Still, there's plenty of room for the/. editors to pad the copy with a brief explanation of whatever the thing is - like how 2/3 of any article about North Korea or the Iranian nuclear program is boilerplate that people who follow the subject have read dozens of times already. The people who know what the thing is skip over those parts and newbies don't have to go somewhere else for an explanation.
Indeed. I'm too busy struggling to stay almost not quite embarrassingly behind on front-end buzzword compliance, and now this? I'd have no idea what it was if I wasn't friends with a devops specialist. Ditto Chef, Hadoop, and a few other extremely specific buzzword compliant "concepts" tech writers whisper about in worshipful tones.
I kinda miss the era in which a general computing proficiency was possible. Specialization used to be for insects.
I don't know how a controller reports itself to the system, but it probably makes sense to take a balanced approach - if it's possible to sniff an x-box controller then present the appropriate menus; if it's unrecognized then the oldschool List Of Options makes sense - while you can account for a good number of popular variables full coverage just doesn't seem to be economically feasible, especially for small developers.
Keyboards present their own problems - the French, for example, don't use WASD - the keys in those positions are ZQSD (see here). I use a Mac keyboard on my PC - it was easier to just bring it along than to retrain muscle memory for a windows layout. I haven't had issues with games since screenshot functionality was added to Steam (f12). My control/alt/"windows" keys are laid out differently... and I have F13-F15 and no "print screen" key. I'm an edge case on Windows but that's a standard Mac layout, and a variable to account for with multi-system ports.
Oddly, back when I played EVE Online I was able to map drone controls to F13-F15 on the PC... but the Mac port, with a Mac keyboard, didn't see the F13-F15 keys. I haven't tried to map those keys on other games, as the majority of my game time these days is keyboard and mouse with the left hand in the general area of WASD.
The advantage of the keyboard is that the basic shape doesn't change much - the sizing and spacing of the meta keys between Windows an Mac keyboards and localization differences aside it makes sense (to me, anyway) to separate the keycaps from the keys themselves. Localization and the occasional rogue Dvorak layout seem to be the biggest issues. There are a few weird split "hacker" or "ergonomic" designs but I haven't seen one in the wild since around 2003.
If you went with a keyboard graphic for a controls menu I think any design would be acceptable so long as it fits with the rest of the game's UX - I wouldn't expect a representation of a factory-fresh bondi blue Apple USB keyboard in Metro 2033, though a banged-up IBM Model M missing a few keys would fit right in (and could be used to, say... indicate that the Windows key is unmappable - just an empty socket). I like Half-Life 2's implementation - Valve uses a custom font for UI icon display (all the guns/weapons are font characters) - I don't know if their keyboard representation is done the same way but it makes sense that it would be. There are a few basic shapes/sizes for keys and a full board could be assembled with a small number of glyphs/objects.
I think that in a roundabout way we've summarized why consoles are attractive for developers - they're fixed, comparatively slow-moving targets.:)
Not hardcoding names/functions is a an excellent idea; I'd totally accept seeing "Press Start" on the title screen on a console or if I had a controller with a "start" button plugged into the machine.
Re: keys - this is a UX issue with a number of different approaches. The keybinding menu on PC games is typically a lengthy list of $function [ $keybind ] - FORWARD [ W ], CROUCH [ SHIFT ], USE [ E ], etc. Some games present the keybind menu as a list, some break it into sections ("exploration," "combat," "utility," etc). I have yet to see one that shows the keyboard as a graphic in the way I've seen some games show the controller, as a graphic or technical drawing with clearly defined labels. The experience of displaying and remapping keybinds has plenty of room for improvement - it doesn't seem to get much love in large part because many people don't change the defaults, or when they do it's once or twice and that's it... or they use a controller. The existing editing interface is similar across most games I've seen allow for it; as it stands now it's low-hanging fruit for UX development.
WASD is so omnipresent that it's considered a solved problem; knowledge of what those keys do is assumed to the point where they aren't even covered in tutorials anymore. Half-Life 2 did a good job of relaying controls to the player in-game - while a game that did this sort of intuitive and timely reveal with its menu system might not win any awards for it, the work would not go unnoticed.
Re: Big Picture - I'm not in the living room demographic; I don't know how many people have a TV-sized display hanging off their PC. I do know that text two feet away and text eight feet away need to be different sizes to appear the same relative size to the human eye, regardless of the number of pixels on the screen. Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas are the best examples I can think of offhand that account for this, albeit after market. Darnified UI is a mod that, among other things, changes the font size, making it possible to fit a lot more text on screen without scrolling. I think SkyUI does the same thing, though I have "before" and "after" experience with F3/FNV and have never played Skyrim without mods.
Basically, it boils down to polish - some games feel right, some don't. There's no need to go totally overboard in one way or the other; I think game developers could stand to make fewer assumptions about their target demographic (assuming controller, assuming Big Picture, etc - if you're building a PC port assume there's at least a few people out there who use the things as something other than glorified skinner boxes).
In Bethesda's case the policy seems to be "let the community figure it out." Skyrim has SkyUI, which really takes advantage of the real estate (and cursor). Just allowing for mods and having well-documented tools is a step in the right direction - the people that are bent out of shape enough to do something about it will, and the people that don't mind aren't going to be looking for UI mods anyway.
JC2 handles fine on the PC - the fact that on first run it loaded to a "Press Start" screen felt like sloppy QA more than anything else. Apparently the game plays fine with a controller - why the game expects one instead of checking to see if one is plugged in is beyond me. Psychonauts actually has x-box controls in the game menu screens - it would be cool if those weren't there by default and popped up when you're playing with a controller but as-is the x-box menu screens really drive home the fact that the PC version is a port.
Borderlands is fine once you get used to it - I came in from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series so the fact that the BL games are very arcade-like to the point that an the "INSERT COIN" message on death would not be out of place was pretty jarring. Like the Metro series it doesn't need a particularly deep or complex UI.
I wouldn't mind some developer out there remembering that ten percent of the population is left-handed and making handedness a character option, but that's ultimately up to the animators and not a console -> PC issue. Ever watch a lefty use a bolt-action rifle?
As to interface improvements, in the general sense... allowing for key remapping is a pretty standard feature - to the point where having hard-mapped keys that can't be remapped can be pretty jarring (F1/F2/F3 in Fallout 3 / New Vegas, for example). Allowing for customization without clearly explaining why the keys are where they are by default can cause difficulties as well - Dishonored allows for remapping but the default layout is fairly organic once you're used to it.... muck around with one or two keybindings and suddenly RSI is through the roof... with no menu indicator of what the old keybind was without resetting everything to default.
The real console -> PC issue seems to be font sizing and use of real estate more than anything else - PC users are typically sitting closer to smaller higher resolution screens whereas console users are typically sitting further back, looking at larger, lower resolution displays.
I bought my PC to build and render 3d environments and assets for my webcomic. The fact that Steam was the second thing I installed and the Orange Box was the first PC game pack I bought is gravy - if the hardware can't be used for productivity I have no use for it and I'm not wasting money on it. Entertainment is a secondary function.
That said, the fact that Borderlands, Skyrim, Just Cause 2 etc. are all running barely-localized console interfaces makes me feel like the PC is a second-class citizen, shoved to the back of the line in favor of consumer hardware that can't do anything else.:-/
Bing is also better on old hardware and marginal connections... even in Chrome. I have a 2009 Shuttle box and a megabit DSL link and Bing just kind of appears. Faster hardware improves things a bit but Google services just seem to assume infinite bandwidth - the lack of throttling on Google Drive makes it useless and OH GLOB I'M RANTING.
tldr; Bing is faster than Google - and loads immediately on those occasions when Chrome's address bar is horking like it has a hairball. It's not as drastic as the difference between Amazon (just loads) and Newegg (takes forever) but it's there.
I'm fine with twitter being a self-contained thing. "News" "reports" that consist of screen after screen of embedded tweets with "analysis" along the lines of "he said.... she said.... OH NO THEY DIDN'T!" is a waste of clock cycles, electricity, photons, and calories.
Humor is pretty subjective - I set "funny" at a -1 and found that it improved the quality of the comments I was reading enormously. Funny posts are still in the mix, just not at the default intensity. This was a lot more of an issue a decade or so back, when the Slashdot Effect was a real threat to websites and the site was practically my home page. These days the sort of shoot-from-the-hip snark that swamped the comments section "above the fold" has migrated over to Reddit, where, depending on the subreddit and subject, I may have to hit the Page Down key up to half a dozen times to get past the jokes, one-liners, and associated snark - all upvoted far past the point where my downvote would have any meaningful impact. While that's where the fun is for a lot of people, I really like being able to de-prioritize that sort of commentary or toss it out entirely - the fact that Slashdot allows for a degree of user-controlled comment display means we're not as subject to groupthink... and I'm far more likely to use my modpoints to upvote deserving comments than I am to spitefully downvote "funny" posts that don't mesh with my sense of humor.
Slashdot's comments are upvoted/downvoted in a more granular fashion than any other site out there and comment display can be skewed by user preferences - I penalize "funny" posts and really wish I could do the same on Reddit. The best the rest of the internet has managed to implement is a Nero-style upvote/downvote system, which puts the same weight on puns and one-liners as it does on trolls and insightful responses.
Commenting in general is ripe for disruption - if Disqus upgraded from upvote/downvote to something along the lines of the system Slashdot has had since the 90s it would change the Comments section overnight.
Part of my old job (in a museum Exhibits department) was upgrading interactives and videos from the 80s and 90s to modern equipment - that included "transferring" laser discs the old fashioned way - plugging one of the still-working players from the floor directly into the capture hardware.
The thing is, I was transferring LD to DVD, which is actually a step *down* in quality. Kind of but not quite like how VHS is a step down from Beta (which I also dealt with).
The great thing about standards is there's so many of them!
Anyone who's used Apple software for more than five years has been burned by forced format obsolescence - ClarisWorks, AppleWorks, old QuickTime codecs, the PICT format, SimpleText, Font Suitcases, the list goes on. And on. And that's just *one* platform and set of formats off the top of my head. I lose data to software "upgrades" so often that it's the single biggest determining factor in my upgrade cycle and a huge determining factor in the uptake and use of new software. We aren't heading for a digital dark age - we're in one already.
This is where Comcast building wifi hotspots into their cable modems becomes pretty damned insidious - how long until devices like this are "pre-authorized" to automatically connect to the mothership through any available wireless connection?
Imagine if a Samsung TV automatically phoned home through your neighbor's Comcast wifi/modem link not because you enabled it but because Samsung had paid Comcast to allow its devices through. And of course this behavior is on by default and block it, thanks to some timely lobbying, is now a violation of the first amendment (or something equally deranged-but-feasible vis-a-vis corporate personhood).
Over the years I've learned that I can rely on two factors when it comes to games - word of mouth and development staff. Somebody who knows me and knows what I like probably isn't going to recommend something outside of that sphere (or if they do it's due to incomplete information, for a laugh, or for reasons unrelated to gameplay), and if I like a game or series of games it's usually a good indicator that I'm going to like whatever the people that made that game work on next - usually but not always.
I agree on "multiple reviewers per game" - different reviewers have different priorities and play styles and that can subtly skew impressions. While I find Rock Paper Shotgun reporting on FPS games to be solid and reliable, my impression of their review of Just Cause 2 - which I read after playing the game - was "Did we play the same game? o_O"
I've found that high ratings tend to be simple and very echo-chamber - people that praise a game tend to like it for similar reasons. The real variety is in the negative reviews, which is where any issues with gameplay or story (or both) tend to surface. If I'm interested in a game enough to want more than the upvoted reviews on the Steam Store (which tend to give a fairly concise answer to the question "Why would I buy this?") I've found that one or two positive Metacritic user reviews and then three or four negative reviews generally give me a good idea of what to expect.
Metacritic is also a great - and in some cases the only - way to get *negative* reviews. Review sites are astroturf at best and completely useless at worst. I could care less how awesome a paid reviewer thinks a product is; I want to hear about the experience somebody who paid money for a thing has had with it - if they think they got their money's worth, what pisses them off about it, etc.
Then there's the fact that with games the product is largely subjective - for example Metacritic gives Dishonored a 91 (see here) and Metro: Last Light a an 82 (see here). I've played both and personally I'd rate Last Light an A+ and Dishonored a solid D, maybe a C. Both games curve pretty similarly on graphics and gameplay - Dishonored *looks* like an Unreal engine game and the reward curve on stealth mechanics feels capricious at best - it's possible to finish a level without tripping any alarms but you still "fail" (accumulate chaos) if the guy you knocked out and stuffed in a dumpster at the beginning of the level is eaten by rats - and the end-of-mission screen is the only indicator this has happened. Last Light, on the other hand, is a similar-length game that rewards stealth but also requires a satisfying amount of run-and-gun, and is 100% pure lighting porn. It's gorgeous, immersive, and you aren't capriciously penalized for non-lethal kills - stealth mechanics are strong, realistic, and don't penalize the player with unforeseeable consequences.
I bought Dishonored based on the studio, price (sale), and alleged stealth gameplay. I didn't care for the steampunk aesthetics and found the lore intrusive - books all over the place easily triggered but less easily backed out of. The story didn't do anything for me and the art direction so strongly evoked Half-Life 2 that it felt like City 17 had been ported to the Unreal engine. I bought Last Light based on the studio and prior work of the development team, price (sale), and full knowledge of what to expect for gameplay. The story was engrossing and the art direction was film grade and incredibly immersive. Reviews contributed to neither purchase and review scores in no way reflect my experience with either game... and these are just two examples that I've played recently.
Re-read what I wrote. I didn't say Everything works in Chrome, I said Chrome Just Works on everything I run it on.
I don't care what features a browser has; if it's using large bold fonts and fear-mongering fraidy-text to try to goad me into upgrading my operating system so I can upgrade my browser, I'm going to switch to a browser that runs on the OS that I'm using and doesn't cry about it.
It turns out I don't miss greasemonkey all that much - I just shut off javascript on any website that feels like it's taking forever to do nothing. It's a steadily growing list but I'm not actually missing anything. Oh, I can't read the article because your content farm grabs it from somewhere else via javascript? Oh, I can't read the comments? Oh, I can't load your video ads or your video "content"? Man, you really don't want me around.
The fact that the internet has gotten progressively less useful over the last decade isn't a problem that Chrome or Firefox can solve. It's their job to render the garbage... and it's the job of the hosts file to keep it from getting to the browser in the first place.
In the case of Chrome at least, the "three horizontal bars" isn't just the way to Settings, it's where everything is if you're using Chrome on Windows. Settings is just one of the items in the list that pops up - bookmarks, tabs, history, etc. are all in there and boiling all of the menus down to a single item frees up a considerable amount of real estate, at least on Windows (on the Mac the menu at the top of the screen is retained and has most of the information and options of the dropdown, though that's Chrome behaving like software running on OS X should).
Otherwise, agreed - seems like it's easier to change out the hubcaps on the newly reinvented wheel than it is to investigate other ways of crossing the ocean.
I thought the Yahoo move was pretty hilarious, if only in the fact that Yahoo reported an uptick in people actually using Yahoo for search at some point shortly after.
I also find it hilarious that Bing loads faster and returns results a lot faster than Google does on Chrome, though that's not strictly relevant to the conversation.* One thing I can say for Firefox - whatever they try to default the search box to the danged thing has never sat there spluttering and not bothering to send/load content the way the Chrome combined address/search bar occasionally does.
* Point of fact if bandwidth and hardware are an issue literally every non-google web service I've used is faster than the google equivalent.
I'm glad Pale Moon exists. Although windows isn't my primary platform I'll download it and give it a test drive. I've never had any issues with Gecko; it's been the progressively heavier stack of everything sitting on top of it that made firefox unpalatable... then Chrome integrated so well with my general web usage across several machines that I doubt I'll be heading to anything else any time soon. That doesn't mean I don't need to occasionally look at websites in other browsers, though.
Agreed, Thunderbird does not need "improved," at least in the sense that the article summary seems to be implying. It's been a long time since I've used it and when I did my *only* complaint was execution speed, and that may well have been due to running it on ancient hardware.
Oh jeeze the last thing Thunderbird needs is to be raked over the trendy UX coals the way Firefox has. If Chrome's market share has come at the expense of Firefox it may be in part because many people who jumped ship - myself included - found that each Firefox release was becoming successively more and more "chrome-like" without offering any of the benefits that make Chrome a compelling offering. In my case it was speed and performance on a 2006 Mac Mini running 10.6 - firefox was bloated slug that constantly screamed at me to upgrade my OS; Chrome ran as fast as it does on modern hardware and never complained about anything. Chrome's UI and core functionality haven't changed much since I started using it, either - I grew to dread Firefox updates as you never knew if it was going to pull an iTunes and reboot with some new horrible "feature" that didn't have extensions to revert the behavior back to prior functionality - Firefox deciding it was going to handle PDFs inline, and that functionality being far beyond slow and a real pain in the ass to disable - was the last straw for me. When I left the browser half of my extensions and customizations were to undo things the devs had "improved" over the years - the other half were ad and flash blocking extensions, which Chrome does almost as well.
TLDR; Firefox was awesome when it was Mozilla Without The Cruft. Then it started to cruft up and bloat up and horrible terrible very bad things started to happen to the UI and now it's Just Another Browser. Which is fine, really. Thunderbird does not need to be "innovated" in the same way - Firefox needs to be replaced by Firefox Without The Cruft the way Firefox replaced Mozilla. Maybe stick to the UNIX idea of "do one thing well" this time around, instead of "do one thing reasonably well and an increasingly lengthy list of perpedicular things in a totally half-assed fashion."
I used Netscape Navigator until IE5 (Mac) came along, then I used Mozilla until Safari popped up, then Firefox until it drove me to Chrome. Chrome Just Works on everything I run it on and has never nagged at me to update or screamed at me to upgrade my operating system Because Reasons. It has yet to roll out a game-changing UI element that I hate, and it isn't slowly modeling its overall UX to resemble the competition. I hope the Mozilla foundation keeps going because we need choice, now more than ever - and maybe one day they'll be my choice again.
No amount of history education is going to stop the herd mentality from handing your privacy over to some domestic intelligence type claiming it's Required to combat terrorism or pedophelia or both. Don't want to hand over your rights? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
(watching this happen in the UK is predictably hilarious)
Slashdot Mirror
That's a fair point.
Still, there's plenty of room for the /. editors to pad the copy with a brief explanation of whatever the thing is - like how 2/3 of any article about North Korea or the Iranian nuclear program is boilerplate that people who follow the subject have read dozens of times already. The people who know what the thing is skip over those parts and newbies don't have to go somewhere else for an explanation.
Indeed. I'm too busy struggling to stay almost not quite embarrassingly behind on front-end buzzword compliance, and now this? I'd have no idea what it was if I wasn't friends with a devops specialist. Ditto Chef, Hadoop, and a few other extremely specific buzzword compliant "concepts" tech writers whisper about in worshipful tones.
I kinda miss the era in which a general computing proficiency was possible. Specialization used to be for insects.
I don't know how a controller reports itself to the system, but it probably makes sense to take a balanced approach - if it's possible to sniff an x-box controller then present the appropriate menus; if it's unrecognized then the oldschool List Of Options makes sense - while you can account for a good number of popular variables full coverage just doesn't seem to be economically feasible, especially for small developers.
Keyboards present their own problems - the French, for example, don't use WASD - the keys in those positions are ZQSD (see here). I use a Mac keyboard on my PC - it was easier to just bring it along than to retrain muscle memory for a windows layout. I haven't had issues with games since screenshot functionality was added to Steam (f12). My control/alt/"windows" keys are laid out differently... and I have F13-F15 and no "print screen" key. I'm an edge case on Windows but that's a standard Mac layout, and a variable to account for with multi-system ports.
Oddly, back when I played EVE Online I was able to map drone controls to F13-F15 on the PC... but the Mac port, with a Mac keyboard, didn't see the F13-F15 keys. I haven't tried to map those keys on other games, as the majority of my game time these days is keyboard and mouse with the left hand in the general area of WASD.
The advantage of the keyboard is that the basic shape doesn't change much - the sizing and spacing of the meta keys between Windows an Mac keyboards and localization differences aside it makes sense (to me, anyway) to separate the keycaps from the keys themselves. Localization and the occasional rogue Dvorak layout seem to be the biggest issues. There are a few weird split "hacker" or "ergonomic" designs but I haven't seen one in the wild since around 2003.
If you went with a keyboard graphic for a controls menu I think any design would be acceptable so long as it fits with the rest of the game's UX - I wouldn't expect a representation of a factory-fresh bondi blue Apple USB keyboard in Metro 2033, though a banged-up IBM Model M missing a few keys would fit right in (and could be used to, say... indicate that the Windows key is unmappable - just an empty socket). I like Half-Life 2's implementation - Valve uses a custom font for UI icon display (all the guns/weapons are font characters) - I don't know if their keyboard representation is done the same way but it makes sense that it would be. There are a few basic shapes/sizes for keys and a full board could be assembled with a small number of glyphs/objects.
I think that in a roundabout way we've summarized why consoles are attractive for developers - they're fixed, comparatively slow-moving targets. :)
Not hardcoding names/functions is a an excellent idea; I'd totally accept seeing "Press Start" on the title screen on a console or if I had a controller with a "start" button plugged into the machine.
Re: keys - this is a UX issue with a number of different approaches. The keybinding menu on PC games is typically a lengthy list of $function [ $keybind ] - FORWARD [ W ], CROUCH [ SHIFT ], USE [ E ], etc. Some games present the keybind menu as a list, some break it into sections ("exploration," "combat," "utility," etc). I have yet to see one that shows the keyboard as a graphic in the way I've seen some games show the controller, as a graphic or technical drawing with clearly defined labels. The experience of displaying and remapping keybinds has plenty of room for improvement - it doesn't seem to get much love in large part because many people don't change the defaults, or when they do it's once or twice and that's it... or they use a controller. The existing editing interface is similar across most games I've seen allow for it; as it stands now it's low-hanging fruit for UX development.
WASD is so omnipresent that it's considered a solved problem; knowledge of what those keys do is assumed to the point where they aren't even covered in tutorials anymore. Half-Life 2 did a good job of relaying controls to the player in-game - while a game that did this sort of intuitive and timely reveal with its menu system might not win any awards for it, the work would not go unnoticed.
Re: Big Picture - I'm not in the living room demographic; I don't know how many people have a TV-sized display hanging off their PC. I do know that text two feet away and text eight feet away need to be different sizes to appear the same relative size to the human eye, regardless of the number of pixels on the screen. Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas are the best examples I can think of offhand that account for this, albeit after market. Darnified UI is a mod that, among other things, changes the font size, making it possible to fit a lot more text on screen without scrolling. I think SkyUI does the same thing, though I have "before" and "after" experience with F3/FNV and have never played Skyrim without mods.
Basically, it boils down to polish - some games feel right, some don't. There's no need to go totally overboard in one way or the other; I think game developers could stand to make fewer assumptions about their target demographic (assuming controller, assuming Big Picture, etc - if you're building a PC port assume there's at least a few people out there who use the things as something other than glorified skinner boxes).
In Bethesda's case the policy seems to be "let the community figure it out." Skyrim has SkyUI, which really takes advantage of the real estate (and cursor). Just allowing for mods and having well-documented tools is a step in the right direction - the people that are bent out of shape enough to do something about it will, and the people that don't mind aren't going to be looking for UI mods anyway.
JC2 handles fine on the PC - the fact that on first run it loaded to a "Press Start" screen felt like sloppy QA more than anything else. Apparently the game plays fine with a controller - why the game expects one instead of checking to see if one is plugged in is beyond me. Psychonauts actually has x-box controls in the game menu screens - it would be cool if those weren't there by default and popped up when you're playing with a controller but as-is the x-box menu screens really drive home the fact that the PC version is a port.
Borderlands is fine once you get used to it - I came in from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series so the fact that the BL games are very arcade-like to the point that an the "INSERT COIN" message on death would not be out of place was pretty jarring. Like the Metro series it doesn't need a particularly deep or complex UI.
I wouldn't mind some developer out there remembering that ten percent of the population is left-handed and making handedness a character option, but that's ultimately up to the animators and not a console -> PC issue. Ever watch a lefty use a bolt-action rifle?
As to interface improvements, in the general sense... allowing for key remapping is a pretty standard feature - to the point where having hard-mapped keys that can't be remapped can be pretty jarring (F1/F2/F3 in Fallout 3 / New Vegas, for example). Allowing for customization without clearly explaining why the keys are where they are by default can cause difficulties as well - Dishonored allows for remapping but the default layout is fairly organic once you're used to it.... muck around with one or two keybindings and suddenly RSI is through the roof... with no menu indicator of what the old keybind was without resetting everything to default.
The real console -> PC issue seems to be font sizing and use of real estate more than anything else - PC users are typically sitting closer to smaller higher resolution screens whereas console users are typically sitting further back, looking at larger, lower resolution displays.
I bought my PC to build and render 3d environments and assets for my webcomic. The fact that Steam was the second thing I installed and the Orange Box was the first PC game pack I bought is gravy - if the hardware can't be used for productivity I have no use for it and I'm not wasting money on it. Entertainment is a secondary function.
That said, the fact that Borderlands, Skyrim, Just Cause 2 etc. are all running barely-localized console interfaces makes me feel like the PC is a second-class citizen, shoved to the back of the line in favor of consumer hardware that can't do anything else. :-/
Bing is also better on old hardware and marginal connections... even in Chrome. I have a 2009 Shuttle box and a megabit DSL link and Bing just kind of appears. Faster hardware improves things a bit but Google services just seem to assume infinite bandwidth - the lack of throttling on Google Drive makes it useless and OH GLOB I'M RANTING.
tldr; Bing is faster than Google - and loads immediately on those occasions when Chrome's address bar is horking like it has a hairball. It's not as drastic as the difference between Amazon (just loads) and Newegg (takes forever) but it's there.
I'm fine with twitter being a self-contained thing. "News" "reports" that consist of screen after screen of embedded tweets with "analysis" along the lines of "he said.... she said.... OH NO THEY DIDN'T!" is a waste of clock cycles, electricity, photons, and calories.
Until it runs on something other than Windows it's already locked-in.
Humor is pretty subjective - I set "funny" at a -1 and found that it improved the quality of the comments I was reading enormously. Funny posts are still in the mix, just not at the default intensity. This was a lot more of an issue a decade or so back, when the Slashdot Effect was a real threat to websites and the site was practically my home page. These days the sort of shoot-from-the-hip snark that swamped the comments section "above the fold" has migrated over to Reddit, where, depending on the subreddit and subject, I may have to hit the Page Down key up to half a dozen times to get past the jokes, one-liners, and associated snark - all upvoted far past the point where my downvote would have any meaningful impact. While that's where the fun is for a lot of people, I really like being able to de-prioritize that sort of commentary or toss it out entirely - the fact that Slashdot allows for a degree of user-controlled comment display means we're not as subject to groupthink... and I'm far more likely to use my modpoints to upvote deserving comments than I am to spitefully downvote "funny" posts that don't mesh with my sense of humor.
Slashdot's comments are upvoted/downvoted in a more granular fashion than any other site out there and comment display can be skewed by user preferences - I penalize "funny" posts and really wish I could do the same on Reddit. The best the rest of the internet has managed to implement is a Nero-style upvote/downvote system, which puts the same weight on puns and one-liners as it does on trolls and insightful responses.
Commenting in general is ripe for disruption - if Disqus upgraded from upvote/downvote to something along the lines of the system Slashdot has had since the 90s it would change the Comments section overnight.
Part of my old job (in a museum Exhibits department) was upgrading interactives and videos from the 80s and 90s to modern equipment - that included "transferring" laser discs the old fashioned way - plugging one of the still-working players from the floor directly into the capture hardware.
The thing is, I was transferring LD to DVD, which is actually a step *down* in quality. Kind of but not quite like how VHS is a step down from Beta (which I also dealt with).
The great thing about standards is there's so many of them!
Anyone who's used Apple software for more than five years has been burned by forced format obsolescence - ClarisWorks, AppleWorks, old QuickTime codecs, the PICT format, SimpleText, Font Suitcases, the list goes on. And on. And that's just *one* platform and set of formats off the top of my head. I lose data to software "upgrades" so often that it's the single biggest determining factor in my upgrade cycle and a huge determining factor in the uptake and use of new software. We aren't heading for a digital dark age - we're in one already.
This is where Comcast building wifi hotspots into their cable modems becomes pretty damned insidious - how long until devices like this are "pre-authorized" to automatically connect to the mothership through any available wireless connection?
Imagine if a Samsung TV automatically phoned home through your neighbor's Comcast wifi/modem link not because you enabled it but because Samsung had paid Comcast to allow its devices through. And of course this behavior is on by default and block it, thanks to some timely lobbying, is now a violation of the first amendment (or something equally deranged-but-feasible vis-a-vis corporate personhood).
Over the years I've learned that I can rely on two factors when it comes to games - word of mouth and development staff. Somebody who knows me and knows what I like probably isn't going to recommend something outside of that sphere (or if they do it's due to incomplete information, for a laugh, or for reasons unrelated to gameplay), and if I like a game or series of games it's usually a good indicator that I'm going to like whatever the people that made that game work on next - usually but not always.
I agree on "multiple reviewers per game" - different reviewers have different priorities and play styles and that can subtly skew impressions. While I find Rock Paper Shotgun reporting on FPS games to be solid and reliable, my impression of their review of Just Cause 2 - which I read after playing the game - was "Did we play the same game? o_O"
I've found that high ratings tend to be simple and very echo-chamber - people that praise a game tend to like it for similar reasons. The real variety is in the negative reviews, which is where any issues with gameplay or story (or both) tend to surface. If I'm interested in a game enough to want more than the upvoted reviews on the Steam Store (which tend to give a fairly concise answer to the question "Why would I buy this?") I've found that one or two positive Metacritic user reviews and then three or four negative reviews generally give me a good idea of what to expect.
Metacritic is also a great - and in some cases the only - way to get *negative* reviews. Review sites are astroturf at best and completely useless at worst. I could care less how awesome a paid reviewer thinks a product is; I want to hear about the experience somebody who paid money for a thing has had with it - if they think they got their money's worth, what pisses them off about it, etc.
Then there's the fact that with games the product is largely subjective - for example Metacritic gives Dishonored a 91 (see here) and Metro: Last Light a an 82 (see here). I've played both and personally I'd rate Last Light an A+ and Dishonored a solid D, maybe a C. Both games curve pretty similarly on graphics and gameplay - Dishonored *looks* like an Unreal engine game and the reward curve on stealth mechanics feels capricious at best - it's possible to finish a level without tripping any alarms but you still "fail" (accumulate chaos) if the guy you knocked out and stuffed in a dumpster at the beginning of the level is eaten by rats - and the end-of-mission screen is the only indicator this has happened. Last Light, on the other hand, is a similar-length game that rewards stealth but also requires a satisfying amount of run-and-gun, and is 100% pure lighting porn. It's gorgeous, immersive, and you aren't capriciously penalized for non-lethal kills - stealth mechanics are strong, realistic, and don't penalize the player with unforeseeable consequences.
I bought Dishonored based on the studio, price (sale), and alleged stealth gameplay. I didn't care for the steampunk aesthetics and found the lore intrusive - books all over the place easily triggered but less easily backed out of. The story didn't do anything for me and the art direction so strongly evoked Half-Life 2 that it felt like City 17 had been ported to the Unreal engine. I bought Last Light based on the studio and prior work of the development team, price (sale), and full knowledge of what to expect for gameplay. The story was engrossing and the art direction was film grade and incredibly immersive. Reviews contributed to neither purchase and review scores in no way reflect my experience with either game... and these are just two examples that I've played recently.
...and then have to pay a monthly/yearly fee for PSN access?
Re-read what I wrote. I didn't say Everything works in Chrome, I said Chrome Just Works on everything I run it on.
I don't care what features a browser has; if it's using large bold fonts and fear-mongering fraidy-text to try to goad me into upgrading my operating system so I can upgrade my browser, I'm going to switch to a browser that runs on the OS that I'm using and doesn't cry about it.
It turns out I don't miss greasemonkey all that much - I just shut off javascript on any website that feels like it's taking forever to do nothing. It's a steadily growing list but I'm not actually missing anything. Oh, I can't read the article because your content farm grabs it from somewhere else via javascript? Oh, I can't read the comments? Oh, I can't load your video ads or your video "content"? Man, you really don't want me around.
The fact that the internet has gotten progressively less useful over the last decade isn't a problem that Chrome or Firefox can solve. It's their job to render the garbage... and it's the job of the hosts file to keep it from getting to the browser in the first place.
In the case of Chrome at least, the "three horizontal bars" isn't just the way to Settings, it's where everything is if you're using Chrome on Windows. Settings is just one of the items in the list that pops up - bookmarks, tabs, history, etc. are all in there and boiling all of the menus down to a single item frees up a considerable amount of real estate, at least on Windows (on the Mac the menu at the top of the screen is retained and has most of the information and options of the dropdown, though that's Chrome behaving like software running on OS X should).
Otherwise, agreed - seems like it's easier to change out the hubcaps on the newly reinvented wheel than it is to investigate other ways of crossing the ocean.
I thought the Yahoo move was pretty hilarious, if only in the fact that Yahoo reported an uptick in people actually using Yahoo for search at some point shortly after.
I also find it hilarious that Bing loads faster and returns results a lot faster than Google does on Chrome, though that's not strictly relevant to the conversation.* One thing I can say for Firefox - whatever they try to default the search box to the danged thing has never sat there spluttering and not bothering to send/load content the way the Chrome combined address/search bar occasionally does.
* Point of fact if bandwidth and hardware are an issue literally every non-google web service I've used is faster than the google equivalent.
I'm glad Pale Moon exists. Although windows isn't my primary platform I'll download it and give it a test drive. I've never had any issues with Gecko; it's been the progressively heavier stack of everything sitting on top of it that made firefox unpalatable... then Chrome integrated so well with my general web usage across several machines that I doubt I'll be heading to anything else any time soon. That doesn't mean I don't need to occasionally look at websites in other browsers, though.
Agreed, Thunderbird does not need "improved," at least in the sense that the article summary seems to be implying. It's been a long time since I've used it and when I did my *only* complaint was execution speed, and that may well have been due to running it on ancient hardware.
Oh jeeze the last thing Thunderbird needs is to be raked over the trendy UX coals the way Firefox has. If Chrome's market share has come at the expense of Firefox it may be in part because many people who jumped ship - myself included - found that each Firefox release was becoming successively more and more "chrome-like" without offering any of the benefits that make Chrome a compelling offering. In my case it was speed and performance on a 2006 Mac Mini running 10.6 - firefox was bloated slug that constantly screamed at me to upgrade my OS; Chrome ran as fast as it does on modern hardware and never complained about anything. Chrome's UI and core functionality haven't changed much since I started using it, either - I grew to dread Firefox updates as you never knew if it was going to pull an iTunes and reboot with some new horrible "feature" that didn't have extensions to revert the behavior back to prior functionality - Firefox deciding it was going to handle PDFs inline, and that functionality being far beyond slow and a real pain in the ass to disable - was the last straw for me. When I left the browser half of my extensions and customizations were to undo things the devs had "improved" over the years - the other half were ad and flash blocking extensions, which Chrome does almost as well.
TLDR; Firefox was awesome when it was Mozilla Without The Cruft. Then it started to cruft up and bloat up and horrible terrible very bad things started to happen to the UI and now it's Just Another Browser. Which is fine, really. Thunderbird does not need to be "innovated" in the same way - Firefox needs to be replaced by Firefox Without The Cruft the way Firefox replaced Mozilla. Maybe stick to the UNIX idea of "do one thing well" this time around, instead of "do one thing reasonably well and an increasingly lengthy list of perpedicular things in a totally half-assed fashion."
I used Netscape Navigator until IE5 (Mac) came along, then I used Mozilla until Safari popped up, then Firefox until it drove me to Chrome. Chrome Just Works on everything I run it on and has never nagged at me to update or screamed at me to upgrade my operating system Because Reasons. It has yet to roll out a game-changing UI element that I hate, and it isn't slowly modeling its overall UX to resemble the competition. I hope the Mozilla foundation keeps going because we need choice, now more than ever - and maybe one day they'll be my choice again.
But don't you dare call it a Depression!
No amount of history education is going to stop the herd mentality from handing your privacy over to some domestic intelligence type claiming it's Required to combat terrorism or pedophelia or both. Don't want to hand over your rights? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
(watching this happen in the UK is predictably hilarious)