artificialidiot

I don't get why RSS is "dying". Many people who create online content that is worth following provide a feed which you can subscribe through so many ways it is not funny.

Maybe social network addicted people may not recognize but there is a whole world who use email, instant messaging and other stuff like feeds to communicate, which are very established and not beholden to whims of any single moneymaking scheme.

Feeds are a very simple and open idea. Inability to put a toll booth between the communicating parties doesn't mean feeds are useless or dying. It just means you are unimaginative. Browsers may chose to hide the functionality out of a desire to idiot proof their software but it doesn't mean people who have an attention span more than a goldfish have no other ways to subscribe.

"While you are trying to find optimal gfx settings, we also detected you are having difficulty passing level 4. Shall we play instead of you so you can go on with your life?"

It is not prioritising my workflow but not changing already working software.

Idiot proofing is often necessary when the end user have to be spoon fed software and it is done by someone else who is perfectly capable of finding the said software on the internet form its official source, installing the package, finding the "easy mode" form its official source and clicking install button when the software prompts you to do so.

Alternatively, a version of software can be shipped by "easy mode" installed and enabled by default, just like how you choose which OS/localisation combo to download. Difference being that, software ships with rich configuration options by default and you can access them when you need it just by disabling "easy mode", not downloading something. No need to overhaul existing UI which is familiar to millions already, and prioritise people who cannot be trusted not to fiddle with options they don't know, just because you can.

Dumbing down or idiot-proofing software doesn't make it more user friendly or easier to use. As an anectode, I had had to import my own certificates, disable/enable js, disable/enable image loading , set up cache size manually and other stupid crap in situations unrelated to development.

An equally valid counter argument to simplification can be made: Leave the software as is. It is a known quantity. Create an "easy mode" add on instead for people who really need it.

I hope we won't see firefox equivalent of iphone (just an example among many, don't jump on me) in the future.

Except the web likes to pretend everything is 96dpi.

Reading my sentence again, I think we can agree CSS is not well behaved.

Security is not only dereferencing an invalid pointer or executing data that is not meant to be. IOS way of doing things is just a choice out of many and have nothing to do with other OSes. It is all about offering and enforcing a highly controlled and predictable development environment.

Nothing prevents exploits that utilize existing web platform which is the basis of FFOS exclusively.

Having said that, main goal appears to be not bringing web to the mobile, but freeing mobile into the web so eventually browsers can have a de facto standards for hardware capabilites. Yet another mobile sandbox is not a goal, as I see it.

FFOS cannot be compared to any other OS for mobile until now, in terms of goals and politics.

So, does anyone consider the fact that most of the mobile web is optimized for whatever apple ships? It is not surprising to me that small annoyances in web pages exist in everywhere but ios. I have no comments on browser chrome though, they all have annoying behaviours in general.

I think it would be better to call bitcoin for what it is: entertainment for grown ups.

Whether you use it get drugs, gamble, bet or speculate on some other place doesn't matter. It has become a game on its own right just like UO, WoW or EVE ... You can view it as game of a currency instead of currency of a game. It has intrinsic entertainment value, thus a commodity that can be priced in real currency.

Nobody bats an eye when a mmorpg makes millions in revenues, nobody bats an eye when a gamer builds a four grands rig. Why should we care about bitcoin replacing real money now or ever? It is not like governments will readily hand over monetary control to its citizens anyway.