So Shoot Me I Like Internet Explorer 9!

[commodorejohn]

I stick with Firefox 1.5 and K-Meleon 1.5.4 - they do everything I need, and they're lighter than every alternative I've tried. (Haven't tried Chrome, because I don't trust Google as far as I could kick 'em.)

HTML5 is just wrong-headed. Don't get me wrong, HTML could use a revamp, but putting direct rendering control in the hands of Javascript programmers is like giving a chimpanzee a machine gun. Web designers are bad about (poorly) reinventing basic browser functionality now; by the time this stuff is commonplace, your whole processor load will be consumed by someone's shoddy Javascript-and-canvas implementation of a window manager, dropdown menus, and desktop environment.

(And, uh, wasn't it just ten short years ago that the same group of people now advocating for HTML5 were screaming at people to use CSS because "HTML is supposed to specify the content, not the layout!"?)

It's fun to watch browsers fumblingly recapitulate the history of window management. Someday we'll have xmonad as a Firefox extension.

[commodorejohn]

I have to cringe a little bit when reading this. Google is fine; there are much worse companies to worry about out there (Facebook for one). I've been using Google products for quite a while and I haven't had my identity stolen nor have advertisers shown up at my door, nor have I had my online banking info stolen or anything else related to privacy. I *am* biased as I used to work for Google in the past so take it however you like, but even after leaving them I'd still trust them with quite a bit.

Yes, Facebook is more evil - which is why I don't use it and never have. Doesn't change the fact that Google has (among other things) tried to strongarm GMail users into connecting their accounts to Google Buzz, spied on public wi-fi users, and played along with Chinese government censorship in order to get those few extra dollars in the bank. The worst company in existence? Maybe not. But not exactly an impressive record.

Canvas apps, even in most web pages, are going to be very specific to games and other types of full screen apps.

And Flash is going to be specific to games and multimedia, and will never be used to replace actual site functionality or make ads that talk to you. OH WAIT.

Also I would give modern day JavaScript developers more credit than you do. There are still some bad devs out there for sure, but there are some very talented ones too. And the number of talented JS devs is increasing every day due specifically to the fact JavaScript is growing in power and gaining the attention of others.

There may very well be some talented Javascript developers out there, but that doesn't change the fact that once you give a bad developer free reign, as HTML5 does, you're basically sunk. The site produced will be bad, and it doesn't matter how many good developers there are out there who could do it better, because you'd have to convince the site owners to hire a better developer and expend the time, money, and effort for a revamp, which they're not going to do.

And the quality of the Javascript is only part of the problem - the other part is that web designers use it in tons of places where it has absolutely no business being. Links are replaced with calls to JS functions which redirect the page, form-submit buttons are replaced with function calls to submit the form, hell, some pages even display page text via Javascript! It's hideous how common this crap is becoming. Giving JS devs more tools is only going to result in more unnecessarily JS-dependent websites.

There's already sites that are completely unreadable with NoScript activated; the more accepted this kind of thing becomes, the fewer sites will remain readable. I'm sorry, it's just really, really not worth the tradeoff.

[commodorejohn]

You're partly on linux right? I reeeally liked Epiphany back in the day, but I don't know how much it's progressed these days

Actually no, I've done a number of switchover attempts but I finally gave up after the last one in November. Last I saw of Epiphany, it's pretty alright; it's not a massive memory hog like later versions of Firefox, if nothing else. My problem with it is it's part of the whole GNOME tangle, which means it's going to get "updated" for GNOME 3, if it hasn't already :/

[commodorejohn]

Somehow Google always comes out as the Great Satan - not MS though, the company that pretty much put the term "anti trust suit" into modern vocabulary.

I think it's because Microsoft has been pretty transparently sinister since about the time they announced Windows just after getting a good look at what the Mac Team was cooking up over at Apple. Google got to be the garage-startup darlings of the early-2000s web-Renaissance before maturing into a solid tech company, so they've always enjoyed good PR; consequently, they feel more insidious in their evil than MS does.