I'm not sure I'd accuse Apple of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". That's not really their model at all. For one thing they are disinterested in monopoly.

Well said, excellent comment. Just a correction. CR LF (Windows), LF (Unix) and CR (Macintosh) so there are still 3. Also 0x00 is still used for lots of mainframe data for end of line though that gets a bit more tricky since the underlying concept of file doesn't map as well.

As CRLF was most common on teletypes.

Microsoft did a lot of great engineering under Gates and Ballmer as well. In terms of softening their competitive streak that happens to many companies as they move up market. IBM for example is far less proprietary now than they used to be.

I don't know that's true. Gecko is open source as well. I'd say Webkit is likely dominant because Google picked it as an alternative to Firefox and Google's programmers plus Apple's programmers worked cooperatively for years. That pairing could have happened on a closed source project under a licensing agreement as per many other projects jointly developed.

The other thing I think that helped Webkit is that Webkit was designed from the ground up to be useful for other applications to build small custom browsers like one sees in many mobile apps.

Yes I can. That's the sort of stuff they did say 20 years ago. They were advocates of both standards and individual experimentation. So for example they liked Flash being cross platform but wanted Active-X for when developers wanted platform specific features.

10 years ago their goal was to retard progress on the web.

I'm not sure it is such a long time at all. How much does the complexity of computer systems increase every 5 years? How far is something Google's engine from being an autonomous, self improving analysis system far smarter than a human? As for self replicating code is what is self replicating not the AI. The same way that cultures break themselves into individual brains and replicate partial copies of the culture into new brains.

Your years are way off. Windows 3.1 laptops all had hard drives. The portables with just dual floppy are mid 80s.

I just don't want the boss to be disrespectful to me when the estimate is not accurate. Get us some estimation training or something. Don't give me a lecture. I'm too old for lectures.

Yes the group that voted the 2nd time. That's who we have statistics on.

As you decrease unnecessary color those colors that exist become much more visible from far away (i.e. at small sizes). Think about a match sized fire in a completely dark room or a single drop of red paint on a giant white wall. Decreasing distracting information increases the information density you can absorb.

I haven't seen an increase in screen sizes over the last few years. Moreover screen sizes as people migrate to smaller form factors like tablet style laptops are quite likely to go down not up. And you add in things like 2-3 pixels repeated a 5-10x across the screen x 1/2 dozen of these type of wastes and you are in the 100 pixels of waste. That can be something like 15% wasted space.

There are people who don't understand basic economics and I'd assume their opinion could be easily changed in a bipartisan way. Our system is generally effective in dealing with ignorance and educating when it is united.

Not going to happen. The functionality that the new designs allow for is what is driving the aesthetic. When there are practical concerns driving an aesthetic the switch is generally at least semi-permanent.

1c coin exists because there is a zinc lobby though they have agreed to a compromise which is a problem for the vending machine lobby. There is fundamentally no good reason economically and even politically this would be fixable given a less destructive congress.

Yes they are. The new style of design allows for less borders between boxes which makes screens more efficient in how they use space. Being able to visually comprehend more on a screen occupying the same physical space is an upgrade.

Moreover once you introduce touch and thus have an inaccurate pointing device borderless works far better since you want the pointing device to be closest center not border and except for circles that's not going to be the same thing.