Why not Mozilla's Hello service?

It's browser-based, encrypted, open source and P2P.
You do currently have to use Firefox to generate the initial URL to share (but that will hopefully be remedied in the near future).

Browsers are pretty complicated, yes. Things like low-latency high-performance VMs, hardware-accelerated video pipelines, plus the details, like actual HTML parsing, CSS layout, a network stack, and so forth. Also, what matters is not just the complication but how fast you're trying to change things, and people are adding new things (flexbox, more complicated CSS layout modes, mode DOM APIs, etc) faster than ever before.

But also, in addition to a browser Mozilla is working on FirefoxOS, which involves a whole separate bunch of developers, since it's not like the browser developers are writing things like the dialer app for FirefoxOS. Also, you need QA, not just developers.

And yes, Mozilla has 1000-ish employees, for what it's worth.

It's not just Mozilla. If I look at https://www.openhub.net/p/chro... I see on the order of 600 committers with commits in the last month. And that's not even counting whoever is working on the non-open-source parts of Chrome. And not counting, again, QA and so forth.

And the worst part is, this is not a new development. Microsoft had over 1000 people working on IE6 in 1999, according to http://ericsink.com/Browser_Wa...

So yes, browsers, complicated.

The "let" keyword is not the same thing as "let blocks" and "let expressions".

The keyword looks like this:

    let x = 5;

and is in ES6. A let block or let expression (neither of which is in ES6) looks like this:

    let (x = 5) alert(x);

so that "x" is only in scope for the duration of the let block. It's syntactic sugar for:

{
    let x = 5;
    alert(x);
}

> So you still have to buy an iPhone, an iPad, an
> Android phone, and an Android tablet to test on them,

Sure. The point here is to allow you to use the devtools of your choice, not to create a test environment.

> So, they're running Android and iOS on your
> computer to run the same binaries as those
> platforms?

No. "They" are allowing you to connect your Android or iOS device to your computer (likely via USB), then debugging the on-device browser using the Firefox debugger running on your computer. That way you're debugging the thing you actually want to debug, but using the same developer tools you're using for your other debugging, and which therefore you're already familiar with.

He also (correctly) warned about the entanglement of government and scientific research, in the same speach as the military-industrial complex warning. It's funny that people remember one warning, but not the other.

What was the point of Firefox? IE was free and was a proven and already well-established browser. By your logic, we never should have built Firefox and the Web should have stalled with IE6 in 2002.

The world needs a truly open mobile OS as much as it needed a truly open browser a decade ago. Android is open in name only and Google is hurriedly moving its most lucrative components into closed proprietary services and apps that aren't a part of open source Android. iOS is as closed as everything Apple does. Windows is getting some nice HTML5 support for apps, but not nearly enough. There's clearly an opportunity for HTML5 apps to compete on mobile if someone can build a solid alternative platform to the monopolies and silos we're all stuck with today.

Other than being a fork of Gecko 24 (released over a year ago) and no plans to pick up anything newer, yeah, it's great.

Anyone else think this is simply an attempt to let the issue calm down and be forgotten by the public?

I don't think the so-called slashdot effect is in effect these days except for casual and amateur sites. Pretty much any serious site can handle a hard slashdot hit any more.

Ukrainian tanks don't have reactive armor, as the article points out.

And sure, no one is suggesting launching nukes at Russia based on the evidence we have right now.

That's pretty normal for press coverage, for what it's worth: they have to fill up space, so will throw in unrelated pictures all the time...

Getting clear close-ups of stuff in a war zone is hard, of course, especially if the stuff is being hidden.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... has some photographs if you care.

Mugen Power Batteries, great batteries, excellent price. They make extended batteries, some that fit in stock battery compartments, some that use extended battery covers. I've used them on several phones, and am about to buy one for my new LG G3 (only an extra 100ma, but when you're on call, it helps).