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The Man At Microsoft Charged With Destroying IE6
Barence writes "The man in charge of Internet Explorer has told PC Pro that he's been tasked with destroying IE6. Internet Explorer 6 continues to be the most used browser version in the world at the ripe old age of nine. IE6's position as the default browser in Windows XP means many companies still cling to the browser. 'Part of my job is to get IE6 share down to zero as soon as possible,' said Ryan Gavin, head of the Internet Explorer business group. Microsoft has also been giving further previews of Internet Explorer 9, with demonstrations showing two 720p HD videos running simultaneously on a netbook, thanks to IE9's GPU-accelerated graphics."
IE8 is: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=3
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
I like my xp install, so I'm gonna vote no.
Much simpler solution: Pay google a meager sum to add some javascript that displays an "upgrade to IE9" link instead of google search for people still running IE6. Do the same thing on Bing.
google already does that on youtube and google docs
I've worked for a few companies who did this, but using Citrix to do this. So if you needed to access the IE6 only app, you used a shortcut on your desktop or something that would open a remote IE6 running in a controlled environment that only had access to the legacy app and nothing else. It was surprisingly easy to setup, too. Citrix (like WinServer2008 or X) lets you run remote apps as if they were local, so its pretty seamless to end users, and the client (as far as I know) doesn't even need to be Windows.
Pretty much the best solution in this case, or for any legacy app thats preventing you from upgrading or changing platform.
You'd be surprised. Some of the machines here at work are similarly specked. I just installed 7 on a 1.2 GHz Mobile Celeron with 512 MB RAM. Wish Aero and indexing turned off it is still fairly peppy. I wouldn't want to do any 3D modeling or CAD work, but it does get the job done.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Windows XP works nicely on a 1GHz Mobile P3 CPU and 512MB of PC133 RAM. Since 7 is a good replacement for XP, it will surely work just as fast as XP works now. Right?
Right. Close, at least.
I know it's popular to slam Microsoft products, but seriously -- Windows 7 is much leaner than Vista was, and overall is pretty similar to XP in performance. It will run on a pentium 3 CPU, and it will run just fine with 512MB of RAM as well. Granted, you'd probably will need to turn of the Aero graphic acceleration on the desktop and some other eyecandy, but in general it's perfectly happy on a 512MB machine... Unlike Vista, which was pretty much a slideshow on anything with less than a gigabyte.
In actual benchmarks XP may edge it in certain areas (There's some CPU penalty for added functionality, of course), but it really is surprisingly usable on older hardware. Microsoft really did a pretty decent job on trying to turn the whole vista trainwreck around.
KHTML was an underachieving render engine a decade ago, with little users and little developers. Now, WebKit is the world most advanced and most used web rendering technology out there, used by leading companies such as Nokia, Google, Adobe and even Microsoft to deliver web pages with speed and standard compliancy.
WebKit was the first web rendering engine to support a bytecode interpreter for Javascript, significantly increasing performance. They had support for HTML5 video back in 2007. It was the first engine to fully pass the Acid3 test. They created the basis for CSS transitions and animations, and relayed their concepts back to the W3C so other browsers can benefit from their work as well.
Long story short, WebKit is awesome. Sure, KHTML was the foundation for it, but KHTML never was what WebKit is today.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Firefox 4 will work on XP, but without either of those APIs. But if you take away the hardware acceleration of IE9, it's just IE8 with better html5 support. They've publicly said they just want to throw away most of the IE rendering and JS execution codebase and go for something new in IE9.
Also, XP is ten years old. What version of Firefox will installs on Debian Potato/Woody?
People who bought XP in 2008 were not getting XP SP0, but XP SP3... which is supported until 2014.
Don't let that important detail slip by.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
But it doesn't have all the features of XP. Off the top of my head:
1. Non-customizable start menu like XP (yeah, you can type what you want, but there are advantages to having dynamic menus)
2. Tree Views don't have line options anymore (removed in 7, were still available in Vista) In fact, the whole operation of the Tree View of folders is totally fucked up now. It tries too hard to estimate what you want to do.
3. Movable address "toolbars" so you could customize the layout and look of your Explorer Window, (IE6 as well as XP)
4. Totally customizable toolbars so if you wanted to remove the favorites bar from IE you could and it wouldn't push it into the tab bar for some unknown reason... maybe this falls into or replaces #3?)
5. Absolutely retarded Control panel, additional wizards all over the place (extra clicks to change options)
6. Status "bar" at the bottom of windows shows too much information, no options to reduce this.
7. Ribbons. Say what you will, I'd rather have toolbars... at least make it an option!
8. Creating new folders on the desktop. They are there, but they do not show up all the time.
9. The taskbar buttons size kind of funny if you have more than one row. I still haven't figured out the rhyme or reason behind this.
10. I can't seem to be able to "right click" on a taskbar item and select move to bring it back on screen if it happens to be off.
11. Searching a specific folder... ugh. Maybe I want to search through a collection of files for specific words without searching my whole drive!
12. Aero snap when you don't want it to snap.
13. Excess padding on everything!
Those are my biggest gripes. The inability to customize your install. I'm sure I missed some as well.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.