GerbilMechs 152: Heart Stopper

13Sep05 (Monthenor): I've been plagued with an ear infection since last Thursday, causing me to sit around the apartment listlessly. It may look like that's all I ever do anyway, but right now I'm not enjoying it.

I really should have posted this way back when Morgion first showed me, as it really is the epitome of the Open Source Hates You mentality: witness as the FireFox developers tell us we don't need "Print" in a right-click context menu...for two years. It's so bad, they also started a forum thread to parallel the Bugzilla discussion.

Let me try to put that in perspective. Two years ago, the FireFox browser was still called "Firebird". Two years ago, we already had winners like "View Background Image" and "View Page Info" in the context menu. Two years ago, that silly useless Go button wasn't part of the default toolbar. Two years ago, we didn't have "Send Link..." in the context menu...but that was considered more urgent.

Pay special attention to the discussion from this point onward. Much as this thread is the exemplar of OSHY, Asa Dotzler seems to personify the Biggest Penis competitive spirit. The other devs at least attempted to justify their decision in terms of usability or code bloat; Asa just wants you to shut up because goddammit he is a developer and the developers have spoken and he is sick of getting these emails and so help me I will banz j00! I especially like his for-example alternatives, one of which is understandable for a programmer (Ctrl+P), and one of which is just him being a dick.

That thread makes me angry every time I look at it. Advocacy of feature requests is spam WTF?