[conspire] Browser 'Wars'

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Micah Lee (twopointfour at riseup.net):

> On 02/10/2011 02:51 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> It depends.

No.  You are going out of your way to misread what I said.
I didn't say JavaScript is undesirable.  I said _gratuitous_ JavaScript
is.  In so many words.  Verbatim.  (I could have added:  Dependency 
without graceful fallback is incompetent.)

> So you would prefer to run Flash to watch streaming video than use the
> new open web standards that make Flash irrelevant?

An irrelevant question that is unresponsive to what I actually said.  

> > 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.
> 
> Obviously.

But you excluded them in your listing of 'real' Web browsers --
more than likely because they're unknown on MS-Windows.  Thus my point.


> You do realize that most of those Firefox addons, especially
> Greasemonkey, Firebug, EditCSS, and Web Developer, were all written by
> web developers, right?

Well, Chris Pederick certainly is.  Jesse Ruderman of EditCSS is not.
Erik Vold of Greasemonkey is not.  Joe Hewitt of Firebug is not.

Of course, you are likely using a sense of the term 'Web developer' that
tactically includes all Firefox coders and anyone who for any reason has
written an extension, i.e., you're expressing a tautology.  

> I'm sorry that lots of websites are annoying and insecure, and I highly
> encourage running Adblock Plus, NoScript, and other plugins that give
> you control over your browser. But that doesn't mean that open web
> standards and powerful modern web browsers are a bad thing, it means
> that web developers need to stop making shitty websites.

Fair enough and agreed.