OK, devil's advocate here:
Marketing and commerce helps the government, despite all the annoyance we the consumers get.
This resolves into revenue that the government well know they can tax at some point.

Publicly admitting to spying by doing us a public service like you describe would be great, but doesn't help them right now. Look at the NSA's name. Since what they're doing is covert anyway, they can play the "Commerce is not our jurisdiction because Security and not Commerce is part of our name."

At the same time, the boss (government) can just play innocent even though it COULD put the data to good use. Again, if you follow the money, you'll see little motive in cutting money flow by shutting down telemarketers. It's not black and white like can-spam, though. Telemarketing calls tend to be legit, and just take advantage of liberal sharing policies from businesses you already trust [because subtle fine print always allows partners and affiliates to get data unless you opt out by call or mail, which is a bother], as well as loopholes.

Here is a little known technicalities about version-itis: Back in the days of IE6 on Windows, the powers that be decided that IE5 would be the last version of the browser on Macs. Likely they didn't feel like supporting [and putting up with APIs from] the competition. *

Safari 5 for Windows is following in the same steps. It's two years out of date, behind Safari 7. Yet iTunes bugs Windows users with the latest revenue-increasing upgrades despite the platform gap. The official Safari 5 for Windows binaries were relegated to cumbersome search item out of dozens of others in the support subdomain with no apologies or even footnotes.
I have little sympathy for Apple's short support cycles starting with their iMac-era financial rebirth. iOS OTA updates seem to be the exception rather than norm.

* At some point around 2005 or so, the IE5-for mac download site at Microsoft stopped linking the software, actually encouraging users to get alternative browsers. Moment of silence for the likes of iCab, Netscape and Camino, whose names we used to respect but have forgotten in the wake of Webkit^W safari, Opera, Firefox and eventually Chrome.

There is a whole other industry out there that measures by a completely different method than we're used to, but as usual, tech doesn't define trends. Smart salesmen do.

But let's think like consumers for five minutes, and accept a bit of tongue-in-cheek realism.
Not as easy as you think to recall 2160p to ask to see one at the store to... BUY it! ;-)

* how many non-zero numbers do I have to recall, and in what order did they go, again?
* what do I do if see the 720 and 1080 stickers, but want to ask if they carry that OTHER size that I only know to be in some way higher?
* 1080 is only 3 syllables. How many in 2160 again?

What will matter for public uptake in the long run is extremelly silly, but ...mark my words:
1) It's just 2 Syllables!!!!!111!!*
2) EASY on the consumer:

Don't laymen need some simple way to figure out how much [marginally] better those 1080 whatchamacallit numbers on all the boxes are than their current 720 screen? It's like we're back in the nineties simply counting X's for CD reader speeds 2X, 4X, 16X, 20X, etc. No more awkwardness when the salesman shows 'em the number and the educated consumer can't do long division in his head.

For those who don't get the reference, Peggy isn't a female. Here's one I like... sooo true!

Think of the implications this can have for us with the NSA bundling it. I wouldn't be surprised if this similar tech is already snooping on us.
No amount of de-wiring the obvious attack points will help. Seriously, the world is getting extremely inconvenient to live in when it comes to computing we can trust.

Skinning fills some kind of primal need to stand out and put your personal brand on something. I really feel sorry for those guys who just keep their default wallpapers, but there are lots nowadays. I recall back when Windows 95 and 98 Plus! theme packs allowed people to place sounds and cursors and interesting touches on their PC. Then, Win2k came out and all that was kinda dropped from our collective memory. Suddenly the only people offering you OS skins and sounds for events where Gator and other spyware friends, so I had to start warning people against customizing. Yet, custom skins were sort of the precursor to today's mainstream fad^Wwish to have custom ringtones, and they were awesome.

Windows Media Player has horrible skin support, and I never see people customizing it like Winamp owners. iTunes doesn't even... so it's true that Winamp kinda has no mainstream peer.

I keep revisiting Winamp due to playlist features and chiptune plugins. Back this summer I installed it again and looked forward to skinning it. I was disappointed at how inaccurate the skin search is now, and had to settle with a modified Aeris skin, rather than the classic I got a decade ago on the same site.

Soon, lots of unmaintained plugin repositories pointing to Winamp will leave people scratching their heads at the dead links. Google didn't help me find Aeris. It's one thing finding some EXE, and quite another to locate specific filenames for skins that are centrally uploaded. File lockers didn't exist back then, and most hosting from has died. I ended up finding a few interesting files in a geocities-type search result, but that thought is cringe-worthy. I fear again what will happen to today's internet. It is 100 times more prone to obfuscate things behind js calls and ephemeral third-parties that won't be around in 10 years.

Took way too long to edit this, but also opens my eyes to another thing: if the digital world is something that gets me so worked up, I need to turn away from it and find more tangible hobbies for my own good. The powers that be could be months away from clicking a switch blocking half of that stuff, and it will feel like the pain of losing our imaginary MMORPG chars after a services closes.

Same reason why we "even" hold onto Word files: it's not that we *create* them, but that they're PUSHED hard to us by other content creators for work reasons. In a digital world, they are transmission and retention standards*. Our only influence is issuing private complaints to whoever sends us the files, but sometimes their workflow or software removes any say they personally have in the matter, as much automation outputs exclusively to pdf.

We can't be judging standard fatigue till *we* stop sending all our own non-trivial stuff in them. We tend to have "important" docs like high-quality resumes (*.doc is shifty for that), digital copies of your e-filed tax returns, blueprints, and certain legal docs and paystubs that just GOTTA be assured to look the same in all platforms. Thus, no, our trying to change the world by pasting into plain text, taking a screenshot, or giving a link to an [insecure] HTML server doesn't fix the issue. Sending a doc in some esoteric typeset format? ditto.

Just like the "solution" to facebook we all know, what will fix this one problem it is the appearance of yet another a run-everywhere competitor. Sadly, none of those tend to be very Free & Open

* Remember zip files?

Two things I've noticed: youtube seems to have different servers depending on the display size of your stream. Found a single video in a series that is buffering hard? Switching from 360p to 480p sometimes GREATLY improves delivery because you are fetching from a different nearby server that does not require buffering (not sure if that's changed recently)

A recent and stupid change is that when you backtrack in a video, your browser requests the old data AGAIN. Sometimes even if just a few seconds old. Bonus: It will *drop* your current buffer section too even if it was several minutes long! Other players don't do that even with videos that are 60 minutes long.

The only thing that comes to mind for that regression is mobile delivery experience on poor fragmented hardware with a bad least common denominator. After all, it's not the same to deliver a buffer of 300MB to a desktop for a 10 minute video than to a mobile running Froyo whose max ram is 256MB. If that is indeed what's done, perhaps they have some write once, roll out everywhere API and are betting against desktops for simplicity of encoding.

I got a support call recently from a user whose whole office puzzled me when they said their local IT branch has them on version 17.
Our official policy only observes 2 versions and I had never thought hard about those stray callers that blatantly appear to be ~10 versions "behind".

Thanks for reminding me that LTS is the reason behind this. I much preferred the days of you could say "you're running 2.0 and should upgrade to 3.0" You can no longer tell that the huge number gap is no more than 12 months because of Mozilla's crazy version madness. FF 17 was released Nov 20 2012!

Oops, should have removed the word "never" after my edits.

Same reason why the world never keeps electing bad new leaders: great past record and *promises* somewhere else is no guarantee of future performance at their new post. With this in mind, even lawyers now put warnings like that in their own advertisements, even though the point is that "I won 30 million for this guy and 20 for that one" is what is supposed to have you hire them in the first place ;)

You didn't say if the other UA tricks were tested so...
try an extension with selectable agents and pick Safari for iPad or iPhone. Coupled with adblock, disabling flash and using noscript is closer to my setup and probably confuses their sniffing.
I haven't tested in while

This.
I don't have IOS myself, but heard that its non-stock apps (rather, the OS API) require user approval before sending out tweets such as an embarrassing #softwarepirateconfession resulting from your misunderstanding what the app really wanted to do. We all know how much dialogs do in the hands of Joe Bloggs, but to us here it is fair enough warning.

I would expect that OS protection from Android alone, and NOT Apple. The added burden [and power] placed on the user is uncharacteristic of Apple anyway. Yet, Android's "best effort" in this area is as follows:
1) Google or mobile carriers install Facebook and other sneaky tracking apps by default.
2) User opens app BUT isn't given any permission manifest warnings
3) PROFIT!! User has already given up their rights without being asked, because stick Android prefs are an all-or-nothing gamble.

Alternate timeline steps [which /.ers on Android bitterly face as rite of passage]
4) Suppose the user uninstalls the app.*
(i) Some weeks later said user tries to get it again from the Market.
(ii) They are forced to notice that said app required Fine-grained Network Location services, SMS, full internet access, user identity, address book, and five other categories.
(iii) The app could be Facebook, but more commonly it's some game (grrrr) or Samsung utility.
5) User has heart attack... at the implications of what the app did all along with months worth of information secretly gathered without express consent.

* Likely uninstalled to counter the cryptic internal RAM space problems that only we understand. Probably only after rooting to gain the ability to cut unwanted shovelware ;)

Whatever. The early version numbers were little known, and when I came on board the browser was around 0.8 or 0.9 already.
I recall having tried the predecessor, plain old "Mozilla browser" around 1.2 and wasn't expecting of my first trial of phoenix. Yet it was good enough to wean me off of Opera.
Things were fine for a while, but by version 2.0 I was already preferring to install 0.9 to get around the sluggishness and large memory consumption of new builds on my single core PC. That was before I used extensions, even. Today, the browser never starts under 100MB even after their "on-demand" loading was implemented to lazily get around the real problems of their memory model. Under heavy work usage, FF will blow up to 1GB. It can't get any bigger because enterprises still won't comfortably deploy more 64 bit windows on our 64 bit machines. That leads to the theoretical 4GB ceiling going down to 3GB. Combined with bare essentials like antivirus, Outlook.exe and java-based VPN software, ram gets pinched so hard that Firefox just quits.

I never understood why they can't copy 15-year old practices and just give you a warning that memory is low. If it weren't for built-in tab sessions, what would this FF world have come to?

Google has some lies and secrets here.
Their defacto behavior, which I'll call a "claim" is that you must have flash to play video xyz even in the HTML5 mode. This happens with MOST popular videos because they are monetized (the secret there is that Google's advertisement modules aren't ready in HTML5 yet)

To debunk this, just load an iPad or iPhone and see if you're *ever* forced to suffer even half of the consecuences... when sir Steve Job decided to ignore Flash on mobile. The takeaway is that faking your UA string with a FF extension yields those nice mp4 files without fuss, and I don't recall seeing video ads in player with that variant. The annoying thing is you have to put up with the mobile navigation, AND as of about 9 months ago, clicking a playlist link to with a preordered list of long series of videos (videogame Let's plays) would link you to a standalone vid. When you have about 100 videos and need to continue from #86, it's a major pain to rely on searches and the unreliable sidebar randomly hinting episode #2 or #98 but not #87. I'm pretty sure there's some express secret reason youtube doesn't like you binging^W playing sequential videos.