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IE9 May Not Be Enough To Save IE
An anonymous reader writes "The October market share numbers are in and Net Applications' numbers show a surprising drop in IE8 market share — the first time since the browser was introduced. Strangely, IE9 has not gained much and IE7 as well as IE6 are losing as well. The only two browsers gaining are Chrome and Safari — and both browsers have hit new record market shares. The frenzy around IE8 may have subsided already, and Microsoft is under tremendous pressure to roll out IE9 soon. StatCounter's numbers indicate that Firefox is close to surpassing IE in Europe."
The frenzy around IE9 may have subsided already and [...]
What frenzy? :-)
Seemingly not!
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
IE9 might not be gaining market share, but thank the diety of your choosing that IE6 is losing market share. Microsoft should probably throw an office party for the occasion.
Wake me up before you go-go...
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Since when was IE9 actually launched? Are we seriously predicting the doom of IE because not so many people downloaded a browser that isn't even released yet?
There are legitimate concerns for web developers about how widely IE9 will be adopted, not least the operating systems it will run on (or not), but for goodness' sake, this whole story is just premature.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Really? I hate IE as much as the next web developer, but I don't think it needs to be saved. Seems like its doing well enough already.
Now, if IE6 turned out to be IE9
I don't mind, I don't mind
Alright, if all the hippies cut off all their hair
I don't care, I don't care
Dig, 'cause I got my own browser to live through
And I ain't gonna copy you...
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
They've to 60% of the market! Are they losing market share? Definitely. But to claim it needs to be "saved" is ridiculous. When they're at 2% market share, then we can discuss whether or not the product will actually die and possibly go away. I realize this site likes to hate on MS, but can we be just a *BIT* less biased in the story summaries?
Also, they're under tremendous pressure to release IE9? By who? The public? You can't say people are fleeing because IE9 isn't a big deal, and then turn around and say they have to get it out because all these people are waiting for it. Reality is, the average Joe has no idea that IE9 is in development, has no idea when it will be released, and *DOESN'T CARE*. They click the blue E, and they get to the internet. And every couple years, the window looks a bit different and they don't really know why, but it still works so that's good enough. *THE MAJORITY OF WORLD ARE NOT TECH GEEKS*.
I'm saving my judgement until after IE9 is released. Caring about which major browser most people are using is as rediculous as voting for the winning candidate just because they are winning.
I just hope they fix the issues with text looking like crap when GPU acceleration is enabled. Firefox 4 has some of the same issues as IE9 in this regard.
I would prefer it if there is no clean winner. Competition is driving the companies to put serious efforts into the browser market. The result is everyone benefits from faster, more robust and frequently more secure browsers.
I like having Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, IE and all the others out there, at each other's throats.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
http://ompldr.org/vNjA3aw
And yet just last week, a friend told me he couldn't make a filing with the Georgia Department of Revenue because "his browser was insecure." Nevermind that he was using the latest version of Safari, which is likely more secure than any version of IE.
What they actually meant was "we are too lazy to program for anything but IE... but that's OK, because 99% of the world uses IE... right?"
Gee, I wonder why a beta browser from Microsoft isn't gaining market share. Don't predict any death knells for the browser until it's actually, you know, released. Geez.
Oh no I won't be able to see that more "Beautiful Web" after all -.-
Dear Internet Explorer,
Please die.
Signed-
The Internet
FTA:
FTA's other article, that the quote is from:
See a difference there? If there were 10 million downloads of IE9 after it's launched wouldn't be surprising (it's usually not pushed out on Windows Update then), but that is actually a LOT of betas, even if people were just downloading it to see if the hardware accelerated rendering actually worked.
Who knew that one word (Betas) made that big a difference.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Microsoft Vista? $200. Microsoft 7? $300. Losing your hard-drive and being unable to recover because your licence is tied to a particular disk in a particular physical machine? Priceless!
I only ever use IE for work machines, because far too many web sites I use at work are Microsoft stuff that doesn't always play well with other browsers. For most stuff at work I use Firefox.
I just don't trust IE -- for years it was one of the worst vectors for exploits, malware, and all sorts of annoying shit. If there's an equivalent to noscript for IE, I might consider using it.
Until then, IE is a "when all else fails, and you have to trust the site", otherwise, it's something I stay away from as much as possible.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I wonder if the figures include iPads? Apple have shipped almsot ten million all of which are pretty much required to use Safari as their browser. I'd have to imagine ten million additional clients would show up in the stats.
The larger the usage share of the browser you use, the more likely web developers will be to test their sites in the browser you use, and thus the more websites will work properly in the web browser you use.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Why? Is there some software that requires Win7? Oh! Right! IE9.
Chicken... meet egg.
What's that, they aren't releasing software for a platform that's a decade old? Jerks! Are you equally pissed you can't get firefox 4.0 for Redhat 7.2 from Redhat? Not to mention you haven't been able to get an update in how long? It never ceases to amaze me how unreasonable people are.
While the IE is losing ground a bit, they have enough share to make it a pain to develop web apps... I am still plagued with clients that have older IE versions and don't upgrade and I end up having to work around all the HTML and CSS standards that IE does not support or just plain ignore... So, I am glad to hear they are losing ground. I wonder if it is because web developers have stopped making exceptions in their source code for shitty IE browser support of STANDARDS and people are switching browsers to get their web pages to look the right way... Microsoft, are you listening?
Have fun as more and more software says "Fuck you" and you can't run it on your fancy-shmancy XP Pro any more, because you think using a decade-old OS is a great idea.
At that point it will presumably be a good time to upgrade to Linux.
...I'm not impressed with any browser right now. Chrome still has privacy issues (and also has standards conformance issues), Firefox is getting very slow and will occasionally leave zombie processes, IE is as naff as always, Opera and Safari don't support the plugins that I actually do need.
And NONE of them support scripting using LaTeX or Metapost (HTML is becoming an inferior typesetting language rather than the presentation language it used to be, with virtually nobody implementing the complex standards anyway). Seems to me that if people want CSS and HTML to let you typeset, you'd be better off with a browser supporting LaTeX 2e and the A tag natively, then emulating HTML. The results can't be any worse and would add all the features people wanted in HTML5 and will doubtless pester for in HTML6.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Apples to oranges. Can you think of other popular Windows software that will not run on Windows XP, besides the latest version of IE?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Microsoft Vista? $200. Microsoft 7? $300. Losing your hard-drive and being unable to recover because your licence is tied to a particular disk in a particular physical machine? Priceless!
It isn't, the OEM license is tied to the motherboard. New motherboard, new license. The only exception is a like-for-like replacement in order to effect a repair - if there's no like-for-like on the market, then it sucks to be you.
Interestingly, this means that Microsoft are essentially forcing small PC shops (which can't reasonably be expected to keep a good stock of spares for every PC they've ever built, not when motherboards seldom stay on the market that long) to either break the terms of the license or absorb quite a bit of additional risk over the large OEM - the customer can't very reasonably be expected to fork out for another Windows license when their motherboard failed under warranty.
I'll probably get marked redundant, but, come on, really? IE9 hasn't been released yet! The fact that it had 10 million downloads in six weeks while IT WAS STILL IN BETA should say that IE is not dying. Its marketshare may be slipping, but not by enough to worry about.
I think the only reason this story even got posted is because this is Slashdot, and any chance to take a stab at Microsoft, whether founded on actual facts, fluff, or paranioa, always seems to be welcome.
Considering how big a regression Vista and 7 are, it's a rational decision to use XP if you still need Windows.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Direct X 10 and 11.
I was thinking along the lines of end-user applications, not APIs supported by the operating system. Sorry if I did not make this clear. I thought the intention of the question would be obvious. Users run applications. Are there other applications that users need to upgrade their version of Windows in order to use the latest version?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
"Chrome still has privacy issues (and also has standards conformance issues)"
What issues would that be?
Mesh
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
But, I recently installed Chromium on my wife's laptop. This is a person that didn't like 'Mor-zilla' (as she kept referring to FF) and doesn't like 'change', nor things that aren't 'mainstream'. She prefers Chromium over IE though...
The spin put on this story is strange - when you look at Net Applications itself:
Windows 7 has by far the highest share of Internet Explorer 9.0 beta users. Our browser usage numbers show that Internet Explorer 9 Beta has grown about 2.5 times from 0.61% in September to 1.46% in October on the Windows 7 platform. Worldwide, Internet Explorer 9 Beta represents 0.32% of browser usage share across all operating systems. Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9
The IE9 Beta replaces 32 and 64 bit IE 7/8.
That is something new for IE and for Windows as a mass-market OS.
In Net Applications' OS platform stats only Windows, OSX and iOS have a greater than 1% global market share. That is a very impressive performance for Apple's mobile devices - and Win 7's performance doesn't look too shabby. But, for all the attention given to mobile, it remains a very small part of a picture that doesn't seem to be changing very much. Top Operating System Share Trend
I refuse to pay Microsoft for an upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, an upgrade I believe should be viewed as a massive UI bug fix. But I was pleasantly surprised that installing the IE9 Beta also installed or updated various other software components so that Vista is at least mildly less annoying. For instance: right clicking the taskbar no longer results in a 10 second hdd thrashing pause before my dual-core 2gb ram machine figures out how to pull up a menu. So that's nice. I still surf the web with Chrome though :)
For those too lazy to search you can check out the w3c browser statistics here and you'll notice that the stats are:
IE: 31.1%
Firefox: 45.1%
Chrome: 17.3%
Safari: 3.7%
Opera: 2.2%
Those are the estimates for September and I'm assuming that's from all of the doctype fetching. Though, I predict that Firefox will lose numbers to Chrome soon because FF isn't what it used to be, rather Chrome is what FF used to be to IE back in the day IMO.
Calling XP 'a decade old' is misleading. Until very recently (i.e. this year), it was still shipped by MS OEMs - if you bought a Netbook in January, for example, it probably came with XP. Supporting a product that you were shipping less than a year ago is very different from supporting a decade-old product. Your comparison ti Red Hat 7.2 is misleading, because Red Hat 7.2 wasn't being sold by Red Hat early this year. You could still get updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (including updates of third-party software), which was superseded by RHEL 5 in 2007, until 2009.
Using FireFox in your example is also misleading, because it's not made by the same company, and no company has any obligation to support another company's products. A better example would be Safari on OS X, as both are made by Apple. Last time I turned on my PowerBook, running OS X 10.4, it had an update to Safari 4 waiting, which contained a back-port of most of the features of Safari 5. Apple stopped shipping OS X 10.4 long before Microsoft stopped shipping XP.
When did Microsoft stop shipping XP? I just checked on their site - apparently it was one week ago: October 22, 2010. Not quite a decade.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Interesting how so much is being read into a program that is free from most vendors. This is not exactly adding to the bottom line in any direct fashion for any of these companies.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
IE9 don't run on Linux, neither does IE8. Just tried to install it for fun, and see if how IE looks now. Didn't used IE since IE6 with Windows 2000, or something.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
I've never heard of Mesh. Perhaps you could think of popular applications that will not run on Windows XP? Besides, it looks like Mesh is also from Microsoft. Any popular non-Microsoft applications that will not run on Windows XP?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Just because your unreasonable expectations have thus far been met by Herculean backwards compatibility efforts doesn't make them reasonable. If you use new API calls, it won't work on old systems. Thus, nobody ever uses new features, and everything stagnates. In another article, somebody posted that they won't upgrade to Windows Vista/7/8 because they no longer correctly run Windows 3.1 software. Insanity.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Talk about jumping to conclusions:
This is not the result Microsoft would have hoped for, but the writing was on the wall when we heard last week from CEO Steve Ballmer that IE9 was downloaded only 10 million times within 6 weeks after launch. That is a big number, but given the expensive marketing campaign, Microsoft surely needed much more. We remember: Apple got 11 million Safari 4 downloads within one week and with a simple press release.
Err, that's 10 million beta downloads according to the linked article, making it the most popular IE beta ever(according to Ballmer). That's in contrast to the Safari number which was a regular version launch.
And the drop in IE8 numbers was:
This trend is even more puzzling as IE8 shed market share for the first time in its history and fell from 29.06% to 29.01% (a number that does not included shares of IE8 fragmented versions as Net Applications recently decided not to publish this data anymore.)
A drop of 0.05%? That seems to be well within the margin of error and might have to do with the non-inclusion of IE8 fragmented versions.
The article is bad and the title and summary of the Slashdot are even worse. Lets save the news of IE9's death after it has been released(in Spring 2011), okay?
This space for rent.
I'm kind of curious what makes the European market adopt non-IE browsers faster than the North American market.
Microsoft Vista? $200. Microsoft 7? $300. Losing your hard-drive and being unable to recover because your licence is tied to a particular disk in a particular physical machine? Priceless!
For well under $300 you can get about a hundred Windows 7 (10 for each version of 7, spread over the many versions) licenses for your family's computers via Technet. Or you can buy a single license for $100. Or you can buy 3 in a Family Pack for $50 each. Even the non-upgrade retail license is $170, not even close to your $300.
And there are no versions tied to a disk. The closest is an OEM version of the OS, which is tied to a motherboard. But even then, if you want to change motherboards you can just call MS and they'll happily let you reactivate provided the 5 word explanation, "I have a new motherboard."
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
This seems weird, but makes sense in a way. While IE7 initially took a huge market share away from IE6, this is a self-selecting sample of people who both care enough about security (but not enough to ditch IE completely, evidently) and are flexible enough (no intranet lock-in) to upgrade to new versions of IE. These people were more likely to upgrade to IE8. The remaining users of IE6 weren't going to switch then, and aren't going to switch now.
That's why IE8's growth comes out of IE7, not IE6. It will be that way for IE9 as well.
This is frustrating news for web designers, but with the market share down to 15%, it soon will be justifiable to stop maintaining IE6 compatibility on websites.
Regression? Are you high? Tighter more granular security controls, better process threading, better multitasking, better and more stable scalability, ability to run applications that were developed this decade.
Windows Vista wasn't a very strong product, but it did offer several improvements over Windows XP, at the cost of system requirements and some driver issues, mostly as a result of the kernel changes.
Windows 7 is a huge jump in usability, simplicity, and stability. When you start using a product in the real world, outside of your parents stern warnings about messing up their computer, you might actually have an idea of what's being offered.
Dear Firef *waits 9 seconds* ox. Please di *waits 5 seconds* e.
Signed-
The *waits 30 seconds* Internet.
in before "what add-ons and plug-ins do you have installed": /.)
A. The ones that make FireFox actually worth using.
B. None when I last reproduced the above scenario and that made for a very fun browsing experience all day long, let me tell you. Please, by all means, ask me to do that again after changing some undocumented about:config value. I have time and sanity to waste (as evidenced by posting comments at
Time to give Chrome another shot, despite its inane UI (if I want more screen real estate for the page I'm visiting, I'll hit fullscreen, and keep my useful menus and button on-screen otherwise, thanks).
they should sue the state of Georgia for violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution .
Does Christine O'Donnell work for the State of Georgia now?
I use both Firefox Namoroka and Chrome ..
I'd add that I don't see the "decade-old" argument as valid. XP is old, yes, but it's quite good in its last incarnations, SP2 & SP3. The only reason I'm using 7 right now is because my old motherboard broke and there were no replacements/a replacement would be awfully expensive, so --> new computer. 7 is good, but so was XP. Now, some may say that I grew accustomed to XP and that's why I don't value 7. To those I say, well, I grew "accustomed" to Me too, but my cyber-life took a turn for the better as soon as I could ditch it. Now that I ditched XP, my cyber-life hasn't improved much. I'd say it stays about the same but with Aero Glass (tm) graphics. And yes, I do know that things have changed under the hood too, but the whole XP-to-7 experience feels meh. I'm not complaining, though, because the experience could have been awful, like many people's (with exceptions) XP-to-Vista. tl;dr: 7 is good. XP is old, but good, too. I understand why people don't upgrade until their computers broke/software won't run anymore.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
IE 4.0 was a dramatic leap in quality over 3.0. Shockingly good compared to IE 3 and Netscape 4. Microsoft has already warned their competition that they fully intend to make IE9 really, really exploit the native capabilities of Windows. They don't intend it to be cross-platform in the least. Rather, it'll be built almost as a show piece for what modern Windows installations can do in its use of DirectX and other features.
If I were Google or Mozilla, I would regard this as a warning that "the empire is rearming, man the barricades."
The fact is that if Microsoft goes balls-to-the-wall on exploiting every last advanced feature of their OS, they might end up creating a product that can, at the very least, curb-stomp Firefox in performance.
I love how these articles omit Asia, the largest web using population, which is still dominated by IE. Also, IE9 is still in beta, its a little early for articles like this.
For the HTML 5 game developer community, IE9 is actually the best candidate so far for quality games using HTML 5 canvas and SVG.
i think im speaking for all developers/webamsters and their hairs which they wont be pulling out now, since it seems in future they wont have to fix innumerable discrepancies in regard to html code interpretation each ie version introduces.
Read radical news here
The only two browsers gaining are Chrome and Safari — and both browsers have hit new record market shares.
The only way I can imagine this has happened is because it is due to the rise in market share for iMacs and people are just using the browser that came with the OS. I run iMacs in my house and never run Safari, though.
The browser has nice things going for it, and I still won't use it.
Microsoft has done this to themselves. They two have two groups. One are the enterprise environments who drank the Flavor-Aid way back in the day and wrote all their internal web apps to rely on IE6 specific features. Since Microsoft spurned compliant HTML/CSS rendering, their newer browsers have trouble handling IE6-specific sites. These shops refuse to upgrade to IE7/IE8/IE9, and thusly refuse to upgrade to Vista or 7. The only reason Microsoft hasn't really hurt themselves with this has been selling Vista and 7 licenses to these customers, but allowing them to downgrade to XP.
The second group of users care about web standards. They care about speed and security. They realize that IE is dead last in standards compliance, speed and security. So even when Microsoft rolls out some neat hardware acceleration features, they aren't worth all the other massive trade-offs involved.
Honestly, how many people are there that will want to use IE9 as their primary browser?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
You won't upgrade to Windows 7 because there are no "popular Windows software that will not run on Windows XP."
Programmers won't create Windows 7-only programs because there's not users that have Windows 7 to justify ending support for Windows XP.
Chicken... egg.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Any Windows user is stuck with one form of IE or another. Personally I find the IE7 is OK, but IE8 is really slow on my 64bit system. So I uninstalled it and just use IE7.
But if I want to surf the web generally I would use Chrome. This is because it's quicker and easier to use and also seems better at detecting malicous sites.
Don't bother with Firefox as there is no need, but I know some people like all the add-on's.
Some of the web traffic is going to smart phones.Until Microsoft has a successful smart phone, they could loose more & more.
"Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f-ing Peace Corps." - John 'Bluto' Blutarsky
We need IE dammit.
How else I'm I supposed to download Firefox on a fresh install?
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
None, yet (that doesn't exist modified/simplified in some ways for XP) - because XP still has a too large userbase - and most standard programs just aren't sensitive enough to care.
What can kill XP however are 64-bit programs. Now you don't need to point out that XP has a 64-bit version; i know that; but what does need to be pointed out is that the 64-bit version of XP is poorly supported. Tons of missing drivers, and outdated drivers, results in a OS that regularly doesn't behave that nicely compared to the NT6 OSs and XP 32-bit.
This however is still likely some ways off.
The news is that Chrome is eating market share at 0.5-1% per month, check out the graph here. I'm more interested to see what this means for Firefox, pretty soon they might not be that interesting to back. I'd say it's more Firefox that should be worried what will happen if IE stems the tide to alternative browsers and Chrome starts putting Firefox into a decline. The streams could cross already in 2011 if this trend keeps going...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm an Apple fan, but I don't count MS out of anything. Maybe it's from all the years of people saying Apple was dying, which obviously never came true.
When you have a hard-core fan base, such as Apple and MS, that company isn't just going to die off easily. MS will hopefully learn some important lessons from all the past mistakes and perhaps pull off something extraordinary. I personally, I hope they do. Having one company dominate the market is just bad for the consumer. Having some healthy competition is always a plus.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
What's that, they aren't releasing software for a platform that's a decade old?
And still the market leader. There's no way they would ever not release for WinXP if it wasn't the same company.
Dear The Internet,
Don't you understand, we are the one and the same. You are just my better half.
Signed-
IE
MS MS MS MS MS. You sound like a whiney 2 year old.
I switched to Chrome from Firefox you insensitive clod!
Supporting existing products is nothing at all like developing for them. When people mention "XP is a decade old" they don't mean it's been 9 years since the last update... they mean it's been 9 years since the original platform release. There are a lot of differences between XP and 7. The top 3 most relevant are probably, Direct2D (new), Media Foundation (new, replacing DirectShow), WIC (new, replacing GDI+ codecs).
People paint SP2 and SP3 as a development 'refresh' of Windows XP, but quite frankly they don't know what they're talking about. I'm sorry but very little changed underneath.
Essentially IE9 isn't even portable to XP because DX10 is stopping it. The IE team would need to introduce a D3D/GDI+ compatibility layer for XP. So what's the point? I too would say "Fuck you!" to the XP users if I were Microsoft. Even if you legally purchased XP, you would be doing Microsoft a favor by pirating Windows 7.
Didn't you hear? TMZ is buying Slashdot.
Who installs iTunes? :)
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
The above October browser market share facts are correct. Their interpretation is subject to debate. Here are the facts without interpretation.
HRH The Duke of Windsor
"Windows 7 is a huge jump in usability, simplicity, and stability."
Another MS fanbot.
XP runs everything I need it to.
XP is paid for.
Usability and simplicity improvements are totally subjective.
Stability is a toss up since XP drivers are more mature but the W7 OS is more secure.
The bottom line is that W7 can not answer with tangible numbers how it will increase my revenue or reduce my expenses.
Just Cause 2?
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Firefox may be gaining popularity in the corporate world because the latest version of PeopleSoft does not currently support IE8. The recommended work around is to use Firefox
Technet subscriptions are only for "evaluation and testing"... If you are using such software in production then you are breaking the terms of the license.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Oh, yeah, that's the other argument: Lots of differences under the hood, Direct whatever not available for XP... Yes, 7 is better, but that doesn't change the fact that XP was/is good enough (I know, I know) for most users.
Some of those features not available for XP could have been ported to XP if MS really wanted to. But MS wants to sell new OS licenses.
Obligatory car analogy: Vista & 7 are like brand new models of cars with ESP, Super-Mega-ABS, 12 airbags, GPS, iPod dock... while XP is like a humble, but still perfectly-functioning sedan with ABS, 2 airbags and a CD player. The ESP, Super-Mega-ABS and 12 airbags are very nice, sure, but the humble sedan still does the job for most people, and the economy is not ripe for unnecessary expenses. When the sedan breaks beyond repair, people will buy the new model.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Most applications currently being developed still support XP, despite its age.
For general day to day use, 7 is not really any more stable than xp was. And other under the hood improvements mean nothing to the average user either.
Windows 7 is significantly different to XP such that users will face a learning curve to use the new interface, this may not have much impact on the average slashdot user but to joe public it can easily put them off. linux and mac have the same problem, a new interface may technically be superior and given a clean slate (ie someone with no prior experience) might be easier to learn, but users are burdened by what they're already familiar with and hate change.
There are also gaps in the driver support in 7, many older peripherals will simply not work, also some applications no longer work.
And finally, while not as much of a pig as vista was, 7 still has significantly higher system requirements than xp, meaning it generally runs slower on the same hardware.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I wonder what the market share for web browsers would look like if Internet Explorer wasn't mandated as THE browser in certain organizations. (ignoring the fact that it's merely installed on every Windows PC). How much of an effect is Chrome or Firefox or Safari making in corporations where a majority of users don't have admin rights to their system and therefore can't even install other browsers if they wanted to (or knew about it)?
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
I have to disagree with the choice of the word 'may.'
First off, its still in beta...
Second, go to PDC site and watch the previews of IE9 if you dont want to install..
Soon IE9 will be the only game in town that supports full graphics acceleration. So you will have the option of browsing the 'fast' web in chrome, or have a completely new user experience in IE.
"fuckie" opinion tag != News Site (OPINIONS FOR NERDS. STUFF THAT MATTERS TO US.)
c wat i did thar?
You're welcome America.
Some frenzy of automated of negative-publicity for sites detected that don't work right without IE, for activeX or whatever reason, would be great. I have met more than a few users who simply stick to IE just because "it works with all sites".
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Then quit calling people names and just stick with XP? None of us will care. Honest.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Anyone that trusts IE has rocks in their head. ... guess what?
After years of non-compliances and lock-in, you would seriously have to be a fool to trust MS again.
Why is there such a huge market share for other browsers? Because we don't forget. We suffered at the hands of Microsoft until Firefox (competition) came along. Then all of a sudden Microsoft put an ounce of effort in again. If IE takes off again
AC
Counterexample: I had MS' activation drone tell me to buy Windows again when I told him I had a new motherboard.
I think I had the same problem with Fx. There's, at least, one bugzilla bug report regarding Fx's pauses, lags, jerkiness. Mozila folks are aware of the issue and they claim to be working on it. I haven't tried Fx 4, but I use Pale Moon plus some anti-lag tweaks I found on the web and now the lags while filling forms, etc. seem gone.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
True, but there isn't much advantage once you get above 30% or so. And really if you've got 20% of the web share, competent devs can't ignore that.
That's my plan. Few of the programs I use really require Windows and most of them are available for OSX for the price I've already paid. Or run under Crossover Office. Having been screwed one too many times by MS, I'm not going to be buying anything more from them. It'll be a challenge and I may have to tolerate giving them a small amount of money through G4WL and such, but I'm not buying anything that they sell, especially not Windows or Office.
But what's likely to hurt them more is that I'm not going to fix their problems. Meaning that it's going to take more and more to get me to fix problems that are caused by MS' incompetence. I've lost way too much time troubleshooting what turned out to be their mistake trying to use their incompetently written documentation. Thankfully Google makes it a lot easier to troubleshoot than in the past, but still I shouldn't have to do that.
I recently went to help someone out who was having trouble with their Comcast mail. When they would try to compose a new mail and start typing the recipient's name in the "to" field, the auto-complete was not working. They were using IE at the time. I didn't want to spend forever debugging this. First thing I did was open Firefox and have them try it again. Everything worked as it should. They were running IE8. Now they're using FF instead.
A lot of people don't upgrade their stuff until it needs replacing. Your arguments are similar the the standard logic for deciding when to buy a car.
Windows 7 is good. You can do your stuff. It doesn't run slowly on a remotely modern computer. It doesn't crash.
The mistake here is expecting any operating system to be a "huge jump" in anything. Windows 2000 is good enough for almost everyone. Windows 7 lets you get a *whole lot* more stuff done if you have a lot of software, multiple monitors (I'd be lost without the new titlebar-dragging mechanics), gaming hardware, etc etc etc.
The other thing that happens when you get a new operating system is that you get all the latest backend stuff that users don't know about but get upset if they don't have (DX11, WPF, desktop compositing, IPv6, WDDM, that kind of thing).
It's a lot easier to write and maintain spiffy, modern software if you're using recent APIs and standards. You're welcome to stick with what works, but don't expect the rest of the world to wait for you.
Is that even legal? I mean MS can put anything it likes in the EULA, but actually getting it enforced is another matter. They've chosen to be bound by the laws of WA state for these things, and they'd have a really tough time getting any money in court for that sort of infringement as state law requires them to prove damages.
Just Cause 2
It's not apples and oranges, it's apples versus half-apples. Software does run on old operating systems, but often features have to be lopped off.
DX10/11 is the most obvious example, of course. Your game will run on Windows XP. If you like tesselation/dynamic DOF/CUDA, you need to upgrade.
It is amazing that there will be an IE 9 coexisting in the world with an IE 6 in use.
XP doesn't have updates for software enhancements, it only has security updates now. Nice try, but your OS is too old to be supported. Also, the hardware accelerated rendering uses technology not available to XP (DX10/DX11). Mozilla had to run it on OpenGL for it to work on XP.
It doesn't matter how long ago you got XP, it's not supported, period.
I'll take Firefox.
Safari is a nice browser, but it is proprietary and Steve Jobs has proven he is willing to be quite the dick that way.
Chrome is also very nice, but I don't trust Google not to spy on me.
I'm sure at some point I will be on a Windows box for work and will have to use IE 9 at least little bit, you know, check to make sure things work there after I make sure it works in Firefox.
The contents of your average Microsoft EULA were, for some reason, mostly ignored in the antitrust trials and even today contain clauses that should raise eyebrows.
For instance, a company can't use an OEM version of Windows to form the basis of an image they roll out to their PCs. They can, however, use a version they purchased through an Enterprise agreement. Such agreements include language to the effect that you license Windows for every PC which is capable of running Windows - no exceptions. So that includes those that came with an OEM license that already covers the version you're buying - and you can have Linux on the desktop but you'll be paying for Windows anyhow.
I agree that I'm not sure how well such things would stand up in court but I have yet to meet an organisation that has the stomach to openly take Microsoft on.
Microsoft didn't launch Internet Explorer to take over the lucrative browser market - they gave it away free, competing with Netscape who gave it away free, and older browsers like Mosaic, some of which were also free, or even because it helped them take over the web page development tool market, which they could charge money for. They did it to save Windows, and to save their products which depend on Windows, like Office and Mail.
The threat to Microsoft was the combination of Netscape, Java, and AOL, which were enough of an application platform to make the underlying operating system irrelevant, plus a distribution system that had people willing to feed dubious coasters into their home computers and a popular enough email system to compete with MSMail/Outlook. If the market got committed to that platform, and to compatibility with those standards, then it wouldn't matter if the underlying OS got replaced by Linux or Solaris or whatever.
By giving the public IE, and making sure that it wasn't quite compatible with Netscape and taking advantage of its proprietary or non-standard features, Microsoft was able to take over enough of the browser market that Netscape/Java/AOL couldn't displace them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I never said anything about an argument not to upgrade to Windows 7. I said that it's fair to complain about Microsoft not making IE 9 run on Windows XP, because all other browsers and popular programs from other companies do run on Windows XP.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Oh yes, that's a great idea. Backport the new WDDM driver architecture to the stable XP. Are you crazy or something?
As if that itself isn't enough...
Nevermind the fact that none of the XP PCs at the time are even DX10-capable (DX10 machines came preinstalled with Vista). Nevermind the fact that it took 2 years for IHVs to create stable WDDM drivers for Vista... which also would've tarnished XP's reputation. Nevermind the fact that this would create two official competing driver models, with only one supporting DX9 (XPDM) and the other DX10+ (WDDM)... nope not confusing at all.
Major fundamental changes to a Windows version? When has Microsoft decided in favor of that? Windows doesn't work in that way. Linux does. And both policies suck in their own special way.
You can optionally use newer API calls and fall back to older ones if they aren't available. Besides, this has nothing to do with my or anyone else's expectations. The bottom line is that Windows XP users, which still make the majority of the desktop and laptop market, will not be able to run IE9. Most IE8 users who want a newer browser will need to switch to Firefox or Chrome. They're not going to buy a new computer or do a OS reinstall just to get a newer browser.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Technet subscriptions are only for "evaluation and testing"... If you are using such software in production then you are breaking the terms of the license.
Plus the GP assumes all geeks just buy in packets of 3 and 10 when adding a single new PC to our living rooms. He's also assuming we'll pay the min $200 USD to save less than that same $200 dollars for the one PC we're building per year. He is also assuming that we all have fat pipes to download the 4GB DVD's, and that we don't prefer shrinkwrapped proof in case MS activation ever acts up. MS only gives you boxes in the 3-times-costlier tier of pro subscriptions.
But we'll bite. Just have our IT boss foot that personal use bill... oh, wait.
Maybe having more than that will insure the incompetent devs don't ignore you as well?
This just in: Macfag doesn't like MS. Congradulations fuckface.
Well, yeah! Nobody is installing IE 9.0! Nobody is installing Office 2012! Nobody is installing Windows 8! Nobody is installing Visual Studio 2012! Nobody is using Zing, the (future) succesor of Bing! Sell all of your Microsoft shares! Sell them to ME! I will buy them all!
In related news, nobody is buying the iPhone 5 3D or the iPad 2 Marble Edition. We are still waiting Steve Jobs reaction. Rumour has he is hiding under his bed. People is starting to change the Apple logos on their devices for penguins. They think they are cute.
I still want to know what idiot had the idea of putting windows 7 on a netbook...
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
why are they bothering? I can't imagine how they will make it worse than IE8... but I know they won't let me down. Come on, IE9, suck, and suck big!
It wasn't a personal tax filing. I just looked up the division he was filing with.
Go here:
https://gaefile.dor.ga.gov/HelpLinks/welcome.htm
the last link is:
https://gaefile.dor.ga.gov/AUT/welcome.aspx/
which in Safari leads to:
https://gaefile.dor.ga.gov/AUT/BrowserCheck.aspx
"We have detected that the browser you are using is incompatible with this application. This site requires Internet Explorer 5.0 and above, Netscape 7.0 and above, or Firefox 1.0 and above.
The use of an incompatible browser could possibly cause line and image format problems, as well as functionality issues when using this application.
To upgrade your Internet Explorer browser, go to Microsoft.com
To upgrade your Netscape browser, go to Netscape.com
To upgrade your Firefox browser, go to GetFirefox.com
So he was right that it didn't let him in with Safari, but admittedly quite wrong that it said anything about security.
But it is very weird. The programmers decided they can program for IE 5 and Firefox 1 but not Safari 5?
Can it download Firefox or Chrome any faster than IE8?
Yep, bought be a netbook this summer (May? June?) and it came with XP, I couldn't get it without the Microsoft tax but I figure at those rates it couldn't have been much. I see buying a legal OEM Windows 7 Home Premium here costs 995,- NOK and the total for the whole netbook was slightly over 1900,- NOK. I think Microsoft were selling these licenses at "please don't ship with Linux" rates, really.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Or call Microsoft to have the activation limit reset. BTW, I think for a retail copy of Windows that limit is about 3.
/.er but they do enough actual evil. We don't need to make shit up.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Hear hear. I moved to linux years ago, and one of the unintended benefits was that I could honestly say "I haven't used windows for ages - you'd be better off finding someone else."
Linux has given me days of my life back, and I don't miss that sick trapped feeling where you "just take a quick look" and end up doing a full reinstall and still have them coming back day after day because some other odd application they used to have has disappeared.
Oh yes, and virtualbox is an end run around all those "I can't move off windows cos I need to run X" excuses. (Where X is a given application, not Xwindows, ya geek!)
Do as you would be done to.
Frankly, as a former developer at Opera Software, I haven't personally used IE other than out of curiosity for years. My kids use it regularly though since their web games often don't run on anything else.
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Frankly IE is still the browser targeted and tested by developers most often. Things are changing with the soon to come Web 2.0 (it's still not quite here) as people are coding less in EcmaScript directly and coding more in languages that actually compile to EcmaScript instead. Therefore the compilers/libraries/engines themselves are being altered to support all browsers as opposed to the developer needing to screw around to make it happen.
IE is still actively used because of many reasons. ActiveX being a huge one.
Browsers lack standardized support for
- Sound (input and output)
- Video (input and output)
- 3D graphics
- focus control
- plug-ins that don't quash surrounding content.
- DRM for videos with content rights control
ActiveX while insecure as hell over the years was actually one of the best technologies ever introduced to the browser. Netscape plug-ins (and I personally added plug-in support to Opera for several platforms... and even MADE the NPAPI changes for them) was a dirty nasty hack. The only platform they weren't really trashy on was actually Mac Classic which didn't have OS level support for "windows". Developers simply had to draw to specific parts of a window, handle translation and clipping themselves. On other platforms we just instantiate a window and draw within it.
Interaction between the document model and the plugin was non-existant. Even now, it would be a massive improvement if plug-ins would be forced to simply execute by altering a canvas element, but there'd be no point to it as it wouldn't give you 3D or a high speed graphics context for raw video.
ActiveX resembled the Mac Classic model more closely and therefore ActiveX content became more "part of the page" and less "another application running in a section of a web page".
HTML5 brings us the video tag... which frankly sucks for anything but youtube like video... WITHOUT DRM which means you'll still need to use plug-ins to view content which has viewing restrictions. That means ActiveX friendly browsers will work best because of the aforementioned reasons. Plug-ins will still suck and make every web page where a plug-in is used right below a HTML based drop down menu unusable.
The canvas object and 3D canvas will solve many problems. This means most kids games will be able to be modified to play 3D games... mostly.
Graphics require sound and sound even in HTML5 is rudimentary at best. There needs to be a sound canvas element which offers support for multi-channel sound, audio filters, time-lining, the ability to cancel or apply mixing filters in real time to sound which should be stopped based on some event etc...
That means, it'll still be better to write games for Flash or using custom made plug-ins like the Unity3D player for games.
Performance is a huge issue in browsers for fancy development as well. I promise you that within 5 more years, EcmaScript will be the fastest runtime platform for any language. I mean that EcmaScript (not including DOM interaction) will be faster for every task than even C and C++ or often hand coded assembler... with the exception of cases where vectorization will be useful. This is because Google, Firefox, Opera and IE are all working like made to make the fastest environments for "web 2.0" related things. Their compilers are gaining the fastest code generators for each platform and rapidly gaining the fastest garbage collectors possible (this really does count and is where C and C++ generally lose as all memory management must be handled immediately).
In fact, even now, it would be incredibly effective to implement distributed tasks like Seti and Folding @home in a browser environment... if all that mattered was CPU (as opposed to vectorized code w
I'm not making shit up. Microsoft have a dedicated licensing team who are happy to answer all sorts of questions, and I called them about this exact issue.
In Microsoft's view, the OEM license is tied to the motherboard. You can have the activation reset if it complains at you, eg. because you upgraded some other bit of hardware. But (again, this is Microsoft's view, not mine), a motherboard replacement which is not a like-for-like repair - regardless of the reason - is sufficient to effectively kill the OEM license. If you're a small computer shop and you couldn't source an identical motherboard so you had to use something else - tough. Sucks to be you.
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And the only way to kill them off really was to shut down the browser - called Internet Explorer.
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It pissed me off no end, and so I started to look at other options like Opera and Firefox and Netscape etc... and they all had or had gotten "POP UP BLOCKING" in their functions.
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So I then complained to Microsoft - and they basically told me to go fuck myself by both ignoring me, doing nothing about it, AND worst of all, they too another 5 or 6 years - yes - you heard right; MICROSOFT took another FIVE or SIX YEARS to put pop up blocking into Internet Explorer - AFTER every other browser company had done it.
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HELLO? - is there anybody in there?
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Trouble is that because MS has done such a fucking shitty job of everything - along with their NAZIFICATION of the web - people have just walked.
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Every bit of fucking stupidity that Microsoft imposes upon me is one less reason to use that product - so much so, I have become a full time linux user....
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Fuck their browser / naziware / covert surveillance software.
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Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
Sorry, couldn't resist the combination of Microsoft and throw in one sentence.
1. Select "Activate by telephone".
/minutes of bad Indian accents and slow typing.
/click.
2. Ring the number and type in the 36 character long string displayed on screen.
3. THEM: Hello Welcome to Microsoft Australia (from a man with a thick Indian accent)
ME: Uhh, Hi, I'm unable to activate Windows.
THEM: Your activation limit has been reached.
ME: I've had to get my PC repaired.
THEM: Please type this code into the box one number at a time in six number blocks.
THEM: Windows should have now activated.
THEM: Is there anyting else I can help you with.
THEM: Would you mind completing a short survey about your experience with Microsoft support?
ME: No thank you.
4. Profit^W Activation.
As I said, no need to make shit up, if you cant figure out this simple process I've been using for years then it really must suck to be you.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I am well aware you can work around it. I'm talking about the letter of the EULA, not whether or not such a scenario would leave you high and dry in the real world.