The list of supported codecs in Firefox for <video> is hardcoded and can't be changed by plugins, by design. (Maybe if they were invasive enough they could do some horrible hack, I don't know, but I wouldn't bet on it.)

Unlikely. Interface lag is going to be caused by too much stuff being done on the thread that renders the interface. IIRC, Chrome was written from the beginning with a dedicated interface thread that did no blocking syscalls or other real work. Thus it usually responds instantly to input, no matter what you're doing. One of the performance improvements they're doing in Firefox 4 is moving stuff off the interface thread, so that the interface feels snappier. The kinds of computations that are sped up by the JaegerMonkey work are almost certain to be irrelevant to Firefox's responsiveness.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a browser implementer, so possibly I don't know what I'm talking about.)

Or just store them in strings, which is what the MySQL software I know about does for IPv4 anyway. Just make the string field a bit longer.

True. But I'm just talking about when Flash is practically extinct. It's already on the way down, and HTML5 is already close to an acceptable replacement for some basic use-cases. I'd bet on top-tier video sites switching to HTML5 by default on some platforms in less than two years (they already support HTML5 as an option). Obviously there will be no massive change in the next six months – that's only practical when the client and server are controlled by the same party.

I'm not familiar with many top-tier websites, but the one I am familiar with is Wikipedia. That still runs on MediaWiki on top of LAMP behind Squid, pretty much the same as five years ago, although with a number of fairly significant improvements across the board. Most of the others are so secretive that it's hard to say, unless the site actually didn't exist five years ago. Regardless, your general point is correct.

No, but they're still standardized. Standardization is just when the exact way to do something is written down in a central and agreed-upon place. Editor's Drafts are standards. You can even have standards that aren't written down in any special place at all, like rel="nofollow". You might call some of these de facto standards rather than proper "official" standards, but they're still standards. To reach W3C Recommendation, every single feature of a document (which is often very large) must have two independent implementations and often a full test suite. Most of the individual features may well have been standardized years before.

Yep, sure. It's standardized, but as I said, it's not implemented. The distinction is important, since a lot of random Slashdotters seem to blame the W3C for slow standards progress. In fact, in core web technologies like CSS and HTML5, it's the implementers who are usually the bottleneck, since writing a spec is typically quicker than coding the feature.

All of the technologies you list are part of "HTML5" in the broad sense. "HTML5" colloquially means "all recent standards-based additions to the web platform". They're all supported more or less interoperably by different browsers on different OSes, although not all of them are finalized yet (for example, WebSockets isn't fully stable).

As other people pointed out, it's not Flash, it's its own plugin. So you're comparing HTML5 to native code. Yeah, no kidding, native code will be faster than JavaScript. But it has all sorts of other problems: it's insecure, it's harder to install, it only works on specific platforms.

Flash is not dying quickly, it's dying slowly. It's not going to be replaced right now: IE is too much of a problem. Give it a few years and we'll see.

Depends what you mean by "soon". I predict less than five years until Flash is no longer widely used except as fallback or for niche features.

Really? Give examples of this, please. In CSS you sometimes have to state the same exact rule three times or more, but it's the same rule with the same syntax in all common cases I can think of except gradients. HTML5 video/canvas generally don't require many cross-browser hacks. You just have to stick to what all browsers have implemented. Libraries like jQuery can also abstract away browser differences for you.

In fact, this stuff is generally standardized already. The problem is it's not always implemented, and when it is, often it's only in newer browsers. So HTML5 will take time to win, but it will win, at least for the common cases. Plugins might always be needed for special functionality that's too narrow to standardize, but not for basic video viewing, browser games, etc.

Oracle doesn't control btrfs. It's part of the Linux kernel. Oracle pays the one who's currently in charge of btrfs development, Chris Mason, but a) someone else could take over if he left (look at how many developers there are); and b) plenty of other companies would be willing to hire him if Oracle didn't want to pay him to work on btrfs anymore. Oracle has influence over btrfs, but not control.

Lots of people have contributed to btrfs. It's part of the Linus' tree, not a separate thing that Oracle controls. Oracle only holds the copyright on what its employees (like Chris Mason) have written. It couldn't release a closed-source version of the filesystem without getting licenses from all the non-Oracle people who contributed, or rewriting all their code. You only need to look over the commit history to see how many people that is. Most of the commits don't look like they come from Oracle employees, judging by the e-mail addresses.

Does anyone seriously believe Google is sending data to Verizon over the backbones? There's a little thing called peering. ISPs go over their traffic records, find the data centers they're paying the backbones the most to ship traffic to, and run direct lines instead when that would save them money in the long term. IIRC, even Wikipedia only pays for about half of its bandwidth – the rest is peering. Google must use orders of magnitude more bandwidth, so I can't believe it's paying for practically any of it. It wouldn't be worth it for any significant ISP not to peer with Google.

Or maybe you can't take driving away from them because in large parts of the country, they have to drive to get to school/the doctor/etc., since the population density is sometimes too low for any kind of public transportation (or non-motor transportation, like bicycles) to be workable.

There are plenty of third-person RPGs with "move to" commands that work flawlessly even if you click on someplace very distant: I've had my character take the most direct route when I did that in Dragon Age even when it took like a minute on a roundabout path to get there. AFAICT, a typical PC can do excellent pathfinding for one actor at a time, if you do it right. Just not hundreds, like you get in RTSes. But an onboard car computer only needs to do one at a time.

Disassembled binaries generally have no comments, but you get points for effort.

Maybe this is related to the fact that the European Union has per-capita GDP of $32,600 (#42 in the world), while the United States has per-capita GDP of $46,400 (#11 in the world). As people get richer, it's less and less worthwhile to spend time being picky about what you buy. I bet Europeans are a heck of a lot less picky than Middle Easterners, say.

Or maybe it's just because they're anti-American and anti-corporate. Microsoft, Apple, etc. are American corporations, while Linux, Firefox, etc. are not-for-profit and thoroughly international. The seventh Halloween Document is the results of a survey conducted by Microsoft, and one of the findings is that a major reason for favoring Linux is as "an alternative to Microsoft". 61% of French respondents, 37% of Germans, and 35% of Swedes gave this as their top reason for supporting Linux. Not that it works better, or costs less, they just hate Microsoft.

Americans, on the other hand, are much more pro-corporate, and (duh) pro-American. This open-source stuff sounds suspiciously hippie and foreign. Australia is a pretty conservative and pro-American nation too, so the same might apply.

In fact, what's possibly the most pro-open source country in the world? Venezuela. You know, run by Hugo Chávez, who doesn't get along well with America. Is it a big surprise that they don't want their entire computing infrastructure dependent on Americans?

The next time anyone comes up with an explanation that makes them or those they admire (e.g., Europeans) look good, try thinking up a more cynical explanation. It will probably be more correct.

Funny thing, but as an American, I run into other Americans on a regular basis who use Ubuntu. Like my best friend's fiancée told me that her whole family uses Ubuntu, and I field questions all the time on the message board I run from people (mostly Americans) who want to install Ubuntu. Maybe it's not so special to Europe?