I read a fantastic interview with one of the lead IE developers as they were prepping the launch of IE 7. He said his daughter came home from school one day and asked him if he was responsible for breaking the web.
In the interview, he seemed to imply the current IE team feels guilty and responsible for previous versions being so poor in standards compliance, and that the new developers were pushing to make IE more complaint in the future.
Technically, they have succeeded. IE 7 and 8 are more complaint. They still however are not very compliant on the whole.
So yes, they have families. And even their beloved daughters call them out for IE's problems.
People always suggest that Apple does UI better than everyone else, but Apple hasn't been able to improve upon UI in a revolutionary way. Google however, shook up the browser market with Chrome, proving improvement was certainly possible.
Citation need: Why is it terrible?
I haven't tried the "Genius Mix" features yet which some people love so much. Back when I was a Windows only user, I tried iTunes. It refused to play my WMA collection (which was about 15,000 tracks I ripped from my CD collection). I let it try to convert all 15,000 tracks. It kept crashing, messed several of the tracks up, and took forever. Next, it refused to pull in my existing album art, and demanded a credit card number to display album art.
I said fuck it, and gave Apple my credit card number just to play my music. And then it failed to find album art for a good chunk of my music, despite the fact that I had album art already in the folders.
WMP (which I was using at the time) allowed me to search for music, or browse easily by artist, genre, album, rating, or playlist. iTunes made it much more difficult to navigate to my music. I sat scrolling all day.
Thankfully, I eventually moved to Linux and started using Amarok. Amarok automatically finds lyrics and album art. Playlists are amazingly simple and intuitive. Finding my music is simple. Amarok also makes it very simple to switch between listing to a podcast, my Last.fm account, or locally saved MP3's.
Since I purchased an iPhone, I installed iTunes again. It refuses to sync my contacts properly. As a smartphone software, it is easily the worst I have ever used. I can't edit contacts, or appointments within the app. So I had to manually type ALL of them in to the phone.
Again, iTunes started moving around my music and ringtones to a new folder structure that was anything but intuitive. In fact, it seems like it was designed to be intentionally a pain.
And to this day, the navigational controls within iTunes to find particular songs and put them in a playlist are worse than WMP and Amarok.
Aside from that, iTunes also wipes half the apps from my iPhone every once in a while during a sync. It isn't the same apps nor can I find any rhyme or reason to it, but it does the same thing with my wife's iPhone. I also can't sync my phone on my work laptop because it demands an internet connection to sync my phone locally, and the work firewall blocks it.
Why, oh why is iTunes calling home to Apple for me to sync my phone locally? Why does it refuse to sync if it can't talk to Apple?
Most iPhone users I've talked to say using iTunes is the single worse part of owning an iPhone. It almost drove me to return the phone.
Yep, its not perfect. But how does it compare to other phone UIs?
Compared to Windows Mobile, it is good in many regards. However, it has several UI regressions, even when compared to older phones. Compared to Android phones, and the new Pre, the iPhone is lacking in many regards.
No, it wouldn't, or Linux/KDE/Dolphin would be on every desktop thats running OS X instead of OS X and Finder.
Popularity does not equate to quality. Your logic suggests that Microsoft products have the best UI because everyone uses them.
However, there are tons of Linux users who purchased Macs to get away from Windows, and ended up with Linux in the end. Running Linux on Mac hardware is fairly common in the Linux community.
Dolphin would kill Finder in a UI contest because the UI is better. Popularity isn't the issue here.
I can't imagine rekonq will take over Firefox's market share. That's fine. I still recommend Firefox to people I meet who are Windows users. But Firefox is less than stellar on Linux. I also absolutely loathe GTK file dialogs.
Thankfully in openSUSE I have a found a repo where someone has a KDE 4-integrated build of Firefox.
If Google had the good sense to build Chrome with Qt from day one (where it would be faster, more efficient, and tie-in natively with WebKit) it would work basically from day 1 on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc.
Even better, the devs porting Chrome to Linux bitched about how hard it was to do the sound/audio porting to Linux. Again, if they had used Qt from day 1, the entire sound system would be much simpler with Phonon.
Unfortunately, with mammoth companies, you can disparate divisions that don't communicate or coordinate. And while Google relies completely on Linux internally, they put a huge project in the hands of Windows-only devs who knew nothing about designing an app from day 1 to be cross-platform. And the company didn't think enough to do research in the planning phase of what languages and toolkits to use.
Nokia merged a Qt 4 branch into mainline but I haven't heard anything on it in over a year, nor seen any builds of it.
Are there any builders who build Firefox on Linux? Aside from using emerge in Gentoo, I have never tried setting up a build environment for Firefox personally, but I'd really like to see Qt build of Firefox personally. However, I have greater hope for Rekonq at the moment.
I think Apple gets a lot of credit for pretty themes, and people insist they have great design and UI.
In reality, Safari is no better than Chrome or Firefox in UI.
iTunes is flat out terrible.
And my iPhone drives me up the wall with usability problems.
Certainly no one has nailed usability perfectly, but I'll take a good KDE desktop over OS X in a usability battle. Dolphin would kill Finder. The area KDE 4 would suffer from the most right now is that desktop customizations are in several different locations that aren't immediately apparent.
Except usability study after usability study showed that once you learned the ribbon, supposedly it was better, and that people found features easier that they never knew were nestled in the menus. When OOo did their usability studies, they came to the same conclusion.
You insist this hurts usability, and yet usability professionals insist otherwise.
I saw mockups on Planet Mozilla a while back that they had carefully thought about each part of UI and decided to greatly simply the UI. The mockups reminded me a great deal of Chrome.
I can't imagine the "ribbon" will look anything like Office 2007. I'm guessing they will take advantage of the ribbon API present in Vista and 7. That doesn't mean it will actually look like Office 2007. MS Paint in 7 uses the new ribbon API, and it looks really good.
Reading up on community responses to Moblin, it seems like many are not quite satisfied with the package selection, stability, and overall polish of the distro.
I'm certainly not an Ubuntu fan by any means, but one thing they do well, is have ten million packages ready for their distro. The more new distros out there that pop up, the more we fragment the community on packaging for each of these distros, and providing community support for each distro.
Conversely, the benefits Moblin provides is not suddenly primarily offered up only to those who are willing to migrate away from the distros they already enjoy, and give up the opportunity cost those distros might currently provide them.
Moblin is open-source, but if they focused their energy on simply providing a shell and optimizations for the Atom processor, that code would more easily directly benefit all existing distros, while requiring less effort on Intel's part, as opposed to creating an entire distro.
Instead of a distro, I'd rather see the Moblin concepts applied as a shell in Gnome and/or a containment in KDE 4. This is much nicer than the netbook containment concept I see the KDE 4 guys currently kicking around. However, as a complete distro, it suddenly requires package maintainers and much more support overhead. In that regard, Moblin seems to fall short.
Jokes aside regarding how I shouldn't read the article, but the article doesn't even hint at where Gnome and KDE spend their money. Once again Bruce Byfield writes an empty piece of fluff.
I would be very interested in reading a nice, detailed article on where they do spend their money.
The patent pledge is binding in that it is considered part of the EU deal. The EU has dropped the hammer on them twice, and said if they don't comply, they will drop the hammer again.
Tangentially here, people often wonder why Microsoft would spend money developing IE as a free product. IE is free, but it generates revenue in that it encourages developers to develop on other Microsoft platforms like ASP, ActiveX and IIS.
Microsoft has made promises before. Not one of them, no matter how altruistic they look, were upheld
Outright lie. Microsoft has made a number of patent pledges. The EU demanded they work on interoperability. Not only had Microsoft maintained these promises, but I'm not sure they can afford to break them in the future because of the EU. However, keep wearing that tin hat. I prefer to operate in reality.
Funny that, despite the IE team's best efforts that you claim they made, IE8 scored the absolute lowest of all web browsers in the Acid3 tests.
Another lie. IE6 can't handle the test at all. IE7 scores a 10/100. IE7 was an improvement on IE6, and IE8 scores higher than IE7. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc. are still MUCH MORE compliant, but it shows that the IE team has made progress on a more compliant browser. Again, this was a pledge they made, and honored despite your statement otherwise.
And frankly I see Mono as nothing but a patent trap.
Well, that is your paranoid opinion. The facts are that Microsoft made a patent pledge to protect Mono. Again, that pledge is part of the EU deal.
Interesting, when I first open Firefox, it gives me a choice, Google being among them, but when I open IE for the first time, it immediately takes me to MSN without a word. Are you just pulling crap out of your ass now?
Reading Comprehension 101 - I said search engine, not home page. Firefox defaults to a search engine without asking. IE asks you to pick one.
Did you even RESEARCH that point? The only reason they released them under the GPL was because someone caught them in the act of violating the GPL in the first place and was about to make it public. It had NOTHING to do with interoperability.
Again, a lie. Microsoft developed some code, which they had not released yet. They asked someone for advise. That person told them they had to license the code under the GPL to get it in the Linux kernel. Given that they hadn't released up to that point, there was no GPL violation. Had they modified GPL code, released a compiled version while denying access to the source code, or refusing to license it under the GPL, that would be a violation. Microsoft made no violation. They just didn't understand how the GPL worked initially, but did in fact comply.
Did you even research the point?
Apparently not. Fucking ACs. Grow a brain, and also grow a pair and post under your name.
Microsoft IS only playing nice because the EU is demanding it, or they are pretending to lull gullible morons like you into thinking Microsoft is suddenly wanting to be helpful to FOSS.
Or, perhaps the possibility exists that all these employees who spoke out against past Microsoft practices, said they don't believe in them, and wanted to move Microsoft in a more open direction. And note I didn't make a definitive statement, because we can't know peoples' motives for sure, but you pretend to know for sure. Wonderful assumptions on your part. You assume every Microsoft employee is a liar, and malevolent.
How are they less evil? All they have done is simply went from ignoring OSS to attempting to embrace and extend it.
They've made patent pledges not to sue, allowing others to use their patented technologies for free. Old Microsoft would never have done that.
The IE team has worked to better respect web standards. The IE team even sends open encouragement to Firefox, saying they welcome innovation and competition. I read an interview with an IE developer who said his daughter accused him of breaking the internet. Since IE 6, the IE devs have made several positive strides for far more compliant rendering.
Microsoft is assisting the Mono developers, but again Mono owns all copyright on all the code, and the code is GPL. Microsoft is also assisting the same developers with Moonlight.
When you load IE, it prompts you to choose a search engine. Firefox and other browsers simply give you a default with no choice.
Microsoft has released a boat-load of technical documentation, enabling the Samba devs to reach 100% feature parity for better interoperability.
Microsoft just released GPL code directly for the first time. It was Hyper-V drivers for Linux, which is self-serving, but it does benefit interoperability. It is possible in joint ventures like these to have a win-win. I'm fine with that.
There are plenty of examples like this. It is entirely possible that Microsoft is only playing nice because the EU is demanding it. Or it could be that they honestly want to start playing nice. Either way, the result is that Microsoft is less evil than before.
Is Ballmer still a patent troll? Yes. Is Microsoft brainwashing Best Buy employees with FUD? Yes. Was the OOXML fiasco illegal? Yes. (It is against US federal laws to bribe foreign officials). Was it illegal when Microsoft used bribes to block foreign Mandriva deals? Yes.
But Microsoft is more open than they were before. They used to be 99% evil, and now they're more like 90% evil.
Slashdot Mirror
I read a fantastic interview with one of the lead IE developers as they were prepping the launch of IE 7. He said his daughter came home from school one day and asked him if he was responsible for breaking the web.
In the interview, he seemed to imply the current IE team feels guilty and responsible for previous versions being so poor in standards compliance, and that the new developers were pushing to make IE more complaint in the future.
Technically, they have succeeded. IE 7 and 8 are more complaint. They still however are not very compliant on the whole.
So yes, they have families. And even their beloved daughters call them out for IE's problems.
That doesn't change 'apple did it right'
People always suggest that Apple does UI better than everyone else, but Apple hasn't been able to improve upon UI in a revolutionary way. Google however, shook up the browser market with Chrome, proving improvement was certainly possible.
Citation need: Why is it terrible?
I haven't tried the "Genius Mix" features yet which some people love so much. Back when I was a Windows only user, I tried iTunes. It refused to play my WMA collection (which was about 15,000 tracks I ripped from my CD collection). I let it try to convert all 15,000 tracks. It kept crashing, messed several of the tracks up, and took forever. Next, it refused to pull in my existing album art, and demanded a credit card number to display album art.
I said fuck it, and gave Apple my credit card number just to play my music. And then it failed to find album art for a good chunk of my music, despite the fact that I had album art already in the folders.
WMP (which I was using at the time) allowed me to search for music, or browse easily by artist, genre, album, rating, or playlist. iTunes made it much more difficult to navigate to my music. I sat scrolling all day.
Thankfully, I eventually moved to Linux and started using Amarok. Amarok automatically finds lyrics and album art. Playlists are amazingly simple and intuitive. Finding my music is simple. Amarok also makes it very simple to switch between listing to a podcast, my Last.fm account, or locally saved MP3's.
Since I purchased an iPhone, I installed iTunes again. It refuses to sync my contacts properly. As a smartphone software, it is easily the worst I have ever used. I can't edit contacts, or appointments within the app. So I had to manually type ALL of them in to the phone.
Again, iTunes started moving around my music and ringtones to a new folder structure that was anything but intuitive. In fact, it seems like it was designed to be intentionally a pain.
And to this day, the navigational controls within iTunes to find particular songs and put them in a playlist are worse than WMP and Amarok.
Aside from that, iTunes also wipes half the apps from my iPhone every once in a while during a sync. It isn't the same apps nor can I find any rhyme or reason to it, but it does the same thing with my wife's iPhone. I also can't sync my phone on my work laptop because it demands an internet connection to sync my phone locally, and the work firewall blocks it.
Why, oh why is iTunes calling home to Apple for me to sync my phone locally? Why does it refuse to sync if it can't talk to Apple?
Most iPhone users I've talked to say using iTunes is the single worse part of owning an iPhone. It almost drove me to return the phone.
Yep, its not perfect. But how does it compare to other phone UIs?
Compared to Windows Mobile, it is good in many regards. However, it has several UI regressions, even when compared to older phones. Compared to Android phones, and the new Pre, the iPhone is lacking in many regards.
No, it wouldn't, or Linux/KDE/Dolphin would be on every desktop thats running OS X instead of OS X and Finder.
Popularity does not equate to quality. Your logic suggests that Microsoft products have the best UI because everyone uses them.
However, there are tons of Linux users who purchased Macs to get away from Windows, and ended up with Linux in the end. Running Linux on Mac hardware is fairly common in the Linux community.
Dolphin would kill Finder in a UI contest because the UI is better. Popularity isn't the issue here.
I can't imagine rekonq will take over Firefox's market share. That's fine. I still recommend Firefox to people I meet who are Windows users. But Firefox is less than stellar on Linux. I also absolutely loathe GTK file dialogs.
Thankfully in openSUSE I have a found a repo where someone has a KDE 4-integrated build of Firefox.
http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/FirefoxIntegration
If Google had the good sense to build Chrome with Qt from day one (where it would be faster, more efficient, and tie-in natively with WebKit) it would work basically from day 1 on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc.
Even better, the devs porting Chrome to Linux bitched about how hard it was to do the sound/audio porting to Linux. Again, if they had used Qt from day 1, the entire sound system would be much simpler with Phonon.
Unfortunately, with mammoth companies, you can disparate divisions that don't communicate or coordinate. And while Google relies completely on Linux internally, they put a huge project in the hands of Windows-only devs who knew nothing about designing an app from day 1 to be cross-platform. And the company didn't think enough to do research in the planning phase of what languages and toolkits to use.
The awesomebar has gotten better since it was first launched. That being said, Chrome has the best implementation of it.
And you can always just run Firefox 2.x if you want. Nothing is stopping you.
Nokia merged a Qt 4 branch into mainline but I haven't heard anything on it in over a year, nor seen any builds of it.
Are there any builders who build Firefox on Linux? Aside from using emerge in Gentoo, I have never tried setting up a build environment for Firefox personally, but I'd really like to see Qt build of Firefox personally. However, I have greater hope for Rekonq at the moment.
http://rekonq.sourceforge.net/
Stylish makes it easy to skin the browser UI, but not sites.
You can skin sites easily with Greasemonkey however.
I think Apple gets a lot of credit for pretty themes, and people insist they have great design and UI.
In reality, Safari is no better than Chrome or Firefox in UI.
iTunes is flat out terrible.
And my iPhone drives me up the wall with usability problems.
Certainly no one has nailed usability perfectly, but I'll take a good KDE desktop over OS X in a usability battle. Dolphin would kill Finder. The area KDE 4 would suffer from the most right now is that desktop customizations are in several different locations that aren't immediately apparent.
Except usability study after usability study showed that once you learned the ribbon, supposedly it was better, and that people found features easier that they never knew were nestled in the menus. When OOo did their usability studies, they came to the same conclusion.
You insist this hurts usability, and yet usability professionals insist otherwise.
I saw mockups on Planet Mozilla a while back that they had carefully thought about each part of UI and decided to greatly simply the UI. The mockups reminded me a great deal of Chrome.
I can't imagine the "ribbon" will look anything like Office 2007. I'm guessing they will take advantage of the ribbon API present in Vista and 7. That doesn't mean it will actually look like Office 2007. MS Paint in 7 uses the new ribbon API, and it looks really good.
The solution is clearly ice-nine.
Microsoft is pushing IPv6. Many people will be switching to IPv6 and not even realize it.
Reading up on community responses to Moblin, it seems like many are not quite satisfied with the package selection, stability, and overall polish of the distro.
I'm certainly not an Ubuntu fan by any means, but one thing they do well, is have ten million packages ready for their distro. The more new distros out there that pop up, the more we fragment the community on packaging for each of these distros, and providing community support for each distro.
Conversely, the benefits Moblin provides is not suddenly primarily offered up only to those who are willing to migrate away from the distros they already enjoy, and give up the opportunity cost those distros might currently provide them.
Moblin is open-source, but if they focused their energy on simply providing a shell and optimizations for the Atom processor, that code would more easily directly benefit all existing distros, while requiring less effort on Intel's part, as opposed to creating an entire distro.
There is a fairly recent port, but it is also a Mozilla port, as opposed to a Firefox port.
http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/
It looks like they basically are trying to update the 6 year old Mozilla for OS 9 with all the updates Mozilla/Firefox has seen since then.
Instead of a distro, I'd rather see the Moblin concepts applied as a shell in Gnome and/or a containment in KDE 4. This is much nicer than the netbook containment concept I see the KDE 4 guys currently kicking around. However, as a complete distro, it suddenly requires package maintainers and much more support overhead. In that regard, Moblin seems to fall short.
But, rest assured, Hurd development should proceed very rapidly.
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/faq.html
This is truly fantastic.
Q3. Why bother writing a new OS when we have Linux and 386/BSD?
For one thing, Linux and BSD don't scale well.
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/faq.html
I was going to say GEOS, but apparently that is still around in some form.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
http://www.breadbox.com/
Amazing.
The user should look up the Mozilla Firefox ports to OS 9.
Jokes aside regarding how I shouldn't read the article, but the article doesn't even hint at where Gnome and KDE spend their money. Once again Bruce Byfield writes an empty piece of fluff.
I would be very interested in reading a nice, detailed article on where they do spend their money.
The patent pledge is binding in that it is considered part of the EU deal. The EU has dropped the hammer on them twice, and said if they don't comply, they will drop the hammer again.
It is legally binding.
If you think the core evil of Microsoft is Gates, then Microsoft should be less evil since Gates isn't in charge of day-to-day operations anymore.
Very good point.
Tangentially here, people often wonder why Microsoft would spend money developing IE as a free product. IE is free, but it generates revenue in that it encourages developers to develop on other Microsoft platforms like ASP, ActiveX and IIS.
Microsoft has made promises before. Not one of them, no matter how altruistic they look, were upheld
Outright lie. Microsoft has made a number of patent pledges. The EU demanded they work on interoperability. Not only had Microsoft maintained these promises, but I'm not sure they can afford to break them in the future because of the EU. However, keep wearing that tin hat. I prefer to operate in reality.
Funny that, despite the IE team's best efforts that you claim they made, IE8 scored the absolute lowest of all web browsers in the Acid3 tests.
Another lie. IE6 can't handle the test at all. IE7 scores a 10/100. IE7 was an improvement on IE6, and IE8 scores higher than IE7. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc. are still MUCH MORE compliant, but it shows that the IE team has made progress on a more compliant browser. Again, this was a pledge they made, and honored despite your statement otherwise.
And frankly I see Mono as nothing but a patent trap.
Well, that is your paranoid opinion. The facts are that Microsoft made a patent pledge to protect Mono. Again, that pledge is part of the EU deal.
Interesting, when I first open Firefox, it gives me a choice, Google being among them, but when I open IE for the first time, it immediately takes me to MSN without a word. Are you just pulling crap out of your ass now?
Reading Comprehension 101 - I said search engine, not home page. Firefox defaults to a search engine without asking. IE asks you to pick one.
Did you even RESEARCH that point? The only reason they released them under the GPL was because someone caught them in the act of violating the GPL in the first place and was about to make it public. It had NOTHING to do with interoperability.
Again, a lie. Microsoft developed some code, which they had not released yet. They asked someone for advise. That person told them they had to license the code under the GPL to get it in the Linux kernel. Given that they hadn't released up to that point, there was no GPL violation. Had they modified GPL code, released a compiled version while denying access to the source code, or refusing to license it under the GPL, that would be a violation. Microsoft made no violation. They just didn't understand how the GPL worked initially, but did in fact comply.
Did you even research the point?
Apparently not. Fucking ACs. Grow a brain, and also grow a pair and post under your name.
Microsoft IS only playing nice because the EU is demanding it, or they are pretending to lull gullible morons like you into thinking Microsoft is suddenly wanting to be helpful to FOSS.
Or, perhaps the possibility exists that all these employees who spoke out against past Microsoft practices, said they don't believe in them, and wanted to move Microsoft in a more open direction. And note I didn't make a definitive statement, because we can't know peoples' motives for sure, but you pretend to know for sure. Wonderful assumptions on your part. You assume every Microsoft employee is a liar, and malevolent.
How are they less evil? All they have done is simply went from ignoring OSS to attempting to embrace and extend it.
They've made patent pledges not to sue, allowing others to use their patented technologies for free. Old Microsoft would never have done that.
The IE team has worked to better respect web standards. The IE team even sends open encouragement to Firefox, saying they welcome innovation and competition. I read an interview with an IE developer who said his daughter accused him of breaking the internet. Since IE 6, the IE devs have made several positive strides for far more compliant rendering.
Microsoft is assisting the Mono developers, but again Mono owns all copyright on all the code, and the code is GPL. Microsoft is also assisting the same developers with Moonlight.
When you load IE, it prompts you to choose a search engine. Firefox and other browsers simply give you a default with no choice.
Microsoft has released a boat-load of technical documentation, enabling the Samba devs to reach 100% feature parity for better interoperability.
Microsoft just released GPL code directly for the first time. It was Hyper-V drivers for Linux, which is self-serving, but it does benefit interoperability. It is possible in joint ventures like these to have a win-win. I'm fine with that.
There are plenty of examples like this. It is entirely possible that Microsoft is only playing nice because the EU is demanding it. Or it could be that they honestly want to start playing nice. Either way, the result is that Microsoft is less evil than before.
Is Ballmer still a patent troll? Yes. Is Microsoft brainwashing Best Buy employees with FUD? Yes. Was the OOXML fiasco illegal? Yes. (It is against US federal laws to bribe foreign officials). Was it illegal when Microsoft used bribes to block foreign Mandriva deals? Yes.
But Microsoft is more open than they were before. They used to be 99% evil, and now they're more like 90% evil.