One would have to ask why you bother going through all that effort? How is it harmful to have Silverlight on your system? It isn't. In fact, it's pretty lightweight, installs very quickly (either via Windows update or via a link that anyone can click), doesn't gum up or muck up a system or use resources when not in use...
Seriously, your efforts seem rather irrational to me. What exactly is the point?
Microsoft has been trying to push people off of IE6 for years now. Sure, they're not somehow pulling the plug on them (how exactly would they do that?) but they've been at the forefront of pushind web developers to drop support for IE6 and encourage any IE6 users they detect to upgrade/update their browser. So your comment is sort of out of place and unwarranted.
For the third time now, I'm NOT talking about speed to market. And my comments on what is cost effective were based primarily on development time, testing time, and support time. Yet you respond as if you hadn't read my comment at all, or like I said something completely different.
Since you're clearly not even bothering to read my comments, I guess it's pointless to continue.
I said *ignoring* speed-to-market, there are very real cost considerations. Why write from scratch something that is already written in a library? Why support really really old software, OSs, or libraries when the amount of return on the investment in testing and extra coding isn't covered by the additional expense (in time, developers, testing, and support)?
There's a BUSINESS side to this, and to such decisions, that you seem to be completely ignoring.
The reality is that the XP market is rapidly shrinking, and many of the people staying behind won't be using your product (or paying for it) anyway. With a "free" product like iCloud, which supports "premium" products like iPads and iPhones and iMacs, why waste time and money testing on and supporting platforms that it's unlikely you'll ever really need to worry about? After all, you're not getting a lot of revenue, and your users can obviously afford to upgrade to Win7 if they have to (and frankly, Win7 is so much better than XP in almost every way, especially security, that anything that encourages people to update is a Good Thing anyway).
It's not cost effective. It doesn't make business sense.
FTA: Also, the ARM compatibility is a double edge knife â" sure, Windows 8 will run on more machines, including mobile devices. But the applications themselves wonâ(TM)t be interchangeable, software written for ARM wonâ(TM)t work on your PC. Whatâ(TM)s the point in calling it one system, when effectively you will have two systems, each with a separate set of compatible apps?
True on one hand (apps like Office), but not true on another. The statement was made that apps that run entirely on the new desktop with the new Windows 8 facilities can be written entirely in HTML5 and JavaScript. As such, desktop widgets and even more sophisticated apps and games can be written once, and run across both platforms. In fact, I think that's precisly why MS made such a big deal about emphasizing that much of what you're seeing in the new shell is HTML5 and JavaScript.
I'm assuming that.Net is still supported as well, adn even that can compile to IL, which can then be run on each platform, compiling down to native code at either install or run time.
Ignoring the very real issue of speed to market, how about a simple cost basis? It may be not only faster to get to market, but remarkably less expensive to do so to develop in.Net, or to just require IE9 (and forego all that testing on IE6, 7, and 8). There are a lot of considerations.
In fact, even in the story, just because someone cried wolf didn't mean the wolf wasn't there. It just meant people ignored him when the wolf DID appear... leading to disaster.
Zune didn't have enough features? It had more than comparable iPods (the Classic, not the Touch). Like a built in radio tuner. And the ability to buy/download a song from the radio with a click. And over-the-air syncing. And Sharing. And ZunePass.
The Zune80 and Zune120 were superior to the iPod Classic in just about every way but two... better hardware, better sound quality, better UI, and better desktop software (Zune), and ZunePass. It just didn't measure up in market share/3rd party support, and international support (ZunePass being US only was a huge problem).
So no, the Zune didn't "suck" compared to the competition. I owned both, and I assure you the Zune (as well as the Zune HD) are great pieces of hardware, with great UIs, and the Zune software beats iTunes on the PC hands-down for what it does.
Apple, however, owns the market, and "trendy" and "popular" drive the market. And with a name like Zune and the original clunky brown model, the Zune name got tarnished from which it never recovered.
The "Windows Rot" that slowed down Windows as time went on seems to have been eliminated with Win7. I've been using Win7 since it was released, and it's just as fast as it was the day it was installed. And I'm using it as a development machine, so it's getting some serious abuse, LOTS of installed apps, etc.
Reinstalling XP every year is excessive unless you're doing something insane to your computer, but I think pretty much anyone noticed that after two or three years XP was taking a LOT longer to do things than it originally was.
Windows 7 is just not "torture" to maintain. Install Microsoft Security Essentials (free) and Windows Live Essentials (to get email and photo organizer and basic stuff like that), and you really don't need to do much. You don't need to worry about folders much (windows search finds most things, jump lists go directly to your commonly used and recently used files, and the default settings protect most important files and system files from being damaged accidentally.
As for crapware like search bars and emoticons, that's just user error, and ANY OS could fall prey to that crap, if users are stupid enough to click on anything and everything and just download and install random crap from the internet without paying any attention. That's not Windows fault, other than it's got the massive market share that motivates the idiots who produce all that crap.
I hate Objective-C (as do most developers I know). It's syntax is just annoying and awful. It's probably the number one reason I don't do any development for OS X or iOS.
C# is vastly superior. I even perferred C++. Hell, I even liked Java better.
Windows Phone developer tools are the best of any platform, and are free... it's easily the most developer-friendly platform, and many applications can be easily ported to Windows and XBox 360 Live Arcade.
Developers obviously go where the users are, and right now that isn't the WP7 platform. But then agian, it's only been released for six months. Let's see where things are in two years.
Apple claimed they did, but I never thought so. There are significant differences in the UIs, and always have been. And the concept of 'over-lapping windows' is so generic it really can't be claimed as a patent, imho.
To claim that a tablet can't be rectangular with rounded corners and a border? Dear lord, that's just ridiculous.
I think you misinterpret deep integration. Having the rendering engine call native APIs that go directly to the hardware, instead of calling abstraction layers, isn't dangerous. Neither is providing the ability to pin pages to the task bar (a user-initiated task that I cannot personally fathom as being any sort of major security risk). You can have deep integration without opening up huge security holes... and it need not have anything at all to do with sandboxing runing scripts (i.e. you can do both).
I did not know that. It's not something I ever experienced (I ran IE8 on Vista for years without any issue, so I guess my standard displays, though big and high-resolutioney) weren't "high DPI".
But then again, upgrading Vista to Win7 is pretty fast and easy... the only pain point being the cost (just over a hundred bucks)... and I've upgraded all my systems to Win7 at this point.
Perhaps this is a reason that they're dropping Vista for IE10?
You understand the "native" here means native OS interaction, as opposed to being layered on top of abstraction libraries, right?
It's amazing to me how the smart people at Slashdot so completely (and likely willfully) misunderstand what MS was saying with the "Native" stuff. To get IE9 (or 10) to run on XP, they'd have to build a whole bunch of abstraction layers and software emulations and such... which would slow IE9 down. And for what? XP is rapidly dying. It's a waste of time, development effort, and testing effort to continue supporting such an OS indefinitely. And the fact is, IE9 is pretty damn fast compared to all the competition out there. And that, clearly, is their goal with IE... to be the fastest running browser out there. And they've decided it's worth it to jettison XP (and Vista for IE10) to meet that goal.
I would say Apple is the worst at this. The iPhone 3G is all but useless right now (can't run iOS4 on it at all, it slows to such a crawl as to be useless... it's not even very usable with the latest iOS 3 version on it). Apple pretty much forces everyone to upgrade with every wave of new hardware or OS. They change entire architectures and just cast away the old stuff after very short times. It's just that their user base is used to this and even expects it. Count the number of people who buy new iPhones every year, even though the contract is two years long... it's a significant percentage of the base.
I wouldn't say the decline is subtle or incremental at all. A friend of mine with an iPhone 3G simply cannot function. Opening the maps application takes MINUTES, during which the phone is utterly unusable (frozen). Things like that. He's currently saving up for the iPhone 4 or 5, depending on what's available once he gets the money.
It's not that it can't be done. The question is, is it worth it to expend the development costs in order to achieve it, and at what price? The drop in performance of having to use abstraction libraries, and the cost to develop separate code-bases that behave identically (and the additional factors of increasted/required testing) are not things Microsoft apparently wants to pay. Their whole goal here is to make IE the 'fastest' browser, and they're doing pretty good on that front. Their secondary goal is to get people off XP and give them an excuse to finally upgrade. Given that... why wouldn't they drop XP? And given that by the time IE10 is released, Vista will represent at most 7% of the market (and will be rapidly shrinking), why bother to expend so much energy to support it? Especially given the update from Vista to Win7 is pretty fast, easy, and painless?
For all we know, they might do an upgrade push, with a big sale on upgrades from Vista to Win7. I imagine that, as they ready Windows.Next, it would make perfect marketing and financial sense to offer a Vista->Win7 upgrade for $29 or something. Who knows? It's what I would do.
Not so. Microsoft is VERY up front with its support time-lines, and extended suppot for XP several times. People who bought XP in 2009 knew exactly what they were doing, and the "end of support date" was out there and well known. Nobody was being screwed here.
I think the issue goes back to this "native" support MS was talking about (and most of Slashdot completely misinterpreted).
IE9 (and presumably IE10) talks directly to the OS, without translation and abstraction layers that other browsers need to use in order to run across OS's. This presumably gives IE9 (and soon 10) an advatage over the competition in browse speed, deep integration with OS features, and more nimbleness in that they have less code to maintain and don't have to worry about how to implement something that has to differ on each platform (making it cheaper for them to develop). Of course, MS won't exploit much of the "nibleness" aspect (Google is all over them on that), but will certainly appreciate the cost savings, and will certainly push the performance advantages and feature integrations.
And frankly, I think other browsers are wasting time and money developing new code that still runs "exactly the same" on older OSs like XP. It's over a decade old. Time to move on. XP needs to die, if only for security reasons. Never mind it's becoming less and less compatable with newer generations of hardware. It's a dying audience, consistently shrinking. There's no need to target it any more.
And it's quite likely that IE10 will be released around the same time as Windows.Next, so IE10 will still run on the "current OS plus one version back" anyway, just like IE9. It's not like IE10 is coming out this year. (or at least, I'd be shocked if it did)
I disagree. "corporate users" are the only ones trapped on IE6, and so they can just find some way to use that on their coporate LANs. There is no requirement they use IE6 at home or anywhere else. If it's such an issue, the corporation can either pay to upgrade the sites, or pay for their customers to have VMs that run IE6 to access their legacy sites. Or you can just install FireFox or Chrome next to IE6 and use one for legacy sites, and the other for everything else.
The vast majority of people have no NEED to use IE6, and the vast majority of web developers have no need to support IE6. In fact, I's say there is ZERO requirement for ANY web developer to EVER support IE6 at this point. Anyone who says otherwise is making excuses or lying.
And there's no need to support IE7 either. Because it's such an easy, pain-free upgrade from that to IE8, and there aren't any sites out there that REQUIRE IE7 in the way that some coporate sites require IE6. IE8's "compatability mode" is "good enough".
So you're just wrong here. You only need to suppot IE8 and IE9 right now. Period. Once IE10 comes out, you will only NEED to support IE9 and IE10 (IE 9's compatibility mode is "good enough" for any site quirky enough to run only in IE8).
Every web developer just needs to put their foot down on IE6 support (and now IE7). Period. Even MS wants developers to do this. Nobody should code to, or test on IE6 any more, period. It's a complete waste of time and money and effort. Just stop it.
Slashdot Mirror
One would have to ask why you bother going through all that effort? How is it harmful to have Silverlight on your system? It isn't. In fact, it's pretty lightweight, installs very quickly (either via Windows update or via a link that anyone can click), doesn't gum up or muck up a system or use resources when not in use...
Seriously, your efforts seem rather irrational to me. What exactly is the point?
Microsoft has been trying to push people off of IE6 for years now. Sure, they're not somehow pulling the plug on them (how exactly would they do that?) but they've been at the forefront of pushind web developers to drop support for IE6 and encourage any IE6 users they detect to upgrade/update their browser. So your comment is sort of out of place and unwarranted.
The fact that they left out C# seems odd as well. It makes me wonder what the point was, really.
Again, you ignored my comment.
For the third time now, I'm NOT talking about speed to market. And my comments on what is cost effective were based primarily on development time, testing time, and support time. Yet you respond as if you hadn't read my comment at all, or like I said something completely different.
Since you're clearly not even bothering to read my comments, I guess it's pointless to continue.
You completely ignored my comment. Interesting.
I said *ignoring* speed-to-market, there are very real cost considerations. Why write from scratch something that is already written in a library? Why support really really old software, OSs, or libraries when the amount of return on the investment in testing and extra coding isn't covered by the additional expense (in time, developers, testing, and support)?
There's a BUSINESS side to this, and to such decisions, that you seem to be completely ignoring.
The reality is that the XP market is rapidly shrinking, and many of the people staying behind won't be using your product (or paying for it) anyway. With a "free" product like iCloud, which supports "premium" products like iPads and iPhones and iMacs, why waste time and money testing on and supporting platforms that it's unlikely you'll ever really need to worry about? After all, you're not getting a lot of revenue, and your users can obviously afford to upgrade to Win7 if they have to (and frankly, Win7 is so much better than XP in almost every way, especially security, that anything that encourages people to update is a Good Thing anyway).
It's not cost effective. It doesn't make business sense.
FTA:
Also, the ARM compatibility is a double edge knife â" sure, Windows 8 will run on more machines, including mobile devices. But the applications themselves wonâ(TM)t be interchangeable, software written for ARM wonâ(TM)t work on your PC. Whatâ(TM)s the point in calling it one system, when effectively you will have two systems, each with a separate set of compatible apps?
True on one hand (apps like Office), but not true on another. The statement was made that apps that run entirely on the new desktop with the new Windows 8 facilities can be written entirely in HTML5 and JavaScript. As such, desktop widgets and even more sophisticated apps and games can be written once, and run across both platforms. In fact, I think that's precisly why MS made such a big deal about emphasizing that much of what you're seeing in the new shell is HTML5 and JavaScript.
I'm assuming that .Net is still supported as well, adn even that can compile to IL, which can then be run on each platform, compiling down to native code at either install or run time.
Ignoring the very real issue of speed to market, how about a simple cost basis? It may be not only faster to get to market, but remarkably less expensive to do so to develop in .Net, or to just require IE9 (and forego all that testing on IE6, 7, and 8). There are a lot of considerations.
In fact, even in the story, just because someone cried wolf didn't mean the wolf wasn't there. It just meant people ignored him when the wolf DID appear... leading to disaster.
Zune didn't have enough features? It had more than comparable iPods (the Classic, not the Touch). Like a built in radio tuner. And the ability to buy/download a song from the radio with a click. And over-the-air syncing. And Sharing. And ZunePass.
The Zune80 and Zune120 were superior to the iPod Classic in just about every way but two... better hardware, better sound quality, better UI, and better desktop software (Zune), and ZunePass. It just didn't measure up in market share/3rd party support, and international support (ZunePass being US only was a huge problem).
So no, the Zune didn't "suck" compared to the competition. I owned both, and I assure you the Zune (as well as the Zune HD) are great pieces of hardware, with great UIs, and the Zune software beats iTunes on the PC hands-down for what it does.
Apple, however, owns the market, and "trendy" and "popular" drive the market. And with a name like Zune and the original clunky brown model, the Zune name got tarnished from which it never recovered.
That's my question.
The "Windows Rot" that slowed down Windows as time went on seems to have been eliminated with Win7. I've been using Win7 since it was released, and it's just as fast as it was the day it was installed. And I'm using it as a development machine, so it's getting some serious abuse, LOTS of installed apps, etc.
Reinstalling XP every year is excessive unless you're doing something insane to your computer, but I think pretty much anyone noticed that after two or three years XP was taking a LOT longer to do things than it originally was.
Windows 7 is just not "torture" to maintain. Install Microsoft Security Essentials (free) and Windows Live Essentials (to get email and photo organizer and basic stuff like that), and you really don't need to do much. You don't need to worry about folders much (windows search finds most things, jump lists go directly to your commonly used and recently used files, and the default settings protect most important files and system files from being damaged accidentally.
As for crapware like search bars and emoticons, that's just user error, and ANY OS could fall prey to that crap, if users are stupid enough to click on anything and everything and just download and install random crap from the internet without paying any attention. That's not Windows fault, other than it's got the massive market share that motivates the idiots who produce all that crap.
I hate Objective-C (as do most developers I know). It's syntax is just annoying and awful. It's probably the number one reason I don't do any development for OS X or iOS.
C# is vastly superior. I even perferred C++. Hell, I even liked Java better.
Windows Phone developer tools are the best of any platform, and are free... it's easily the most developer-friendly platform, and many applications can be easily ported to Windows and XBox 360 Live Arcade.
Developers obviously go where the users are, and right now that isn't the WP7 platform. But then agian, it's only been released for six months. Let's see where things are in two years.
Apple claimed they did, but I never thought so. There are significant differences in the UIs, and always have been. And the concept of 'over-lapping windows' is so generic it really can't be claimed as a patent, imho.
To claim that a tablet can't be rectangular with rounded corners and a border? Dear lord, that's just ridiculous.
The update from iOS 2.x to iOS 3.x was sudden shit. That step wasn't incremental at all.
I think you misinterpret deep integration. Having the rendering engine call native APIs that go directly to the hardware, instead of calling abstraction layers, isn't dangerous. Neither is providing the ability to pin pages to the task bar (a user-initiated task that I cannot personally fathom as being any sort of major security risk). You can have deep integration without opening up huge security holes... and it need not have anything at all to do with sandboxing runing scripts (i.e. you can do both).
I did not know that. It's not something I ever experienced (I ran IE8 on Vista for years without any issue, so I guess my standard displays, though big and high-resolutioney) weren't "high DPI".
But then again, upgrading Vista to Win7 is pretty fast and easy... the only pain point being the cost (just over a hundred bucks)... and I've upgraded all my systems to Win7 at this point.
Perhaps this is a reason that they're dropping Vista for IE10?
You understand the "native" here means native OS interaction, as opposed to being layered on top of abstraction libraries, right?
It's amazing to me how the smart people at Slashdot so completely (and likely willfully) misunderstand what MS was saying with the "Native" stuff. To get IE9 (or 10) to run on XP, they'd have to build a whole bunch of abstraction layers and software emulations and such... which would slow IE9 down. And for what? XP is rapidly dying. It's a waste of time, development effort, and testing effort to continue supporting such an OS indefinitely. And the fact is, IE9 is pretty damn fast compared to all the competition out there. And that, clearly, is their goal with IE... to be the fastest running browser out there. And they've decided it's worth it to jettison XP (and Vista for IE10) to meet that goal.
I would say Apple is the worst at this. The iPhone 3G is all but useless right now (can't run iOS4 on it at all, it slows to such a crawl as to be useless... it's not even very usable with the latest iOS 3 version on it). Apple pretty much forces everyone to upgrade with every wave of new hardware or OS. They change entire architectures and just cast away the old stuff after very short times. It's just that their user base is used to this and even expects it. Count the number of people who buy new iPhones every year, even though the contract is two years long... it's a significant percentage of the base.
I wouldn't say the decline is subtle or incremental at all. A friend of mine with an iPhone 3G simply cannot function. Opening the maps application takes MINUTES, during which the phone is utterly unusable (frozen). Things like that. He's currently saving up for the iPhone 4 or 5, depending on what's available once he gets the money.
And he's not an isolated case either.
It's not that it can't be done. The question is, is it worth it to expend the development costs in order to achieve it, and at what price? The drop in performance of having to use abstraction libraries, and the cost to develop separate code-bases that behave identically (and the additional factors of increasted/required testing) are not things Microsoft apparently wants to pay. Their whole goal here is to make IE the 'fastest' browser, and they're doing pretty good on that front. Their secondary goal is to get people off XP and give them an excuse to finally upgrade. Given that... why wouldn't they drop XP? And given that by the time IE10 is released, Vista will represent at most 7% of the market (and will be rapidly shrinking), why bother to expend so much energy to support it? Especially given the update from Vista to Win7 is pretty fast, easy, and painless?
For all we know, they might do an upgrade push, with a big sale on upgrades from Vista to Win7. I imagine that, as they ready Windows.Next, it would make perfect marketing and financial sense to offer a Vista->Win7 upgrade for $29 or something. Who knows? It's what I would do.
Not so. Microsoft is VERY up front with its support time-lines, and extended suppot for XP several times. People who bought XP in 2009 knew exactly what they were doing, and the "end of support date" was out there and well known. Nobody was being screwed here.
I think the issue goes back to this "native" support MS was talking about (and most of Slashdot completely misinterpreted).
IE9 (and presumably IE10) talks directly to the OS, without translation and abstraction layers that other browsers need to use in order to run across OS's. This presumably gives IE9 (and soon 10) an advatage over the competition in browse speed, deep integration with OS features, and more nimbleness in that they have less code to maintain and don't have to worry about how to implement something that has to differ on each platform (making it cheaper for them to develop). Of course, MS won't exploit much of the "nibleness" aspect (Google is all over them on that), but will certainly appreciate the cost savings, and will certainly push the performance advantages and feature integrations.
And frankly, I think other browsers are wasting time and money developing new code that still runs "exactly the same" on older OSs like XP. It's over a decade old. Time to move on. XP needs to die, if only for security reasons. Never mind it's becoming less and less compatable with newer generations of hardware. It's a dying audience, consistently shrinking. There's no need to target it any more.
And it's quite likely that IE10 will be released around the same time as Windows.Next, so IE10 will still run on the "current OS plus one version back" anyway, just like IE9. It's not like IE10 is coming out this year. (or at least, I'd be shocked if it did)
I disagree. "corporate users" are the only ones trapped on IE6, and so they can just find some way to use that on their coporate LANs. There is no requirement they use IE6 at home or anywhere else. If it's such an issue, the corporation can either pay to upgrade the sites, or pay for their customers to have VMs that run IE6 to access their legacy sites. Or you can just install FireFox or Chrome next to IE6 and use one for legacy sites, and the other for everything else.
The vast majority of people have no NEED to use IE6, and the vast majority of web developers have no need to support IE6. In fact, I's say there is ZERO requirement for ANY web developer to EVER support IE6 at this point. Anyone who says otherwise is making excuses or lying.
And there's no need to support IE7 either. Because it's such an easy, pain-free upgrade from that to IE8, and there aren't any sites out there that REQUIRE IE7 in the way that some coporate sites require IE6. IE8's "compatability mode" is "good enough".
So you're just wrong here. You only need to suppot IE8 and IE9 right now. Period. Once IE10 comes out, you will only NEED to support IE9 and IE10 (IE 9's compatibility mode is "good enough" for any site quirky enough to run only in IE8).
Every web developer just needs to put their foot down on IE6 support (and now IE7). Period. Even MS wants developers to do this. Nobody should code to, or test on IE6 any more, period. It's a complete waste of time and money and effort. Just stop it.
Apparently English syntax is something you're new two. Here's a hit: notice the comma placement.
"desktops and laptops" are one class. Then there's "The XBox console". And finally their Phone OS.
Snark is only funny if it's not patently ignorant.