I’ve been doing cross-browser comparison of font rendering, and Firefox now has the worst font rendering of any of the major browsers in Windows.

It used to to be the best. What a travesty that is, too.

QupZilla mentioned below has the best. Side-by-side below, Firefox on the left and QupZilla on the right.

Look at those horribly-rendered glyphs. Just terrible.

I have been looking for alternatives to Firefox and Chrome/Chromium, and though this also used Webkit it seems pretty polished and stable.

It’s not perfect. I really dislike how it used the middle mouse button for mouse gestures. But at least it has mouse gestures.

As Firefox goes completely nuts and other browsers are already privacy-violating nightmares, viable alternatives are worth exploring.

A vision of America’s possible future.

If you think that could not happen here, well, I welcome you to history. Enjoy the ride.

Why I always laugh when clueless folks – usually utterly dopey Northerners –  say “no one needs an air conditioner anywhere ever.”

That’s almost 5AM. Eighty degrees with 94 percent humidity at the “coolest” part of the day in St. Petersburg, FL.

That’s not even as hot as it gets at 5AM there. Sometimes the daily low is 83-85 degrees at nearly 100 percent humidity.

I guess you can debate the definition of “need,” but I do a lot of work at night. There’s no way I can work with hot computers running indoors when it’s 85 degrees plus.

That’s at night, of course. During the day it’s 90+ at similar humidity. Do think you can work in an office that’s 90+ degrees with around 100% humidity?

Most people – most Westerners at least – haven’t done that, but I have. And I know how shitty it is and how unproductive. US Army, five years, will put you in situations like that.

About 10% as productive that way.

And oh yeah, elderly and sick people start dying when it gets that hot, but who cares about them when we have to prove our liberal bona fides. Fuck them, right?

“Thought” is really a misnomer and giving them too much credit.

But here is the Mozilla thought process on Firefox.

1) Covertly decide to remove a feature because, well, who knows? All the data analysis of theirs I’ve seen would be laughed out of a fucking fourth-grade science fair.

2) To placate power users and to give themselves more justification, first hide the feature by burying it or moving it into about:config.

3) Then run shoddy “analysis” and conclude that no one is using the now very-well-hidden feature. Of course usage decreases. You’ve hidden the damn thing.

4) Remove the feature completely with the above claim that it is not being used.

5) When an uproar occurs among the hundreds of thousands of people actually using the feature or who are mourning its disappearance, claim that people “just hate change” and that “the data analysis show only 4 dead people in Mongolia were using this feature, one of whom was actually a marmot. Also dead.”

6) Repeat as needed until Firefox is only suitable to run on phones and/or whatever asinine, unadvertised goal that they are actually trying to achieve occurs.

Here is the evidence.

If you decide to upgrade to Firefox 31 be aware that it is beset with some huge privacy issues, like this one.

The short summary is that nearly every file you download is sent to Google (and thus the NSA &c.) by Firefox.

If that doesn’t worry you – which it should on principle – then I guess go on right ahead with that. But if it does worry you, instructions on how to turn it off are in the link.

How can you write a piece with a sentence like this and not mention Orphan Black and Tatiana Maslany?

Movies once provided all the drama, intelligence and adult entertainment that TV lacked; now that situation has almost completely flipped. Not only do Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, True Detective and Game of Thrones provide characters and storytelling depth that Hollywood movies seem to have lost, but they’ve become the best place to watch that most old-school of theatrical movie attractions: acting.

Maslany makes Bryan Cranston look like Rob Schneider.

I even agree with most of the article, but that is a huge, huge oversight. Maslany is better than all the CGI in the universe.

However, for a well-integrated use of CGI that really added to the movie rather than detracted, the defense of Hogwarts in the final Harry Potter movie was exceptionally well-done and just as thrilling as those practical effects moments mentioned in Pevere’s piece.