Internet Explorer Is Evil (2002)
toastytech.com
toastytech.com
> Windows 95 was also heavily about choice.
I recently received a tech support phone call from my mother because her "computer was showing an error that she only has one drive working, and it's really slow. I need all my drives!" Windows computers are throwing errors now if you don't have OneDrive configured. Tasteless. I'm so sick of this.
I don't want OneDrive, I don't want Teams, I don't want a 3d Objects folder. I don't want my computer to schedule its own restart, I don't want my (supposedly) sleeping computer to randomly play an "error" sound. I don't want my login screen to default to PIN instead of passwords. A young version of me considered Microsoft superior because unlike Apple, I felt like I could make choices about my environment. I just gave my mom a laptop with Linux Mint installed, I changed all of the mint icons to windows icons, I renamed Libre office programs to their Microsoft office counterparts. We'll see how this experiment goes.
But hang in there man, youre fighting the good fight! I had my mum and dad on Linux from 2005-2014 when a gift from my sister (garmin running watch) exposed my lie!
I understand it's annoying, but as someone who deals with spam, I prefer that Microsoft forces people to apply security upgrades on their home computers.
(Maybe there’s a whole anti-IE album’s worth out there?)
Thanks for expressing my emotions better than I could on a number of occasions!
> Somewhere around this point, people began spewing mindless drivel about how browsers would somehow magically replace operating systems eventually, and how in the future all applications would be "web based". This, of course, got Microsoft's attention.
I still miss some gotchas from Windows 95 UX (1 pixel width things, no overuse of shadows/highlights, concise color pallette, etc), and started to respect it even more after reading this article: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
You could disable it in a breeze and get a good boost.
>Somewhere around this point, people began spewing mindless drivel about how browsers would somehow magically replace operating systems eventually, and how in the future all applications would be "web based".
From you:
>a desktop environment made with Electron today.
A browser DE would be great. ;w; A crossplatform shell with the same tray and file manager and everything? Wherein I can open a browser and play crossplatform browser games[0]?
When pls
On your link:
Exception thrown, see JavaScript console
Then the UI is compiled to javascript, which means it's portable and looks the same on every platform, but you can actually write your program in a less brain-damaged language like Rust or Python (or C or whatever you like).
Fun fact: Up to NS4 / IE4, you couldn't print a JavaScript generated HTML output, which was a major restriction in the days, when "the Internet" was commonly printed by a assistant for the benefit of a higher echelon, for whom the Web mostly came on paper. However, for whatever reasons, with a PostScript printer you could. (Generally speaking, pages were reloaded and reflowed for printing and JS generated content didn't work well with printer drivers which did also RIPping. Apparently, the process was somewhat different with PS printers.)
> Fun fact: Up to NS4 / IE4, you couldn't print a JavaScript generated HTML output, which was a major restriction in the days, when "the Internet" was commonly printed by a assistant for the benefit of a higher echelon...
Fun fact: printing web pages today is a PITA. The only browser which some years ago made a decent job was Opera. Firefox, Chrome and IE are total disasters.
Chrome Is Evil (2020)
It wasn't until 2005 when they stopped caring about making browsers better and it started lagging behind Firefox in all the new design fads at the time - transparent PNGs, rounded corners - and the dev tools couldn't keep up with Firebug. That is when IE started to be annoying, in my opinion anyway.
Not true. IE was part of the embrace-extend-extinguish campaign when Microsoft wanted to win computing and the nascent World Wide Web. Thankfully, the antitrust case threw them for a loop and they never realized their dream.
I'm convinced that if they'd have won that case they'd have squashed Google, Apple wouldn't have had its chance to thrive, and the web would look like a Microsoft version of AOL.
We'd be using MSN messenger, Hotmail, and Windows Mobile.
Balmer lacked the tenacity and the vision of Gates (you can see it in the historical stock price), and the government forced them from building an unstoppable empire.
We need the DOJ to revisit antitrust and direct it at Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. They're using their power and platform to disenfranchise and steal, just like Microsoft wanted and historically enjoyed:
- App stores need to stop being an exclusive gate and required tax.
- You can't lie to your customers about ad impressions or views, nor can you disregard robot and fake account activity when it benefits your bottom line.
- You can't control the world's most popular browser and be the default search engine, most widespread ad platform, and most popular mobile operating system.
It's all bad behavior that hurts small and independent business as well as the web.
Microsoft has played surprisingly nice recently, and Nadella is absolutely killing it. There's no reason the other giants can't be more open. Google doesn't need Chrome as a moat.
With Messenger, the official client wasn't that bad, and MSNP was a surprisingly nice and simple protocol --- plenty of third-party clients were available, and I wrote one too.
Perhaps if Microsoft got Windows Mobile out first, it would be more like WinCE and not the locked-down iOS/Android clone that it tried to chase after.
Microsoft has played surprisingly nice recently
I wouldn't call their user-hostile spyware/adware OS "nice", nor let all the stuff they're open-sourcing[1] distract from the fact that MS is tryng to head towards being a Google too.
[1] The fact that people have been modding DOS/Windows and applications for literally decades without source suggests the value of it is not as high as the FSF and so forth would believe.
Anecdotal evidence suggests they are now almost beloved. In the tech community as well as enterprise (where they have always been). They are almost never mentioned in Antitrust discussions. Many seem to hate/distrust Google, Facebook and to some extent Amazon.
All the while MS has the highest market cap and is integrating and consolidating right, left and center.
I can only imagine it is because they have fewer touch points with consumers. They rake in insane amounts of cash with Azure, almost automatically. They don‘t have to deal with republicans accusing them of “liberal bias” or end user privacy in general. Even though WIN10 has telemetry just as deep as Android.
Life sure is nice when your main source of revenue is enterprise.
Now I mostly like them.
I use Windows 10 and I think is nice. I use Edge on Android because it has built in Ad Block and I find it rather nice.
I do like Github.
I love Visual Studio which has made my life easier.
I enjoy using Visual Studio Code.
I do enjoy greatly working with .NET Core.
Sometimes I use Bing when Google annoys me too much, and that is often.
That’s just it though. Microsoft kind of has the luxury to solely focus on their paying clients. They only have to consider their needs.
Google (and Facebook) have to juggle the needs of advertisers and users. That’s why cloud is so important for them. They really need to lower their reliance on ad revenue.
That would be great.
I am not convinced that would happen and even if that would happen, I am not convinced it would be a bad thing.
Google spying on people and selling their data is worse from my point of view than anything MS did. Also, Apple has a far greater lock down on their products than MS ever dreamed of.
But it is no (so much) worse than what MS does with telemetry.
+1
These were Windows-only. They had all the security of Flash, but at least you could run Flash on Mac and Linux. If ActiveX had won out as the default web authoring platform, non-MS smartphones would have been crippled from launch; they wouldn't be able to run "real web pages" containing ActiveX, and relegated to a WAP-like second class citizen status.
I’m honestly grateful for where we are at right now with major browsers and web standards.
More like browser --- or two, if you count Firefox...
and web standards
...are being wielded as a weapon to maintain a monopoly. The fact that it's a standard means nothing more than... the fact that it's a standard. The ones in control are still those at Google, and they can change the standards however they want.
At least the stagnation of the IE6 times meant that most pages were designed specifically to a more lowest-common-denominator, which also helped greatly with accessibility and letting the even smaller minorities of browsers be useful. These days far too many sites are being turned into JS-heavy SPAs when they absolutely don't need to be, because a lot of web developers are assuming everyone has/wants(?) to use a monster-browser like Chrome.
for chrome, every single point here is true (just replace outlook with gmail): A Glimpse in to an "Enterprise" Intranet
plus, IE never caries around my login and offer to it to more sites than facebook, like chrome does with my google login.
No, MS became more cunning and evil, they've moved al those practices to their OS.
Safari on the other hand... You're not even allowed to replace it with an open source browser.
Google punishes you for using non-Google stuff.
I'm using Firefox with some pretty paranoid privacy settings and I actually didn't have all that many problems with recaptcha recently. I agree that it was pretty bad for a while though.
Meanwhile, Apple decided to prevent anything like that happening from the start.
Firefox is more or less Chrome. Edge same. Vivaldi is also Chrome.
> Safari on the other hand... You're not even allowed to replace it with an open source browser.
This is a feature.
Not really. Chrome is closer to Safari, since it uses Blink, which is a fork of WebKit (which in turn is a fork of KHTML used in Konqueror). Firefox uses Gecko, which comes from Netscape.
YouTube tells me they will soon be retiring support for IE, though.
There were a few reasons the OOXML spec was quite a bit longer than the ODF spec. The main were:
1. ODF has a cleaner and less verbose markup.
2. ODF was very underspecified. For example, the spreadsheet spec didn't say much about formulas beyond that they should exist. The OOXML spec, on the other hand, had hundreds of pages defining spreadsheet formulas and the functions available.
One problem with ODF was that Sun wanted ODF to have just what it needed to support StarOffice and nothing more. There were proposals to make ODF better able to represent documents from other systems such as existing Office, Word Perfect, and Lotus, but Sun had sufficient influence to stop that.
Pretty much in contrast of what Chrome and Safari teams are doing, no?
/irony
Why? You think that people will enjoy having subpar desktop experience by using Linux? Or they all afford to pay 2x or 3x for Apple products compared to a regular PC?