Sorry, Netscape 4 was a disaster. I can't even remember how many updates were pushed until it was usable. From a developer point of view, it had so many bugs that makes IE6 pale in comparison. There was a resize bug that mangled the content if the window was resized and developers had to trigger a page reload by javascript. Absolutely-positioned DIVs did not display properly unless they had a border. And this is just some stuff I can remember. Then there were proprietary tags, like LAYER.
Netscape Communicator 4 made me use IE4 and Outlook. That's how bad it was.
It's actually important for me. From Google Analytics and Yahoo Finance to a game I play daily I rely on Flash. I actually like flash. I also like to be able to write my own flash app and to be able to install it on a device.
I seriously considered buying an iPad, but I decided against it due to lack of flash and MKV support (I understand there is a player albeit very buggy).
It's supposed to be boring. This way no one will start nitpicking the text and will concentrate on layout/design.
At that stage of the work, text content doesn't matter. What matters is the font, color, size, placement and so on. You want the client to say "I like the font, maybe make it bigger by 1pt" rather than "you didn't capitalize properly."
Well, that's the whole point. A client may be confused for a few seconds about "gibberish text" and then will ignore it, concentrating on things that actually matter.
If you put in text, they'll start nitpicking on details that are irrelevant at that stage, like "it's 'M.D.', not 'MD'" or "you didn't capitalize properly" and so on.
Always use "Lorem Ipsum" text when you're doing layout work and don't want to be concerned with actual content.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Frameworks are great but they are also overused. JQuery is fantastic if you're doing a big site that you want to feel like an app, but many people load JQuery just to do an image fade or animation - stuff that you can easily code yourself.
To add insult to injury, sites made with Joomla, WP, Drupal, etc. often rely on plugins, which use their own libraries. The end result is a site that loads JQuery, Mootools and Scriptaculous just to do some trivial effects that would be achieved just as well with document.getElementById(), setTimeout() and the element.style property.
Canvas is already abused. Some/Many sites use it for font rendering - see Cufon and similar projects. Cufon was born as an alternative to sIFR, the flash method of doing the same thing. Of course, the sane way of doing this is by embedding fonts, but that way has its own issues (licensing, quality of fonts, etc.)
Windows 7 has autorun off by default. It shows a popup when a media is detected with some actions depending on the situation (burn cd, play video, etc.) but nothing gets executed automatically.
It's because it's not "real" beer, that's why it tastes so atrocious. Budweiser is not beer, it's a soda drink with beer flavor and some alcohol, so you shouldn't be that amazed that it tastes the same everywhere - you never wondered how Coca Cola pulls this off...
Americans, when you come to Europe, do yourself a favor and try some real beer (no, imported stuff doesn't count, it still sucks)
Bloated is not the right word. It's more that it looks like an overweight person running. It's not a pleasant sight. Firefox is now like a mall cop trying to compete with an athlete. You can point out that it provides security, or that it has lots of handy stuff attached to his belt, but it doesn't change anything.
To address your questions: - startup time is definitely the worst, compared to any other browser. Years ago people were dismissing any comparison to IE by saying that it's unfair since IE uses libraries already loaded. Well, Opera, Safari and Chrome also beat the crap out of it. To me, 5 to 15 seconds loading time is unacceptable. - UI responsiveness - it has nothing to do with smooth scrolling, it has with the interface freezing up when I'm typing an URL. XUL may look good on paper but not in the real world. - page load/rendering time is OK. - Look and feel is OK too, it never gave me the feeling of bloat. - memory usage - things seem to have improved lately and Flash doesn't crash anymore (by the way, I only experienced Flash crashing in Firefox, never in other browsers). - Javascript performance - more than enough.
The feeling of bloat is mostly related to the application responsiveness. Programmers may dismiss that, but UI is everything to user satisfaction. It's the lesson Apple learned long ago and that's why then can afford to do their stunts.
So, what's your point? If the contraption is working well, i.e. it does what's supposed to be doing while not killing the battery, then it really doesn't matter if it was written in Cobol.NET or you wrote the machine code directly because you dreamed of it last night.
Apps should be judged by their actual performance, not the tools used to generate them. We, as developers, of all people, should be able to comprehend that. Does anyone care if your app was compiled using gcc or Intel's compiler? That's C or Python or Delphi?
"Noticeable" is an understatement. My primary machine is a P8600 dual-core laptop with 2Gb of RAM and firefox + 4 plugins take 5 times more to load than Chrome + 4 plugins. My workhorse is a quad-core Q8400 with 8 Gb RAM. There, Chrome loads instantly, whereas Firefox takes 2 seconds even with no plugins.
I'm using Firefox for development only and just because of Firebug (I know there's a Firebug lite for Chrome but it's not even close, like its Developer Tools).
I can't speak for everyone who uses PS and/or Gimp, just for myself.
The real news was not the ability to do this kind of interpolation, but the fact that's built-in and integrated in the workflow. For Photoshop, Alien Skin Image Doctor has been available for years (2002 maybe). What matters for me is that I no longer need to use a plugin and I can use this smart fills in several scenarios, including as a brush to remove fine things like wires.
The same goes with another new feature in PS CS5, the new selection tools. There were at least 2 or 3 plugins (like Fluid Mask) that could do tricky selections, but now it's built-in. Same with the new lens corrections, no need for PTLens anymore, I can even profile my own lenses using the new lens profile creator from the labs.
I don't want to sound like I'm defending Adobe here, I used to hate them. For 10 years I've been using Corel Photo-Paint (from v3 to X3) plus a few others including The Gimp. In the end I realized that despite its shortcomings, PS really is the best tool for the job. When you're under pressure to deliver, small differences add up.
There's one thing to say "this is unsupported, run at your own risk" and something else entirely to actively deny any such installation. Many people use modified versions of OSX on a variety of configurations and even on VmWare.
you can always just pack up and walk across the border whenever you want
Sweet innocence... in no country under a dictatorship can you just pack up and leave. I should know, I spent my whole childhood in such regime and I had a neighbor who tried to cross the border and failed. They made a lesson of him.
Flash 10.1 uses hardware acceleration for video, so presumably battery life will be longer. Also, on Adroid, Flash delivers better performance than HTML5/Canvas (http://visualrinse.com/2010/04/15/benchmarking-html5-vs-flash-player-10-1-on-mobile-devices/).
Regarding "some of its features make little sense on a multi-touch screen" -- nothing springs to mind, care to elaborate? It does have rollover support but that doesn't mean that you have to use it. It has multi-touch support too...
As for security... I can only recall 3 major flaws in the last 5 years; maybe there are more but it's still not more insecure than Java or IE.
OS X has been working for quite some time on VMWare with a Windows/Linux host. It's been even hacked to work with AMD processors on the host, so from a technical standpoint, nothing new.
Frankly, I'm getting really tired of all the artificial limitations that Jobs is placing left and right for developers and consumers alike. A bit offtopic, but yesterday I realized that while quicktime pro can export to MP4 as well as MOV, if you want to use H264, you need to use the MOV container. Why? When Microsoft did that with WMA vs MP3, people complained. Loudly.
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Sorry, Netscape 4 was a disaster. I can't even remember how many updates were pushed until it was usable.
From a developer point of view, it had so many bugs that makes IE6 pale in comparison. There was a resize bug that mangled the content if the window was resized and developers had to trigger a page reload by javascript. Absolutely-positioned DIVs did not display properly unless they had a border. And this is just some stuff I can remember. Then there were proprietary tags, like LAYER.
Netscape Communicator 4 made me use IE4 and Outlook. That's how bad it was.
It's actually important for me.
From Google Analytics and Yahoo Finance to a game I play daily I rely on Flash. I actually like flash. I also like to be able to write my own flash app and to be able to install it on a device.
I seriously considered buying an iPad, but I decided against it due to lack of flash and MKV support (I understand there is a player albeit very buggy).
The first time I saw the effect was in 2001, on HP website, a section dedicated to Shrek.
The Internet says Prince is over.
Who's right?
It's supposed to be boring. This way no one will start nitpicking the text and will concentrate on layout/design.
At that stage of the work, text content doesn't matter. What matters is the font, color, size, placement and so on. You want the client to say "I like the font, maybe make it bigger by 1pt" rather than "you didn't capitalize properly."
Well, that's the whole point.
A client may be confused for a few seconds about "gibberish text" and then will ignore it, concentrating on things that actually matter.
If you put in text, they'll start nitpicking on details that are irrelevant at that stage, like "it's 'M.D.', not 'MD'" or "you didn't capitalize properly" and so on.
Always use "Lorem Ipsum" text when you're doing layout work and don't want to be concerned with actual content.
Frameworks are great but they are also overused.
JQuery is fantastic if you're doing a big site that you want to feel like an app, but many people load JQuery just to do an image fade or animation - stuff that you can easily code yourself.
To add insult to injury, sites made with Joomla, WP, Drupal, etc. often rely on plugins, which use their own libraries. The end result is a site that loads JQuery, Mootools and Scriptaculous just to do some trivial effects that would be achieved just as well with document.getElementById(), setTimeout() and the element.style property.
Canvas is already abused. Some/Many sites use it for font rendering - see Cufon and similar projects. Cufon was born as an alternative to sIFR, the flash method of doing the same thing.
Of course, the sane way of doing this is by embedding fonts, but that way has its own issues (licensing, quality of fonts, etc.)
Windows 7 has autorun off by default.
It shows a popup when a media is detected with some actions depending on the situation (burn cd, play video, etc.) but nothing gets executed automatically.
not weeks before -- it was released on a Friday, with CS5 launch on next Monday.
It's because it's not "real" beer, that's why it tastes so atrocious.
Budweiser is not beer, it's a soda drink with beer flavor and some alcohol, so you shouldn't be that amazed that it tastes the same everywhere - you never wondered how Coca Cola pulls this off...
Americans, when you come to Europe, do yourself a favor and try some real beer (no, imported stuff doesn't count, it still sucks)
UAC annoying? I can't really believe that.
Commonly, you get the UAC dialog when you install a new program - exactly the way it should be.
Some actions require elevated privileges (like seeing all processes in task manager) but that's it. I hardly see the UAC in Windows 7.
Bloated is not the right word. It's more that it looks like an overweight person running. It's not a pleasant sight.
Firefox is now like a mall cop trying to compete with an athlete. You can point out that it provides security, or that it has lots of handy stuff attached to his belt, but it doesn't change anything.
To address your questions:
- startup time is definitely the worst, compared to any other browser. Years ago people were dismissing any comparison to IE by saying that it's unfair since IE uses libraries already loaded. Well, Opera, Safari and Chrome also beat the crap out of it. To me, 5 to 15 seconds loading time is unacceptable.
- UI responsiveness - it has nothing to do with smooth scrolling, it has with the interface freezing up when I'm typing an URL. XUL may look good on paper but not in the real world.
- page load/rendering time is OK.
- Look and feel is OK too, it never gave me the feeling of bloat.
- memory usage - things seem to have improved lately and Flash doesn't crash anymore (by the way, I only experienced Flash crashing in Firefox, never in other browsers).
- Javascript performance - more than enough.
The feeling of bloat is mostly related to the application responsiveness. Programmers may dismiss that, but UI is everything to user satisfaction. It's the lesson Apple learned long ago and that's why then can afford to do their stunts.
Freshly installed laptop, Windows 7 x64, Core Duo P8600, 2 GB RAM.
Chrome with 6 plugins loads instantly (1sec).
Firefox with 1 plugin (Firebug) loads in 6 seconds.
After months of use, Firefox gets to a point when if freezes for 1-2 seconds when you're typing a URL and other weird things like that.
I only use Firefox for development, because Chrome Developer Tools are no match for Firebug, but for daily browsing I definitely prefer Chrome.
So, what's your point? If the contraption is working well, i.e. it does what's supposed to be doing while not killing the battery, then it really doesn't matter if it was written in Cobol.NET or you wrote the machine code directly because you dreamed of it last night.
Apps should be judged by their actual performance, not the tools used to generate them. We, as developers, of all people, should be able to comprehend that. Does anyone care if your app was compiled using gcc or Intel's compiler? That's C or Python or Delphi?
"Noticeable" is an understatement. My primary machine is a P8600 dual-core laptop with 2Gb of RAM and firefox + 4 plugins take 5 times more to load than Chrome + 4 plugins. My workhorse is a quad-core Q8400 with 8 Gb RAM. There, Chrome loads instantly, whereas Firefox takes 2 seconds even with no plugins.
I'm using Firefox for development only and just because of Firebug (I know there's a Firebug lite for Chrome but it's not even close, like its Developer Tools).
I can't speak for everyone who uses PS and/or Gimp, just for myself.
The real news was not the ability to do this kind of interpolation, but the fact that's built-in and integrated in the workflow.
For Photoshop, Alien Skin Image Doctor has been available for years (2002 maybe). What matters for me is that I no longer need to use a plugin and I can use this smart fills in several scenarios, including as a brush to remove fine things like wires.
The same goes with another new feature in PS CS5, the new selection tools. There were at least 2 or 3 plugins (like Fluid Mask) that could do tricky selections, but now it's built-in.
Same with the new lens corrections, no need for PTLens anymore, I can even profile my own lenses using the new lens profile creator from the labs.
I don't want to sound like I'm defending Adobe here, I used to hate them. For 10 years I've been using Corel Photo-Paint (from v3 to X3) plus a few others including The Gimp. In the end I realized that despite its shortcomings, PS really is the best tool for the job. When you're under pressure to deliver, small differences add up.
There's one thing to say "this is unsupported, run at your own risk" and something else entirely to actively deny any such installation. Many people use modified versions of OSX on a variety of configurations and even on VmWare.
Sweet innocence... in no country under a dictatorship can you just pack up and leave. I should know, I spent my whole childhood in such regime and I had a neighbor who tried to cross the border and failed. They made a lesson of him.
Flash 10.1 uses hardware acceleration for video, so presumably battery life will be longer.
Also, on Adroid, Flash delivers better performance than HTML5/Canvas (http://visualrinse.com/2010/04/15/benchmarking-html5-vs-flash-player-10-1-on-mobile-devices/).
Regarding "some of its features make little sense on a multi-touch screen" -- nothing springs to mind, care to elaborate? It does have rollover support but that doesn't mean that you have to use it. It has multi-touch support too...
As for security... I can only recall 3 major flaws in the last 5 years; maybe there are more but it's still not more insecure than Java or IE.
Anectodal, I know, but my LG TV supports MKV. Basically I just hook up a 1 TB hard drive via USB to the TV and I can play all my favorite stuff.
I tried the Windows version... (so yeah, it's my fault) :)
Doesn't work for me in Windows... sorry, I really didn't mean to sound trollish.
OS X has been working for quite some time on VMWare with a Windows/Linux host. It's been even hacked to work with AMD processors on the host, so from a technical standpoint, nothing new.
Frankly, I'm getting really tired of all the artificial limitations that Jobs is placing left and right for developers and consumers alike. A bit offtopic, but yesterday I realized that while quicktime pro can export to MP4 as well as MOV, if you want to use H264, you need to use the MOV container. Why? When Microsoft did that with WMA vs MP3, people complained. Loudly.