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Unfortunately, it started a few years ago when Gruber took a break from writing anything interesting and decided to focus all of his energy for months on the thoroughly uninteresting wi-fi macbook hack story (on which he was ultimately pretty wrong).

There have been some real gems in the last year, like when Gruber took it upon himself to declare the A4 the most advanced mobile computing chip ever created (despite knowing essentially nothing about what the A4 actually was).

I honestly don't remember what Gruber wrote about the Macbook hack, but I remember us writing about it (back when we blogged current events in security), and I remember a back-and-forth with Gruber, and why I'm bringing this up is: do we actually know anything definitive about what happened with the wifi hack?

I'm not sure we do, 'boucher.

Also (from right now) it seems that Gruber doesn't know what browser sniffing is (or at least pretends to), but still has an opinion:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/04/html5-safari-ope...

Yeah, this piece really riled me.

I agree with the original post, he has been pushing harder and harder on Apple doing the right things with its control complex, whereas previously he wouldn't have done. If you swapped "Apple" from some of the pieces on the App Store and HTML5 stuff with "Microsoft" or "Adobe", you could be sure he'd be a frothy mess.

I loved the Gruber of old. Where's he gone? Why is it just "If you don't love Apple, you can git out?" Fortunately, at least Wil Shipley has been holding his feet to the fire on Twitter, but I don't know why Gruber's gone this route at all.

But he does now (a couple of hours later):

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/04/modernizr

Apparently after reading HN:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/04/df-hn

More likely from seeing my tweet: http://twitter.com/KuraFire/status/15401140612

What’s hard to understand about Apple’s pages?

> The demos below show how Apple’s Safari web browser supports the capabilities of web standards such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.

Gruber’s point is this: if Opera wants some better “HTML5” demos (presumably that work across browsers, and don’t just “use HTML5 as a buzzword”) they can easily make some themselves. Why should Apple be responsible for making sure their Safari promotion showcase works perfectly in every other browser?

As for why they block other browsers: probably some or most of the demos break in some way or another. If a naive user with (say) Firefox visited a page and the layout looked like shit and nothing worked, the user would quite reasonably think that Apple’s site was broken.

> Why should Apple be responsible for making sure their Safari promotion showcase works perfectly in every other browser?

Because the whole point of the exercise is to show how standards-compliant, open, web apps work so great on iPhone OS. Except by excluding every browser but Safari, it may as well be a front for the App Store. It might be standards-compliant, but it sure as heck isn't open or inclusive. In that regard, even Flash runs in more browsers than this showcase does.

It seems to me that these are really WebKit demos, which is the defacto standard for mobile browsing. Historically, I think that standards have caught up with practice on the Web, rather than the other way around.

I don’t think that’s actually the point of the exercise, from Apple’s perspective. (Even though they use “openness” and so on as buzzwords.)

Instead, as far as I can tell, the primary point is to promote Safari and prove that Flash is unneeded to make pretty neat graphics/interactive thingums.

Opera is maybe justified in being miffed if Apple can get traction off the back of using “open” and “HTML5” as buzzwords, but I really don’t think the primary audience for this showcase knows or cares much one way or the other what HTML5 really means.

Why are you irritated that Apple is making it hard for Firefox and Chrome users to see an advertisement for HTML5?

> The demos below show how Apple’s Safari web browser supports the capabilities of web standards such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.

Just sayin.

Actually, Safari is the only actual browser allowed on the iPhone/iPad. Also, it IS open/inclusive. Anyone can code his web app for the iPhone/iPad, and they have to target Safari, but they can code anything the want and bypass the App Store.

("Opera for the iPhone" is using a mediator service, and as such is not a real web browser).

> Actually Bing shows a random professional image, not one of your choice from your photo album.

I think you kind of missed the point. To whit: putting an image behind the search engine homepage is a stupid gimmick which adds nothing to the value to my search results.

Normal people love this kind of stuff. When they use a computer they like to see their kids photos all over the place, or their beach house they saved up for, or their dogs, or whatever. They want their computer desktop to be like their physical desktop.

Just because you don't appreciate it doesn't mean it's a "stupid gimmick".

EDIT: clarify a point

Maybe. Google’s draw (for me, and I assume for at least some others) was always that it took a cut the bullshit, focus on the results approach.

Not really, in ChromeOS, the google homepage will be kind of like your desktop. So putting a picture there is like putting a picture on your desktop wallpaper. Also, Google.com/ig has been themable for years, so allowing to put pictures is not a copy of bing IMO, just an improvement of the theme feature.

Okay, well even if you think that having a customizable search-engine backdrop picture is a killer feature, can’t we at least agree that Gruber’s snarky joke implying it’s just as gimmicky as Bing’s non-customizable search-engine backdrop picture is still just a joke, and not really proof that he’s biased against Google in general?

have you seen him doing those kind of snarky jokes about apple? ever?

what about (back in the day) microsoft, (recently) adobe and (since the january battle call) google?

all the time?

> have you seen him doing those kind of snarky jokes about apple? ever?

Yes. Numerous times. I’m not really in the mood to go skimming through the several months of archives it would take to find a good example.

To be honest though, Microsoft is much easier to ridicule, because they have much looser control over their messaging, and so it’s not terribly surprising that a generally Apple-oriented commentator could consistently poke fun at them.

A recent example of snark against Apple. Gruber had generally seemed to think that has been reasonable in deal with Gizmodo and the acquired iPhone. However, when Jobs was reported to have said that Apple had to stand by it's core values in dealing withrge situation, Gruber said he wasn't sure what core value that might be, other than "don't fuck with us." ( http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/02/jobs-slide ). That sounds just a but snarky to me. You can read this snark againt Apple on the current front page at DaringFireball, not far from the one about Google. It's not unusual for Gruber to write snarky things about Apple. People who say otherwise: a) don't read Gruber and have no idea what he says and are thus unqualified to comment on his content, or b) do read him, but are so biased against him that their selective memory taints their ability to make objective comments.

Funnily enough, my own thoughts about Gruber becoming annoying recently (after reading him for years) is because Gruber has started commenting on things he doesn't understand the facts of

If you think he's annoying, stop reading what he posts?

There are a people pushing words around on the Internet that are outlandish or that others don't agree with. Thankfully, most of them don't result in hundreds of comments and discussions over their shortcomings.