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by kevingadd 4622 days ago
As I explained in the parent post (which you failed to parse correctly - was my English too complex? I'm not the greatest at writing clearly), the advantage of the new streaming installer is that all user interaction is frontloaded, not that it adds new UI. I don't know why you thought I was claiming the ability to pick an install directory is a new feature.

Anyway, my point re things like the blacklist and webgl rasterizer is that the browser is not completely installed without those components. The offline installer is missing key features and components of the browser; things that show up on feature lists that web applications can rely on. Without the WebGL rasterizer, WebGL demos won't work in your offline-installed copy of Chrome in your VM without hardware accel. Without the GPU blacklist, on some configurations Firefox will be nonfunctional (or worse, crash your machine) because it attempts to do acceleration on a broken driver. Audio/video codecs are another area where it's no longer possible to realistically ship 'everything' in a single offline installer.

If you simply want an offline installer for a bare minimum browser that can do a stripped down subset of HTML5, it's still possible to deliver that. But the amount of the 'web' that works in that bare minimum installation will keep decreasing.

P.S. The reason Firefox has to install a service is because it's not possible to install updates cleanly in any other fashion on UAC-enabled Windows. Your alternatives are installing into %AppData% (like chrome does, which removes the ability to pick an install dir and has other gross consequences) or requiring the user to UAC elevate every time an update installs. As I stated in the parent post, not installing updates puts users at risk when you're dealing with a web browser - the attack surface is enormous.
1 comments
qwerty_asdf 4620 days ago 

  > The reason Firefox has to install a service is because 
  > it's not possible to install updates cleanly in any 
  > other fashion on UAC-enabled Windows.
Ah ha! Now you're speaking my language! That I understand perfectly!

It makes sense that Windows UAC has forced bad decision making. Windows, in general, is just a hideous, mutated mess nowadays.

Anyway, it's essentially a correct decision to never marry a browser to device drivers or hardware. The websites that count won't dare crash browsers due to hardware requirements. The browsers that count will fail gracefully, and tell the user that their settings are not compliant with the requirements of the page they are trying to view, before they ever crash. However one wishes to communicate the nature of highly specific user options, and then adapt to the long fragmented tail of hardware conditions, is beyond the scope of a "NORMAL" web browser (no-true-scotsman).

When requirements become that unforgiving, you've entered the realm of the highly specialized plug-in, or custom client-server software. It's cool that Firefox is brave enough to wade into those territories, and still deliver awesomeness, but the core necessities of the web browser should never be sacrificed, for fluff and sugar-coated eye candy.

I'm really not worried about the idea that "The Web" is changing. The sites that matter will always work with the bare minimum, with little more than HTTP GET and HTTP POST, even with JavaScript disabled.

The rest is just cruft.

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