I agree, tabbed browsing isn't that great. It's for people who run their browsers maximized because they don't understand windowing interfaces or lack the resolution. Being able to actually see the page I want to switch to as opposed to memorizing its title (which may be obscure) is much better.
Tabbed browsing does have SOME uses though (like for porn and whatnot).
Just like Firefox ripped IE's info bar down to its color, except Firefox's is fatter and lacks accessibility. Right? =)
Dragging tabs around seems a likely feature given the fact other Microsoft products that use tabbed interfaces also have this feature (Visual Studio, etc.)
Just FYI, you can order a FREE (no s&h) CD of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/getthebetas/
If you want to distribute programs you make with it, you have to sign the GoLive aggreement here: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/golive/licens e/
Microsoft has thousands of full-time employees who do nothing but test code. Product teams regularly shut down for sometimes months at a time, to comb over source code looking for bugs. Compiled code goes through extensive source code analysis tools to find common problems. In fact, Windows takes almost as long to compile as it did 10 years (despite better hardware) because of all the extensive code analysis that is done today. I know this because I'm an intern at the company.
Look at the security holes in Internet Explorer. How many of them are indicative of shoddy programming? 3 buffer overflows? Nearly all of the holes are issues involving the possibility of "social engineering" or are resulting from complex interaction between different (often legacy) components. You don't see issues like being able to read arbitrary values from memory using Javascript as with Firefox.
Are technologies such as CSS or XHTML really standards at all? The W3C doesn't even refer to them as standards, they're called 'recommendations.' As far as I'm concerned a technology can be considered a standard by one of two ways. Either its endorsed by a standards organization such as ISO or it becomes used and accepted by the greater majority. New recommendations such as CSS2 or XHTML meet neither of these requirements.
It seems like you're getting a lot of your facts confused. Windows, I'm talking about NT here, has more in common with Unix than you might think. Windows NT has a POSIX subsystem (although limited) that gives some compatibility with UNIX-based applications. Windows NT and 9x both use pre-emptive multitasking and NT also supports symmetric multiprocessing. Yes, fork() and exec() do not exist in Win32 but there are equivalent functions with more capabilities. Pathetic memmory management in Win9x? Yeah, it does have some memory protection issues mostly stemming from the need to provide compatibility with old 16-bit programs but hey, NT's memory management is really nice. A 16-bit DOS core in Win9x? Well, it certainly boots off of DOS but Win9x runs in 32-Bit protected mode. "True" pipes are certainly supported, both named and anonymous, but there are many more effective ways of doing interprocess communication. Yeah there are no symbolic links but hey you can use.lnk files =] Also, NTFS does support hard links. In fact, they finally added some user commands for managing hard links in WinXP, check out the fsutil console command. No portability? Only with Win9x. NT is and/or has run on several different platforms such and MIPS and now IA64. The modern modular micro-kernal based design of NT and the hardware abstraction layer make it fairly easy to port the OS to new architectures and there is no silly kernal recompiling to gain extra driver support. Imho as for APIs, there's one Win32 API which, although certainly not perfect, provides a very large number of useful functions with constant naming conventions, a universal error code system, a handle-based system instead of pointers, etc.
If you haven't already, I'd recommend upgrading to the latest NVidia Detonator drivers. The drivers evidently enable hardware acceleration for all the silly UI effects.
After upgrading, I got a big performance increase even with the effects off.
I agree, tabbed browsing isn't that great. It's for people who run their browsers maximized because they don't understand windowing interfaces or lack the resolution. Being able to actually see the page I want to switch to as opposed to memorizing its title (which may be obscure) is much better.
Tabbed browsing does have SOME uses though (like for porn and whatnot).
Just like Firefox ripped IE's info bar down to its color, except Firefox's is fatter and lacks accessibility. Right? =) Dragging tabs around seems a likely feature given the fact other Microsoft products that use tabbed interfaces also have this feature (Visual Studio, etc.)
I don't see what a bug from Win95/98 has to do with XP.
Of course in Adobe Acrobat Reader tradition, the whole web browser would have to freeze while downloading the PDF file.
Just FYI, you can order a FREE (no s&h) CD of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/getthebetas/
s e/
If you want to distribute programs you make with it, you have to sign the GoLive aggreement here: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/golive/licen
Microsoft has thousands of full-time employees who do nothing but test code. Product teams regularly shut down for sometimes months at a time, to comb over source code looking for bugs. Compiled code goes through extensive source code analysis tools to find common problems. In fact, Windows takes almost as long to compile as it did 10 years (despite better hardware) because of all the extensive code analysis that is done today. I know this because I'm an intern at the company.
Look at the security holes in Internet Explorer. How many of them are indicative of shoddy programming? 3 buffer overflows? Nearly all of the holes are issues involving the possibility of "social engineering" or are resulting from complex interaction between different (often legacy) components. You don't see issues like being able to read arbitrary values from memory using Javascript as with Firefox.
Are technologies such as CSS or XHTML really standards at all? The W3C doesn't even refer to them as standards, they're called 'recommendations.' As far as I'm concerned a technology can be considered a standard by one of two ways. Either its endorsed by a standards organization such as ISO or it becomes used and accepted by the greater majority. New recommendations such as CSS2 or XHTML meet neither of these requirements.
It seems like you're getting a lot of your facts confused. Windows, I'm talking about NT here, has more in common with Unix than you might think. Windows NT has a POSIX subsystem (although limited) that gives some compatibility with UNIX-based applications. Windows NT and 9x both use pre-emptive multitasking and NT also supports symmetric multiprocessing. Yes, fork() and exec() do not exist in Win32 but there are equivalent functions with more capabilities. Pathetic memmory management in Win9x? Yeah, it does have some memory protection issues mostly stemming from the need to provide compatibility with old 16-bit programs but hey, NT's memory management is really nice. A 16-bit DOS core in Win9x? Well, it certainly boots off of DOS but Win9x runs in 32-Bit protected mode. "True" pipes are certainly supported, both named and anonymous, but there are many more effective ways of doing interprocess communication. Yeah there are no symbolic links but hey you can use .lnk files =] Also, NTFS does support hard links. In fact, they finally added some user commands for managing hard links in WinXP, check out the fsutil console command. No portability? Only with Win9x. NT is and/or has run on several different platforms such and MIPS and now IA64. The modern modular micro-kernal based design of NT and the hardware abstraction layer make it fairly easy to port the OS to new architectures and there is no silly kernal recompiling to gain extra driver support. Imho as for APIs, there's one Win32 API which, although certainly not perfect, provides a very large number of useful functions with constant naming conventions, a universal error code system, a handle-based system instead of pointers, etc.
If you haven't already, I'd recommend upgrading to the latest NVidia Detonator drivers. The drivers evidently enable hardware acceleration for all the silly UI effects.
After upgrading, I got a big performance increase even with the effects off.