scott_o

Why not? Its just that for the subjective metrics people will have different opinions and therefore draw different conclusions about which one is "better"

Which is the OPs exact point. While some people value their editor being very light on ram, other people value other things, and that's okay.

It sounds like this was an automatic thing, the host could query the terminal and would get a response without any user input.

So that still leaves me with the question of why the key exists?

What use cases would you have for voluntarily sending the host your "identification"? Was this used for authentication?

I don't think so. Last time I checked they don't do any polyfills, instead relying on commonJS for that.

[meta] did anybody try opening this article without adblock? I got two flash ads autoplaying audio in firefox (in chrome they don't auto-play audio), each with the same movie trailer but one was about a second behind the other. And it jacked up my scrolling pretty hard, probably due to the performance hit (the page loaded noticeably slower.)