Which version of Windows do you run? I set FF and Chrome to use Windows fonts because I like how IE 9 looked and hated the fact the fonts do not look as good as Windows apps. Exact opposite.
Did you enable GPU acceleration? I do that with Chrome and FF so maybe this will turn on or off the directwrite portion as FF does only partial hardware acceleration.
I just got tired of seeing the same comments over and over again which were valid with FF 3.0 and certainly 4.0 and 5.0, but not true anymore. I am glad to see moderators now mod down these comments. I would suggest the grandparent upgrade beyond 3.6 to ESR 10 which has memory improvements or use IE if he is at work and has only 1 gig of ram on his work machine.
I have never seen these memory leaks. At least not recently but I admit I only just started warming up to FF again after 4 came out. It had a lot of issues all last year.
In many ways it is. MS dragged their feet on longhorn so much when they put the foot down and fired the Windows Project manager and announced 6 months Vista will be gold... no really honest. The device makers and OEMs laughed.
When it came down to it and they were serious they had a mere 90 days from RTM until Christmas to fix the damn thing.
Worse the driver model constantly changed so if any hardware makers had alpha quality drivers in the alpha builds then they did not work in the beta. So yes it is Microsofts totally. XP as a comparison as its best OS to many who refuse to leave it, had XP/w2k driver model and hardware makers knew it was coming since Wiindows 2000 hit and the porting was minor between the two and they had plenty of time to get ready. There will still a few issues if I remember with security software and some sound drivers but that was it.
Yes it is usable in 25 seconds on that old POS that barely runs. MS really did make it very trimmed down as the kernel will run on phones. The hard drive spins for about 3 to 4 seconds while I log in and then it is all done and ready to go.
My Windows 7 desktop does have more software on it I admit, but I use MSConfig to just load Avast AV, mouse software, ATi script (not the cataylst) for accelerated media and thats it. My desktop is usable after about 50 seconds.
For a comparison I had Windows 7 on that el cheapo laptop before and it became usable after 1.20 minutes when I timed it before. I did have the same AV software that is not present on Win 8 though.
The flipside is these corporate users would all love to still be running DOS 5 and Windows 3.11 today in 2012 with their Novel Netware scripts at startup if they could get away with it.
The new beancounter mentality is fairly new as they try to get ahead by staying behind their competiton rather than spending to get ahead with better staff and infrastructure, rather than staying cheap and inferior to gain a foothold. That is a new thing in this day and age.
They will never upgrade unless by force which is what it is coming too presently with newer hardware not supporting XP like SSDs, retina 200 dpi, usb 3, etc. MS is cutting support too so I expect the rest of this year and next year to see a rapid decline of legacy systems. Windows 8 if it did not have METRO would help make argument to stay ahead as more and more employees work from home as its mobile features are fucking nice and give a good return on investment.
Of course some think it is all costs and no benefit and that an employee can be just as productive with DOS today.
Windows 8 is fucking NICE kernel wise. I am using on a crappy el cheapo laptop with only 2 gigs of ram and a dual 1.6 ghz AMD turon with integrated graphics circa 2007. It boots in 25 seconds!
It is slip, Windows update runs circles around my 3 ghz phenom II desktop with 8 gigs of ram running Windows 7. Even with the buggy bios it sleeps and resumes in half the time my Asus desktop does with Windows 7.
It is even liter than XP on that old laptop. WindowsTOGO makes it possible to use a Windows bootcd like Linux users have done for a decade. Profiles are synched with all your desktop settings on the go and even has some Active Directory features without AD such as having policies and profiles complete with apps uploaded to your mobile device/laptop when you log in with your corporate email address as your login.
If Windows 7 was not a good enough reason for corporations to leave XP, Windows 8 certainly is appealing as sales and mobile people are a pain in the ass to support and lockdown when they are never on the network.... If it were not for METRO I would predict corps skipping Win 7 and going right for Windows 8. But the gui is very very important for a workstation user as it is what the user interacts with all day. Sigh
I guess we will hear of malware, rootkits, and spam goig bezirk in 2014 and IT will be a nightmare.
Just like equipment ages the costs increase exponentially as it ages. Webmasters, Micorosft, OEMs, hardware makers, and IT support professionals should not have to take the external costs anymore to support that 11 year old OS. Some SCADA stuff should not be on the internet anyway and the world is already moving on as the bean counters do not consider the costs of malware and hardware without drivers when making decisions to sit and wait.
I am tired of learning new IE 6 tricks and should not have to do that in 2012.
I know my comment would hit a nerve with some people.:-)
You had many many years and it costs money and puts external costs on everyone else to keep supporting IE 6, 7, XP, and other obsolete technologies. Nvidia and ATI would love nothing more than to halve their development of drivers, webmasters realize they can't use 2009 standards yet because of that few 18% who use an obsolete version of IE. Malware is a big threat as XP does not have design and features of more modern versions of Windows. Web developers hate XP with a passion for this reason as we should not have to working around incompatible implementations of 1998 standards in 2012. No these corporate users can't use anything but IE for large rollouts.
SSDs die within months if not weeks do to the lack of trim, no USB 3 or thunderport support, no h.264 etc. Support professionals like myself do not even have memorized the mouse click menus anymore as I have not used XP for years at home and have been using Windows 7 at some clients for the last year or two.
In the old days software stopped working after 3 years when newer versions of Windows came out and that was life.
For an OS that is dying why should Microsoft invest the cost to put IE 9 in? They would have to turn the XP kernel into Vista lite and do licensing changing for DRM that is required for h.264 that would break the current driver model and for an OS that will be phasing out rapidly for Windows 7 next year.
You can still use that old system but the world wont cater to it anymore and it is time to move on. In fact last year they started doing just that.
Great news. However, corporate users still love these dinosaurs as corporate sites typically do not use Statcounter. IE 8 while not as picky still has many issues and many corporations who have learned to lock down their browsers for 10 years will be using that with Windows 7 until 2020 until support ends.
It is far from over but great that you can now ignore IE 6 for all but hte most corporate users and by this time next year ignore it as they will be about done with the transition to Windows 7.
Don't treat number of posts on dice or monster as indicative of anything. Most of them are daily re-posts for non-existing jobs by resume-collection mills. Jobs which actually exist and get filled statistically end up being much more rare on those sites.
Other metrics are all biased as everyone has their ideal language. Real world demand and valuation on what someone is willing to pay for something should be the metric as it is what society needs the most. That is economics 101.
I just ran across a company that does almost all their in-house development in C. They are not hiring. They have no trouble finding C programmers when they need more, and those they have are very productive.
Which is why C is not top 1. There are more programmers than positions fluent in that language which was exactly my point.
What a webmaster cares about is ugly hacks and weird sh*t that you have to do with IE 6,7,and 8 like not adding methods to elements in javascript, no pixel formatting, only using css properties on a per div basis etc.
IE 9 has just a few minor things if you get dirty and heavily into custom code but generally identical to everything else. IE 10 which will come out automatically acts like Chrome and FF like a real standard browser should act.
I care about IE 6 and 7 marketshare as they are... no words to describe them. IE 8 sucks and has no HTML 5 or css 3 support at all due to its age of 3 years. All the comment boxes on slashdot do not even have curved edges and are squared with on IE 8 for crying out loud! Curved boxes have been w3c standard since like 2001.
Even if Windows 8 will be a trainwreck it will still impact IE marketshares and webmaster coding standards.
IE is now set on an annual update path with WIndows Update automatically for the grandmas and other users who do not like change.
When Windows 8 is released Windows 7 users will get automatically upgraded to IE 10. IE 10 from what I read is so good that even its javascript compliancy beats all the competitors. I will have to wait and see and talk to more professional hardcore javascript developers about this but if IE no longer sucks and is back in the game then it wont be worth the effort for users to upgrade.
IE 9 is a relatively good browser now too. Not great yet, but I use it for multimedia heavy sites with graphics because the hardware acceleration still beats FF and Chrome by a decent margin. For grandmas and office workers it is certainly worthy to upgrade to.
This wont necessarily be a bad thing as webmasters just have to leave the css tricks and hacks for corporate users who refuse to update old IE crying and screaming the whole way. My hope is if enough of us refuse to support it htey will upgrade to IE 10 as well as corporations leave XP behind for Windows 7 next year before EOL in early 2014.
No one but Grandmas and super cheap corporations run XP nowdays. If you go to those links of g.statcounter.com you will see in the US it is around 30% on the weekday (corporate) and 23% on the weekends (consumer).
China skews the results since everything is pirated worldwide, but they have their own internet there and live in a different world where 40% still use IE 6.
It is time to let XP die as hardly anyone uses it. By next year it will be significantly smaller as corporations accelerate their transition to WIndows 7 and the last XP machines die off. It is not worth it to even bother porting IE 9 to it and I bet you Firefox and Chrome will stop supporting XP by the end of 2013 when it hits the EOL finally.
Not to mention it is summer and hobbiests use than vs highschool web design classes and corporate training courses which are locked to IE during the rest of the normal academic year.
C is hardly in demand at all in the job market compared to other languages if you check monster.com and dice. I am not saying it is not important as operating systems tend to be written in it, but most demand is not to write operating systems or do very low level things.
Java was tops the last time I looked followed by C#.net, with php third but I would not be surprised if.NET overcame Java and php is becoming more and more popular.
Any other measure of importance is subjective and biased as every nerd has his opinion on why his tastes are better. But job openings and demand truly show what the market wants and is willing to pay which equals value/importance. Fact is I saw only one C programming position advertised in the last 7 years. .
Read the article on arstechica.com or ifixit.com? It is glued to the case and board. You have to throw the whole thing away for such a low price.
My exe had a Sony and when the battery got old it refused to even boot up unless you took the battery. You are looking at 3 years max for such a device for that price. A wintel desktop can last up to 10 years.
No it is a way to force people to buy new laptops over and over again. Batteries need to be replaced between 1 - 2 years and they know that.
Apple already lowered the quality of their IPhone screens so they break when you drop htem. Now you pay $700 over and over again and that made a lot of profit for them.
Have you seen the pictures of it at www.arstechnica.com? It is just a tiny cell phone board with 2 huge holes and all proprietary parts glued in low quality fashion and they turn around try to trick you into it as a luxury $1700 item.
If glue were such high quality why aren't buildings and cars glued together?
So I pay $1700 for a MacbookPro and in 2 years when the battery needs to be charged after only an hour I have to throw the whole damn thing away!
F*ck you Apple.
If that is not a scam I do not know what is. Batteries die and so do SSDs. My phone is a year old and I can tell the battery is dying and needs to be replaced. Apple is making money hoping I would be retarded enough to pay them $3400 in a 4 year time frame for profit reasons. Or I can buy a $900 laptop and replace the battery in 2 years and keep using it for another 2. SSD die? Just replace it and it is designed to be easy. I fail to see how glue can make a battery magically thinner and smaller.
Why don't I replace my car every 4,000 miles for an oil change too?
A large reason is JQuery which has become popular and other bloated frameworks. Older browsers like IE 6 were such a pain to code for that developers starting using these and the all so lovely facebook like scripts and every other ad analytic service to increase the revenue.
Multiply that per tab and it adds up. Worse many in corporate America who refuse to leave XP wont upgrade and claim their 512 meg machines run just fine. They just blame whatever browser for being ram hungry instead
What kind of graphics do you have on your system? IE 9 is the fastest on my system under graphical tests because I have a dedicated ati 5750 with 1 gig of dedicated ram. Hardware acceleration uses the extra ram on my video card as well. I do have to say starting at Chrome 18 when I change the about:flags to use gpu acceleration it is starting to catch up to IE 9,
I noticed SWTOR FPS is cut in half when I have more than 5 tabs opened in IE 9. I do not have this problem with Chrome or FF. I do not have any software to check for video ram but I think IE 9 does tricks like this.
On my older el cheapo laptop IE 9 is not that much difference with choppy graphics compared to FF or Chrome. My guess is because the video is not dedicated. I get no benefit.
Chrome seems to cream others with AJAX sites like Google maps and other things. So they are do different things better. CSS 3 support is lacking in IE 9 because it is a 2010 era browser. Java applets are still heavily used in the enterprise for Kronos, Bank of America, Manpower, Oracle crap, ADP, and other financial institutions. These systems get infected all the time iwth java exploits and it makes me want to scream as these companies wont support any Java newer than 1.4 in many of these systems and as a result can't be upgraded to WIndows 7 yet. Consumer versions of these sites do not have the java applets.
I know it's now cool to backlash against chrome users when they talk about "memory usage" but they're simply just using the wrong phrase. YES chrome uses more actual bytes of memory and always has, but what it does with that memory makes it work so much faster than Firefox. Typical idiot vernacular causes you to say "firefox uses more memory" when in fact what they mean is "it is slower and less responsive."
Let's get a grip here people, it's 2012. If your computer doesn't have 4-8 gigs of ddr3 ram, you're doing it wrong. Chrome is allowed to use as much memory as it wants as long as it gets the job done better than anyone else.
I posted this story because I was tired of people repeating that over and over on how bloated FF is when they have not used it since version 4. It is time to clean the air up on this.
But until very recently that was true. Firefox 4 and even slashdot's beloved FF 3.6 are really crappy browsers. I just installed FF 3.6 on a VM because I am working on a site that is business oriented and corporations have not moved off it yet. WHAT A DIFFERENCE. It was slow and hogged the hard drive and just moving the up and down arrows did slow redraws. It was painful.
Early last year I even caught myself using IE 8 as I found it faster and smoother. Yes, it is a bad browser too with numerous rendering issues. 2010 - 2011 was when CHrome starting to become popular and it was a breath of fresh air.
FF is now catching up to Chrome, but historically for the last 2 years Chrome has always been lean and mean and could run circles around FF. Mozilla needed to fix the memory issue as slashdotters such as cpu6502 always complain even with FF 13 that his 512 ram system comes to a slowdown as well as most of corporate America who still own ancient XP systems and refuse to upgrade as they all work just fine.
These corporations when they need IE 6 for intranet sites use FF 3.6 for external web ones and it is painfully slow on such systems.
I can't defend Apple's actions but then I don't need to. What they do is legal. The problem is the system. There will always be the Microsofts, Apples and Oracles of the world but giving them this kind of power is beyond stupid. If it wasn't Apple it would be someone else.
thing is, what Microsoft can't do they have Apple do. Either for fear of government interference(this is still a very large real threat for MS, but not to Apple due to legacy reasons and Apple owning just a small part of the desktop world) or fear of pissing up their manufacturers, some of which are only shipping windows phone as lip service to MS to keep them from litigating against their Android phones - and to reap money back from MS they have to pay to MS as licenses when shipping androids, by getting discounts on WP licenses.
Apple has no problem with the manufacturers shipping MS products(cross licensing in place - with unpublished details). And Nokia has cross license agreements with said manufacturers so they don't want to stir the pot(and they're knee deep in frand licensing too, which Apple isn't).
It's sort of a new age duopoly arrangement. Mere few years ago these players were busy litigating each other but now they're effectively married as far as patents and blocking each others products go, with cross licensing agreements between Apple, Nokia and MS going every way and even a patent troll created by MS and Nokia as a pool - and they all want android and the other manufacturers dead or under their control(Nokia maps as default win wp8 amounts to wp licensees effectively paying their competitor a small sum for every shipped phone, though again details are hidden). It's part of the system that has kept new handset manufacturers blocked from market despite foxconn being available as a manufacturing resource for anyone, the os being available for anyone, the parts sources being available for anyone...
what's even more ridiculous is that multiple firms have patents for things which amount to being the same thing when executed. that's sick.
anyhow, mixed local and web searches suck ass.
It is a step beyond this with Apple. THey all agree not to use or do cross licensing and patent protection rackets with each other so if a third party comes in and sues they can combine forces and sue for defense.
But not Apple. Apple is everyone MUST OWN AN IPHONE or no phone at all. Everyone who makes phones needs to go out of business or leave the market to Apple altogether. They are extreme and fanatical and wont stop unless everyone but Apple is out of business. You can't negotiate with them as they do not want your profits. THey want you out of the market so Jobs vision of him outdoing Bill Gates succeeds. Tim's Cook ego is more important than your needs to your device you paid for.
I think anti trust laws need to go to Apple as this is beyond the equivalent of giving away IE 6 for free. This is more like if MS sued every OEM who dared include any other browser and used the FTC to ban the downloads and imports of every browser but IE 6. Apple is much more agresive and is using its money to block competitors from entering the market.
I think Apple should be killed first. I have never seen a worse bully or a sorer loser. The tech industry needs to rid itself off this idiocy of a company once and for all. With all the money they have, they have the power now to completely annihilate innovation in the entire tech World. Things were better when they did not have that kind of money power; atleast then they had the hunger to build better products. Instead of quashing competition in the Courts and with the FTC.
I know MS is still hated here with a passion, but Apple is much more evil. At least MS will coexist with Android and only ask a few dollars per device. Not go out all nuke and throw you out of business and go crazy!
I never in my years thought I would say this but I am glad crappy Windows won in the PC war of the 80s and 90s. Who knows what would have happened if the Mac one.
Yes Mac is superior but shit its creators are insane. Apple is turning anti consumer now just like MS as they build their monopoly. Want to replace that battery for your $1700 macbook pro? Throw it out and buy a new one!
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Which version of Windows do you run? I set FF and Chrome to use Windows fonts because I like how IE 9 looked and hated the fact the fonts do not look as good as Windows apps. Exact opposite.
Did you enable GPU acceleration? I do that with Chrome and FF so maybe this will turn on or off the directwrite portion as FF does only partial hardware acceleration.
Yep
Until I posted this story last week with real RAM usage in a browser showdown, the lie will keep being repeated and modded up by moderators.
I just got tired of seeing the same comments over and over again which were valid with FF 3.0 and certainly 4.0 and 5.0, but not true anymore. I am glad to see moderators now mod down these comments. I would suggest the grandparent upgrade beyond 3.6 to ESR 10 which has memory improvements or use IE if he is at work and has only 1 gig of ram on his work machine.
I have never seen these memory leaks. At least not recently but I admit I only just started warming up to FF again after 4 came out. It had a lot of issues all last year.
In many ways it is. MS dragged their feet on longhorn so much when they put the foot down and fired the Windows Project manager and announced 6 months Vista will be gold ... no really honest. The device makers and OEMs laughed.
When it came down to it and they were serious they had a mere 90 days from RTM until Christmas to fix the damn thing.
Worse the driver model constantly changed so if any hardware makers had alpha quality drivers in the alpha builds then they did not work in the beta. So yes it is Microsofts totally. XP as a comparison as its best OS to many who refuse to leave it, had XP/w2k driver model and hardware makers knew it was coming since Wiindows 2000 hit and the porting was minor between the two and they had plenty of time to get ready. There will still a few issues if I remember with security software and some sound drivers but that was it.
Yes it is usable in 25 seconds on that old POS that barely runs. MS really did make it very trimmed down as the kernel will run on phones. The hard drive spins for about 3 to 4 seconds while I log in and then it is all done and ready to go.
My Windows 7 desktop does have more software on it I admit, but I use MSConfig to just load Avast AV, mouse software, ATi script (not the cataylst) for accelerated media and thats it. My desktop is usable after about 50 seconds.
For a comparison I had Windows 7 on that el cheapo laptop before and it became usable after 1.20 minutes when I timed it before. I did have the same AV software that is not present on Win 8 though.
The flipside is these corporate users would all love to still be running DOS 5 and Windows 3.11 today in 2012 with their Novel Netware scripts at startup if they could get away with it.
The new beancounter mentality is fairly new as they try to get ahead by staying behind their competiton rather than spending to get ahead with better staff and infrastructure, rather than staying cheap and inferior to gain a foothold. That is a new thing in this day and age.
They will never upgrade unless by force which is what it is coming too presently with newer hardware not supporting XP like SSDs, retina 200 dpi, usb 3, etc. MS is cutting support too so I expect the rest of this year and next year to see a rapid decline of legacy systems. Windows 8 if it did not have METRO would help make argument to stay ahead as more and more employees work from home as its mobile features are fucking nice and give a good return on investment.
Of course some think it is all costs and no benefit and that an employee can be just as productive with DOS today.
Windows 8 is fucking NICE kernel wise. I am using on a crappy el cheapo laptop with only 2 gigs of ram and a dual 1.6 ghz AMD turon with integrated graphics circa 2007. It boots in 25 seconds!
It is slip, Windows update runs circles around my 3 ghz phenom II desktop with 8 gigs of ram running Windows 7. Even with the buggy bios it sleeps and resumes in half the time my Asus desktop does with Windows 7.
It is even liter than XP on that old laptop. WindowsTOGO makes it possible to use a Windows bootcd like Linux users have done for a decade. Profiles are synched with all your desktop settings on the go and even has some Active Directory features without AD such as having policies and profiles complete with apps uploaded to your mobile device/laptop when you log in with your corporate email address as your login.
If Windows 7 was not a good enough reason for corporations to leave XP, Windows 8 certainly is appealing as sales and mobile people are a pain in the ass to support and lockdown when they are never on the network. ... If it were not for METRO I would predict corps skipping Win 7 and going right for Windows 8. But the gui is very very important for a workstation user as it is what the user interacts with all day. Sigh
I guess we will hear of malware, rootkits, and spam goig bezirk in 2014 and IT will be a nightmare.
Just like equipment ages the costs increase exponentially as it ages. Webmasters, Micorosft, OEMs, hardware makers, and IT support professionals should not have to take the external costs anymore to support that 11 year old OS. Some SCADA stuff should not be on the internet anyway and the world is already moving on as the bean counters do not consider the costs of malware and hardware without drivers when making decisions to sit and wait.
I am tired of learning new IE 6 tricks and should not have to do that in 2012.
I know my comment would hit a nerve with some people. :-)
You had many many years and it costs money and puts external costs on everyone else to keep supporting IE 6, 7, XP, and other obsolete technologies. Nvidia and ATI would love nothing more than to halve their development of drivers, webmasters realize they can't use 2009 standards yet because of that few 18% who use an obsolete version of IE. Malware is a big threat as XP does not have design and features of more modern versions of Windows. Web developers hate XP with a passion for this reason as we should not have to working around incompatible implementations of 1998 standards in 2012. No these corporate users can't use anything but IE for large rollouts.
SSDs die within months if not weeks do to the lack of trim, no USB 3 or thunderport support, no h.264 etc. Support professionals like myself do not even have memorized the mouse click menus anymore as I have not used XP for years at home and have been using Windows 7 at some clients for the last year or two.
In the old days software stopped working after 3 years when newer versions of Windows came out and that was life.
For an OS that is dying why should Microsoft invest the cost to put IE 9 in? They would have to turn the XP kernel into Vista lite and do licensing changing for DRM that is required for h.264 that would break the current driver model and for an OS that will be phasing out rapidly for Windows 7 next year.
You can still use that old system but the world wont cater to it anymore and it is time to move on. In fact last year they started doing just that.
Great news. However, corporate users still love these dinosaurs as corporate sites typically do not use Statcounter. IE 8 while not as picky still has many issues and many corporations who have learned to lock down their browsers for 10 years will be using that with Windows 7 until 2020 until support ends.
It is far from over but great that you can now ignore IE 6 for all but hte most corporate users and by this time next year ignore it as they will be about done with the transition to Windows 7.
Don't treat number of posts on dice or monster as indicative of anything. Most of them are daily re-posts for non-existing jobs by resume-collection mills. Jobs which actually exist and get filled statistically end up being much more rare on those sites.
Other metrics are all biased as everyone has their ideal language. Real world demand and valuation on what someone is willing to pay for something should be the metric as it is what society needs the most. That is economics 101.
I just ran across a company that does almost all their in-house development in C. They are not hiring. They have no trouble finding C programmers when they need more, and those they have are very productive.
Which is why C is not top 1. There are more programmers than positions fluent in that language which was exactly my point.
What a webmaster cares about is ugly hacks and weird sh*t that you have to do with IE 6,7,and 8 like not adding methods to elements in javascript, no pixel formatting, only using css properties on a per div basis etc.
IE 9 has just a few minor things if you get dirty and heavily into custom code but generally identical to everything else. IE 10 which will come out automatically acts like Chrome and FF like a real standard browser should act.
I care about IE 6 and 7 marketshare as they are ... no words to describe them. IE 8 sucks and has no HTML 5 or css 3 support at all due to its age of 3 years. All the comment boxes on slashdot do not even have curved edges and are squared with on IE 8 for crying out loud! Curved boxes have been w3c standard since like 2001.
Even if Windows 8 will be a trainwreck it will still impact IE marketshares and webmaster coding standards.
IE is now set on an annual update path with WIndows Update automatically for the grandmas and other users who do not like change.
When Windows 8 is released Windows 7 users will get automatically upgraded to IE 10. IE 10 from what I read is so good that even its javascript compliancy beats all the competitors. I will have to wait and see and talk to more professional hardcore javascript developers about this but if IE no longer sucks and is back in the game then it wont be worth the effort for users to upgrade.
IE 9 is a relatively good browser now too. Not great yet, but I use it for multimedia heavy sites with graphics because the hardware acceleration still beats FF and Chrome by a decent margin. For grandmas and office workers it is certainly worthy to upgrade to.
This wont necessarily be a bad thing as webmasters just have to leave the css tricks and hacks for corporate users who refuse to update old IE crying and screaming the whole way. My hope is if enough of us refuse to support it htey will upgrade to IE 10 as well as corporations leave XP behind for Windows 7 next year before EOL in early 2014.
No one but Grandmas and super cheap corporations run XP nowdays. If you go to those links of g.statcounter.com you will see in the US it is around 30% on the weekday (corporate) and 23% on the weekends (consumer).
China skews the results since everything is pirated worldwide, but they have their own internet there and live in a different world where 40% still use IE 6.
It is time to let XP die as hardly anyone uses it. By next year it will be significantly smaller as corporations accelerate their transition to WIndows 7 and the last XP machines die off. It is not worth it to even bother porting IE 9 to it and I bet you Firefox and Chrome will stop supporting XP by the end of 2013 when it hits the EOL finally.
Not to mention it is summer and hobbiests use than vs highschool web design classes and corporate training courses which are locked to IE during the rest of the normal academic year.
C is hardly in demand at all in the job market compared to other languages if you check monster.com and dice. I am not saying it is not important as operating systems tend to be written in it, but most demand is not to write operating systems or do very low level things.
Java was tops the last time I looked followed by C#.net, with php third but I would not be surprised if .NET overcame Java and php is becoming more and more popular.
Any other measure of importance is subjective and biased as every nerd has his opinion on why his tastes are better. But job openings and demand truly show what the market wants and is willing to pay which equals value/importance. Fact is I saw only one C programming position advertised in the last 7 years. .
You can't replace the battery.
Read the article on arstechica.com or ifixit.com? It is glued to the case and board. You have to throw the whole thing away for such a low price.
My exe had a Sony and when the battery got old it refused to even boot up unless you took the battery. You are looking at 3 years max for such a device for that price. A wintel desktop can last up to 10 years.
No it is a way to force people to buy new laptops over and over again. Batteries need to be replaced between 1 - 2 years and they know that.
Apple already lowered the quality of their IPhone screens so they break when you drop htem. Now you pay $700 over and over again and that made a lot of profit for them.
Have you seen the pictures of it at www.arstechnica.com? It is just a tiny cell phone board with 2 huge holes and all proprietary parts glued in low quality fashion and they turn around try to trick you into it as a luxury $1700 item.
If glue were such high quality why aren't buildings and cars glued together?
Not to scam people?
So I pay $1700 for a MacbookPro and in 2 years when the battery needs to be charged after only an hour I have to throw the whole damn thing away!
F*ck you Apple.
If that is not a scam I do not know what is. Batteries die and so do SSDs. My phone is a year old and I can tell the battery is dying and needs to be replaced. Apple is making money hoping I would be retarded enough to pay them $3400 in a 4 year time frame for profit reasons. Or I can buy a $900 laptop and replace the battery in 2 years and keep using it for another 2. SSD die? Just replace it and it is designed to be easy. I fail to see how glue can make a battery magically thinner and smaller.
Why don't I replace my car every 4,000 miles for an oil change too?
A large reason is JQuery which has become popular and other bloated frameworks. Older browsers like IE 6 were such a pain to code for that developers starting using these and the all so lovely facebook like scripts and every other ad analytic service to increase the revenue.
Multiply that per tab and it adds up. Worse many in corporate America who refuse to leave XP wont upgrade and claim their 512 meg machines run just fine. They just blame whatever browser for being ram hungry instead
Flash can be spawn, but not each of the 40 tabs like other browsers.
What kind of graphics do you have on your system? IE 9 is the fastest on my system under graphical tests because I have a dedicated ati 5750 with 1 gig of dedicated ram. Hardware acceleration uses the extra ram on my video card as well. I do have to say starting at Chrome 18 when I change the about:flags to use gpu acceleration it is starting to catch up to IE 9,
I noticed SWTOR FPS is cut in half when I have more than 5 tabs opened in IE 9. I do not have this problem with Chrome or FF. I do not have any software to check for video ram but I think IE 9 does tricks like this.
On my older el cheapo laptop IE 9 is not that much difference with choppy graphics compared to FF or Chrome. My guess is because the video is not dedicated. I get no benefit.
Chrome seems to cream others with AJAX sites like Google maps and other things. So they are do different things better. CSS 3 support is lacking in IE 9 because it is a 2010 era browser. Java applets are still heavily used in the enterprise for Kronos, Bank of America, Manpower, Oracle crap, ADP, and other financial institutions. These systems get infected all the time iwth java exploits and it makes me want to scream as these companies wont support any Java newer than 1.4 in many of these systems and as a result can't be upgraded to WIndows 7 yet. Consumer versions of these sites do not have the java applets.
I know it's now cool to backlash against chrome users when they talk about "memory usage" but they're simply just using the wrong phrase. YES chrome uses more actual bytes of memory and always has, but what it does with that memory makes it work so much faster than Firefox. Typical idiot vernacular causes you to say "firefox uses more memory" when in fact what they mean is "it is slower and less responsive."
Let's get a grip here people, it's 2012. If your computer doesn't have 4-8 gigs of ddr3 ram, you're doing it wrong. Chrome is allowed to use as much memory as it wants as long as it gets the job done better than anyone else.
I posted this story because I was tired of people repeating that over and over on how bloated FF is when they have not used it since version 4. It is time to clean the air up on this.
But until very recently that was true. Firefox 4 and even slashdot's beloved FF 3.6 are really crappy browsers. I just installed FF 3.6 on a VM because I am working on a site that is business oriented and corporations have not moved off it yet. WHAT A DIFFERENCE. It was slow and hogged the hard drive and just moving the up and down arrows did slow redraws. It was painful.
Early last year I even caught myself using IE 8 as I found it faster and smoother. Yes, it is a bad browser too with numerous rendering issues. 2010 - 2011 was when CHrome starting to become popular and it was a breath of fresh air.
FF is now catching up to Chrome, but historically for the last 2 years Chrome has always been lean and mean and could run circles around FF. Mozilla needed to fix the memory issue as slashdotters such as cpu6502 always complain even with FF 13 that his 512 ram system comes to a slowdown as well as most of corporate America who still own ancient XP systems and refuse to upgrade as they all work just fine.
These corporations when they need IE 6 for intranet sites use FF 3.6 for external web ones and it is painfully slow on such systems.
I can't defend Apple's actions but then I don't need to. What they do is legal. The problem is the system. There will always be the Microsofts, Apples and Oracles of the world but giving them this kind of power is beyond stupid. If it wasn't Apple it would be someone else.
thing is, what Microsoft can't do they have Apple do. Either for fear of government interference(this is still a very large real threat for MS, but not to Apple due to legacy reasons and Apple owning just a small part of the desktop world) or fear of pissing up their manufacturers, some of which are only shipping windows phone as lip service to MS to keep them from litigating against their Android phones - and to reap money back from MS they have to pay to MS as licenses when shipping androids, by getting discounts on WP licenses.
Apple has no problem with the manufacturers shipping MS products(cross licensing in place - with unpublished details). And Nokia has cross license agreements with said manufacturers so they don't want to stir the pot(and they're knee deep in frand licensing too, which Apple isn't).
It's sort of a new age duopoly arrangement. Mere few years ago these players were busy litigating each other but now they're effectively married as far as patents and blocking each others products go, with cross licensing agreements between Apple, Nokia and MS going every way and even a patent troll created by MS and Nokia as a pool - and they all want android and the other manufacturers dead or under their control(Nokia maps as default win wp8 amounts to wp licensees effectively paying their competitor a small sum for every shipped phone, though again details are hidden). It's part of the system that has kept new handset manufacturers blocked from market despite foxconn being available as a manufacturing resource for anyone, the os being available for anyone, the parts sources being available for anyone...
what's even more ridiculous is that multiple firms have patents for things which amount to being the same thing when executed. that's sick.
anyhow, mixed local and web searches suck ass.
It is a step beyond this with Apple. THey all agree not to use or do cross licensing and patent protection rackets with each other so if a third party comes in and sues they can combine forces and sue for defense.
But not Apple. Apple is everyone MUST OWN AN IPHONE or no phone at all. Everyone who makes phones needs to go out of business or leave the market to Apple altogether. They are extreme and fanatical and wont stop unless everyone but Apple is out of business. You can't negotiate with them as they do not want your profits. THey want you out of the market so Jobs vision of him outdoing Bill Gates succeeds. Tim's Cook ego is more important than your needs to your device you paid for.
I think anti trust laws need to go to Apple as this is beyond the equivalent of giving away IE 6 for free. This is more like if MS sued every OEM who dared include any other browser and used the FTC to ban the downloads and imports of every browser but IE 6. Apple is much more agresive and is using its money to block competitors from entering the market.
I think Apple should be killed first. I have never seen a worse bully or a sorer loser. The tech industry needs to rid itself off this idiocy of a company once and for all. With all the money they have, they have the power now to completely annihilate innovation in the entire tech World. Things were better when they did not have that kind of money power; atleast then they had the hunger to build better products. Instead of quashing competition in the Courts and with the FTC.
I know MS is still hated here with a passion, but Apple is much more evil. At least MS will coexist with Android and only ask a few dollars per device. Not go out all nuke and throw you out of business and go crazy!
I never in my years thought I would say this but I am glad crappy Windows won in the PC war of the 80s and 90s. Who knows what would have happened if the Mac one.
Yes Mac is superior but shit its creators are insane. Apple is turning anti consumer now just like MS as they build their monopoly. Want to replace that battery for your $1700 macbook pro? Throw it out and buy a new one!