Anyway, my point re things like the blacklist and webgl rasterizer is that the browser is not completely installed without those components. The offline installer is missing key features and components of the browser; things that show up on feature lists that web applications can rely on. Without the WebGL rasterizer, WebGL demos won't work in your offline-installed copy of Chrome in your VM without hardware accel. Without the GPU blacklist, on some configurations Firefox will be nonfunctional (or worse, crash your machine) because it attempts to do acceleration on a broken driver. Audio/video codecs are another area where it's no longer possible to realistically ship 'everything' in a single offline installer.
If you simply want an offline installer for a bare minimum browser that can do a stripped down subset of HTML5, it's still possible to deliver that. But the amount of the 'web' that works in that bare minimum installation will keep decreasing.
P.S. The reason Firefox has to install a service is because it's not possible to install updates cleanly in any other fashion on UAC-enabled Windows. Your alternatives are installing into %AppData% (like chrome does, which removes the ability to pick an install dir and has other gross consequences) or requiring the user to UAC elevate every time an update installs. As I stated in the parent post, not installing updates puts users at risk when you're dealing with a web browser - the attack surface is enormous.
> The reason Firefox has to install a service is because
> it's not possible to install updates cleanly in any
> other fashion on UAC-enabled Windows.
It makes sense that Windows UAC has forced bad decision making. Windows, in general, is just a hideous, mutated mess nowadays.
Anyway, it's essentially a correct decision to never marry a browser to device drivers or hardware. The websites that count won't dare crash browsers due to hardware requirements. The browsers that count will fail gracefully, and tell the user that their settings are not compliant with the requirements of the page they are trying to view, before they ever crash. However one wishes to communicate the nature of highly specific user options, and then adapt to the long fragmented tail of hardware conditions, is beyond the scope of a "NORMAL" web browser (no-true-scotsman).
When requirements become that unforgiving, you've entered the realm of the highly specialized plug-in, or custom client-server software. It's cool that Firefox is brave enough to wade into those territories, and still deliver awesomeness, but the core necessities of the web browser should never be sacrificed, for fluff and sugar-coated eye candy.
I'm really not worried about the idea that "The Web" is changing. The sites that matter will always work with the bare minimum, with little more than HTTP GET and HTTP POST, even with JavaScript disabled.
The rest is just cruft.
Firefox's installer is dead simple, and believe me, I am HUGELY grateful for that. The only thing easier than the Windows installer is unzipping the Linux tarball into whatever path I choose. I hate Adobe's Flash and PDF installers, and I fucking DESPISE the Java installer, with its damnable bundling of that bloody Ask.com toolbar.
Seeing Firefox add these additional layers of background updater services and stub installers deeply worries me, and fills me with concern that as a "salary paying organization" (albeit, ostensibly non-profit), they might veer down an ugly path, go the way of the Sith, and start engaging in questionable behavior that is inappropriate for an open source project.
Consider the example of Ubuntu's desktop file search bundling Amazon ads in the results. What if one day, Mozilla decides that in order to pay the bills, it needs to negotiate a deal, whereby all those users with automatic updating enabled should get railroaded with some kind of optional-but-defaulted-to-enabled third party feature suggesting helpful reminders to buy more burritos from Jimbo's Refried Beans Emporium. Just sayin'...
Not to do things without my permission, they don't. This "need" business... I disagree.A browser only "needs" to to exactly what I ask it to do, and not much else. I tell the browser what to do, not the other way around.
Optional. That's an important adjective in your sentence. Yeah, the very same blacklist that I'm frequently bypassing to check out all the cool Web GL experiments people post here on HN. I know all about that.Malware blacklists are another concept that I tend to reject as mostly ineffective in achieving their stated goal. We could go round and around with that argument for days. Let's not get started on THAT can of worms.
When you use the word "impossible", I have to just flatly disagree with you. And in general, most of the things that you mentioned are things that I don't care about, and will never be interested in.