Rafe (etcet ) wrote,

Now that every side has cookies, how will the Dark Side set itself apart?

[originally posted to tumblr, because it crossposts better than LJ does these days]

I installed Internet Explorer 11 this morning on my netbook, and my inner performance and stat geek is not unimpressed so far, especially with Ctrl-Shift-U, which pops out a FRAPS-like performance overlay, showing the load time, render time, CPU utilization, memory footprint, and network request count in a business card-sized overlay.

Given how flaky and lockup-prone Firefox25 has gotten (especially if you leave a pile of self-refreshing sites up (read: a bunch of email and social media tabs; in my case, this is Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Tumbr, and Facebook, with the manually-refreshed LiveJournal and Texts From Last Night), FFX’s memory footprint and CPU load spool up to levels approaching “stupid” and “asinine.”

Chrome is hardly better - if you run more than, say, two add-ons, any multi-tabbed browsing session will iterate literally dozens of process threads (one thread for each tab, and one thread for each add-on for each tab - shit gets hectic in a hurry if you’re doing any kind of research and link-chasing while leaving the original tab(s) open).

As a longtime IE hater, going back to my days of supporting internet service in the dark days of Win95 and the earliest versions of the monopoly-inducing browser wars, it’s got an uphill battle to win my affection, but right now, the other contenders are so pointedly shooting themselves in the feet while looping barbed wire around their necks that merely being able to walk briskly while chewing gum might be enough.

Yes, I am a cranky old fucker who is barely able to code in raw HTML 1.1, and who loathes the explosion of Flash-based content delivery, and had hoped that HMTL5 would be a nimble, lightweight answer to that amalgamation of proprietary, standards-ignorant bullshit. There are a lot of sites with heavy, shitty, inefficient code out there, and I have no love for them, either - they’re the small-dicked dudebros and nervous soccer moms of the internet lumbering around in their first-gen HMMVs, clogging up the flow of traffic with their wasteful, slow-moving, backwards-looking idiocy, afraid to join this goddamned century.

If your site needs IE7 compatibility mode to work correctly, either find new clients, or find new programmers, because you might as well be using a fucking Lite Brite and an Etch-a-Sketch. (Yes, I’m aware that places like the US Government still runs WinXP, because it’s a known thing and has been vetted within a hairsbreadth of its life; I DO NOT CARE. So it’s been out for a dozen fucking years; you think that folks who want to compromise it don’t know how? Get with the program.).
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