Comment by scoutt
6 years ago
Me too. Then a breach happens and someone with a straight face tells you: "we take your privacy very seriously", asking apologies, because the breach used some of your data to push some political campaign or to bother you with spam/extortions because that night you were watching some porn.
Programmers should stop pushing buggy or incomplete software as is, and start releasing software that works. Otherwise upper levels have an excuse to do all this "experience" telemetry, and we all are smart enough to see the consequences of a data breach.
> Programmers should stop pushing buggy or incomplete software as is, and start releasing software that works
If you demand a perfection-of-function guarantee from something as complicated as a web browser, you'll never get a web browser with more features than the ones released in the '90s (and I'm not even sure we'd be that far along by now).
If I'm given a forced choice between "more privacy" and "the software ever having the features I want to use" I'm also going to lean towards "the software ever having the features I want to use." And we know this is true for users in general because of the number of users who had Flash installed back-in-the-day in spite of the fact that it allowed a total bypass of the browser security model, because it had features that the browser lacked otherwise.
Instead of giving my privacy away, I prefer software like anything that you have installed from a CD-ROM back in the 90's and didn't needed a weekly update. Games, 3D-Studio, Autocad (to name a few) were more complex than a web-browser (a today's web-browser) and didn't needed a weekly update or the hunger for user-requested features, let alone dialing home because. The world worked relatively fine without the up-to-date wankery we see today.
I remember them.
They were also buggy and could crash their resident OSs all the way to a stuck state, and if they did, the solution was "Try not to trigger that bug again."
Software quality has significantly improved in the era of easy patch access and auto-patching.
Holy Jesus. Those things were chock full of security holes. If you used a web browser that arrived on a CD ROM you'd be advertising massive pwnability.
In fact, you could easily simulate this by using last year's Firefox.
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> you'll never get a web browser with more features than the ones released in the '90s
I would actively prefer a web browser that lacks the features added since the '90s.
That's understandable, but it isn't what most people want---developers or users alike.
Browsers aren't just thin-clients to support HTTP protocol and HTML rendering. They've grown to adopt a new distributed computing paradigm, not unlike UNIX and its descendants grew to support a new multi-user-cum-multi-process paradigm. The things web development offers---location agnosticism, platform agnosticism, combined multimedia interaction, a workable security model for multi-source aggregate-component content---are eating software development, and the browser is becoming the OS of the modern era. We know users want this because users were willing to use Flash (even though Flash broke out of the security model of the old browser).
There'll always be a place for small text-based pages much as modern computing will always have a place for command-line tools, but the genie is out of the bottle and it won't be put back in.
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The mozilla suite in 1998 included a browser, an email/newsgroup client, an IRC client, an address book and an html editor.
Modern browsers for all their bloat actually have less features.
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