to pay any attention at all to what’s already there, whereas blurring requires that each pixel’s new value be computed individually based not only on its previous value, but on the previous values of all of the other pixels within a certain radius. You can check this yourself by opening up a full-sized photograph in Photoshop or the GIMP: replacing the entire photograph with a large black rectangle can happen nearly instantaneously, whereas performing a Gaussian (or other) blur over it will likely take at least a second or two even on a high-end machine. (This can be optimized by using a faster blur algorithm, but it’s still going to be slower by an order of magnitude or more.)

For many of us, that doesn’t really matter, because these days many people have processor power to spare: you may not even notice the difference on blurred text vs. redacted-via-black-stripe text, especially for short passages of spoilers, especially if you personally are not on a lower-end device. But there are people coming to the forum from a wide variety of backgrounds, and on a wide variety of devices, and there’s a contingent that’s specifically interested in retrogaming and retrocomputing and using lower-end devices, and the burden of blurred text is likely to fall more heavily on them. I think it’s worth making a small visual concession to people who can’t afford a high-end laptop.

The fact that only Firefox has been cited as a pain point in this discussion doesn’t mean the problem only applies there; it’s a general problem that’s likely to rear its head again in some other form in the future, and it’s hard to know whether people are silently leaving based on it. It would be a shame if people noped out because they landed on a spoiler-heavy passage from a Google search and thought that the forum required more resources than their computers could supply, is all I’m saying.

Yes, blurred text is a cool effect, but it’s not worth sending the signal that people without the spare processor power to make it painless are less-worthy members of the community over. Making it something that users could disable might help to ease that pain point.

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Brave has a lot of controversial aspects that this description leaves out. If you want Chromium without Google services, ungoogled-chromium is there for you, though I am also in the camp of “please give me anything that isn’t based on Chromium.”

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