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Opera Tells EU That Microsoft's IE Hurts the Web
kastababy writes "In yet another instance of up-and-coming browser developers fighting back against the Microsoft behemoth, the makers of Opera have filed a complaint with the European Union against Microsoft. In their complaint, they allege that IE's 77% market share abuses its dominant position by tying IE to Windows and its refusal to accept Web standards, causing significant interoperability issues. The complaint also requests that the EU's Antitrust Division force Microsoft to separate IE from Windows and accept several different standards, thereby resolving major interoperability issues and providing consumers more choice in the browser market." Update: 12/14 19:47 GMT by Z : We also discussed this yesterday.
Didn't we see this yesterday here???
This is just sad.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
EU seems to show signs of hard of hearing or is Zonk having hard of seeing?
...Fire burns and water is wet.
My humor is probably your flamebait
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/13/1524233
It's not so much that we care as that they're saying what's on everybody's mind. Suddenoutbreakofcommonsense.
Microsoft is the one company that comes up with new standards, most of them poor. However, they are also the ones who are the worst at following well established standards, as well as adapting to new commonly accepted ones. For example, when do you think IE will support SVG without any 3rd party plugins?
Pure awesomenes
And it will be my last using Opera.
\u262D = \u5350
I think it would be great if IE at least tried to follow web standards, but forcing them to adopt them is hard to enforce, as no current browser (that I'm aware of) follows the standards 100%.
But in IE's case, it seems almost to be a complete disregard for the standards.
Up and coming since 1994? How far and how slowly do they have to climb? No offense, but Opera's chief mission in life seems to be making it slightly more complicated to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for cross-browser performance.
"I'm a marketroid, not a developer!"
Internet? this isn't about the internet, jsut the software used to access it and that can be regulated easily. Doesn't need to be airtight since it's only about removing IE's advantage, not about preventing the use of IE completely.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
would make it kind of irritating to get any browser. You can't really tell them they have to provide a browser written by a competitor, so how would people go to websites to download the browser they want?
There are more Internet users in Europe than in the USA.
That is why.... Simple isn't it.
The EU ( not all European Counties are members, Norway, Switzerland, Serbia etc) has a bigger population that the US + Canada.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
When did the W3C try to challenge IE? Also how is this a fair competition when one browser ships as the default for 90% of the PCs out there just because it's bundled and welded into the OS they come with?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
There should be regulations stating that whenever a computer is sold with a pre-installed operating system, at least two different systems must be installed, such that the user can easily choose one or the other at power-up.
Exceptions might be made for very low-cost machines.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
If there is a finer mobile browser on the market I have yet to experience it. Additionally, can you name another browser with supported releases that run on any web enabled device from game consoles to personal computers?
I've always been under the opinion that the largest companies in an industry create the standards? I understand that IE isn't a particularly 'safe' browser, but isn't that more because it makes more sense for hackers and whatnot to go after IE users because they account for a larger portion of the market share?
This is the third time this comment has been posted. Oddly this one is offtopic while the first one was modded "redundant" *head asplodes*
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Wrong. MSIE has always been a driving force behind and an early adopter of web standards - they just don't seem to be able to finish, and never go back and fix their old stuff. IE isn't a money-maker for MS, so they dont' throw money at it. IMHO, they should open the code and let the community have at it, with them for oversight. MSIE is a very visible part of Windows, and leveraging the community like that to polish their image would be a brilliant move.
Learn about Photography Basics.
You are aware that Microsoft is a member of the W3C, right? And that they contributed to the development of such standards as CSS2? And that Microsoft pledged to support these standards back in 1998, and yet somehow their competitors support considerably more parts of that spec than they do? (I suspect ceasing all development other than security fixes for 3-4 years had quite a bit to do with that.)
A bunch of companies didn't get together and say, "We don't like how Microsoft does the web, let's design another one." A bunch of companies including Microsoft got together and said, "Here's how we're going to design the web," Microsoft signed off on it, and then went off in their own direction.
Really, it all starts with getting rid of the damned thing in the first place--End 6!
But can you cure a rainy day?
I actually gave opera a try yesterday because of this articles first round on the /. mainpage. nothing to do with the politics, just wanted to try it out because its free [as in beer] and cross platform. the browser itself seemed pretty solid compared to other browsers out of the box capabilities. it was fast and lightweight and the phonebook is kinda cool. however I found "content blocker" to be an annoyance now that I am used to adblock plus keeping its list up to date for me. the ability to control scripts on a domain by domain basis like noscript allows seemed not very intuitive if its even possible. the ability to transparently force all gmail links to use https is nonexistant. for those 3 reasons I am back to firefox after only an hour or so. if you are using IE or no plugins in firefox its much better. I however am addicted to noscript, adblock plus, and customize google and couldn't find a way to mimic the features in those plugins that I use regularly.
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
It doesn't mean not ship with a browser. It means the ability to un-install/get rid of IE without breaking windows so an OEM can for example do a deal with Opera to have their browser as default instead of IE.
It looks like Opera sees an opportunity to make some money. Forcing Microsoft to adhere to standards is a good idea, but removing IE from Windows will leave users without the ability to browse the web without using command line FTP to first obtain a browser. Opera wants users to either buy a copy of Opera or force Microsoft to licence their web browser as a replacement.
Sig is for Signature, so you don't have to manually sign every post.
What, you expect them to create an OS, take a majority share of the market and then bundle their own browser with it just to play on even footing with IE?
Do you think that if Windows didn't come with IE that anyone would voluntarily pick IE?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I think Zonk himself is moderating over this article.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I'm actually stupider for having read it.
Jesus H Christ, do you people listen to yourselves sometimes?
Why do you say that, Mr. Ballmer? HEY PUT THAT CHAIR DOWN!!!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Read radical news here
So when is Apple going to open up and let people run OS X on whatever hardware platform they choose? Why is it OK to tell Microsoft they can't include their own browser in their OS and yet Apple can tell you you must by their hardware to run their OS? Windows and OS X are both very restrictive.
Operatic. I hope this brings about an Operatic deneument to the internet exploder...
(and, to dupes on Slashdot...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
What everybody seems to misunderstand is that as a world wide monopoly, Microsoft is supposed to act in a responsible way so as not to inhibit the growth of competition. Unfortunately, that is exactly what Microsoft does at every turn.
By denying access to it's communication protocols, Microsoft inhibits competition for network services.
By creating media formats that are secret and proprietary it inhibits competition for media creation and playback.
By creating a browser that is non-standard it skews the entire browser market and online experience.
By creating document formats that are proprietary with unpublished protocols Microsoft effectively locks customers into a continuous cycle of purchases once again locking out competition.
That is why Microsoft was found guilty of being an aggressive predatory monopoly. The only reason Microsoft didn't have to face any consequences is because the Bush administration was flush with Microsoft dollars when they came to power.
Microsoft must be held to a higher standard of conduct because of it's monopoly market condition. Unfortunately, Microsoft uses it's vast wealth and power to stifle competition at every turn. Whether it's a children's learning tool in Nigeria or gaming a world standard or a groundswell of support for Linux in China, Microsoft attempts to suppress competition with bribes and corruption.
I sincerely hope the EU takes their head off because we sure can't rely on the Americans to do the right thing.
Ed
Given that /. is the only website with a -1 Redundant option, you're right.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
I think it's more a case of Opera being pissed that it's not funded with Google money like Mozilla Firefox is.
Wait, so Opera is pissed at Google and Firefox, so their solution is to sue Microsoft? Oh, yeah, and who said Opera doesn't take money from Google?
If "developers" are going to "fight", how about developing something the market cares about instead, eh?
Maybe they'll appeal to the market once the market is actually choosing the best browser instead of having IE forced on it?
No, seriously--this is great! This looks interesting but I'm mainly interested in the discussion here. (I've got my ideas; I'm curious how other people see it.) It just so happens I was pretty busy yesterday and didn't catch this story. Now I don't have to wait an hour for there to be a good number of +5 comments--I can just check out yesterday's! Thanks, Slashdot!
:-)
Dupes: they're not a bug, they're a feature!
My opinion, in case anyone cares: I dislike MS and IE as much as anyone else here, but I think Opera is full of shit on this one.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I agree with improving the browser and following the standards, but why ask to untie Windows and IE?, what about MacOS X and Linux? Linux and MacOS X are slowly getting market share from Windows and seems like this isn't going to stop, so why should Microsoft sell an OS without a web browser, why punish a company out to extinction? Is just because it isn't European? I understand Opera asking to make IE standards complaint, but what business do they have with the OS?
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's the kind of things that can happen when you're your own main competitor.
It's perfectly plausible that Microsoft got fed up with Microsoft and joined the W3C as a consequence.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Out of curiosity, how do you do that in Firefox?
Someone posted what I thought was a rather insightful comment the other day pointing out that Microsoft will never adhere to "standards," since the majority of computer users will be using their software by default and will assume that it's every other browser that is "broken," or it's Openoffice.org's fault that the MS Word document they're try to open isn't displaying the tables correctly.
So I'm not surprised Microsoft went off in their own direction with regard to the W3C, just as nobody will be surprised when documents saved in the OOXML format by Microsoft software don't act as expected when opened in Openoffice.org, for example. People will say Openoffice.org is shit, and decide to stick with MS Office because it "just works."
I replaced it with a Firefox build...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Last time I checked, it's pretty easy for people with any kind of preference to install windows, use IE once to download Firefox/Opera/Lynx/etc. and delete all shortcuts to IE, never to be seen again (except maybe for Windows Update). Are we really saying that IE's significant majority in the browser market is wholly due to people's apathy/stupidity?
This will probably result in a number of death threats, but, I've tried Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Netscape and I still choose to use IE7. Yeah, the others might be a little faster rendering pages, but I make extensive use of tabbed browsing and rarely wait for a pages to render. Firefox is a memory sieve. The others don't support Windows Authentication (yes, I know, evil M$ proprietery, etc.) but that's a requirement at work, so switching to another browser (or running 2 browsers in parallel) on principle when I'm perfectly happy with IE just doesn't appeal to me.
Microsoft had a good reason to suspend development on IE for a few years. They don't make any money on IE and Microsoft is a for-profit company. It was generous of them to create a new version and to do additional work, but this is bad for shareholders. The main goal of IE has been two-fold 1) provide a platform for Microsoft techology and 2) provide a basic browser for the masses. They've succeeded at this. They should stop doing additional work since it is a waste of resources and concentrate in the areas where they make money. Let the for-free crowd fight over this. Web browsers is a stupid business and shouldn't be something Microsoft wastes its time and resources on.
Now internet tell the nice man where Microsoft touched you... Its ok he will be locked away for a long long time and wont be able to hurt you anymore. Just point it out on this doll.
Opera is doomed in its mission of a lawsuit. However, it's the best of the three browsers out there.
As I explain in detail here, the issue is more complicated than most people see.
Most of us don't fit into these two sides:
1. We hate the big guy side -- Firefox is God, Linux is God, they can do no wrong, the world will be saved if we go to Linux/FF.
2. We distrust the little guy side -- Firefox is funded by Google, Firefox is a revenge project against MSFT, you get uneven results in open source, the world will be doomed if we leave browsing up to volunteers.
But enough loud people do that the truth is as usual obscured. Firefox/Linux fanboys are the Amiga fanboys of the 00s!
technical writing / development
...on the head?
Opera's gripe may superficially appear to be the coupling of current web content with Internet Explorer, but really their complaint is the coupling of the web with computers. I mean, come on! Who wants to fork out for a PC just to browse the web and send emails? But right now, that's what you've got to do, because the threads of the web aren't as closely tied if you're not on Windows..
While webpages are written for a non-compliant PC-based browser, instead of to the agreed standards, the internet is trapped on PCs. If the web wasn't for the huge number of IE-only pages, your average PVR would probably now have an ethernet socket and a copy of Opera installed for use on your shiny new HD TV, and more people would be browsing on their mobiles.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
.. some odds, but much beauty
;)
I run Opera 9.24 (int) and Firefox 2.0.0.1 (de)
Opera_int (6.3 MB)
Firefox_de (5.7 MB)
1.) ODD
- Opera is very slow handling
ebay.de/.com
reichelt.de (radioshackalike)
pages, for these pages I use Firefox.
- not OpenSource
2.) Beauty
- win32/bsd/linux
- Email Client (IMAP/POP3)
- Addressbook
- lightweight
- can close all tabs (beautifull and slick)
- restores sessions faster than firefox
- Wand (Password manager) == awesome
- speeddial
- Bookmarkmanager, it's a mighty tool in contrast to FF
- abook/bookmark/mail export/import function == very good
- Widgets (addons)
- uses Mozilla Pluggins
These features are built in, and must not be installed manually,
like you would do with Plugginfox.
Well and as you can think this post was written within Opera/win2k
here comes my advise
Just try it out, and judge.
Factual error. The rest of your post is just as idiotic.
No, the "IE won and thus reigns king" crowd needs to accept that IE doesn't even have its own set of standards and that this is the real root of the problem. Version to version, we see some bugs fixed, some bugs ignored, and wholly *new* ones appear. When you do a QA cycle on a site and find that IE6 actually renders something mostly okay while it totally breaks in IE7, you can see how ridiculous this is.
Yes, it's a tremendous pain in the ass when there's a standard everybody else either complies with or at least makes a sincere effort to comply with, but when the one player who doesn't follow it doesn't even prove itself to be consistent internally, the resulting product is worthless. They don't even provide any documentation as to what coding standards *should* be followed for their browser; this is why they outright recommend conditional comments as a fix for (qutoing them) "pages that display correctly in browsers other than Internet Explorer."
Now, you can either keep lying to yourself, or you can accept the fact that IE is crap and in need of either serious repair or published documentation of how to code for it, and will remain crap until such a time.
Not necessarily. End users don't pick their browsers for standards compliance. They do pick them by questions like, "Does this browser work with my bank's website?"
If the most-used browser (IE or otherwise) is fully standards-compliant, that lowers the bar for developers to build sites that work with multiple browsers: target standards and you get something that works in IE8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc., instead of targeting IE6, tweaking for IE7, tweaking for Firefox, and deciding anyone running another browser is just SOL.
End result: More websites are compatible across the board, so when people try Opera, fewer of them will run it for 2 days and say, "Well, I sorta like it, but the POS browser can't handle my favorite website. I'm going back to IE."
Opera released Version 3.0 about 2 months after Microsoft released IE4, and 6 months after Netscape dumped the famously ugly and bloated Communicator (4) on us (1997).
Opera didn't appeal to the market then either. The only game in town was Netscape.
Funny how it's never Opera's fault, but it's always a different Bad Guy.
... she has been putting on weight and all ...
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
I wonder what all the high performance browsers built on the IE engine think about this?
I think Opera's time has long passed.
I don't think so. They're just coming into their own, as a light and fast mobile browser. I use Opera Mini all the time on my XDA, it makes mobile web browsing less of an annoyance and more of a useful tool.
I write bullshit
Undercut the only real competition and drive them out of business by offering a free web browser then "extend and embrace" to make it incompatible with existing standards, brilliant!
-- Just my $0.02 worth...
As an anti-trust measure, Windows source code is subpoenaed, to ensure that IE is not getting preferential API's in the OS, a hidden home-team advantage.
Since Windows is now Open Source, and a way exists for Open Source to periodically call Closed Source's cards, the nature of the playing field will be changed.
Windows is called before the court, source, build process, build, statistical analyses surrounding the build.
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
Aren't you forgetting IIS? A lot of pointy-haired types won't run anything else in their shop because IE is everywhere. Web servers "guaranteed" to work with IE make a lot of cash for Microsoft.
That said, I think even the government is finally realizing that they can do it cheaper with open solutions. Where I'm at they recently converted a large-ish (15000 employee) payroll system over to Apache from IIS and the project management folks sure seem a lot happier these days.
It's a part of the CustomizeGoogle extension for Firefox, though not enabled by default if I remember correctly.
I take it you've been in a coma since 2005? Opera ditched the built-in ads 2 years ago.
NO!!
The filthy userses will see our precious code, they will. Tricksy and false!
Our precious code... our precious...
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
I have yet to work at an office running anything other than IE6. I bet that impacts the metric quite a bit.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
huh? Oprah?
In reality, people can just code for IE and ignore the other browsers and hit most of the web. It's not really Microsoft's problem - it's everyone else's. Trying to get Microsoft to see it as something they need to fix is futile. They don't need to do a thing. They have no interest in making the web interoperable. Why would they?
The smart thing to do is ignore them and move on. The wasteful thing to do is to scream at them, much like a brick wall.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Separtment of redundancy department (Score:-1, Offtopic)
...
Wow. Finally, some correct moderation around here.... :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Why do I care when they stopped the spyware? Have they stopped beating their wives yet? No second chances for spammers or vendors of spyware.
So you do realize you're talking about the situation 10 years ago, right?
Anyway, the end result of Opera's lawsuit, if successful, is not to force the market to use Opera. It's to give the market more freedom to choose Opera or Firefox, or other browsers.
I thought the US congress covered this already. Though they may have dealt with the two issues separately.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
So if I would code a crappy (according to IE) web page, IIS would automatically change the code to work well with IE? No, I'm not asking you, I'm asking your PHB.
I've been a web designer for 8 years now. The last few years i've been building to css and standards. All I can say is:- I would enjoy my job much much more, if 50% of my time wasn't fixing IE bugs and having to include seperate styles for every version of IE. I hate Microsoft for doing this to me. They had a chance to make it better with IE7, but they just fucked it up...again!!! And to all you I.T folks out there. Get IE7 on all your machines, I'm fed up coding for the 30% of users in their offices still on IE6!!! Pleeaaasseee!!!!
I keep an installation file of Internet Explorer 3.0 available on a floppy disk for emergencies.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
Microsoft commands about 39 percent of active sites on the net. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/11/23/november_2007_web_server_survey.html I believe this is mainly because of the deal they made with Godaddy to host parked domains on Windows servers. Active hosting of fully developed and public websites should show a completely different picture. It would show that people spend a lower percentage visiting websites hosted on Windows servers than they do with visiting sites hosted on Apache. If Microsoft gets more active interest for hosting completed sites on their servers then they could possibly consider to release a separate version of IE to be open because the server market would be profitable for them to compensate any loss incured by that browser. It's all speculation from my point of view but from a stance of someone who would try to protect their IP, it seems more than likely that this is the cause for all that goes on in their world.
About standards, Macromedia and Sun really did change the scope of how the internet ended up. Without Flash and Java, Microsoft would have been the true driving force behind the Internet. MS has been playing catch up for quite a long time now. The competition of innovations has forced them to do patchy work inside that market and for some weird reason they haven't really adapted well. If they did then their latest products would do more than just speed up transactions using XML. While it's nice to have things run fast, it would be even better if they could provide specific and adequate solutions for invididuals to fit their needs. They can only do so much of that because they know what can become of that. The kind of support to accomodate something like that would hurt them a lot, not to mention more lawsuits involving trusts, monopolies and stolen IP from unrecognized developers.
All in all, I've spent so much time watching the entire market evolve. I've started back when the whole thing with Javascrip/Jscript was going on and have been researching everything up to that time just to catch up on this stuff. While I don't have much stature in the bigger things in life, I do have a strong feeling in my gut that things are going to get a lot more complicated in the next 5 years. Even if Adobe and Sun sides up with Microsoft, it really wouldn't make that much difference in the bigger scheme of things. Even if MS would go open source to the American Public, it would provide a small opening for the US to speed up its innovation. While I believe and defend Open Source, I do believe in America and in dealing with this stuff you have to take into account of American/Democratic/Capatalist Interests. That's a whole other rant.
Ugh, I wish I could give simple answers. :(
- People who browse the Web from the break room at work, from a public library, or from any other computer that they can use but not install programs on.
- People who try to download Firefox Setup 2.0.0.11.exe, but they are too inexperienced with Windows to save to the desktop or to correlate the location in a Save As dialog boxes with the location in Windows Explorer.
- People who prefer not to install software that they didn't hear about in a TV ad, thinking that little-known software is more likely to be malware.
- People who manage to install Firefox, but because the icons look different from those of Internet Explorer, they cannot find their way around.
Do you know of any special techniques that a web site maintainer can use to handle these cases? but I have to keep a copy of IE around because my bank's website only works with IE. I don't know whether there's a Chase branch near you, but Chase.com works fine for me in Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta 1. Which bank do you use, so that other Slashdot users can consider transferring their balances away from this bank?Yes I do, and 10 years later, they're still 4th in a 3 browser race.
You can use any browser you want, no one is stopping you.
The widows UI (you know all this) uses the IE render engine, the same way OS-X uses Safari's, KDE uses Konquerer's, and Gnome uses Epiphany's. If you remove the whole browser, you break the UI. So, you remove the UI to the Browser and leave the render engine. On any of them. On all of them. Or you could save the "uninstall script" and just delete the shortcut.
The difference is you want to be able to completely remove IE from the machine altogether. KDE won't let you remove Konq, hell, Gnome won't even let you remove Gaim.
Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to use IE, I've never once failed to download and install any web browser that has a Windows version in any version of Windows.
You're just pissed that few people care which browser they use.
Microsoft publicly denounced standards as I recall. They try their best to avoid them. They comply with them because they have to. They have that right and in certain respects it's good for them to do that. For your average web developer who needs things to work a certain way, it becomes complicated and for the most part standards help with compatibility between browsers thus limiting the power of one company's dream for everyone else.
They won't. The whole point of IE was to build a browser that would be incompatible with standards and tied to Microsoft's OS. They didn't go through all that trouble to kill Netscape just because they thought it'd be fun. They did it to stall the growth of the Web. Microsoft was seriously worried that Netscape's vision of thin-client linux-like boxes running just a web browser becoming the new standard for computers. But more importantly they were worried that they would get 95% of the marketshare in this new world.
Microsoft will fight tooth and nail to keep IE closed source so that they can continue to use it strategically to throw a wrench into the standards. As long as stuff doesn't quite work right on IE and IE is the majority browser Microsoft can continue to stall and delay anything that challenges their dominance.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Given that /. is the only website with a -1 Redundant option, you're right. HA!
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
In reality, people can just code for IE and ignore the other browsers and hit most of the web.
Sure they can. Except coding for IE alone is still a bitch, and ignoring other browsers is incredibly naive as IE no longer holds 95%+ dominance as it once did. In reality, these people are stupid as far as creating web content goes.
The only instance where this is an acceptable practice in business terms is when the client specifically says, "compatibility with anything other than IE is not necessary" - either because it's for an internally-geared site where the end users are definitely only using a particular version of IE, or because they don't want want to pay for the time sunk into cross-browser QA. It still winds up costing quite a bit of money in the end, though, because as mentioned before, there *is no standard* for how markup behaves in IE, let alone between different versions of IE. Developing for IE is a case of remembering what sort of breakage there is between versions and attempting to account for each mangled take on how HTML and CSS is supposed to be written.
Furthermore, even if you want to discount other browsers to the point where you pooh-pooh the significant adoption of Firefox and the popularity of Safari on the Mac, you're totally screwed when you try to implement the design the client's in-house or third-party designer created on their Mac and they call you up to say how broken it is in Safari. Then you'll wind up engaging in the same compatibility gymnastics you would've engaged in for IE, except you'll be having to transfer the IE-compatible markup and styling to a separate stylesheet because you'll now find yourself having to write to standards to make it work. Suddenly, you'll realize you wasted an insane amount of time not writing to standards and then fixing things for IE.
It's not really Microsoft's problem - it's everyone else's. Trying to get Microsoft to see it as something they need to fix is futile. They don't need to do a thing. They have no interest in making the web interoperable. Why would they?
To compete and attempt to remain relevant! They've already lost more browser market share in the past few years than anyone had anticipated being possible. The one and only advantage that IE has at this point is being the default browser on Windows. That's it. When even laypeople are using other browsers, that's a pretty tenuous advantage.
Here's a shocker for you: Europe is not the US!
I'm sick of hearing the "if they fix IE, thousands of sites will break" excuse.
Let's face it, those sites are broken too, in ways that apologize for and accommodate the broken state of that browser.
If gcc had similarly poor c support and all programmers were forced to write workarounds in their software to get past the bugs, would it be as widely used as it is? Even if it did, would demands that gcc be fixed be met with cries of "But our programs will break?" I think not, because in that case everyone will already know what broken really means.
If MS fixes IE (really fixes it, not the laughable token effort that was IE7), then those lazy developers will be forced to learn what the standards really are, and the whining cacophony from them will be much louder than when MS pushed the pathetic "Getting Sites Ready for IE7" rhetoric.
That IE still has pitiful standards support is a statement of how incapable the W3C is at enforcing their standards.
Opera's claim makes no more sense today than it did yesterday.
I suppose next the EU is going to decide that, just like with Teh Lunix, there needs to be a robust assortment of text editors for Windows, so they are going to force MS to make a version of Windows with Notepad unbundled.
Also, they want to stop Windows from using MSPaint, and any kind of file search is going to have to be unbundled so as to provide a market for Google Desktop.
There is, according to the EU, nothing MS can possibly have on Windows which should not be unbundled. Eventually, the EU will seek to force MS to become a Lunix distro. Then the entire world can know the kind of Lunix-based failure which the City of Munich currently knows (unless you think having every "linux desktop" running a VM of Windows to be "successfully migrating from Windows").
1) Opera isn't adware.
2) I don't know how an 'attempt to use tabs' can be 'poor', it's kind of an on/off thing. Care to explain?
3) Which plugins can't you use? Any plugin I've found for Firefox or IE works just as well in Opera. I assume you're talking about plugins, by the way, and not extensions or add-ons which are a completely different kettle of fish.
Having said all that, no I don't agree with Opera on this one - but Opera is still my choice of browser for speed and compliance.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
who read the headline as 'Oprah tells EU...'?
Funnily enough, I do agree with Opera on this one, though I don't use Opera.
It may be faster and nicer in many ways, but some Firefox extensions are simply way too valuable to me.
Ignore this signature. By order.
I thought Microsoft said the browser was part of the operating system, and couldn't be removed from it. Don't they make money on their operating system?
1b) ODD
*Your slashdot posts come out in a monospaced font.
You're just pissed that few people care which browser they use.
No, I'm pissed that because of Microsoft's anti-competitive practices, web developers have to spend 5x more time and effort than they should because they can't code to the W3C standards for HTML and CSS. I'm pissed that because of this, many lazy web developers have chosen to only support the one major browser that doesn't conform to standards, which means I can't necessarily use the browser I want.
I'm pissed because Microsoft is purposefully trying to make sure I can't use the browser I want to use. For years, using a browser that conformed to standards meant that pages rendered incorrectly or didn't function at all. This was largely due to Microsoft, and it was on purpose. Sometimes this was the case on major sites, which meant that people could not use any browser other than IE and expect to be able to use the internet. Even still, Microsoft won't build its own sites according to standards. If you visit their knowledge base in any browser other than IE, it will cut off articles prematurely. If you visit an OWA site in anything other than IE, you don't get the real version of their web app. Microsoft was even caught putting extra code into MSN.com just so that it wouldn't render in Opera.
Face it, Microsoft has been systematic about subverting web standards in the hopes of forcing people to use their OS, their browser, and their websites. They do it in order to restrict the freedom of the market to choose anything other than their products. Because they have a monopoly and are able to overpower market forces, government intervention is probably required.
So is Opera gonna be happy if MS puts Firefox in new Windows machines?
I just lost a ton of respect for Opera. Instead of improving their product and marketing better to increase marketing share they have resorted to using government force to compete with Microsoft. Opera is attempting to limit people's rights through the court system. They want to take away the rights of Microsoft's owners to make mutually agreed upon trades with their customers. There is simply no excuse for using government force in such a manner. If Opera wants my business they should offer me a better trade than Microsoft. Shame on you Opera...
Creative Demolition
Or as the rest of the world call it, they did an America
League of nations, Geneva, etc
Back in the old days, yes. Internet Explorer 4 (and 5) were several orders of magnitude better than Netscape 4.
Sadly, IE5.5 and 6.0 were pretty much the same as 5 but with additional proprietary crap. Not surprisingly, all the other browser programmers used the last decade or so to implement the standards better than Microsoft did.
That's not even addressing IE7, which didn't even fix all the bugs IE6 had.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I prefer monospaced fonts, it's a matter choice ;)
Now I've tried alot of browsers in my day. Mostly trying to alleviate the need for ever increasing processor and memory requirements, as I was using a Pentium 3 1Ghz coppermine up until very recently... During that time, I fell in love with Firefox, sure, out of the top three (IE, Firefox, Opera) it used to the most memory. With Opera coming in 2nd and IE6 1st. But it was also the most down to earth and straight forward of the three... I just fail to see any appeal in regard to Opera. But then again, at 24 years of age. I'm pretty old and set in my ways... So yeah, let 'em bitch to the EU. It's an issue that should of been addressed years ago. But for the love of god don't try and tell me Opera is a superior browser, or for that matter even a 'good' browser. Because it just isn't...
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Disclaimer: I use Opera as my primary browser, although I keep an up-to-date copy of Firefox 2.x around with a number of plugins.
One of my biggest UI concerns with Opera is that there is no option to put a button for the per-domain settings on the toolbar. I can put all my global options on a toolbar, but not the per-domain ones. >:/
The per-domain settings are accessed through the menus: Tools -> Quick Preferences (F12) -> Edit site preferences..., or by right-clicking on a blank spot and choosing Edit site preferences...
Personally, I tolerate ads and only block the ones that really annoy me. Thus, the content blocker works fairly well for me. Particularly combined with the site preferences pane, which allows me to disable/enable things on a per-site basis, such as Plugins (read: Flash).
As for the google thing, I can't help you there.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Fun fact: Opera is free now because of the money they get from Google. It's not as much as Mozilla gets, but then again, Opera has a significantly smaller userbase.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
It's depressing that this paranoid fantasy won you positive mod points.
On and off over the years I've had occasion to work with Microsoft developers on various things. At one point I worked with the COM team and the IE team for several months. I didn't work for MS, I worked for a company that had discovered a weird and complicated bug. "They" are just a bunch of guys, regular programmers, just like you find at every other big company in the world. Nobody has a secret evil plan. It just doesn't exist. They bust their ass meeting deadlines and building things and dealing with bug reports and testing and builds and everything else, and frankly there are so many different people involved, any such Evil Agenda would be exposed so quickly from the inside it would make your head spin.
It's exactly the same as people who talk about "the government" engaging in these elaborate machinations: both organizations are too large, and spread across too many people, and moving in too many different directions simultaneously to permit the kind of organization and single-mindedness of purpose that is required to execute these clever, evil plots. There are too many points of exposure. Too many potentially disgruntled employees in the loop.
Sure, occasionally somebody really does take it upon themselves to do something underhanded, but as an organization-wide "strategy" it just doesn't happen that way.
But this is slashdot, and reason takes a back seat to self-righteous anti-capitalism.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
I have gone as far as slapping my little brother around the head and saying "do you know what you are doing?"
Here's a shocker for you, it was a joke, based on "ms damaging the internet", the congressional tubes remark, the ms bloat concept... oh, never mind.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I killed my brother for using IE. I stole my Dad's gun and shot him in the head. Now I'm serving life without parole in prison.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I like Opera (using it now) but this standards thing is ridiculous.
E.g. now people complain that IE doesn't support SVG. There's a reason for that - in 1998 Microsoft, Visio and Autodesk proposed VML as a standard, already implemented in IE 5.0. Everyone else hates Microsoft so they decided to standardise on an SVG instead which is as different from VML as possible. It took them about 4 years, until 2001 so there was no chance of it being in IE 6.0 (released in 2001). It's not exactly widely used on the web as far as I can tell. MS decided not to bother supporting it in IE 7.
If users want SVG, they can download a free plugin. Actually websites using SVG could make a web page that autodownloads a signed ActiveX control like flash does. Flash isn't natively supported by IE either, and yet virtually all sites use it. Or like Google maps they could use VML instead to render vector content on IE. I don't see what the complaint is really.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
MS wasn't exactly required to cease development on IE after 6.0.
I don't really care about SVG, I'd rather see proper markup interpretation.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It's easy but it requires an active choice which most people won't bother with or even know about. IE doesn't require any choice beyond not doing anything which is an inherent advantage.
As for the Windows Authentication thing, that really doesn't sound like something other browsers can even implement if they want to. That's the issue here, MS has a monopoly so whenever they decide to ignore standards everyone has to use their way and often it's simply not possible to do so. They are a convicted monopoly too so they are not allowed to do that.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It's the same with CSS and so on as far as I can see. Microsoft invents a way of doing things and implements it in IE. Everyone else decides that the standard will do things as differently as possible from that, and a standard is released several years later. Microsoft ignores the standard and web site authors end up using the Microsoft implementation, since they want their site to work on IE.
ODF vs OOXML is similar too. Office has been around for ages and loads of legacy cruft in it. E.g. the date format in Office copies a bug from Lotus 1-2-3 so that Excel uses the same internal date representation as Lotus 1-2-3. And this date format is preserved in OOXML. The ODF people came along and whined and whined that OOXML was making bugs the standard and ODF was technically superior. But if you save Excel spreadsheets into ODF, my guess is that the ones that rely on this sort of thing will stop working.
Now most people don't care about the internals of this stuff. People back when Office took over from Excel did things like calculating date serial numbers using a formula and they wanted to be able to load that Lotus sheet into Excel and have it generate the same date. So Microsoft copied the bug. The few percent of people now that embed dates in spreadsheets as a numeric constant will find that saving as OOXML works for them and saving as ODF doesn't. But Microsoft's monoply is built out things like this. There are loads of quirks in their platform that a few percent of people rely on. If you want to replace them, you need to handle this. Just like when Microsoft took over from Lotus they copied Lotus quirks and outright bugs.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
First the rallies for Obama, now complaints about IE. When will she stop being so political?
When did the W3C try to challenge IE?
:)
When they released Amaya?
(The people defending Microsoft's wayward ways - and IE in particular - are just deluded. Why they come to Slashdot where they will be lambasted for their Microsoft-loving paranoia is a mystery.)
and yet a small private company consisting of tens of individuals (opera) can make a standards compliant browser while microsoft (60000 employees and 20 billion profit every year) cannot.
so i must conclude that either microsoft is incompetent or microsoft is deliberately not implementing the standards.
The "spyware" claims have been revealed to be FUD form Firefox diehards, and they quieted up when it transpired Firefox was even more a candidate for the label. Go wank yourself.
Firstly, what do Microsoft's developers have to do with anything? Sure they write the code, but like you said, they bust their ass meeting deadlines and implementing what their managers tell them to implement, to the best of their ability. And they love it, of course, because why else would they be developers? But just because the guys that write the code don't have a master plan doesn't mean there isn't one.
Secondly, you keep using the term "evil". I'm not sure where you got that from. Also, treating the PP as some kind of "conspiracy theory" is kind of weird. Microsoft's management are paid to come up with and implement (or at least follow) plans that will make Microsoft money. That's their job, and I'd wager that most of them very much enjoy working out ways of leveraging their assets (such as IE and Windows) to improve the returns on other properties, and how to kill off the competition, and keep people on the Windows platform. There's nothing evil about this. It must be fascinating and exciting. Much like a military commander would enjoy examining the map of the battlefield, considering where his forces are, where the enemies (known) forces are, trying to imagine what they're planning and coming up with counters, etc. We make games about this stuff, because it's really fun - especially when you're winning! But of course, in the real world, if someone's winning than it usually means that someone else is losing.
Back on topic, of course Microsoft use MSIE as a tool to derail standardisation processes and keep people locked into their big money maker: the Windows OS. You don't have to be an evil genius to realise that the more people feel they're able to use alternative products, the more people will use alternative products. Leveraging IE and the tremendous market share of their core products in an effort to keep others from gaining ground against you isn't "evil" or "underhanded", it's just good business sense.
When your market share is the size of Microsoft's, interoperability only hurts you, because it makes it easier for others to replace your products. Interoperability is for the little guys. Most of us on /. want a world full of little guys who get along nicely, because that means you have consumer choice. Where there's choice, there's competition. And competition is what capitalism thrives on. So, wanting the browser with the largest market share to be compliant with standards and therefore a commodity item replaceable by any number of others isn't "anti-capitalism" at all.
Anyway, my point is: what about "leveraging IE to maintain or expand Microsoft's dominance in the PC market" requires an underhanded, secret or evil plot?
That's, what you usually call bureaucracy. ;-)
Despite Microsofts evil plans...
Otherwise you would know that Steve Jobs is God.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I agree with the view that IE should be removed from windows... but this doesn't hurt Microsoft enough.
Basically a lot of people are not able to change platforms due to one piece of software which has been in windows since windows 98... Nearly all games currently available need directx to run, which is deeply embedded in windows. If microsoft is forced to distribute directx separately from windows and charge for it per installation (per seat), I think a lot of game developers will choose a different api, thereby allowing games to be ported easier to other platforms.
Another thing: Microsoft should be stopped from tampering with the hardware market. As it stands most "cheap" motherboards and laptops have trouble running anything other then windows due to a severely foobar'ed acpi (for which we can thank the severely broken microsoft acpi compiler).
Change *your* user.css to force *your* browser to render your posts in monospace and quit fucking with how *I* choose to view Slashdot posts by wrapping them all in unnecessary <tt> tags.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Mine is Good
Your comments just show how long it has been since you used Opera last. Opera no longer has the advert bar across the top and has not since either version 8.0 or 8.5 (I think it was 8.5, actually). They implemented tabbed browsing long, long ago (since at least v5.0 which is the first time I used their browser). As another poster already pointed out, they have good support for plug-ins.
Furthermore, the fact that IE is bundled with Windows means that most people will choose to use IE since most people are lazy to the point that they will simply use whatever program they are initially presented with. Naturally, it also doesn't help that people are likely to continue using/doing what they are familiar with, even if they know that there is a better way. I'm sure we could go on for days detailing different human tendencies that allow for abuse of market power by any corporation (not just MS) and why government needs to step in from time to time to make sure that corporations are not exploiting our tendencies to our detriment.
I like prolly every other person on here sees that IE's lack of standards compliance regarding the web browser is an issue for all, but my concerns are the following: The Windows OS is the property and work of Microsoft, as such why should Microsoft not be able to include a browser or any other product they have Second lets say there is no browser included with Microsoft OS how do except a home user to download any browser....sounds like more headaches than anything Also, since this is Microsoft's OS and product they should be able to include any of their products they see fit, by including the browser they are not stopping anyone from installing firefox, opera, etc. If opera is so much better why doesnt it have the 77% market share. Instead of having the EU fight Microsoft for you man up and put out a product that people can't deny is not only better but is more useful than IE. For most IE works just fine so why would they switch. Market your product better. Dont get mad get better.
1. Give the customer the choice of XP or Vista (or a blank machine) when he wants to buy a PC.
2. If the customer wants (say) XP, give him a machine with ONLY the OS installed. No IE, no Paint, Calculator, Solitaire... NO applications at all. Just Windows Explorer.
3. Offer the customer a CD for $10 that contains above mentioned products from MS. Also offer the customer a CD with above mentioned products from company X, Y or Z for $X, $Y or $Z. Independent software companies can push their own basic software pack.
Fair and easy. We all know that most people would simply take the MS offering; but this sorts out for once and for all all this bundling crap.... AND finally gets the message across to Joe Sixpack that IE, Paint etc. are all just applications, and that their are alternatives out there. Also opens up the market.
I was at an MSDN developers' conference some years back, and BG appeared on a datalink to explain his long-term strategy for the internet. The internet, he said, only had a few years left in it. People wouldn't put up with the continuing anarchy and unreliability for much longer. They and their families wanted proper safe, reliable, certified content, produced by proper media companies. A few years from now, Bill told us, we wouldn't need to worry about this internet thing, because by then everyone would have migrated over to Microsoft Network. MSN was The Future that we should all be planning for.
I guess it was a straightforward calculation: if you can get everyone to use a proprietary system that you own and control, then you can do deals with big corporations like Disney and Time Warner to distribute their branded content direct to customers. You own the market, and make a buck every time someone wants to go online. On the other hand, if an open system catches on and becomes popular, then even if customers are happier, you've lost control, and its more difficult to get the money flowing in your direction.
So MS decided that the road they were going down was proprietary closed software, and they didn't go out of their way to get standardised HTML working on their systems. They'd always wanted businesses to use proprietary formats like MSWord rather than RTF or HTML, and whenever an open format started becoming popular, they'd try to step in to "Microsoft-ify" it.
This isn't an Evil Plan as such, its simply a business calculation.
If MS had realised what was actually going on, and had had a chance to stop it, then the internet as we currently know it might not have happened. They might have tried to find some way to head it off, like lobbying for people not to be allowed to own websites unless they had an expensive license, or for web content to be brought under the regulatory remit of the FCC.
Luckily, the early betas of MSN were so laughably, absurdly, ludicrously bad, that MS didn't have a serious alternative to offer, and they had to content themselves with trying to wrestle control of HTML standardisation instead.
Incomplete support means that the standards committees never manage to get quite as much credit (and power and control) as they'd otherwise have, and that perceived weakness prevents them from being able to publicly dictate to MS how products like IE have to behave. If compliance was considered necessary and the W3C could demand that IE supports the standards (under penalty of having to stop representing IE as a "fully-functional" internet browser), then MS loses the ability to use its control over IE to support any future MS business scheme.
One of the key strategies for maintaining a monopoly is to have control over several different independent sectors (e.g. applications, tools, distribution, content, formats), and whenever one of those areas encounters serious competition, to leverage your control of all the others to see off the threat, in ways that your single-sector competition can't respond to. If a company makes a better browser than yours, and you can't compete, then you eliminate their market and their cashflow by giving yours away with your popular operating system. If your OS is weak, you bundle applications with it, or you ensure that a popular application is only available for that OS. If applications are weak but tools are strong, then you reengineer the tools to work preferentially with the applications' formats, or to encourage third-party designers to write applications that require the office suite to be installed on the end-user's system. It's a constant juggling operation, playing off strengths and weaknesses between different market sectors, but if you get it right, nobody can compete with you. The downside is that you never get to release a truly great product, because the "strong
Eric Baird
Do you seriously think the W3C tried to make everything the exact opposite of MS's implementation? MS is a freaking PART of the W3C. IE does read some parts of the standard, the problem is it reads some of that completely wrong. If IE just ignored everything that's part of the standard and not 100% in IE that'd be a lot less trouble but as it is you have to feed IE some seriously nonsensical data to exploit its rendering bugs to get what you want. If MS wants IE to be a competing standard they should just publish a freaking spec and adhere to it (between IE6 and 7 there were many changes that broke lots of IE hack code websites), make it official that that thing doesn't use the standard, don't pretend it does and then have it fuck up badly if anyone takes them seriously.
Do you think the other browsers were using that standard before it was out? They had to implement it afterwards too. MS didn't bother with it. What Opera is saying is that MS should stop forcing their browser on everyone if they can't be arsed to make it properly.
The ODF people came along and whined and whined that OOXML was making bugs the standard and ODF was technically superior. But if you save Excel spreadsheets into ODF, my guess is that the ones that rely on this sort of thing will stop working.
As it should. Bugs should be fixed, when you do a workaround based on faulty behaviour (i.e. work out of spec) you shouldn't expect it to work with any future version. If bugs are fixed quickly enough that won't cause much rewriting as the number of scripts with workarounds is very small. MS procrastinated and is reaping what it sowed.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Clever signature text goes here.
Never once did I speak of people making me sick. It's more that I'd much prefer being able to bill my clients for doing worthwhile work rather than having to create hacky fixes for IE so that people who either default or insist on using a broken browser can be presented particular bits of content in the way intended.
Here's the thing about web standards that you might not understand: they're *defined*. Following them, most things can be done in a predictable manner, and so creating markup and styling it is relatively straight-forward; if you can read and you're not dumber than a rock, you can not only figure out how to put stuff together, but understand *why* it works the way it does. This is completely the opposite of the way things work in IE: because there are not documented standards, you have to blindly chip away at it until it works, and this behavior isn't even consistent between the two most recent versions, so you need fixes for both, and these fixes also have to be isolated. And this is just for (X)HTML and CSS...I won't even talk about Javascript and DOM woes.
If you can't understand why burning hours upon hours fixing this sort of stuff is a problem, let me spell it out for you: not only is it boring for me, not only does it mean that I have time taken away from other, more productive work I could be doing for my clients, but it also means the client is having to pay for these fixes. Most of my clients are health/human services oriented non-profits and the extra cash they have to spend because of this crap would be better used on things more directly impacting their constituency. Microsoft is responsible for requiring these organizations to spend money on these extra fixes.
Considering you addressed NONE of the points I've spoken of in previous posts, I'm sure it's futile, but here it is again since you seem to have missed it: Microsoft could be less of a bad guy in one of two ways. One, and my preferred way, would be following W3C standards. The other would be establishing, documenting, and adhering to their own standards so that the rendering of content in their browser is predictable and can be accounted for methodically rather than through stumbling around in the dark.
Well, I have to appreciate the number of words you devoted to your reply. However, methinks thou dost protest too much. I've met a lot of people who complain a lot about a lot of things. Most of the time it is complaining about things not in their control - as if things would be different if they had control. Kinda like a petty dictator syndrome. They provide a superficial analysis of the situation, tag on some frustration, cultural-economic slurs, then wrap up - as if they have washed the muck out of their soul. Too bad though. The muck is still there.
Mine is Good
So where do you stand? Do you believe that your meta-critical histrionics are saving the world, or are you just an asshole?
I think it's in the numbers.
Too many people together form dogma, because most of them don't understand the vision of their leaders. If they don't have leaders, it's even worse.
I like Opera, but it was made by a small team with actual vision. Firefox is basically an IE clone at this point, with some "added features" of dubious value to most users. But it's a trend and it makes people feel happy to be part of it.
Still, Firefox is a buggy piece of junk compared to Opera. I don't think open source is anything more than volunteer corporations, unless there's someone with some real vision involved, and that person has power.
Otherwise, I agree somewhat with your comments and would mod them up. Cheerio
technical writing / development
I agree completely. Maybe I've got 'em trained.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest