In Defense of Netflix

According to investment blog Seeking Alpha, Netflix is going to lower fourth quarter guidance because, among other things, “Everybody hates the split of the brand into Netflix and Qwikster.” A couple of web comics, Oatmeal and The Joy of Tech, rip into the company even more mercilessly. Press coverage has been almost universally negative. This [...]

Firefox's Version Controversy isn't Just About Marketing. It's About the Strategic Direction of the Company.

For those who tuned in late, Mozilla announced after the release of Firefox 4 in March that they would be instituting a rapid release schedule like that of Google Chrome, involving a new browser release every six weeks. Resistance to the plan has been widespread. To some degree this reaction was psychological: Firefox 4 was [...]

Death to the Downloads Folder

Like many geeks, I’m a bit of a slob. I depend on technology to help me stay organized, not create more chaos and clutter. So I’ve become increasingly irritated by the web browser downloads folder, that ubiquitous garbage heap for any content you might stumble upon that isn’t an HTML page or image. On Mac, [...]

Apple's Award-Winning Customer Support in Action

At the beginning of November last year, I finally managed to get my hands on an iPhone 4. I’m nothing short of delighted with the phone, which addresses many of the issues that I had with my old iPhone 3G (slow performance, crappy camera, no rotation lock, etc.). When I went to update my iPhone [...]

The Trouble With Web Standards, Part 2: Top-Down Doesn't Work

When I first got into SGML, about 15 years ago, I remember someone remarking that to write a fully conforming parser you would have to “have the resources of the U.S. government or be James Clark.” This was both an indication of James’s incredible hacking chops and his dedication to making SGML a success (and [...]

Rabid Register Chromes at the Mouth

There’s much to like about Ted Dziuba’s frothy rant in the Register, in which he takes the media to task for overhyping Google’s new Chrome browser. I wish I’d coined the brilliant term “Googasm”. He says “fuck” a lot, which makes a funny piece even funnier, at least for those with a solidly sophomoric sense [...]

The Trouble with Google Docs (And How to Fix It)

I’ve been obsessing recently with configuring my home office software environment just so. Since I went all Apple, all the time, I’m able to benefit from a lot of goodies that are built into OS X (notably iTunes). And developing on Mozilla means that I can do pretty much everything from the command line, using [...]

The Future of Firefox Extensions: Make Them More Like Web Apps

A few years ago, having just started work on a very ambitious (and now defunct) Firefox extension, my business partner and I met with some of the Mozilla top brass to pick their brains. One of the most interesting tidbits that we walked away with was the rough estimate that only 5% of Firefox users [...]

More on the Open Web

There were so many great comments on yesterday’s post that I have material for at least two follow-ups. I’ll talk more about the new DRM capabilities of Adobe Flash tomorrow, but first let me clarify a couple of points about the open web. Considering that most people reading this are open source techie types, it’s [...]

AIR, Flex and the Open Web

With the official release yesterday of Adobe AIR and Flex 3, it’s worth taking another look at the question of what these products mean for the evolution of the web. Criticism of Adobe for the proprietary nature of its technology is hardly novel. A widely read piece by Ted Leung calling Adobe the “Microsoft of [...]