My attitude might change if IE actually got to the point where I could sanely develop an entire web app, and have it tested in Firefox, Chrome, and Konqueror, and when it was all finished, spend less than an hour testing in Safari and IE. At that point, it would no longer make my life miserable that people use IE.
The problem with that is that Firefox, Chrome, and Konqueror all are moving targets, and most of them are implementing draft standards that can change at any time. CSS3 is still nowhere near being finalized, and HTML5 won't be final, by their own admission, for at least another 10 years. Meahwhile, we have browser vendors implementing their own standards that they hope to have included in HTML5 (Canvas anyone?), and if people start using this functionality and then the standard changes, you have even more problems.
Whatever happened to the days when standards weren't implemented until they were ratified?
IE bastardized the web standards it supports, and failed to support any decent new ones, for about a decade.
That's an interesting way of interpreting history. Technically, at various times, IE has been more standards conformant than any other browser. For example, when IE6 was released in 2001, IE6 had the best CSS support. The problem was not that IE "bastardized" standards, it's that it didn't keep up with evolving standards, and it didn't improve it's standard support so that it's competitors soon surpassed it in standards conformance. Also, IE had a number of bugs in their implementation which they did not bother to fix also. For example, IE7 became significantly more compliant just by fixing the majority of their current CSS bugs.
What you're saying is that an 1967 dodge charger "bastardized" EPA regulations from the 1980's, even though it existed long before those regulations existed, or before any of it's competitors had implemented them.
There's no doubt that Microsoft ignores some standards. But one can only criticize them for new works they release after those standards are defined and commonly implemented, or for not updating their products. You can't criticize their old product for not conforming to new standards.
Apple is not a monopoly as it barely has about 5-8% of the "desktop operating system" market. Windows with its ~ 75% is considered a monopoly.
Except that legally, it's not "desktop operating system" market, since you can't (legally) run MacOS on non-mac hardware. Judge Jackson defined the market as "Intel compatible", which technically current Apples are, but because of apples limitations on their OS to run only on their hardware, it puts them in their own camp.
While that's true, the amount of effort required to create a web browser is orders of magnitude more than that of creating a text editor. Many of those text editor programs are written and maintained by a single person. Web browsers take hundreds of people years of development to get right. And to date, none have (gotten it right).
Opera is not the most used browser on Computers though. It's mostly used in handheld devices, which are used far more often for internet access than computers in eastern europe.
I use opera on my phone as well, and frankly, I hate it. It's AJAX support is terrible, typically causing entire page refreshes every few seconds when using ajax apps like gmail.
Actually, you forgot "financial injury", which is basically what an anti-trust suit is (same with breaking your neighbors window). A defendant can be found to have violated a law, but they are not "guilty" of it because the burden of proof in civil court is far less than that of a criminal case.
Civil court has liability, criminal court has guilt.
It's hardly exotic, and while dual-head is standard on most PCI-e video cards, you forget that most OEM computers don't come with such cards, they have video on the motherboard with only a single interface (if you're lucky, it might have a dvi-interface as well, but it's pretty rare). This means you buy a third party video card for your second monitor. This configuration is VERY common.
Uhh... No. It really is breain dead simple to do multi-monitor on virtually any video card (and virtually any combination of video card) made for Windows in the last 10 years. I have a machine here with a PCI-e nvidia card, an SIS PCI card, and an S3 PCI card, both the PCI cards are ancient. It worked in 3 clicks.
I'll bet you have monitors that are the same size and resolution. I bet you don't try to do anything 3D. I bet you don't use compositing.
One highly frustrating thing about Linux's multi-monitor support is that if you want a combined desktop (not multiple sessions) then Xinerama is incapable of respecting screen boundaries correctly for everything. Programs that are "Xinerama aware" can find the corect dimensions, but apps should not have to be aware of the environment. This is particularly bad for apps that can go full-screen, because in full-screen mode you can't rely on the window manager to know this stuff, the app has to know.
For example, it's not uncommon to have an app maximize and be off the screen at the bottom because it's on a smaller screen than the largest monitor, because the desktop is considered as tall as the largest monitor.
Hell, just getting the desktops to show up correctly takes tons of tweaking, unless you use all nvidia cards and can use the TwinView feature.
Because Xinerama is broken. Horribly broken. You can't, for instance, use compiz with Xinerama (well, you can on the main screen, but not the secondary ones) and you can't use secondary screens for any 3D purposes. Some argue that this is not broken, just not a feature supported by Xinerama, which while true doesn't change the fact that Xinerama doesn't live up to users expectations... as such, broken in my book. TwinView exists solely to work around Xinerama's limitations.
"Bit rot, also known as bit decay, data rot, or data decay, is a colloquial computing term used either to describe gradual decay of storage media or to facetiously describe the spontaneous degradation of a software program over time."
I don't understand your point. You throw a rock through my window, I take you to court. I go to a glass company and get an estimate for the cost of repair. you lose, you have to pay the cost of the estimate.
If it costs me half that to replace it because i own my own glass company, I don't have to give you a refund. I pocket the difference.
That doesn't matter. Let's say you throw a rock through your neighbors window, and you know for a fact that he owns a glass company and can replace it cheaply, but he takes you to court and seeks the full price of the repair.
Assuming you don't contest that you did it, or he can prove that you did, you will be liable for full price regardless of the price it costs him to replace it.
Actually, there is something similar that occurs in software, called "bit rot". The older a piece of software is, the more security vulnerabilities have likely been found in it, making it a bigger and bigger target so long as it is in continued use (obviously, now that Windows 9x's user base is about 3 dozen people, they're not much of a target anymore).
This is true of MacOS X, Linux and Windows. If you install a new copy of Fedora 8, you are going to have a ton more security patches to apply than a recent Fedora 12.
And clicking "Yes, I want to install this add-on", then "Yes, I really really mean I want to install this add-on", and then "Yes, I want to run this add-on" isn't "knowing you're installing something"?
I'd argue that ActiveX has far more intentional installation than Firefox plug-ins do. Users don't care. They just want to do whatever it takes for them to see the naked pictures.
I didn't say it's forbidden... My point is that there are a ton of standards out there any given browser *could* support, for example, which browser supports WebCGM or XForms? The closest you get are plug-ins that support them.
Who defines what a browser is "supposed" to support? Who says it has to support PNG, or JPG or SVG? In general, a browser tends to support things that are commonly used on the web, which makes it a bit of a chicken and egg scenario because SVG is just not commonly used.
Doesn't help if it's already installed, and that's not what I was referring to. I was referring to the fact that there is no security mechanism between plug-ins and the browser, so once installed they are fully trusted, just like ActiveX.
There is no functional difference between ActiveX and Mozilla plug-ins, other than a half-assed white-listing system. In fact, I was just reading that a bunch of security vulnerabilities have been found in firefox plug-ins, and that FF has no security system in place to deal with this.
This is just ridiculous. It's HTML 3 all over again. This lack of formalized standard leads to browser vendors creating proprietary extensions in the hope they might eventually be included in some final standard. Canvas is a good example of this.. thankfully the working group accepted it (but again, not officially standard) or we'd have tons of sites utilizing non-standard features.
How, exactly, does someone have an extension to something that's not even a standard? All browsers had "extensions" because the W3C dropped the ball on HTML 3.
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My attitude might change if IE actually got to the point where I could sanely develop an entire web app, and have it tested in Firefox, Chrome, and Konqueror, and when it was all finished, spend less than an hour testing in Safari and IE. At that point, it would no longer make my life miserable that people use IE.
The problem with that is that Firefox, Chrome, and Konqueror all are moving targets, and most of them are implementing draft standards that can change at any time. CSS3 is still nowhere near being finalized, and HTML5 won't be final, by their own admission, for at least another 10 years. Meahwhile, we have browser vendors implementing their own standards that they hope to have included in HTML5 (Canvas anyone?), and if people start using this functionality and then the standard changes, you have even more problems.
Whatever happened to the days when standards weren't implemented until they were ratified?
IE bastardized the web standards it supports, and failed to support any decent new ones, for about a decade.
That's an interesting way of interpreting history. Technically, at various times, IE has been more standards conformant than any other browser. For example, when IE6 was released in 2001, IE6 had the best CSS support. The problem was not that IE "bastardized" standards, it's that it didn't keep up with evolving standards, and it didn't improve it's standard support so that it's competitors soon surpassed it in standards conformance. Also, IE had a number of bugs in their implementation which they did not bother to fix also. For example, IE7 became significantly more compliant just by fixing the majority of their current CSS bugs.
What you're saying is that an 1967 dodge charger "bastardized" EPA regulations from the 1980's, even though it existed long before those regulations existed, or before any of it's competitors had implemented them.
There's no doubt that Microsoft ignores some standards. But one can only criticize them for new works they release after those standards are defined and commonly implemented, or for not updating their products. You can't criticize their old product for not conforming to new standards.
Apple is not a monopoly as it barely has about 5-8% of the "desktop operating system" market. Windows with its ~ 75% is considered a monopoly.
Except that legally, it's not "desktop operating system" market, since you can't (legally) run MacOS on non-mac hardware. Judge Jackson defined the market as "Intel compatible", which technically current Apples are, but because of apples limitations on their OS to run only on their hardware, it puts them in their own camp.
While that's true, the amount of effort required to create a web browser is orders of magnitude more than that of creating a text editor. Many of those text editor programs are written and maintained by a single person. Web browsers take hundreds of people years of development to get right. And to date, none have (gotten it right).
Opera is not the most used browser on Computers though. It's mostly used in handheld devices, which are used far more often for internet access than computers in eastern europe.
I use opera on my phone as well, and frankly, I hate it. It's AJAX support is terrible, typically causing entire page refreshes every few seconds when using ajax apps like gmail.
Actually, you forgot "financial injury", which is basically what an anti-trust suit is (same with breaking your neighbors window). A defendant can be found to have violated a law, but they are not "guilty" of it because the burden of proof in civil court is far less than that of a criminal case.
Civil court has liability, criminal court has guilt.
It's hardly exotic, and while dual-head is standard on most PCI-e video cards, you forget that most OEM computers don't come with such cards, they have video on the motherboard with only a single interface (if you're lucky, it might have a dvi-interface as well, but it's pretty rare). This means you buy a third party video card for your second monitor. This configuration is VERY common.
Uhh... No. It really is breain dead simple to do multi-monitor on virtually any video card (and virtually any combination of video card) made for Windows in the last 10 years. I have a machine here with a PCI-e nvidia card, an SIS PCI card, and an S3 PCI card, both the PCI cards are ancient. It worked in 3 clicks.
You have a very small expectation for "works".
I'll bet you have monitors that are the same size and resolution. I bet you don't try to do anything 3D. I bet you don't use compositing.
One highly frustrating thing about Linux's multi-monitor support is that if you want a combined desktop (not multiple sessions) then Xinerama is incapable of respecting screen boundaries correctly for everything. Programs that are "Xinerama aware" can find the corect dimensions, but apps should not have to be aware of the environment. This is particularly bad for apps that can go full-screen, because in full-screen mode you can't rely on the window manager to know this stuff, the app has to know.
For example, it's not uncommon to have an app maximize and be off the screen at the bottom because it's on a smaller screen than the largest monitor, because the desktop is considered as tall as the largest monitor.
Hell, just getting the desktops to show up correctly takes tons of tweaking, unless you use all nvidia cards and can use the TwinView feature.
Because Xinerama is broken. Horribly broken. You can't, for instance, use compiz with Xinerama (well, you can on the main screen, but not the secondary ones) and you can't use secondary screens for any 3D purposes. Some argue that this is not broken, just not a feature supported by Xinerama, which while true doesn't change the fact that Xinerama doesn't live up to users expectations... as such, broken in my book. TwinView exists solely to work around Xinerama's limitations.
Try again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rot
"Bit rot, also known as bit decay, data rot, or data decay, is a colloquial computing term used either to describe gradual decay of storage media or to facetiously describe the spontaneous degradation of a software program over time. "
They can basically do whatever they want, because their return policy is available before you purchase the item.
I don't understand your point. You throw a rock through my window, I take you to court. I go to a glass company and get an estimate for the cost of repair. you lose, you have to pay the cost of the estimate.
If it costs me half that to replace it because i own my own glass company, I don't have to give you a refund. I pocket the difference.
That doesn't matter. Let's say you throw a rock through your neighbors window, and you know for a fact that he owns a glass company and can replace it cheaply, but he takes you to court and seeks the full price of the repair.
Assuming you don't contest that you did it, or he can prove that you did, you will be liable for full price regardless of the price it costs him to replace it.
Actually, quite a few places have "restocking fees", which basically means yes.. they do give you about wholesale price back.
Actually, there is something similar that occurs in software, called "bit rot". The older a piece of software is, the more security vulnerabilities have likely been found in it, making it a bigger and bigger target so long as it is in continued use (obviously, now that Windows 9x's user base is about 3 dozen people, they're not much of a target anymore).
This is true of MacOS X, Linux and Windows. If you install a new copy of Fedora 8, you are going to have a ton more security patches to apply than a recent Fedora 12.
But whitelists are easily counterable with DNS poisoning. AFAIK, mozilla plugins aren't even digitally signed, unlike ActiveX.
largely because of the Unisys LZW patent issues.
And clicking "Yes, I want to install this add-on", then "Yes, I really really mean I want to install this add-on", and then "Yes, I want to run this add-on" isn't "knowing you're installing something"?
I'd argue that ActiveX has far more intentional installation than Firefox plug-ins do. Users don't care. They just want to do whatever it takes for them to see the naked pictures.
I didn't say it's forbidden... My point is that there are a ton of standards out there any given browser *could* support, for example, which browser supports WebCGM or XForms? The closest you get are plug-ins that support them.
Who defines what a browser is "supposed" to support? Who says it has to support PNG, or JPG or SVG? In general, a browser tends to support things that are commonly used on the web, which makes it a bit of a chicken and egg scenario because SVG is just not commonly used.
Doesn't help if it's already installed, and that's not what I was referring to. I was referring to the fact that there is no security mechanism between plug-ins and the browser, so once installed they are fully trusted, just like ActiveX.
You didn't answer my question. What part of any HTML standard mandates SVG? How about recommends?
The W3C has tons of recommendations that aren't implemented by Firefox, or Opera, or Chrome, or Safari...
There is no functional difference between ActiveX and Mozilla plug-ins, other than a half-assed white-listing system. In fact, I was just reading that a bunch of security vulnerabilities have been found in firefox plug-ins, and that FF has no security system in place to deal with this.
This is just ridiculous. It's HTML 3 all over again. This lack of formalized standard leads to browser vendors creating proprietary extensions in the hope they might eventually be included in some final standard. Canvas is a good example of this.. thankfully the working group accepted it (but again, not officially standard) or we'd have tons of sites utilizing non-standard features.
How, exactly, does someone have an extension to something that's not even a standard? All browsers had "extensions" because the W3C dropped the ball on HTML 3.