Browser elitism benefits no one. The user is left insulted, and the developer strokes their own ego.

I was merely pointing out the fact that it is the running of a 3 year old browser that benefits no one and debilitates the web.

> [...] the onus is on us as web developers to encourage [him/her] (in positive ways) to upgrade - through better web applications that require new features, better communicating the reasons for upgrading, etc.

I disagree. The onus is on those peddling the product (i.e. marketers) to sell its worth to users.

> Believe me when I say that I understand the frustrations that come from having to support outdated browsers

I read about “frustration” when referring to older browsers a lot. That has led me to question just how much people learn about supporting those browsers. Shouldn't supporting browser X become trivial once a certain amount of experience is accrued? Or do we just hunt and peck until a page ostensibly works?

> There isn't enough information in the original post to determine if the last one (auto-update occurring despite being turned off) is what happened here - I'd like to learn more. It would be worrying (and I'd argue an insecure design) if the software were even capable of self-updating with that setting turned off.

As someone who tests every whole number version of Firefox (1-14), I have experience with the force-fed updates. Imagine my frustration when viewing the version information (via Help > About) led to the browser paving over my existing installation. I really don't want to have to tinker with the settings for fourteen separate programs.

Conversely, Opera 8+ will ask before updating. Though this happens every time I open the program, I can easily decline and continue with my business. This is how to respect users.

Chrome is far worse, as it forbids the existence of an older build, even after the newer build is uninstalled.

You've been misled into thinking that you need features X, Y and Z. Web pages can be functional without flashy new features.

Your browser is your choice, and we as developers need to respect that.

Well, to be fair, some new things are pretty cool. I'd love to have both the latest cool stuff and be able to run every add-on I've ever liked since Mozilla 1.0.

I know that's just not going to happen, so I made a choice. I'll do without certain things in order to keep other things.

I'm just occasionally concerned that I'm overlooking some serious downside (e.g. FF 3.x can be made to set my Linux machine on fire or whatever).

Mostly the only thing I notice is that WebGL demos don't work. Not really a big deal for me. I can run those on Chrome or something.

UserAgent sniffing and Graceful Degradation do not mesh.

This sniffing in particular will fail for Opera 6-8, therefore excluding perfectly capable browsers by a very shallow criterion.

The sniff serves no purpose, and is furthermore based upon a thoroughly disproved anti-pattern.

Oddly enough, I was working on a similar problem earlier today.

I've found that collecting the Text nodes and returning them in an Array is preferable. All it requires is some simple traversal. The developer (that should know what text goes where) can then map text to nodes.

> I find that naming things descriptively and an 80 character limit are at odds.

I don't. I use descriptive names for functions and short, concise words for variables (sometimes clear abbreviations).

> Another nit, Google Style guides disallow formatting for readability except for comments?!?!

> Allowed

> [regularly formatted variable declarations]

> Not allowed

> ["pretty" formatted variable declarations with indentation]

Code Complete 2 explicitly discourages the latter style, and I tend to agree. It's too difficult to maintain.

>> I find that naming things descriptively and an 80 character limit are at odds. > I don't. I use descriptive names for functions and short, concise words for variables (sometimes clear abbreviations)

That might work. Unfortunately abbreviations are forbidden by the Google Style Guide.

> As for lining up

my point still holds. Either lining up helps or it doesn't. If it doesn't help then lining up comments should not be allowed. If it does help, then it helps every where.

    var infos = [
      { name: "red",   value: [255,   0,   0, 255], },
      { name: "green", value: [  0, 255,   0, 255], },
      { name: "blue",  value: [  0,   0, 255, 255], }
    ];

Is vastly easier to read and find errors in IMO than this

    var infos = [
      { name: "red", value: [255, 0, 0, 255], },
      { name: "green", value: [ 0, 255, 0, 255], },
      { name: "blue", value: [ 0, 0, 255, 255], }
    ];

The first is not allowed by the Google Style guide. It requires the 2nd.

i generally avoid putting all properties of an object in one the same line in the name of readability and also to avoid the 80 char limit.

instead i do something like this. (incorrect trailing commas removed from the previous example)

  var infos = [
    {
      name: "red",
      value: [255, 0, 0, 255]
    },
    {
      name: "green",
      value: [0, 255, 0, 255]
    },
    {
      name: "blue",
      value: [0, 0, 255, 255]
    }
  ];

How’s this then, for another example:

    M_CAT02 = new Matrix3([
         .7328,  .4296, -.1624,
        -.7036, 1.6975,  .0061,
         .0030,  .0136,  .9834])
    M_HPE = new Matrix3([
         .38971,  .68898, -.07868,
        -.22981, 1.18340,  .04641,
         .00000,  .00000, 1.00000])

Without lining those all up, it becomes a real pain in the butt to read the matrix.

Nowhere are abbreviations forbidden by the Google Style Guide.

its not difficult to maintain. Emacs in particular has M-x align-regexp = (which does the alignment for you)

I'm pleased that someone else favours a sensible line limit.

I stick to 72 columns for width and 20 lines per function body. The result has been very concise code that's easy to follow. Only exceptional cases such as heavy recursion have eluded the line limit.

If popular JavaScript projects wrote code with cleanliness in mind, maybe more people would take the language seriously.

When so many text editors let you collapse blocks of code, it's hard to persuade programmers to keep line-count sane.

Isn't 72 columns a little bit restrictive?

I much prefer "responsive" Web pages to "mobile" sites. Many "mobile" sites cram way too many flashy graphics and bloated scripts into the client; compound that with features that disable zooming, and you have a UI disaster. Finally, don't forget URL fragmentation because of the "m.inane.com" nomenclature. "mobile" users then link "desktop" users to the "mobile" site, which is unnecessary.

Nonetheless, we're probably both guilty of selection bias.

> Web technology is great for many things. Replicating a native app experience is not one of them.

Yep.

The client-side environment is far too unstable to build a "native app". There's a reason why monumental frameworks like ExtJS barely work in IE 9.

Windows 8 allows you to build native apps in HTML/JS. You would be very hard pressed to tell any difference at all.

Windows 8 also provides a consistent set of APIs across all languages supported: JScript, C#, C++ and VB.NET. There's nothing you can do in C# that you can't do in JScript on Windows 8, with the possible exception of DirectX.

Are we talking plain vanilla HTML/JS or HTML/JS+Metro extensions? Also, I guess those apps don't have to be cross-browser.

There are extensions.

> If there is something out there that is better by a wide enough margin to justify giving up that established ecosystem, I'd love to hear about it. The ecosystem has plenty of imperfections, but I haven't come across anything yet that seems nearly comprehensive enough to displace the incumbent here.

David Mark's My Library[0] is the best DOM library available by a wide margin. It has supreme browser support, and it's "modular" with a custom builder. The code is so solid that many people have borrowed from it, including the jQuery project and myself.

I've also created a DOM library, but with a more limited feature set (it's only a few months old). See my submissions for details.

[0]: http://www.cinsoft.net/mylib.html