Firefox has add-ons such as Ghostery, Noscript, ShareMeNot etc. to help with that sort of thing.

I also run three different browsers concurrently (Firefox, Chrome, Opera) depending on what I need to do.

But then the OS I use most often is Linux (around 80% of the time), followed by Win7, and OS/X 10.6.8 for very specific applications.

I almost never use Windows for anything important, and almost NEVER use IE (too much risk).

Now I am thinking that I should give it another spin.

What on earth are you even arguing?

Look, there’s a HUGE difference between adding the essential innovations THAT MAKE A MARKET EXPLODE and adding trivial little bells and whistles that ever so slightly make one device or application more desirable than another, but are enough to allow a new entrant into a an ALREADY ESTABLISHED MARKET gradually to take over that market. What Apple did in the iPhone was clearly the first case; what Android does, is, at most (and probably not even), the second case.

If you can’t see the difference between the two, what do you really have to add to the discussion?

In the end, your overall argument collapses into absurdity. You seem to think that because the touchscreen existed before the iPhone, for example, that Apple could not have innovated in its application to the iPhone. But if you want to be that reductionistic, why not conclude that there’s no innovation at all in Silicon Valley, despite the belief in virtually everyone that it’s rife with innovation? Virtually everything has an identifiable precursor — does that mean innovation never happens?

I will, though, tell you one place innovation NEVER seems to occur: in Open Source.

Sounds to me like you are now saying Apple’s SOMETHING right amounts to about 2%.

True. And I am sure that Google does this intentionally. Everyone used to hate Microsoft for this sort of thing but the Google gets a pass for any crap it does. I am not going to use Chrome for the same reason that I never used IE.

Look, I did mention at least some of the characteristics of the iPhone that were largely new, or at least so organized that they made its use very accessible.

The iPhone certainly made great use, as never before, of the touchscreen in order to use a large GUI on a mobile device. It scrolled and expanded the GUI in a way, by using one’s fingers, that allowed people to think about and use the relatively small geometry of a mobile phone so that they could effectively expand the conceptual windows in which that device’s applications were displayed. This went well beyond the mere use of a touchscreen; it employed a touchscreen to overcome the most significant deterrent to the use of smart phones: their extremely cramped space. Because, unlike virtually all other smartphones at the time, no space was required for physical buttons, the GUI itself also became distinctly larger.

I think it’s pretty fair to say that Apple understood with great clarity exactly what the deepest problem to overcome was with smartphones, and put together the best possible elements to solve that precise problem.

Now no doubt certain aspects of this might have been attempted before. But I don’t know of any credible case in which all of the elements were put together in such a way that the GUI was able to overcome the well known limitation of smartphones.

I should think that it might be obvious that Apple must have gotten SOMETHING important right in the iPhone that, say, Palm never got right, because why would the iPhone take off as it did, and create this explosive market, when Palm had had so much time, and natural advantage, to do so if it possibly could?

And I continue to ask: what has the Android introduced that anybody cares about, or ANY open source venture, that might compare to the iPhone?

Imitation is the most sincere form of Open Source. In fact, it’s the ONLY form.

I actually use both Firefox and Chrome these days — often using one browser to consume some media, while using the other for reading.

And I’m consistently underwhelmed by the “innovation” that comes out of Apple. Apple does world class marketing and pays attention to that last .1% of detail which makes a big difference. I’m more willing to deal with kludgy tech products though (I’m running Linux) and don’t see much fundamental innovation coming out of Apple. They wait for tech to mature and put a wonderful polish on it.

I had a smartphone that did everything the iPhone did long before the iPhone. But it was a bit of a pain and a bit kludgy and most people wouldn’t want to deal with the hassle. Apple has provided a very valuable service for most people. I just see disappointingly little fundamental innovaton. Their products are generally just nicer versions of stuff that already exists.

You may be sure that I am no Apple fanboi. I think in general that the contributions of Apple are far overrated, nor do I deny that Apple has itself borrowed heavily from other sources.

But here’s the point: it also ADDED something very important to the iPhone interface that wasn’t there before. What it added was, by all evidence, absolutely crucial to the breakthrough success of the entire market of smartphones.

That level of innovation is PRECISELY what Android lacks, and open source more generally. They are both, nearly without exception, shameless copying of pre-existing ideas.

Well, yours is a pretty typical response — at least typical of those who get behind Open Source, though I’ll admit I don’t know that that is where you are coming from.

Look, what are we to believe here, according to your account? That there’s been no innovation on the mobile phone interface, or in GUIs in general, in the last twenty years? That, despite the fact that just about everybody talks about the innovations coming out of Silicon Valley, and the tremendous inventiveness of those who work there, it’s all a scam, and all that’s really going on is that everyone is just copying ideas that have been around forever, and pretending that they’re innovative?

You’re right that certain BASIC aspects of the iPhone interface have been around for a long time. But there are such things as IMPROVEMENTS on those basics that can, indeed, prove to be the absolutely crucial innovations to the success of the technology. Somehow, the iPhone managed to make smartphone technology accessible and successful in a way that no previous entrants to the field managed to do, including, for example, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Perhaps it was the way in which the apps were presented; perhaps it was the ability to scroll or expand images that one finds on the iPhone; perhaps it was any number of things in the iPhone, or the combination of them all that made for the breakthrough market; but it was something. I don’t think anyone objective has seriously argued that the iPhone really did NOTHING original.

The point is, there was certainly SOME important level of innovation represented by the iPhone. And the problem is with Android, and more generally with Open Source just about anything, that there’s nothing even remotely resembling that level of innovation. It is, instead, absolutely shameless copying, and almost nothing but. The concept of “innovation” in Android and Open Source more generally is something like, “Oh, look at how I reduced this code to a macro!! Did you ever see such a thing??”

It’s also funny to hear an Apple fanboi trashing open-source, considering that OS X is based on BSD and Mach – both effectively open-source, that iTunes relies on the Gracenote database which was originally an open-source project, and that Apple’s Safari browser is a fork of KHTML, an open-source browser.