mbitca

It's there, just not out in the open.

1. Go to a web page 2. Click the "tabs" button in the bottom right corner 3. Press the "i" icon on the tab 4. Press the security circle for even more info

And you got a full page reload for your troubles. That was the point. Had you enabled js, you'd get the better user experience, by not having to do that roundtrip. You might not care if you're at your desktop on a fat pipe, but performance and user experience matters. Speed matters.

JS isn't there to replace hypermedia. It's there to give you a better user experience by augmenting what plain hypermedia can do. You can argue that many authors are doing a bad job of it, but that's a different discussion. Baby, bathwater, etc.

To take a trivial example: If HN didn't use js, an upvote would mean a server roundtrip and a payload of 50k or more for popular discussions. So mobile users get shafted. Crappy hotel wifi users get shafted. You are forced to update all discussion threads, even one you might be in the middle of, just to upvote. Basically, your experience is made worse.

And this is about the simplest use of JS I can think of. For other sites there are great opportunities to make your user experience better.

They did give their users those tools. Site prefs have been a feature of Opera for a decade or so.

Doubt it. Unlike Opera, Mozilla is a non-profit. There're not shareholders pushing for higher profits, regardless of consequences.

> A dollar at the margin for a person with a $600 phone on a $50/mo data contract is not an enormous gamble

It's not a big economic gamble, but there are good chances of getting screwed, which is more important than the money. I believe that's contributing to the prices being pushed down. I don't mind paying for the software I like, but I absolutely mind paying to try out 4 other apps that turned out that sucked. Indeed, because I had to give them money to find out, they will have the funds to keep on sucking. Effectively, I can't vote with my wallet.

Try shopping for an ssh client or a vnc client in the app store. I suspect you'll have that exact experience.

While I agree they don't particularly play nice with the community, they do still let people download the raw data for non-commercial use at least. Not that they promote that fact much. http://www.imdb.com/interfaces/

There is a mymediadb plugin for xbmc that does this. Can probably borrow code from there if you have your own backend thingy. https://github.com/netbrain/mmdb-xbmc-addon