...and then have to pay a monthly/yearly fee for PSN access?

Re-read what I wrote. I didn't say Everything works in Chrome, I said Chrome Just Works on everything I run it on.

I don't care what features a browser has; if it's using large bold fonts and fear-mongering fraidy-text to try to goad me into upgrading my operating system so I can upgrade my browser, I'm going to switch to a browser that runs on the OS that I'm using and doesn't cry about it.

It turns out I don't miss greasemonkey all that much - I just shut off javascript on any website that feels like it's taking forever to do nothing. It's a steadily growing list but I'm not actually missing anything. Oh, I can't read the article because your content farm grabs it from somewhere else via javascript? Oh, I can't read the comments? Oh, I can't load your video ads or your video "content"? Man, you really don't want me around.

The fact that the internet has gotten progressively less useful over the last decade isn't a problem that Chrome or Firefox can solve. It's their job to render the garbage... and it's the job of the hosts file to keep it from getting to the browser in the first place.

In the case of Chrome at least, the "three horizontal bars" isn't just the way to Settings, it's where everything is if you're using Chrome on Windows. Settings is just one of the items in the list that pops up - bookmarks, tabs, history, etc. are all in there and boiling all of the menus down to a single item frees up a considerable amount of real estate, at least on Windows (on the Mac the menu at the top of the screen is retained and has most of the information and options of the dropdown, though that's Chrome behaving like software running on OS X should).

Otherwise, agreed - seems like it's easier to change out the hubcaps on the newly reinvented wheel than it is to investigate other ways of crossing the ocean.

I thought the Yahoo move was pretty hilarious, if only in the fact that Yahoo reported an uptick in people actually using Yahoo for search at some point shortly after.

I also find it hilarious that Bing loads faster and returns results a lot faster than Google does on Chrome, though that's not strictly relevant to the conversation.* One thing I can say for Firefox - whatever they try to default the search box to the danged thing has never sat there spluttering and not bothering to send/load content the way the Chrome combined address/search bar occasionally does.

* Point of fact if bandwidth and hardware are an issue literally every non-google web service I've used is faster than the google equivalent.

I'm glad Pale Moon exists. Although windows isn't my primary platform I'll download it and give it a test drive. I've never had any issues with Gecko; it's been the progressively heavier stack of everything sitting on top of it that made firefox unpalatable... then Chrome integrated so well with my general web usage across several machines that I doubt I'll be heading to anything else any time soon. That doesn't mean I don't need to occasionally look at websites in other browsers, though.

Agreed, Thunderbird does not need "improved," at least in the sense that the article summary seems to be implying. It's been a long time since I've used it and when I did my *only* complaint was execution speed, and that may well have been due to running it on ancient hardware.

Oh jeeze the last thing Thunderbird needs is to be raked over the trendy UX coals the way Firefox has. If Chrome's market share has come at the expense of Firefox it may be in part because many people who jumped ship - myself included - found that each Firefox release was becoming successively more and more "chrome-like" without offering any of the benefits that make Chrome a compelling offering. In my case it was speed and performance on a 2006 Mac Mini running 10.6 - firefox was bloated slug that constantly screamed at me to upgrade my OS; Chrome ran as fast as it does on modern hardware and never complained about anything. Chrome's UI and core functionality haven't changed much since I started using it, either - I grew to dread Firefox updates as you never knew if it was going to pull an iTunes and reboot with some new horrible "feature" that didn't have extensions to revert the behavior back to prior functionality - Firefox deciding it was going to handle PDFs inline, and that functionality being far beyond slow and a real pain in the ass to disable - was the last straw for me. When I left the browser half of my extensions and customizations were to undo things the devs had "improved" over the years - the other half were ad and flash blocking extensions, which Chrome does almost as well.

TLDR; Firefox was awesome when it was Mozilla Without The Cruft. Then it started to cruft up and bloat up and horrible terrible very bad things started to happen to the UI and now it's Just Another Browser. Which is fine, really. Thunderbird does not need to be "innovated" in the same way - Firefox needs to be replaced by Firefox Without The Cruft the way Firefox replaced Mozilla. Maybe stick to the UNIX idea of "do one thing well" this time around, instead of "do one thing reasonably well and an increasingly lengthy list of perpedicular things in a totally half-assed fashion."

I used Netscape Navigator until IE5 (Mac) came along, then I used Mozilla until Safari popped up, then Firefox until it drove me to Chrome. Chrome Just Works on everything I run it on and has never nagged at me to update or screamed at me to upgrade my operating system Because Reasons. It has yet to roll out a game-changing UI element that I hate, and it isn't slowly modeling its overall UX to resemble the competition. I hope the Mozilla foundation keeps going because we need choice, now more than ever - and maybe one day they'll be my choice again.

But don't you dare call it a Depression!

No amount of history education is going to stop the herd mentality from handing your privacy over to some domestic intelligence type claiming it's Required to combat terrorism or pedophelia or both. Don't want to hand over your rights? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

(watching this happen in the UK is predictably hilarious)

It doesn't matter if you use Facebook or not - they can already infer that TV shows and musicians exist via user data and automatically construct pages for them - WKRP In Cincinnati is a good example or was when I looked at it last summer. If they can infer media exists then it stands to reason that they can infer that you exist. Imagine that, if you will - a near future in which you have a fairly accurate social media profile rather you want one or not.

...and unlike reddit, a registered and logged in user can dock "funny" posts and read at a threshold that scrubs most of the jokers and trolls under the rug. A feature slashdot has had since the 90s; a feature the rest of the internet still hasn't implemented.

Which, voting for Reagan, or being old enough to vote in 84?

Apple markup may be the fattest in the industry but if anyone can kick the bottom out of medical device pricing while still making an enormous profit, they're the company to do it.

Answers like this make Slashdot great. :-)

This would be why I snort derisively at rapture-like interpretations of The Singularity - evolution is an endless process of optimization, not a directed A to B to C progression. Animals that haven't evolved in millennia - sharks, for example - aren't "Evolutionary dead ends," they are in fact optimized for survival in their habitats.

Actually, Apple did it first with Sherlock, the search replacement in OS 9.