The killer of me switching now would be that it doesn't have synch built in, and with the number of Chrome installs I have (5), that is a bit of a PITA. Presumably there are extensions to do that, but right now I'm not fussed.

Firefox does have Sync built in - it has since version 4, I think. It can sync history, bookmarks, etc. It's right there on whatever they call the orange menu.

I wasn't big on it at first, but "Open Tabs From A Different Computer" is probably the best browser UI idea in a while.

Uh. I think the story is silly and Acid3 irrelevant, but you're running Firefox 7 while the author was talking about Firefox 10 (aurora).I have no idea whether it actually passes Acid3 or not, but it's very different from Firefox 7.

Um, this is Microsoft we're talking about; they do that all the time. And I'm not just saying that to be snotty, there's a whole history of examples: Windows 1 & 2, Windows Me, Windows Vista, the Zune, the first several versions of IE, the first several iterations of WinCE/PocketPC/Mobile. Microsoft often gets it right eventually, but getting a sub-standard product to market and then trying to fix it is a time-honored tradition with them.

The Zune was certainly a commercial flop, but there was nothing substandard about it. Except maybe the color on the original Zune. ;)

There were two reasons the Zune didn't crush the iPod: marketing, and the iPod came out first. The Zune was technically a little better than the iPod, but not oh-my-gosh-gotta-buy-it-now. I think it did have a much better interface - maybe I'm retarded, but the older iPods were the most confounding things I've ever used, and the scroll wheels sucked for precision. And the Zune software made iTunes look like a bloated, unintuitive mess. But that alone certainly wasn't enough to overcome the momentum of the iPod, especially with Microsoft's tepid marketing and crazy business decisions (no open App Store for Zune HDs?!.)

The anti-enterprise position was never the official view of Mozilla; it was something expressed by a few employees of Mozilla. There are certainly plenty of others who feel quite differently about it, as you can see from reading Planet Mozilla. I don't think Mozilla has expressed a position on any of this.

For example, here's a counterpoint view. There's some good points there. The main point: major Firefox releases that include important bugfixes were taking more than a year to come out. This was very bad for many groups of people. Point releases took 6-8 to come out, but without too many major changes (the idea that Firefox point releases never included new functionality is false - out-of-process plugins came in a point release.) Mozilla has now simply merged the two: the only releases will come out every 6-8 weeks and will include whatever's ready, like Chrome.

There is, in fact, a stable extension API called Jetpack. The problem is that Firefox extensions can literally do anything at all to Firefox, access internal APIs and do whatever else they want. An external API like Jetpack is no good for that. There's a tradeoff. AMO bumps compatibility on most extensions automatically, but not all. So some extensions will be temporarily incompatible (personally, I didn't have any issues - about 15 extensions). On the other hand, users will get, for example, the massive memory improvements coming in Firefox 7 in a month or two rather than sometime in 2013.

Because from a user perspective nothing had changed. A new version number is a new product, calling a minor update a new product is confusing and fragments the user base, and 10 security bug fixes is an important, but functionally minor update. If nothing else, imagine a year or two from now and Firefox is ready to put out a new release that actually is something new and exciting and they're stuck assigning it the same importance that the assigned to this security patch, because they already assigned the highest importance possible to this update.

Hyperbole much? This is the full list of changes and it's a whole lot more than "ten security bugs." A couple orders of magnitude more. It's not even true that nothing has changed from the user perspective; there are a couple minor changes. (Of course, had there been a UI revamp as in 4.0, people would be screaming in anger.)

What _is_ the big component that is royally screwing the USA is the US corporate income tax rate of 35%, when combined with the average state income tax at around 4.5%, makes the US the 2nd-highest corporate income tax nation on the planet. That is what is screwing us.

Even assuming that most corporations paid the full tax - which they don't - and pretending that states don't offer corporations massive tax breaks for being in their state - which they do, that is not the second highest tax rate in the world. It looks to be quite average. All these countries we outsource work to have similar tax rates - India is 33%, Bangladesh has up to 45%, etc.

Either way, the tax rate cannot even be compared to the cost of labor. That's insane and you have no idea what you're talking about. I suspect you're also forgetting that corporations are taxed on their profits, not their revenue.

We don't have "job killing taxes." We have, in practice, some of the lowest corporate taxes in the world. If corporations actually paid the rates they should, that would solve a lot of problems. In fact, during some periods when we had higher taxes, companies would hire more employees and pay their existing employees more because hey, it's better than wasting it in taxes.

I doubt very much a physicist is likely to cook you up some antihydrogen on demand. Does that make physics wrong?

Look - I'm a science guy. But you have to understand the practical limitations we're dealing with and look at things through other people's eyes.

"Is your hypothesis testable?" If the answer is "yes", it's science, if the answer is "no", it's religion.

You're missing the entire point of the article. The problem is in practice the average person is entirely incapable of testing many scientific hypotheses, let alone understanding the reasoning behind them and their ramifications. Yes, in theory, if I spent 7 years getting a doctorate in physics, I could be seeing and understanding actual evidence. Otherwise, I'm just taking everything on faith. It does me no good if a hypothesis is testable in theory. Priests can just as well tell me that they're able to replicate miracles all the time for all the difference it makes to me.

If it only works with Firefox, then they're not clearly using HTML5 standards. Opera, Chrome and Internet Explorer 9 all have a great support for HTML5. Why is it not working with them? And this is open source project, which should have even more standard support than proprietary software. Or is Microsoft actually better? Do it correctly!

Maybe Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Opera implement different subsets of the "standard" (HTML5 is not what I'd call a standard) and functionality this needs is implemented only in Firefox's subset? Maybe they even implement vague parts of the standard in different ways?

Just because there is a standard doesn't mean that writing an application conforming to that standard will get you cross-platform support in every platform that claims to support that platform.

(Of course, they could be using mozilla-prefixed CSS properties and whatnot - but that's part of the standard too.)

Firefox is currently the only browser lacking plugin sandboxing.. They're really lagging behind, and Microsoft has taken over Firefox.

Huh? Firefox has had plugin sandboxing since 3.6