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Perception is killing Internet Explorer

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Texashiker said:
At one time ford controlled the car market, and then along came dodge, chevy, toyota,,,,,,. Even today, new car companies are hitting the market.
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There is the USA, and there's about 191 other countries on the planet. Your analogy does not apply well to the rest. Ford never had a monopoly anywhere else as far as I'm aware.

At one time microsoft controlled the OS market, but not anymore. MS might control the desktop market, but hopefully that will not last too much longer.

Who knows what could happen in the next couple of years? Maybe google will introduce their own desktop running a droid OS?

The longest journey starts with a single step. Maybe IE falling out of its top spot is the first step in removing MS out of its top spot in the desktop?
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Your post does not have much to discuss. "Hmm, indeed, who knows?", perhaps as a response? One thing that definitely is true is that companies that try to diversify too much end up screwing up in a big way.
 
My company FINALLY moved to IE 8 a few weeks ago. You can forget about 9 for the foreseeable future. At least I finally got tabs now!

Firefox was an okay substitute, but I use IE8 at home. Too lazy to try out other browsers, so I use the one "god" gave me...
 
I've been really impressed with IE9, the design thought that's gone into it is very good in terms of maximizing your screen real estate and I swear it's the fastest I've used. It is unfortunate that IE6 (mostly) put enough of of a bad taste in everyone's mouth to hinder 9 though.

Firefox I've tried but it always ends up feeling bloated and never very quick. Chrome I've tried but never really given much of a chance too. It is fucking ugly though.

Day to day I'm an Opera user for quite a few years now. Love the skin I've used for so long and how I've got it organized. I don't really care much for plugins or apps or widgets or whatever, never used a single one.
 
darkewaffle said:
Firefox I've tried but it always ends up feeling bloated and never very quick. Chrome I've tried but never really given much of a chance too. It is fucking ugly though.

Day to day I'm an Opera user for quite a few years now. Love the skin I've used for so long and how I've got it organized. I don't really care much for plugins or apps or widgets or whatever, never used a single one.
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I think if I were to switch around your comments about Firefox and Opera and say that Opera seems to get bloated and never very quick, you would be as confused as I am by your statement 🙂

My Firefox setup as Adobe Flash as the only enabled plug-in, NoScript and the British dictionary, and it seems as fast to me as it ever has done (ie. acceptable performance, nicely responsive). My only peeve with it is when I open many tabs (say more than 15) at once, Firefox's responsiveness goes out the window until the tabs are loaded, even though CPU usage is very low, I have loads of RAM and the HD isn't being hammered. I tried to convert to Opera but the lack of NoScript or similar functionality stopped me. I find Chrome a bit too simple-looking and lacking in UI options.
 
Well I haven't used Firefox since version 4 or something, so I'd imagine it's closed the gap. For quite a while Opera was touted as the fastest browser, but the field has evened a lot I believe with FF's and Chrome's maturation and IE's evolution. Opera does memory hog with enough tabs, as do all browsers, but even with them all open it still responds quickly in my experience. I used to have problems with it crashing now and again but not in recent memory. Also not long ago I tried using AutoHotKey with FF/Opera/IE/Chrome and FF was the only one I couldn't get it to work on, but it was again an older version since the plugin I was playing with had been discontinued.
 
Imp said:
My company FINALLY moved to IE 8 a few weeks ago. You can forget about 9 for the foreseeable future. At least I finally got tabs now!

Firefox was an okay substitute, but I use IE8 at home. Too lazy to try out other browsers, so I use the one "god" gave me...
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I use both at work and home, IE for general browsing and FF when I need it for plugins like DTA, Flashgot etc. I have never understood this religious fervor when it comes to browsers, they are all much better than Lynx. 😉
 
At present IE9 is the safest, most secure browser available and I hardly ever use it. I love my Firefox plugins and extensions too much.
 
boochi said:
http://www.nsslabs.com/assets/noreg-reports/2011/nss%20labs_q2_2011_browsersem_FINAL.pdf

edit.
from Q3 2011
http://www.nsslabs.com/assets/noreg-reports/2011/nss labs_q3_2011_browsersem GLOBAL-FINAL.pdf
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Which assesses a grand total of one facet of browser security.

Here are some others to consider:

* How many vulnerabilities were reported per browser (including a breakdown depending on the seriousness of the vulnerability)
* Time between the first report to the vendor of the vulnerability to the delivery of a fully-functioning patch for it
* Time between a malicious URL going live and the point that it is classified and blocked as a malicious URL per browser

If it is possible to measure, the effectiveness of plug-in sandboxing to reduce the effectiveness of an attack against a given browser.

Blacklists can be helpful, but because of the way they work, they represent a very thin layer of security.
 
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ElFenix said:
chrome is on version eleventy billion. soon they're going to be using avogadro's number.
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Chrome may be getting relatively constant updates and new versions but unlike firefox I don't really notice. The user experience is pretty consistent with each new version.
 
Bignate603 said:
Chrome may be getting relatively constant updates and new versions but unlike firefox I don't really notice. The user experience is pretty consistent with each new version.
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Which brings us to IE's biggest problems. IE is awesome when it first comes out. It might not even get released to the public for a few months after it is finished. It'll be a year before it gets any major updates.

The weekly developer's build of IE was always awesome when I was at Microsoft. They had even developed a neat little updating tool to make updating a breeze (no restart or anything). All of the developers wanted to do public updates more often (at least monthly), but the higher ups were against it for some reason.
 
Texashiker said:
This was referring to operating systems, and some of the small quirks in the OS.
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I would encourage you to read some of the history posts on The Old New Thing. Microsoft goes to outlandish lengths to ensure backwards compatibility in Windows. If there is any one factor that defines their development culture, it is backwards compatibility.

If you had windows xp installed, and tried to install windows 98 to make the system dual boot, the installer said you already had an OS installed and the operation aborted.
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The technical aspects of this have already been discussed, but I would add that Microsoft went to enormous lengths to try to ensure that you didn't need to also install Win98.

lxskllr said:
The product doesn't matter. They all work /about/ the same. If you know MS Office inside and out, and can't use LibreOffice after a very brief look over, you're just about too stupid to breathe. That's why it's important to teach how to use a computer, and not be a button monkey.
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This was true-ish 5 years ago (although LibreOffice hadn't forked yet then, but nevermind that), but not so much since MS Office started using the Ribbon interface.

As a sidenote, this type of rhetoric combined with claims like "free software is an ethical issue" are a major part of why the free software people are not taken seriously. That, and RMS.

Texashiker said:
The problem I see, MS wants to direct the flow of technology. This is why xp does not support the newer versions of IE, and why XP does not support DX11.
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XP does not support those things because supporting them would mean either gutting the features of the new products (in which case you would be mad they didn't release something better), or investing a very large amount of effort to back-port new features into an OS that is a decade old, two versions out of date, already past end-of-life for feature development, and about to hit end-of-life even for security updates.
 
Aluvus said:
I would encourage you to read some of the history posts on The Old New Thing. Microsoft goes to outlandish lengths to ensure backwards compatibility in Windows. If there is any one factor that defines their development culture, it is backwards compatibility.
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I agree. I have MS Access 2000 on my Win7-64 setup, as well as the rest of MS Office 2k7, and the only time that things start getting a bit iffy is if I have Access 2007 on as well (though I have had both working).

In stark contrast, when Apple went from PPC to x86, they had PPC emulation in the OS for a couple of years (maybe three at the most), then stripped it out in a later version of OS X, which means you could have been unlikely enough to invest a lot of money in PPC software only not to be able to use it on your new Mac in the space of three years after the software purchase. Considering how much a lot of Mac software costs, that would have been a deal breaker for me.

I've got a piece of 15-year-old software on my Win7-64 setup, and aside from a couple of workaroundable quirks, it works.

Microsoft have dropped the ball on backwards compatibility as well though - Microsoft's "Open XML" formats were developed to derail a new, open document format from supplanting Microsoft Office's format of choice. I don't know about Office 2010, but documents produced by Office 2007 apparently don't even adhere to the published "open" standard that Microsoft produce to placate government agencies (who wanted a document format that they would be guaranteed to be able to read with 100% compatibility in decades to come, rather than having to nurse a crusty old machine with a specific version of said software).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#Application_support

There's also a bug in Outlook 2002/XP in that no e-mail passwords are remembered after the program is restarted if you're using Vista or 7 (this affects every machine on Vista/7 because the password storage system used by that version of Office wasn't built into those OSs). Outlook 2002/XP was 5 years old when Vista was released, and at that time a copy of office with Outlook in would set you back at least £250 UKP / $450 USD (I can't remember if Outlook came with Small Business Edition or just Pro back then).
 
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Aluvus said:
This was true-ish 5 years ago (although LibreOffice hadn't forked yet then, but nevermind that), but not so much since MS Office started using the Ribbon interface.
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You totally don't get it. The ribbon interface(or any other) doesn't mean a damned thing. If you can't go from one to another, you don't know how to use a computer. You're a button monkey. Button monkeys are just about worthless because they're inflexible, and ignorant. Technology moves too fast for button monkeys, and they get left behind.

As a sidenote, this type of rhetoric combined with claims like "free software is an ethical issue" are a major part of why the free software people are not taken seriously. That, and RMS.
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If you don't understand why being a button monkey is bad, ethical issues are far beyond you. I won't even try...
 
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