"As CNET reported"
Considering that's the home of SJVN I'm not surprised. Anyway, My point is that for any company there should be no such thing as an "inherent" trust. People love to pick on MS, but countless people intrinsically trust Google, Mozilla, and Canonical, to the point where they don't know what to do when it's revealed that these companies are in fact companies too. (Mozilla got a lot of it's revenue earlier on by partnering with google and setting google as it's default start page, Google makes it's revenue through ad services, and Canonical, well, It's just a financial sink for Mark to throw his money at.
Anyway, back to browsers, they still all suck awfully. Come to think of it though the only one I cannot think of a good reason for it's suckage is IE, unless "history" counts. (IE6 doesn't support modern standards, so for some reason we should assume the same for later versions, according to some pundits, primarily Linux users whose last experience with windows was with Windows 98 when they were 12).
Firefox is consuming more memory on this system than Visual Studio, Google Chrome fails at looking OS native on the majority of systems, instead trying to look like some sort of half-breed windows 7/Luna hybrid,(or on win7 with aero, completely broken) Opera only works well with 100% web standard web sites which excludes it from about 90% of the internet, Safari isn't even worth mentioning.
Part of the problem is that the entire web ecosystem has changed and in doing so is trying to repurpose old tools to do new things. HTML was designed to markup basic text and provide hyperlinks, but now it's being used to present the underlying foundation of which AJAX, CSS, and various other technologies can do their tasks, meanwhile, somebody noticed that HTML was similar to XML and decided that they should make a version that was XML compliant, thus was born the lobotomized brother of HTML, which abandons usability in favour of parsability (XHTML). Even flash was somehow retooled from a vector graphics animation package (Macromedia Director and Macromedia Flash) to Full motion video (YouTube) Which is pretty much the only reason it's still around. HTML5 support is still about as fractured as support for HTML4 and CSS2 was with IE4 and NS3. Ever see a box shadow on a element? Non-standard.
Whatever the case, the longer the W3C and other standards bodies squabble about standards, and recommendations, or whatever it is they spend their time doing, the more likely the idea of the "open web" (which is in many ways laughable anyway) will die. Google, Apple, Adobe, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. are not pissing away years and years in endless turf wars and meaningless posturing akin to people like Ian Hickson. They are moving <NOW> to monetize every last bit of the web they can. (And to be honest, this what they've all been trying to do since the web really exploded with the introduction of broadband around the year 2000, with varying degrees of success).
What's a bit sad though is that unlike a company, you can't really take any action against a standards body. They are supposed to move slowly, and most of the reason they ever have issues is because they have some psychotic squeaky wheel trying to take credit for everything and ignoring any and all user input. But since nobody is really in charge it's like a House of Commons/House of Lords without a speaker- just a bunch of mindless rabble, and at the end of the day they call it "organization".
Meanwhile, browsers continue to make big claims- "Best browser ever" "fastest browser ever" "Most secure browser ever" while all supporting non-standard technologies like webkit- moz- and ms- prefixed CSS selectors (webkit- works with chrome, moz- works with firefox, and ms- works with IE, and none work with other browsers, meaning you need to determine the browser and use the appropriate vendor-specific CSS selector or attribute, all of which seem to have their own specific syntax and fiobles, and hope you can get them working similarly. And then at some point in the future I guess one of the three implementations will be chosen as a standards and over two thirds of the people who chose the "wrong one" will have to fix their implementation and the ones that chose the right one will still need to change their CSS to use the new tag name without the prefix.
