The Wrath of the Apple Tribe

Narrative Fallacy writes "If you've ever written about Apple products with even a hint of negativity, you'll appreciate Salon's excerpt from Farhad Manjoo's True Enough, about why the Apple tribe is so rabid. 'There are many tribes in the tech world: TiVo lovers, Blackberry addicts, Palm Treo fanatics, and people who exhibit unhealthy affection for their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners,' writes Manjoo. 'But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company.' Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has even coined a name for the phenomenon — the 'Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation.' 'If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it's partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy,' says psychologist Lee Ross at Stanford University. 'You think there are more facts and better facts on your side than on the other side. The very act of giving them equal weight seems like bias. Like inappropriate evenhandedness.'"

Comments

Re:It's a religion

[KURAAKU Deibiddo]

Either that, or they're web-developers. While I've been too lazy to do anything with my site in years, I have spent a lot of time and effort at site design, in addition to theming content management systems like Drupal, and it has only made me hate IE that much more (particularly 6.x, which far too many people still use). Nothing is more frustrating to me than having XHTML and CSS that validates without errors and works beautifully in any browser other than IE, but which breaks miserably in IE < 7.x.

While I can see the point of view of people who wouldn't want Safari forced upon them, my first thought was, "If that contributes to people not using Internet Explorer, I'm all for it."

With things like PNG transparency and various CSS effects, you can create beautifully stylish pages with (X|)HTML that focuses on content and the presentation of data, and it's ridiculously frustrating to have to come up with a work-around or alternate CSS to shoehorn it into working for IE. If the site owner doesn't care to support IE6, in favor of having transparent PNG images called via CSS (or other features not supported by obsolete IE versions), I've taken to including the following code in my PHP:

<?php
/* Check for Internet Explorer */
if (preg_match("/MSIE [56]/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']))
{
if (preg_match("/MSIE 5/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']))
{
$secunia_url = "http://secunia.com/product/10/";
}
else
{
$secunia_url = "http://secunia.com/product/11/";
}
echo <<< END
<h1 id="ie_warning">Warning:</h1>
<p id="ie_detected">You appear to be using an <strong><a
href="$ie_criticism_url">obsolete, insecure, and broken web
browser</a></strong>. Not only can this lead to the theft of any personal
information that you might enter into it, including passwords, account
numbers, and other financial information, it also leaves your computer wide
open for attack, through a <strong><a href="$secunia_url">wide range of
vulnerabilities</a></strong>. This site is not intended to support your
browser, and will not correctly render in it. Please download and use one
of the following free web browsers, which are <em>considerably</em> more
secure, and adhere to web standards, guaranteeing you a vastly superior
(and safer) web-browsing experience: <a href="http://mozilla.com/">Firefox</a>,
<a href="http://opera.com/">Opera</a>, or <a href="http://apple.com/safari/">Safari</a>.</p>
END;
}
?>

Feel free to use this and set $ie_criticism_url to whatever works for you; the page on Wikipedia that I was using (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#Criticisms) is no more, but there's always http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Vulnerabilities and other possibilities. Sure, perhaps I'm being heavy-handed with it, but after a while, you almost have to hit people over the head with the clue-stick. ;-)