menial tasks that are important such as unit test coverage
This is one of the cases where AI is worse. LLMs will generate the tests based on how the code works and not how it is supposed to work. Granted lots of mediocre engineers also use the “freeze the results” method for meaningless test coverage, but at least human beings have ability to reflect on what the hell they are doing at some point.
What does Capitalism™ say about “innovations” that can’t deliver results? Filtering out crap that only works on some bullshit paper is the one thing capitalism is supposed to be good at.
Gecko is kind of PITA to integrate on anything, unless you are just writing a glorified Firefox skin. That’s why Apple forked khtml to make webkit, despite khtml being less compatible with websites back then. It doesn’t help most Firefox forks come into almost-unusable-paranoia-driven flavour (like Librewolf) and maintainers-are-in-way-over-their-heads flavour (like Zen), and they all lack enough maintainers to keep up with upstream.
Servo could be a serious Blink/Webkit competitor, but unfortunately Mozilla dropped the ball there, and Samsung is still not taking it seriously enough.
This and the recent Wine patches to support Photoshop’s installer might open the door to Linux becoming viable for graphic designers.
Really good news on that front this week.
The financial supporters page has a donor from December 2025, so they are listing new sponsors. And Crunchydata seems to still use that branding in https://www.crunchydata.com/