Actually, yes. The amount of time wasted learning Kanji in Japanese schooling is nuts, IMO. And the affect on literacy is similarly appalling -- you can't even read a newspaper without completing secondary school, because of the need to memorise all those characters.

I'm a big fan of Japan switching over completely to hiragana. One simple phonetic alphabet for everything, anyone with a couple of years of primary school ed. can read, what's not to like? Kanji is seriously holding Japan back.

Just my two yen.

http://forum.xda-developers.co...

Fixed that for you. Android -- ya want a new windshield wiper, ya gotta install it yourself. But at least it's open and free.

Android has come with emojis as a system resource since 4.1 (and I assume iOS has had them built-in for similarly as long). You don't download them (and certainly not each time ... that would be incredibly weird). You can be reassured that no bandwidth has been wasted by the world (at least, not as far as emojis are concerned). (And using them as trackers? Seriously? Most apps easily have the permissions to track their users without ever having to resort to emoji-based methods, even if emoji-tracking was even possible ...)

That said, I think that emojis are ugly, stupid and are dumbing down communication. The OED has lost any remaining credibility if it's adding emoji as words (god help us all), and it can get off my lawn.

You say that like it's a bad thing ...

I'd be interested to know if you have any stats on the actual performance hit of using a large hosts file. Personally, I find it an excellent way to block ads (and other odious sites) at the source. It's not my only adblocker, but it's a damn effective one (and there are good online sources for up-to-date lists that you can periodically update from).

Do you mean Labour under Corbyn?? Corbyn's been strongly against any form of police state in his comments to date. I suggest you take a look at

http://jeremycorbyn.org.uk/cat...

Wait, so, when images that looked more like faces were used, the average looked more like a human face? Just crazy.

It's cute, but I'm not sure it's particularly profound.

Uh, yes, but it doesn't work that way. I'm pretty sure that Dolphin uses webview to display webpages on android (I think almost every browser except Firefox and Opera do -- most 3rd party browsers just write a simple GUI wrapper for webview) ... and all versions of Android starting from KitKat include the v8 javascript engine as part of webview:

https://developer.chrome.com/m...

More concerningly, if you're using KitKat, webview won't be updated without a system update (it got moved to an APK in lollipop). So that exploit is probably good forever ... :( (For lollipop and above I'd assume that the exploit will get fixed in webview the same time as it gets fixed in chrome.)

I suspect you haven't looked for a little while. Google's dashboards suggest that only 4% of users are still on 2.x (poor things!):

http://developer.android.com/a...

You also probably need to combine the counts of "Chrome for Android" and "Chrome" in those stats the parent posted to get the total chrome market share for Android.

???? You're going to need to explain that one. Are you referring to the adoption of systemd? (That seems a very long way from Microsoft's current actions with Windows 10, but hey, maybe you hate linux but have a soft spot for sysvinit ...)

Thanks for the link to Pale Moon, though. Looks good!

*shrug* ... I have 8192 lines of scroll back and generally more than 10 terminals open at once, and I really can't say I get anywhere near a gig of ram usage. Even if I did, what's a gig these days? It's a bit pathetic that a few terminals take up so much, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it except when I need every last drop of memory (which is thankfully rare).

But thanks for the oblique link to ROXterm from your spreadsheet -- that's the first terminal I've found that does side tabs! Amazing ...!!

Only free as in beer, though ...

Hopefully the point is that with a significant commercial interest at stake, linux drivers will actually receive more development and will improve.

Memory usage by a terminal emulator can hardly be a deciding factor these days, can it? Just checked my work box, and gnome terminal is using ~45Mb out of 32Gb, even with god-knows-how-many terminal tabs open. It's not going to break the bank ...

Come to think of it -- does anyone know of a terminal emulator with Tree Style Tabs?? That would be a true killer feature for me.

All excellent points!

But, you know, maybe these latest changes to Firefox will invite a Phoenix-style fork after all?

For what it's worth, that's been discussed here:

https://billmccloskey.wordpres...

Although the official response seems to be along the lines of -- well, we'll add an API that would kinda allow the same thing, more or less. Whether or not that actually encourages a dev to rewrite their entire, very mature, extension from scratch again remains to be seen. My guess on the latter is that it won't happen :(