First, "discussed" means there's nothing official, and no clear consensus.
Second, if it's possible to be addicted to, say, work -- what are we doing about that addiction? Why are MMOs worse?
Oh, and I meant sports as a sports fan, not an athlete -- as an athlete, that could at least be physical. But I'm honestly not sure if WoW has logged more time than, say, fantasy football.
Honestly, I have a set of disks at my house for halflife 2 I cannot play thanks to Steam. You see, I moved, and my old email address doesn't exist anymore.
I'm confused -- was there no way to tell Steam about the new email address? Was there no way to register a new account with the new email address?
It's not an entirely unsolvable problem, either. Domains are cheap, and Gmail is free.
Now, I will admit, I have almost lost my own account -- due to sheer disuse, I forgot the password. Since I was reinstalling from scratch, I had to go dig up my old installation, restore it to a virtual machine, and extract the password -- hardly something you'd expect to have to do for a game.
But then, when was the last time you lost, say, your bank account number? Some banks will insist on mailing you a new PIN, if you want to reset it -- what if you've moved? Again, not convenient, but not impossible, and not really unreasonable.
So, I see your point, but I find it much easier to keep track of a username, a password, and an email address, than to keep track of the original install media (and keep it in working order).
All this realism stuff gets on my nerves. Sure it looks more realistic but is it actually a better game?
Sometimes, yes.
I don't care about the graphics.
Yes, you do, you just don't realize it.
I've said it before, and probably better, but every part of the game affects gameplay, and can make a game better or worse. More realistic graphics can, in fact, make a game better.
Now, granted, Crysis was mostly about pretty pictures and who's got the bigger dic^Wvideo card. But that doesn't mean this particular game is going to be another Crysis.
Realism isn't always the best way to convey the most emotion and impact,
Not always, but sometimes.
Look at film. Certainly, there's a place for anime, and it often does a better job than a summer flick which is focused purely on pretty pictures. But there are also films which are vividly realistic, both in video ("graphics") and in story and dialog -- downright gritty. And everything in between.
Taking your example:
So the eyes flicker around in this new game like the eyes of people in a meeting just waiting for it to finish,
Have you never seen a movie which makes good use of facial expressions, even eyes?
Re:On tabs crashing
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So, regarding the whole "a tab crashing will no longer crash all other tabs" deal, how about we instead made it so no tab actually crashed?
Because isolating the tabs is somewhat difficult.
Writing a bug-free program is incredibly difficult. When that program depends on third-party plugins like Flash, it's also impossible, short of buying Adobe and making them get their shit together.
I'm with you, but realistically, there's not much of a downside to isolating tabs, and it gives us a more robust browser right now, without having to rewrite Webkit. And as a bonus, it gives us concurrent tabs, which means it's faster faster (on dual core) and more responsive (everywhere).
If I have 2 or 4 or 8 GB sitting there, why would I want my software to not use it?
Mostly, so that other software can.
What do I possibly gain by having a program that uses only 100 MB when it could be using 1 GB to keep more rendered pages in memory (and speed up the display when I hit "back" a couple of times), for example?
The problem here is that there's no common way to tell a program to free some cache. Suppose Firefox sucks down 1.5 gigs of your 2 gigs of RAM, because it was sitting unused. How does Firefox know, then, when you launch WoW, that you want a gig or so of that back? Is there a way it can know before it starts getting pushed out to swap space (or the Windows pagefile)?
But when you look at situations where memory really matters, you find that you can run Opera on pretty much any cellphone but you can't run Firefox.
Mostly because Opera has a mobile version, designed specifically for cell phones. Does Firefox?
plus a ful index of your e-mail, so you have instant page flips, instant mail searches, etc..
In the case of mail, that really doesn't need to be held in RAM by the client -- if you're searching your mail frequently, the index could as easily be kept on-disk. Just let the OS do the caching -- that way, when you launch WoW (as in the above example), rather than wasting space and time duplicating the same data in a pagefile, it could simply free that cache.
And that's the crux of it, I think -- there are a few very basic operations which should be understood, at the OS level (think kernel), and aren't.
Caching is one of them -- the OS has a filesystem cache, but no concept of a common API for applications to do their own caching. Browsers should be able to tell the OS, "Here's a bunch of data that I might want later, but you can nuke it if you're low on RAM." It would be a trivial API to write and learn, I'd think -- maybe more complex for the OS to implement, but they've already done it for filesystems.
I could go on. (Why not cache HTTP?) And on. (Transparent file compression?) But let's start there, at least, with the RAM usage -- honestly, rendering a page doesn't take so long that it'd bother you, if that's all it needed to do when you came back from your hypothetical WoW session. It'd actually be far worse if it had to pull that cached copy out of the pagefile.
At the same time, if you're viewing the same three or four rendered pages quite a lot (switching between tabs, or back and forth in the browser), you probably could afford to spend a few extra megs of RAM just on those pages.
Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution, short of patching the OS. And I don't know of an OS that does this right.
No, it wasn't, and I've never understood how Firefox came to be marketed so damn well. Whoever managed to seed the belief that Firefox was lean, small and fast did a superb job.
No, actually, it was lean, small, and fast. It's bloated quite a bit since it was Pheonix, and it's no longer marketed based on those qualities.
It's still fast, or at least, faster than Konqueror, for some things. The difference is, if I'm already in KDE, Konq loads in half a second. Firefox takes several seconds, even when the entire thing is already cached in RAM.
Also, I would say that the Mozilla suite was this bad -- for its time. I don't think I opened as many tabs then, and I don't think there was as much Flash then -- and it included a mail client, a chat client, a calendar, some sort of XUL console, and a newsreader -- am I missing anything?
But you can always try for yourself -- there may still be some modern Seamonkey builds somewhere.
Re:These articles still don't answer my question
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 1
I would say, yes from IE, no from Firefox.
And the performance is a "new" feature, and one not easily duplicated by Firefox, unless you're already on Tamarin -- and I'm not sure we know yet whether Tamarin beats V8.
Re:We need to go in the other direction
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Flash is particularly bad -- and, far too often, necessary.
Re:We need to go in the other direction
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
When Flash crashes, I still have to restart the browser. Firefox doesn't crash because of it -- nor does Konqueror, for that matter -- but Flash never gets restarted until the browser does.
Of course, my biggest complaint is the speed, but I haven't used Flash on 32-bit Ubuntu for so long that I don't remember if it, for example, plays fullscreen HD video at a reasonable speed. (Because mplayer does.)
Re:OpinionWare Continues....
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 1
Is a browser an Xbox or an SGML viewer?
Neither. However, when new computers are designed to run Vista, they shouldn't have a problem running any browser out there today. (Might be a problem trying to run both at once, though. Upgrade to XP, or Ubuntu.)
200MB+??????? Yeah. Right.
I no longer own a computer with less than 2 gigs of RAM. It can have 200 megs, no problem.
I'd much rather have it today, and stable, than in another five years, with half the features and half the reliability. That's why we don't use assembly.
Virtual Mac.
Ah, yes, because running binary code for another platform in an emulator is the fscking definition of "stealthy, tight code."
Ah, yes, open source. Like the EULA.
Like the EULA, which doesn't seem to apply to the source code. I wasn't required to agree to anything to download it.
There are tons of licenses on individual projects included in the distribution -- BSD and MIT in all flavors and sizes, GPL, MPL, and very few "all rights reserved" messages. I didn't notice any license that wasn't well-known.
Yes, the EULA sucks. Fortunately, it's the first thing I'm going to strip whenever it's possible to build a working Linux version.
If they're smart, they could do an nspluginwrapper-like coup and run the plugin itself in a separate (32-bit or 64-bit) process, while the browser is a 64-bit process.
2 gigs per Flash widget really should be enough for anyone. Hopefully, by the time that statement sounds pathetically outdated, Flash itself will be, too.
I want the same page to display the same way on Konqueror, Safari, IEWhatever, Chrome (please, a marketing guy needs a spanking), Opera, or whatever. Stop for a while and get it right guys.
Valid comment for IE8, maybe, but probably not for Chrome -- especially given that Chrome didn't write a rendering engine, they just took Webkit. (Didn't Webkit have the highest score on Acid3?)
An advantage of 64-bit Linux?
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I only use 64-bit Linux these days. Since Flash isn't 64-bit yet, it runs in a separate process from my 64-bit browser, thanks to nspluginwrapper.
The only problem is, when it does crash, it doesn't restart until I restart my browser. So, my browser is fine, but I won't be watching any more YouTube. Better than a crash, but not as good as it could be. If anyone knows enough about nspluginwrapper to fix this, it would be awesome -- maybe even for 32-bit users.
I believe Chrome does this, too -- but I would hope that, since they've done it deliberately, as a way to minimize the damage a plugin can do, they would also be able to handle plugin crashes more gracefully than requiring a full browser restart.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 1
Not unique to Blu-Ray, just a lot rarer in DVD. That, and ever since CSS was cracked, you could always choose a DVD player (VLC, anyone?) which makes them skippable again.
why not just let us download and burn it for $5.00? I'd put up with DRM's for that.
I'd pay the $5, but I wouldn't put up with DRM.
For that matter, iTunes offers DRM-free music, but I don't buy any of it, mostly because even for these songs, you have to purchase and download them through iTunes. Since iTunes will never have a Linux version, I end up buying music from people who let me buy downloadable things the old-fashioned way -- through a web browser.
Nitpicking, but "jscript" is actually not short for JavaScript. It's Microsoft's JavaScript implementation -- they didn't have the necessary trademark agreements, so they couldn't call it JavaScript, so they called it JScript and made it almost entirely compatible.
From what I can tell, this browser does actually use the term "JavaScript".
If you really want to get pedantic, it's actually EcmaScript.
Fine, but really the browser shouldn't crash often enough for this to mean anything at all. Can't recall the last time I crashed FF, so hey.
It shouldn't happen, but it does. Firefox 3 has been rock solid for me, yet I've seen it crash frequently for others. Konqueror is rock solid for others, but crashes frequently for me, especially when typing Slashdot comments (taking my entire comment with it).
And it's not just the process-per-tab -- it's also splitting the plugin out of the rendering process, so that a plugin crash won't crash your tab. Flash crashes all the time for me, on Linux -- fortunately, it's inside nspluginwrapper, so not in the same process, so my browser's still alive. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be) it means I have no Flash at all until I restart my browser.
Relatedly - no bookmarks menu
I would imagine that they intend the address bar to take its place -- but I haven't tried it, so I don't know.
Auto-run updaters should only be added for critical components like AV.
For what it's worth, your browser is at least as critical as AV -- moreso, because if you've got a secure browser, that's one less reason you need AV at all.
And as others have pointed out, its open source. I'm curious to see what license it's under, because frankly, after reading the comic, I can't wait for some of the stuff under the hood -- process-per-tab, JS speed, rock-solid Webkit, and actual tools to monitor performance (top only shows me which browser is using 100% CPU, not which tab).
But the privacy stuff bugs me a bit, and the lack of extensions (and Linux support) bugs me a lot. So I'll use Konqueror and Firefox, and I'll wait.
It could use some adblock, but I don't think noscript applies as much, with the tabs so thoroughly sandboxed, and the resource control stuff -- you can actually see how much CPU a given tab is using.
I must be missing something, then -- what's the use case for noscript?
I prefer to see ads so I can ignore those sites that use them in a particularly annoying way.
Well, you could also use a blocker which doesn't download the ads in the first place.
This way the more obnoxious ads cause page views, and eventually revenue, to go down.
I prefer to let ad views go down. That way, I'm further balancing the scales by also causing bandwidth.
I tend to run my own filters, and my personal criteria is, anything that moves is blocked, especially Flash. Static images are fine. Moving images distract me from the actual content, and Flash also sucks down tons of CPU.
Unfortunately, most Slashdot ads seem to be blocked now, through this process. After the first few times, I start blocking whole domains, and not long after that, I won't see any ads on that site at all.
Google made a name for themselves doing simple contextual ads. They've expanded their horizons since, but they're not going anywhere, so long as people with Adblock don't feel the need to filter text ads.
And, really, now:
they're paying good money for sites like Slashdot, 4chan and independent blogs to crow about how a fucking web browser is the third coming of Christ
So who was paying for it when these same sites declared Firefox as the same?
Has it occurred to you that an endorsement may actually just be that someone liked it, and not that they were paid off?
Re:A couple of annoying things I've found so far
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is pretty much take it or leave it. This is very evident with google talk, I liked the feel of it but eventually I just couldn't change one or two things that bugged me so I am not so fond of it now.
At least they seem to like open standards. Google Talk uses Jabber, which means I can use any Jabber client, and even my own Jabber server on my own domain, to talk to anyone using Gmail.
Same with this browser. If you really start to hate it, you can always use a different browser. Not so with, say, IE -- if you really start to hate it, there's still a fair chance that one site will force you to use it anyway.
For that matter:
we don't want to slip back into the days of IE 6 being all that web developers targeted.
It kind of is that way now. It's incredibly rare that I find a bug that only exists on, say, Firefox, or Safari, or even Konqueror. It's incredibly common that I find a bug that only exists on IE6.
So, while we don't only target IE6, it is still the only browser we have to jump through hoops for.
I might, at some point. But I very rarely do that, partly because of trojans, but mostly because I don't want to give them the satisfaction of proving them right.
See, they like to use their dropping sales as some sort of "proof" that it's all going to piracy -- and there's always plenty of piracy to support that. And they use that as an excuse to add even more DRM.
Of course, I realize they'll do that anyway. If sales go up, they'll say it's because the DRM is working -- so why stop now? If sales go down, they may well be right that it's because of piracy -- but they might be missing how much of the piracy is caused by DRM.
I'm willing to pay. I'm more than able -- I'm single, living cheaply in a small town, which gives me a fair amount of disposable income. If you make it easy -- even Steam has figured this out, mostly -- I'll gladly pay.
Slashdot Mirror
Which makes me realize two things:
First, "discussed" means there's nothing official, and no clear consensus.
Second, if it's possible to be addicted to, say, work -- what are we doing about that addiction? Why are MMOs worse?
Oh, and I meant sports as a sports fan, not an athlete -- as an athlete, that could at least be physical. But I'm honestly not sure if WoW has logged more time than, say, fantasy football.
Honestly, I have a set of disks at my house for halflife 2 I cannot play thanks to Steam. You see, I moved, and my old email address doesn't exist anymore.
I'm confused -- was there no way to tell Steam about the new email address? Was there no way to register a new account with the new email address?
It's not an entirely unsolvable problem, either. Domains are cheap, and Gmail is free.
Now, I will admit, I have almost lost my own account -- due to sheer disuse, I forgot the password. Since I was reinstalling from scratch, I had to go dig up my old installation, restore it to a virtual machine, and extract the password -- hardly something you'd expect to have to do for a game.
But then, when was the last time you lost, say, your bank account number? Some banks will insist on mailing you a new PIN, if you want to reset it -- what if you've moved? Again, not convenient, but not impossible, and not really unreasonable.
So, I see your point, but I find it much easier to keep track of a username, a password, and an email address, than to keep track of the original install media (and keep it in working order).
All this realism stuff gets on my nerves. Sure it looks more realistic but is it actually a better game?
Sometimes, yes.
I don't care about the graphics.
Yes, you do, you just don't realize it.
I've said it before, and probably better, but every part of the game affects gameplay, and can make a game better or worse. More realistic graphics can, in fact, make a game better.
Now, granted, Crysis was mostly about pretty pictures and who's got the bigger dic^Wvideo card. But that doesn't mean this particular game is going to be another Crysis.
Realism isn't always the best way to convey the most emotion and impact,
Not always, but sometimes.
Look at film. Certainly, there's a place for anime, and it often does a better job than a summer flick which is focused purely on pretty pictures. But there are also films which are vividly realistic, both in video ("graphics") and in story and dialog -- downright gritty. And everything in between.
Taking your example:
So the eyes flicker around in this new game like the eyes of people in a meeting just waiting for it to finish,
Have you never seen a movie which makes good use of facial expressions, even eyes?
So, regarding the whole "a tab crashing will no longer crash all other tabs" deal, how about we instead made it so no tab actually crashed?
Because isolating the tabs is somewhat difficult.
Writing a bug-free program is incredibly difficult. When that program depends on third-party plugins like Flash, it's also impossible, short of buying Adobe and making them get their shit together.
I'm with you, but realistically, there's not much of a downside to isolating tabs, and it gives us a more robust browser right now, without having to rewrite Webkit. And as a bonus, it gives us concurrent tabs, which means it's faster faster (on dual core) and more responsive (everywhere).
If I have 2 or 4 or 8 GB sitting there, why would I want my software to not use it?
Mostly, so that other software can.
What do I possibly gain by having a program that uses only 100 MB when it could be using 1 GB to keep more rendered pages in memory (and speed up the display when I hit "back" a couple of times), for example?
The problem here is that there's no common way to tell a program to free some cache. Suppose Firefox sucks down 1.5 gigs of your 2 gigs of RAM, because it was sitting unused. How does Firefox know, then, when you launch WoW, that you want a gig or so of that back? Is there a way it can know before it starts getting pushed out to swap space (or the Windows pagefile)?
But when you look at situations where memory really matters, you find that you can run Opera on pretty much any cellphone but you can't run Firefox.
Mostly because Opera has a mobile version, designed specifically for cell phones. Does Firefox?
plus a ful index of your e-mail, so you have instant page flips, instant mail searches, etc..
In the case of mail, that really doesn't need to be held in RAM by the client -- if you're searching your mail frequently, the index could as easily be kept on-disk. Just let the OS do the caching -- that way, when you launch WoW (as in the above example), rather than wasting space and time duplicating the same data in a pagefile, it could simply free that cache.
And that's the crux of it, I think -- there are a few very basic operations which should be understood, at the OS level (think kernel), and aren't.
Caching is one of them -- the OS has a filesystem cache, but no concept of a common API for applications to do their own caching. Browsers should be able to tell the OS, "Here's a bunch of data that I might want later, but you can nuke it if you're low on RAM." It would be a trivial API to write and learn, I'd think -- maybe more complex for the OS to implement, but they've already done it for filesystems.
I could go on. (Why not cache HTTP?) And on. (Transparent file compression?) But let's start there, at least, with the RAM usage -- honestly, rendering a page doesn't take so long that it'd bother you, if that's all it needed to do when you came back from your hypothetical WoW session. It'd actually be far worse if it had to pull that cached copy out of the pagefile.
At the same time, if you're viewing the same three or four rendered pages quite a lot (switching between tabs, or back and forth in the browser), you probably could afford to spend a few extra megs of RAM just on those pages.
Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution, short of patching the OS. And I don't know of an OS that does this right.
No, it wasn't, and I've never understood how Firefox came to be marketed so damn well. Whoever managed to seed the belief that Firefox was lean, small and fast did a superb job.
No, actually, it was lean, small, and fast. It's bloated quite a bit since it was Pheonix, and it's no longer marketed based on those qualities.
It's still fast, or at least, faster than Konqueror, for some things. The difference is, if I'm already in KDE, Konq loads in half a second. Firefox takes several seconds, even when the entire thing is already cached in RAM.
Also, I would say that the Mozilla suite was this bad -- for its time. I don't think I opened as many tabs then, and I don't think there was as much Flash then -- and it included a mail client, a chat client, a calendar, some sort of XUL console, and a newsreader -- am I missing anything?
But you can always try for yourself -- there may still be some modern Seamonkey builds somewhere.
I would say, yes from IE, no from Firefox.
And the performance is a "new" feature, and one not easily duplicated by Firefox, unless you're already on Tamarin -- and I'm not sure we know yet whether Tamarin beats V8.
You're thinking "extension" -- we're talking plugins.
Flash is particularly bad -- and, far too often, necessary.
When Flash crashes, I still have to restart the browser. Firefox doesn't crash because of it -- nor does Konqueror, for that matter -- but Flash never gets restarted until the browser does.
Of course, my biggest complaint is the speed, but I haven't used Flash on 32-bit Ubuntu for so long that I don't remember if it, for example, plays fullscreen HD video at a reasonable speed. (Because mplayer does.)
Is a browser an Xbox or an SGML viewer?
Neither. However, when new computers are designed to run Vista, they shouldn't have a problem running any browser out there today. (Might be a problem trying to run both at once, though. Upgrade to XP, or Ubuntu.)
200MB+??????? Yeah. Right.
I no longer own a computer with less than 2 gigs of RAM. It can have 200 megs, no problem.
I'd much rather have it today, and stable, than in another five years, with half the features and half the reliability. That's why we don't use assembly.
Virtual Mac.
Ah, yes, because running binary code for another platform in an emulator is the fscking definition of "stealthy, tight code."
Ah, yes, open source. Like the EULA.
Like the EULA, which doesn't seem to apply to the source code. I wasn't required to agree to anything to download it.
There are tons of licenses on individual projects included in the distribution -- BSD and MIT in all flavors and sizes, GPL, MPL, and very few "all rights reserved" messages. I didn't notice any license that wasn't well-known.
Yes, the EULA sucks. Fortunately, it's the first thing I'm going to strip whenever it's possible to build a working Linux version.
If they're smart, they could do an nspluginwrapper-like coup and run the plugin itself in a separate (32-bit or 64-bit) process, while the browser is a 64-bit process.
2 gigs per Flash widget really should be enough for anyone. Hopefully, by the time that statement sounds pathetically outdated, Flash itself will be, too.
I want the same page to display the same way on Konqueror, Safari, IEWhatever, Chrome (please, a marketing guy needs a spanking), Opera, or whatever. Stop for a while and get it right guys.
Valid comment for IE8, maybe, but probably not for Chrome -- especially given that Chrome didn't write a rendering engine, they just took Webkit. (Didn't Webkit have the highest score on Acid3?)
I only use 64-bit Linux these days. Since Flash isn't 64-bit yet, it runs in a separate process from my 64-bit browser, thanks to nspluginwrapper.
The only problem is, when it does crash, it doesn't restart until I restart my browser. So, my browser is fine, but I won't be watching any more YouTube. Better than a crash, but not as good as it could be. If anyone knows enough about nspluginwrapper to fix this, it would be awesome -- maybe even for 32-bit users.
I believe Chrome does this, too -- but I would hope that, since they've done it deliberately, as a way to minimize the damage a plugin can do, they would also be able to handle plugin crashes more gracefully than requiring a full browser restart.
A usable one?
Unskippable commercials?!!
Not unique to Blu-Ray, just a lot rarer in DVD. That, and ever since CSS was cracked, you could always choose a DVD player (VLC, anyone?) which makes them skippable again.
why not just let us download and burn it for $5.00? I'd put up with DRM's for that.
I'd pay the $5, but I wouldn't put up with DRM.
For that matter, iTunes offers DRM-free music, but I don't buy any of it, mostly because even for these songs, you have to purchase and download them through iTunes. Since iTunes will never have a Linux version, I end up buying music from people who let me buy downloadable things the old-fashioned way -- through a web browser.
Nitpicking, but "jscript" is actually not short for JavaScript. It's Microsoft's JavaScript implementation -- they didn't have the necessary trademark agreements, so they couldn't call it JavaScript, so they called it JScript and made it almost entirely compatible.
From what I can tell, this browser does actually use the term "JavaScript".
If you really want to get pedantic, it's actually EcmaScript.
So, it should refuse to support that at all?
Are you using Firefox? It has some support as well.
No adblocker (and probably never will be).
Open source, so if people actually like the app, it's inevitable that there will be.
Fine, but really the browser shouldn't crash often enough for this to mean anything at all. Can't recall the last time I crashed FF, so hey.
It shouldn't happen, but it does. Firefox 3 has been rock solid for me, yet I've seen it crash frequently for others. Konqueror is rock solid for others, but crashes frequently for me, especially when typing Slashdot comments (taking my entire comment with it).
And it's not just the process-per-tab -- it's also splitting the plugin out of the rendering process, so that a plugin crash won't crash your tab. Flash crashes all the time for me, on Linux -- fortunately, it's inside nspluginwrapper, so not in the same process, so my browser's still alive. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be) it means I have no Flash at all until I restart my browser.
Relatedly - no bookmarks menu
I would imagine that they intend the address bar to take its place -- but I haven't tried it, so I don't know.
Auto-run updaters should only be added for critical components like AV.
For what it's worth, your browser is at least as critical as AV -- moreso, because if you've got a secure browser, that's one less reason you need AV at all.
And as others have pointed out, its open source. I'm curious to see what license it's under, because frankly, after reading the comic, I can't wait for some of the stuff under the hood -- process-per-tab, JS speed, rock-solid Webkit, and actual tools to monitor performance (top only shows me which browser is using 100% CPU, not which tab).
But the privacy stuff bugs me a bit, and the lack of extensions (and Linux support) bugs me a lot. So I'll use Konqueror and Firefox, and I'll wait.
It could use some adblock, but I don't think noscript applies as much, with the tabs so thoroughly sandboxed, and the resource control stuff -- you can actually see how much CPU a given tab is using.
I must be missing something, then -- what's the use case for noscript?
I prefer to see ads so I can ignore those sites that use them in a particularly annoying way.
Well, you could also use a blocker which doesn't download the ads in the first place.
This way the more obnoxious ads cause page views, and eventually revenue, to go down.
I prefer to let ad views go down. That way, I'm further balancing the scales by also causing bandwidth.
I tend to run my own filters, and my personal criteria is, anything that moves is blocked, especially Flash. Static images are fine. Moving images distract me from the actual content, and Flash also sucks down tons of CPU.
Unfortunately, most Slashdot ads seem to be blocked now, through this process. After the first few times, I start blocking whole domains, and not long after that, I won't see any ads on that site at all.
Google made a name for themselves doing simple contextual ads. They've expanded their horizons since, but they're not going anywhere, so long as people with Adblock don't feel the need to filter text ads.
And, really, now:
they're paying good money for sites like Slashdot, 4chan and independent blogs to crow about how a fucking web browser is the third coming of Christ
So who was paying for it when these same sites declared Firefox as the same?
Has it occurred to you that an endorsement may actually just be that someone liked it, and not that they were paid off?
It is pretty much take it or leave it. This is very evident with google talk, I liked the feel of it but eventually I just couldn't change one or two things that bugged me so I am not so fond of it now.
At least they seem to like open standards. Google Talk uses Jabber, which means I can use any Jabber client, and even my own Jabber server on my own domain, to talk to anyone using Gmail.
Same with this browser. If you really start to hate it, you can always use a different browser. Not so with, say, IE -- if you really start to hate it, there's still a fair chance that one site will force you to use it anyway.
For that matter:
we don't want to slip back into the days of IE 6 being all that web developers targeted.
It kind of is that way now. It's incredibly rare that I find a bug that only exists on, say, Firefox, or Safari, or even Konqueror. It's incredibly common that I find a bug that only exists on IE6.
So, while we don't only target IE6, it is still the only browser we have to jump through hoops for.
Citation needed.
Last I checked, non-physical addictions were poorly defined, at best.
Is it possible to be addicted to sex? What about work? Or sports?
I might, at some point. But I very rarely do that, partly because of trojans, but mostly because I don't want to give them the satisfaction of proving them right.
See, they like to use their dropping sales as some sort of "proof" that it's all going to piracy -- and there's always plenty of piracy to support that. And they use that as an excuse to add even more DRM.
Of course, I realize they'll do that anyway. If sales go up, they'll say it's because the DRM is working -- so why stop now? If sales go down, they may well be right that it's because of piracy -- but they might be missing how much of the piracy is caused by DRM.
I'm willing to pay. I'm more than able -- I'm single, living cheaply in a small town, which gives me a fair amount of disposable income. If you make it easy -- even Steam has figured this out, mostly -- I'll gladly pay.