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IE8 Breaking Microsoft's Web Standards Promise?
An anonymous reader points out a story in The Register by Opera Software CTO Hakon Lie which tells the story of how Microsoft's interoperability promise for IE8 seems to have been broken in less than six months. Quoting:
"In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default. Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise. This week, the promise was broken."
Given MS' history this was almost a given.
What do you expect? They said that their operating systems were supposed to be extremely secure, and were they? No. Microsoft is not a software company driven by good morals, they are driven by money and their marketing department. So it was a publicity stunt. Microsoft has had many publicity stunts in the past and have broken many promises.
Anything and Everything about the Net
That long list of file extensions comes from a list of recommended blocked extensions. You will find that when you rename a .EXE to the majority of these extensions, the executable runs just fine. Other extensions just need a little more help but can be just as effective. And the fact that filename extensions are always hidden by default obscures a lot from users they should be aware of.
"...just like ever other remotely user-friendly GUI shell does?" Not a Mac user...at least not a technical Mac user since every Mac user generally knows that the program to open a file with is included with the file description and not exclusively directed by file extension.
Apple did not try and fail writing a new OS from scratch. Okay, they didn't write it from scratch either, but they didn't fail. OS X is wildly successful. What annoys people most about OS X is that they can't not change it... and too often.
HAHAHAHA... no need to rewrite WindowsNT?! Yes there is. Another poster referred to Microsoft as MICROS~1 and I caught his meaning immediately. Microsoft builds their OSes upon the remains of their old OSes. There is still a lot of DOS in WindowsXP and Vista. I know there are claims to the contrary, but the leaked source code says otherwise. You know what happens when you build something on an unsuitable foundation? It crashes. The foundations of Windows are unsuitable for a security-sensitive world like the public internet.
"The fact remains that the vast, vast..."
Uh, yeah. Let's go back to that ridiculous level of complexity for keeping security concerns to a minimum to enable users to be reasonably secure without having to be or have an IT expert. Windows has been teetering between being an OS for the user and an OS for the server to the effect that it can be neither effectively. And I can now safely claim that I have personally run Linux servers on the wild-wild-internet without rebooting for a contiguous, uninterrupted calendar year without a reboot or power down. (I wasn't smart enough to have a dual power supply on the server when I was bringing the UPS down for an upgrade... so I had to bring the server down) That is what people should expect from a server OS. Windows is not stable enough to do that and it is designed in such a way that many or even most services that get updated require a reboot of the whole OS. (I can patch Apache or MySQL without bringing down the whole server... I've done it... many times) The point of that rambling was to show that a server class OS has a level of expectation to live up to that user OSes shouldn't need to consider. However, the same is true for a user-intended OS as well.
I won't deny that Windows has potential to live up to all of those expectations, but I can't say that it does or ever will. Every time I hear about Microsoft doing something exciting like ditching "backward compatibility" in favor of more efficient or more secure methods, I am listening closely and not because I want Microsoft to fail. I was one of the original Microsoft fanboys and would be again if they would just get their acts together and do what clearly and obviously needs to be done. I wouldn't dream of pushing Linux onto users and MacOSX doesn't have the applications support that serious business needs. It would be terrific if Microsoft would actually invest its money in product development instead of lawyers, marketing, keeping the competition down, lobbyists, bribery and a whole host of dirty tricks that have made them infamous over the past few years. All most of us ever hope for is a good, stable product.