Have you ever heard the phrase, "the buck stops here?" How about we stop passing the buck and get problems fixed? Note that in this case, "getting problems fixed" might actually involve leaving your basement and having to talk to actual human beings! Ick!
I frankly don't give a shit whose fault it is.
The sooner you figure that out, the sooner we might get a working Flash player.
It's kind of funny we keep hearing this. If you compare pre-1995 Linux distros with, say, current Ubuntu, most people would agree there has been improvement.
Well, ok, der. But there's a couple points here:
1) This story is talking about kernel developers. I think it's pretty safe to say that very few kernel developers, especially those being paid by server companies like Redhat, are working on improving the desktop at all. Possibly none. There is the very famous recent case of Con Kolivas leaving kernel development with that exact complaint, you may recall.
And remember, as a bunch of snarky Linux fans have told me a dozen times, "Linux is a kernel!!! Not an OS!!!" (BTW, one obvious area of improvement would get that terminology straightened-out.) I can, for once, snark the other way! Woo.
2) Linux distros have been improving faster partially because they were so far behind in the first place. A pre-1995 Linux distro didn't have working copy&paste, or a windowing system worth crap (if it had one at all), or any of the hundreds of complete and usable features that Mac and Windows had in 1995.
3) Part of the reason for the fast improvement is that the Linux community has had a template to follow-- why bother doing your own usability research when you can just crib from Apple or Microsoft? That advantage goes away when you're actually on-par with your competitors, and (IMO) Linux has shown almost zero competence in innovating on the desktop.
So yes, to summarize, some companies are working on the Linux desktop, but I don't think they've caught up to their competitors yet, and I don't think there's much hope of innovation in that realm when they do, but most importantly that's irrelevant to the topic at-hand which is specifically about the kernel.
All in all, I have to wonder why you want to paint Linux with a dark brush so badly that you resort to outright lies to accomplish it.
Well, first of all, you haven't demonstrated it's a lie. I'm sure it is at least an exaggeration, though.
Another big benefit is that you can pay people other than software developers to work on your project. For example, artists, designers, usability experts, technical writers, trainers/evangelism.
All attempts to get people to donate those skills to open source projects (except perhaps evangelism) have pretty much failed.
The problem with this story is while a lot of companies are working on Linux, none of them are focused on usability and none of them are focused on the desktop-- the thing Linux is worst at. Since all of these companies only use Linux on the server, they only pay for development efforts relevant to the server... which gives us the nice "Linux can run on a 1024-core computer, but it can't play a Flash movie without stuttering" problem. At this rate, it'll never improve.
How is that different from what we're doing now on desktop computers?
iTunes has a different arrangement of widgets (for searching music) than Excel has than Word has than Outlook has. Ok...
So you're described what the iPhone is doing, but what I don't get is how this is new or revolutionary in any way. What's the difference between this and just running all your Windows apps maximized?
For example, if I file something in a physical folder and go to look for it later, there's usually no chance that I'll have look inside a nested folder that is, apart from the name, practically indistinguishable from the one that contains it. The problem seems (to me) to be that users have trouble establishing a sense of place, of where the documents are stored. Where's my letter?
Mac Classic went a long way towards solving that, they called it a spatial file browser. The principles were:
1) There is only one copy of every object. For example, the open window displaying the contents of a folder *is* the folder. It's not a "view" of the folder, or an "instance" of the folder, it *is* the folder. If you double-click the folder icon again, you'll never get a second window showing the same contents.
2) Things stay where you put them, to the pixel. If I drop an icon 240 pixels from the top and 300 pixels from the left edge of a folder, it damned well stays there until *I* move it. In contrast, modern OSes move files all over the place all the freakin' time. (Which drives Mac Classic fans like me crazy.)
You kind of misunderstand the phenomena. The reason all the things you listed are easy-to-take is that they don't even look remotely close to humans.
The uncanny valley refers to the emotional detachment towards CGI creations that look and behave *almost* (but not exactly) like real people. A good example would be the recent CGI Beowulf movie, or another poster mentioned Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within from a few years ago.
The theory is that the less human a creature looks/acts, the more we can accept it. Pilot or Rigel from Farscape don't look human at all, for example. As the creature approaches realism, the viewer will have more and more trouble accepting them. Once your simulation is sufficiently complete, then you accept them as you would an actual human actor. That's why porcelain dolls are so creepy.
So you take Rigel, easy to accept. The humans in Beowulf, much less so. Some would argue that the aliens in Avatar are close enough to human that people accept them without any problems, which partially explains why the film has been so successful.
Perhaps, the package manager should be part of: Linux Standards Base if it already is not?
That would require either: 1) A "meta-package manager" that could "wrap" all the others in use right now 2) Everybody in the Linux community to agree on using the same package manager
If it's going to happen, it'll be option 1, which is by far the worst. But I doubt it'll ever happen at all, partially because it's a good ideal, partially because even when it's in the LSB the LSB isn't being rolled-out to distros very quickly, and partially because the community can never agree on anything.
Even more if this is a web proxy password and that, each month, you have to change the proxy password for every f*** application that connect to the web (That Windows OS is really really bad).
Windows has an API for requesting the proxy info from the OS. It's not Microsoft's fault that your applications suck and don't make use of it. (So does OS X, for the record. I'm not sure about Linux.)
I came across one site that didn't consider "-" a punctuation mark. That pissed me off enough that I put in a support ticket over it: don't force me to include punctuation marks in the password if your system is so retarded it doesn't even know what punctuation marks look like.
Until I see some evidence, I'm not calling this anything other than a paranoid conspiracy theory. I don't know if you've noticed, but conspiracy theories are pretty popular among Microsoft-haters, and there's nothing here concrete that you can really grasp on to. No company names, no dates, no documents.
Adding to this, I'd wager that his school has provided him with a computer and a license for Office already, and he's just being too much of a pig-headed prick to turn it on. But calling Word's file format "obscure," that's simply delusional, there's no other word for it...
There is no one stopping you or anybody else from making closed source applications on GNU/Linux, if you want to.
There's also nobody making it easy, or even pretending to make it easy.
Everything from cross-distro compatibility to installing commercial apps right now is a giant pain in the ass. Sure, distros have a great and revolutionary software respository-- seemingly designed from day 1 solely to exclude commercial software.
So yes, you're right: it is possible. That's not enough. Make it easy.
To be fair, you have to go into the comments because half of the stories/summaries are at least misleading, at worst plain wrong, an the first few modded-up comments correct the crappy-ass summary.
I'd actually be more alarmed if somebody read Slashdot without reading the comments. Imagine what kind of trash would fill their brain if they actually thought this was a genuine story! (That particular summary was so bad, other news sites picked up on it.)
ETM was actually a precursor to The Matrix Reloaded and involved different characters and locations to set the scene for the movie. How cool was that? And how many other games have done this?!
I dunno, but Chronicles of Riddick definitely did, and it was also a tremendous game. Enter The Matrix beat it by a year, though.
BTW, for the people complaining about the Matrix trilogy, at least none of those films were Chronicles of Riddick! What a stinker.
Frankly, if the bad guys have the ability to place and execute a 16-bit application on your computer, you're probably already toast. This exploit is only effective if combined with another exploit, so it's really not nearly as big a deal as the Slashdot story implies.
Yes, it is a problem, and yes it wasn't noticed for a very long time. But it's not like viewing a.gif image on a website is going to pwn you.
Mac OS X managed to move from MacOS to a Unix - a far more significant change than anything Windows has done - without breaking much at all.
Buulllshiiittt.
Spoken like a true, "I never touched Classic Mac in my life." The reason people say shit like this is only because Apple has *always* been so bad about breaking apps, that they didn't break any *more* than expected when OS X came out. (Remember the legions of apps that System 7 busted when it came out? Christ. Expectations are pretty low compared to that.)
I switched away from OS X when it became apparent that: 1) Classic would never be fixed to run more apps, nor would its more substantial flaws be fixed. (For example, how it drained laptop batteries like crazy for no reason.) 2) Apple doesn't give a shit about anything older than about 3 years. For example, my parents can't use their camcorder with their laptop because, while OS X supports USB camcorders, it only supports them on x86 and their computer is a very-late-model PPC
In the Mac world, if you don't upgrade once a year, you're fucked. I don't have the money or patience for that.
Same with PowerPC to x86.
That went smoother, as did their transition from 68k to PPC. But that just means they usually break apps for reasons other than CPU changes.:)
Ah give up, it's just the Internet version of "things were better back in my day! Get off my lawn!" A combination of crippling nostalgia, surliness, and not having played any actual modern video games.
You see this a lot on Slashdot for some reason; I like to call it "the games forum for people who haven't played games in a decade".)
You'll notice that people who still frequently play videos never lay those vague "games are less smart"-type of gripes, because they're aware of how false they are. It would be a really hard case to make that, for example, Bioshock is "less smart" than System Shock 2. (Well, to make rationally.)
What's the last version of Windows you used? Your gripes are pretty out-of-date.
I think you should try installing windows more often then. It is not exactly "click-click-done" either. After you install the "Operative System", you have to install all the drivers
Actually, if the driver exists, Windows Vista/Windows 7 will find it. I've yet to find a piece of (supported) hardware that Microsoft didn't already have a driver for in Windows Update.
Now your latter point about older hardware is correct-- for example, my Canon scanner doesn't have a 64-bit compatible driver for Vista or Windows 7-- but on the other hand, you can hardly blame Microsoft for that. Canon could easily write one (it's a USB scanner), they just don't.
Not to mention the update process. Ubuntu wins hands-on on that one to windows.
Howso? Be specific. They seem pretty much exactly equivalent to me...
Give it to grandma, and in one year and a half, reformat and reinstall.
Vista didn't cruft-up like XP did after 2 years of high techy use (meaning: frequent installs/uninstalls of software, frequent reconfiguration, stuff like that.) You are correct that previous versions had this problem, but I'm putting this one into the "solved" bucket.
Someday I gotta write up a list of gripes about Redhat 6.2, so I can use it to reply to these constant "Windows sucks" posts from people who haven't used Windows in a decade...
So? Suspend and Hibernate is broken on a lot of new machines.
Like what? Please provide a model number.
I've never seen a new machine where Suspend/Hibernate didn't work, back a decade or so. I've definitely never seen a Mac where it's broken. I think you're spouting bullcrap.
I also know people who prefer Word, but the implication that you can't actually use Open Office, or anything but Word as a word processor is false in my opinion.
Except nobody ever said that. You have to read the posts in the thread, you can't just listen to the whispering voices in your head.
The claim I made is that OpenOffice isn't nearly good enough to replace Word, despite the fact that it's free. Which is true, demonstrably true, since it hasn't displaced Word.
You're again missing my point that people used IE for more reasons that it was free.
Yes, and one of those reasons was, "it was better than Netscape 4." Which was my entire point that started this thread.
But from whenever Firefox came out, what ~2004? Why did it take so long to hit 30%? I can't think of any way that IE6 was objectively better than Firefox, and I don't think it got close to parity till maybe IE8 this year, and that's pretty arguable. And it's been widely known that IE is a major vector for getting your PC infected since 2007 or so, though techies knew it back in 2000.
Security issues aside...
1) Since Netscape binned all of their old marketshare and bred a ton of ill-will towards their brand, there was no way any browser from Mozilla would succeed if it was named "Netscape." Releasing Netscape 6 was a complete waste of time, and doesn't count towards their "return" to the market.
2) Netscape 6 and Mozilla made the same mistakes that Netscape was making towards the end of the Netscape 4 era: they threw in everything and the kitchen sink, but people just wanted a web browser. Mozilla was a bloated monster that did everything from tune guitars to load shipping containers, but one thing it didn't do well was browse web pages.
3) New products (and we might as well consider Firefox a new product, due to point 1 and 2) take a long time to gain marketshare. How fast did you *expect* it to grow? It's actually doing quite well.
4) I would argue that IE and Firefox was in parity when IE7 came out for all intents and purposes. Remember that the feature even Firefox-head crows about "plug-ins!!" has been in IE since something like version 5 or 5.5. The only difference is that IE called them "toolbars", but other than that they were identical. The only other feature unique to Firefox was tabbed windows, and IE7 added those.
Right now, the only thing that sets IE8 apart from Firefox are: 1) Firefox has a faster JS engine 2) Firefox is faster at opening new windows/tabs, but... 3) IE8 has real process separation, so it won't lose all your work when one window/tab crashes. (Note that Firefox is about the LAST browser to have this feature.) 4) Firefox has more plug-ins than IE8.
IE's ride down has been quite a bit slower than Netscapes was, and that's why I think there's more going on than it's "just that good".
Yes, that's because since it was the only browser for so long, people used it as an applications platform. Those applications are universally poorly-written "enterprise" pieces of crap that can't be ported to IE7 because they rely on quirks/bugs specific to IE6, or they rely on the old Microsoft Java plug-in which doesn't exist for newer versions of IE.
Pretty much anyone I know who uses IE does so because it's what is there by default. They didn't objectively choose it.
If you're talking about home users, that's partially from habit, and partially because IE7/IE8 are just as good as Firefox.
I have to say also that I've never had embedded media in my text documents, so I guess I never had any knowledge of normal view - again, though, I've managed to get this far in life with about 5hrs of Word use, so I don't match the discussed demographic.
Hello! Thanks for demonstrating my exact point!
People who don't *use* office applications should not be judging the quality of office applications. If you've only used 5 hours of Word, how can you come here and say OpenOffice is just as good? You have no idea what Word even does!
But you've also gone far beyond the original point that IE and Netscape were equivalent - you strongly believe that IE was a lot better.
Because it was. Even if you don't agree IE4 was, it would be an extremely hard case to say that IE 5 and 5.5 were as well. (Those also competed with Netscape 4, due to Netscape giving up.)
IE6 was by almost any measure far worse than any other browser - crashier, lacking features like tabs, horribly insecure and not updated for forever.
You're like Mr. Selective Memory here. No, IE6 was more stable than Netscape 4, was patched a hell of a lot more often than Netscape 4. (Of course, Netscape 4 wasn't patched at all.) And while it didn't have tabs, neither did anything else except BeOS's browser and possibly Opera.
Was it un-updated? Yes... but: 1) That's due to the points I made in this very thread 2) It was still more maintained than Netscape 4, which wasn't maintained at all
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever heard the phrase, "the buck stops here?" How about we stop passing the buck and get problems fixed? Note that in this case, "getting problems fixed" might actually involve leaving your basement and having to talk to actual human beings! Ick!
I frankly don't give a shit whose fault it is.
The sooner you figure that out, the sooner we might get a working Flash player.
It's kind of funny we keep hearing this. If you compare pre-1995 Linux distros with, say, current Ubuntu, most people would agree there has been improvement.
Well, ok, der. But there's a couple points here:
1) This story is talking about kernel developers. I think it's pretty safe to say that very few kernel developers, especially those being paid by server companies like Redhat, are working on improving the desktop at all. Possibly none. There is the very famous recent case of Con Kolivas leaving kernel development with that exact complaint, you may recall.
And remember, as a bunch of snarky Linux fans have told me a dozen times, "Linux is a kernel!!! Not an OS!!!" (BTW, one obvious area of improvement would get that terminology straightened-out.) I can, for once, snark the other way! Woo.
2) Linux distros have been improving faster partially because they were so far behind in the first place. A pre-1995 Linux distro didn't have working copy&paste, or a windowing system worth crap (if it had one at all), or any of the hundreds of complete and usable features that Mac and Windows had in 1995.
3) Part of the reason for the fast improvement is that the Linux community has had a template to follow-- why bother doing your own usability research when you can just crib from Apple or Microsoft? That advantage goes away when you're actually on-par with your competitors, and (IMO) Linux has shown almost zero competence in innovating on the desktop.
So yes, to summarize, some companies are working on the Linux desktop, but I don't think they've caught up to their competitors yet, and I don't think there's much hope of innovation in that realm when they do, but most importantly that's irrelevant to the topic at-hand which is specifically about the kernel.
All in all, I have to wonder why you want to paint Linux with a dark brush so badly that you resort to outright lies to accomplish it.
Well, first of all, you haven't demonstrated it's a lie. I'm sure it is at least an exaggeration, though.
Another big benefit is that you can pay people other than software developers to work on your project. For example, artists, designers, usability experts, technical writers, trainers/evangelism.
All attempts to get people to donate those skills to open source projects (except perhaps evangelism) have pretty much failed.
The problem with this story is while a lot of companies are working on Linux, none of them are focused on usability and none of them are focused on the desktop-- the thing Linux is worst at. Since all of these companies only use Linux on the server, they only pay for development efforts relevant to the server... which gives us the nice "Linux can run on a 1024-core computer, but it can't play a Flash movie without stuttering" problem. At this rate, it'll never improve.
Your GPS doesn't get traffic data.
The iPhone? Yah it does, in my city at least. (Seattle.)
Not to dispute your point, but it would help your point if you actually made sure your examples were correct.
How is that different from what we're doing now on desktop computers?
iTunes has a different arrangement of widgets (for searching music) than Excel has than Word has than Outlook has. Ok...
So you're described what the iPhone is doing, but what I don't get is how this is new or revolutionary in any way. What's the difference between this and just running all your Windows apps maximized?
For example, if I file something in a physical folder and go to look for it later, there's usually no chance that I'll have look inside a nested folder that is, apart from the name, practically indistinguishable from the one that contains it. The problem seems (to me) to be that users have trouble establishing a sense of place, of where the documents are stored. Where's my letter?
Mac Classic went a long way towards solving that, they called it a spatial file browser. The principles were:
1) There is only one copy of every object. For example, the open window displaying the contents of a folder *is* the folder. It's not a "view" of the folder, or an "instance" of the folder, it *is* the folder. If you double-click the folder icon again, you'll never get a second window showing the same contents.
2) Things stay where you put them, to the pixel. If I drop an icon 240 pixels from the top and 300 pixels from the left edge of a folder, it damned well stays there until *I* move it. In contrast, modern OSes move files all over the place all the freakin' time. (Which drives Mac Classic fans like me crazy.)
You kind of misunderstand the phenomena. The reason all the things you listed are easy-to-take is that they don't even look remotely close to humans.
The uncanny valley refers to the emotional detachment towards CGI creations that look and behave *almost* (but not exactly) like real people. A good example would be the recent CGI Beowulf movie, or another poster mentioned Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within from a few years ago.
The theory is that the less human a creature looks/acts, the more we can accept it. Pilot or Rigel from Farscape don't look human at all, for example. As the creature approaches realism, the viewer will have more and more trouble accepting them. Once your simulation is sufficiently complete, then you accept them as you would an actual human actor. That's why porcelain dolls are so creepy.
So you take Rigel, easy to accept. The humans in Beowulf, much less so. Some would argue that the aliens in Avatar are close enough to human that people accept them without any problems, which partially explains why the film has been so successful.
Perhaps, the package manager should be part of: Linux Standards Base if it already is not?
That would require either:
1) A "meta-package manager" that could "wrap" all the others in use right now
2) Everybody in the Linux community to agree on using the same package manager
If it's going to happen, it'll be option 1, which is by far the worst. But I doubt it'll ever happen at all, partially because it's a good ideal, partially because even when it's in the LSB the LSB isn't being rolled-out to distros very quickly, and partially because the community can never agree on anything.
Where does "princess" come from? Is that used as a password in a movie or TV show or something? Seems odd that it would be number 6 on the list.
Even more if this is a web proxy password and that, each month, you have to change the proxy password for every f*** application that connect to the web (That Windows OS is really really bad).
Windows has an API for requesting the proxy info from the OS. It's not Microsoft's fault that your applications suck and don't make use of it. (So does OS X, for the record. I'm not sure about Linux.)
I came across one site that didn't consider "-" a punctuation mark. That pissed me off enough that I put in a support ticket over it: don't force me to include punctuation marks in the password if your system is so retarded it doesn't even know what punctuation marks look like.
Europe doesn't have zoos? :)
Until I see some evidence, I'm not calling this anything other than a paranoid conspiracy theory. I don't know if you've noticed, but conspiracy theories are pretty popular among Microsoft-haters, and there's nothing here concrete that you can really grasp on to. No company names, no dates, no documents.
No kidding.
Adding to this, I'd wager that his school has provided him with a computer and a license for Office already, and he's just being too much of a pig-headed prick to turn it on. But calling Word's file format "obscure," that's simply delusional, there's no other word for it...
There is no one stopping you or anybody else from making closed source applications on GNU/Linux, if you want to.
There's also nobody making it easy, or even pretending to make it easy.
Everything from cross-distro compatibility to installing commercial apps right now is a giant pain in the ass. Sure, distros have a great and revolutionary software respository-- seemingly designed from day 1 solely to exclude commercial software.
So yes, you're right: it is possible. That's not enough. Make it easy.
To be fair, you have to go into the comments because half of the stories/summaries are at least misleading, at worst plain wrong, an the first few modded-up comments correct the crappy-ass summary.
I'd actually be more alarmed if somebody read Slashdot without reading the comments. Imagine what kind of trash would fill their brain if they actually thought this was a genuine story! (That particular summary was so bad, other news sites picked up on it.)
ETM was actually a precursor to The Matrix Reloaded and involved different characters and locations to set the scene for the movie. How cool was that? And how many other games have done this?!
I dunno, but Chronicles of Riddick definitely did, and it was also a tremendous game. Enter The Matrix beat it by a year, though.
BTW, for the people complaining about the Matrix trilogy, at least none of those films were Chronicles of Riddick! What a stinker.
Frankly, if the bad guys have the ability to place and execute a 16-bit application on your computer, you're probably already toast. This exploit is only effective if combined with another exploit, so it's really not nearly as big a deal as the Slashdot story implies.
Yes, it is a problem, and yes it wasn't noticed for a very long time. But it's not like viewing a .gif image on a website is going to pwn you.
Mac OS X managed to move from MacOS to a Unix - a far more significant change than anything Windows has done - without breaking much at all.
Buulllshiiittt.
Spoken like a true, "I never touched Classic Mac in my life." The reason people say shit like this is only because Apple has *always* been so bad about breaking apps, that they didn't break any *more* than expected when OS X came out. (Remember the legions of apps that System 7 busted when it came out? Christ. Expectations are pretty low compared to that.)
I switched away from OS X when it became apparent that:
1) Classic would never be fixed to run more apps, nor would its more substantial flaws be fixed. (For example, how it drained laptop batteries like crazy for no reason.)
2) Apple doesn't give a shit about anything older than about 3 years. For example, my parents can't use their camcorder with their laptop because, while OS X supports USB camcorders, it only supports them on x86 and their computer is a very-late-model PPC
In the Mac world, if you don't upgrade once a year, you're fucked. I don't have the money or patience for that.
Same with PowerPC to x86.
That went smoother, as did their transition from 68k to PPC. But that just means they usually break apps for reasons other than CPU changes. :)
Ah give up, it's just the Internet version of "things were better back in my day! Get off my lawn!" A combination of crippling nostalgia, surliness, and not having played any actual modern video games.
You see this a lot on Slashdot for some reason; I like to call it "the games forum for people who haven't played games in a decade".)
You'll notice that people who still frequently play videos never lay those vague "games are less smart"-type of gripes, because they're aware of how false they are. It would be a really hard case to make that, for example, Bioshock is "less smart" than System Shock 2. (Well, to make rationally.)
What's the last version of Windows you used? Your gripes are pretty out-of-date.
I think you should try installing windows more often then. It is not exactly "click-click-done" either. After you install the "Operative System", you have to install all the drivers
Actually, if the driver exists, Windows Vista/Windows 7 will find it. I've yet to find a piece of (supported) hardware that Microsoft didn't already have a driver for in Windows Update.
Now your latter point about older hardware is correct-- for example, my Canon scanner doesn't have a 64-bit compatible driver for Vista or Windows 7-- but on the other hand, you can hardly blame Microsoft for that. Canon could easily write one (it's a USB scanner), they just don't.
Not to mention the update process. Ubuntu wins hands-on on that one to windows.
Howso? Be specific. They seem pretty much exactly equivalent to me...
Give it to grandma, and in one year and a half, reformat and reinstall.
Vista didn't cruft-up like XP did after 2 years of high techy use (meaning: frequent installs/uninstalls of software, frequent reconfiguration, stuff like that.) You are correct that previous versions had this problem, but I'm putting this one into the "solved" bucket.
Someday I gotta write up a list of gripes about Redhat 6.2, so I can use it to reply to these constant "Windows sucks" posts from people who haven't used Windows in a decade...
So? Suspend and Hibernate is broken on a lot of new machines.
Like what? Please provide a model number.
I've never seen a new machine where Suspend/Hibernate didn't work, back a decade or so. I've definitely never seen a Mac where it's broken. I think you're spouting bullcrap.
today, I can buy almost any laptop/desktop and install Ubuntu on it with little to no problems.
Really? Which laptop models support Sleep/Suspend?
I've yet to get that working on any hardware I've tried it on. (Dell laptop, HP laptop, Apple iBook.)
I also know people who prefer Word, but the implication that you can't actually use Open Office, or anything but Word as a word processor is false in my opinion.
Except nobody ever said that. You have to read the posts in the thread, you can't just listen to the whispering voices in your head.
The claim I made is that OpenOffice isn't nearly good enough to replace Word, despite the fact that it's free. Which is true, demonstrably true, since it hasn't displaced Word.
You're again missing my point that people used IE for more reasons that it was free.
Yes, and one of those reasons was, "it was better than Netscape 4." Which was my entire point that started this thread.
But from whenever Firefox came out, what ~2004? Why did it take so long to hit 30%? I can't think of any way that IE6 was objectively better than Firefox, and I don't think it got close to parity till maybe IE8 this year, and that's pretty arguable. And it's been widely known that IE is a major vector for getting your PC infected since 2007 or so, though techies knew it back in 2000.
Security issues aside...
1) Since Netscape binned all of their old marketshare and bred a ton of ill-will towards their brand, there was no way any browser from Mozilla would succeed if it was named "Netscape." Releasing Netscape 6 was a complete waste of time, and doesn't count towards their "return" to the market.
2) Netscape 6 and Mozilla made the same mistakes that Netscape was making towards the end of the Netscape 4 era: they threw in everything and the kitchen sink, but people just wanted a web browser. Mozilla was a bloated monster that did everything from tune guitars to load shipping containers, but one thing it didn't do well was browse web pages.
3) New products (and we might as well consider Firefox a new product, due to point 1 and 2) take a long time to gain marketshare. How fast did you *expect* it to grow? It's actually doing quite well.
4) I would argue that IE and Firefox was in parity when IE7 came out for all intents and purposes. Remember that the feature even Firefox-head crows about "plug-ins!!" has been in IE since something like version 5 or 5.5. The only difference is that IE called them "toolbars", but other than that they were identical. The only other feature unique to Firefox was tabbed windows, and IE7 added those.
Right now, the only thing that sets IE8 apart from Firefox are:
1) Firefox has a faster JS engine
2) Firefox is faster at opening new windows/tabs, but...
3) IE8 has real process separation, so it won't lose all your work when one window/tab crashes. (Note that Firefox is about the LAST browser to have this feature.)
4) Firefox has more plug-ins than IE8.
IE's ride down has been quite a bit slower than Netscapes was, and that's why I think there's more going on than it's "just that good".
Yes, that's because since it was the only browser for so long, people used it as an applications platform. Those applications are universally poorly-written "enterprise" pieces of crap that can't be ported to IE7 because they rely on quirks/bugs specific to IE6, or they rely on the old Microsoft Java plug-in which doesn't exist for newer versions of IE.
Pretty much anyone I know who uses IE does so because it's what is there by default. They didn't objectively choose it.
If you're talking about home users, that's partially from habit, and partially because IE7/IE8 are just as good as Firefox.
I have to say also that I've never had embedded media in my text documents, so I guess I never had any knowledge of normal view - again, though, I've managed to get this far in life with about 5hrs of Word use, so I don't match the discussed demographic.
Hello! Thanks for demonstrating my exact point!
People who don't *use* office applications should not be judging the quality of office applications. If you've only used 5 hours of Word, how can you come here and say OpenOffice is just as good? You have no idea what Word even does!
But you've also gone far beyond the original point that IE and Netscape were
equivalent - you strongly believe that IE was a lot better.
Because it was. Even if you don't agree IE4 was, it would be an extremely hard case to say that IE 5 and 5.5 were as well. (Those also competed with Netscape 4, due to Netscape giving up.)
IE6 was by almost any measure far worse than any other browser - crashier, lacking features like tabs, horribly insecure and not updated for forever.
You're like Mr. Selective Memory here. No, IE6 was more stable than Netscape 4, was patched a hell of a lot more often than Netscape 4. (Of course, Netscape 4 wasn't patched at all.) And while it didn't have tabs, neither did anything else except BeOS's browser and possibly Opera.
Was it un-updated? Yes... but:
1) That's due to the points I made in this very thread
2) It was still more maintained than Netscape 4, which wasn't maintained at all