Asa Dotzler
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asadotzler.com
Asa Dotzler
@asadotzler.com
490 followers 530 following 3.4K posts
Sir Robin's minstrel
ex-Netscape, ex-Mozilla

https://asadotzler.com
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asadotzler.com
If you haven't seen Wim Wenders' "Until the End of the World," it's really good. You want the 5 hour cut. If that one grabs you, then the 20 hr cut :D

Also, one of the best soundtracks ever. Original songs from Talking Heads, Julee Cruise, Lou Reed, R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, and more.
Still from Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World featuring Solveig Dommartin as Claire Tourneur wearing a head mounted display. She's framed facing the camera, head and shoulders, with her left hand gripping the goggles.
November 11, 2025 at 1:42 AM
asadotzler.com
Another Chris Messina creation, one we didn't use :D
close up photo of a back blue jeans pocket wit a brown knit shirt loosely tucked in and a white condom package with the Firefox logo poking out. Below that is the text "Always use protection." and "GetFirefox.com" with tiny text "Firefox is the free web browser that offers greater privacy and prevents pop-ups, spyware, and viruses.
November 10, 2025 at 1:13 AM
asadotzler.com
Happy 21st birthday, Firefox.

This is our community-funded 2 page New York Times launch announcement. The names of nearly 10,000 small donor fans are designed into the first page.
First of 2 facing pages in the New York Times print newspaper, featuring the Firefox logo and wordmark created from the names of nearly 10,000 donors filling the page top to bottom in tiny but legible text. Splitting the page at about 1/3rd up from the bottom is a white space with bold text, "Are you fed up with your web browser? You're not alone. We want you to know that there *is* an alternative..." Page 2 of the NYT ad, designed by Chris Messina and the Spread Firefox gang, features a large Firefox logo filling the top half, and below that "Introducing Mozilla Firefox 1.0" and several quotes from happy users: "I installed Firefox on my laptop today. It's so fast - I never knew there could be that much of a difference." - Stephen Cropp, New Zealand "I was tired of my browser crashing everyday, so I tried Firefox. Now I can't live without it. Pop-up blocking, secure browsing and no spyware. Best of all ... not a crash since I switched." - Justin Henderson, USA "I thought changing and learning a new web browser would be difficult, but with Firefox I had no problems at all. Browsing is now smooth." - Jouni Hätinen, Finland Below the user testimonials reads: "Firefox is the free, open source web browser from the Mozilla Foundation that lets you surf faster and more efficiently and helps avoid annoying pop-ups and spyware. Join us and make the switch today - Firefox imports your Favorites, settings and other information, so there's nothing to lose. Find out what more than 10 million users from around the world already know: there is an alternative!" The ad concludes with "Download today from GetFirefox.com" and in super-small text under that: "This message has been brought to you by the thousands who contributed funds to the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet. Special thanks to the employees of Haberman & Associates, MozSource, Oracle, Red Herring, Red Hat, Sourceforge.net, Speakeasy and Sun Microsystems for helping to make this possible.
November 10, 2025 at 12:53 AM
asadotzler.com
Updated
Peter Parker's glasses meme. With his glasses off he sees 10 web browsers from Arc to Opera. With his glasses on, it's 8 Chromium browsers, Firefox, and Safari.
November 9, 2025 at 11:39 PM
asadotzler.com
Yes! It's been a long time coming.
Summary of Ben Goodger's activity removing Profile Manager UI from Firefox months before Firefox 1.0, with an opening comment "Profile Manager is still present in Firebird, and as such it requires a UI review, respecification and update." followed by "Need to turn this off for 1.0." and a patch attached to do so.
November 9, 2025 at 11:07 PM
asadotzler.com
If you're on a web page that makes it difficult to grab an image, and a screenshot won't do, Firefox has your back.

Open Page Info (ctrl+i) and select the Media tab. Now you've got a sortable list of every image on the page for easy download or referencing directly by its URL.
A screenshot of a Pinterest page featuring a backyard deck surrounding a multi-trunked tree and a floating Page Info window featuring tabs at the top for General, Media, Permissions, and Security, a scrolling and sortable list of URLs for images on the page, image info for the selected item, a save button, and a preview of the selected image.
November 9, 2025 at 10:29 PM
asadotzler.com
Apple has lost its way. "Make the OS readable" is an option buried in the accessibility settings.
Image of default Liquid Glass notifications that are unreadable white text on an almost entirely transparent control on top of a floral background. Below that is the same screen with an accessibility option toggled that makes the notification control surface far more opaque (though still translucent) in sort of a very pale frosted glass look where black text is nearly good enough to be readable by the typical users.
November 4, 2025 at 9:24 PM
asadotzler.com
Yeah.
Lita Ford, Debbie Harry & Joan Jett, photographed together in 1977
November 4, 2025 at 9:47 AM
asadotzler.com
My early childhood was in large and busy house. For a time it was 8 adults and 13 kids, and a bunkhouse next door with several young men in their late teens.

One of my fondest memories of that house is me and about half the clan sitting around the living room playing Dungeons & Dragons. Good times!
Three hardback books displayed as a triptych, Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual, the core books for playing AD&D in the early 1980s. Image lifted without permission (sorry, Wayne) from Wayne's Books RPG Reference at this web address http://www.waynesbooks.com/Hardbacks.html Check out his site and collection. It's quite impressive, usually over 150 D&D books, maps, screens, adventure guides, and other cool published content. Maybe buy something from him, they range from about $10 to about $300 and there are some real gems in there.
November 3, 2025 at 2:01 AM
asadotzler.com
Happy 41st anniversary, Dragon Lance.

Weiss & Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles, and their follow-up trilogy, Legends, remain among my favorite fantasy books. I attached to them like I did Lord of the Rings, reading and re-reading, until the spines split and whole sections fell out.
Cover of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Volume 1 of the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. The mostly red cover features three geared characters posing in front of a hill with a red dragon poking out from behind a tree. Cover of Dragons of Winter Night, Volume 2 of the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. The mostly white and blue cover features three geared characters posing in front of a blue dragon standing in rocky hills. Cover of Dragons of Spring Dawning, Volume 3 of the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. The mostly green cover features three geared characters standing in front of a hill with a green dragon.
November 2, 2025 at 10:57 PM
asadotzler.com
Napkin math:

Meta Quest 3 virtual display text clarity is worse than a 1280x720 physical PC screen.

Apple Vision Pro virtual displays are only a bit better than 1366x768 and well shy of 1920x1080.

If you are accustomed to "retina" quality displays, you're not gonna enjoy working on those one bit.
CC 2.0 image of iPad display close-up from Flickr (via Wikipedia) demonstrating low pixel density and high pixel density displaying "A characters under high magnification revealing very jaggedy, stair-step edges in the lower density panel and smoother, crisper characters in the higher density display.
November 1, 2025 at 10:54 PM
asadotzler.com
Commodore 64 was the best.
capture from Commodore 64 game, Snokie, with cute jellybean shaped, 8 bit pink penguin navigating an ice cave with jagged floor and ceiling.
October 29, 2025 at 10:45 PM
asadotzler.com
This is why Apple didn't ship the original head mount with a top strap. The thick white band adds at least 50% more dork.
man facing camera wearing a Vision Pro, big shiny black goggles with a thick white head strap that immediately catches your attention and looks kind of like head gear for a CPAP machine.
October 28, 2025 at 8:49 PM
asadotzler.com
Apple thinks this is good and legible.
Apple search field implemented in "Liquid Glass" with a light background visible behind the glassy search field, the placeholder text and icon "App Library" is nearly invisible.
October 26, 2025 at 7:42 PM
asadotzler.com
Snap thinks this is a good look for its marketing video.
Attractive woman with Snap Spectacles sitting atop her head. The glasses are giant, chunky cheap looking plastic that could be some kind of safety glasses maybe.
October 24, 2025 at 9:58 AM
asadotzler.com
Samsung has released its $1,799 Galaxy XR mixed reality face PC. The company spent 2 years and approx. $1B making it. Samsung will build ~100K units.

Galaxy XR will be the junior version of Apple's 10 years and $33B R&D for a $3,599 Vision Pro face PC with a production run of ~500K units.
Man, 3/4 view with short curly hair and a shapely beard wearing VR goggles constructed of gray plastic straps and forehead cap, and a big bulbous sleep mask shaped goggles with a clear plastic face that's got the mirrored shades look but with a pair of big light colored camera dots visible "behind the glass" that give a cringy cartoon robot eyes vibe. I won't say the guy in the goggles looks like a dork, because this fella's actually got some handsome around the dork goggles. It sort of cancels out in this case, rather than dorky, it's just "odd," same kind of odd as that guy in the Starbucks 5 years ago who had his whole-ass desktop with him. Odd is fine. It's like quirky. I'm down with that. What I'm most certain of is this is not the future of personal computing. At best it's game console scale because no one will use these outside of their homes, ever. The form factor, the ergonomics, the use cases, none of it works as a general purpose PC like our laptops and smartphones so this guy's posing for the magazine and he's doing OK considering the abasement of it all.
October 22, 2025 at 6:20 AM
asadotzler.com
Tim Cook was on Good Morning America telling the most mainstream audience imaginable that this was our next PC, that it could do everything our Macs and iPhones do and more. This is the personal computing future he wanted for all of us.
Profile view of a bald man with a beard wearing the Vision Pro face PC, which looks like hefty white scuba goggles tightly pressed against his face by wide and chunky cargo strap elastic bands that cross over the top and around the back of his head.
October 21, 2025 at 9:13 PM
asadotzler.com
Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. Wow, that's pretty.

Borman: Hey, don't take that, it's not scheduled.

Anders: (laughs) You got a color film, Jim? Hand me that roll of color quick, would you...

Lovell: Oh man, that's great!
Typically oriented so the Earth is shown above the Moon, the original photograph, and the photographer's preferred orientation, has Earth to the left of the Moon and that's how the photograph is displayed here. The Earth is sliding around the Moon rather than rising above it. William Anders' world-renowned photo features a blue and white marbled Earth centered against a black sky and tilted slightly to the right with its left hemisphere illuminated. The right side of the image is framed by a gray moonscape with dramatic textures of craters and bright ejecta streaks, a bumpy horizon slicing across the the black beyond.
October 21, 2025 at 4:28 AM
asadotzler.com
I wonder how people who care about their faces, hair and makeup, would deal with a boss telling them this was a required work PC.
Woman with long hair pulled back tight adjusting the Vision Pro goggles and head straps.
October 16, 2025 at 3:00 AM
asadotzler.com
What happened to Apple's quality control.

Aluminum is Apple's specialty. It has more experience in milled and anodized aluminum-wrapped consumer products than anyone, ever. And this is what it ships?

Slowing innovation and multiple failed billion dollar bets are concerning, but this is shocking.
Two orange iPhone Pros held next to each other. One is orange as shown in marketing photos. The other is only orange on the glass back but the aluminum is pink, or certainly far less orange and into natural pumpkin bordering on grapefruit. iPhone Pro in orange but only the glass back remains orange while the aluminum is pink copper, bordering on a rich mauve.
October 14, 2025 at 8:21 PM
asadotzler.com
These hinges are assembled from precision machined custom alloys, lightweight and durable while providing screen crease support and strong open and closed positions. They're marvels of engineering, and also very costly.

Hinge suppliers will rival screen and camera suppliers' earnings for foldables.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold hinges, an older model silver metallic colored hinges splayed open showing little springs, brackets, connectors, and tiny screw holes.
October 12, 2025 at 8:22 PM
asadotzler.com
One summer favorite.
screen capture from C-64 Zaxxon game, blue surface with walls, tanks, guns and rockets as the player's airplane flies over.
October 7, 2025 at 11:32 PM
asadotzler.com
Left: Meta Ray-Ban Display
Right: Apple Vision Pro

AR spectacles can only add light, not take it away, and that's why these two experience are so different.

Don't believe it when Meta and Apple tell you AR glasses are the evolution of VR goggles.
Looking through glasses in a living room setting with a very translucent almost transparent Apple Music window with text and image that are almost indecipherable with so much ambient light coming through. Apple Music on Vision Pro in a living room setting with darkened transparent background making text legible and a fully opaque album art that's detailed and decipherable.
October 4, 2025 at 8:28 PM
asadotzler.com
Because today's reflective waveguide optics cannot occlude light, only add light, spectacles like Meta's Ray-Ban Display are pretty terrible in brightly lit places.
view through Meta Ray-Ban display glasses showing a navigation overlay that's nearly invisible against a moderately bright street.
October 3, 2025 at 5:05 PM
asadotzler.com
Oligarchs are not your friends.
Tim Cook giving a thumbs up sign.
October 3, 2025 at 4:42 PM