The Moz team should be looking with urgency at how corporate customers can keep it up to date - I'm sure that would also make it a much easier sell to business.
I completely agree (but from a Firefox standpoint; I haven't used Mozilla in ages). There needs to be serious consideration of usage in corporate settings on Windows desktops. Features such as an MSI package to ease in deployment across Active Directory networks is needed. Yes, you can create your own MSI packages, but it'd be nice if one was provided. For those who don't know what I'm talking about with AD, it basically means that with a few mouse clicks (seriously), I can install Firefox on all computers on my network. You could probably replicate that with logon scripts, but this method provides automatic uninstallation of old versions when upgrading Firefox, as well as installation repairing if files are corrupted (but I'm not sure how useful that is, since it might point to more serious hardware problems).
Firefox settings in Group Policy would also be awesome, although that would require either placing Firefox settings in the registry or writing a Group Policy plugin to handle settings. What this would mean is that Firefox configuration settings for an entire network can be controlled from a central location.
There are other minor problems (such as placement of Firefox cache in Application Data instead of Local Settings\Application Data, causing the entire cache to be synchronized with the domain server on logon and logoff), so if they aren't already, Firefox developers should be sure to test on machines with multiple user profiles with reduced privileges. These things, although inconsequential to regular users at home, are quite important for acceptance in corporate Windows networks.
Also, apologies if you can already do all of these, but if that's the case, a page discussing these things for network administrators would also be nice.
I was playing with 1.0PR last night and found the firebird developers have already mimicked IE. The "info bar" [everythingisnt.com] which displays when something is blocked is blatantly "stolen" from IE. Not that I care or even think its wrong, but its interesting to see the browser war heat up again.
Heh and if IE stole something from Firefox everyone here would be in an uproar. But I'm the same in that I don't care. Both browsers have good points (yes, even IE has nice things about it!), and currently both also have annoyances such that I cannot claim a favorite overall browser.
I don't care if either copies the other; in fact, I want Firefox to copy IE's good features, and vice versa. Competition is good. Firefox may be the best thing that's ever happened to IE.
This seems to be a problem afflicting many open source projects now. OpenOffice.org is slower and heavier than MS Office. Firefox is slower and heaver than IE (not by a great deal, and it's still a superb browser). GNOME/KDE are slower and heavier than WinXP. I mean, I can run Office, IE and Outlook together SMOOTHLY on a WinXP box with 128M RAM.
I know people are going to post saying Firefox runs smoothly on such hardware, or that both IE and Firefox have comparable performance, but I happen to have hardware with performance right in the range where there are noticeable differences between the two. For high end machines the difference is only in the startup time, which is understandable considering that the IE web browser component is probably already in memory, but on my siblings' computers the startup time difference is magnified and very noticeable. There's also enough of a performance difference in plain web browsing that I opt for IE whenever using those computers.
So yeah, don't underestimate the existence of usage of old hardware, and test on such hardware when possible. And above all, do not ignore people who complain about performance, especially if they're normal non-technical users. It doesn't matter if the competition is technically faster; if it feels slow, it is slow to the end user.
Currently no mozilla based browser will work "automatically" with roaming profiles. What happens is that a user will create his profile on one computer, move to another, then Firefox (Mozilla, Netscape, etc) will continually ask for a profile since it does not find the one that was created previously.
You might want to recheck, since I currently have Firefox working with roaming profiles and don't recall any difficulties in doing so. The profiles are stored in the Application Data\Firefox directory of a user's profile, so it should work. With that said, their usage of roaming profiles is bad in that they store the Internet cache in Application Data\Firefox instead of Local Settings\Application Data\Firefox. What this means is that with a 50 MB cache, logging on and logging off means resynchronizing 50 MB of data with the domain server. This is 50 MB of unnecessary traffic in the worst case when the client needs to copy the cache back to the server, and is unacceptable in a large domain with roaming profiles.
Another complaint I hear from fellow Adminstrators is the fact that you can easily "lock down" Internet Explorer by using Group Policies through Active Directory. Example, you can easily change the home page of every user by simply creating a policy object and applying it to an Active Directory User Container that includes all of your users. To do this with Firefox would take hours (if not days) depending on the number of installations.
Yes, this is needed. The lack of Group Policies for Firefox meant that I had to edit the Javascript files that determined Firefox settings manually. The act of editing wasn't that bad, since settings were decently documented. What was lacking was documentation regarding what each of the files themselves did. I literally found 3 or 4.js files with settings in various places in the Firefox folder, and to this day, I have no idea what the difference between each is. Compare this with IE SP2 (pre-SP2 IE control via Group Policy was worthless because they didn't expose enough settings), where all security settings can be set by simply clicking checkboxes or selecting items in a listbox.
And the nice thing with IE group policy is that I can change settings and reapply to everyone as you mentioned. Reapplying Firefox settings right now would basically require reinstalling Firefox, which isn't bad with MSI support, but might be a pain otherwise (I created my own MSI so I don't know about the latter case).
Situation: If you type in an address in Firefox -- about:plugins, yahoo.com (with or without http:// and www.) -- and hit enter, nothing happens.
Just wanted to let you know that you're not alone. I've encountered that problem before, and a variety of other incredibly annoying keyboard problems. It seems like Firefox places the keyboard focus on odd controls in a lot of instances, causing keyboard input to have no effect. This especially occurs when ctrl+tabbing through tabs.
If there's a Firefox dev out there reading this, pretty please fix these problems! It will be part of the polish and will be what brings me back to Firefox!
I find it funny that I have NEVER had this problem with Firefox. Never, not once. I honestly have no idea what people are referring to./. has never rendered poorly via Firefox.
Yeah, maybe you've never had this problem, but some people take it a step further and basically state that the problem doesn't exist because they've never seen it. I'm not saying that you're doing it, but to those that do, it's annoying. And yeah, I've had that problem before in Firefox. The funny thing is that I didn't see it for a while either, but it mysteriously developed one day and decided to stay.
I open everything in new windows and usually close them using the keyboard. That does not work if the focus is wrong, etc. Mouse-centric folk won't notice this much but it is a killer for me.
Believe it or not, the focus problems became annoying enough that I've switched back to IE. Yes, they are that annoying. And no, it doesn't matter if it doesn't happen to you; the fact is, when I use Firefox, I spend a lot of time doing unnecessary clicks on the pages in Firefox to ensure the focus is in the right place. It was bad enough with a mouse, but 10 times worse on my laptop with its touchpad.
For now I'll run IE with a proxy to block ads (gotta have adblock-equivalent functionality). I don't run with administrator privileges on Windows, and I've secured file system permissions fairly well, so hopefully spyware will have a difficult time entering my computer.
This isn't saying I'm permanently turning away from Firefox; if they would fix those keyboard problems and others I'd be glad to switch back. But in its current state, I respectfully refuse.
Great now you'll have to include 60 MB of IDL code to run any program. Where do these ideas come from? Who would think to port a bloated server app development API to a portable device..NET is loved by managers who think they can dumb down their server side code so any H1-B can do it, that's about it. Nobody even uses.NET for desktop apps, so where'd the idiotic idea that it would take off in a portable environment come from. The main reason I refuse to use.NET for desktop apps is the 60 MB IDL needs to be included, better to VB 6 or anything else for that matter. M
I would imagine most of that 60 MB is the.NET framework library, only a fraction of which you'd really need to port to portable devices. Stuff like ASP.NET, Winforms, the entire System.Drawing namespace probably wouldn't be needed. At the very core you'd only need an execution engine, which is basically an IL interpretor, and perhaps a partial implementation of the System namespace. Yes, there's bloat, but certainly nothing like 60 MB, and for something non-critical like Lego Mindstorms, the bloat would be acceptable to me.
Still trying to catch up... to Java, huh? This stuff has been around for Java for years now.
Which wouldn't be surprising since Java was released in 1996, while.NET was released in 2002. You could've said the same thing when Java was first implemented on an embedded device. C/C++ and assembly were likely there for years before.
What about Slashdot URLs? I'm currently at http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 9/10/0012242&tid=156&tid=201&tid=170&tid=1 when http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?date=tod ay'sdate&mode=comments would suffice. The simplegeek link probably reference some sort of permanent link database; the entries on that site can also be accessed via a simpler format that includes the date: http://www.simplegeek.com/default.aspx?date=2004-0 9-08
And yeah, the author's name is absent in the URL, but it's on his own domain. If Miguel had his own domain, would you expect http://www.domainname.com/miguel?? And what about the php extension? Or.pl for Slashdot articles? Your post is just a moronic flame against something that really doesn't mean much in the first place.
I'd heard of sub-streams. As far as I know, no-one uses them - they really restrict how you can transport files, because no e-mail or FTP software supports them, and neither do most other FS'es.
The reason they aren't used is primarily because other file systems and protocols don't support them. FAT32 doesn't have streams, for example, and I'm quite sure HTTP and FTP don't have a concept of streams attached to a file. But if you can ensure usage on only NTFS, it's perfectly feasible to write a program that uses streams.
Things that use streams include the Summary tab for file properties, as well as the Windows XP SP2 feature that displays a warning for files downloaded with IE (all downloaded files get a stream that basically lets Windows know it was from the Internet).
Why are they so hard to implement, and why does WMP have to implement a horrendous hack to get into the taskbar.
Nitpick: WMP on the taskbar is implemented as a deskband, which has a fully exposed and public interface. This means that other people could write their own deskbands if they wanted, which I don't consider a hack. MSDN has an article with some details.
On the other hand, I do like being able to "save" my current work state on the server and reconnect later and continue with my programs still open. I'm sure you could hack something similar with X, but terminal services isn't as bad as you make it sound.
I've thought about this before, and then concluded that while things may look different, they at least behave the same generally. You can't guarantee that similar widgets of various *nix toolkits will work the same, especially menus, which all seem to behave in different ways.
The fact that Visual Studio menus have icons on them and a different color scheme from most applications is no consequence to me. At least I can consistenly press Alt, F, down, O to get the Open dialog box.
And about why some Windows apps use their own skin, blame it on the developer (yes, even WMP):P Windows has no say in the development of the Winamp UI.
I wonder about the hatred too. I code heavily on Microsoft platforms, and looking at the documentation for the new Longhorn APIs, I am quite sure Mono will become even more important when Longhorn rolls out. Why? Just look at the docs; all the new APIs are managed.NET APIs.
I commend Miguel for his awesome work, and the rest of the people behind Mono. When Microsoft is working on a new version of Windows, which is undeniably the most used desktop OS in the world, and heavily uses.NET, you simply don't ignore the thing.
So dragging windows now would get ~5fps on my TNT2.
Longhorn will come with multiple "user experience" levels, which basically means the UI graphics will reduce in quality on slower machines. AFAIK the current GUI interface will still remain in Longhorn. In fact, there was a hack for one of the recent leaks that allowed the Desktop Composition Engine to be turned on, which basically took over the GUI and accelerated desktop rendering, so at least right now it seems like 3D acceleration is something that can be toggled on (and presumably off when you restart).
The last thing I want is another big Microsoft API. Let me know when the Windows API gets smaller, or when Windows implements the Single Unix Specification in any meaningful manner. I have better things to do than to waste my time trying to write programs against a cumbersome toy OS API.
Unfortunately, a lot of the new graphics and OS stuff will be exposed as new.NET APIs, so you'll have to learn those. But if you think about it, this is a good thing since Win32 is getting crufty in some areas, and Win32 GDI and User (UI stuff) APIs are severely underpowered and just incapable of the graphics stuff Longhorn will be doing.
I've coded with the new API, and even with the lack of documentation at this point (seriously, you'll get a list of methods and properties for classes, and maybe a one-sentence description for important methods), it's still considerably better than the existing Win32 API. That's saying a lot considering I've been using Win32 for at least 6 years.
If you're interested in the new API, take a look at the MSDN documentation. Take a look just to see what it's like, even if you don't use Windows or plan on using Longhorn. Avalon graphics stuff is in System.Windows.Media; I haven't taken a look at the rest of the new APIs.
Microsoft is really hyping up Longhorn and none of the meat of Avalon has made it into the technical previews. Judging by the Ctrl+Alt+Del animations, the smooth color fades in Explorer, the few existing vector graphics, the other random programmer art in the technical previews, Avalon is going to be IMPRESSIVE.
The Ctrl+Alt+Del animations and fades are like little grains of sand compared to the internal demos I saw (but can't describe, unfortunately). They were impressive visually, but simply mindblowing from a developer standpoint.
I recall the Xbox version of Doom 3 having modifications such as monster placement in levels to cope with Xbox's inferior graphics hardware (compared to what PCs are capable of). Can anyone verify this?
Mmm interesting. I prefer Firefox; do you know of any resource or online documentation on doing something similar with Firefox? MSIs are great, but if Firefox has administrative tools that are just as easy to use, I could live with those too. The biggest problem I found while customizing Firefox and packaging it as an MSI package was simply configuring all the settings and getting plugins packaged together properly. The former simply needs documentation, and the latter was done through trial-and-error.
Samba doesn't have Active Directory support, which I use heavily to automatically install software on my computers. Sure, I could write scripts to do the same thing, but why do that when the functionality already exists as part of Windows server?
Active Directory also manages group policies, which is a necessary capability, although I admit I'm unsure if Samba supports this.
The integration of an OSS browser with an OSS operating system is much better for your sanity, health and network!
Or I can just use an OSS browser with Windows. For a network as small as mine, administration hasn't been an issue at all aside from initial setting up.
As a last result, I replaced the firefox icon with the IE icon, and renamed it to "Internet Explorer." Everyone started using it, and I heard no complaints.
I noticed that at home too. My parents don't notice if IE is made inaccessible and replaced with Firefox. If a website doesn't work under Firefox, they don't know enough to realize that it is a browser compatibility problem, and will be content to treat it as a general computer problem. For not-so-knowledgeable people I think this is a great solution. No spyware and security holes at the expense of a few web sites that don't work.
It's a slightly bigger problem with my siblings, who recognize they're not using Firefox. My brother uses Firefox now because of the lack of popups, but my sister still uses IE because it's noticeably faster. Yes, IE is faster on the slow 750 MHz computers they both use.
... in a public library, or any public place, is its lack of integration into Microsoft's active directory.
I second that. Integrate Mozilla and Firefox with Active Directory and you'll start seeing large deployments on Windows networks. Currently I can easily change IE security settings on all computers on my network with a couple mouse clicks. And somewhat related, I can also install programs that provide Windows Installer (MSI) packages with a couple mouse clicks. Luckily MSI support is listed in Firefox's Bugzilla (and was almost made blocking for 1.0), so hopefully it'll be soon when an official Firefox MSI is released.
It's actually pretty easy to create an MSI yourself if you have Visual Studio.NET (and maybe WiX, but I haven't tried), but some administrative rollout tools would be nice to augment MSIs. What'd be really great is MSI transforms that install additional plugins, so I can for example install Firefox on every computer in a Windows network and install Adblock.
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The Moz team should be looking with urgency at how corporate customers can keep it up to date - I'm sure that would also make it a much easier sell to business.
I completely agree (but from a Firefox standpoint; I haven't used Mozilla in ages). There needs to be serious consideration of usage in corporate settings on Windows desktops. Features such as an MSI package to ease in deployment across Active Directory networks is needed. Yes, you can create your own MSI packages, but it'd be nice if one was provided. For those who don't know what I'm talking about with AD, it basically means that with a few mouse clicks (seriously), I can install Firefox on all computers on my network. You could probably replicate that with logon scripts, but this method provides automatic uninstallation of old versions when upgrading Firefox, as well as installation repairing if files are corrupted (but I'm not sure how useful that is, since it might point to more serious hardware problems).
Firefox settings in Group Policy would also be awesome, although that would require either placing Firefox settings in the registry or writing a Group Policy plugin to handle settings. What this would mean is that Firefox configuration settings for an entire network can be controlled from a central location.
There are other minor problems (such as placement of Firefox cache in Application Data instead of Local Settings\Application Data, causing the entire cache to be synchronized with the domain server on logon and logoff), so if they aren't already, Firefox developers should be sure to test on machines with multiple user profiles with reduced privileges. These things, although inconsequential to regular users at home, are quite important for acceptance in corporate Windows networks.
Also, apologies if you can already do all of these, but if that's the case, a page discussing these things for network administrators would also be nice.
I was playing with 1.0PR last night and found the firebird developers have already mimicked IE. The "info bar" [everythingisnt.com] which displays when something is blocked is blatantly "stolen" from IE. Not that I care or even think its wrong, but its interesting to see the browser war heat up again.
Heh and if IE stole something from Firefox everyone here would be in an uproar. But I'm the same in that I don't care. Both browsers have good points (yes, even IE has nice things about it!), and currently both also have annoyances such that I cannot claim a favorite overall browser.
I don't care if either copies the other; in fact, I want Firefox to copy IE's good features, and vice versa. Competition is good. Firefox may be the best thing that's ever happened to IE.
This seems to be a problem afflicting many open source projects now. OpenOffice.org is slower and heavier than MS Office. Firefox is slower and heaver than IE (not by a great deal, and it's still a superb browser). GNOME/KDE are slower and heavier than WinXP. I mean, I can run Office, IE and Outlook together SMOOTHLY on a WinXP box with 128M RAM.
I know people are going to post saying Firefox runs smoothly on such hardware, or that both IE and Firefox have comparable performance, but I happen to have hardware with performance right in the range where there are noticeable differences between the two. For high end machines the difference is only in the startup time, which is understandable considering that the IE web browser component is probably already in memory, but on my siblings' computers the startup time difference is magnified and very noticeable. There's also enough of a performance difference in plain web browsing that I opt for IE whenever using those computers.
So yeah, don't underestimate the existence of usage of old hardware, and test on such hardware when possible. And above all, do not ignore people who complain about performance, especially if they're normal non-technical users. It doesn't matter if the competition is technically faster; if it feels slow, it is slow to the end user.
Currently no mozilla based browser will work "automatically" with roaming profiles. What happens is that a user will create his profile on one computer, move to another, then Firefox (Mozilla, Netscape, etc) will continually ask for a profile since it does not find the one that was created previously.
You might want to recheck, since I currently have Firefox working with roaming profiles and don't recall any difficulties in doing so. The profiles are stored in the Application Data\Firefox directory of a user's profile, so it should work. With that said, their usage of roaming profiles is bad in that they store the Internet cache in Application Data\Firefox instead of Local Settings\Application Data\Firefox. What this means is that with a 50 MB cache, logging on and logging off means resynchronizing 50 MB of data with the domain server. This is 50 MB of unnecessary traffic in the worst case when the client needs to copy the cache back to the server, and is unacceptable in a large domain with roaming profiles.
Another complaint I hear from fellow Adminstrators is the fact that you can easily "lock down" Internet Explorer by using Group Policies through Active Directory. Example, you can easily change the home page of every user by simply creating a policy object and applying it to an Active Directory User Container that includes all of your users. To do this with Firefox would take hours (if not days) depending on the number of installations.
Yes, this is needed. The lack of Group Policies for Firefox meant that I had to edit the Javascript files that determined Firefox settings manually. The act of editing wasn't that bad, since settings were decently documented. What was lacking was documentation regarding what each of the files themselves did. I literally found 3 or 4 .js files with settings in various places in the Firefox folder, and to this day, I have no idea what the difference between each is. Compare this with IE SP2 (pre-SP2 IE control via Group Policy was worthless because they didn't expose enough settings), where all security settings can be set by simply clicking checkboxes or selecting items in a listbox.
And the nice thing with IE group policy is that I can change settings and reapply to everyone as you mentioned. Reapplying Firefox settings right now would basically require reinstalling Firefox, which isn't bad with MSI support, but might be a pain otherwise (I created my own MSI so I don't know about the latter case).
Situation: If you type in an address in Firefox -- about:plugins, yahoo.com (with or without http:// and www.) -- and hit enter, nothing happens.
Just wanted to let you know that you're not alone. I've encountered that problem before, and a variety of other incredibly annoying keyboard problems. It seems like Firefox places the keyboard focus on odd controls in a lot of instances, causing keyboard input to have no effect. This especially occurs when ctrl+tabbing through tabs.
If there's a Firefox dev out there reading this, pretty please fix these problems! It will be part of the polish and will be what brings me back to Firefox!
I find it funny that I have NEVER had this problem with Firefox. Never, not once. I honestly have no idea what people are referring to. /. has never rendered poorly via Firefox.
Yeah, maybe you've never had this problem, but some people take it a step further and basically state that the problem doesn't exist because they've never seen it. I'm not saying that you're doing it, but to those that do, it's annoying. And yeah, I've had that problem before in Firefox. The funny thing is that I didn't see it for a while either, but it mysteriously developed one day and decided to stay.
I open everything in new windows and usually close them using the keyboard. That does not work if the focus is wrong, etc. Mouse-centric folk won't notice this much but it is a killer for me.
Believe it or not, the focus problems became annoying enough that I've switched back to IE. Yes, they are that annoying. And no, it doesn't matter if it doesn't happen to you; the fact is, when I use Firefox, I spend a lot of time doing unnecessary clicks on the pages in Firefox to ensure the focus is in the right place. It was bad enough with a mouse, but 10 times worse on my laptop with its touchpad.
For now I'll run IE with a proxy to block ads (gotta have adblock-equivalent functionality). I don't run with administrator privileges on Windows, and I've secured file system permissions fairly well, so hopefully spyware will have a difficult time entering my computer.
This isn't saying I'm permanently turning away from Firefox; if they would fix those keyboard problems and others I'd be glad to switch back. But in its current state, I respectfully refuse.
Great now you'll have to include 60 MB of IDL code to run any program. Where do these ideas come from? Who would think to port a bloated server app development API to a portable device. .NET is loved by managers who think they can dumb down their server side code so any H1-B can do it, that's about it. Nobody even uses .NET for desktop apps, so where'd the idiotic idea that it would take off in a portable environment come from. The main reason I refuse to use .NET for desktop apps is the 60 MB IDL needs to be included, better to VB 6 or anything else for that matter. M
I would imagine most of that 60 MB is the .NET framework library, only a fraction of which you'd really need to port to portable devices. Stuff like ASP.NET, Winforms, the entire System.Drawing namespace probably wouldn't be needed. At the very core you'd only need an execution engine, which is basically an IL interpretor, and perhaps a partial implementation of the System namespace. Yes, there's bloat, but certainly nothing like 60 MB, and for something non-critical like Lego Mindstorms, the bloat would be acceptable to me.
Still trying to catch up ... to Java, huh? This stuff has been around for Java for years now.
Which wouldn't be surprising since Java was released in 1996, while .NET was released in 2002. You could've said the same thing when Java was first implemented on an embedded device. C/C++ and assembly were likely there for years before.
What about Slashdot URLs? I'm currently at http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 9/10/0012242&tid=156&tid=201&tid=170&tid=1 when http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?date=tod ay'sdate&mode=comments would suffice. The simplegeek link probably reference some sort of permanent link database; the entries on that site can also be accessed via a simpler format that includes the date: http://www.simplegeek.com/default.aspx?date=2004-0 9-08
And yeah, the author's name is absent in the URL, but it's on his own domain. If Miguel had his own domain, would you expect http://www.domainname.com/miguel?? And what about the php extension? Or .pl for Slashdot articles? Your post is just a moronic flame against something that really doesn't mean much in the first place.
I'd heard of sub-streams. As far as I know, no-one uses them - they really restrict how you can transport files, because no e-mail or FTP software supports them, and neither do most other FS'es.
The reason they aren't used is primarily because other file systems and protocols don't support them. FAT32 doesn't have streams, for example, and I'm quite sure HTTP and FTP don't have a concept of streams attached to a file. But if you can ensure usage on only NTFS, it's perfectly feasible to write a program that uses streams.
Things that use streams include the Summary tab for file properties, as well as the Windows XP SP2 feature that displays a warning for files downloaded with IE (all downloaded files get a stream that basically lets Windows know it was from the Internet).
Why are they so hard to implement, and why does WMP have to implement a horrendous hack to get into the taskbar.
Nitpick: WMP on the taskbar is implemented as a deskband, which has a fully exposed and public interface. This means that other people could write their own deskbands if they wanted, which I don't consider a hack. MSDN has an article with some details.
On the other hand, I do like being able to "save" my current work state on the server and reconnect later and continue with my programs still open. I'm sure you could hack something similar with X, but terminal services isn't as bad as you make it sound.
I've thought about this before, and then concluded that while things may look different, they at least behave the same generally. You can't guarantee that similar widgets of various *nix toolkits will work the same, especially menus, which all seem to behave in different ways.
The fact that Visual Studio menus have icons on them and a different color scheme from most applications is no consequence to me. At least I can consistenly press Alt, F, down, O to get the Open dialog box.
And about why some Windows apps use their own skin, blame it on the developer (yes, even WMP) :P Windows has no say in the development of the Winamp UI.
I wonder about the hatred too. I code heavily on Microsoft platforms, and looking at the documentation for the new Longhorn APIs, I am quite sure Mono will become even more important when Longhorn rolls out. Why? Just look at the docs; all the new APIs are managed .NET APIs.
I commend Miguel for his awesome work, and the rest of the people behind Mono. When Microsoft is working on a new version of Windows, which is undeniably the most used desktop OS in the world, and heavily uses .NET, you simply don't ignore the thing.
What happens if you lose your CueCat?
So dragging windows now would get ~5fps on my TNT2.
Longhorn will come with multiple "user experience" levels, which basically means the UI graphics will reduce in quality on slower machines. AFAIK the current GUI interface will still remain in Longhorn. In fact, there was a hack for one of the recent leaks that allowed the Desktop Composition Engine to be turned on, which basically took over the GUI and accelerated desktop rendering, so at least right now it seems like 3D acceleration is something that can be toggled on (and presumably off when you restart).
The last thing I want is another big Microsoft API. Let me know when the Windows API gets smaller, or when Windows implements the Single Unix Specification in any meaningful manner. I have better things to do than to waste my time trying to write programs against a cumbersome toy OS API.
Unfortunately, a lot of the new graphics and OS stuff will be exposed as new .NET APIs, so you'll have to learn those. But if you think about it, this is a good thing since Win32 is getting crufty in some areas, and Win32 GDI and User (UI stuff) APIs are severely underpowered and just incapable of the graphics stuff Longhorn will be doing.
I've coded with the new API, and even with the lack of documentation at this point (seriously, you'll get a list of methods and properties for classes, and maybe a one-sentence description for important methods), it's still considerably better than the existing Win32 API. That's saying a lot considering I've been using Win32 for at least 6 years.
If you're interested in the new API, take a look at the MSDN documentation. Take a look just to see what it's like, even if you don't use Windows or plan on using Longhorn. Avalon graphics stuff is in System.Windows.Media; I haven't taken a look at the rest of the new APIs.
Microsoft is really hyping up Longhorn and none of the meat of Avalon has made it into the technical previews. Judging by the Ctrl+Alt+Del animations, the smooth color fades in Explorer, the few existing vector graphics, the other random programmer art in the technical previews, Avalon is going to be IMPRESSIVE.
The Ctrl+Alt+Del animations and fades are like little grains of sand compared to the internal demos I saw (but can't describe, unfortunately). They were impressive visually, but simply mindblowing from a developer standpoint.
Longhorn and its graphics suck and so does this color scheme.
Keep in mind that the final Longhorn UI is under development. All the current UI and schemes are temporary.
I recall the Xbox version of Doom 3 having modifications such as monster placement in levels to cope with Xbox's inferior graphics hardware (compared to what PCs are capable of). Can anyone verify this?
Mmm interesting. I prefer Firefox; do you know of any resource or online documentation on doing something similar with Firefox? MSIs are great, but if Firefox has administrative tools that are just as easy to use, I could live with those too. The biggest problem I found while customizing Firefox and packaging it as an MSI package was simply configuring all the settings and getting plugins packaged together properly. The former simply needs documentation, and the latter was done through trial-and-error.
Samba doesn't have Active Directory support, which I use heavily to automatically install software on my computers. Sure, I could write scripts to do the same thing, but why do that when the functionality already exists as part of Windows server?
Active Directory also manages group policies, which is a necessary capability, although I admit I'm unsure if Samba supports this.
The integration of an OSS browser with an OSS operating system is much better for your sanity, health and network!
Or I can just use an OSS browser with Windows. For a network as small as mine, administration hasn't been an issue at all aside from initial setting up.
As a last result, I replaced the firefox icon with the IE icon, and renamed it to "Internet Explorer." Everyone started using it, and I heard no complaints.
I noticed that at home too. My parents don't notice if IE is made inaccessible and replaced with Firefox. If a website doesn't work under Firefox, they don't know enough to realize that it is a browser compatibility problem, and will be content to treat it as a general computer problem. For not-so-knowledgeable people I think this is a great solution. No spyware and security holes at the expense of a few web sites that don't work.
It's a slightly bigger problem with my siblings, who recognize they're not using Firefox. My brother uses Firefox now because of the lack of popups, but my sister still uses IE because it's noticeably faster. Yes, IE is faster on the slow 750 MHz computers they both use.
I second that. Integrate Mozilla and Firefox with Active Directory and you'll start seeing large deployments on Windows networks. Currently I can easily change IE security settings on all computers on my network with a couple mouse clicks. And somewhat related, I can also install programs that provide Windows Installer (MSI) packages with a couple mouse clicks. Luckily MSI support is listed in Firefox's Bugzilla (and was almost made blocking for 1.0), so hopefully it'll be soon when an official Firefox MSI is released.
It's actually pretty easy to create an MSI yourself if you have Visual Studio.NET (and maybe WiX, but I haven't tried), but some administrative rollout tools would be nice to augment MSIs. What'd be really great is MSI transforms that install additional plugins, so I can for example install Firefox on every computer in a Windows network and install Adblock.