The actual process is super super super slow compared to any partitioning process + it needs to be called many times and the partitioning process can be called once and cached, so pretty much anything in the partitioning portion is fair game.

Thanks for the input.

I am an android user so I know it ships with Internet, but have never used it.

In this modern world of every company fighting to be the default for everything, how does Samsung not ship with modern Chrome or Firefox or both? Seems like Samsung is leaving some licensing money on the table there in a big way?

Regardless, that is also one of those terrible UX things that when you have to deal with it, you should be able to punch the person responsible for it being that way.

A) You post in this thread therefore I'd be surprised if you use the "Internet" browser.

B) No one chooses their Android phone based on what browser it ships with.

C) Samsung is the 500lb Gorilla in Android phone world. So they get to do what they want.

Does anyone know if S6 finally does away with the Android native browser? Please say yes.

Not sure how androids work with carriers, but it seems Verizon at least doesn't have Internet on s6

https://community.verizonwireless.co...oRedirect=true

Yeah I saw that. Hopefully AT&T will do likewise. That would probably be enough that we can drop support for that damn thing.

I have an s6e on verizon and pretty sure it didn't come with "internet" but not sure what would happen if you tried to go to a url.

Hmm well some perusing online seems to be people complaining about the stock browser missing on Verizon so they can't use stuff like fingerprint login. No one is complaining about AT&T so I have to assume it's still there, and we have another couple years of supporting a browser with the Chrome 28 rendering engine (unless Google actually updated it). AWESOME!

I'm going to go into an AT&T store and hit what's my user agent with an S6. You can see the Chrome version in the user agent. Will report back. If it's at least over 35 that solves a lot of our problems.

If your experience is 10 years of using Visual Database Tools, then that is pretty worthless, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe this person exists.

Was there another reason to have this opinion (if it is genuine)?

For browsers, built-in has a lot of market by default. I don't care what HN tries to say, the latest gen of IE is pure trash, but that doesn't stop it from having double-digit market share.

IE-10 and 11 actually do pretty much everything we need. We don't support IE-8 any more so there's only a few things like flex-box, HTML5 placeholders, etc. that IE-9 can't do. IE-8 was dead in the water with angular.

Is this Google not updating, or Sumsung asserting its walled garden?

Well a little of both. Google updates the OS and says "hey have at it guys". Then I think it's more up to the carriers than Samsung whether to release an update. Then they push that to the user.

Unless you jailbreak there is no way to update the OS on your own as a user until the carrier has made it available. In general it seems like you get 1-2 updates per phone model and then they quit and the phone becomes a brick in a few years.

But also within that Google hasn't been updating the stock browser for a long time: http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/andro...-eternal-dying

Maybe from a developer standpoint it is okay, but as an end-user, it is horrible to use. Obnoxiously slow, each tab is a new window, constant freezing and rollback when you try to go to a new URL, and that's about all the complaints I have about it because why would I want to continue?

If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, you can change that.

I'm sure default users probably don't know that tho, which tend to also be IE users

I just learned that all browsers use the same testing engine on iOS. Apple won't allow anything else so chrome, Firefox, etc are all stuck with the ****ty safari behavior.

https://aws.amazon.com/device-farm/

This thread has made me unreasonably angry. But also glad I'm not a web dev.

The problem with those things is they can't test the bugs we get like "scroll choppy when sticky header is showing", "virtual keyboard shows for one second then hides, when input is at the bottom of the screen on Note III only" or "weird border around text area on Nexus 7 tablet".

Or pretty much everything on Kindle. Such a POS. Amazon should focus on making that thing better.

The funny thing is you could replace Android flavors and iOS with "Safari, Opera, IE 6, Netscape and Firefox" from 2005 and you'd have all the same quirks. Then browsers matured, and frameworks came out to handle all the browser-specific quirks that were left.

We were just getting to where everything was nice and stable and you could easily crank out fairly predictable web behavior, when boom - mobile blew it all up again. Job security I guess.

Very hard to offshore mobile web development. Even if they actually have the devices to test on, for whatever reason the culture just doesn't seem to foster the creativity and debugging skills. Lots of smart developers, but they seem to need a very well-defined environment and problem set to start with. Offshore devs don't seem to do well in wild-west scenarios at all. The best developers get brought over here and some of them do very well. But it's almost impossible for a developer to succeed in mobile development from offshore.

Web development really isn't bad and actually very enjoyable if you use the latest stuff when developing.

Years ago, developing for the web was pretty painful but those years are gone.
I'm leaning towards the assumption, that within 5 years web developers for front and backend will feel like they don't have much to complain about at all.

Currently I could harp about how great Nodejs makes developing so simple. Using modules that the community builds, which can be examined or modified and work on both front and backend. JSON has become the standard for handling pretty much every container of passing data. Everything moving towards pure javascript and nice template engines like jade for making html actually look pretty. Boilerplates constantly getting fine tuned and going off years of best design practices as default with customizability.

Sure I could nitpick things about the above but its come a long way from the dreaded **** people had to deal with years ago and it will only continue to get better. Anyway i'm not a web developer because I don't consider myself one and just hop around to whatever I want to play with, so take the above as a grain of salt.

There are a boat load of Bluetooth connectivity issues with Android phones as well. Android updates would fix these issues. My understanding is that a big part of the problem with doing Android updates is that Google and the firmware vendors are not synced that well. Google Android changes often require board support package changes for the phone firmware and that is a problem. Locking in on a consistent OS firmware interface abstraction like Windows has done with their Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) would be a step in the right direction. Btw Windows phones are terrible regarding Bluetooth functionality.

At our scale I am convinced it is impossible.

We had 20-25 people up at one point on 4 continents, and are now going 100% onshore.

I'm unconvinced that you can actually off-shore at a discount except at the super enterprise scale right now. Is there a company in the world that considers technical debt as anything resembling real debt?

It is just way harder to find talented, creative, thoughtful people offshore, and the ones you do find are smart and trying to move around (see: straight up) ASAP.

Depends on where you offshore to. For European companies it's often not bad to offshore "eastwards". The engineering/development backgrounds are still strong and the cost is lower (as are the living costs for developers).
At the same time your developers are in a similar (or the same) timezone and usually speak English reasonably well so there's less issues communicating.

+the living conditions gap is not huge so people are less likely to leave home. For example you can find fairly smart people with a good CS background in Bulgaria who don't really want to leave their home country if you pay them a salary that is very good for Bulgarian standards.
[Sofia is 1h ahead of CEST]

Yea, I don't have direct experience with those locations, but that is what some of our competitors do. I've also heard Russia is great for biotech/pharmaceutical outsourcing, where the work I basically 50% advanced math 50% development.

We had some luck in South America in some of their developing economies but in the end as our work got more high end, they became the weak point. India is super tricky, 90% of companies will say they can easily take on your work and then bomb.

I have very little experience with SA but have heard good things about Brazil especially if your stack is pretty FLOSS based.

Quick git question:
I have a JS project template and want to eventually move it to ES6. For now I want to keep it ES5 but I'll update it to ES6 in parallel.

Is creating an es6 branch and just not mergeing it until I want to make the switch for good the way to go?
[and then I just checkout the es6 branch whenever I want to start a new ES6 project and master if not]