Had Slashdot been around during the bad old days you'd have been claiming it was just an anti-IBM site.
Okay, so this basically makes my point. It's a technology solution. You guys obviously have way better solutions... why don't you just make a better product?
Yeah, just make a better technological solution just like we did to overcome IBM's monopoly influence... except antitrust regulators had to step in and restrict IBM's practices, if you know your computing history. You know, the same laws that make what MS is doing illegal and prevents better solutions from winning. You don't seem to understand antitrust issues very well.
Right, what a lame rationalization. Of course, suddenly proprietary junk is okay.
We have this thing called the capitalist free market. It works pretty well to sort out theses sorts of problems because people who make better solutions for consumers get more customers and make more money. That is sufficient to keep Adobe more or less working for us. The free market is broken by monopoly abuse, which is why something else is required to mitigate the issue with Silverlight.
Is it cheaper to use proper development tools and actually get some work done using adobe or Microsoft stuff, or to fight off the horde or morons who attack you in court?
What are you talking about? MS is the only one likely to end up in court over this issue, not Vortal or Adobe (unless Vortal broke their contract or local laws in the process of using Silverlight).
Oh I see- as far as I can tell it sounds like the crowd here represent the group trying to win a market battle with litigation instead of technical merits.
Sigh. You can't win on technical merits if a monopoly is leveraged against you. That's the whole point. You create a better solution using cool new HTML 5. It is open and standard and innovative and cutting edge. MS refuses to implement the technology in IE, making the only way to get it to work on IE Silverlight. Because MS can force feed IE to the entire Windows using populace and you have no ability to do the same with another browser, your solution loses... despite being technically better.
Can't make a better profit so you just dub the competition criminal?
The only way to determine what is better is to let the free market decide. The free market cannot decide if it is undermined by a monopoly. We have laws on the books to prevent such undermining and MS is breaking them. They are a criminal. They've already been convicted of the same crime numerous times.
Why do you hate the free market? Are you a commie:) If MS's solutions are better then surely they can win on a level playing field, where IE is not bundled and standards have been restored, right? You don't want Silverlight to win if it can't win fairly, do you?
Design by committee has always and will always lag behind, web standards like javascript vs tuned solutions like flash and silverlight is just another sterling example of this.
Web standards have been artificially held back by one particular monopolist. Previous to MS's gaining control of the browser market, they were advancing quite rapidly.
Okay, other people clued you in about this.
No, it was just other random zealots posting on my comment.
So pointing out you are factually incorrect when you assert Moonlight can run the program in question is zealotry now? Why am I bothering replying to such a fanatic?
I maintain that I made a good point, that's why it's considered "flamebait"...
I'm so sorry your brilliance is persecuted by all those jealous moderators. Obviously they are biased.
... this is not a community of good ideas or linux platform strength, but fanboy anger.
You must be right. There can be no other answer. Might I suggest you try another forum, like Digg?
LOL, MS discontinued IE for Mac, so they're going to discontinue Silverlight. Yup, that's bulletproof.
It certainly isn't bulletproof, but it is MS's tried and true business strategy. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Once they have sufficient market share for a technology and the competition is hosed, they tend to make those technologies exclusive to their platform. It's not just IE.
Microsoft nearly did kill Office for the Mac, but was a required part of a dispute settlement. Now, it's too profitable to kill off. That's called a dilemma.
MSOffice for the Mac is profitable, but not so much that MS could not kill it if they thought it strategic. The reason they don't is because it would not be a good move for them. Nearly everyone knows MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's, but they also have monopoly influence on the office suite software market. They've spent huge amounts of money in settlements making sure no court case ever gets to the point where that is an official ruling, but it is true nonetheless. It is one of their largest lock-ins to prevent Linux adoption which is why they have been fighting open standard formats so hard and in such a dirty fashion. It's also their business plan going forward for software as a service.
Losing the entire Mac chunk of the market would do a lot undermine their ability to maintain that monopoly influence going forward. It would almost instantly triple the market for alternative office suites and MS really, really doesn't want that to happen.
Basically, you're all letting your fanboy rage over Microsoft blind your sense to the point that you're pushing a fully proprietary non-oss solution (flash) over a fully open source solution.
Who's promoting Flash? This could be done in Java or javascript even using all open Web standards. Failing that, Flash is not being promoted by a criminal organization whose trust gives them direct, financial incentive to break compatibility with other versions. Finally, Adobe pushing the proprietary Flash upon the industry is not illegal since they aren't abusing a monopoly in another market to do it.
As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter how much better the development is made by tools, docs, and language, or how open source the project is... all that matters is Microsoft affiliation.
Not at all. I'm just as opposed to other antitrust abuse from other companies as I am to abuse from MS. Most other people seem to feel the same. Take a look at discussions about local cable and phone monopolies, for example.
So slashdot isn't necessarily pro-linux, pro-oss, or pro-free software. It's just anti-microsoft.
Slashdot is not homogenous, but a lot of people are very vocal about MS. MS has given them good reason. This is primarily a computing forum and MS has done more damage to various parts of the computing industry via their criminal acts than pretty much any other company. Had Slashdot been around during the bad old days you'd have been claiming it was just an anti-IBM site.
Here's the final word: if Microsoft is beating the Adobe toolchain in a cost-benefit-analysis, then more people should volunteer on Moonlight...
I'd say if MS is beating them without breaking the law... which is highly unlikely if you understand antitrust law. Even then it is debatable.
That's funny because I had the exact opposite experience with a dell laptop and a macbook air. The Air wouldn't detect the majority of displays plugged into it so you have to force it to use multiple monitors
I've used laptops from Dell, IBM, and Apple and so far only the Apple one has smoothly worked for me. Generally I use the laptop when I'm out and about, plug into a monitor at the office and plug into a different monitor when working from home. With Mac laptops I can close the lid and take it to the coffee shop and open it and it works. I can close the lid unplug my work monitor, take it home and plug in my home monitor open the lid and it works. With all the others I had to unplug the monitor before suspending then un-suspend, then plug in a new monitor, and even then I often had to mess with the preferences.
It's one of the reasons I haven't bought a Lenovo laptop for a long time.
Quite frankly, although Microsoft getting people dependent on their proprietary APIs is a common business model, this isn't really Microsoft's fault, but Vortal's.
Well, sort of. Remember that ongoing prosecution of MS in the EU courts for antitrust abuse? Remember what it is about? MS intentionally broke interoperability with Web standards and prevented Web standards from advancing and being more functional on the majority of user's systems by leveraging their Windows monopoly to artificially promote IE. As a result, it is harder for companies like Vortal to implement a procurement system using Web standards, resulting in more companies using Silverlight (and Flash). But since Silverlight is another Microsoft product... well hopefully you see where this is going.
You can argue Vortal should not have used Silverlight for this project and I'd agree with you. That doesn't mean MS bears no guilt for making developing this with interoperable Web standards artificially difficult for Vortal.
...my 2.5 year old MacBook Pro (no AppleCare) has an annoying hardware fault that makes it all too apparent that Macs are subject to the same faults as any other PC.
Has anyone argued Macs don't ever fail? The point is you can't equivocate and claim they fail as often unless you have evidence to contradict market studies.
OS-X is nice, until you start really trying to do Unix stuff on it, then you might as well run a Linux VM instead of fighting with all the necessary "adjustments" to make whatever happy under OS-X.
I think you have this a little wrong. OS X is fine for UNIX stuff. It takes adjustment, to run software intended for Linux or really iffy ports of said software.I can see where you'd be confused though if you don't differentiate between Linux and UNIX.
Until Display Port gets much wider market penetration, I'm going to call it a proprietary...
Okay, why do we care? People said the same thing about USB when Apple was basically the only company including it on consumer machines. New technologies have slow adoption rates. That doesn't make them proprietary, which is something else entirely.
I think that OS-X would be a lot more useful if Psystar wins some kind of court decision forcing legal acceptance of hackintoshes.
The most Pystar can hope for is a ruling that says pre-installing off the shelf on generic hardware is legal and thus forcing Apple to stop selling OS X in boxes and only sell upgrades via the Web. It makes it less convenient for users and Pystar is still screwed, but that's really the only thing they can hope to accomplish in the long run (aside from a legal precedent against EULAs, which would be awfully nice).
But that link is not a link in the *document*, it's meta-information.
From a technical perspective, yes. From a UI perspective, no, the back button, the forward button, and links are all ways of navigating forward and backward through links. You can't jump from UI metaphors to technical methods and expect that to hold up when discussing usability.
The keyboard is an interface to the UI. Since it is not on the screen, we don't need to argue about where it should be spatially to make sense with the metaphor.
So is the toolbar.
Actually, the keyboard is an input method, just like the mouse. The keyboard, however, does not interact with objects displayed in the same space, which makes it qualitatively different in terms of the metaphor.
You're dodging my point.
No, I'm disagreeing with you.
Yeah, but you haven't provided any evidence or even arguments as to why having the tabs below the controls fits better with the UI metaphor. You just asserted it.
Yeah... if it renders your website properly. (I can't)
I haven't had a problem with any Website in years using Safari.
If you can get *all* your plugins to work with it. (I can't)
I don't install a lot of them, but everything I've tried works.
If you prefer having a just different enough way of doing things on each platform that you never know where to find things. (I don't)
This might be fundamental difference between us. I don't like my browser crippled to use the feature set of the least functional OS I use. I'm a power user. I use OS X when all other things are equal because it has more functionality... unless you use Firefox.
Mozilla isn't perfect, but it's damned nice, and doesn't suffer the above problems. It's decent, sure. But Firefox has it beat hands down.
I don't generally use Firefox on OS X for two big reasons:
it is slow
It can't use system services and other OS X features.
Both are important, but the second one might warrant more detail. I've spent years training my spelling and grammar checkers. They work in all my programs whether they are word processors, chat, terminals, layout programs, word processors, or text editors. They don't work in Firefox. No matter what Firefox claims, I've never gotten it to use the default system spelling checker and I really really don't want to train yet another dictionary that MPLS and a hundred other technical terms are not misspellings. It also can't properly handle my text manipulation services like auto-translation, line endings, replacements, bibliography auto formatting, etc., and mouse gestures and other services.
So sure, I could go and try to find mozilla plug-ins to replicate all the functionality I already have in every other program, and then I could train all those plug-ins over time to be nearly the same, but it will never be as easy and I'll still be using two use cases instead of one. Firefox is a good browser, but it is the jack of all OS's and the master of none. I'm sure it is fine for casual users, but it fails miserably for the more advanced features.
* I live in a multi-computer home environment. I've got two Windows machines, an Ubuntu machine, a MythTV, and random stuff. The Mac works great *when you do everything the OSX way*. However, in a mixed environment, it doesn't. I'm thinking of movies, pictures, address book, and things like that.
This depends a lot in my experience based upon how you interoperate. OS X is very good at using open standards and file formats provided you pick decent software to run on top of it. It is less good at interoperating with Windows proprietary formats and protocols and if your servers or Windows machines are using them and you're set on them, Linux is often better at reverse engineered solutions. Example, if you standardized on Windows Media formats, OS X will play them, but not as well as Windows or even Linux. If you picked MP3, MP4, OGG, and the like, OS X is much better than Windows at interoperating.
I bought my iMac G5 20" ALS, and it was a great machine for about 40 months. Then, it failed.
Your anecdote certainly shows reason to be annoyed, but what could Apple the vendor do to prevent this? Extend their warranties to four years and then people complain when machines fail a month after that. Would you like more reliable hardware? Of course, we all always want more reliable hardware, but Apple already is the top rated among major vendors by consumer reports and other independent reviewers. Some people will always have hardware fail regardless. You're that person. And Apple is already taking flack for using more expensive and reliable components. Just look at all the comments here about how expensive Apple is compared not to the other top rated vendors, but ones with very poor reliability numbers. People don't look at reliability when buying.
I hate backing up/home/username.
Umm, you've heard of Time machine, right? You can apply it only to selected parts of your filesystem and it does versioning more smoothly and easily than almost anything. Or, use one of many third party backup solutions that handles them intelligently.
* The hardware *is* expensive. And, in my experience, very proprietary to the point where a failure totals a machine. My x86 tower is nicely generic.
Apple has custom motherboards, but other than that, everything is pretty much off the shelf. What are you looking to replace? I don't see how it is any harder than anything else (with the exception of the motherboard which you have to buy from Apple).
* OSX isn't perfect. Neither is XP/Vista/Ubuntu.
I don't really see how this is a challenge for Apple. You want them to be perfect? Not going to happen.
Okay, I don't quite know what my rant is. I'm just in a small minority of "Mac Fanboy for ages, switching to Windows and living just fine."
Hey, use what you like and what works for you. I use OS X, Linux, and Windows daily. On my laptop Linux and Windows live in VMs and OS X gets the most love because OS X handles migrations the best and because running OS X in a VM on top of Linux or Windows gives me more headaches. People get way to hung up an emotional about these things.
The URL is the place the document was retrieved from. It changes as I switch between tabs. Logically, it should be grouped as part of the document then, right?
No more than the index or other meta-information on the folder should. If you "save the whole page" to your desktop, the URL changes when you read it, but the content doesn't.
Yes, the content certainly does, because it is no longer live, and any dynamic/streaming elements re no longer functional.
No, it moves you "back one page". It doesn't change depending on the document, so when you're viewing Microsoft.com it doesn't switch to "previous article". It moves you "back one page" even if you got there from a completely different place than the author of the document expected.
It usually moves you back one link, not one document. The common case for using the Web is to follow links in the page, not type new URLs all the time. Either way, it applies only to the tab in the forefront, not to all the tabs. It is specific to that tab and applies only to that tab and if you have a different tab up it causes a different action.
Neither does command-back, and command-w doesn't close all tabs. But the keyboard isn't "part of the document".
The keyboard is an interface to the UI. Since it is not on the screen, we don't need to argue about where it should be spatially to make sense with the metaphor. We do have that consideration for GUI elements. You're dodging my point. Admit it, having he tabs at the top fits the metaphor better.
But since Safari probably has no toolbar configurabilities or multi-tab skills I guess it could be made to work, but it doesn't seem very forward thinking to me.
Actually, you can configure the toolbars in Safari and you can save all tabs, but that action is via the menus not via a button and none of the default buttons affect multiple tabs.
The stuff at the top of the window, that's the "outside of the folder".
The URL is the place the document was retrieved from. It changes as I switch between tabs. Logically, it should be grouped as part of the document then, right?
The stuff inside the tabs, that's the document.
So if I'm looking at a document and I want to go back one link, I click the back button, but its behavior is contextual depending upon which document I'm viewing. It doesn't make all the tabs go back a link, just the current tab. If it isn't part of the document it should apply to everything according to the metaphor, right? Instead it is the back button for that document, i.e., that tab. So it should be in the tab, right?
As far as the tabbed documents metaphor, this seems to fit it better, not worse.
Yes, but they want something they can use for THIS presidential term.
It works in my browser. Maybe the government should promote standards by using the new technology and directing users to a browser that is innovative and current and supports the standard.
They asked about standards and it turned into bundling all major browsers with Windows OSes?
Again, please go get the facts. Opera complained about antitrust abuse and specifically asked the EU to look into broken Web standards. Firefox asked to have input. MS said they were afraid the EU might force them to bundle other browsers, but neither Opera nor the EU have ever said any such thing.
Explain the leap of logic that occurred here without prompting?
It's not logic that is taking a leap here, it is the assumption that the EU is going to make any particular remedy when they haven't even done the conviction stage of this trial yet.
Even assuming they didn't prompt it in anyway, and the EU Commission just came up with it...
MS came up with it, no one else. Even they phrased it as a potential worst case liability for their shareholders.
...why aren't they opposing this current extension of logic?
Maybe because it is a bunch of premature speculation from the person they are convicting. Until they determine the damage done and formally assess the market they aren't going to comment on potential remedies because they don't have the information they need.
Because they aren't benevolent, they're just in it for themselves.
Who is "they" in your sentence? The EU? They're a bunch of appointed commissioners with no vested interest who have applied these same laws hundreds of times over the years. Opera? They reported the crime and asked the EU to deal with it, mentioning standards as a concern for them (which makes sense if you understand their business model).
They are just as guilty in principle as Microsoft.
Again, I don't know who you mean by "they" but MS knowingly broke antitrust law. The EU is prosecuting and other companies are providing advice and describing how they have been victimized by the crime for purposes of redress. I don't see how that makes any of them "as guilty as MS". It seems like no one here even knows what antitrust law is, let alone what specific crime MS is about to be convicted of.
Why is it a usability flaw to put the tabs above the toolbar if it removes unused whitespace and gives the user more real estate for viewing pages?
Because it breaks the visual metaphor that makes tabs so effective and easy to understand and use.
I don't see how. How does having the tabs above the toolbar break the metaphor? Ever go through folder of tabs, where within each folder there were forms that all had the same fields at the top, but which were filled out differently depending on the contents of the document? I certainly have. If anything I'd argue that having a URL hown above the tab, which changes whenever you change tabs conforms less to the metaphor of tabs. Clicking a tab I'd expect everything below it to change and nothing above it, but in your preferred arrangement the URL field changes as I click tabs and what the other buttons affect changes as well.
And if saving space was that important, they could get rid of the menu bar completely and make it a contextual menu on the title bar
They could... if space were the only consideration... but it obviously is not. The point here is you don't lose any functionality by moving the tabs or slow down access to anything. At the same time you save space. Your proposals all slow or drastically change how one has to perform tasks in order to gin the space.
The whole point of the GUI is that the value of the metaphor is high enough to make it worth burning a few percent of the available real-estate on it.
Yeah, the smallest amount for real estate possible for the task to be easy, leaving more room for you to get your work done.
Playing games with the UI to scrape up a few extra pixels is daft.
By that logic, we should have huge buttons since they are easier to click. Luckily UI designers try to balance overall usability instead of ignoring one aspect in favor of another.
Power users have screens that are big enough they don't begrudge losing 2% of the screen height.
I disagree. I'm pretty close to the definition of a power user, but all my main systems for years have been small or medium widescreen laptops that can plug into an external monitor when at my desk. Having more vertical space is almost always one of my biggest limitations even at my desk since I still use the laptop screen even if I'm also using a larger screen as well.
Mad geeks who try and act like power users on ultranotebooks are the only ones who need this crap.
The notebook and ultra notebook crowd certainly include their share of power users in my experience. Would you consider the attendees at Blackhat to be power users? How many people there each year don't have a medium or small laptop?
Hmm, I have a slightly older version of Flash and it has not caused any problems. Even Silverlight seems to be working fine. It's good to keep in mind though. Thanks.
I forget to click on the active tab as I drag and it selects a new tab. Sometimes.
Umm, for me clicking a non-active tab and dragging moves the window. It doesn't bring the background tab to the foreground. Even clicking the "new tab" button and dragging does not make a new tab if you hold the button down and try to drag as you would for moving the window. Perhas the Windows version is different or am I still misunderstanding your problem?
Once, and I'm not sure how I did this, but the tab detached from the window and became a new window.
The only way to do that I now of is to right click a tab and select "move to a new window" or select the same option from the Window menu. If it happened randomly somehow, that sounds like an implementation bug, not a usability issue.
Sometimes I click on a tab to activate it, but because my finger wobbles a bit on the track pad it thinks I want to drag the window and so nothing happens.
It sounds like your click speed and/or mouse pad sensitivity is misconfigured. If you're having problems with tabs in Safari, it probably also causes problems in other applications that require fine controls.
Other times it does what I want, but even then it doesn't feel right.
This is just learnability and your conditioned behaviors. Anything unfamiliar like this might feel a bit off, which is why most users who switch OS's dislike the new OS for some time, it is just different not necessarily bad.
I don't feel that the UI confusion is a good trade off for saving a couple pixels, and it adds no new capability that I care about.
A lot of people, like myself, really care about saving a whole tab bar's worth of vertical (premium) space when using the Web. It's the same reason I always turn off the bookmarks bar. This is catering to power users more than anything, but in that it has an advantage. Very basic users don't use tabs. Very advanced users want the space. I guess it is mostly the middle of the road users that will take a bit to get used to this. I think it is a win, and doubt it will go away, but hopefully they'll give you a way to revert to the old behavior so you don't have to deal with it.
It's not part of the page because the URL field is in the same place, and has the same shape, on every page.
But it has different contents on each page. I don't see how this is a UI problem. Why is it objectionable to you?
you don't get it turning into a search bar on Google and a Knowledge base lookup on Microsoft.com.
No, you have it displaying different URL information, information pertinent to that tab.
Studied UI design and usability for years so feel free to get technical if you have a real objection.
Argument from authority is one of Slashdot's most popular logical fallacies.
An argument from authority is when I assert I'm right because I have better credentials. Telling you I have such credentials and inviting you to go into technical details, is not an appeal to authority. You're awfully defensive.
So maybe I'm just slow. Why is it a usability flaw to put the tabs above the toolbar if it removes unused whitespace and gives the user more real estate for viewing pages?
f nothing else, the wisdom of keeping a hand on the source code for urgent security fixes, rather than wait that it goes through the whole chain of Apple - WebKit - Qt - KDE.
I don't understand. How is it harder to make urgent security fixes to the open source code of KHTML rather than the open source code of Webkit? You write your patch, release the changes and compile. Now maybe Apple and Google and Nokia and other contributors to Webkit won't like your fix or implement it or pull those changes in, but I don't see why you'd have to wait for Apple to do anything in an emergency.
You mean "any other browser but Chrome"? That's a WebKit feature, and works perfectly fine in Chrome last I checked.
I do all my browsing from OS X, so I only played with Chrome briefly (no OS X version yet). When I tried it early on the feature did not function, although there was a UI component for it (it just didn't do anything).
The URL field is not part of the web page, neither is anything else in the toolbar and bookmarks bar.
What do you mean? The URL field shows you the URL of the tab you are looking at. How is that not part of the page? The toolbar items are forward, back, autofill, reload, search, and bug report. All of those, excepting search are specific to the tab you have in the forefront.
As for the bookmarks bar (I always make it go away), it is related to navigating away from the page, but I don't see how moving the tabs higher makes it any more or less useful.
Studied UI design and usability for years so feel free to get technical if you have a real objection.
Agree. There's an ambiguity between "I'm clicking this to drag the window" vs. "I'm clicking this to change the active tab" that's really irritating.
I guess I don't see the problem. It works intuitively for me. I click a tab and it switches to that tab. I click a tab and hold the key down and drag and it moves the window. What use case are you having a problem with?
Slashdot Mirror
Had Slashdot been around during the bad old days you'd have been claiming it was just an anti-IBM site.
Okay, so this basically makes my point. It's a technology solution. You guys obviously have way better solutions... why don't you just make a better product?
Yeah, just make a better technological solution just like we did to overcome IBM's monopoly influence... except antitrust regulators had to step in and restrict IBM's practices, if you know your computing history. You know, the same laws that make what MS is doing illegal and prevents better solutions from winning. You don't seem to understand antitrust issues very well.
Right, what a lame rationalization. Of course, suddenly proprietary junk is okay.
We have this thing called the capitalist free market. It works pretty well to sort out theses sorts of problems because people who make better solutions for consumers get more customers and make more money. That is sufficient to keep Adobe more or less working for us. The free market is broken by monopoly abuse, which is why something else is required to mitigate the issue with Silverlight.
Is it cheaper to use proper development tools and actually get some work done using adobe or Microsoft stuff, or to fight off the horde or morons who attack you in court?
What are you talking about? MS is the only one likely to end up in court over this issue, not Vortal or Adobe (unless Vortal broke their contract or local laws in the process of using Silverlight).
Oh I see- as far as I can tell it sounds like the crowd here represent the group trying to win a market battle with litigation instead of technical merits.
Sigh. You can't win on technical merits if a monopoly is leveraged against you. That's the whole point. You create a better solution using cool new HTML 5. It is open and standard and innovative and cutting edge. MS refuses to implement the technology in IE, making the only way to get it to work on IE Silverlight. Because MS can force feed IE to the entire Windows using populace and you have no ability to do the same with another browser, your solution loses... despite being technically better.
Can't make a better profit so you just dub the competition criminal?
The only way to determine what is better is to let the free market decide. The free market cannot decide if it is undermined by a monopoly. We have laws on the books to prevent such undermining and MS is breaking them. They are a criminal. They've already been convicted of the same crime numerous times.
Why do you hate the free market? Are you a commie :) If MS's solutions are better then surely they can win on a level playing field, where IE is not bundled and standards have been restored, right? You don't want Silverlight to win if it can't win fairly, do you?
Design by committee has always and will always lag behind, web standards like javascript vs tuned solutions like flash and silverlight is just another sterling example of this.
Web standards have been artificially held back by one particular monopolist. Previous to MS's gaining control of the browser market, they were advancing quite rapidly.
Okay, other people clued you in about this.
No, it was just other random zealots posting on my comment.
So pointing out you are factually incorrect when you assert Moonlight can run the program in question is zealotry now? Why am I bothering replying to such a fanatic?
I maintain that I made a good point, that's why it's considered "flamebait"...
I'm so sorry your brilliance is persecuted by all those jealous moderators. Obviously they are biased.
... this is not a community of good ideas or linux platform strength, but fanboy anger.
You must be right. There can be no other answer. Might I suggest you try another forum, like Digg?
LOL, MS discontinued IE for Mac, so they're going to discontinue Silverlight. Yup, that's bulletproof.
It certainly isn't bulletproof, but it is MS's tried and true business strategy. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Once they have sufficient market share for a technology and the competition is hosed, they tend to make those technologies exclusive to their platform. It's not just IE.
Microsoft nearly did kill Office for the Mac, but was a required part of a dispute settlement. Now, it's too profitable to kill off. That's called a dilemma.
MSOffice for the Mac is profitable, but not so much that MS could not kill it if they thought it strategic. The reason they don't is because it would not be a good move for them. Nearly everyone knows MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's, but they also have monopoly influence on the office suite software market. They've spent huge amounts of money in settlements making sure no court case ever gets to the point where that is an official ruling, but it is true nonetheless. It is one of their largest lock-ins to prevent Linux adoption which is why they have been fighting open standard formats so hard and in such a dirty fashion. It's also their business plan going forward for software as a service.
Losing the entire Mac chunk of the market would do a lot undermine their ability to maintain that monopoly influence going forward. It would almost instantly triple the market for alternative office suites and MS really, really doesn't want that to happen.
Are we all forgetting about Moonlight?
Okay, other people clued you in about this.
...while retaining no licensing snafus.
That's a really hard assertion to prove.
Basically, you're all letting your fanboy rage over Microsoft blind your sense to the point that you're pushing a fully proprietary non-oss solution (flash) over a fully open source solution.
Who's promoting Flash? This could be done in Java or javascript even using all open Web standards. Failing that, Flash is not being promoted by a criminal organization whose trust gives them direct, financial incentive to break compatibility with other versions. Finally, Adobe pushing the proprietary Flash upon the industry is not illegal since they aren't abusing a monopoly in another market to do it.
As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter how much better the development is made by tools, docs, and language, or how open source the project is... all that matters is Microsoft affiliation.
Not at all. I'm just as opposed to other antitrust abuse from other companies as I am to abuse from MS. Most other people seem to feel the same. Take a look at discussions about local cable and phone monopolies, for example.
So slashdot isn't necessarily pro-linux, pro-oss, or pro-free software. It's just anti-microsoft.
Slashdot is not homogenous, but a lot of people are very vocal about MS. MS has given them good reason. This is primarily a computing forum and MS has done more damage to various parts of the computing industry via their criminal acts than pretty much any other company. Had Slashdot been around during the bad old days you'd have been claiming it was just an anti-IBM site.
Here's the final word: if Microsoft is beating the Adobe toolchain in a cost-benefit-analysis, then more people should volunteer on Moonlight...
I'd say if MS is beating them without breaking the law... which is highly unlikely if you understand antitrust law. Even then it is debatable.
That's funny because I had the exact opposite experience with a dell laptop and a macbook air. The Air wouldn't detect the majority of displays plugged into it so you have to force it to use multiple monitors
I've used laptops from Dell, IBM, and Apple and so far only the Apple one has smoothly worked for me. Generally I use the laptop when I'm out and about, plug into a monitor at the office and plug into a different monitor when working from home. With Mac laptops I can close the lid and take it to the coffee shop and open it and it works. I can close the lid unplug my work monitor, take it home and plug in my home monitor open the lid and it works. With all the others I had to unplug the monitor before suspending then un-suspend, then plug in a new monitor, and even then I often had to mess with the preferences.
It's one of the reasons I haven't bought a Lenovo laptop for a long time.
Quite frankly, although Microsoft getting people dependent on their proprietary APIs is a common business model, this isn't really Microsoft's fault, but Vortal's.
Well, sort of. Remember that ongoing prosecution of MS in the EU courts for antitrust abuse? Remember what it is about? MS intentionally broke interoperability with Web standards and prevented Web standards from advancing and being more functional on the majority of user's systems by leveraging their Windows monopoly to artificially promote IE. As a result, it is harder for companies like Vortal to implement a procurement system using Web standards, resulting in more companies using Silverlight (and Flash). But since Silverlight is another Microsoft product... well hopefully you see where this is going.
You can argue Vortal should not have used Silverlight for this project and I'd agree with you. That doesn't mean MS bears no guilt for making developing this with interoperable Web standards artificially difficult for Vortal.
...my 2.5 year old MacBook Pro (no AppleCare) has an annoying hardware fault that makes it all too apparent that Macs are subject to the same faults as any other PC.
Has anyone argued Macs don't ever fail? The point is you can't equivocate and claim they fail as often unless you have evidence to contradict market studies.
OS-X is nice, until you start really trying to do Unix stuff on it, then you might as well run a Linux VM instead of fighting with all the necessary "adjustments" to make whatever happy under OS-X.
I think you have this a little wrong. OS X is fine for UNIX stuff. It takes adjustment, to run software intended for Linux or really iffy ports of said software.I can see where you'd be confused though if you don't differentiate between Linux and UNIX.
Until Display Port gets much wider market penetration, I'm going to call it a proprietary...
Okay, why do we care? People said the same thing about USB when Apple was basically the only company including it on consumer machines. New technologies have slow adoption rates. That doesn't make them proprietary, which is something else entirely.
I think that OS-X would be a lot more useful if Psystar wins some kind of court decision forcing legal acceptance of hackintoshes.
The most Pystar can hope for is a ruling that says pre-installing off the shelf on generic hardware is legal and thus forcing Apple to stop selling OS X in boxes and only sell upgrades via the Web. It makes it less convenient for users and Pystar is still screwed, but that's really the only thing they can hope to accomplish in the long run (aside from a legal precedent against EULAs, which would be awfully nice).
But that link is not a link in the *document*, it's meta-information.
From a technical perspective, yes. From a UI perspective, no, the back button, the forward button, and links are all ways of navigating forward and backward through links. You can't jump from UI metaphors to technical methods and expect that to hold up when discussing usability.
The keyboard is an interface to the UI. Since it is not on the screen, we don't need to argue about where it should be spatially to make sense with the metaphor.
So is the toolbar.
Actually, the keyboard is an input method, just like the mouse. The keyboard, however, does not interact with objects displayed in the same space, which makes it qualitatively different in terms of the metaphor.
You're dodging my point.
No, I'm disagreeing with you.
Yeah, but you haven't provided any evidence or even arguments as to why having the tabs below the controls fits better with the UI metaphor. You just asserted it.
Yeah... if it renders your website properly. (I can't)
I haven't had a problem with any Website in years using Safari.
If you can get *all* your plugins to work with it. (I can't)
I don't install a lot of them, but everything I've tried works.
If you prefer having a just different enough way of doing things on each platform that you never know where to find things. (I don't)
This might be fundamental difference between us. I don't like my browser crippled to use the feature set of the least functional OS I use. I'm a power user. I use OS X when all other things are equal because it has more functionality... unless you use Firefox.
Mozilla isn't perfect, but it's damned nice, and doesn't suffer the above problems. It's decent, sure. But Firefox has it beat hands down.
I don't generally use Firefox on OS X for two big reasons:
Both are important, but the second one might warrant more detail. I've spent years training my spelling and grammar checkers. They work in all my programs whether they are word processors, chat, terminals, layout programs, word processors, or text editors. They don't work in Firefox. No matter what Firefox claims, I've never gotten it to use the default system spelling checker and I really really don't want to train yet another dictionary that MPLS and a hundred other technical terms are not misspellings. It also can't properly handle my text manipulation services like auto-translation, line endings, replacements, bibliography auto formatting, etc., and mouse gestures and other services.
So sure, I could go and try to find mozilla plug-ins to replicate all the functionality I already have in every other program, and then I could train all those plug-ins over time to be nearly the same, but it will never be as easy and I'll still be using two use cases instead of one. Firefox is a good browser, but it is the jack of all OS's and the master of none. I'm sure it is fine for casual users, but it fails miserably for the more advanced features.
* I live in a multi-computer home environment. I've got two Windows machines, an Ubuntu machine, a MythTV, and random stuff. The Mac works great *when you do everything the OSX way*. However, in a mixed environment, it doesn't. I'm thinking of movies, pictures, address book, and things like that.
This depends a lot in my experience based upon how you interoperate. OS X is very good at using open standards and file formats provided you pick decent software to run on top of it. It is less good at interoperating with Windows proprietary formats and protocols and if your servers or Windows machines are using them and you're set on them, Linux is often better at reverse engineered solutions. Example, if you standardized on Windows Media formats, OS X will play them, but not as well as Windows or even Linux. If you picked MP3, MP4, OGG, and the like, OS X is much better than Windows at interoperating.
I bought my iMac G5 20" ALS, and it was a great machine for about 40 months. Then, it failed.
Your anecdote certainly shows reason to be annoyed, but what could Apple the vendor do to prevent this? Extend their warranties to four years and then people complain when machines fail a month after that. Would you like more reliable hardware? Of course, we all always want more reliable hardware, but Apple already is the top rated among major vendors by consumer reports and other independent reviewers. Some people will always have hardware fail regardless. You're that person. And Apple is already taking flack for using more expensive and reliable components. Just look at all the comments here about how expensive Apple is compared not to the other top rated vendors, but ones with very poor reliability numbers. People don't look at reliability when buying.
I hate backing up /home/username.
Umm, you've heard of Time machine, right? You can apply it only to selected parts of your filesystem and it does versioning more smoothly and easily than almost anything. Or, use one of many third party backup solutions that handles them intelligently.
* The hardware *is* expensive. And, in my experience, very proprietary to the point where a failure totals a machine. My x86 tower is nicely generic.
Apple has custom motherboards, but other than that, everything is pretty much off the shelf. What are you looking to replace? I don't see how it is any harder than anything else (with the exception of the motherboard which you have to buy from Apple).
* OSX isn't perfect. Neither is XP/Vista/Ubuntu.
I don't really see how this is a challenge for Apple. You want them to be perfect? Not going to happen.
Okay, I don't quite know what my rant is. I'm just in a small minority of "Mac Fanboy for ages, switching to Windows and living just fine."
Hey, use what you like and what works for you. I use OS X, Linux, and Windows daily. On my laptop Linux and Windows live in VMs and OS X gets the most love because OS X handles migrations the best and because running OS X in a VM on top of Linux or Windows gives me more headaches. People get way to hung up an emotional about these things.
The URL is the place the document was retrieved from. It changes as I switch between tabs. Logically, it should be grouped as part of the document then, right?
No more than the index or other meta-information on the folder should. If you "save the whole page" to your desktop, the URL changes when you read it, but the content doesn't.
Yes, the content certainly does, because it is no longer live, and any dynamic/streaming elements re no longer functional.
No, it moves you "back one page". It doesn't change depending on the document, so when you're viewing Microsoft.com it doesn't switch to "previous article". It moves you "back one page" even if you got there from a completely different place than the author of the document expected.
It usually moves you back one link, not one document. The common case for using the Web is to follow links in the page, not type new URLs all the time. Either way, it applies only to the tab in the forefront, not to all the tabs. It is specific to that tab and applies only to that tab and if you have a different tab up it causes a different action.
Neither does command-back, and command-w doesn't close all tabs. But the keyboard isn't "part of the document".
The keyboard is an interface to the UI. Since it is not on the screen, we don't need to argue about where it should be spatially to make sense with the metaphor. We do have that consideration for GUI elements. You're dodging my point. Admit it, having he tabs at the top fits the metaphor better.
But since Safari probably has no toolbar configurabilities or multi-tab skills I guess it could be made to work, but it doesn't seem very forward thinking to me.
Actually, you can configure the toolbars in Safari and you can save all tabs, but that action is via the menus not via a button and none of the default buttons affect multiple tabs.
The stuff at the top of the window, that's the "outside of the folder".
The URL is the place the document was retrieved from. It changes as I switch between tabs. Logically, it should be grouped as part of the document then, right?
The stuff inside the tabs, that's the document.
So if I'm looking at a document and I want to go back one link, I click the back button, but its behavior is contextual depending upon which document I'm viewing. It doesn't make all the tabs go back a link, just the current tab. If it isn't part of the document it should apply to everything according to the metaphor, right? Instead it is the back button for that document, i.e., that tab. So it should be in the tab, right?
As far as the tabbed documents metaphor, this seems to fit it better, not worse.
When HTML 5 is done they can use the <video> tag.
Yes, but they want something they can use for THIS presidential term.
It works in my browser. Maybe the government should promote standards by using the new technology and directing users to a browser that is innovative and current and supports the standard.
They asked about standards and it turned into bundling all major browsers with Windows OSes?
Again, please go get the facts. Opera complained about antitrust abuse and specifically asked the EU to look into broken Web standards. Firefox asked to have input. MS said they were afraid the EU might force them to bundle other browsers, but neither Opera nor the EU have ever said any such thing.
Explain the leap of logic that occurred here without prompting?
It's not logic that is taking a leap here, it is the assumption that the EU is going to make any particular remedy when they haven't even done the conviction stage of this trial yet.
Even assuming they didn't prompt it in anyway, and the EU Commission just came up with it...
MS came up with it, no one else. Even they phrased it as a potential worst case liability for their shareholders.
...why aren't they opposing this current extension of logic?
Maybe because it is a bunch of premature speculation from the person they are convicting. Until they determine the damage done and formally assess the market they aren't going to comment on potential remedies because they don't have the information they need.
Because they aren't benevolent, they're just in it for themselves.
Who is "they" in your sentence? The EU? They're a bunch of appointed commissioners with no vested interest who have applied these same laws hundreds of times over the years. Opera? They reported the crime and asked the EU to deal with it, mentioning standards as a concern for them (which makes sense if you understand their business model).
They are just as guilty in principle as Microsoft.
Again, I don't know who you mean by "they" but MS knowingly broke antitrust law. The EU is prosecuting and other companies are providing advice and describing how they have been victimized by the crime for purposes of redress. I don't see how that makes any of them "as guilty as MS". It seems like no one here even knows what antitrust law is, let alone what specific crime MS is about to be convicted of.
Why is it a usability flaw to put the tabs above the toolbar if it removes unused whitespace and gives the user more real estate for viewing pages?
Because it breaks the visual metaphor that makes tabs so effective and easy to understand and use.
I don't see how. How does having the tabs above the toolbar break the metaphor? Ever go through folder of tabs, where within each folder there were forms that all had the same fields at the top, but which were filled out differently depending on the contents of the document? I certainly have. If anything I'd argue that having a URL hown above the tab, which changes whenever you change tabs conforms less to the metaphor of tabs. Clicking a tab I'd expect everything below it to change and nothing above it, but in your preferred arrangement the URL field changes as I click tabs and what the other buttons affect changes as well.
And if saving space was that important, they could get rid of the menu bar completely and make it a contextual menu on the title bar
They could... if space were the only consideration... but it obviously is not. The point here is you don't lose any functionality by moving the tabs or slow down access to anything. At the same time you save space. Your proposals all slow or drastically change how one has to perform tasks in order to gin the space.
The whole point of the GUI is that the value of the metaphor is high enough to make it worth burning a few percent of the available real-estate on it.
Yeah, the smallest amount for real estate possible for the task to be easy, leaving more room for you to get your work done.
Playing games with the UI to scrape up a few extra pixels is daft.
By that logic, we should have huge buttons since they are easier to click. Luckily UI designers try to balance overall usability instead of ignoring one aspect in favor of another.
Power users have screens that are big enough they don't begrudge losing 2% of the screen height.
I disagree. I'm pretty close to the definition of a power user, but all my main systems for years have been small or medium widescreen laptops that can plug into an external monitor when at my desk. Having more vertical space is almost always one of my biggest limitations even at my desk since I still use the laptop screen even if I'm also using a larger screen as well.
Mad geeks who try and act like power users on ultranotebooks are the only ones who need this crap.
The notebook and ultra notebook crowd certainly include their share of power users in my experience. Would you consider the attendees at Blackhat to be power users? How many people there each year don't have a medium or small laptop?
Hmm, I have a slightly older version of Flash and it has not caused any problems. Even Silverlight seems to be working fine. It's good to keep in mind though. Thanks.
I forget to click on the active tab as I drag and it selects a new tab. Sometimes.
Umm, for me clicking a non-active tab and dragging moves the window. It doesn't bring the background tab to the foreground. Even clicking the "new tab" button and dragging does not make a new tab if you hold the button down and try to drag as you would for moving the window. Perhas the Windows version is different or am I still misunderstanding your problem?
Once, and I'm not sure how I did this, but the tab detached from the window and became a new window.
The only way to do that I now of is to right click a tab and select "move to a new window" or select the same option from the Window menu. If it happened randomly somehow, that sounds like an implementation bug, not a usability issue.
Sometimes I click on a tab to activate it, but because my finger wobbles a bit on the track pad it thinks I want to drag the window and so nothing happens.
It sounds like your click speed and/or mouse pad sensitivity is misconfigured. If you're having problems with tabs in Safari, it probably also causes problems in other applications that require fine controls.
Other times it does what I want, but even then it doesn't feel right.
This is just learnability and your conditioned behaviors. Anything unfamiliar like this might feel a bit off, which is why most users who switch OS's dislike the new OS for some time, it is just different not necessarily bad.
I don't feel that the UI confusion is a good trade off for saving a couple pixels, and it adds no new capability that I care about.
A lot of people, like myself, really care about saving a whole tab bar's worth of vertical (premium) space when using the Web. It's the same reason I always turn off the bookmarks bar. This is catering to power users more than anything, but in that it has an advantage. Very basic users don't use tabs. Very advanced users want the space. I guess it is mostly the middle of the road users that will take a bit to get used to this. I think it is a win, and doubt it will go away, but hopefully they'll give you a way to revert to the old behavior so you don't have to deal with it.
It's not part of the page because the URL field is in the same place, and has the same shape, on every page.
But it has different contents on each page. I don't see how this is a UI problem. Why is it objectionable to you?
you don't get it turning into a search bar on Google and a Knowledge base lookup on Microsoft.com.
No, you have it displaying different URL information, information pertinent to that tab.
Studied UI design and usability for years so feel free to get technical if you have a real objection.
Argument from authority is one of Slashdot's most popular logical fallacies.
An argument from authority is when I assert I'm right because I have better credentials. Telling you I have such credentials and inviting you to go into technical details, is not an appeal to authority. You're awfully defensive.
So maybe I'm just slow. Why is it a usability flaw to put the tabs above the toolbar if it removes unused whitespace and gives the user more real estate for viewing pages?
f nothing else, the wisdom of keeping a hand on the source code for urgent security fixes, rather than wait that it goes through the whole chain of Apple - WebKit - Qt - KDE.
I don't understand. How is it harder to make urgent security fixes to the open source code of KHTML rather than the open source code of Webkit? You write your patch, release the changes and compile. Now maybe Apple and Google and Nokia and other contributors to Webkit won't like your fix or implement it or pull those changes in, but I don't see why you'd have to wait for Apple to do anything in an emergency.
You mean "any other browser but Chrome"? That's a WebKit feature, and works perfectly fine in Chrome last I checked.
I do all my browsing from OS X, so I only played with Chrome briefly (no OS X version yet). When I tried it early on the feature did not function, although there was a UI component for it (it just didn't do anything).
The URL field is not part of the web page, neither is anything else in the toolbar and bookmarks bar.
What do you mean? The URL field shows you the URL of the tab you are looking at. How is that not part of the page? The toolbar items are forward, back, autofill, reload, search, and bug report. All of those, excepting search are specific to the tab you have in the forefront.
As for the bookmarks bar (I always make it go away), it is related to navigating away from the page, but I don't see how moving the tabs higher makes it any more or less useful.
Studied UI design and usability for years so feel free to get technical if you have a real objection.
Just curious... does the forcefully installed v3 advertise beta 4?
Not that I have seen. I found out the beta existed from a news article.
Agree. There's an ambiguity between "I'm clicking this to drag the window" vs. "I'm clicking this to change the active tab" that's really irritating.
I guess I don't see the problem. It works intuitively for me. I click a tab and it switches to that tab. I click a tab and hold the key down and drag and it moves the window. What use case are you having a problem with?