Password Hasher: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3282/

Anthropomorphising governments and corporations, are we?

I wanted something like this for quite a while, except my primary use cases are for preventing inactivity-related actions: 1) don't lock the screen if I'm still at the computer, regardless of the inactivity timeout; and 2) don't dim the screen if I'm looking at it. I'm probably reading and I like the brightness level just the way it is.

Both you and the article author are somewhat misinformed. Flash has been running on mobile platforms for quite a while, albeit in the form of Flash Lite, which is not on par with the desktop version.

My 4-year old Nokia N80 can run older Flash content from the web (I think up to Flash 7), but more importantly it runs "phone applications" written in Flash.

You're of course correct with the rest of your arguments -- I'm not too fond of Flash myself.

All I can say is a subjective "smooth enough". And it's been actually supported for quite a while by all major browsers except IE. And IE9 will come with hardware-accelerated canvas (it was covered on /. not long ago), and Firefox has it partially working in trunk.

Actually you're trolling more than playing devil's advocate. There's a sh*tload of zoom & pan-enabled image viewing libraries, both in JS and Flash, all using tiles just like Silverlight -- try to google some.

And for that matter it's trivial to DIY from scratch using canvas, which of course IE conveniently doesn't support, but that problem was solved too long ago. OpenLayers, which you might have seen at work at OpenStreetMap, includes a VML rendering backend, besides canvas and SVG.

The really funny part about your "advocating" is that MS has an Ajax library that does exactly the same thing as its Silverlight counterpart: http://www.seadragon.com/developer/ajax/

Now there's an interesting idea. Someone should code a botnet that only downloads and shares copyrighted content, nothing else malicious.

The "metaserver" can be just a tracker. And if you're scared of a central server needed for authentication, look no further than kerberos.

You mean Linux... which is a server, or supercomputer, or desktop, or laptop, or netbook, router, TV, camera, handheld, media player, embedded device, [...] OS.

A very long time ago it was a server OS. Now it can be tailored for everything, and it is everywhere. Except on toasters I guess, those are BSDs.

Don't confuse the kernel with the graphics / widget libraries. Which by the way are cheerfully getting to that level of adaptability as well.

No, I'm defending Firefox's stance because it's moral, and branding it a lost cause doesn't make it idiotic. And no, I'm working around Flash, as I have before with http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50771

Nice straw man though. Maybe I should pull a Godwin on you: joining the German Resistance was obviously idiotic, right?

Please do. In case you haven't figured out, you're 100% free to switch to a different browser, or fork Firefox and port the Fennec changes you seem so familiar with. Would you now please let "the rest of us" make our own choices too?

I hope you do realise you sound like a desperate guy ditched by his girlfriend, who's screaming out loud how his life will be great without her, while she'll suffer like hell because he was the best thing that ever happened to her...

Lieber Herr Gott mach mich stumm
Daß ich nicht nach Dachau komm.

Yes, but the "overnight" part gives them slack to rock the boat some.

Maybe, but (IMO) it's not that dangerous -- not until IE9 is about to ship, anyway.

About other issues they want to raise awareness about, I come short trying to find others as important. The browser wars are on again, and this time with more and stronger players. IE is going standards-compliant for fear of irrelevance, the EU spanked MS hard (10 years too late), and Google is here to stay... So you could say they already did their job wonderfully on that front.

Yes.

Guess what, I'm using it.

And the sites using those features are... http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/round/index.xhtml ? As far as non-Windows users are concerned, the most painful problem is Flash being crap for video playback, and the fix for that is one add-on or greasemonkey script away.

The battle may be lost, but that doesn't change a thing. No, garbage is saying the war is over, and then crying foul when someone else has the balls to take a stand.

I rather suspect they decided to not do that *right now* for political reasons.

Right now html5 video is not widespread, and their purpose is still chewing at the IE marketshare. If the world embraces html5 video overnight and everybody and their dog switches to Chrome because of its h264 support, you can be damn sure they'll fold. The same if IE9 comes out with html5 support.

Right now they have nothing to worry about (except maybe inconveniencing some foul-mouthed slashdot poster that can't be bothered to search for solutions, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/83149/ ).

So as long as there's no real threat of pushing Firefox towards irrelevance, *now* is the right time to make a stand and raise awareness about how detrimental patents are to free software. Thank you, developers with a backbone!