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Comment by haneefmubarak | Hacker News Reader

He has strongly opposed free software for a long, long time. Additionally, his company has been a strong proponent of DRM for ages and just keeps making it worse.

That wouldn't be so bad if it worked with few problems, but somehow, I always seem to get caught up in the DRM bugs in Microsoft's implementations.

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Also Internet Explorer, with its incompatibilities, yet very large user base, and Microsoft trying to enforce its own web standards - held the internet back for a long time. Web apps could have been better and cheaper to develop if it wasn't for this factor.

Reminds me of the -webkit tags that became the defacto standard forcing Opera, mobile Firefox and mobile IE to support them since web developers can't be bothered to code to standards or update their code. If it works in Safari/Chrome it ships because of their very large user base in mobile, exactly the same situation with IE.

http://css.dzone.com/articles/why-webkit-new-ie6-trap-vendor http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/australian-technology/the-w...

Not to mention Chrome developers "trying to enforce their own web standards":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184912

Progress on web standards have always been spearheaded by browser implementations before being standardized, there were many non standard extensions that Netscape implemented that IE had to add support back in the day. IE6 was a particularly bad issue because major browser releases were tied to Windows releases and Longhorn/Vista had to be reset and delayed.

Yes. I am not saying that Microsoft has monopoly for this. But they had better leverage than anybody else in the desktop era (thanks to the way IE was bundled with Windows) and did it for large scale. Which made them disliked. I'm not a supporter of Google, which is becoming more of a bad guy than Microsoft these days.

We are still paying for IE. XP can't install a version greater than IE8, which many people and companies still use.

Yes, 14 year old operating systems have limitations, have you tried installing Chrome on Redhat 7.2 recently?

How about Chrome on Mac OS 9, or Mac OS X 10.1?

I think you're completely missing the point. First, I'm not blaming Microsoft. Second, there are more people using XP than using Macintoshes or Linux. I'm simply pointing out that we're still paying the price for the IE domination of the late 90s early 2000's. At this point Microsoft is paying a price too. Hopefully windows 10 will garner enough support that they can move away from their past also. Their latest versions of IE are actually quite good.

Virtually every company in the world has opposed free software... Including Apple and Google. Outside of Mozilla and Xamiran, I can't think of many companies that do back free software.

Xamarin (if that's what you meant) is proprietary and quite pricey at that ;)

All the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt) Gates' ilk produced to scare people from Freedom will bring tears to future generations' eyes. How could someone so ruthlessly oppose voluntary, community-led development (which by now we can safely say won)? Answer: Look at his company's financial investors.

Relevant Revolution OS snippet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c&t=6m40s

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