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Best product? This make me question the story of Microsoft. MS-DOS, Windows and especially the Internet-Explorer (Trident). All of them won in a competitive ma

Best product? This make me question the story of Microsoft. MS-DOS, Windows and especially the Internet-Explorer (Trident). All of them won in a competitive marketplace and where of questionable quality and in long term harmful. I cannot defend Apples locked platform! Yes, WebKit is crucial to the web and also needed on Linux (WebKitGtk, GNOME, Qt-WebKit, Epiphany, RasPi). Actually I'm quiet happy with WebKit but would appreciate always more speed. Feels like a lot of folks use Chrome and expect every other web-browser must use the same engine so they don't need to care about compatibility? Which is bad. * KHTML - gone * Trident - gone * Opera - gone It is only Blink, WebKit and Firefox. Firefox is also in struggle and Microsoft Teams still blocks it? Like back in 2001. The EU also doesn't require Microsoft to present the modal browser choice dialog anymore. And Google is pushing hard on iOS-users to install their apps. Same on Windows. I would appreciate if politics put strict control over Google, Microsoft and Apple and require them to allow full access without the luring users with locked-down systems, lower fees and other things. I prefer strict control of companies because it worked very well with AT&T until it was broken up.

masswerk 4y ago
> Best product? To be read cum grano salis. The list is long (including VHS) so, what is the best product in a marketplace? Probably, the definition will not be a technical one. It may be more like with an auction, where the result doesn't honor the value, but rather defines it. More cynically, it may be like with competing (traditional, non-alt – not entering that discussion) coins, where it's the worst coin which is the one left in the marketplace. (© Adam Smith, I believe.) In both perspectives, there are reasons for this. To say the least, to the customer technical aspects are just features among others. Vendors exhausting their capacities in rapid development cycles doesn't help either, often it's the vendor left with most capacities for marketing and connecting to non-technical users and media who wins the competition, often with a clearly inferior product, even with no development at all (DOS anyone?). (E.g., personally, I'm absolutely horrified by the experience of the desktop Chrome UI. Even more so on macOS, where there's a menubar anyways, so why don't use it to make functions accessible? This is really mocking the user. – And no, at this point it's not about screen estate, it's about who's controlling the window, if there's a controllable app with controls worth controlling at all, or just that god-given/sent viewport. Mozilla on Win isn't much better nowadays: even, if you activate menus, there's not much to be found, in contrast to the Mac edition.) P.S.: Also agree with the statement on developer bias by laziness and locked-in expectations. (As is, Chrome is the new IE. An example may be the storage implementation. Apple's implementation was fully standard compliant, but we must do it the Chrome-way, because Chrome and anything else is a bug. On the other hand, when Chrome messed up the Web Audio API for several iterations, nobody complained. Or, when Chrome messed up repaint of the canvas element, etc, etc.)

masswerk 4y ago

> Best product? To be read cum grano salis. The list is long (including VHS) so, what is the best product in a marketplace? Probably, the definition will not be a technical one. It may be more like with an auction, where the result doesn't honor the value, but rather defines it. More cynically, it may be like with competing (traditional, non-alt – not entering that discussion) coins, where it's the worst coin which is the one left in the marketplace. (© Adam Smith, I believe.) In both perspectives, there are reasons for this. To say the least, to the customer technical aspects are just features among others. Vendors exhausting their capacities in rapid development cycles doesn't help either, often it's the vendor left with most capacities for marketing and connecting to non-technical users and media who wins the competition, often with a clearly inferior product, even with no development at all (DOS anyone?). (E.g., personally, I'm absolutely horrified by the experience of the desktop Chrome UI. Even more so on macOS, where there's a menubar anyways, so why don't use it to make functions accessible? This is really mocking the user. – And no, at this point it's not about screen estate, it's about who's controlling the window, if there's a controllable app with controls worth controlling at all, or just that god-given/sent viewport. Mozilla on Win isn't much better nowadays: even, if you activate menus, there's not much to be found, in contrast to the Mac edition.) P.S.: Also agree with the statement on developer bias by laziness and locked-in expectations. (As is, Chrome is the new IE. An example may be the storage implementation. Apple's implementation was fully standard compliant, but we must do it the Chrome-way, because Chrome and anything else is a bug. On the other hand, when Chrome messed up the Web Audio API for several iterations, nobody complained. Or, when Chrome messed up repaint of the canvas element, etc, etc.)