Very true - it's definitely a symbiotic relationship. I doubt DDG could drop $300M a year, but MSFT could. Mozilla isn't going to give up that kind of $ just to hurt Google. The numbers vary by source, but across the board you see that FF's market share has dropped by about 1/3 or more since 2009, so every month that number gets lower (which seems to be the trend), FF becomes less and less valuable to Google.
Should have been clear. I wasn't saying beginning 2009, but their high in market share, which was late 2009. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers, which contains the graphic you linked to. In November 2009, FF's market share hit it's high of 32.2%. January 2013: 21.4%. Not FUD: the graph you linked shows the same. That's a reduction of 33%.
I'll probably write up something at length about this decision when/if it happens… but this is the current thinking:
CSS transitions are just total shit to deal with in javascript.
What people often don't realize is that there is an event for transitionEnd in javascript – but this isn't always fired in a reliable way – only when a transition successfully ends (which isn't all the time).
This is incredibly problematic because often really important functionality is tied to the completion of transitions.
Because these functions never finish, sometimes you're left with dead dom nodes or weird incomplete states.
What's more, there isn't a performance benefit to using css transitions – the benefit is that they were suppose to be make transitions easier and provide a nice separation of style from logic – but they end up being incredibly more difficult and because of the necessary fallback logic, the styles end up leaking back into your logic anyways. It's a pain in the neck :/
With bootstrap we really just want to give everyone the most reliable product we can, and css transitions just aren't that.
Also, from what I hear, the spec is basically dead in the water – and a reliable cancel event isn't in the works (unless this has changed in the last month or so)… which is more of a reason to consider alternatives.
Most likely we will end up going with some sort of combination. CSS transitions when we don't need a reliable "complete" event – and css transitions when we don't really care (though this case is becoming more infrequent).
It's on our list to check it out because of some of lack of control CSS transitions afford us. Hacks with overflow hidden cause issues, mobile performance is rather spotty, and more. Not a guarantee, but we're considering it.
Oh, it's plenty different. First off, software is not one thing. It encompasses more orders of magnitude of difference than almost any other industry. At one end you might have throwaway fart apps or single serving joke websites and at the other end you might have spacecraft avionics or industrial systems control or banking systems, and in the middle there is a multi-dimensional realm of tremendous breadth and volume. Additionally, software construction is by its nature creative. Creating a million or a billion or even a trillion copies of a piece of software is a more or less trivial and heavily automated task. Software isn't like making cars or houses or bridges. When you make a bridge there is a lot of work that goes into design but most of the work is in implementation. In software the implementation (the actual running of the software) is automated, all of the development work and all of the so-called "implementation" work is in truth just design work on finer and finer scales.
The combination of all of these factors makes software a different sort of beast than a lot of other work. Now, as I said, that doesn't mean that you can't still attack it with brute force and obtain results, but software is actually one of the realms where that is one of the least effective strategies.
This is ridiculously arrogant. All of the arguments you make for software engineering being different can be applied to any other engineering discipline. Throwaway fart apps == single-use plate connections or custom fab bolts. Spacecraft avionics == spacecraft structural design. Etc, etc.
Your statement about design vs implementation shows that you're clearly outside of your knowledge space when talking about other disciplines. Depending on bridge span, length, and construction method, the man hours required for design can be much more than those required for construction.
Software is not really all that different from any other type of work. It even shares the trait that people that are part of the software sector think that their sector is somehow inherently different.
sigh Let's call off the angry accusation slinging straw man slap fight and just pencil in on the official forms that we did it, shall we?
I haven't said, nor do I mean to imply, that my dad is better than your dad, err, I mean, that software development is somehow on a higher plane or superior to other work. However, there is something that sets software apart from most other work in that it is almost entirely design work, even "construction" is design work. (Of course, there is often something that sets most genres of work apart from other genres too, every industry has its unique aspects.) A particular engineering task might require more man-hours in design than in construction but that is an edge case, and the ratio is unlikely to be higher than an order of magnitude, the norms still apply. And again, software sees a rather larger range of scale than almost any other industry. The difference in, say, the amount of data handled by a given piece of software can range from a single byte (or even a single bit) up to petabytes or higher (the LHC processes zettabytes of data per year). That's 21 orders of magnitude. The difference between the smallest features in a microchip and the longest superhighways on Earth is only 15 magnitudes, and those are considered to be hugely different industries.
The main point I wanted to get at though was that due to the primacy of design individual talent can often have an outsized impact on overall product quality or capability. You certainly see that in many other disciplines but not necessarily on the same scale. Because, again, it's not terribly rare to have a situation where a piece of software developed by a single developer is just generally better than one developed by a team working at a multi-billion dollar mega-corp. That's the equivalent of some guy building a Mach 10 plane in his garage that runs on solar power. You tend not to see extremes on such magnitudes outside of software.
Indeed, it's even a driving force in the industry, as the idea of being able to build some new or better product from nothing and scale up to a billion dollar company in a matter of years starting from only one or two founders is rather common in software and shockingly uncommon outside of it.
So your major point is that software is unique because it:
1. Spans N orders of magnitude in scale which is M orders of magnitude more than X sector.
2. A single individual can put out superb products while some teams put out mediocre products.
3. The possibility exists for companies to be created with J founders and reach a valuation of K in L years.
Sorry, but none of these are unique to software. They're just the same arguments for anything else with different values for the variables.
Again, your sector is not unique. Last time we thought software was a unique sector lead to the great "paradigm shift" (as Greenspan called it, I believe) of 2000. You might know it better as the dot-com bubble.
Being able to earn some money on the internet does not make you any smarter from any other profession. So it's just the internet what makes you feel so special. Good luck software engineering your bilion dollars without it.
