Not specifically, and I may be hanging up on the status bar, but its removal (and the inclusion of Pandora) are sending the wrong message to me personally about how they're "making Firefox better!". In my experience, that is not the case, so I'll go somewhere else until it is actually better.
I really can't see anything wrong with FF 3.6 as it is right now. If they want to roll all those speed enhancements (which I;m not really seeing in real world use compared to 3.6) into FF, then why mess with the UI. It smacks of trying to fix something that isn't broken.
They're not the only ones - the new icons in the sidebar of iTunes 10 are also a step backwards - identical to the old ones, just all monochrome, so it's more difficult to navigate at a glance.
The same was true for the change to Mail in 10.5 (I believe) when the mailbox list that used to be a drawer (OS X UI element) that could be on either the left or right of the main window was changed to a fixed element that could *only* be in the left. As someone who kept the drawer on the right, I was annoyed.
That was my point - it was sarcasm. The status bar was never bloat, hence my amusing comparison to "balancing out" the bloat by removing it to make room for Pandora.
It doesn't always work - I have already read reports by some people who have said it just plain doesn't work, or clashes with other extensions (and hey, we have to keep using extensions right, since that's how you add functionality).
It's not bitching to complain that an extremely useful and basic feature is taken out of a piece of software you use all the time, only to be told "lulz, you can put it back with a third party status bar called 'status 4 evar'".
How very.... professional looking. This is a piece of software (firefox) that is meant to be taken seriously?
Sure, you have flashy tab grouping and window razzmatazz, and it's as buggy as a reptile house in breeding season, but the status bar is gone!
I don't use that many plugins. In fact, my 3.6 install of FF has only one plugin that I added myself: AdBlock. So, I'd have to increase the number of plugins I use by 100% in order to restore function that was working just fine in FF 3.6.
So, if I shouldn't have to download extensions, how do I turn on the status bar?
Assuming, that by your own admission, it "should have enough features that most users shouldn't need to". I am *far* from the only person who has expressed dismay at the removal of such a core function, so if the people who are ambivalent about the bar (ie, can just disable if if they don't want it if it was included) is more than 50% of the total users, compared to the ones that want it to stay then it's ok because "most" don't care for it (and can easily disable it).
As it is, they took out one of the most useful ways to check URLs at a glance, and instead added a big feature that has introduced a load of showstopper bugs for their release candidate. How strange. Looking at the FF4 beta made me trade it out for Chrome as my secondary browser to see how that goes for a while.
Perhaps this is why Chrome has gained so much marketshare over its relatively short life (obviously in small part due to being promoted by Google on the main page on on youtube) - FF is doing strange things like taking out highly useful core function that *a lot* of people requested be put back (but have been told "no, go away") and instead have tried to put in flashy stuff like Pandora that's buggy as hell, adds to the bloat and is now included whether you want it or not - seemingly the ideal thing that should be an addon.
I'm sure the code for the status bar is practically behemoth in comparison! An unwieldy monster that was dragging FF performance to its knees!
Ok, so in the spirit of "removing bloat" Pandora is now a feature, but to balance it out, the status bar has to go!
There are some UI elements that genuinely work and are useful without being bloated or ineffective - the status bar was (is) one of them; somewhere to display the entire URL when you hover on a link and any other "status" items the browser shows you.
Your argument that the entire point is that it has extensions to get it the way you want would work if the thing was totally barebones and you had to add in everything you wanted - like Pandora, ad blocking, flash plugin etc, but that's just not the case. What you have now is a browser that has some default features that are more suited to plugins, and some plugins that really should be built in.
No, it's definitely gone - there are a number of sites that address how to get it back, and all of them point to the "status 4 evar" plugin that restores the lost function. I'm sure if you could just switch it back on another way there would have been no need for the plugin, although I am willing to be corrected either way if that is the case.
As you may notice, from your own link, you need a third party extension to bring the status bar back, as I mentioned in my post originally; necessary because YES they did take away the option to have the status bar.
Using third party extensions to put back functionality that you removed is the very definition of "took away the option". If the option still existed, as it does in FF 3.6, then this third party extension would not be necessary.
You can try and justify the decision with a handwavy "oh, you can get a plugin" but that really isn't the point.
In my experience then, the performance enhancements just aren't being felt. In real world use, I can't say that Firefox or Safari is "faster" - they both perform adequately in terms of speed.
I'm not sitting at my desk thinking "I wish this browser would just be faster!" at this stage of the game - all the browsers I have tried have been pretty good in recent years. What does affect me are large swings in usability that make a browser annoying to use - like the removal of the status bar, or whatever bug has been added to Webkit that causes the hyper annoying "no paste" in some slashdot comment boxes on Safari.
Performance matters to an extent, but I think it's been turned into a "my browser is 30 ms faster!" pissing contest now that the "my browser scores higher on Acid!" stuff has died down a little.
I agree that they're (FF devs) stuck between the proverbial Dwane Johnson and a hard place; a big complaint was feature bloat, so they stripped features, but that argument falls down a little when something like Pandora is rolled in as a primary feature and something as simple and useful as the status bar is taken out. Not all people like Pandora, so they can disable it. Not all people *don't* like a status bar... but you have to go third party extension to get it back.
I wonder if the ultimate goal of the FF project should be a "roll your own" - a core, barebones browser that has a whole list of features available, and you just checkbox the ones you want at download (or install) time, or go for a few pre-defined profiles.
The biggest thing (other than UI) is Gecko vs Webkit. Pretty much all of the main functionality is duplicated across both - ad blocking, popup blocking, other extensions etc, but there tend to be a lot more FF plugins, so if you're very plugin-happy, you may be unhappy with Chrome. I'm using Chrome as my sandboxing browser (keeps Facebook isolated from everything else I browse on the web), and it's pretty good. I used to use FF 3.6 for that, but I'm giving Chrome a go.
...they took away even the *option* to have the status bar.
I guess in the true OSS way I'll have to fork the project and add my own.;)
(yes yes, sarcasm. probably best to spell it out ahead of time, because what slashdot post isn't complete these days without a plethora of disclaimers and qualifiers)
The necessary qualifier to ensure my criticism of open source software doesn't earn me a minus 1: I like open source. The necessary disclaimer that forking FF is silly: I am well aware that third party extensions for FF4 exist that add status bar function.
BBC iPlayer is geo-locked. It's the modern internet equivalent annoyance - while once it was animated gifs and midi files embedded into web pages, now it is video services that refuse to play content if you are outside a specific geographical area.
You can get around them with proxies, but it's annoying. I can't watch clips of The Daily Show on the website, for example, because they are not available to viewers in the UK (at the request of Channel 4).
If you ask for the salt at dinner and I hand you a bottle of potassium cyanide I can say "ha, it's a salt, you should have specified".
Metal oxides other than iron are *not* called "rust" in common usage - that is specifically a term for iron oxide, or is that bag of quicklime also called "rust", or uranium oxide.
Also, not all metals rust - gold and platinum, while you can oxidise them, really don't do so to any appreciable degree at STP.
I guess in the US. In any other developed nation though, you'd be covered by universal healthcare and you wouldn't be crippled by medical debt when your insurance ran out, or they stopped covering you when you had a break in employment due to long term illness and lost coverage briefly and won't let you pick it up again at the old price.
Although, I doubt money has everything to do with survival from cancer - sometimes you just cannot beat it, sometimes you recover.
I make stuff too, and I like the feedback - it helps me to make better stuff.
If you can't handle the feedback, perhaps making stuff is not for you. But then, you are posting AC, so I am going to assume that you've never made anything before and are just going for some cheap trolling because you disagree with me.
As the first non-AC mozilla dev I have seen here, can I address this to you? Please put the status bar back, at the very least as an option.
Sure, many people may be happy to lose it, but they were perfectly able to do that on 3.6 by disabling it from the menu. I can't re-enable it in FF4, which is extremely annoying. I can't be the only one. Now whenever I scroll down with my my mouse pointer over the main page, every time a link sweeps past the pointer the top of the screen flashes (as the URL is displayed up there, (and utterly uselessly *partially* if it is a long URL) which is extremely distracting.
I can see that "bloat elimination" must have been high on the list of things to achieve, but the status bar?
The UI is nice, it has the same "security issues" as Chrome since they both use Webkit (ie, "I've solved all my crime problems by moving into my neighbour's house! It's identical, but the door is painted blue!").
It's faster than Firefox 3.6, it actually has a fucking status bar unlike Firefox 4.
I don't care about "shit installed on Windows*" since I don't use Windows while using OS X, so why that would be a factor in my choice of browser on OS X is totally beyond me, since I'm not some blind zealot that cuts off their nose to spite has face.
* although the "shit" installed is optional, but useful if you want to view quicktime content, and not necessary if you already have Quicktime installed.
I know - that's the beauty of Android, the flexibility and the choice. It's where it trumps iOS. However, even if you do go the totally free route, there are many people who did not, and you end up with a fragmented platform where the Android Marketplace suffers. Not all apps are guaranteed to work on all handsets, even with the same version of Android, due to differences in hardware or some other inconsistency. Some handsets are trapped on 1.6 for evermore, some handsets have awesome screens but if you target those, you leave out other handsets.
The very fact that *other* people are buying these locked down or generally suboptimal Android handsets are what causes fragmentation to happen. The second part of the reason anyway - the availability is the first part. If you only consider yourself, or the subset of people who only go open and carefully decide on their handset choice based on that then you can say "no fragmentation for me" but the Android userbase is not just composed of those people. From a developer's standpoint, you (as a group) are only one facet of the market they are looking at.
It matters because I was just double checking you were the same person. Yes, it was written as if you were, but I was just confirming so I don;t look like a muppet responding as if you were. You're really trying to make my question "are you the same guy?" into some negative "points scoring"?
I don't think we're going to achieve anything productive if that's the way you're approaching this.
Who says I'm attacking Android, or this is "the best thing I've got"? I happen to think Android is exactly what the smartphone market needs (and I'm an iPhone user), and have seen some truly exceptional Android-based handsets.
You are very quick to leap on any perceived criticism of the platform though, as evidenced by not thoroughly reading my post. The open nature of Android is one of its biggest strengths, but it also its biggest weakness, since what is open for the user is also open to the vendor (and carrier), so you end up with a situation that exists right now. There *are* Android phones on the market right now that are locked down, and not upgradable without rooting them (not necessarily the one in the article - as you say, rumour). For you or I, "simply" installing a custom ROM onto a phone is "easy", but for the vast majority of phone users I imagine you'd have to start by explaining that a modern smartphone is much like a computer with an operating system.... then you'd have to explain what an operating system is.
Just because it's trivial for you to defeat the roadblocks put in place by handset manufacturers or carriers does not eliminate the issue. Joe Sixpack is not going to root his phone, or even drop a custom OS image on there (that isn;t offered as an easy, official update from his carrier or manufacturer, and even then he has to go looking for it).
You have to take the rough with the smooth. It's a pitfall that the iOS ecosystem has largely avoided (although is still slightly affected by due to 3 handsets and a tablet), but at the cost of the much greater flexibility offered by Android. There are are pros and cons to both approaches. Just because I dare to suggest that there might be some negative aspects to something related to Android doesn't mean I'm "attacking" it.
I think your sig is remarkably apt in this situation.
Right, but it can't cut both ways - that argument works, but it counteracts the "fragmentation is not an issue" argument that people like to also air on slashdot (in a 'android can do no wrong' sort of way. (although I agree with your argument)
It's exactly this sort of thing that serves as a good example; there are totally open, upgradable, do-anything-you-like Android phones (I've used one or two and they are very impressive [my main phone is an iPhone 3G]), and there are phones like the one in the article, which is worse off than the supposed "totally locked down" iPhone because it is now clear that the manufacturer wants to artificially stall the phone and keep it in amber, never to be updated to newer versions of Android for no technical reason. Sure you can jailbreak or root it, but I thought the whole point was that you went Android *not* to do that.
It is looking more and more like there are two entirely separate Android markets - the market that is attempting to replicate the iPhone as closely as possible, including its ecosystem (tightly controlled user experience, less user freedom), and then there's the original Android market, with the freedom to do anything you want. Unfortunately the former is more attractive to vendors and carriers
Posting AC by accident I will assume. I have nothing to apologise for because you can't handle a bit of satire, that you're now desperately trying to say that it *wasn't*, which is funny because earlier in the argument you were fine to accept that it was satire, but that I "had only thought of it after the fact".
You need to pick one argument and stick with it.
You're asking me to act my age? I have had a "robust" debate/argument with you, and you're the only one so far to resort to childish vulgarity. I'm not really the one who needs to be acting my age.
You're also grasping at the thinnest of straws to try and slither out of this. I did wonder when I wrote that sentence whether I should really clarify it with an lengthy addendum or parenthesis but I went for the slightly imprecise statement since it read better. You and I both know what I meant there, especially since you've spent the better part of the argument saying how unfair it was that I inferred you might be stupid.
That comment is the very definition of satire. I asked you, admittedly in a less than perfect medium of text (so it is hard to judge the tone of the comment) whether you had ever used a computer before, on an online forum for a technology-focused site with probably the highest ratio of computer literate people on the whole internet (pause for laughs as people mock the decline of slashdot over the years). There's no getting around that. The very fact that you are spelling out how long you have been using computers for is proof of my point, and the reason I went for it in the first place. I have no doubt that you've be working with computers since before black and white monitors were all the rage - you're a 6 digit UID on slashdot - by no means the "early adopters" but certainly been here a while.
Add to that fact the point that I have never been vulgar, and it's clear what my intent was. My apologies for wounding your clearly thin skin with some gentle satire, in surprise that someone using computers for more than 30 years (x > 30, since that is my age) couldn't work out how to back up an iPhone. Something I immediately put down to you sitting down in front of iTunes with a preconceived "I hate this software, rar!" level of anger, making it harder for yourself that necessary and instantly frustrating you when then answer wasn't obvious to you within 5 seconds (It took me 7 seconds with google, and I'm a woful typist).
Then there is something else at play, since there are a number of people, both Chrome and Safari users reporting this bug. I can replicate it here on OS X with the latest version of Safari (5.0.3). Perhaps it requires some other software interaction to also be present (or missing) like javascript or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Not specifically, and I may be hanging up on the status bar, but its removal (and the inclusion of Pandora) are sending the wrong message to me personally about how they're "making Firefox better!". In my experience, that is not the case, so I'll go somewhere else until it is actually better.
I really can't see anything wrong with FF 3.6 as it is right now. If they want to roll all those speed enhancements (which I;m not really seeing in real world use compared to 3.6) into FF, then why mess with the UI. It smacks of trying to fix something that isn't broken.
They're not the only ones - the new icons in the sidebar of iTunes 10 are also a step backwards - identical to the old ones, just all monochrome, so it's more difficult to navigate at a glance.
The same was true for the change to Mail in 10.5 (I believe) when the mailbox list that used to be a drawer (OS X UI element) that could be on either the left or right of the main window was changed to a fixed element that could *only* be in the left. As someone who kept the drawer on the right, I was annoyed.
That was my point - it was sarcasm. The status bar was never bloat, hence my amusing comparison to "balancing out" the bloat by removing it to make room for Pandora.
It doesn't always work - I have already read reports by some people who have said it just plain doesn't work, or clashes with other extensions (and hey, we have to keep using extensions right, since that's how you add functionality).
It's not bitching to complain that an extremely useful and basic feature is taken out of a piece of software you use all the time, only to be told "lulz, you can put it back with a third party status bar called 'status 4 evar'".
How very.... professional looking. This is a piece of software (firefox) that is meant to be taken seriously?
Sure, you have flashy tab grouping and window razzmatazz, and it's as buggy as a reptile house in breeding season, but the status bar is gone!
I don't use that many plugins. In fact, my 3.6 install of FF has only one plugin that I added myself: AdBlock. So, I'd have to increase the number of plugins I use by 100% in order to restore function that was working just fine in FF 3.6.
Thanks but no thanks.
So, if I shouldn't have to download extensions, how do I turn on the status bar?
Assuming, that by your own admission, it "should have enough features that most users shouldn't need to". I am *far* from the only person who has expressed dismay at the removal of such a core function, so if the people who are ambivalent about the bar (ie, can just disable if if they don't want it if it was included) is more than 50% of the total users, compared to the ones that want it to stay then it's ok because "most" don't care for it (and can easily disable it).
As it is, they took out one of the most useful ways to check URLs at a glance, and instead added a big feature that has introduced a load of showstopper bugs for their release candidate. How strange. Looking at the FF4 beta made me trade it out for Chrome as my secondary browser to see how that goes for a while.
Perhaps this is why Chrome has gained so much marketshare over its relatively short life (obviously in small part due to being promoted by Google on the main page on on youtube) - FF is doing strange things like taking out highly useful core function that *a lot* of people requested be put back (but have been told "no, go away") and instead have tried to put in flashy stuff like Pandora that's buggy as hell, adds to the bloat and is now included whether you want it or not - seemingly the ideal thing that should be an addon.
I'm sure the code for the status bar is practically behemoth in comparison! An unwieldy monster that was dragging FF performance to its knees!
Ok, so in the spirit of "removing bloat" Pandora is now a feature, but to balance it out, the status bar has to go!
There are some UI elements that genuinely work and are useful without being bloated or ineffective - the status bar was (is) one of them; somewhere to display the entire URL when you hover on a link and any other "status" items the browser shows you.
Your argument that the entire point is that it has extensions to get it the way you want would work if the thing was totally barebones and you had to add in everything you wanted - like Pandora, ad blocking, flash plugin etc, but that's just not the case. What you have now is a browser that has some default features that are more suited to plugins, and some plugins that really should be built in.
No, it's definitely gone - there are a number of sites that address how to get it back, and all of them point to the "status 4 evar" plugin that restores the lost function. I'm sure if you could just switch it back on another way there would have been no need for the plugin, although I am willing to be corrected either way if that is the case.
As you may notice, from your own link, you need a third party extension to bring the status bar back, as I mentioned in my post originally; necessary because YES they did take away the option to have the status bar.
Using third party extensions to put back functionality that you removed is the very definition of "took away the option". If the option still existed, as it does in FF 3.6, then this third party extension would not be necessary.
You can try and justify the decision with a handwavy "oh, you can get a plugin" but that really isn't the point.
In my experience then, the performance enhancements just aren't being felt. In real world use, I can't say that Firefox or Safari is "faster" - they both perform adequately in terms of speed.
I'm not sitting at my desk thinking "I wish this browser would just be faster!" at this stage of the game - all the browsers I have tried have been pretty good in recent years. What does affect me are large swings in usability that make a browser annoying to use - like the removal of the status bar, or whatever bug has been added to Webkit that causes the hyper annoying "no paste" in some slashdot comment boxes on Safari.
Performance matters to an extent, but I think it's been turned into a "my browser is 30 ms faster!" pissing contest now that the "my browser scores higher on Acid!" stuff has died down a little.
I agree that they're (FF devs) stuck between the proverbial Dwane Johnson and a hard place; a big complaint was feature bloat, so they stripped features, but that argument falls down a little when something like Pandora is rolled in as a primary feature and something as simple and useful as the status bar is taken out. Not all people like Pandora, so they can disable it. Not all people *don't* like a status bar... but you have to go third party extension to get it back.
I wonder if the ultimate goal of the FF project should be a "roll your own" - a core, barebones browser that has a whole list of features available, and you just checkbox the ones you want at download (or install) time, or go for a few pre-defined profiles.
The biggest thing (other than UI) is Gecko vs Webkit. Pretty much all of the main functionality is duplicated across both - ad blocking, popup blocking, other extensions etc, but there tend to be a lot more FF plugins, so if you're very plugin-happy, you may be unhappy with Chrome. I'm using Chrome as my sandboxing browser (keeps Facebook isolated from everything else I browse on the web), and it's pretty good. I used to use FF 3.6 for that, but I'm giving Chrome a go.
...they took away even the *option* to have the status bar.
I guess in the true OSS way I'll have to fork the project and add my own. ;)
(yes yes, sarcasm. probably best to spell it out ahead of time, because what slashdot post isn't complete these days without a plethora of disclaimers and qualifiers)
The necessary qualifier to ensure my criticism of open source software doesn't earn me a minus 1: I like open source.
The necessary disclaimer that forking FF is silly: I am well aware that third party extensions for FF4 exist that add status bar function.
I assume you got your definition of socialism from Fox News.
BBC iPlayer is geo-locked. It's the modern internet equivalent annoyance - while once it was animated gifs and midi files embedded into web pages, now it is video services that refuse to play content if you are outside a specific geographical area.
You can get around them with proxies, but it's annoying. I can't watch clips of The Daily Show on the website, for example, because they are not available to viewers in the UK (at the request of Channel 4).
It's not really pedantry.
If you ask for the salt at dinner and I hand you a bottle of potassium cyanide I can say "ha, it's a salt, you should have specified".
Metal oxides other than iron are *not* called "rust" in common usage - that is specifically a term for iron oxide, or is that bag of quicklime also called "rust", or uranium oxide.
Also, not all metals rust - gold and platinum, while you can oxidise them, really don't do so to any appreciable degree at STP.
Only if there's iron in it.
I guess in the US. In any other developed nation though, you'd be covered by universal healthcare and you wouldn't be crippled by medical debt when your insurance ran out, or they stopped covering you when you had a break in employment due to long term illness and lost coverage briefly and won't let you pick it up again at the old price.
Although, I doubt money has everything to do with survival from cancer - sometimes you just cannot beat it, sometimes you recover.
I make stuff too, and I like the feedback - it helps me to make better stuff.
If you can't handle the feedback, perhaps making stuff is not for you. But then, you are posting AC, so I am going to assume that you've never made anything before and are just going for some cheap trolling because you disagree with me.
As the first non-AC mozilla dev I have seen here, can I address this to you? Please put the status bar back, at the very least as an option.
Sure, many people may be happy to lose it, but they were perfectly able to do that on 3.6 by disabling it from the menu. I can't re-enable it in FF4, which is extremely annoying. I can't be the only one. Now whenever I scroll down with my my mouse pointer over the main page, every time a link sweeps past the pointer the top of the screen flashes (as the URL is displayed up there, (and utterly uselessly *partially* if it is a long URL) which is extremely distracting.
I can see that "bloat elimination" must have been high on the list of things to achieve, but the status bar?
The UI is nice, it has the same "security issues" as Chrome since they both use Webkit (ie, "I've solved all my crime problems by moving into my neighbour's house! It's identical, but the door is painted blue!").
It's faster than Firefox 3.6, it actually has a fucking status bar unlike Firefox 4.
I don't care about "shit installed on Windows*" since I don't use Windows while using OS X, so why that would be a factor in my choice of browser on OS X is totally beyond me, since I'm not some blind zealot that cuts off their nose to spite has face.
* although the "shit" installed is optional, but useful if you want to view quicktime content, and not necessary if you already have Quicktime installed.
I know - that's the beauty of Android, the flexibility and the choice. It's where it trumps iOS. However, even if you do go the totally free route, there are many people who did not, and you end up with a fragmented platform where the Android Marketplace suffers. Not all apps are guaranteed to work on all handsets, even with the same version of Android, due to differences in hardware or some other inconsistency. Some handsets are trapped on 1.6 for evermore, some handsets have awesome screens but if you target those, you leave out other handsets.
The very fact that *other* people are buying these locked down or generally suboptimal Android handsets are what causes fragmentation to happen. The second part of the reason anyway - the availability is the first part. If you only consider yourself, or the subset of people who only go open and carefully decide on their handset choice based on that then you can say "no fragmentation for me" but the Android userbase is not just composed of those people. From a developer's standpoint, you (as a group) are only one facet of the market they are looking at.
It matters because I was just double checking you were the same person. Yes, it was written as if you were, but I was just confirming so I don;t look like a muppet responding as if you were. You're really trying to make my question "are you the same guy?" into some negative "points scoring"?
I don't think we're going to achieve anything productive if that's the way you're approaching this.
Who says I'm attacking Android, or this is "the best thing I've got"? I happen to think Android is exactly what the smartphone market needs (and I'm an iPhone user), and have seen some truly exceptional Android-based handsets.
You are very quick to leap on any perceived criticism of the platform though, as evidenced by not thoroughly reading my post. The open nature of Android is one of its biggest strengths, but it also its biggest weakness, since what is open for the user is also open to the vendor (and carrier), so you end up with a situation that exists right now. There *are* Android phones on the market right now that are locked down, and not upgradable without rooting them (not necessarily the one in the article - as you say, rumour). For you or I, "simply" installing a custom ROM onto a phone is "easy", but for the vast majority of phone users I imagine you'd have to start by explaining that a modern smartphone is much like a computer with an operating system.... then you'd have to explain what an operating system is.
Just because it's trivial for you to defeat the roadblocks put in place by handset manufacturers or carriers does not eliminate the issue. Joe Sixpack is not going to root his phone, or even drop a custom OS image on there (that isn;t offered as an easy, official update from his carrier or manufacturer, and even then he has to go looking for it).
You have to take the rough with the smooth. It's a pitfall that the iOS ecosystem has largely avoided (although is still slightly affected by due to 3 handsets and a tablet), but at the cost of the much greater flexibility offered by Android. There are are pros and cons to both approaches. Just because I dare to suggest that there might be some negative aspects to something related to Android doesn't mean I'm "attacking" it.
I think your sig is remarkably apt in this situation.
Right, but it can't cut both ways - that argument works, but it counteracts the "fragmentation is not an issue" argument that people like to also air on slashdot (in a 'android can do no wrong' sort of way. (although I agree with your argument)
It's exactly this sort of thing that serves as a good example; there are totally open, upgradable, do-anything-you-like Android phones (I've used one or two and they are very impressive [my main phone is an iPhone 3G]), and there are phones like the one in the article, which is worse off than the supposed "totally locked down" iPhone because it is now clear that the manufacturer wants to artificially stall the phone and keep it in amber, never to be updated to newer versions of Android for no technical reason. Sure you can jailbreak or root it, but I thought the whole point was that you went Android *not* to do that.
It is looking more and more like there are two entirely separate Android markets - the market that is attempting to replicate the iPhone as closely as possible, including its ecosystem (tightly controlled user experience, less user freedom), and then there's the original Android market, with the freedom to do anything you want. Unfortunately the former is more attractive to vendors and carriers
Posting AC by accident I will assume. I have nothing to apologise for because you can't handle a bit of satire, that you're now desperately trying to say that it *wasn't*, which is funny because earlier in the argument you were fine to accept that it was satire, but that I "had only thought of it after the fact".
You need to pick one argument and stick with it.
You're asking me to act my age? I have had a "robust" debate/argument with you, and you're the only one so far to resort to childish vulgarity. I'm not really the one who needs to be acting my age.
You're also grasping at the thinnest of straws to try and slither out of this. I did wonder when I wrote that sentence whether I should really clarify it with an lengthy addendum or parenthesis but I went for the slightly imprecise statement since it read better. You and I both know what I meant there, especially since you've spent the better part of the argument saying how unfair it was that I inferred you might be stupid.
That comment is the very definition of satire. I asked you, admittedly in a less than perfect medium of text (so it is hard to judge the tone of the comment) whether you had ever used a computer before, on an online forum for a technology-focused site with probably the highest ratio of computer literate people on the whole internet (pause for laughs as people mock the decline of slashdot over the years). There's no getting around that. The very fact that you are spelling out how long you have been using computers for is proof of my point, and the reason I went for it in the first place. I have no doubt that you've be working with computers since before black and white monitors were all the rage - you're a 6 digit UID on slashdot - by no means the "early adopters" but certainly been here a while.
Add to that fact the point that I have never been vulgar, and it's clear what my intent was. My apologies for wounding your clearly thin skin with some gentle satire, in surprise that someone using computers for more than 30 years (x > 30, since that is my age) couldn't work out how to back up an iPhone. Something I immediately put down to you sitting down in front of iTunes with a preconceived "I hate this software, rar!" level of anger, making it harder for yourself that necessary and instantly frustrating you when then answer wasn't obvious to you within 5 seconds (It took me 7 seconds with google, and I'm a woful typist).
Then there is something else at play, since there are a number of people, both Chrome and Safari users reporting this bug. I can replicate it here on OS X with the latest version of Safari (5.0.3). Perhaps it requires some other software interaction to also be present (or missing) like javascript or something.