One pattern does seem clear: once FLOSS gets a start in an area, it appears to attain supremacy within about five to ten years. And once FLOSS takes a niche, proprietary software never takes it back.
Can you cite an example or two, please?
Open source OSes have had GUIs for ten years, but I don't see any threat to OS X or Windows anytime soon. GIMP is over 10 years old, and I'm not seeing Adobe quaking in their boots.
Honestly, most commercial software just plain sucks. Not from a "I can't copy this or modify the source" way but the fact that it breaks, has outdated documentation, gives cryptic error messages.
Most software period sucks. I've tried using Linux before, don't try to tell me it has non-cryptic error messages.
About the only commercial software I would call "good" would be some proprietary games.
Are you joking? All games suck. Even World of Warcraft, which is probably the best-coded game out there, has irritating bugs all over it. (For instance, in Windowed mode it doesn't save window size or position. The Mac version does, because I nagged one of their Mac developers about it, but I haven't figured out how to get the message to the Windows version. The UI Add-Ons are stored in the Program Files folder, which is multiple levels of failure right there. Etc.)
If you try an EA game, say Battlefield: 2142, you'll pluck your eyeballs out it's such a giant POS. In the games field, "runs for an hour without crashing" is considered high quality.
I'm starting to think you actually live in Bizarro world here and not Earth.
a program that can easily be replaced with a F/OSS solution or a horrible UI.
And as an added bonus, the F/OSS solution will have a horrible UI so you can kill two birds with one stone!
Thanks for the honest reply, but I have to take issues with a few points. I'm one of the rare few on Slashdot known as the "happy Windows user."
1) I agree; this was the beauty of Classic Mac OS. One of the reasons I moved to Windows is that Classic, which was implemented in something like 100 easy-to-understand clearly-named files changed into OS X, which is implemented as 400,000 tiny randomly-named files in a confusing directory structure... just like Windows.
2) It seems to me that Vista has security pretty much down. The only security issues in the news recently have been Flash, and IE 7 runs on a security sandbox. The part of security they haven't solved is "ignorant user hits 'Ok' several times to install malware", and I'm not sure there is anything they can do to solve that one.
3) That is subjective, but you do have a point as well. What's amazing to me isn't that people find the XP look ugly, it's that some of those people then switch to the 'shiny silver and olive' version of the theme, which is hideous. Still, Microsoft could do a better job of engaging graphics design when developing their interface. (And you have to admit, Vista is a huge improvement, even if you're not running Aero.)
4) Half of those issues are third-party software, which Microsoft can't do a lot about. If you install Windows on a machine that meets the requirements, and nothing else, it will be snappy and won't interrupt your typing. The problem is that you then go on to install dozens of other programs, and God knows what they do. One of the big advantages that OS X has is that Apple's 3rd party developers actually care about the quality of the software they produce. I have no idea what Apple did to make this happen.
5) Windows is stable when paired with stable hardware. Enough said.
Oh boy, they're giving the world really greasy, dirty screens and cute, useless time wasters! Good thing they're working on that instead of security, useability, or generally making it not suck.
"They're wasting time working on a usability feature when they should be working on usability!"
Brilliant thinking went into your post.
In any case, the Windows team has thousands of programs. What evidence do you have that they're not working on security or "generally making it not suck?" (Which, BTW, I think belongs in the Guiness Book of World Records in the 'easier said than done' category.)
I for one am about 10x faster with a mouse than my fingers and a bunch of tilted, 3D objects lying around in my programs is gonna drive me crazy.
Then don't use it. I have a tablet PC I plug a mouse into for that very reason. What evidence do you have that Microsoft is going to remove mouse support?
I think they're actually determined to turn windows into an idiot's OS for new computer users and 10 year olds and all the serious people will use Linux.
Not to mention that there is no support for this. After all, how many people/corporations buying commodity windows hardware are going to pay the premium to get all their screens with high quality touch?
That's a ridiculous argument. Both OS X and Windows have tablet computer features, but not all computers are tablets! (Hell, Apple doesn't even make a tablet, unless you count the iPhone or that 3rd party iBook mod.) Both OS X and Windows have voice recognition features, but not all computers have microphones!
Do you think it's possible, it just might, in a million years, be possible that Windows 7 will be usable without a multi-touch monitor? Just like XP, Vista and OS X are usable without tablet PCs and microphones?
Also, pie menu is interesting, but problematic. Does it float over the other windows or sit under? Can it be moved around? Will we have to alt-tab to get to the Start menu? How nice will it play with multiple screen setups and other non standard desktop layouts?
This is a pre-alpha preview. Just relax and let them develop the damned thing; it's pointless to shoot holes in the idea at this point.
Do you honestly believe there is anything Microsoft can do to make that commenter, or yourself, happy?
They introduce your bare-bones Windows 2000-like OS, and suddenly everyone complains that OS X has all these media and other features that Windows doesn't have. Microsoft is firmly in the "damned if they do; damned if they don't" camp at this point.
Just let them make what they make. If you like it, buy it. If you don't, don't.
The point isn't that Superman 3 invented it, the point is that most people first heard of it from watching Superman 3 and so when you're trying to explain to people what you're doing, you can say "you know, like Superman 3" and they know what you mean. Thus the joke in Office Space:
A: B: "Huh?" A: "You know, like in Superman 3." B: "Oooh, now I get it."
It's funny, damnit. Made funnier than Superman 3 is actually a pretty awful movie. (But it's an awful movie that most everybody's seen.)
When's the last time you actually installed Windows? Windows XP and Vista have so many generic drivers that you'll do just as well as you would with Linux, with the added bonus that some of the things Linux has trouble with (like wifi) Windows can find drivers for easily.
Why would ANYBODY go buy a random PC and then just expect Linux to work on it? WTF?
Why wouldn't they? Windows works that way. The only OS that doesn't is Mac OS X, and everybody knows you need to buy an Apple machine to use it, so it's a non-issue there as well.
Opera doesn't cost money to use in the desktop (anymore). And Opera will never cost money again in the desktop. No company is that suicidal. They survive by google search profits, just as firefox does.
Christ. But we were TALKING about the long period of time between Netscape 4 and Netscape 6, and Opera did cost money then. Make sure you keep the context in-mind when you reply.:P
I wonder if game developers have ever even considered that some piracy occurs because the gamers cannot afford the games themselves.
I'm sure X% of people pirate games because they can't afford it. That said, "can't afford" is a very fluid notion-- I have a step-sister who "can't afford" health insurance, but just bought a brand new 42" TV. She sees no problem with that.
Frankly, people who genuinely can't afford games probably also can't afford computers or consoles to run the games on. People who claim they can't afford games are probably lying.
Adding a chip that prevents piracy wont result in any additional income from people who simply cannot afford the games to begin with.
Probably, but it might result in a huge amount of additional income from people who can afford the games and pirate them anyway. A group you're leaving out in your analysis.:)
You will have the perfect copy-protection, but only a select few will buy your game.
How do you figure that?
What if GTA V was released next year with perfect copy-protection? Are you saying that only a few will buy it, and the rest won't to make a point against copy-protection? Or are you saying that the "perfect" copy-protection would be so expensive and arduous that only a select few will buy into it?
I know I'm just griping at this point, but that really really should have been addressed before the last release. Didn't anybody at Mozilla try using the browser with a lot of downloads listed? Did they just not care that it took forever for the tiny window to display, and while it was doing that the whole app was locked-up? Nothing against the development, but the testing needs some major work if the testers weren't able to get that fixed before release.
I can't use middle click scrolling with pixel accuracy in the others as I can with Opera.
And... when would I ever want to do that?
That said, the middle-click scrolling in Firefox definitely goes one pixel at-a-time, at least in Windows. So it sounds like Opera doesn't have an edge there. (Of course, I use the good ol' scrollwheel anyway.)
I can't switch tabs holding the right mouse button and moving the wheel in the others as I can with Opera.
Ok, but you could also just left-click the tab you want. And the tabs are hideously ugly in Opera, at least in the version I tried about a year ago.
All this features were in Opera in that time period AFAIR. Opera is not perfect, but you saying that it has/had crappy usability is pure bullshit.
Ah, but you're confusing "usability" with "fancy features." A lot of applications have dozens of fancy features, and yet aren't usable at all-- take Azureus as an example. Or the current bane of my existence, VLC. On Macintosh at least, Opera loved to use its own mutant widgets that looked, but didn't act, like the OS default ones in an infuriating manner. That's not good usability in my book.
I'm glad you like Opera, and I have no problem with it. Even if I concede the fact that Opera is very usable, there's still the matter of its costing $$$ when IE and Firefox don't.
As long as the programmers are completely, entirely, aware of the psychological and strategic importance of the decision, I'm fine with it. The problem is, most people don't recognize NIH when they see it-- they really do think the code is a total mess, and that there's no way out other than a total rewrite. I've refactored some relatively large programs from C into C++ (about 100,000 lines) without ever creating a broken version in the process. It takes a long time, but it's a lot shorter than it takes to re-write and it maintains all those "hairs" that represent bug fixes as well.
If you read Joel's review of Netscape 6: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html you'll see that in this case, he was entirely right. If Mozilla/Netscape used their existing test-cases, it sure didn't show in the final product which was more of a flaming pile of shit than Netscape 4 was, regardless of how much "cleaner" the code was.
Considering that innerHTML can contain HTML and not just text, it makes sense that it is named the way that it is.
That was a typo. I corrected it. I meant to compare "innerText" with "textContent", which is an apples-to-apples comparison.
Perhaps if you had more familiarity with CSS you'd realize just how broken Internet Explorer is. IE failing to properly render valid HTML/CSS that displays correctly in all other browsers is far too common, and more often than not, IE6 and IE7 can be counted upon to break it in entirely different manners.
And that affects the user experience... how?
Look, the beginning and the end of the matter is that making a browser more compliant to standards only helps web developers. Users don't care, will never care, and shouldn't have to care. This is the point I want to hammer into the head of every single person who goes on and on about web standards-- only (some) web developers care!
And since web developers still need to maintain their sites for older browsers, and browsers still have to keep older non-compliant rendering modes (both IE and Firefox have "quirks mode"), then I don't see it as a huge feature. I'd rather than focus on features that directly help the user, and let web developers handle themselves. (After all, they're developers, they should be able to handle the complexity.)
Yeah, but if you boot of a CD that's capable of reading the HD, why bother with the passwords? Just directly add your keylogger to the startup items folder or registry or steal whatever files you were going to steal.
The best way to block this attack, on ANY OS, is a cage with a padlock. Linux, OS X, and Windows all have single-user diagnostic modes that can easily be used with a boot disk.
Maybe he's a troll, but he makes a good point. The standards body seems to be entirely unaware that there are thousands, if not millions, of unmaintained websites out there that will never be upgraded from what they are now, whether they are bog-standard HTML 4 or some browser-detection-script mess of crap from the 4.0 era. Blindly following standards is a waste of effort if it significantly breaks websites... look at the current builds of IE8 if you want to get an idea of how much the web sucks when all sites are in "standards mode".
Both browsers, IE and FF alike, have to draw a balance between supporting standards and supporting existing websites. Some websites will break, undoubtedly. You also need to be aware that the point of the standards are for making better websites... if the user's favorite site breaks, that's extremely counter-productive. Sometimes I think web developers forget the user focus... Firefox being more "standards-compliant" doesn't help you or the user if your site doesn't work in IE6.
Obviously, you're not a web developer, because "performs better" and IE really don't fit together, especially when it comes to rendering web pages in a standards-compliant manner.
Actually, I am a web developer. My script runs the exact same speed in both browsers, I think IE "performs better" in that the IE team made some better decisions when differing from the standards. (For instance, the property name "innerText" makes a hell of a lot more sense than "innerHTML." The fact that Firefox won't just swallow its pride and alias "innerText" to do the same thing it does on IE is a constant thorn in my paw. "Object" tags with IDs are a better solution for Flash than Firefox's "Embed" tags, although now more and more sites are using Object in FF which is nice.)
I might be biased from my history, but IE also had a lot of little niceties it does with Javascript that Firefox doesn't reproduce. For instance, you can easily and automatically refer to tables as a 2-dimensional array. Firefox does have better development tools, though.
As for rendering webpages in a standards-compliant manner, as soon as there's a reference implementation, I might buy that. For the moment, the standards are vague, there's no reference implementation, and the standards body primarily seem to be of the extremely foolish mindset that webpages never become un-maintained, and everybody will instantly adopt your shiny new standard the instant its improved. ("Fixing" HTML by creating XHTML just makes two mostly-but-not-quite-identical standards that all browsers and devices have to support for eternity instead of one. Good work.)
In fact, without a reference implementation, I don't think there even should be a standard. It's easy to sit up in an ivory tower and think up shit to put in HTML/XHTML, but without actually writing the software you'll end up with shit that can't be implemented, or you'll miss the three dozen holes and vagaries in your spec. Let's see the reference implementation, then maybe the standards will get some respect.
(Oh, and hey guys, my web sites already do separate content and presentation-- it's called a "CMS"! I appreciate the bandwidth savings of CSS, but that whole content and presentation separation thing was already taken care of.)
For the time-being, the standard is "whatever you have to do to make the page look good in all browsers," and that work is taken care of by the web designer, not the consumer. I don't see anything on the horizon that will make that change significantly. Sure, the job gets easier for the web designer as older browsers fall out of use (at a glacial page; even today you'd be a fool to break IE 5 compatibility), but the end-user isn't going to see any kind of holy grail of improvement from using a "standards-compliant" browser.
I've not seen Firefox behave as badly as you describe; are you using Vista with less than 2GB of RAM?;)
I dunno if you were trying to make an extremely lame "Vista sucks" joke or not with that smiley. The download window in Firefox is slow on my home computer (Vista with 2GB of RAM, if you must know) and my work computer (XP Pro with 2GB), so it's not the computer.
Recently, I had to re-install Firefox because of a bug my cat triggered while sleeping on the keyboard; somehow I got FF into a mode where every time I clicked on page content, it gave me an insertion cursor, even for non-editable text. I browsed around in about:config for awhile, but I couldn't find jack, so I eventually just gave up and re-installed. That's a sign of quality right there. (Thank God for Google Browser Sync.)
I've been using the nightly builds as my primary browser for over four months, and they've worked great. 3.0 is definitely faster and more responsive than 2.0, and the improvements to the location bar are very welcome, to the point where I can't imagine wanting to browse the web without them.
Good, I like having good browsers. I'd love it if Firefox spent a little time implementing the nice touches that IE has, or at least making the property names consistent.
1) Opera wasn't free during this period of time. Not being free, it's not really in the same "market." 2) Opera, historically, has had crappy usability. It's better now, but it still has a much worse interface than both IE and Firefox, and is generally more annoying to use. Back during the era we're talking about, Opera's interface was crap.
It's kind of a weird feedback loop. The only reason Firefox is competitive now is because IE didn't get worked on for several years; the reason IE didn't get worked on is that it had no competitive browsers.
BTW, I'm not sure you're aware of this, but Joel Spolsky wrote an article about rewriting software from scratch, titled "Things You Should Never Do": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Personally, I'm with you, I agree with every word he says.
(He also writes a later article, I can't find it at the moment, where he describes Netscape release schedule: * Release whatever you have with no cleanup or testing, call it version x.0 * Whenever there's a bug severe enough to get covered in the New York Times, bump the version number up a point Sadly, far too many open source projects use that same release philosophy.)
I'm not a huge fan of Firefox (I think IE7 performs better, generally), but I also think the level of "bloat" is simply normal for a web browser in this day and age. Browsers are page layout programs, even worse than that, page layout programs where the layout can be changed with scripting at any second.
What's bugging me more about Firefox isn't the level of "bloat", it's the responsiveness. It shouldn't take over 5 seconds for the download window to display, it doesn't matter how long my download history is. (And the browser shouldn't be entirely locked-up while it's opening!) Hopefully FF3 will take care of some of those issues.
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One pattern does seem clear: once FLOSS gets a start in an area, it appears to attain supremacy within about five to ten years. And once FLOSS takes a niche, proprietary software never takes it back.
Can you cite an example or two, please?
Open source OSes have had GUIs for ten years, but I don't see any threat to OS X or Windows anytime soon. GIMP is over 10 years old, and I'm not seeing Adobe quaking in their boots.
Honestly, most commercial software just plain sucks. Not from a "I can't copy this or modify the source" way but the fact that it breaks, has outdated documentation, gives cryptic error messages.
Most software period sucks. I've tried using Linux before, don't try to tell me it has non-cryptic error messages.
About the only commercial software I would call "good" would be some proprietary games.
Are you joking? All games suck. Even World of Warcraft, which is probably the best-coded game out there, has irritating bugs all over it. (For instance, in Windowed mode it doesn't save window size or position. The Mac version does, because I nagged one of their Mac developers about it, but I haven't figured out how to get the message to the Windows version. The UI Add-Ons are stored in the Program Files folder, which is multiple levels of failure right there. Etc.)
If you try an EA game, say Battlefield: 2142, you'll pluck your eyeballs out it's such a giant POS. In the games field, "runs for an hour without crashing" is considered high quality.
I'm starting to think you actually live in Bizarro world here and not Earth.
a program that can easily be replaced with a F/OSS solution or a horrible UI.
And as an added bonus, the F/OSS solution will have a horrible UI so you can kill two birds with one stone!
Thanks for the honest reply, but I have to take issues with a few points. I'm one of the rare few on Slashdot known as the "happy Windows user."
1) I agree; this was the beauty of Classic Mac OS. One of the reasons I moved to Windows is that Classic, which was implemented in something like 100 easy-to-understand clearly-named files changed into OS X, which is implemented as 400,000 tiny randomly-named files in a confusing directory structure... just like Windows.
2) It seems to me that Vista has security pretty much down. The only security issues in the news recently have been Flash, and IE 7 runs on a security sandbox. The part of security they haven't solved is "ignorant user hits 'Ok' several times to install malware", and I'm not sure there is anything they can do to solve that one.
3) That is subjective, but you do have a point as well. What's amazing to me isn't that people find the XP look ugly, it's that some of those people then switch to the 'shiny silver and olive' version of the theme, which is hideous. Still, Microsoft could do a better job of engaging graphics design when developing their interface. (And you have to admit, Vista is a huge improvement, even if you're not running Aero.)
4) Half of those issues are third-party software, which Microsoft can't do a lot about. If you install Windows on a machine that meets the requirements, and nothing else, it will be snappy and won't interrupt your typing. The problem is that you then go on to install dozens of other programs, and God knows what they do. One of the big advantages that OS X has is that Apple's 3rd party developers actually care about the quality of the software they produce. I have no idea what Apple did to make this happen.
5) Windows is stable when paired with stable hardware. Enough said.
Oh boy, they're giving the world really greasy, dirty screens and cute, useless time wasters! Good thing they're working on that instead of security, useability, or generally making it not suck.
"They're wasting time working on a usability feature when they should be working on usability!"
Brilliant thinking went into your post.
In any case, the Windows team has thousands of programs. What evidence do you have that they're not working on security or "generally making it not suck?" (Which, BTW, I think belongs in the Guiness Book of World Records in the 'easier said than done' category.)
I for one am about 10x faster with a mouse than my fingers and a bunch of tilted, 3D objects lying around in my programs is gonna drive me crazy.
Then don't use it. I have a tablet PC I plug a mouse into for that very reason. What evidence do you have that Microsoft is going to remove mouse support?
I think they're actually determined to turn windows into an idiot's OS for new computer users and 10 year olds and all the serious people will use Linux.
Yeah; just like the last 3 releases of Windows.
Not to mention that there is no support for this. After all, how many people/corporations buying commodity windows hardware are going to pay the premium to get all their screens with high quality touch?
That's a ridiculous argument. Both OS X and Windows have tablet computer features, but not all computers are tablets! (Hell, Apple doesn't even make a tablet, unless you count the iPhone or that 3rd party iBook mod.) Both OS X and Windows have voice recognition features, but not all computers have microphones!
Do you think it's possible, it just might, in a million years, be possible that Windows 7 will be usable without a multi-touch monitor? Just like XP, Vista and OS X are usable without tablet PCs and microphones?
Also, pie menu is interesting, but problematic. Does it float over the other windows or sit under? Can it be moved around? Will we have to alt-tab to get to the Start menu? How nice will it play with multiple screen setups and other non standard desktop layouts?
This is a pre-alpha preview. Just relax and let them develop the damned thing; it's pointless to shoot holes in the idea at this point.
Do you honestly believe there is anything Microsoft can do to make that commenter, or yourself, happy?
They introduce your bare-bones Windows 2000-like OS, and suddenly everyone complains that OS X has all these media and other features that Windows doesn't have. Microsoft is firmly in the "damned if they do; damned if they don't" camp at this point.
Just let them make what they make. If you like it, buy it. If you don't, don't.
The point isn't that Superman 3 invented it, the point is that most people first heard of it from watching Superman 3 and so when you're trying to explain to people what you're doing, you can say "you know, like Superman 3" and they know what you mean. Thus the joke in Office Space:
A:
B: "Huh?"
A: "You know, like in Superman 3."
B: "Oooh, now I get it."
It's funny, damnit. Made funnier than Superman 3 is actually a pretty awful movie. (But it's an awful movie that most everybody's seen.)
At this point I am hoping Clinton does get the nomination.
Ah, but Clinton wants the federal government to censor video games, and that's an issue that I care about much more than the space program.
Really, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
When's the last time you actually installed Windows? Windows XP and Vista have so many generic drivers that you'll do just as well as you would with Linux, with the added bonus that some of the things Linux has trouble with (like wifi) Windows can find drivers for easily.
Why would ANYBODY go buy a random PC and then just expect Linux to work on it? WTF?
Why wouldn't they? Windows works that way. The only OS that doesn't is Mac OS X, and everybody knows you need to buy an Apple machine to use it, so it's a non-issue there as well.
Opera doesn't cost money to use in the desktop (anymore). And Opera will never cost money again in the desktop. No company is that suicidal. They survive by google search profits, just as firefox does.
:P
Christ. But we were TALKING about the long period of time between Netscape 4 and Netscape 6, and Opera did cost money then. Make sure you keep the context in-mind when you reply.
Out of curiosity, how would I tell if my computers have one or not?
I have a Dell Inspiron 530 desktop, stock except the video card, and a HP Pavilion tx1000.
I wonder if game developers have ever even considered that some piracy occurs because the gamers cannot afford the games themselves.
:)
I'm sure X% of people pirate games because they can't afford it. That said, "can't afford" is a very fluid notion-- I have a step-sister who "can't afford" health insurance, but just bought a brand new 42" TV. She sees no problem with that.
Frankly, people who genuinely can't afford games probably also can't afford computers or consoles to run the games on. People who claim they can't afford games are probably lying.
Adding a chip that prevents piracy wont result in any additional income from people who simply cannot afford the games to begin with.
Probably, but it might result in a huge amount of additional income from people who can afford the games and pirate them anyway. A group you're leaving out in your analysis.
You will have the perfect copy-protection, but only a select few will buy your game.
How do you figure that?
What if GTA V was released next year with perfect copy-protection? Are you saying that only a few will buy it, and the rest won't to make a point against copy-protection? Or are you saying that the "perfect" copy-protection would be so expensive and arduous that only a select few will buy into it?
Please clarify.
I know I'm just griping at this point, but that really really should have been addressed before the last release. Didn't anybody at Mozilla try using the browser with a lot of downloads listed? Did they just not care that it took forever for the tiny window to display, and while it was doing that the whole app was locked-up? Nothing against the development, but the testing needs some major work if the testers weren't able to get that fixed before release.
I can't use middle click scrolling with pixel accuracy in the others as I can with Opera.
And... when would I ever want to do that?
That said, the middle-click scrolling in Firefox definitely goes one pixel at-a-time, at least in Windows. So it sounds like Opera doesn't have an edge there. (Of course, I use the good ol' scrollwheel anyway.)
I can't switch tabs holding the right mouse button and moving the wheel in the others as I can with Opera.
Ok, but you could also just left-click the tab you want. And the tabs are hideously ugly in Opera, at least in the version I tried about a year ago.
All this features were in Opera in that time period AFAIR. Opera is not perfect, but you saying that it has/had crappy usability is pure bullshit.
Ah, but you're confusing "usability" with "fancy features." A lot of applications have dozens of fancy features, and yet aren't usable at all-- take Azureus as an example. Or the current bane of my existence, VLC. On Macintosh at least, Opera loved to use its own mutant widgets that looked, but didn't act, like the OS default ones in an infuriating manner. That's not good usability in my book.
I'm glad you like Opera, and I have no problem with it. Even if I concede the fact that Opera is very usable, there's still the matter of its costing $$$ when IE and Firefox don't.
As long as the programmers are completely, entirely, aware of the psychological and strategic importance of the decision, I'm fine with it. The problem is, most people don't recognize NIH when they see it-- they really do think the code is a total mess, and that there's no way out other than a total rewrite. I've refactored some relatively large programs from C into C++ (about 100,000 lines) without ever creating a broken version in the process. It takes a long time, but it's a lot shorter than it takes to re-write and it maintains all those "hairs" that represent bug fixes as well.
If you read Joel's review of Netscape 6: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html you'll see that in this case, he was entirely right. If Mozilla/Netscape used their existing test-cases, it sure didn't show in the final product which was more of a flaming pile of shit than Netscape 4 was, regardless of how much "cleaner" the code was.
Considering that innerHTML can contain HTML and not just text, it makes sense that it is named the way that it is.
That was a typo. I corrected it. I meant to compare "innerText" with "textContent", which is an apples-to-apples comparison.
Perhaps if you had more familiarity with CSS you'd realize just how broken Internet Explorer is. IE failing to properly render valid HTML/CSS that displays correctly in all other browsers is far too common, and more often than not, IE6 and IE7 can be counted upon to break it in entirely different manners.
And that affects the user experience... how?
Look, the beginning and the end of the matter is that making a browser more compliant to standards only helps web developers. Users don't care, will never care, and shouldn't have to care. This is the point I want to hammer into the head of every single person who goes on and on about web standards-- only (some) web developers care!
And since web developers still need to maintain their sites for older browsers, and browsers still have to keep older non-compliant rendering modes (both IE and Firefox have "quirks mode"), then I don't see it as a huge feature. I'd rather than focus on features that directly help the user, and let web developers handle themselves. (After all, they're developers, they should be able to handle the complexity.)
Yeah, but if you boot of a CD that's capable of reading the HD, why bother with the passwords? Just directly add your keylogger to the startup items folder or registry or steal whatever files you were going to steal.
The best way to block this attack, on ANY OS, is a cage with a padlock. Linux, OS X, and Windows all have single-user diagnostic modes that can easily be used with a boot disk.
Maybe he's a troll, but he makes a good point. The standards body seems to be entirely unaware that there are thousands, if not millions, of unmaintained websites out there that will never be upgraded from what they are now, whether they are bog-standard HTML 4 or some browser-detection-script mess of crap from the 4.0 era. Blindly following standards is a waste of effort if it significantly breaks websites... look at the current builds of IE8 if you want to get an idea of how much the web sucks when all sites are in "standards mode".
Both browsers, IE and FF alike, have to draw a balance between supporting standards and supporting existing websites. Some websites will break, undoubtedly. You also need to be aware that the point of the standards are for making better websites... if the user's favorite site breaks, that's extremely counter-productive. Sometimes I think web developers forget the user focus... Firefox being more "standards-compliant" doesn't help you or the user if your site doesn't work in IE6.
GRAH! Sorry, nasty typos:
For instance, the property name "innerText" makes a hell of a lot more sense than "innerHTML."
Supposed to read:
For instance, the property name "innerText" makes a hell of a lot more sense than "textContent."
Obviously, you're not a web developer, because "performs better" and IE really don't fit together, especially when it comes to rendering web pages in a standards-compliant manner.
;)
Actually, I am a web developer. My script runs the exact same speed in both browsers, I think IE "performs better" in that the IE team made some better decisions when differing from the standards. (For instance, the property name "innerText" makes a hell of a lot more sense than "innerHTML." The fact that Firefox won't just swallow its pride and alias "innerText" to do the same thing it does on IE is a constant thorn in my paw. "Object" tags with IDs are a better solution for Flash than Firefox's "Embed" tags, although now more and more sites are using Object in FF which is nice.)
I might be biased from my history, but IE also had a lot of little niceties it does with Javascript that Firefox doesn't reproduce. For instance, you can easily and automatically refer to tables as a 2-dimensional array. Firefox does have better development tools, though.
As for rendering webpages in a standards-compliant manner, as soon as there's a reference implementation, I might buy that. For the moment, the standards are vague, there's no reference implementation, and the standards body primarily seem to be of the extremely foolish mindset that webpages never become un-maintained, and everybody will instantly adopt your shiny new standard the instant its improved. ("Fixing" HTML by creating XHTML just makes two mostly-but-not-quite-identical standards that all browsers and devices have to support for eternity instead of one. Good work.)
In fact, without a reference implementation, I don't think there even should be a standard. It's easy to sit up in an ivory tower and think up shit to put in HTML/XHTML, but without actually writing the software you'll end up with shit that can't be implemented, or you'll miss the three dozen holes and vagaries in your spec. Let's see the reference implementation, then maybe the standards will get some respect.
(Oh, and hey guys, my web sites already do separate content and presentation-- it's called a "CMS"! I appreciate the bandwidth savings of CSS, but that whole content and presentation separation thing was already taken care of.)
For the time-being, the standard is "whatever you have to do to make the page look good in all browsers," and that work is taken care of by the web designer, not the consumer. I don't see anything on the horizon that will make that change significantly. Sure, the job gets easier for the web designer as older browsers fall out of use (at a glacial page; even today you'd be a fool to break IE 5 compatibility), but the end-user isn't going to see any kind of holy grail of improvement from using a "standards-compliant" browser.
I've not seen Firefox behave as badly as you describe; are you using Vista with less than 2GB of RAM?
I dunno if you were trying to make an extremely lame "Vista sucks" joke or not with that smiley. The download window in Firefox is slow on my home computer (Vista with 2GB of RAM, if you must know) and my work computer (XP Pro with 2GB), so it's not the computer.
Recently, I had to re-install Firefox because of a bug my cat triggered while sleeping on the keyboard; somehow I got FF into a mode where every time I clicked on page content, it gave me an insertion cursor, even for non-editable text. I browsed around in about:config for awhile, but I couldn't find jack, so I eventually just gave up and re-installed. That's a sign of quality right there. (Thank God for Google Browser Sync.)
I've been using the nightly builds as my primary browser for over four months, and they've worked great. 3.0 is definitely faster and more responsive than 2.0, and the improvements to the location bar are very welcome, to the point where I can't imagine wanting to browse the web without them.
Good, I like having good browsers. I'd love it if Firefox spent a little time implementing the nice touches that IE has, or at least making the property names consistent.
1) Opera wasn't free during this period of time. Not being free, it's not really in the same "market."
2) Opera, historically, has had crappy usability. It's better now, but it still has a much worse interface than both IE and Firefox, and is generally more annoying to use. Back during the era we're talking about, Opera's interface was crap.
It's kind of a weird feedback loop. The only reason Firefox is competitive now is because IE didn't get worked on for several years; the reason IE didn't get worked on is that it had no competitive browsers.
BTW, I'm not sure you're aware of this, but Joel Spolsky wrote an article about rewriting software from scratch, titled "Things You Should Never Do": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Personally, I'm with you, I agree with every word he says.
(He also writes a later article, I can't find it at the moment, where he describes Netscape release schedule:
* Release whatever you have with no cleanup or testing, call it version x.0
* Whenever there's a bug severe enough to get covered in the New York Times, bump the version number up a point
Sadly, far too many open source projects use that same release philosophy.)
I'm not a huge fan of Firefox (I think IE7 performs better, generally), but I also think the level of "bloat" is simply normal for a web browser in this day and age. Browsers are page layout programs, even worse than that, page layout programs where the layout can be changed with scripting at any second.
What's bugging me more about Firefox isn't the level of "bloat", it's the responsiveness. It shouldn't take over 5 seconds for the download window to display, it doesn't matter how long my download history is. (And the browser shouldn't be entirely locked-up while it's opening!) Hopefully FF3 will take care of some of those issues.