I can understand it when people complain that extensions break, but banking websites dropping support for Firefx? Banking websites are built plain HTTPS, HTML and CSS and Firefox isn't breaking any of those with any upgrade. I also don't see banks releasing Firefox extensions.

But the question is which users? If a UI changes makes things better or easier for 80% of the users but pisses off 20% of the users, then I'd say go for it. The back button history dropdown makes the UI look less cluttered and saves screen real-estate. Most average users never use the dropdown. It's an overall win. Only the vocal 5% minority chooses to scream death instead of rightclicking and moving on.

Slashdotters always complain about stupid minor things like version numbers. I upgraded to Firefox 5 and Thunderbird 5 a while ago and holy shit it's insanely fast! But no, Slashdot prefers to complain about the version number. I'd say Mozilla should ignore the complaints. If that means the people who complain about Firefox's version number are driven away to Opera then good riddance. That'll just filter out all the bikeshedding so that Mozilla can focus on what really matters, like standards compliance, security and performance.

Yeah and all those people who are listening to music while browsing are out of their minds and are only imagining that they have a problem, right?

Or maybe said "shitty" programmer:
- is writing a for-profit web app for his own company that consists of mostly programmers
- already knows in advance that the only queries he's ever going to make are those defined by the programmers, and that for his particular use case it's no disaster if newly introduced queries only work over new data
- already knows in advance that his data size will become several terabytes in several months and thus needs sharding
- does not want or have the resources to spend several million dollars on expensive Oracle licenses

Go ahead. Find me an auto-sharding solution for MySQL or PostgreSQL that doesn't involve tons of money. Then I'll change my mind.

Only CSS transitions with scale()/translate()/rotate()/etc, as well as scrolling, are GPU accelerated. Everything else is not only rendered in software, it's also literally 10 times slower than on a desktop computer. I presume that Firefox's GPU acceleration goes a bit further than that.

Where are these "most benchmarks"?

Firefox 3 is faster than Firefox 2. Firefox 4 is faster than Firefox 3. You do the math. If you don't believe, download Firefox 2 (don't forget to clear Firefox's caches and history) and compare it for yourself.

It has got nothing to do with how smart or dumb Apple thinks people are, and has got everything to do with the legal system. Most of the US and the UK fall under Common Law where judges interpret laws and contracts to the letter. If something isn't written in the contract then it isn't there. This in contrast to Civil Law countries where judges interpret laws and contracts according to their spirit. If something isn't written in the contract then the judge can still make a decision based on what is reasonable. This is the reason why US contracts are insanely long: every single stupid corner case, no matter how obvious, like chewing on iPods, have to be mentioned, otherwise you can be held liable.

Your cynical undertone that software only get slower and slower is not true. Firefox 4 *is* faster than Firefox 3. Haven't used Firefox 5 yet. Phusion Passenger 3 is 50% faster than Phusion Passenger 2.

These days there are GPGPUs with GP standing for "General Purpose". They're not only used for displaying graphics anymore but for general-purpose vector calculations. GPUs are faster *for vector calculations* because most of the chip consists of arithmetic units. In return, GPUs are much, much worse at pretty much everything else, such as branching. Don't try to run if-statements on GPUs.

And your hyperbole is based on what evidence? Linux 2.6 runs fine even in an x86 emulator written in Javascript.

Wait a minute, you call GNOME NIH but applaud Apple for inventing their own stuff?

Yeah but those differences are nowhere near as big as between OSes. All Linux distros use iptables. All Linux distros have /proc and /sys. Now compare with FreeBSD and Solaris.

The difference between distros is a lot smaller than the difference between any Linux distro and, say, FreeBSD and Solaris.