I'm asking it like it's a bad thing, because how many times I could read there that it's a cancer like flash, pdf and whatever little things. But I just checked yesterday, and it exists for Windows too. And intended for actual use, unlike something like Wine on Windows. And you can even bundle the runtime or bury it in your .exe program.
There are many "one true way" to develop things that work everywhere : java, python, web/javascript, some older things and some newer things I'm sure. But if I want to get started to do little projects, have to pick something. Web would be nice, but maybe I'll never have a smartphone to run little web apps on. My calls and positions are already tracked just by owning a dumbphone.

Back on point, one of the early posters said how he uses C#, and it would probably be a nice fallback / somewhat default language to do semi-system stuff, networking, multimedia, imperative programming.. or gasp, a GUI. What would draw me then is the F# language, and I know its parent language a bit (ML family). It would be awesome to be able to do actual useful stuff in that language (thanks to .NET libraries/infrastructure and some additions or sugar in the language) and if worst to come (i.e. something where functional programming is pointless or gets in the way) I'd use C# or whatever other language supported in the Mono CLR for those parts?
It's 2014 too and maybe Mono is better in 2014 than in 2009 or 2007.

I wasn't finding it in the options lol. Found out there's a "search" in the options and found it that way.
The non-standard UI widgets where tricking me. I didn't think a featureless long rectangle button would open a subpage.

but do 240p, 144p and old 360p videos work? I do not know what codecs they use - and they're needeed, when 240p is the only version or the bandwith is low. And if these are re-encoded to next gen codecs, will there be CPU use increase for old systems.

About flash, Adobe is providing updates to version 11.2.x till 2017. I guess that's the deadline that I have to care about. If I can keep using flash + flashblock for the next two years I'll be more than fine with that

The story is misleading in this, but see TFA and a lot of the article is how he fitted a brand new 3.5" 640x480 screen (which is impressive in res and price by the way)

The summary didn't make sense anyway : Game Boy runs at 6 volts, not 12 volts so it was not about using the Game Boy's screen at all.

I'm sure the transition to H265 will be at least a decade long (do unreleased AMD and Intel CPUs even support it? I think not). H264 will stay for a long time. Even MP3 has been outdated for like 10+ years but still is massively used.

The article mentions Youtube, without giving any specifics. Seems they're shipping the plugin greyed out, disabled etc. and then WebRTC stuff will work (does anyone have either used that?) and then maybe you'll be able to use html5 video in some future version, maybe.

Setting the politics aside, and even whether they intend or not to provide html5 video support, it feels better to do that staged release. I sure would want that the kinks, bugs, networking and security issues are worked out before it is unleashed on millions of unsuspecting users.
Well, people will get that h264 support for WebRTC even though they have no idea what the f that means, but as no one uses WebRTC it wouldn't be as drastic as Youtube support.

On my linux machine it always end up crashing, but sometimes I can see a whole day without a crash. I can sometimes see it coming : web page somewhat freezing up, hard disk grinding and then bam it's bombed.
Now I should do some tab clean up again.. after a crash, I can't load all my tabs (too many of them) so I reload some tabs but open new ones to do stuff, instead of hunting for and reusing older tabs. And I don't really know how to open the "clean up tabs" window without crashing the browser first. I'd like if there was at least a command switch for Firefox to open that on start up.

Feels like the good old days when I ran Internet Explorer 5. Though the "extensions" were automatically installed and consisted of a porn page that opens up in a new window, or software attempting to dial out to an abroad phone number.

File explore / browser integration was even pretty good, I could recycle some unused file manager window. Or do my file stuff, then go on the web, or on an FTP server. Worst machine I used on it had only 40MB of RAM and it was still good.
Obviously, I had to let it go.

The pdf javascript reader wastes kilobytes on your / or C:\ partition, that's all.
But it is handy to have it for some people. I even like sometimes just to have a black and white pdf in a tab, it's not even crashing the browser like in the old days of using acrobat reader plugin. Then a click on the download button will open it in my pdf reader of choice if I need/want it.
Chromium gets it worse : it thinks I want to open it in xpdf. I like having xpdf around (and will install it as the only reader on a lightweight junk box with lxde) but please.

80% of the people who went to the like/dislike menu item and got past the follow up screen disliked Firefox.

Chromium is good if you have 8GB of RAM just to browse the web, and you like that featureless unchangeable UI with 10% the features and options of Firefox's one.. Plus I tried a flashblock extension on it and it sucked.

What if someone just wants to browse "web 1.0" sites (like wikipedia) on a low spec machine. Maybe that's too rare of a use case but it would be nice to have a javascript-less browser with everything else working. Maybe a separate firefox instance which will at least not crash when you're just using it for reading text mainly.

But I've never really tried javascript-less Firefox. I use dillo, which is nice for some things (but currently browsing slashdot on it sucks, I think). Despite being javascript-less I use it to log-in to wifi! (the somewhat secured semi-public hotsposts that leech of ISP customers).
Dillo starts in well under a second, doesn't crash and can get you internet access (if you have acess to a "web 1.0" compatible "wifi login" page) which can then be used for OS/packages security updates and then for launching firefox.

The Windows 7 partition is very useful : it allows to chkdsk a NTFS partition, and so it's good to keep it around.

Oh, I didn't check KDE-on-win for a long time. And anyway I feel at home in the GTK2 environments.

I solved the problem of dual booting by leaving Windows for good. Part is I wouldn't ever reboot anyway (who wants to, and lose everything that's going on?), part is I was fed up with Windows 7 for petty reasons. Disk/memory intensive for my own taste, but foremost after ten years of using Windows 98 then XP with basically the same GUI, there were more than one thing that pissed me off. I had a hilariously ugly desktop at some point, with my attempts to make it more traditional.

I made my life worse, had some ugly quirky desktops (ugly gnome2/mate layout, random combinations of mate/nautilus 3.x/xtce/lxde iwith duplicate tools and a broken icon there and the wrong file manager coming up.. CLI-only debian squeeze NAS that was semi fucked up.. lol!
But in the end, Mint 16 Mate and Mint 17 Mate saved the day. I can install the latter on any buddy's laptop or desktop in 20 minutes, install or tweak just one thing or three and it's done!

Now, what were we talking about..
Yeah I will probably try KDE 5.1 (if it is to have such a versioning scheme) down the road. For psychological reason (let it double-extra mature) and because I now see a philosophical similarity with Mate. Provide a GUI that's still about the same a decade later, but really maintained and with ever so slight improvements here and there that I can't pinpoint but the thing feels ever more polished.
I'm waiting on LXQt 0.8, too (more than KDE). When it's out I'll jump on it to try it first time. High hopes there. I think the main dev has good taste.

The French say "la France", vast majority of countries are called "the Country" with few exceptions, actually small insignificant states, city-states or remote overseas possessions : e.g. San Marin, Singapore, Macao, Trinidad and Tobago, Vanuatu, Palau, many other such examples and then for some reason Israel.