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Comment by gpvos | Hacker News Reader

I used to agree, but even I now sometimes use the camera of my phone.

There's an important difference between hardware and software. Hardware takes up space. It would probably be better to have a dedicated DSLR and a dedicated radio communication device that have a standard method of interoperability, if not for the fact that you'd have to carry them both around. You'd have better quality photos, and could take both wide-angle and zoomed shots, and you could swap out your camera to suit your needs, instead of always having the one camera soldered onto your phone.

Software takes up no space.

I agree and understand; I was being a bit facetious there. However, I actually still don't quite understand why browsers can play video and audio. I much rather play those in dedicated software, to the extent that I regularly view the source of such pages to figure out the URL of the media to be played. I guess this is because of ease of use for the average user, and occasionally for DRM, but it annoys me to no end. Playing all video or audio in the same software means a much better and consistent user interface for things like rewind, pause, full screen, etc.

Definitely agree. If you want a remedy for the specific problem of audio and video, you could come up with some browser + youtube-dl integration. I've been using such a setup for the past year, watching web audio and video in mpv. It's great to have a consistent video player interface, as you said, but you also get powerful features you don't often see in web players, like gamma adjustment, playback speed control and an audio compressor.

That's a very good point, some things are very good at doing everything.

But I don't think that should apply to the browser. Firefox already gives you extensions, which means you can add to it whatever you need.

Would you say the browser should come with a painter program by default? Maybe a file manager too? What about a specific program to print for a specific printer?

At what point should you stop reinventing the wheel?

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