[conspire] Browser 'Wars'

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Micah Lee (twopointfour at riseup.net):

> As a web developer, I'm so thankful that there are new browsers and the
> old ones are dying out.

Yes, better standard compliance in modern browsers is very helpful.  
In particular, if every installation of MSIE 6 were to be nuked from the
planet, that would do a world of good.

I wish, however, that most Web developers were not under the delusion
that they are, and should be, in full control of the remote user's user
interface, and would stick to reasonable content with semantically
meaningful content and tasteful styling, leaving all the baroque crap
and the gratuitous JavaScript dependencies on the floor.

I just had to jigger the user-agent string of my Web browser (Iceweasel
on Debian) to 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)',
using User Agent Switcher, just to use my bank's online banking site.
Why?  'Your browser does not meet [Bank Foo's] security needs.'

Some Web developer (working for Bank Foo) should be taken out and shot.
That's inexcusable idiocy.

> I painfully remember a time before tabbed browsing. Javascript has
> gotten much faster recently, especially in Firefox 4. 

And Firefox (with NoScript) has gotten better at getting rid of
Javascript, foisted on us for mostly extremely bad reasons by Web
developers.

> We no longer need to use Flash to make flashy things.

I have a better idea:  Shitcan the flashy things.  We don't want them,
we're not impressed, and you're mostly just pissing us off, wasting our
time, and obliging us to use Greasemonkey scripts to de-junkify the work
of Web developers.

> The major browsers are: Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari, and the mobile
> browsers in Android and iPhone. Firefox is the only real open source
> option, and in my opinion the best option. Use it.

You're obviously (1) a Windows user, and (2) very poorly informed for a
'Web developer'.  Chromium and Konqueror are very real, major, worthy of
respect, and open source.

I already mentioned to my offlist correspondent that ignorance of those
matters is a typical marker of someone who is both a Microsoft Windows
user and is oblivious to privacy and security loss.  I guess you weren't
paying attention.

> The web has changed a lot recently. 

I consider it a serious indictment of 'Web developers' that almost all
of the _improvement_ changes have been the result of client-side browser
enhancement work from the open-source community, e.g., NoScript, Adblock
Plus, Greasemonkey, Firebug, CustomizeGoogle, BeefTaco, HTTPS
Everywhere, EditCSS, (Chris Pederick's) Web Developer.  By contrast,
there's been not only a distinct lack of leadership from 'Web
developers'; you've been nothing but corporate lackeys working pretty
much entirely _against_ the user's interests.

-- 
Cheers,               Everything is gone;
Rick Moen             Your life's work has been destroyed.
rick at linuxmafia.com   Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?
McQ!  (4x80)           -- David Carlson (winner, haiku error message contest)