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IE 11 Breaks Rendering For Google Products, and Outlook Too
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Register: "The Windows 8.1 rollout has hit more hurdles: the new version 11 of Internet Explorer that ships with the operating system does not render Google products well and is also making life difficult for users of Microsoft's own Outlook Web Access webmail product. The latter issue is well known: Microsoft popped out some advice about the fact that only the most basic interface to the webmail tool will work back in July. It seems not every sysadmin got the memo and implemented Redmond's preferred workarounds, but there are only scattered complaints out there, likely because few organisations have bothered implementing Windows 8.1 yet."
Also from the article: "Numerous reports suggest that IE 11 users can once again enjoy access to all things Google if they un-tick the IE 11 option to 'Use Microsoft Compatibility lists.'" And here's Microsoft KB work around.
Sucks to be you. I upgraded from 7 to 8. I don't have a touch screen yet, but I still enjoy the Start Screen. Gone is the poorly organized and rarely customized Start Menu, though I was one of the few people that bothered to create my own categorized folders and moved all my shortcuts into them, now I don't have to do any of that shit. Windows 8 is faster for me. Can't really find a single thing I don't like about it. I especial like the improved language options and the ability to switch languages on the fly since I live in China. Some people can't adapt, but fuck them. They are the problem.
I can't speak for "everyone" who is not using Windows 8, but I'll tell you about my experience this weekend after upgrading from 8 to 8.1: I am wishing more applications are re-written for Metro. That's how I see that "personality disorder" conversation going away. The UI needs to be experienced for people to accept or reject it on its own merits. First of all, the thing feels faster than before the upgrade. Applications launch faster and switching back and forth does not slow things down, no matter if there's desktop or Metro apps involved.
IE looks great and loads really fast. I'm so used to Firefox that it is a hard sale. If the guys at Mozilla move Firefox to Metro while retaining the extension foundation, I'll be happy. The first beta (or was it alpha?) of Firefox Metro didn't bring anything new to the table in exchange for losing all extensions, so things are not looking good. With IE you can pin sites to the Start screen, I am hoping to do the same with RSS feeds. So far, the "read it later" application that is included is much faster than what I'm getting with Pocket (the original readitlater.com).
The Music app is probably the most elegant I've seen working "out of the box". It is worth trying. The 10 hours of free access to the Zune music collection (per month) sounds like a really nice thing to have. I have yet to try if the stereo mix input is still working ;)
The way I see it, when Microsoft puts out 95, XP, Vista or Windows 8, there is no shortage of people saying that the product feels unfinished and therefore the whole of Microsoft is DoOoOoOoMED. In this day and age, if we judged all companies and web-based services like that, nobody would be good enough.
To the OP who said that nobody wants Windows 8 - that sounds true: Nobody asked for a new version. However, since Microsoft needs to compete and sell more, at some point you'd be facing an upgrade. There are plenty alternatives out there but if you are using Windows this one is more worthwhile than the effort to keep XP running on 2014's PCS.