And your vendor will never fix this issue until Microsoft forces their hand (it is probably something trivial like an incorrect ACL on a temp directory). Got to break some eggs to make an omolet.
Such a change would break thousands of applications, so I can't imagine that there would not be a way of restoring the old behavior. Worst case, just promote your account to Administrator.
To be more specific, Microsoft should kill the default "Administrator" user in the home user setup. And yes, this will break a lot of programs, including Microsoft's.
Just ask the user if they want to run in "Legacy mode" (Admin user with loose ACLs) or "Secure mode" (normal user with tightened ACLs and a password prompt for admin functions). Just like you see with OS X and some Linux distros.
This will force vendors to get their act together and build software that works correctly in a 'multi-user' setup.
Good point -- and Microsoft got slammed for this practice in the antitrust trial.
However, there was a pretty significant voluntary takeup of IE as well, especially among tech people. (I pretty much stopped using Netscape around IE4.01, and many of my collegues did the same.) IE certainly had the "word of mouth" thing going.
[My belief is that IE would have "won" eventually anyway, and that all the illegal stuff was ultimately stupid and unnecessary.]
Oh, and the free licensing helped -- we rolled out ~1000 seats of IE3 at a place that didn't have the budget for Netscape.
Consider that SCO themselves are in the POS Game and have largely failed to upgrade OpenServer users to UNIXWare.
A transition to some IBM product would be an order of magnitude worse -- basically a rip-n-replace. DMaxwell is right on -- a company oriented towards the legacy market could likely profitably support SCO products for many years.
Before they did so, Netscape still had around 65% of the market... People just weren't going to the trouble of downloading IE.
That makes no sense. 35% of the user base decided to download, install, and use a new browser. Which is a strong indicator that many many people felt IE was better. Compare that to the rate of Mozilla adoption!
Incidentally, Microsoft's partial support for W3C standards like DOM and CSS is the only reason those specs were relevant enough for Mozilla to implement them.
There are two main benefits of tabbed browsing though - some people say it allows for a "spatial metaphor" of web pages
The way Mozilla handles the "spatial metaphor" is the main reason I don't use tabs very much -- It doesn't maintain the "z-order" of the pages correctly. It seems more natural to "spatially navigate" with windows rather than tabs.
IIUC, Netscape 5 was supposed to be an early version of the "Gecko" rendering engine inside of the old UI code.
Which would have achived Mozilla's goals of being largely W3C-compatible and IE-compatibile without having everyone wait around for 3 years while they rewrote the mailer from scratch and built platform components.
It seems that the "Netscape 5 sucked so bad we had to dump it" line was a bunch of AOL marketing propaganda -- like he said, every engineer at Netscape supported going forward with it. A lot of that comes from the open sourcers who couldn't make any sense of the bits of code released too.
The funny thing about the DotComs is that BSD has these huge early wins with Yahoo and Hotmail and a fuckload of ISPs. In 1994 it looked like BSD was taking over the Internet. But they were unable to capitalize on these, and virtually 100% of the later PC/*nix commercial deployment was on Linux.
The other aspect nobody is mentioning is that the Linux Community was young and came from a PC/DOS background where the user is king. The BSDers were more elitist datacenter veterans who just didn't want to teach Unix to a bunch of students.
Finally, IIRC, Linux had far lower system requirements than BSD in the early years.
The advantage of extending HTML is that you can deliever a "downlevel" experience to IE while still using the fancy new features with Mozilla.
(IMO, one of things holding back Mozilla adoption is that it doesn't do anything to make the web fancier/slicker/better than IE for the end user. [well, transparent pngs, but that's about it])
Even though Mozilla is fast/fast enough, there's a some things about it that make it "feel slow".
On OS X, the Mozilla user-interface is really clunky. That's probably factor 1.
Also, the incremental renderer tends to show you "half done" pages. Some times this is great. Other times, you get something that looks messed up, or you can watch elements jump around. A user might percieve this behavior to be "slow" even though it isn't.
Also, from what I've seen, if you have a huge page (say a couple megs of HTML), Mozilla really is slow.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm reading reports from Bizarro world....
Anyway, I actually timed a big bunch of javascript, and it ran about 5-10 times slower on Mozilla than IE (windows). It seemed like DOM lookups were really slow, especially if the page was large, and some mailing list chatters seemed to confirm that it was a known issue. (OTOH, Mozilla was more correct, of course). That was v1.4, so things might have changed.
The slowest was Camino for Mac -- you could actually watch new items being added into a SELECT.
Except "Slightly higher cost" was actually like double the price. Others, like NEC, had better semi-portable form-factors as well.
PowerCD is a lot like iPod -- Apple was thinking "Hey, we've got this kickass brand identity, why not make consumer electronics?" But, when it bombed, they never really pursed the idea until ipod.
They are cool as collector's items, but everytime I've found one somewhere, it's broken.
Keep in mind that IE has only had 95% marketshare for the last year or two. Even when MS had "won the browser war", they only had 75%, with Netscape holding steady at 20% for a long time.
(Sadly, most of those NS4 users upgraded to IE and not NS6/Mozilla.)
Don't get me wrong, I agree completely. Just that when the rubber hits the road, client-side seperation does not provide as enormous of an upside that server-side seperation does. Which is why sites like slashdot can function perfectly well with garbage HTML.
any system with strict standards will trump a loose system any day for ease of use, ease of design and ease of alteration
Actually, if that were the case, HTML wouldn't have "won" in the first place. One of key elements of the web is sloppy markup, which is also why it's unlikely that XAML/XUL/Java or whatever will ever replace HTML.
Forget the bug reports, Mozilla made a very clear policy statement in the beginning that they never would support document.all, and people have based their coding on that.
I tend to think that if they had supported.all from the beginning, more sites would have "just worked" than would have broke, and the changes required for Mozilla would have been much smaller. (For example, Opera supports document.all with ok results.)
But, as you point out, people have made the broken assumption that document.all != Mozilla, so it's too late now.
The very best use of XHTML and CSS is by adding PHP into the mix.
Why the hardon for PHP? -- there's a dozen popular template engines, and nothing particularlly special about PHP.
Actually, tech like PHP/ASP/JSP/CF/Perl/.NET/etc has killed a lot of the *need* for seperating content and presentaiton on the client-level. It's already being done on the server-side, where it matters. Content is in the database, presentation (html soup) is generated by the templating engine. It's ugly but it works.
For example, if CmdrTaco wants to search for a particular comment, he'll find it much easier to run a SQL statement than to do an XPath query on generated XHTML. If slashdot had clean, structured HTML, it wouldn't make the comments any better. (although the page might load faster)
Follow the links to Hixie's Web Forms 2 proposal -- which extends HTML forms to include things like date controls and built-in validation. Oh, could we get this? please please pretty-please It would eliminate a ton of the cost assocaited with HTML apps and some of the pushback towards thicker clients.
Just from the outside, it seems like the W3C is whack -- the next-gen tech they are pushing: XHTML2, XForms, RDF, etc is overly complex, not backwards compatible, and doesn't seem to have much of a constituency. It all lacks the easy/sloppy angle that made HTML so popular in the first place. When faced with the choice next-gen tech, it will be a lot easier for devs to pick up MS XAML than XForms.
What we really want is improvements on the core tech of HTML/CSS/etc, not something grandiose and new. The web seems to have stangated around HTML4 and CSS1. If 'they' continue to improve the browser experience, stuff like XAML will stay in the java applet niche.
They've done a ton of characterization episodes, and in my book they're worse than the space opera stuff. -- Troi's Mother, Holo-Doctor learns to play the piano, 80% of DS9 spent sitting around the space tavern -- Yawn.
(The only reason anyone liked the Voyager Doctor is because everyone else was a stick figure. And the Enterprise charactes are the same way -- they're boring, you don't care that they like to play checkers. This is the 'Roddenbury' thing -- everyone has to be a Gee Whiz Boyscout.)
If there's one kernel of corn in Enterprise, it's the Vulcan Psychology stuff. Not always really well executed, but they're taking the Vulcan angle somewhere new.
However, by the end of TNG and certainly the beginning of DS9, and now with Voyager & Enterprise, Roddenberry's vision is boring. There's only so many times you can rehash the same old morality plays.
Very well said, you hit the nail on the head.
I think when people are talking about "Gene's Vision", they are really just expressing "I want new Trek to be as good as I remember old Trek. Berman sucks". Well, Berman tried -- he made the same Roddenbury Godlike Alien/Holodeck/Prime Directive episodes 1000 times, and people hate it because it's just been beaten to death.
It's like Ebert said about the last movie -- "Warp Nine! Sheilds down to 10%!" doesn't have any drama left in it. Why do it?
What needs to happen is for Star Trek to get some new blood... who can actually tell good stories whether they fit in with utopia or not.
It comes down to whether it's a problem with execution or concept. Sure the execution could be a lot better (dull boyscout characters, bad acting, stupid plots), but I really wonder if the idea of "Explore the universe in a spaceship" is just totally played-out and done.
They almost have to throw in time-travel plots and so on because the old formula is dead, and there's no new formula to replace it. (And if there is, it's going to be nothing like Star Trek -- like the "alien prophet" stuff on DS9.)
Slashdot Mirror
And your vendor will never fix this issue until Microsoft forces their hand (it is probably something trivial like an incorrect ACL on a temp directory). Got to break some eggs to make an omolet.
Such a change would break thousands of applications, so I can't imagine that there would not be a way of restoring the old behavior. Worst case, just promote your account to Administrator.
To be more specific, Microsoft should kill the default "Administrator" user in the home user setup. And yes, this will break a lot of programs, including Microsoft's.
Just ask the user if they want to run in "Legacy mode" (Admin user with loose ACLs) or "Secure mode" (normal user with tightened ACLs and a password prompt for admin functions). Just like you see with OS X and some Linux distros.
This will force vendors to get their act together and build software that works correctly in a 'multi-user' setup.
I would say that Tabs are a given. If you have it, launch "NET SDK Documentation" -- voila, IE with Tabs.
No axe, the nick a just a relic of days gone by.
Good point -- and Microsoft got slammed for this practice in the antitrust trial.
However, there was a pretty significant voluntary takeup of IE as well, especially among tech people. (I pretty much stopped using Netscape around IE4.01, and many of my collegues did the same.) IE certainly had the "word of mouth" thing going.
[My belief is that IE would have "won" eventually anyway, and that all the illegal stuff was ultimately stupid and unnecessary.]
Oh, and the free licensing helped -- we rolled out ~1000 seats of IE3 at a place that didn't have the budget for Netscape.
> but someone who is already in the POS game
Consider that SCO themselves are in the POS Game and have largely failed to upgrade OpenServer users to UNIXWare.
A transition to some IBM product would be an order of magnitude worse -- basically a rip-n-replace. DMaxwell is right on -- a company oriented towards the legacy market could likely profitably support SCO products for many years.
Before they did so, Netscape still had around 65% of the market ... People just weren't going to the trouble of downloading IE.
That makes no sense. 35% of the user base decided to download, install, and use a new browser. Which is a strong indicator that many many people felt IE was better. Compare that to the rate of Mozilla adoption!
Incidentally, Microsoft's partial support for W3C standards like DOM and CSS is the only reason those specs were relevant enough for Mozilla to implement them.
There are two main benefits of tabbed browsing though - some people say it allows for a "spatial metaphor" of web pages
The way Mozilla handles the "spatial metaphor" is the main reason I don't use tabs very much -- It doesn't maintain the "z-order" of the pages correctly. It seems more natural to "spatially navigate" with windows rather than tabs.
Ironically, Microsoft's Tabbed Browser (called "NET SDK Documentation") gets this right.
IIUC, Netscape 5 was supposed to be an early version of the "Gecko" rendering engine inside of the old UI code.
Which would have achived Mozilla's goals of being largely W3C-compatible and IE-compatibile without having everyone wait around for 3 years while they rewrote the mailer from scratch and built platform components.
It seems that the "Netscape 5 sucked so bad we had to dump it" line was a bunch of AOL marketing propaganda -- like he said, every engineer at Netscape supported going forward with it. A lot of that comes from the open sourcers who couldn't make any sense of the bits of code released too.
Coolest thing about NextBus is the realtime map
The funny thing about the DotComs is that BSD has these huge early wins with Yahoo and Hotmail and a fuckload of ISPs. In 1994 it looked like BSD was taking over the Internet. But they were unable to capitalize on these, and virtually 100% of the later PC/*nix commercial deployment was on Linux.
The other aspect nobody is mentioning is that the Linux Community was young and came from a PC/DOS background where the user is king. The BSDers were more elitist datacenter veterans who just didn't want to teach Unix to a bunch of students.
Finally, IIRC, Linux had far lower system requirements than BSD in the early years.
I haven't seen anything that couldn't be emulated with a little javascript. Keep in mind that the user doesn't care how the site achieved its look.
The advantage of extending HTML is that you can deliever a "downlevel" experience to IE while still using the fancy new features with Mozilla.
(IMO, one of things holding back Mozilla adoption is that it doesn't do anything to make the web fancier/slicker/better than IE for the end user. [well, transparent pngs, but that's about it])
Even though Mozilla is fast/fast enough, there's a some things about it that make it "feel slow".
On OS X, the Mozilla user-interface is really clunky. That's probably factor 1.
Also, the incremental renderer tends to show you "half done" pages. Some times this is great. Other times, you get something that looks messed up, or you can watch elements jump around. A user might percieve this behavior to be "slow" even though it isn't.
Also, from what I've seen, if you have a huge page (say a couple megs of HTML), Mozilla really is slow.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm reading reports from Bizarro world....
Anyway, I actually timed a big bunch of javascript, and it ran about 5-10 times slower on Mozilla than IE (windows). It seemed like DOM lookups were really slow, especially if the page was large, and some mailing list chatters seemed to confirm that it was a known issue. (OTOH, Mozilla was more correct, of course). That was v1.4, so things might have changed.
The slowest was Camino for Mac -- you could actually watch new items being added into a SELECT.
Except "Slightly higher cost" was actually like double the price. Others, like NEC, had better semi-portable form-factors as well.
PowerCD is a lot like iPod -- Apple was thinking "Hey, we've got this kickass brand identity, why not make consumer electronics?" But, when it bombed, they never really pursed the idea until ipod.
They are cool as collector's items, but everytime I've found one somewhere, it's broken.
iPod was only the first at that formfactor.
Anyone remember Apple's first attempt at a Portable Music Player? harhar
They could also comprimise on the form factor a little. For example, one of these could be adapted into an "iPod-Killer" for less than $50.
Keep in mind that IE has only had 95% marketshare for the last year or two. Even when MS had "won the browser war", they only had 75%, with Netscape holding steady at 20% for a long time.
(Sadly, most of those NS4 users upgraded to IE and not NS6/Mozilla.)
Don't get me wrong, I agree completely. Just that when the rubber hits the road, client-side seperation does not provide as enormous of an upside that server-side seperation does. Which is why sites like slashdot can function perfectly well with garbage HTML.
any system with strict standards will trump a loose system any day for ease of use, ease of design and ease of alteration
Actually, if that were the case, HTML wouldn't have "won" in the first place. One of key elements of the web is sloppy markup, which is also why it's unlikely that XAML/XUL/Java or whatever will ever replace HTML.
Forget the bug reports, Mozilla made a very clear policy statement in the beginning that they never would support document.all, and people have based their coding on that.
.all from the beginning, more sites would have "just worked" than would have broke, and the changes required for Mozilla would have been much smaller. (For example, Opera supports document.all with ok results.)
I tend to think that if they had supported
But, as you point out, people have made the broken assumption that document.all != Mozilla, so it's too late now.
The very best use of XHTML and CSS is by adding PHP into the mix.
Why the hardon for PHP? -- there's a dozen popular template engines, and nothing particularlly special about PHP.
Actually, tech like PHP/ASP/JSP/CF/Perl/.NET/etc has killed a lot of the *need* for seperating content and presentaiton on the client-level. It's already being done on the server-side, where it matters. Content is in the database, presentation (html soup) is generated by the templating engine. It's ugly but it works.
For example, if CmdrTaco wants to search for a particular comment, he'll find it much easier to run a SQL statement than to do an XPath query on generated XHTML. If slashdot had clean, structured HTML, it wouldn't make the comments any better. (although the page might load faster)
Follow the links to Hixie's Web Forms 2 proposal -- which extends HTML forms to include things like date controls and built-in validation. Oh, could we get this? please please pretty-please It would eliminate a ton of the cost assocaited with HTML apps and some of the pushback towards thicker clients.
Just from the outside, it seems like the W3C is whack -- the next-gen tech they are pushing: XHTML2, XForms, RDF, etc is overly complex, not backwards compatible, and doesn't seem to have much of a constituency. It all lacks the easy/sloppy angle that made HTML so popular in the first place. When faced with the choice next-gen tech, it will be a lot easier for devs to pick up MS XAML than XForms.
What we really want is improvements on the core tech of HTML/CSS/etc, not something grandiose and new. The web seems to have stangated around HTML4 and CSS1. If 'they' continue to improve the browser experience, stuff like XAML will stay in the java applet niche.
Assuming they can invent some decent characters.
They've done a ton of characterization episodes, and in my book they're worse than the space opera stuff. -- Troi's Mother, Holo-Doctor learns to play the piano, 80% of DS9 spent sitting around the space tavern -- Yawn.
(The only reason anyone liked the Voyager Doctor is because everyone else was a stick figure. And the Enterprise charactes are the same way -- they're boring, you don't care that they like to play checkers. This is the 'Roddenbury' thing -- everyone has to be a Gee Whiz Boyscout.)
If there's one kernel of corn in Enterprise, it's the Vulcan Psychology stuff. Not always really well executed, but they're taking the Vulcan angle somewhere new.
However, by the end of TNG and certainly the beginning of DS9, and now with Voyager & Enterprise, Roddenberry's vision is boring. There's only so many times you can rehash the same old morality plays.
... who can actually tell good stories whether they fit in with utopia or not.
Very well said, you hit the nail on the head.
I think when people are talking about "Gene's Vision", they are really just expressing "I want new Trek to be as good as I remember old Trek. Berman sucks". Well, Berman tried -- he made the same Roddenbury Godlike Alien/Holodeck/Prime Directive episodes 1000 times, and people hate it because it's just been beaten to death.
It's like Ebert said about the last movie -- "Warp Nine! Sheilds down to 10%!" doesn't have any drama left in it. Why do it?
What needs to happen is for Star Trek to get some new blood
It comes down to whether it's a problem with execution or concept. Sure the execution could be a lot better (dull boyscout characters, bad acting, stupid plots), but I really wonder if the idea of "Explore the universe in a spaceship" is just totally played-out and done.
They almost have to throw in time-travel plots and so on because the old formula is dead, and there's no new formula to replace it. (And if there is, it's going to be nothing like Star Trek -- like the "alien prophet" stuff on DS9.)