And she quit? We've become an oversensitive society of weaklings. When I was in school I was physically harassed daily. I had to fight people because I was into computers. People would come right out and say that they hated computer nerds and that they were going to "bash" me. It was fucking awful and I was miserable the entire time, but at no point did I consider giving computers up. So I have zero sympathy for the fashionable whining about how "hard" it is for some group of people to get into computers. It's never been easier to get into computers. You don't even need talent these days. The computer is practically designed for lazy, factory-style programmers.
The fact that an IQ test worked favourably for someone from a disadvantaged background doesn't demonstrate anything about their appropriateness as an assessor of intelligence. IQ is just a metric. I'm glad employers aren't using it to replace human judgment.
HTML is a terrible way to build applications. All these complex approaches have failed miserably on a technological level. Why are Mozilla even bothering to "solve" all these supposed problems? There is nothing new here. You can build anything you want in a simple virtual machine or sandbox. And yet we're going to get all this stupid application-level nonsense as the bottom level. It's like people are eager to repeat the mistakes of operating systems and plugins, except this time the complexity will be in the standards. Give the power back to the programmers.
I feel you on the hate for Flash, but HTML5 is only marginally less stupid. Javascript as the bottom layer of a platform? Give me a break. And a bloated pile of standards is worse than a simple proprietary tool (which unfortunately, Flash is not).
Why down vote? Web babies seem to get very upset when the abject technological failure of the browser is pointed out to them. It has failed comprehensively:
Zero-install is not difficult. In fact, it was around decades ago. Then people destroyed that with complex operating systems requiring loads of configuration. Even with the stupidity of modern operating systems we could recover zero-install with simple virtual machines (or any number of other mechanisms).
Web links are cool. Just about the only redeeming feature of the web. They have absolutely no connection to JavaScript, HTML5 or any of the other hideous complexity you see in the browser.
Browsers are not "zero friction" upgrading. Behaviour changes from version to version. Using Firefox on Linux I have experienced continued breakages. Again, if you had a simple virtual machine it would be simple to port anywhere, and you wouldn't need constant bug fixes.
Your last point has nothing to do with technology. It is simply the result of vendors successfully selling the technology to people. By doing so they've locked other
better approaches out of the market due to network effects.
The remainder of your post is the good old "it'll be good enough" attitude. Except it won't ever be as good as it was because people are reliant on benchmarks that make "freight train" style systems look "fast" for through-put code.
Sockets are not a new technology. Wrapping sockets in a bunch of overhead and taking away UDP isn't new technology. No smooth scrolling on a PC with a graphics card an inch thick strikes me as a very poor job. But it will be hailed as a "step forwward" because it's in the browser space (which has no standards).
Not trying to bully you, but what part of this is impressive? There doesn't seem to be anything here that wasn't done better decades ago. Why does everything become impressive once it appears in the browser?
Please, stop doing things like this. You people are destroying programming! Why does everything have to be so complicated? Because people keep fucking everything up with stupidity, that's why!
The scrolling was jerky for me on my newish desktop PC. There doesn't seem to be any new "technology" here, just some slow wrappers around stuff that was around years ago. If this is being touted as "the future" then programming is really going down the toilet.