"Problem is this is hard to prove, and I doubt anybody would do any further serious research into it. Why won't they?"
There is research in such a stuff, but mostly from public university and as with all orphan disease not very much. The reason that it is not done is because there are so many research point and at the end of the day you have got to limit yourself to what you can find a funding for. The fact that you found a pubmed article belies your claim that nobody would research it. The simple truth, is that sometimes some stuff will simply through bad luck not be researched.
It's just from breathing Google's hot air for too long. Don't worry, I've quit.
I guess you haven't tried to actually use a Google product from the inside. Fundamentally broken, obvious and repeatable bugs have gone unfixed for years, but as they tell us: "they're working on it." (cough[Shopping]cough)
If it's in a Google car, they'll claim it isn't evil, while being really underhanded (cough[IP rights]cough), but it won't work right (cough[Shopping]cough), and just as you you commit a significant amount of resources to it, they'll either discontinue it (cough[cough]cough) or sideline it. Or never, ever add the features that would make it something actually reasonable (cough[Gmail]cough) Or simply blow out the decent features (cough[Maps]cough) Or never bother to bring it to a level of performance that is even moderately reasonable (cough[Google+]cough)
Unless it never becomes popular. In that case, it might hang around forever. But still under-performing / broken / evil, etc.
No, I'm not bitter. I love when a company wastes my time as if it's worth nothing. Finally I realized that trying to work with Google was making my time worth nothing. So in a way, they had the right idea from the start.
The only car analogy I can come up with is the insufficiently Humvees the government gave our soldiers to drive over IEDs in.
Not a tech dinosaur.
A tech prokaryote-like organism from the Archean.
Even a new instance of Firefox is laggy and slow on my 8-core, 3 GHz, OS X machine. Browsing Amazon has become an extreme exercise in patience.
Starting it fresh with about 6 GB of RAM free, Firefox continuously and greedily consumes memory until I have to quit it to make it give back the gigabytes it has swallowed like an overweight, crazed hot-dog eating contest professional.
One positive thing I will say about Firefox is that even with those major warts continuously unaddressed, it still performs better than Safari. And Firefox is*much* better at dealing with the whole "outdated flash" issue. It asks me instead of smacking me in the face with "you can't do that", so I'm inspired to raise digit #3 to Firefox far less often than I am with Safari.
Sigh.
I could really give the south end of a northbound rat for Netflix on a browser. I have a capable dedicated system which is much more pleasant to watch Netflix-y things on. But I sure do wish FF could just browse places like Amazon without killing off my resources. After all, it's a browser. It seems to me, naive and unduly optimistic fool that I am, that it should be able to do such things. Well.
When will application and OS vendors ever understand that it truly is their obligation to make what they release actually work properly before they slather on more features or proceed to a new version?
I know. Never. *Sigh*
I'd demand you FF enthusiasts to get off my virtual lawn now, but FireFox has grown so large and unwieldy, I can't even tell if you're out there any longer. Hello? Hello? Oh, hey, no RAM left. Again. [gets virtual shotgun out]
Waste not, get your budget cut next year.