I keep an old copy of Firefox around in a VM.

Fire it up sometimes to see what’s been lost, to see how much functionality used to exist and is now excised. And of course I use a lot of older OSes at work — the same story there.

I was talking to my girlfriend today and discussing that we have it particularly tough because we’re from a generation that remembers when computers worked for us rather than actively fought us and harmed us.

Computers and OSes (and I’m including in this tablets and smartphones) now exist to abuse you — to track you, market to you, steal your private data and sell it on, and are only secondarily in the business of performing your requested computing tasks. This is a largely-unrecognized sea change in the human relation to everyday computing.

Most younger people don’t mourn this because all they know is being the product.

I remember when I was not the product but rather the one in control and I liked that much better.