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Redmondmag on Dumping IE
nSignIfikaNt writes "Here is yet another article discussing options to using IE. This one is from redmondmag.com who claims to be the independent voice of the microsoft IT community."
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What better way to evangelize IE than to encourage its own rabid userbase to try out competing browsers? They will try it out, get turned off by the minor differences (such as tabs), and then switch back to IE and be able to say "I've tried the alternate browers, and they are CRAP".
I'm not trying to stereotype microsoft users, I am merely presenting a "devils advocate" viewpoint.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
... I discovered the voice mode of Opera (win2k/XP only, sadly) last night. The thing accepts voice commands: hold down scroll lock and tell it things like "reload", "back", "close window", "zoom in", etc.
You can even select a bunch of text and tell it to "speak", and it will read it to you.
Incidentaly, I had just discovered WinXP's onboard voice synth. A group of people were at a Krystal's and wanted to contact a friend.
We realized that:
--Nobody had a cell phone
--Krystal's has wifi! (I boot up my laptop)
--Our friend wasn't on AIM or similar
--I have a VoIP client... we can call him!
--We have no microphone
--WinXP has a voice synth!
So, with a little mixer tweaking, I routed the voice synth output into Skype's input, called the poor schmuck, and had Microsoft Sam read him a message. (which was, if I recall, "We will be playing Starcraft at ten o'clock and such-and-such a place. Interested?")
My parents, after tons of proding from both my brother and I, finally gave alternative browsers a try (being the scientific sort, we had them try Mozilla, Firefox, AND Opera), and they like all three better than IE. They took to the tabs instantly, and I never hear any complaints about Pop-Up ads. Nor do they have any trouble with plugins for Flash, etc. And while my dad is relatively computer savvy, my mom repeatedly needs to be reminded of how to download/upload attachments. Really, I think all three browsers were well designed with a general population in mind.
Live free or die
This is what Microsoft must be afraid of: cross-platform user interfaces with pluggable scripting languages and super-easy application deployment. This is why they originally fought Netscape - they were afraid that Netscape would become a "platform" independent from the operating system layer. And now exactly that is happening, thanks to open source. The people who designed this stuff were some true visionaries.
The Spread Firefox initiative may seem like a trite marketing effort. But in reality, it is one of the best ways to enable people to switch to other platforms tomorrow. I really hope that the Firefox hackers will get SVG support ready soon, as this is one of the other key features that can have immediate amazing benefits.
As a web developer who has to use quite a bit of javascript I contantly find myself having to tweak it to work in IE. I have to hack test all my scripts in IE before deployment which really sucks.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Lots of the time it is not the media player that goes wrong but the web-site itself. This is an issue with bad configured web servers, and Internet Explorer which does not follow HTTP standards.
The problem is when a server sends data to the browser it will tell the (MIME) type of the data in the HTTP response. Browsers SHOULD handle the data according to this type according to the HTTP specification. Mozilla does this, and is probably not willing to use the Microsoft way specified below.
As usual, Microsoft doesn't keep to the specifications and just looks at the file-type according to the header of the file (and maybe the extension of the filename). Then it takes an educated guess. So a site which returns a movie with the MIME type set to TEXT/HTML (the default in those badly configured webservers) will render OK in internet explorer, but will show garbage (a bit like as in the Matrix, Neo will probably be able to watch the movie) in Mozilla, and any other browser.
The Launchy plugin (for Mozilla) makes you make the educated guess yourself, and save and play also works. Unless the site works with a stupid JavaScript referer in which case you are in trouble. I usually get to the HTML source and figure it out, but for most people that would not really be an option.
Phew. Glad I got to the end of that.
And calling IE "a leetle too forgiving" about HTML is perhaps a weak formulation. I'd say that it has its very own interpretation of how HTML should be formed, as it apparently does NOT conform to the standards in any ways.
"Live free or don't."
I use Firefox.
I like Firefox.
What I don't like about Firefox is its installer. When new a new version comes out you have to uninstall the old one before you install the new one, or else you end up with two entries in your "Add/Remove programs". If you then remove the old one, the new one breaks and must be installed again. This was last noticed when upgrading from b0.93 to PR1.0
This behaviour makes it more difficult to support clueless noobs than it should be, as when a new vuln is discovered it is not as simple as it should be for them to upgrade their systems (after be prompted to by yours truly) by themselves. It becomes necessary to provide them with step by step instructions which often look rather daunting to clueless users. "I never had to do stuff like that before" is a common response.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"