That's not really the point, the main issue is that for all the pontification about how FOSS is more secure because you can see the code the fact is it is ultimately running on closed proprietary hardware, locking all the windows but leaving the doors open makes you a bit more secure but it's only an illusion of security, and that is even worse.
Unfortunately, web sites these days are much slower than the web sites of the old days. They need those faster browsers to get acceptable performance.
If you want the text and static images (or animated gifs) of the old days the performance is much improved.
What is with this technophobic view of progress? Yes websites these days are more interactive and thus require more power, but we have more power and more bandwidth thus we can have higher interactivity and high resolution audio, video and imagery. You really think if we had the same capability in the 90s people just wouldn't use it?
The web browsers these day wouldn't ever finish starting up, if you were to try running them on the hardware that the web browsers of old ran fine on.
Sure they do, even on my old XP system with 1GB RAM Chrome runs fine. And compared to the old horrible IE6 the compatibility with websites is significantly improved.
Bloated: I largely answered this already. HTML browsers were never intended to have full scale virtual machines (javascript).
That doesn't make them "bloated", it's additional functionality that won't even be used if you don't take advantage of them, the definition of what should be included in a web browser has changed, just as it has with pretty much every piece of software. You're nostalgically clinging to what browsers were in the 90s as if that was set in stone.
Want to put video on the 'web'? Fine, link to a video stream/container url pointing to your video back end and the browser will open the system (or the user's favorite) video player.
No, that's stupid, if there is no standard on what formats can be supported and how the streaming content is delivered you end up with a fragmented solution that provides an inconsistent experience.
Hacks to shoehorn video into the browser window are the only reasons flash persists to this day (and why they bolted video on to hyperTEXT markup too).
Nope, you don't need flash for web-based video.
CSS is probably the only somewhat sensible extension to the browser concept, but it also encourages ugly, overdesigned interfaces that sacrifice readability for 'design'
So don't visit sites if you don't like the design.
As far as games and other 'interactivity' go, serious gaming in a browser is a joke rife with performance and interface problems (even with more bolt ons like quakelive) compared with standalone clients
and flashturbation sites are the most useless for those actually looking for useful information.
Flash is not part of the web.
The whole concept of 'mobile' sites is another symptom. There should only be one site with the textual content which the browser formats for the device, leaving any other content to the system (or user installed) software assigned to the URL types.
No, since not all information is presented as just a block of text void of all contextual formatting and presentation it's ridiculous to just produce text and allow the client to do all of the layout and formatting.
Security: On the server side, the whole scripted and 'virtualized' stack is the problem. It was claimed it would be more secure, but all it has done is increased the complexity, increasing the chance for bugs/exploits (eg: php/python etc), and decreased performance.
Citation? Demonstrate where a comparable situation has decreased performance. And no, none of what you have written there backs the claim that the web is less secure. If you opened a site from the 90s on a modern browser it is faster and no less secure.
Speed: No, they are a lot slower.
Wrong, layout engines are much faster nowadays.
There's no reason a browser should need hundreds of MB or more just to render a few pages or take more than half a second to start up.
Memory is cheap, and yes browsers do indeed start up in far less than half a second so I don't know what you're on about there. Even on mobile it is sub-second startup.
Well as the big players have taught us, SaaS cannot be relied upon for any critical work.
You're going off topic, SaaS is not the web.
Features (or even the whole 'application') are here today, gone tomorrow. Same with user data. These providers have made it clear they'll belly up at the slightest government or marketing pressure, so privacy and security are out too. That coupled with metered network connections and the above mentioned architectural abomination leave little to be desired.
Again, not the web, you're just talking about the internet in general.
Cite exactly how it is "more bloated"...and no, more features is not the same thing.
slow
Wrong, web browsers these days are much faster than the web browsers of the old days.
insecure mess.
The insecure mess was the days of Netscape and IE6.
The 'web' wasn't meant to be 'interactive' nor a turing complete development environment for software as a 'service' control-freaks.
Just because at that time nobody could foresee the capabilities of the future doesn't mean you restrict it to the capabilities of old. Interactive content presentation is a good in many cases. But it's ok, you don't need to use modern browsers or visit interactive sites or develop interactive sites if you don't want to. By all means use the web pages and features from the early 90s instead.
If you want interactive, you don't want html or a 'browser', you want software designed for interactivity.
This is software designed for interactivity, a browser works perfectly fine as an application container, there is nothing inherently wrong with that.
I think it has more to do with them being late in the game
I'd agree with that. I found Windows Phone is actually a really good mobile operating system but the problem is nobody wants a superior operating system, they want their device (computer, tablet or phone) to run programs so they can do tasks - which is why I use an iPhone rather than a Windows Phone. If it can't run the programs they want then it doesn't matter how good the operating system is. It's the same reason desktop Linux has never had more than a couple percent marketshare, unless it is disruptive you will end up with a chicken and egg problem with respect to apps if you enter an established market.
In what way? Internally maybe. From a user perspective on a PC? Absolutely not.
Internally is the point, that's where it is better, so your applications run better because that is what people use their computers for. What programs do you spend so much time using on your computer that work differently on Windows 8 than they do on previous versions?
So basically what they are saying is they are still forcing the Tablet/Smartphone interface on PC's and laptops.
No, you just quoted a line specifically stating that they will show how it will look on smartphones and tablets - obviously in contrast to what it looks like on desktops. I've tried the preview a while back and unless it's changed recently I can't see what tablet/smartphone interface is in there... although that said I don't use 'metro' apps.
Seriously slashdot has become the techno phobe all change is bad from a former leading innovative site.
It's that there are a bunch of technology hipsters here wanting everything to be vintage because they can't keep up. We all know the HTML standard back then was horribly incapable and that's why Netscape and IE introduced proprietary extensions to augment which made things worse and for interactivity the best we had was Java applets and Flash, nobody who knows what they're talking about actually believes that time was better.
If it is free software, you should have the possibility of altering the program so that it does not ask for money and you are permitted to distribute such versions.
There are always niche corner cases. Come on. 5k 27" monitor? You can't find it cheaper because no one bothers making it. No one cares enough to buy it.
They are new technology, at this point they are pretty useless to most people anyway which is why they are so expensive. Those people doing 4k video editing aren't using an iMac anyway because they are too low-powered, that's what the Mac Pro is for.
So if you're after a 27" monitor that's high enough resolution to edit 4k video at 1:1, and still have space left over for UI, which cheaper option would you suggest?
If you're editing 4k video on OSX you're not using an iMac, you're using a Mac Pro and most of the people that are editing 4k video aren't skimping on the budget.
Just because Google didn't need to release a security update to 4.3 between its release and 4.4, doesn't mean they wouldn't have.
There's no reason they still couldn't. And given the amount of devices that are stuck on 4.3 it seems logical to do just that.
Google decided 24mo was enough to support the Galaxy Nexus. The hardware wasn't going to be able to keep up with the 4.4 OS update.
Which is precisely why they should patch the vulnerability in 4.3. I'm not saying the Galaxy Nexus needed to run 4.4, just that it's not ok to excuse patching the flaw in 4.3 by saying it's fixed in 4.4 and too bad if your hardware can't run 4.4.
It's a different approach, with usability in mind.
I'd rather it run a bit slower and be secure than just run the old insecure OS. With iOS 8.1.1 even the 4S is fine and at least it is secure.
Why run a mac at all if your goal is to use Linux? PCs are a ton cheaper and in most cases just as good.
Honestly one of the reasons is the same as why I use an iPhone, which is the warranty support. If you live near an Apple store it's as simple as making an appointment (or just walking in if it's midweek) and getting them to fix the issue, most of the time they can do it on the spot. I've had really good warranty support on HP and Dell with enterprise contracts but not on the consumer side. Same with Samsung phones, if you have a problem it's a matter of sending it off to get it fixed and being without it while they resolve the issue, with iPhone you just walk in to the store and they swap it over for you.
That said I do actually dual boot OSX and Linux on my mac.
The Galaxy Nexus received Jellybean(4.3), which came out 20 months after the phone was released. So no, they didn't abandon it after 18 months.
Well 20 months instead of 18, that was the last update to it.
However, hardware and software for mobile devices have been improving at such a pace that you shouldn't expect more than that right now.
Of course you can! Apple manages just fine with iOS devices and even Microsoft does (their 8.0 was such a significant change that it was incompatible with many handsets but in lieu of that they simultaneously released 7.8 that included many 8.0 features for 7.x users).
They have already taken steps both internally(by decoupling more from the OS and putting it in the playstore)
Doing that just moves more of the supposedly "open" Android into a closed, proprietary blob.
and with the manufacturer's(by putting pressure on them for timely updates). Complaining about update support for devices, after Google started addressing the issue, is just idiotic.
No it isn't, patch 4.3 and use this supposed pressure on the manufacturers to release the update.
Considering the guy who designed it has worn wearable computers for more than a decade, I expected better.
That's because he's had over 10 years to get accustomed to and accept the limitations of the devices. It was just about making something and hoping other people could make it useful, it was half a solution looking for the other half and then for a problem to actually solve.
Well the biggest pain will be the operating system itself, the existing compatibility issues that prevent devices from upgrading to newer versions of Android are only going to get worse once you start adding modules that require newer versions of the OS that existing modules are not compatible with especially when these modules start coming from different vendors.
Google doesn't support phones they support android. This is fixed in the latest version of android.
So the response is just a big "fuck you" to all those users in the real world that cannot upgrade to a version that has the fix.
Look I see your point but you have to consider that in reality most Android users cannot get the fix so Google saying "it is fixed in the latest version of Android" is not a useful response for its customers. That sort of response is a good reason not to use Android, even the Galaxy Nexus was abandoned just 18 months after release so getting a Nexus device is no guarantee either.
They have newer versions of the OS, without the vulnerability. There is no reason for them to write a patch for outdated software, when there is a free updated version of the software available.
Except for the fact that around 900 million devices cannot use that new software, so Google is just abandoning those users and leaving them vulnerable.
but they're definitely not the ones responsible for lack of updates.
Don't be such an apologist, they own the OS that has the majority share of the smartphone market, they control the licensing for all the Google applications installed on most of those devices and they control the OHA. Google have more than enough power to make the OEMs - at the very least the OHA members - do the right thing. But even Google's own Galaxy Nexus was abandoned just 18 months after it was released.
No, you had to upgrade to sp1, then sp2 then sp3. They don't make patches for vanilla XP.
Sure they do, there were plenty of patches that weren't service packs updates.
And saying that sp1...2...3 are patches to XP then I can say that android 4.4 4.4,1 4.4.2 4.4.3 4.4.4 are all patches as well that fix this 4.3 issue.
That's all well and good except - as is the whole point of this - the vast majority of 4.3 users can't update to 4.4 so the patch needs to be a patch to 4.3, not an update.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not really the point, the main issue is that for all the pontification about how FOSS is more secure because you can see the code the fact is it is ultimately running on closed proprietary hardware, locking all the windows but leaving the doors open makes you a bit more secure but it's only an illusion of security, and that is even worse.
Unfortunately, web sites these days are much slower than the web sites of the old days. They need those faster browsers to get acceptable performance.
If you want the text and static images (or animated gifs) of the old days the performance is much improved.
What is with this technophobic view of progress? Yes websites these days are more interactive and thus require more power, but we have more power and more bandwidth thus we can have higher interactivity and high resolution audio, video and imagery. You really think if we had the same capability in the 90s people just wouldn't use it?
The web browsers these day wouldn't ever finish starting up, if you were to try running them on the hardware that the web browsers of old ran fine on.
Sure they do, even on my old XP system with 1GB RAM Chrome runs fine. And compared to the old horrible IE6 the compatibility with websites is significantly improved.
Bloated: I largely answered this already. HTML browsers were never intended to have full scale virtual machines (javascript).
That doesn't make them "bloated", it's additional functionality that won't even be used if you don't take advantage of them, the definition of what should be included in a web browser has changed, just as it has with pretty much every piece of software. You're nostalgically clinging to what browsers were in the 90s as if that was set in stone.
Want to put video on the 'web'? Fine, link to a video stream/container url pointing to your video back end and the browser will open the system (or the user's favorite) video player.
No, that's stupid, if there is no standard on what formats can be supported and how the streaming content is delivered you end up with a fragmented solution that provides an inconsistent experience.
Hacks to shoehorn video into the browser window are the only reasons flash persists to this day (and why they bolted video on to hyperTEXT markup too).
Nope, you don't need flash for web-based video.
CSS is probably the only somewhat sensible extension to the browser concept, but it also encourages ugly, overdesigned interfaces that sacrifice readability for 'design'
So don't visit sites if you don't like the design.
As far as games and other 'interactivity' go, serious gaming in a browser is a joke rife with performance and interface problems (even with more bolt ons like quakelive) compared with standalone clients
and flashturbation sites are the most useless for those actually looking for useful information.
Flash is not part of the web.
The whole concept of 'mobile' sites is another symptom. There should only be one site with the textual content which the browser formats for the device, leaving any other content to the system (or user installed) software assigned to the URL types.
No, since not all information is presented as just a block of text void of all contextual formatting and presentation it's ridiculous to just produce text and allow the client to do all of the layout and formatting.
Security: On the server side, the whole scripted and 'virtualized' stack is the problem. It was claimed it would be more secure, but all it has done is increased the complexity, increasing the chance for bugs/exploits (eg: php/python etc), and decreased performance.
Citation? Demonstrate where a comparable situation has decreased performance. And no, none of what you have written there backs the claim that the web is less secure. If you opened a site from the 90s on a modern browser it is faster and no less secure.
Speed: No, they are a lot slower.
Wrong, layout engines are much faster nowadays.
There's no reason a browser should need hundreds of MB or more just to render a few pages or take more than half a second to start up.
Memory is cheap, and yes browsers do indeed start up in far less than half a second so I don't know what you're on about there. Even on mobile it is sub-second startup.
Well as the big players have taught us, SaaS cannot be relied upon for any critical work.
You're going off topic, SaaS is not the web.
Features (or even the whole 'application') are here today, gone tomorrow. Same with user data. These providers have made it clear they'll belly up at the slightest government or marketing pressure, so privacy and security are out too. That coupled with metered network connections and the above mentioned architectural abomination leave little to be desired.
Again, not the web, you're just talking about the internet in general.
bloated
Cite exactly how it is "more bloated"...and no, more features is not the same thing.
slow
Wrong, web browsers these days are much faster than the web browsers of the old days.
insecure mess.
The insecure mess was the days of Netscape and IE6.
The 'web' wasn't meant to be 'interactive' nor a turing complete development environment for software as a 'service' control-freaks.
Just because at that time nobody could foresee the capabilities of the future doesn't mean you restrict it to the capabilities of old. Interactive content presentation is a good in many cases. But it's ok, you don't need to use modern browsers or visit interactive sites or develop interactive sites if you don't want to. By all means use the web pages and features from the early 90s instead.
If you want interactive, you don't want html or a 'browser', you want software designed for interactivity.
This is software designed for interactivity, a browser works perfectly fine as an application container, there is nothing inherently wrong with that.
I think it has more to do with them being late in the game
I'd agree with that. I found Windows Phone is actually a really good mobile operating system but the problem is nobody wants a superior operating system, they want their device (computer, tablet or phone) to run programs so they can do tasks - which is why I use an iPhone rather than a Windows Phone. If it can't run the programs they want then it doesn't matter how good the operating system is. It's the same reason desktop Linux has never had more than a couple percent marketshare, unless it is disruptive you will end up with a chicken and egg problem with respect to apps if you enter an established market.
In what way? Internally maybe. From a user perspective on a PC? Absolutely not.
Internally is the point, that's where it is better, so your applications run better because that is what people use their computers for. What programs do you spend so much time using on your computer that work differently on Windows 8 than they do on previous versions?
So basically what they are saying is they are still forcing the Tablet/Smartphone interface on PC's and laptops.
No, you just quoted a line specifically stating that they will show how it will look on smartphones and tablets - obviously in contrast to what it looks like on desktops. I've tried the preview a while back and unless it's changed recently I can't see what tablet/smartphone interface is in there ... although that said I don't use 'metro' apps.
Our apps are not compatible with W8.
What apps are they?
Seriously slashdot has become the techno phobe all change is bad from a former leading innovative site.
It's that there are a bunch of technology hipsters here wanting everything to be vintage because they can't keep up. We all know the HTML standard back then was horribly incapable and that's why Netscape and IE introduced proprietary extensions to augment which made things worse and for interactivity the best we had was Java applets and Flash, nobody who knows what they're talking about actually believes that time was better.
If it is free software, you should have the possibility of altering the program so that it does not ask for money and you are permitted to distribute such versions.
You can, the source is available here. And it is apparently licensed under the GPLv3.
There are always niche corner cases. Come on. 5k 27" monitor? You can't find it cheaper because no one bothers making it. No one cares enough to buy it.
They are new technology, at this point they are pretty useless to most people anyway which is why they are so expensive. Those people doing 4k video editing aren't using an iMac anyway because they are too low-powered, that's what the Mac Pro is for.
So if you're after a 27" monitor that's high enough resolution to edit 4k video at 1:1, and still have space left over for UI, which cheaper option would you suggest?
If you're editing 4k video on OSX you're not using an iMac, you're using a Mac Pro and most of the people that are editing 4k video aren't skimping on the budget.
Your complaints are just about the DE, no reason you couldn't just run Enlightenment instead. Yes Finder is crapola, i use XFolders.
Just because Google didn't need to release a security update to 4.3 between its release and 4.4, doesn't mean they wouldn't have.
There's no reason they still couldn't. And given the amount of devices that are stuck on 4.3 it seems logical to do just that.
Google decided 24mo was enough to support the Galaxy Nexus. The hardware wasn't going to be able to keep up with the 4.4 OS update.
Which is precisely why they should patch the vulnerability in 4.3. I'm not saying the Galaxy Nexus needed to run 4.4, just that it's not ok to excuse patching the flaw in 4.3 by saying it's fixed in 4.4 and too bad if your hardware can't run 4.4.
It's a different approach, with usability in mind.
I'd rather it run a bit slower and be secure than just run the old insecure OS. With iOS 8.1.1 even the 4S is fine and at least it is secure.
Why run a mac at all if your goal is to use Linux? PCs are a ton cheaper and in most cases just as good.
Honestly one of the reasons is the same as why I use an iPhone, which is the warranty support. If you live near an Apple store it's as simple as making an appointment (or just walking in if it's midweek) and getting them to fix the issue, most of the time they can do it on the spot. I've had really good warranty support on HP and Dell with enterprise contracts but not on the consumer side. Same with Samsung phones, if you have a problem it's a matter of sending it off to get it fixed and being without it while they resolve the issue, with iPhone you just walk in to the store and they swap it over for you.
That said I do actually dual boot OSX and Linux on my mac.
The Galaxy Nexus received Jellybean(4.3), which came out 20 months after the phone was released. So no, they didn't abandon it after 18 months.
Well 20 months instead of 18, that was the last update to it.
However, hardware and software for mobile devices have been improving at such a pace that you shouldn't expect more than that right now.
Of course you can! Apple manages just fine with iOS devices and even Microsoft does (their 8.0 was such a significant change that it was incompatible with many handsets but in lieu of that they simultaneously released 7.8 that included many 8.0 features for 7.x users).
They have already taken steps both internally(by decoupling more from the OS and putting it in the playstore)
Doing that just moves more of the supposedly "open" Android into a closed, proprietary blob.
and with the manufacturer's(by putting pressure on them for timely updates). Complaining about update support for devices, after Google started addressing the issue, is just idiotic.
No it isn't, patch 4.3 and use this supposed pressure on the manufacturers to release the update.
Considering the guy who designed it has worn wearable computers for more than a decade, I expected better.
That's because he's had over 10 years to get accustomed to and accept the limitations of the devices. It was just about making something and hoping other people could make it useful, it was half a solution looking for the other half and then for a problem to actually solve.
In theory if the source code is released, well written, and goes into the upstream kernel there shouldn't be a problem.
Yes in theory, but in practice it certainly hasn't worked that way and I don't see any reason it will change.
Well the biggest pain will be the operating system itself, the existing compatibility issues that prevent devices from upgrading to newer versions of Android are only going to get worse once you start adding modules that require newer versions of the OS that existing modules are not compatible with especially when these modules start coming from different vendors.
That only can patch APIs, not anything in the kernel.
Why the hell would you even think Webview would be in the kernel?
Google doesn't support phones they support android. This is fixed in the latest version of android.
So the response is just a big "fuck you" to all those users in the real world that cannot upgrade to a version that has the fix.
Look I see your point but you have to consider that in reality most Android users cannot get the fix so Google saying "it is fixed in the latest version of Android" is not a useful response for its customers. That sort of response is a good reason not to use Android, even the Galaxy Nexus was abandoned just 18 months after release so getting a Nexus device is no guarantee either.
They have newer versions of the OS, without the vulnerability. There is no reason for them to write a patch for outdated software, when there is a free updated version of the software available.
Except for the fact that around 900 million devices cannot use that new software, so Google is just abandoning those users and leaving them vulnerable.
but they're definitely not the ones responsible for lack of updates.
Don't be such an apologist, they own the OS that has the majority share of the smartphone market, they control the licensing for all the Google applications installed on most of those devices and they control the OHA. Google have more than enough power to make the OEMs - at the very least the OHA members - do the right thing. But even Google's own Galaxy Nexus was abandoned just 18 months after it was released.
But the point is you can upgrade to SP2, all XP users could do that. However most Android users cannot upgrade past 4.3, that's the problem.
No, you had to upgrade to sp1, then sp2 then sp3. They don't make patches for vanilla XP.
Sure they do, there were plenty of patches that weren't service packs updates.
And saying that sp1...2...3 are patches to XP then I can say that android 4.4 4.4,1 4.4.2 4.4.3 4.4.4 are all patches as well that fix this 4.3 issue.
That's all well and good except - as is the whole point of this - the vast majority of 4.3 users can't update to 4.4 so the patch needs to be a patch to 4.3, not an update.