Dave is awesome, I've been reading his stuff since I was a teenager. Books, articles, all of it. His book, Big Trouble, was turned into a movie starring Tim Allen. Although he only sometimes wrote about tech, he was much more clueful than most writers at the time, especially comedy writers.
Because some things only work in Chrome. It's a fact. It's terrible.
We're the frogs being boiled, over the last decade. People sounded the alarms, but they were looked at like they had tin foil on their heads. Now, it's clear they were right.
I'm speaking generally, of course. I use Firefox for all my personal stuff, except for those situations where it doesn't work.
Chrome likes to make up new "standards" and then some websites adopt them immediately.
That said, I can only remember two instances of that slightly inconveniencing me in the past, and both times I was inconvenienced by a Google-run website: once upon a time Google Earth refused to work, and once upon a time I couldn't tweak my Google Meet background. Both are no longer the case.
Citation needed. I've seen the opposite--unless there's a very specific niche that can't be otherwise solved, there's huge internal resistance to going it alone.
The biggest counterexample I can think of: WebUSB was critical to Chromebooks supporting external devices, but I can see why Safari might not want it. It has Firefox support at last, though.
Citation of what exactly? That not all browsers implement the same thing at the same time and that some features are Chrome-exclusive because for one reason or another other browsers refuse to implement it?
Is that really something you need a citation on? You sure seem to have come up with an example of your own.
In the past there were features that didn't work at all; I used to hit those regularly. Device setup flows, AV features, etc. These days, it's never "this doesn't work on other browsers". It's always "this is worse on other browsers", whether because they don't test it or because they don't care.
YouTube is terrible on Firefox. There was a period where it was usable but got increasingly worse with missed frames, low frame rate. On FastMail and Gmail the expanded search overlay doesn't disappear when you click outside (ESC doesn't work), you often get stuck with it. On YouTube when you stop hovering over the "I like this" etc. on full screen video view, the tooltip doesn't disappear. It's death by a thousand cuts.
I wonder if he's using a Radeon gpu, those have had issues like video playback making the entire ui framerate drop. But it happens in steam/electron too, not only firefox. The shader cores aren't used much either, it's just a bug.
A lot of IT now curates the extensions for the browsers and doesn't allow extensions not on the whitelist and then they basically just only do that work on Chrome and disable Firefox. It's kinda self defeating in the long run imo but that's the problem in the industry.
I've run into a few restaurant sites whose ordering pages just do not work properly (or at all) in Firefox. Also webgl2 performance is unfortunately still much better in Chrome vs Firefox; as an example, FoundryVTT (virtual tabletop software) works fine in Firefox but is a stuttery mess IME (though it has improved slightly in the last few years).
ups.com is one that really infuriates me. It shows 404s for me on Firefox and works perfectly on Chrome.
Kaiser's website works mostly on Firefox. Recently I had to print a "letter" and on Firefox it was blank and printed fine with Chrome.
I don't know if it's still this way, but Google Meet didn't work very well in Firefox, so last year I took all my meetings in Chrome.
These are just what I remember. There are a LOT more.
EDIT: on the UPS thing... it happens when I follow links from gmail in Firefox. Sometimes it wouldn't 404, but I'd see a "..." and it would just stay that way.
EDIT2: for a long time (not anymore), sending Kaiser emails was broken. Hitting enter would warp to the bottom on the page and I'd have to scroll back up to finish typing. They're completely redesigned the website recently and that bug is fixed.
Jane Fonda was his last spouse. I hope he left it to her. She's a very cool lady with a great head on her shoulders. A recent interview (The Interview, NYT) is worth listening to. She talked very positive about Ted in this interview, which made me think they had a good relationship still.
I should have said the "Jane Fonda of today"... everyone does dumb things and I didn't agree with everything she did when young. Recent interviews have shown a lot of maturity.
I'll go down that road with you. I agree with Jane on a great many issues, I'm sure. I certainly don't dislike her for her overall political leanings. And yet, I can't look at her without thinking about what she did in Vietnam.
The idea that she passed POW secrets to their captors has been debunked to my satisfaction. But the other stuff she did, calling our POWs liars and touring to support the army we were fighting, is beyond the pale.
Like, you can say we shouldn't be attacking Iran and I won't argue against you. But if you actually went to Iran in support of their soldiers and armies over ours, except maybe as a journalist who documents bad stuff you discover us doing, then I'm going to invite you to stay there.
That's a bit of a weird position to take. You seem to put "American forces" in a special bucket where, even if the actions the US military are taking is wrong, the support and reputation of "American forces" should still be protected at all costs, and the people they're doing wrong things to don't get to have any support.
Let's imagine an alternate universe where Russia didn't invade Ukraine. There were rumors that they were considering it, though, and Europe was not feeling particularly secure, afraid that Russia would not stop with Ukraine. This Ukraine is, like in our universe, nominally an ally of the West, though not the closest of terms. Poland, a US ally and NATO member, afraid that Russia would invade Ukraine and use it as a forward base to attack Poland, decides to preemptively invade Ukraine in order to establish its own forward base, a buffer zone.
I think many people in the US, myself (half Polish from my mom's side) included, would think this was a horrible thing for Poland to do. A bunch of us decide we're going to support Ukraine, protest on their behalf, and donate to their cause. Would you object to that? If not, then that's hypocritical. If so, that's... not a great look for you either.
> You seem to put "American forces" in a special bucket where,
I'm a vet. My default setting is to support American troops unless they're shown to be acting wrongly.
> even if the actions the US military are taking is wrong,
That's a bizarre little strawman. No. I can support the soldiers, sailors, and airmen while believing their leadership is wrong. By civilian analogy, I support the employees of HHS even if I think their boss is an idiot.
> the support and reputation of "American forces" should still be protected at all costs, and the people they're doing wrong things to don't get to have any support.
Your words, not mine. I don't feel that way. American leadership orders all kinds of jackassery. The people doing their jobs, presuming they're not committing war crimes (sorry if that was going to be your next gotcha), have my support. I've not heard any accusations that the POWs Fonda "visited", as though Hanoi Hilton was a zoo and they were wildlife on display, were legitimately war criminals. If they were, I would not support them. I for damn sure would not have supported the North Vietnamese government against our own solders, though. If our guys were in the wrong, it would be perfectly possible to prosecute both sets of people.
> Let's imagine an alternate universe
Let me stop you right there. We don't have to invent increasingly contrived scenarios to debate the core case: is it OK to provide aid and comfort to the enemy? It's not. It doesn't mean you have to automatically say your own military is flawless, either. But in the common case, I'm vastly more likely to support the general actions of the US military over those of the People's Army of Vietnam. I don't think that's an especially hot take.
Replying to myself: indifferent in the context of Americans committing what I consider to be traitorous acts against Americans. If you go join the IDF and shoot your way through Gaza, I'm going to think you're a POS. But I think you'll be a different kind of POS than Fonda was in Vietnam, which is the discussion at hand here.
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