ryanoshea
It's gotten a lot better over the last two years, especially when FF DevTools got support for source maps and TypeScript debugging, but it still lags enough to keep me using Chrome for my job, Firefox at home.
When Trump uses Twitter as his primary method of addressing citizens and announcing administration policies, then selectively prevents citizens from viewing those communications, he's doing something much different (in my mind) than a private company restricting the access of a person to a service whose terms of use they have violated.
The equivalence you drew doesn't seem valid — US citizens have no expectation or right to send communications to the Office of the President and have them read or acted upon. They do have that expectation/right to have equal access to public communications by the President.
I work for a startup that builds a dataflow app platform that fits that description nicely. We support gathering data from databases, files, APIs, etc., full graph-based flow control, strong .NET types on everything, tons of premade boxes for common operations, and support for C#/Python/R/F#/VB for custom data manipulation. Here's a quick example dataflow: http://blog.composableanalytics.com/2016/09/25/querying-data...
- search for and browse for applications and settings (you can do this in the start screen)
- have quick access to favorite programs (this is what tiles are for)
- have quick access to settings shortcuts, like "Devices and Printers" (you can search for these)
- shut down/standby/power commands (these have been moved to a charm, but will return in 8.1 Update 1)
The only thing that has been changed, that people might not like, is the design, the layout, and possibly the change in UX getting from the start screen to a given action. But as far as I can see, every action you'd want to do on the start screen is just as accessible as it was in Windows 7.
To me, pressing the Start key on my keyboard and typing the first few letters of literally anything I want to do on my system is the most important UX component of Windows 8 & 8.1. Windows Vista introduced it, Windows 7 improved it, and now 8 and 8.1 made it shinier and faster. It's amazing to me how many people I see trying to use their computers without taking advantage of this functionality.
Of course, I might have just forgotten something. But it seems like people are mostly just complaining because it's different, regardless of whether it's actually worse.