If I was in a position to make the decision, that is the decision I would make. Obviously, if you've hired me, and you've specified that it has to work on IE6 -- and this would be discussed -- then I am not in that position.
This is very much for corporate America. It is for a specific area of corporate America, which is composed of smaller, somewhat independent branches of a larger corporation, with minimal interference from the larger corporation's IT department.
that's not even going into details on what a POS hackfest that Firefox currently is.
And IE isn't? Especially IE6?
40 known severe vulnerabilities in 2008
How many unpatched? How many live exploits in the wild?
How many might Microsoft have discovered, and hidden in a seemingly unrelated patch, rather than disclose a vulnerability?
For what it's worth, Firefox seems to patch vulnerabilities much quicker than IE patches compatibility.
But it's not about FIrefox, it's about standards. If you think Opera is better, or Chrome, go for it -- most of the time, whatever I write that works on Firefox will work everywhere else except IE. That's why we're having this discussion in the first place -- IE sucks at standards.
you would block Dillo, Lynx, Elinks and whatnot, too, I suppose?
Actually, no. Most of those browsers bastardize HTML far less than IE6 does.
I probably would not go out of my way to make a web application accessible to them, but I would probably at least test a purely content-oriented site on Lynx.
And you would certainly block them with UA sniffing, not so?
I would block anything with an IE6 UA, yes. Or, at the very least, I would give them an interstitial, instead of a banner, demanding that they install a browser that is less evil.
Many browsers lie that they are IE6 in order to work with some intranets or other stupid government/school/bank website.
Really?
My browser can lie that it's IE6, or Firefox, for a specific site, when that specific site is using browser detection. It's trivial to configure this per-domain.
And it helps nobody except Microsoft to use a non-IE browser claiming to be IE, if the site will support both. Wouldn't you rather contribute to statistics that drive down IE's marketshare, rather than the other way around?
Actively blocking all browsers which claim to be IE6 does a disservice to the people who hate IE6 but simply do not have a choice.
True, but that is not your example. Your example is browsers which are smart enough to pretend to be IE6, but too stupid to change user-agent based on domain.
And the users who actually are stuck with IE6, I'd like to make as uncomfortable as possible, to make them that much more motivated to find a choice, even if they have to beat it out of their IT department.
Still it's a good thing that you explain up front that you don't want to do that so they can go and find someone else who does.
That depends entirely on how much I need work at the moment, and how interesting the project is otherwise.
I'm willing to work with IE, if I'm being paid.
If not -- if it's a personal site, or a blog -- I really don't owe you anything. It's not worth 20% of my time to have an additional 80% more readers who are too lazy or apathetic to support good standards.
In fact, on a personal site, your statistics encourage me even more to try to change those numbers, rather than to contribute to the status quo.
I could benchmark Microsoft Office against a Hello World app written in Perl too.
Which is why it was Merb Router vs Raw PHP. More like Hello World in Ruby vs Hello World in Perl.
Except, of course, benchmarking Hello World is as irrelevant as benchmarking fibonacci.
Because too much is going on in the backend to know what precisely you are benchmarking.
Except that this is the same stuff that will be going on in the backend in a real app.
In other words, these are benchmarks of stuff that matter.
Seriously, you'll learn this when you get out of high school.
Has it occurred to you that I might know this from practical experience, designing real applications?
Nah, couldn't be. Obviously, I must be a high school kid, who knows nothing about the subject -- I mean, I disagree with you, isn't that proof enough? I bow to your superior ad-hominem skills.
I can join a Linux machine to an Active Directory domain. I can browse Windows file shares. I can interoperate with pretty much any aspect of the Windows OS environment from Linux.
Except for running that one program that doesn't yet work under Wine. Or using that one piece of hardware that no one's bothered to write a driver for it.
As for the Office Suite, seems Open Office has done pretty well, hasn't it?
And yet, it still routinely screws up trying to import Office documents.
Even in cases where we have the details (like OpenXML), there's still the places where Microsoft doesn't follow their own standard (like OpenXML), and it's still a huge endeavor (just try reading the six thousand page spec, for starters).
The fact is, most people do not have a choice. Or the choice is between using Windows, and finding a new career. And that's before you consider learning curves and real usability hazards. (Note that I'm not counting a learning curve under "real usability hazards" -- there are others.)
And again, you're neglecting the "easy" part. The fact that you can do all of this from Linux does not mean it was "easy" for Linux to be here -- it's been 18 years, and it's still not quite there yet, still largely playing catch-up. (How do I play a 64-bit Windows game on Linux, again?)
The banner can include a note not to hire you for anything that actually makes money.
Two things:
First, if you've hired me, it's up to you. If you want it to work in IE, I'll make it work in IE. Of course, it means I'd likely accept a job where I don't need that over a job where I do.
Second, I do make specialty apps in markets where people would gladly install a downloadable exe. Being forced to download Firefox isn't any worse -- in fact, it's better, because they might find they actually prefer it.
I'm aware. However, unlike Firefox, IE wasn't really written to be cross-platform. I don't really trust the Wine'd version to be similar enough to the Windows version -- fonts alone could make it look wildly different.
Fortunately, I don't have to boot it often -- it tends to just work, and the things that don't seem to be relatively constant. But the few times a week I do test in IE, I'd rather it be a correct IE.
Besides which, while installing IE on Linux may be legal, installing it without a Windows license almost certainly is not. If I've got a Windows license anyway, I may as well use it.
Perhaps not, but the number of bugs which exist in Firefox only on a single OS are quite a lot smaller than the number of bugs which exist in completely different browsers.
About 80% of my users (by page hit) are IE6 and another 14% are IE7. Firefox is mainly used by non-government clients of my website.
Do you suppose that if you offered some encouragement to upgrade, that might change?
The government users have no say over their desktop configuration.
And yet, if every single user is complaining because a particular website doesn't work, and it's clear that it doesn't work because they're on an old version of IE, I suspect it would have some effect.
there were plenty of terminals that sent and received blocks of text that was buffered locally
And today, we can send and receive blocks of styled text, with images, buffered locally -- to say nothing of audio and video. I think I can say with confidence that all terminals were dumber than a web browser.
This does not however mean that it does more useful work. IBM Mainframes from the early 1970s with 16MB RAM could support 17,500 users on 3270 terminals, whereas some netbooks (and indeed a number of machines that aren't netbooks) seem to struggle with one user running today's operating systems and applications.
Of course, with a proper netbook, you would streamline the operating system and the applications.
However, being able to run more users does not imply that they were doing more useful work, either. 16 megabytes of RAM will support a lot of text, but not a lot of images before you start thrashing -- and thrashing isn't good if you're making seventeen thousand users wait.
Some other things I doubt you would have seen: Find-as-you-type autocomplete, underline-as-you-type spellchecker, a GUI at all (let alone a rich one), audio and video chat in realtime, multiple simultaneous text conversations, anything resembling a spreadsheet (lotus needed 256K of RAM for a single user, and that's a minimum -- it could use more), WYSIWYG desktop publishing in any form...
Perhaps it's possible you'd have realtime collaboration between users. I'm honestly not sure.
I'll grant that things are more bloated than they need to be. Some of that is laziness. Some of that is trading raw performance for programmer efficiency and program correctness (garbage collection vs manual allocation, for example). And some of it is because computers of today actually do more than computers from three or four decades ago.
It's not the amount of sales, it's the amount of users that avoid it like the plaque.
I haven't seen a significant growth of that -- in fact, just the opposite. I've seen more and more users who, as much as they might grumble, are forced to use Windows, at least some of the time -- myself included.
Well first of all it was not required to view the Olympics online, maybe one of the website that broadcasted it.
That being the official one. I don't recall if they had deals with others, like YouTube. I'm sure it was on YouTube anyway, but the legal way to watch the Olympics did require Silverlight.
Besides Moonlight also exist.
Not all Silverlight sites work with Moonlight. Not all of them can. Besides which, Microsoft undoubtably holds enough patents on Silverlight that Moonlight pretty much exists as long as they need it, to pretend they are cross-platform.
It might come at a complete shock to you, but for most people the computer is just a tool.... That's why Apple is winning.
Indeed. It's also the problem with Apple -- it is a tool for exactly what Apple lets it be used for.
That is: You buy a new one, you turn it on, you try to plug in your camera... only to find that Apple removed FIreWire in this version. You now either have to bring the computer back and buy a much more expensive Macbook Pro, or you have to buy a new camera.
Believe it or not, people do care about choice. They don't want to have to make choices, and there is that whole "paradox of choice" thing going on. But when you remove a choice, they get upset.
The larger problem there is, most consumers don't always realize it's choice they're wanting. For example, just today, I saw a woman squinting over some tiny text in a webpage viewed on Internet Explorer, on a high-resolution monitor. I showed her Firefox, and ctrl plus/minus.
The trouble is, most simply assume that this is the way things are -- that is why many stay on Windows, after all. The Blue E == The Internet, to them. If their computer gets viruses, it must mean they didn't have strong enough antivirus -- or just that it happens to everyone, nothing they could do about it.
We were talking about RUBY not RUBY+RAILS vs PHP+CakePHP(bloat).
In that case, you might be interested in the examples using the Merb router, which is actually comparable to static content. This was compared to raw PHP, both with echo and with templates.
A real benchmark would at least compare the same code (Yes, like a Fibonnacci) to test how the LANGUAGE and not the FRAMEWORK benchmarks.
A Fibonacci is irrelevant -- when was the last time you used a Fibonacci in a commercial app?
These benchmarks are testing a real app. If that app ends up being written differently in the different languages, I would suggest that this is not necessarily bias, but quite possibly that one language lends itself to cleaner and more efficient code.
Again: Have you actually looked at those benchmarks? Or are you more interested in calling me names than you are in actual facts?
If by "quite close", you mean "still the least standards-compliant browser available", you're right.
Why not simply encourage them to download Firefox? Or Chrome? Or Opera? Or Safari? Or freakin' iCab, if they're on an old Mac?
Upgrading to IE7 is just going to make them do the same again when IE8 comes around, and it's still going to force me to boot Windows just to test in IE. If I was in that position, I would actively block IE6, and have a large banner for IE7 users suggesting Firefox.
Why do you use Microsoft Windows if you don't like it?
I have to use Internet Explorer to test any website I develop, because it is the dominant browser. I also use Windows for games which are not cross-platform.
Does Microsoft write every app you use and do they refuse to port to other OS's?
No, but they do encourage their own private APIs, which they do not always port to other OSes. A game developed for Direct3D would need to be ported first to OpenGL, then to another OS.
Realy, btw, how many people went to a store to actualy buy a $500 OS?
In what way does that matter? That's like asking how many Linux users actually got an Ubuntu DVD in the mail.
Let's face it man; technology is a very rapid changing market.
Some changes quickly, some not so much. There are still people who depend on DOS applications, and Microsoft still attempts to support them in each new release of Windows.
IE lost it's dominance
IE is still 80% of the market. I still have to account for IE in every website/app I make.
Live search is dead
I still see people using it, for no reason other than that it's the default search engine in IE.
Windows Mobile is losing it from the iPhone
How is that a good thing, by the way, even if it's true? Windows Mobile is a more open platform than the iPhone. There may not be an App Store, but I can buy (or download free) a Windows Mobile app from anywhere, including its built-in browser, and install it myself.
the Zune is a device almost nobody bought
If by "almost nobody", you mean "millions of people"...
How's Silverlight doing?
Aside from being required for various high-profile media presentations -- "high-profile" as in "the fucking Olympics" -- I suppose you're right.
How's their API lockin? Take a look at the current state of Wine.
Yeah, I use Wine every day -- on the apps I happen to know will work flawlessly. That's a tiny fraction of the number of appl that work on Windows.
Don't get me wrong, when it works, that's a great reason to switch. The problem is, you can be 95% of the way there for most people, but each of them are going to have a different 5% that you missed.
Linux and Apple are on their way to kill Windows for good.
I hope you're right, but keep in mind:
Apple would not be much better than Microsoft. Apple practices tighter lock-in, they actually sue small blogs over trademarks and leaks, and in general, they are more evil in just about every way than Microsoft.
The only advantage to Apple having 90% marketshare is that their stuff tends to work.
Also: Your argument is basically yet another "year of the Linux desktop" argument. The Year of the Linux Desktop is five years away. It has always been five years away. Unless something dramatic happens, I see no reason that will change.
Keep in mind, ACID is not a comprehensive test of standards-compliance, by any stretch. It is specifically targeting places where certain browsers are known to lag behind in compliance.
But it is worth noting that there does not seem to be a single standard test, objective or subjective, in which IE is ahead of other browsers in standards-compliance.
I've never heard one express annoyance at being "stuck" using those because they want to use Google Search
And I never heard anyone express annoyance at being "stuck" using Internet Explorer, until it was such a monopoly that actual websites started requiring it. However, it did make the case for Netscape hard, and even Firefox, now that it's free, is finding it hard to compete.
Annoyance isn't the only test. Another one might be, to what extent do people use one service because it's bundled and well-integrated with another, even if it doesn't bother them -- and not because it's a good service in its own right?
Of course, it's much harder to be objective about that. Another way of looking at it is, you could have one big service that has started splitting off pieces of itself as separate services. For example, if these social networks (Myspace, Facebook, etc) started handing out email addresses, and turning PMs into actual emails, is that email that's too tightly integrated with Facebook, or is it PM that's finally less integrated?
It should be a bug, X11 is supposed to be a standard that do not rely on the implementation.
Really? I've never even heard it proposed that there's an official, over-the-wire spec.
And yes, I have had apps crash and burn horribly, sometimes simply by using remote X, though it did seem to be more frequent when the X server was a different flavor than the client libraries.
If you have a slow connection, you usually have a slow bandwith AND high latency which will make the work very annoying. You will prefer to get the data you need locally and push them back when you're done. (by downloading them or using sshfs)
Point is, with a well-written browser app, you're already doing this. The app developer can work out how much to balance for client CPU/RAM vs network usage. All without forcing the client to install anything.
Your point about using a database is not valid. If it was easier using a database, why did not the classical GUI application use it ?
Because we were talking about existing apps.
If you want to talk about brand-new apps, sure, might even be better to have it simply use a local sqlite database. But...
GUI application have the benefit that they can see other windows and potentially interact with them, feed them with data.
I'm trying to think if I have ever found that useful.
Nope. And certainly not nearly as useful as feeding other applications data via native APIs, particularly over the Internet.
They are also easier to extend (with Greasemonkey, and with a network API); they come with a number of features users are beginning to expect, out of the box (tabbed interface, back/forward buttons, bookmarks); they are automatically cross-platform in the way Java wishes it was; they are often faster to develop; they're accessible anywhere, and the barrier of entry is way less than trying to teach users about ssh and X forwarding.
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Is this a clarification or backpedaling?
A clarification.
If I was in a position to make the decision, that is the decision I would make. Obviously, if you've hired me, and you've specified that it has to work on IE6 -- and this would be discussed -- then I am not in that position.
So, corporate America is out.
This is very much for corporate America. It is for a specific area of corporate America, which is composed of smaller, somewhat independent branches of a larger corporation, with minimal interference from the larger corporation's IT department.
that's not even going into details on what a POS hackfest that Firefox currently is.
And IE isn't? Especially IE6?
40 known severe vulnerabilities in 2008
How many unpatched? How many live exploits in the wild?
How many might Microsoft have discovered, and hidden in a seemingly unrelated patch, rather than disclose a vulnerability?
For what it's worth, Firefox seems to patch vulnerabilities much quicker than IE patches compatibility.
But it's not about FIrefox, it's about standards. If you think Opera is better, or Chrome, go for it -- most of the time, whatever I write that works on Firefox will work everywhere else except IE. That's why we're having this discussion in the first place -- IE sucks at standards.
you would block Dillo, Lynx, Elinks and whatnot, too, I suppose?
Actually, no. Most of those browsers bastardize HTML far less than IE6 does.
I probably would not go out of my way to make a web application accessible to them, but I would probably at least test a purely content-oriented site on Lynx.
And you would certainly block them with UA sniffing, not so?
I would block anything with an IE6 UA, yes. Or, at the very least, I would give them an interstitial, instead of a banner, demanding that they install a browser that is less evil.
Many browsers lie that they are IE6 in order to work with some intranets or other stupid government/school/bank website.
Really?
My browser can lie that it's IE6, or Firefox, for a specific site, when that specific site is using browser detection. It's trivial to configure this per-domain.
And it helps nobody except Microsoft to use a non-IE browser claiming to be IE, if the site will support both. Wouldn't you rather contribute to statistics that drive down IE's marketshare, rather than the other way around?
Actively blocking all browsers which claim to be IE6 does a disservice to the people who hate IE6 but simply do not have a choice.
True, but that is not your example. Your example is browsers which are smart enough to pretend to be IE6, but too stupid to change user-agent based on domain.
And the users who actually are stuck with IE6, I'd like to make as uncomfortable as possible, to make them that much more motivated to find a choice, even if they have to beat it out of their IT department.
Still it's a good thing that you explain up front that you don't want to do that so they can go and find someone else who does.
That depends entirely on how much I need work at the moment, and how interesting the project is otherwise.
I'm willing to work with IE, if I'm being paid.
If not -- if it's a personal site, or a blog -- I really don't owe you anything. It's not worth 20% of my time to have an additional 80% more readers who are too lazy or apathetic to support good standards.
In fact, on a personal site, your statistics encourage me even more to try to change those numbers, rather than to contribute to the status quo.
If they are using IE6, then they probably like IE.
If they are using IE6, they probably don't know anything about alternate browsers, or browsers in general.
Simply asking them to upgrade to IE7 is the most logical and considerate thing to do,
Or we could ask them to be logical and considerate of us.
some people actually prefer IE over the other browsers.
I know, I have met such people.
I've also met people who prefer Vista. And I've met people who actually like Clippy.
Trust me, you are not the majority.
I could benchmark Microsoft Office against a Hello World app written in Perl too.
Which is why it was Merb Router vs Raw PHP. More like Hello World in Ruby vs Hello World in Perl.
Except, of course, benchmarking Hello World is as irrelevant as benchmarking fibonacci.
Because too much is going on in the backend to know what precisely you are benchmarking.
Except that this is the same stuff that will be going on in the backend in a real app.
In other words, these are benchmarks of stuff that matter.
Seriously, you'll learn this when you get out of high school.
Has it occurred to you that I might know this from practical experience, designing real applications?
Nah, couldn't be. Obviously, I must be a high school kid, who knows nothing about the subject -- I mean, I disagree with you, isn't that proof enough? I bow to your superior ad-hominem skills.
Look to your own sig.
I actually did, for awhile. And yes, we did support IE -- I think we stuck with IE7, though.
I can join a Linux machine to an Active Directory domain. I can browse Windows file shares. I can interoperate with pretty much any aspect of the Windows OS environment from Linux.
Except for running that one program that doesn't yet work under Wine. Or using that one piece of hardware that no one's bothered to write a driver for it.
As for the Office Suite, seems Open Office has done pretty well, hasn't it?
And yet, it still routinely screws up trying to import Office documents.
Even in cases where we have the details (like OpenXML), there's still the places where Microsoft doesn't follow their own standard (like OpenXML), and it's still a huge endeavor (just try reading the six thousand page spec, for starters).
The fact is, most people do not have a choice. Or the choice is between using Windows, and finding a new career. And that's before you consider learning curves and real usability hazards. (Note that I'm not counting a learning curve under "real usability hazards" -- there are others.)
And again, you're neglecting the "easy" part. The fact that you can do all of this from Linux does not mean it was "easy" for Linux to be here -- it's been 18 years, and it's still not quite there yet, still largely playing catch-up. (How do I play a 64-bit Windows game on Linux, again?)
The banner can include a note not to hire you for anything that actually makes money.
Two things:
First, if you've hired me, it's up to you. If you want it to work in IE, I'll make it work in IE. Of course, it means I'd likely accept a job where I don't need that over a job where I do.
Second, I do make specialty apps in markets where people would gladly install a downloadable exe. Being forced to download Firefox isn't any worse -- in fact, it's better, because they might find they actually prefer it.
I'm aware. However, unlike Firefox, IE wasn't really written to be cross-platform. I don't really trust the Wine'd version to be similar enough to the Windows version -- fonts alone could make it look wildly different.
Fortunately, I don't have to boot it often -- it tends to just work, and the things that don't seem to be relatively constant. But the few times a week I do test in IE, I'd rather it be a correct IE.
Besides which, while installing IE on Linux may be legal, installing it without a Windows license almost certainly is not. If I've got a Windows license anyway, I may as well use it.
Perhaps not, but the number of bugs which exist in Firefox only on a single OS are quite a lot smaller than the number of bugs which exist in completely different browsers.
About 80% of my users (by page hit) are IE6 and another 14% are IE7. Firefox is mainly used by non-government clients of my website.
Do you suppose that if you offered some encouragement to upgrade, that might change?
The government users have no say over their desktop configuration.
And yet, if every single user is complaining because a particular website doesn't work, and it's clear that it doesn't work because they're on an old version of IE, I suspect it would have some effect.
Fairfield.
there were plenty of terminals that sent and received blocks of text that was buffered locally
And today, we can send and receive blocks of styled text, with images, buffered locally -- to say nothing of audio and video. I think I can say with confidence that all terminals were dumber than a web browser.
This does not however mean that it does more useful work. IBM Mainframes from the early 1970s with 16MB RAM could support 17,500 users on 3270 terminals, whereas some netbooks (and indeed a number of machines that aren't netbooks) seem to struggle with one user running today's operating systems and applications.
Of course, with a proper netbook, you would streamline the operating system and the applications.
However, being able to run more users does not imply that they were doing more useful work, either. 16 megabytes of RAM will support a lot of text, but not a lot of images before you start thrashing -- and thrashing isn't good if you're making seventeen thousand users wait.
Some other things I doubt you would have seen: Find-as-you-type autocomplete, underline-as-you-type spellchecker, a GUI at all (let alone a rich one), audio and video chat in realtime, multiple simultaneous text conversations, anything resembling a spreadsheet (lotus needed 256K of RAM for a single user, and that's a minimum -- it could use more), WYSIWYG desktop publishing in any form...
Perhaps it's possible you'd have realtime collaboration between users. I'm honestly not sure.
I'll grant that things are more bloated than they need to be. Some of that is laziness. Some of that is trading raw performance for programmer efficiency and program correctness (garbage collection vs manual allocation, for example). And some of it is because computers of today actually do more than computers from three or four decades ago.
It's not the amount of sales, it's the amount of users that avoid it like the plaque.
I haven't seen a significant growth of that -- in fact, just the opposite. I've seen more and more users who, as much as they might grumble, are forced to use Windows, at least some of the time -- myself included.
Well first of all it was not required to view the Olympics online, maybe one of the website that broadcasted it.
That being the official one. I don't recall if they had deals with others, like YouTube. I'm sure it was on YouTube anyway, but the legal way to watch the Olympics did require Silverlight.
Besides Moonlight also exist.
Not all Silverlight sites work with Moonlight. Not all of them can. Besides which, Microsoft undoubtably holds enough patents on Silverlight that Moonlight pretty much exists as long as they need it, to pretend they are cross-platform.
It might come at a complete shock to you, but for most people the computer is just a tool.... That's why Apple is winning.
Indeed. It's also the problem with Apple -- it is a tool for exactly what Apple lets it be used for.
That is: You buy a new one, you turn it on, you try to plug in your camera... only to find that Apple removed FIreWire in this version. You now either have to bring the computer back and buy a much more expensive Macbook Pro, or you have to buy a new camera.
Believe it or not, people do care about choice. They don't want to have to make choices, and there is that whole "paradox of choice" thing going on. But when you remove a choice, they get upset.
The larger problem there is, most consumers don't always realize it's choice they're wanting. For example, just today, I saw a woman squinting over some tiny text in a webpage viewed on Internet Explorer, on a high-resolution monitor. I showed her Firefox, and ctrl plus/minus.
The trouble is, most simply assume that this is the way things are -- that is why many stay on Windows, after all. The Blue E == The Internet, to them. If their computer gets viruses, it must mean they didn't have strong enough antivirus -- or just that it happens to everyone, nothing they could do about it.
Stop blaming Microsoft for bundling the browser.
Why?
I mean, it's hardly the worst thing Microsoft has done, but why should they be forgiven for that?
We were talking about RUBY not RUBY+RAILS vs PHP+CakePHP(bloat).
In that case, you might be interested in the examples using the Merb router, which is actually comparable to static content. This was compared to raw PHP, both with echo and with templates.
A real benchmark would at least compare the same code (Yes, like a Fibonnacci) to test how the LANGUAGE and not the FRAMEWORK benchmarks.
A Fibonacci is irrelevant -- when was the last time you used a Fibonacci in a commercial app?
These benchmarks are testing a real app. If that app ends up being written differently in the different languages, I would suggest that this is not necessarily bias, but quite possibly that one language lends itself to cleaner and more efficient code.
Again: Have you actually looked at those benchmarks? Or are you more interested in calling me names than you are in actual facts?
If by "quite close", you mean "still the least standards-compliant browser available", you're right.
Why not simply encourage them to download Firefox? Or Chrome? Or Opera? Or Safari? Or freakin' iCab, if they're on an old Mac?
Upgrading to IE7 is just going to make them do the same again when IE8 comes around, and it's still going to force me to boot Windows just to test in IE. If I was in that position, I would actively block IE6, and have a large banner for IE7 users suggesting Firefox.
http://liscofiber.com/
Why do you use Microsoft Windows if you don't like it?
I have to use Internet Explorer to test any website I develop, because it is the dominant browser. I also use Windows for games which are not cross-platform.
Does Microsoft write every app you use and do they refuse to port to other OS's?
No, but they do encourage their own private APIs, which they do not always port to other OSes. A game developed for Direct3D would need to be ported first to OpenGL, then to another OS.
Realy, btw, how many people went to a store to actualy buy a $500 OS?
In what way does that matter? That's like asking how many Linux users actually got an Ubuntu DVD in the mail.
Let's face it man; technology is a very rapid changing market.
Some changes quickly, some not so much. There are still people who depend on DOS applications, and Microsoft still attempts to support them in each new release of Windows.
IE lost it's dominance
IE is still 80% of the market. I still have to account for IE in every website/app I make.
Live search is dead
I still see people using it, for no reason other than that it's the default search engine in IE.
Windows Mobile is losing it from the iPhone
How is that a good thing, by the way, even if it's true? Windows Mobile is a more open platform than the iPhone. There may not be an App Store, but I can buy (or download free) a Windows Mobile app from anywhere, including its built-in browser, and install it myself.
the Zune is a device almost nobody bought
If by "almost nobody", you mean "millions of people"...
How's Silverlight doing?
Aside from being required for various high-profile media presentations -- "high-profile" as in "the fucking Olympics" -- I suppose you're right.
How's their API lockin? Take a look at the current state of Wine.
Yeah, I use Wine every day -- on the apps I happen to know will work flawlessly. That's a tiny fraction of the number of appl that work on Windows.
Don't get me wrong, when it works, that's a great reason to switch. The problem is, you can be 95% of the way there for most people, but each of them are going to have a different 5% that you missed.
Linux and Apple are on their way to kill Windows for good.
I hope you're right, but keep in mind:
Apple would not be much better than Microsoft. Apple practices tighter lock-in, they actually sue small blogs over trademarks and leaks, and in general, they are more evil in just about every way than Microsoft.
The only advantage to Apple having 90% marketshare is that their stuff tends to work.
Also: Your argument is basically yet another "year of the Linux desktop" argument. The Year of the Linux Desktop is five years away. It has always been five years away. Unless something dramatic happens, I see no reason that will change.
Keep in mind, ACID is not a comprehensive test of standards-compliance, by any stretch. It is specifically targeting places where certain browsers are known to lag behind in compliance.
But it is worth noting that there does not seem to be a single standard test, objective or subjective, in which IE is ahead of other browsers in standards-compliance.
I've never heard one express annoyance at being "stuck" using those because they want to use Google Search
And I never heard anyone express annoyance at being "stuck" using Internet Explorer, until it was such a monopoly that actual websites started requiring it. However, it did make the case for Netscape hard, and even Firefox, now that it's free, is finding it hard to compete.
Annoyance isn't the only test. Another one might be, to what extent do people use one service because it's bundled and well-integrated with another, even if it doesn't bother them -- and not because it's a good service in its own right?
Of course, it's much harder to be objective about that. Another way of looking at it is, you could have one big service that has started splitting off pieces of itself as separate services. For example, if these social networks (Myspace, Facebook, etc) started handing out email addresses, and turning PMs into actual emails, is that email that's too tightly integrated with Facebook, or is it PM that's finally less integrated?
It should be a bug, X11 is supposed to be a standard that do not rely on the implementation.
Really? I've never even heard it proposed that there's an official, over-the-wire spec.
And yes, I have had apps crash and burn horribly, sometimes simply by using remote X, though it did seem to be more frequent when the X server was a different flavor than the client libraries.
If you have a slow connection, you usually have a slow bandwith AND high latency which will make the work very annoying. You will prefer to get the data you need locally and push them back when you're done. (by downloading them or using sshfs)
Point is, with a well-written browser app, you're already doing this. The app developer can work out how much to balance for client CPU/RAM vs network usage. All without forcing the client to install anything.
Your point about using a database is not valid. If it was easier using a database, why did not the classical GUI application use it ?
Because we were talking about existing apps.
If you want to talk about brand-new apps, sure, might even be better to have it simply use a local sqlite database. But...
GUI application have the benefit that they can see other windows and potentially interact with them, feed them with data.
I'm trying to think if I have ever found that useful.
Nope. And certainly not nearly as useful as feeding other applications data via native APIs, particularly over the Internet.
They are also easier to extend (with Greasemonkey, and with a network API); they come with a number of features users are beginning to expect, out of the box (tabbed interface, back/forward buttons, bookmarks); they are automatically cross-platform in the way Java wishes it was; they are often faster to develop; they're accessible anywhere, and the barrier of entry is way less than trying to teach users about ssh and X forwarding.