From a front-end developer's perspective, IE sucks for two reasons:

1. It used to be bad
2. It takes the average IE user forever to upgrade

If it uses the same rendering and js engine, then you can probably mostly ignore it.

The only thing I ask of Microsoft is that Trident sees more regular improvements (toward standards compliance) independently of major IE version releases.

I've never heard anyone try to pronounce the abbreviation as a word.

http://www.merriam-webster.com...

Sony Vaio Flip is close, but it's got terrible battery life, about half of what you could expect from a macbook air. Instead of a Wacom digizier, it's got an N-Trig, which might be close enough depending on what you want to do with it.

I swear, last time I looked at their site (less than a year ago) they had only a very select few items that were available to purchase online, and that most of the site was simply a catalog for the items you could buy in their stores.

Boy, now don't I look like an idiot.

Perhaps they should start slow attempt to sell a few products online before jump head-first into the Minority Report-style furniture catalog.

I find it funny that when you look at the comments on the Blink articles, there are tons of people upset about Google creating yet another rendering engine, and they're worried about standards compliance issues and having another target to design for.

And then you read the comments in the Opera-switching-to-Blink articles, and everyone is upset about losing diversity in the web ecosystem.

Are these two different groups of people commenting, or is it just one big group of whiners?

Odd, I was under the impression that Blink was, in fact, a fork of WebKit.

It's already available in Chrome's Canary builds. I thought I had read that it'd be in Chrome Stable by June or July.

Blingy might not be the right word, but I am personally not a fan of glossy/shiny/textured interfaces. For example, I much prefer the style of Android's 4.x Holo interface design over iOS. I think the design for Outlook.com is a HUGE improvement over Hotmail.com, and would like to have seen Microsoft push the Windows UI in the same direction.

I don't like it when interface elements are noisy and cluttered and compete for attention with the content I'm looking for. I don't like lots of high color icons and small text; I prefer nice typography with a little bit of breathing room.

But there's no accounting for taste, right?

I'm not a fan of the "UI formerly known as Metro" either, but there are ways to bypass it. It's not simply just a system setting as it should be, but here's the best solution I've found so far:
http://www.wesnext.com/login-directly-to-desktop-bypass-metro-ui/

The Desktop in Windows 8 looks just fine once you get past Metro. It's less blingy than Windows 7, although there is still a lot of room for improvement. I have seen some minimal UI concepts that I think are quite attractive:
http://dribbble.com/shots/576250-Windows-UI-Concept

I'd take the WiiU over a PS3 if the WiiU played blu ray discs and supported DLNA for photo, music, and video streaming over the network.

As far as I know, it doesn't support any of that.

The locked bootloader situation may have more to do with the carrier than the manufacturer, although Motorola certainly isn't blameless here.

There is a reason that the Samsung Galaxy S3 had an unlockable bootloader on every single carrier it was released on except for Verizon.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/09/verizon-blames-samsung-for-locked-bootloader-in-galaxy-s-iii/

4: at the very least, stop cutting the corners off all of the phone designs. It seems like a poor attempt at looking futuristic, but it's just awful. Ugly ugly crap. Go back to the 2011 phone designs if necessary. The Droid X wasn't this ugly.

If they were to offer such a feature, I'm guessing they would also give carriers the option to disable it.

I tried a friend's Kindle Fire, and was a bit disappointed with the performance.. I don't know if it was just me, but the interface felt laggy and failed to register presses about 1/4 of the time. Amazon's launcher is garbage, and the rest of the hacks to the OS likely are too. I think performance will improve quite bit once someone gets an AOSP build of Android good and stable for it.