Actually, yes. You can own your Apple hardware. It's not Apple, but AT&T via contract which locked you out of the iPhone.
Then why is it exactly the same on every other carrier? And why is it different on Android?
Use a dev license on it and write your own, or install someone else's code on it.
The dev license is a yearly subscription, so that's more like renting my own hardware. It also expressly forbids distributing without the app store -- thus, I can't install someone else's code, I can only write my own and use it on my own device -- and then, only for as long as I have a valid license.
Or I could just buy an Android or Moblin device, and actually do what I want with it.
Facebook - you do own your own data. If you "give" it to FB, well, you did give it too them. Don't want them to have it? Don't give it to them.
That's more or less my point about Apple. It does not, however, excuse the behavior of either of them.
they also cut down heavily on the likelihood of malware.
This is and has always been a bullshit argument.
Out of the box, Linux has a free "app store" of sorts. It's called a repository. If you stick to what's available through your distro's repository, you cut down heavily on the likelihood of malware. If you download random crap from the Internet, you're on your own.
But you still have the ability to download random crap from the Internet. It's not necessarily easy, but there's no DRM or legal agreement standing in your way.
On Android, there's at least one app store, and you can stick to that. Or you can download random crap from the Internet. Again, it's trivial to keep malware off the phone.
Notice the difference? With the iPhone, you're no more likely to get malware than you would be by adopting similar habits on other phones. It just forces you to do that. It's like the difference between making a bicycle helmet available for those who want one, and refusing to sell you a bike until they've grafted a helmet to your head.
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple.
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 1
It is funny to defend one closed platform against another.
It would be funny, if that's what I was doing.
Flash is evil and needs to die. Apple is killing it, for which I am grateful. But the way Apple is going about it is evil and has a lot of collateral damage.
I would be all over Apple for not allowing Flash.
Flash is not the point. The point is that people are whining about not being able to do what they want on what is and always has been a closed platform. Note that I also can't develop iPhone apps in Ruby, which is open and something I actually want to use.
Why people want the iPhone to be even more closed
Open-ness is a funny thing -- it entails choice, including the choice to use something closed.
Compare the iPhone to the PC as a platform. Windows may be proprietary, but I can install any software I want. I can install something open (like Firefox) or something closed (like Flash). Linux is even more open in that I can change the source if I really want, but it also provides the same exact choice, right down to installing Flash if I want it.
Forcing people to use an open standard, while it will ultimately be good for the standard and can be seen as a good thing, is still a much more restrictive move.
Let me put it this way: Say I blew away your Windows installation and forced you to install Linux. You could choose any Linux, and you'd of course get full source code, so it's a "more open" choice. But I've robbed you of your choice to use Windows, which makes me kind of a dick. That's roughly what Apple is doing here.
Look at PDF. It is closed and it has rules,
Sorry, what? No it's not. PDF is an open standard, with many compatible open implementations.
In fact, Flash is trying to be -- apparently, SWF is open -- but there are no good competing implementations.
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple.
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Flash is just as closed as anything Apple or Microsoft puts out there.
Nope. Flash is closed-source. Apple is both closed-source and closed-access, which is a very different thing.
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple.
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I really wish everyone would quit whining
If you don't like it, don't listen.
If you don't like it, don't buy it, don't develop for it.
Check. Now what?
Watch the rest of my profession, and a large chunk of the general public, be pulled into this trap? Or speak out against it?
I want what the iPhone should have been, and what Android still has a chance of becoming. That is not going to happen if all of us just sit down, shut up, and let Apple take all the marketshare. There absolutely is a PR battle to be fought over this, and I am going to continue to warn people away from walled gardens as long as they will listen, until the only people left in those gardens are their creators.
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple.
on
Flash Is Not a Right
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
That's what happens when you don't know how to program! You choose one language one platform over all others.
Why is it that everyone assumes I am pro-Flash, simply because I dislike Apple's stand on this matter?
I'm glad Flash is slowly dying. I just don't like the way Apple's chosen to kill it.
As for forcing people to learn multiple languages and multiple platforms, that's a very good thing, but having to completely rewrite an app from the ground up for multiple platforms is a bad thing.
Flash may be proprietary itself, but there's a large extent to which it doesn't dictate what you can do with it.
Apple dictates what software you can develop for their mobile products to an absurd level -- everything from what tools you may use to what kind of morality is appropriate (no porn for you).
I don't like either of them, and I am glad to see Apple kill Flash, but I despise the way they're doing it.
You signed away this "right" by picking Apple.
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 5, Insightful
That's what happens when you choose a closed platform.
So then you freetards need to stop whining when 99% of the world choices not to use or support your shitty OS.
99% of the world does use our OS. You're likely doing it right now. Or did you think Slashdot runs on IIS?
And not that it'd make much difference to an obvious troll, but I use proprietary software when appropriate, and I am in favor of open source, not necessarily "free software." Not every Linux user is RMS. (And if they were, they probably wouldn't be Linux users.)
depending on the architecture and bus, the SATA frequency can vary if you're playing with the FSB. It's usually the last 2 ports, ie if you've got 6 it'd be 5 and 6, it's usually in the manual. If you touch the bus frequency and that affects the SATA ports any, WHAM there's your data corruption.
Hmm. That could be it -- though again, it worked fine, often for weeks or months at a time, before I'd actually see the corruption (or crashes).
See? More trivia I'd have to learn, certainly not something I'd necessarily find out in 45 minutes.
I needed that "fast" _now_ from the cheapest component possible, to play Unreal Tournament 3.
I would again ask why -- a cheap computer now can play amazing games from 2-3 years ago. That also means that much more time for the community and reviewers to filter out the games that are crap, for the developer to fix the bugs, and for the DRM to be well and thoroughly cracked.
I'm also a bit skeptical that any game, new or not, needs $900 worth of CPU power alone.
And while I might actually accept the risk of screwing something up on a gaming machine, my current one is also a work machine, which makes sense -- if I'm going to build something powerful enough to game, it's also going to be a lot nicer to work with. With that in mind... If me screwing up part of the overclock results in my savegame being corrupted, or my game machine crashing, that's one thing. If it results in work being corrupted, or my work machine crashing in the middle of the day, that's a bit worse.
As for tabs, if I middle click my home button (since my iGoogle homepage has RSS feeds to various other sites) in firefox that tab is automatically given focus.
Unless you're using some other definition of "middle click", that's not what Firefox does for me.
if other programs allow this to be customized, why can't Chrome?
I actually agree with you on this point. It's not high on my list of things I want customized, and I much prefer a browser that's easy (for me) to extend, but Firefox does seem to let me customize more.
your privacy is unquestionably comporomised to some degree by joining the address and search bars.
Not really, given you can (again) disable this functionality and go with the more traditional mode of pointing a new tab at Google itself and typing in there for search. Maybe I'm weird, but ctrl+t, hit 'g', hit enter as it suggests google.com from your history, and then start typing, really doesn't seem that much more difficult than clicking on a separate search bar.
Other browsers have the same functionality while retaining your privacy by breaking these bars apart.
I don't agree that it's the same functionality. Again, the current mode is, "Go to the single bar and type where you want to go." It'll pull suggestions from everywhere -- history, search, everywhere -- and unless you end up typing a full URL, you can hit enter at any point to just take the top suggestion.
What you call a "rat's nest", we call "compatibility", and it works surprisingly well. Writing a game? Use OpenAL -- the distro will configure it to work. Need realtime audio for a DAW? Use JACK. Anything else? Use ALSA.
What if you picked the "wrong one"? Doesn't really matter. If you managed to build a decent DAW on top of ALSA, it'll continue to work on top of ALSA. If you used OSS, that still works today.
Video APIs? Flash has its own codecs, so all you need to know is xvideo.
Seriously, you have even less of an excuse than people who bitch about how Linux has both GNOME and KDE, and oh, the horrors of actually having a choice.
I'm not measuring the time to overclock, though that alone was several hours -- reading up on how to test it, finding the right settings, tweak, tweak a little more, make sure it works, meanwhile endless reboots to boot Windows and run Prime95 or SuperPI, then reboot to the BIOS to tweak settings, read forums to find out the right settings to use...
If you're still running within 6hours, you're good to go.
So in addition to what I discussed above, my shiny new computer is completely unusable for much longer than just 45 minutes while I do all of the above.
And remember, that was just the first part. Rinse and repeat in a few weeks when I get sick of my computer crashing for no apparent reason -- and that's after spending several hours trying to figure out whether it was a software problem or not, running various antivirus/antispyware tools, reinstalling Windows to see if that helps, trying a different filesystem on Linux, etc.
And then do it again when clocking it back didn't help. And then again.
Keep in mind, in each of these cases, it did have something like Prime95 running overnight without issues. It was rock-solid stable, except the few moments when it wasn't. It only takes a few moments to baloon into hours trying to figure out WTF went wrong.
If nothing else, going with the stock settings means I can at least eliminate an improper overclock from the list of things to check when shit starts to break. It means I now have a fairly reliable set of tools to test hardware (check SMART, run memtest), and if that works, I can assume it's a software problem and work from there.
You also ignored the point about patience. Why even spend the 45 minutes (plus the extra time without a usable computer) when a cheap, stock PC available in another 2 years will easily be faster than your custom overclocked rig?
I've been overclocking for 5 years and have yet to have any data corruption. Partly that depends on the architecture, and partly on if you've got your hard drives connected to the locked SATA ports.
Locked what now? And why does this matter, considering I had no issues at all once I turned off the overclock?
But the question is WHY would you like to open a PDF inside a browser window...
I don't know. Why would you want to view a PNG inside a browser window?
can someone tell me what am I missing by opening a PDF file in a specific pdf reader
Same thing you'd miss by disabling images and forcing everything to an external viewer. Think about sites like SlideShare. Flash is bad, right? So one obvious way to implement SlideShare without Flash would be with an iframe'd PDF. I know I've written at least one web app which depends on PDFs.
In Chrome's case, it's especially annoying, as Chrome wants to download everything to the Downloads folder before viewing, and (for obvious reasons) never cleans up after that folder. I'd probably care a lot less if it went to a temporary file, but there's still no particular reason for it to open in a separate application, rather than a new tab.
When I was using Konqueror, it made sense -- Okular was the external PDF viewer, and it was also (via a KPart) the in-browser PDF viewer. Now, that same process consists of watching the browser go to some random blank page, or even a blank page in a new tab, then save, then I click the downloaded file from the download bar, then I have to remember to go delete it when I'm done -- that's a major regression.
I understand why you'd want to develop apps natively for the browser. I understand why you'd sometimes want native apps.
But this really seems odd. Why would I ever want to do this from anything other than a native VNC app? KRDC already has a tabbed interface anyway. The only place this seems useful is if you want remote access to your desktop from any random, untrusted terminal, which is a bad idea to begin with.
-Fixed buttons in the toolbar being one of the most retarded aspects of chrome.
Who uses toolbar buttons? Seriously? That's what keyboard shortcuts are for.
-Only part of the default browser theme uses aero, making it look very inconsistent depending on what your aero theme looks like.
You can turn on native window decorations, if you really want.
-Bad tab behavior defaults, like if I open a new tab in firefox, by default the tab is focused. Not so in chrome; not without holding shift.
What?
In Firefox, if I middle-click on a link, by default, it opens in a new background tab. If I press the "new tab" button or hit ctrl+T, I get a new tab, with focus on the new tab.
This is exactly the same as the default Chrome behavior.
-Wide, overlapping tabs aren't very appealing,
They resize when you get enough of them. I find the way this is handled to be much more appealing than Firefox's habit of having a minimum tab length, and eventually starting a new row of tabs.
uncustomizable positioning of all tabs being above the address bar.
Meh. I think if this is the one thing holding you back, you're a bit too picky.
Slashdot Mirror
Tricky -- I'm not sure whether Okular provides an actual plugin. I'll look into it later.
And that was a typo on my part -- it's not "plugins" per se, but I want PDF in the browser, from acroread or otherwise.
Apple's dictating what tools you may use to develop software you wish to distribute through their distribution channel.
Name an alternate legal distribution channel, then.
I'm sure the Cydia store
Nope! Not legal; requires violating the DMCA to get a jailbroken device.
If you don't like Apple's rules, there's always Android.
Yes, there is. I'm still going to bitch about Apple's rules until either Apple changes the rules, or Apple goes away.
Actually, yes. You can own your Apple hardware. It's not Apple, but AT&T via contract which locked you out of the iPhone.
Then why is it exactly the same on every other carrier? And why is it different on Android?
Use a dev license on it and write your own, or install someone else's code on it.
The dev license is a yearly subscription, so that's more like renting my own hardware. It also expressly forbids distributing without the app store -- thus, I can't install someone else's code, I can only write my own and use it on my own device -- and then, only for as long as I have a valid license.
Or I could just buy an Android or Moblin device, and actually do what I want with it.
Facebook - you do own your own data. If you "give" it to FB, well, you did give it too them. Don't want them to have it? Don't give it to them.
That's more or less my point about Apple. It does not, however, excuse the behavior of either of them.
Except that it's likely actually illegal to jailbreak your phone, thanks to the DMCA.
Contrast that with the legal right to do whatever the fuck I want to my TV, with the worst possible penalty being a void warranty.
That analogy works. An "unsupported tuner" as in, an unsupported source of video -- like, say, a game console, DVD player, or satellite receiver?
they also cut down heavily on the likelihood of malware.
This is and has always been a bullshit argument.
Out of the box, Linux has a free "app store" of sorts. It's called a repository. If you stick to what's available through your distro's repository, you cut down heavily on the likelihood of malware. If you download random crap from the Internet, you're on your own.
But you still have the ability to download random crap from the Internet. It's not necessarily easy, but there's no DRM or legal agreement standing in your way.
On Android, there's at least one app store, and you can stick to that. Or you can download random crap from the Internet. Again, it's trivial to keep malware off the phone.
Notice the difference? With the iPhone, you're no more likely to get malware than you would be by adopting similar habits on other phones. It just forces you to do that. It's like the difference between making a bicycle helmet available for those who want one, and refusing to sell you a bike until they've grafted a helmet to your head.
It is funny to defend one closed platform against another.
It would be funny, if that's what I was doing.
Flash is evil and needs to die. Apple is killing it, for which I am grateful. But the way Apple is going about it is evil and has a lot of collateral damage.
I would be all over Apple for not allowing Flash.
Flash is not the point. The point is that people are whining about not being able to do what they want on what is and always has been a closed platform. Note that I also can't develop iPhone apps in Ruby, which is open and something I actually want to use.
Why people want the iPhone to be even more closed
Open-ness is a funny thing -- it entails choice, including the choice to use something closed.
Compare the iPhone to the PC as a platform. Windows may be proprietary, but I can install any software I want. I can install something open (like Firefox) or something closed (like Flash). Linux is even more open in that I can change the source if I really want, but it also provides the same exact choice, right down to installing Flash if I want it.
Forcing people to use an open standard, while it will ultimately be good for the standard and can be seen as a good thing, is still a much more restrictive move.
Let me put it this way: Say I blew away your Windows installation and forced you to install Linux. You could choose any Linux, and you'd of course get full source code, so it's a "more open" choice. But I've robbed you of your choice to use Windows, which makes me kind of a dick. That's roughly what Apple is doing here.
Look at PDF. It is closed and it has rules,
Sorry, what? No it's not. PDF is an open standard, with many compatible open implementations.
In fact, Flash is trying to be -- apparently, SWF is open -- but there are no good competing implementations.
Flash is just as closed as anything Apple or Microsoft puts out there.
Nope. Flash is closed-source. Apple is both closed-source and closed-access, which is a very different thing.
I really wish everyone would quit whining
If you don't like it, don't listen.
If you don't like it, don't buy it, don't develop for it.
Check. Now what?
Watch the rest of my profession, and a large chunk of the general public, be pulled into this trap? Or speak out against it?
I want what the iPhone should have been, and what Android still has a chance of becoming. That is not going to happen if all of us just sit down, shut up, and let Apple take all the marketshare. There absolutely is a PR battle to be fought over this, and I am going to continue to warn people away from walled gardens as long as they will listen, until the only people left in those gardens are their creators.
That's what happens when you don't know how to program! You choose one language one platform over all others.
Why is it that everyone assumes I am pro-Flash, simply because I dislike Apple's stand on this matter?
I'm glad Flash is slowly dying. I just don't like the way Apple's chosen to kill it.
As for forcing people to learn multiple languages and multiple platforms, that's a very good thing, but having to completely rewrite an app from the ground up for multiple platforms is a bad thing.
WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR POINT?
My point is, TFA is right. For example:
most people don't mind which is why there are tons of iPhone apps.
If you really don't mind, I don't want to hear you bitching about the lack of Flash support. You should've seen this coming. That is my point.
I bet half the people who bitch on Slashdot aren't even devs but children trying to be edgy (the majority of Flash "developers").
I am not now and never have been a Flash developer.
It's this stupid "me me me" crap that pervades everything here
Because people who develop and release open source software are clearly doing so out of pure, unadulterated selfishness?
it's worse than the made up demons of Apple and Facebook
Oh, so there's a real Apple somewhere which lets me actually own my own hardware? Or a real Facebook which lets me own my own data?
You can do that, provided you pay for their development kit (isn't that a yearly subscription?), or jailbreak your own phone.
Flash may be proprietary itself, but there's a large extent to which it doesn't dictate what you can do with it.
Apple dictates what software you can develop for their mobile products to an absurd level -- everything from what tools you may use to what kind of morality is appropriate (no porn for you).
I don't like either of them, and I am glad to see Apple kill Flash, but I despise the way they're doing it.
That's what happens when you choose a closed platform.
So then you freetards need to stop whining when 99% of the world choices not to use or support your shitty OS.
99% of the world does use our OS. You're likely doing it right now. Or did you think Slashdot runs on IIS?
And not that it'd make much difference to an obvious troll, but I use proprietary software when appropriate, and I am in favor of open source, not necessarily "free software." Not every Linux user is RMS. (And if they were, they probably wouldn't be Linux users.)
depending on the architecture and bus, the SATA frequency can vary if you're playing with the FSB. It's usually the last 2 ports, ie if you've got 6 it'd be 5 and 6, it's usually in the manual. If you touch the bus frequency and that affects the SATA ports any, WHAM there's your data corruption.
Hmm. That could be it -- though again, it worked fine, often for weeks or months at a time, before I'd actually see the corruption (or crashes).
See? More trivia I'd have to learn, certainly not something I'd necessarily find out in 45 minutes.
I needed that "fast" _now_ from the cheapest component possible, to play Unreal Tournament 3.
I would again ask why -- a cheap computer now can play amazing games from 2-3 years ago. That also means that much more time for the community and reviewers to filter out the games that are crap, for the developer to fix the bugs, and for the DRM to be well and thoroughly cracked.
I'm also a bit skeptical that any game, new or not, needs $900 worth of CPU power alone.
And while I might actually accept the risk of screwing something up on a gaming machine, my current one is also a work machine, which makes sense -- if I'm going to build something powerful enough to game, it's also going to be a lot nicer to work with. With that in mind... If me screwing up part of the overclock results in my savegame being corrupted, or my game machine crashing, that's one thing. If it results in work being corrupted, or my work machine crashing in the middle of the day, that's a bit worse.
As for tabs, if I middle click my home button (since my iGoogle homepage has RSS feeds to various other sites) in firefox that tab is automatically given focus.
Unless you're using some other definition of "middle click", that's not what Firefox does for me.
if other programs allow this to be customized, why can't Chrome?
I actually agree with you on this point. It's not high on my list of things I want customized, and I much prefer a browser that's easy (for me) to extend, but Firefox does seem to let me customize more.
your privacy is unquestionably comporomised to some degree by joining the address and search bars.
Not really, given you can (again) disable this functionality and go with the more traditional mode of pointing a new tab at Google itself and typing in there for search. Maybe I'm weird, but ctrl+t, hit 'g', hit enter as it suggests google.com from your history, and then start typing, really doesn't seem that much more difficult than clicking on a separate search bar.
Other browsers have the same functionality while retaining your privacy by breaking these bars apart.
I don't agree that it's the same functionality. Again, the current mode is, "Go to the single bar and type where you want to go." It'll pull suggestions from everywhere -- history, search, everywhere -- and unless you end up typing a full URL, you can hit enter at any point to just take the top suggestion.
Pick one.
What you call a "rat's nest", we call "compatibility", and it works surprisingly well. Writing a game? Use OpenAL -- the distro will configure it to work. Need realtime audio for a DAW? Use JACK. Anything else? Use ALSA.
What if you picked the "wrong one"? Doesn't really matter. If you managed to build a decent DAW on top of ALSA, it'll continue to work on top of ALSA. If you used OSS, that still works today.
Video APIs? Flash has its own codecs, so all you need to know is xvideo.
Seriously, you have even less of an excuse than people who bitch about how Linux has both GNOME and KDE, and oh, the horrors of actually having a choice.
How did it take you 45 hours to overclock it?
I'm not measuring the time to overclock, though that alone was several hours -- reading up on how to test it, finding the right settings, tweak, tweak a little more, make sure it works, meanwhile endless reboots to boot Windows and run Prime95 or SuperPI, then reboot to the BIOS to tweak settings, read forums to find out the right settings to use...
If you're still running within 6hours, you're good to go.
So in addition to what I discussed above, my shiny new computer is completely unusable for much longer than just 45 minutes while I do all of the above.
And remember, that was just the first part. Rinse and repeat in a few weeks when I get sick of my computer crashing for no apparent reason -- and that's after spending several hours trying to figure out whether it was a software problem or not, running various antivirus/antispyware tools, reinstalling Windows to see if that helps, trying a different filesystem on Linux, etc.
And then do it again when clocking it back didn't help. And then again.
Keep in mind, in each of these cases, it did have something like Prime95 running overnight without issues. It was rock-solid stable, except the few moments when it wasn't. It only takes a few moments to baloon into hours trying to figure out WTF went wrong.
If nothing else, going with the stock settings means I can at least eliminate an improper overclock from the list of things to check when shit starts to break. It means I now have a fairly reliable set of tools to test hardware (check SMART, run memtest), and if that works, I can assume it's a software problem and work from there.
You also ignored the point about patience. Why even spend the 45 minutes (plus the extra time without a usable computer) when a cheap, stock PC available in another 2 years will easily be faster than your custom overclocked rig?
I've been overclocking for 5 years and have yet to have any data corruption. Partly that depends on the architecture, and partly on if you've got your hard drives connected to the locked SATA ports.
Locked what now? And why does this matter, considering I had no issues at all once I turned off the overclock?
But the question is WHY would you like to open a PDF inside a browser window...
I don't know. Why would you want to view a PNG inside a browser window?
can someone tell me what am I missing by opening a PDF file in a specific pdf reader
Same thing you'd miss by disabling images and forcing everything to an external viewer. Think about sites like SlideShare. Flash is bad, right? So one obvious way to implement SlideShare without Flash would be with an iframe'd PDF. I know I've written at least one web app which depends on PDFs.
In Chrome's case, it's especially annoying, as Chrome wants to download everything to the Downloads folder before viewing, and (for obvious reasons) never cleans up after that folder. I'd probably care a lot less if it went to a temporary file, but there's still no particular reason for it to open in a separate application, rather than a new tab.
When I was using Konqueror, it made sense -- Okular was the external PDF viewer, and it was also (via a KPart) the in-browser PDF viewer. Now, that same process consists of watching the browser go to some random blank page, or even a blank page in a new tab, then save, then I click the downloaded file from the download bar, then I have to remember to go delete it when I'm done -- that's a major regression.
I understand why you'd want to develop apps natively for the browser. I understand why you'd sometimes want native apps.
But this really seems odd. Why would I ever want to do this from anything other than a native VNC app? KRDC already has a tabbed interface anyway. The only place this seems useful is if you want remote access to your desktop from any random, untrusted terminal, which is a bad idea to begin with.
If it really bothers you, it should be trivial to add as an extension.
-Fixed buttons in the toolbar being one of the most retarded aspects of chrome.
Who uses toolbar buttons? Seriously? That's what keyboard shortcuts are for.
-Only part of the default browser theme uses aero, making it look very inconsistent depending on what your aero theme looks like.
You can turn on native window decorations, if you really want.
-Bad tab behavior defaults, like if I open a new tab in firefox, by default the tab is focused. Not so in chrome; not without holding shift.
What?
In Firefox, if I middle-click on a link, by default, it opens in a new background tab. If I press the "new tab" button or hit ctrl+T, I get a new tab, with focus on the new tab.
This is exactly the same as the default Chrome behavior.
-Wide, overlapping tabs aren't very appealing,
They resize when you get enough of them. I find the way this is handled to be much more appealing than Firefox's habit of having a minimum tab length, and eventually starting a new row of tabs.
uncustomizable positioning of all tabs being above the address bar.
Meh. I think if this is the one thing holding you back, you're a bit too picky.
I don't want acroread. I want plugins. Okular would be fine.