[conspire] Browser 'Wars'

[Micah Lee]

On 02/10/2011 04:21 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> 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.)

Agreed. Javascript dependencies that don't gracefully fallback are
obnoxious.

>> 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.  

Sorry, the <video> tag is a good example of big improvements coming to
modern web browsers that help rid us of proprietary crap like Flash. And
I consider streaming video to be "flashy".

Have you looked through source code in github lately? It's an example of
a really elegant use of flashy javascript that makes it way nicer and
faster to use. And it does a good job of falling back to the old slower
way when javascript is disabled.

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

I thought you could run Chromium on Windows? I didn't include Chromium
because my understanding is that Chrome is just Chromium with a
proprietary wrapper (I could be wrong, I've never used Chromium). And I
didn't include Konqueror because it's not very popular and it has the
huge disadvantage of being embedded into KDE the same way IE is embedded
into Windows, making it not cross-platform. That doesn't mean it's not a
solid standards-compliant browser though.

>> 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 was assuming that people who write web development tools do so to help
them develop websites, but I suppose I don't know for sure. I don't see
why someone write a powerful and featureful javascript debugger (Firebug
being the most useful of all my add-ons) if they didn't develop in that
environment.

>> 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.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> conspire mailing list
> conspire at linuxmafia.com
> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire
>