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Comment by torstenvl | Hacker News Reader

Deeply disappointing. O'Reilly had some really good things going for it, and it just decided to flush it down the drain.

This is on par with Apple moving to butterfly switch keyboards across its entire laptop line, or Netscape deciding to ditch its browser and rewrite it from scratch. Tragic, user-hostile blunders. And it wouldn't completely surprise me if this marked the beginning of the end for O'Reilly.

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You remember a different Netscape than I do. Netscape was the kind of browser you hated to recommend to a loved one. The experience was truly subpar. When Firebird was announced, the user experience improved significantly over what Netscape could have ever hoped to attain, though it still took some time before recommending it to a loved one would turn out not to be a mistake.

You're talking about the change from Netscape Communicator 6+ to Firebird and eventually Firefox in ~2003. That was a positive change.

I'm talking about the the change from Navigator 4.x to the MAS-based buggy crashy slow XUL monstrosity in 1998-2000. That was a terrible change, it killed Netscape as a company, almost gave Microsoft complete control over the future of the Web, and ended up necessitating Firebird/Firefox.

(It's the "touch bar" that made this my last Apple laptop until they get rid of it, but true, the keyboard is pretty darn bad too.)

Isn't that an optional feature?

Only on the 13-inch, and even there the non-TouchBar version has some lame limitations (e.g. only 2 USB-C ports and slower WiFi)

Sadly no, it's forced on every pro model except the lowest spec one.

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