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IE Market Share Drops Below 70%
Mike writes "Microsoft's market share in the browser dropped below 70% for the first time in eight years, while Mozilla broke the 20% barrier for the first time in its history. It's too early to tell for sure, but if Net Applications' numbers are correct, then Microsoft's Internet Explorer will end 2008 with a historic market share loss in a software segment Microsoft believes is key to its business."
Stop it already.
Do you realize how pathetic any form of joyous cheering and celebration about something as "M$' Imperial Expander bellow 70% for first time in human history" is to anyone able to count above 69?
Only thing more pathetic coming to mind at the moment is the fact that it is "bellow 70%" - BY 0.23%.
Whoopdie-fuckin-doo!
Yeah, IE sucks. Yeah, Microsoft is a monopolistic behemoth that keeps churning out antiquated and broken software.
But they are, despite all that, STILL holding the 69.77% of the figurative (and actual - in TFA) pie depicting the use of a browser that I haven't seen in use since... well... not sure... I know I was using Netscape at the time...
Well... years ago anyway.
How about NOT pointing out that more than two thirds of users on this planet are still browsing the net with IE - but instead using the title of the actual article as the "news" part of the story?
Firefox Share Tops 20% for November
Or how about... "Firefox used by 1 in five humans on this planet"
Gloating about the fat rich kid finally having ONLY 69.77% of the pie for himself is truly, really in the realm of "somebody please end my pathetic existence".
Do you also celebrate when your team scores 3 times less then "those other bastards that wouldn't know what a ball is if they didn't have a pair attached to their body"?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It was just a matter of time before people realised how good Safari really is. ;)
More important is the fact that ActiveX is a BAD IDEA
ActiveX was hardly a bad idea. All ActiveX is is, is a marketing term for COM, which is nothing more than a way for binary executable files to talk to each other in a rich and programmer friendly way. Saying ActiveX is a bad idea is like saying "C" style externs on libraries are a bad idea. You have to call a library somehow. ActiveX is just a technology for calling libraries.
Two problems really hurt ActiveX. The first hurt all libraries on Windows, and that was the default path for loading a library forced multiple applications to share a single library amongst themselves and so if there was a breaking version change in one, then both apps would go down.
Now, the one part of ActiveX that was a bad implementation was the registry. The idea behind the registry was simple enough - to make a better Windows INI file because scanning text files for a central object repository was so slow. The idea of first OLE 1 then, COM is that an application would query the repository using a known symbolic name of a component using either a GUID or a name that maps to a GUID. The Registry just tried to make this thing more centralized, and easier to manage through tools, and to have better performance, all of which, they achieved, but, what MS missed the boat on was that in an era where memory and disk were becoming cheap, it made more sense to just have different copies of the same COM object floating around.
Now, the one question I have, which I should probably test, if I were still really into COM, is what happens if you only specify the name of a binary but not its path in the Windows folder. I would think that because CoGetClassObject runs in the context of its caller, then, you could have multiple applications each with its own object path so long as the InProcServer reference associated with the CLSID only had the name of the binary and not its full path. If you were doing ActiveX today I would think that would be the preferred way to go, because that would allow, indeed, require each application to have its own copy.
Of course, in the bad old days, everyone used to shove everything in the Window folder and then, even worse, MS used to essentially delegate OS updates to application developers so you could have Joe's Paint Program go and blow away all the COM underpinnings of Windows with a version for the app.. and the OS wouldn't care. I actually in test, actually replaced the Windows 95 32 bit COM stuff with 16 bit Windows 3.1 COM whilst writing an installer, and, well, it was a rather painful way to trash my desktop, I must say.
The point is, though, the bad idea of objects isn't objects, its the central registration and built in conflict of multiple versions.
This is my sig.