(Side note: Here in the U.S., Tim Berners-Lee is on NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday tomorrow 11/1.)

Rant!

For political reasons, I have committed to not buy any more Microsoft products, to wean myself from Windows in general, and specifically avoid IE unless someone puts a gun to my head.

I use Mozilla/Netscape, Opera, and Konqueror. Each has its ups and downs. Opera is a bit behind on javascript support it seems that becomes a problem when visiting many of the more-complicated-than-they-need-to-be Web sites so prevalent today.

Much of the time I still use a Win2K for work stuff like Visio while VNC-ing to Linux boxes. I am trying to be happy with Mozilla under Windows, but it seems impossible. In my configuration anyway, it crashes on a regular basis on certain sites, and Mozilla 1.1 got to the point where it wouldn't run at all. I tried looking at the output of Talkbalk/Quality Feedback agent but it crashes every time it runs, too!

Oh, I know I have to take a more systematic approach to my tribulations other than deinstalling and reinstalling the latest version (no 1.2beta won't run, either!, and the menu bars on Netscape 7 are munged), but I just felt like a bit of a rant.

The one point that I am leading up to is that I have *not* had the same problems running Mozilla/Netscape versions from 4.7 up to present-day -- beta or not -- under Linux. Is it that I am not browsing there as much? Would I see as many crashes if I was? Personally, I'm feeling not. I feel like I am being stalked by some dirty, stale Registry entry or a psychopathic DLL.

A bad dll seems likely. I'd try uninstalling/reinstalling IP. Sometimes wsock32.dll gets farked.

For political reasons, I have committed to not buy any more Microsoft products, to wean myself from Windows in general, and specifically avoid IE unless someone puts a gun to my head.

I never made such a commitment. I just don't use Windows, IE, Office or any of it. No problem. I never did, so there was no "weaning".

You know between Slashdot and here I do get sick of all the MS hating going on.

Let me just say I love Microsoft. They are the biggest selling because they are the best, not because of any anti-competitive practices or whatever else the MS haters dream up to bitch about. It is not perfect, but they have gotten where they are today because their stuff is just better than that of the competition. Word and Excel, Windows, VB, IE, they are all the best in their field, and have been for a while and have little serious competition coming.

I use the other stuff; Linux has its uses and I do have a box here, but Windows is much more useful on a daily basis and Linux certainly isn't user-friendly, Mozilla is a wondeful program but it is not ready to take on IE quite yet. Java is not a serious contender for real programming. (Oh, I am going to get hard for that, aren't I, but I had to learn it and I discovered I really hate the damn language) I would be more than happy to use non-IE products if they were actually better, but they are sadly not.

<Put on flame suit>

You know between Slashdot and here I do get sick of all the MS hating going on.

Well, rest assured that I would never try to prevent you from buying Microsoft products. Perhaps my reference to "political reasons" isn't perfectly accurate -- maybe "strategic reasons" would be better -- but, personally, I feel like I arrived at my decision not to buy any more pretty dispassionately. But I think I have blown enough wind on that subject on this BBS. If you care, most of that wind can be found back here.

They are the biggest selling because they are the best, not because of any anti-competitive practices or whatever else the MS haters dream up to bitch about.

Wrong. Go read the Findings of Fact and repeat that above statement with a straight face. I know number 236 is true as I worked at Gateway when the internal fights were going on over what browser to use. Finally Gateway did cave to the pressure, and in a single swipe, replaced every Netscape browser internally with IE to please Microsoft and to get them to stop extorting Gateway for more money.

As for the quality of their products, thats been discussed before, and I won't discuss it here beyond one point: I have been employeed for several years of my working life for the sole reason that MS products do not work as well as they advertise. And this covers both desktop and server arenas. Their bugs in their server OS and web server have insured my recent job security, as call volume spiked quite a bit when MS patches to fix Code Red began bluescreening the boxes they were installed on.

MS won the browser wars for two reasons:

1. IE is bundled with Windows.
2. Netscape sucked. And still does.

MS won the browser wars for two reasons:

1. IE is bundled with Windows.

Agreed

2. Netscape sucked. And still does.

Agreed. But IE sucked just as much back when the major browser war was going on. I think for me, IE 5.0 passed Netcape 4 in almost every way. (Of course IE users had to wait for 5.5 to get Print Preview).

To me today, Mozilla (and now Pheonix) is much better then IE for the feature set. Netscape? Well, thats just AOL's twisted version of Mozilla now.

Is there anything illegal about #236? As far as I can tell, Gateway using Netscape was just hurting their business realtionship with MS. It is illegal to have a monopoly, but it isn't illegal to refuse to do business with Gateway.

i use mozilla as my main browser on windows and i find it so much better than ie. the tabs feature is amazing - only having to have one browser window open rather than about 10. have only ever had it crash once in the last few months & i don't find it slow at all. then again i do have 1gb of ram - i think it's maybe not so good on a machine with not much ram. i've only come across a couple of pages which don't render properly in it - mostly microsofts msdn site.

is illegal to have a monopoly

At least learn something before you spout off.

It is in no way illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to use that monopoly power in areas in which you have no monopoly. For example, your power company is likely to be a monopoly (albeit a government granted one, but that's irrelevant). But it would be illegal for them to tell you ``you have to buy Enron Long Distance telephone service or we won't sell you any electricity''.

> Wrong. Go read the Findings of Fact and repeat that above statement with a straight face.

Let me clarify. I never said MS didn't engage in said practices 'cause well, that would be silly, but I maintain that that isn't why IE won.

There was a time when I used Netscape exclusively and I wouldn't have touched IE with a ten-foot pole, but IE surpassed it quite some time ago. Netscape, before V6, did not interpret HTML correctly; tables and frames were both buggy as hell. It's Javascript support was very bad, frequently causing the browser to crash. At around v3 or v4 IE caught up and started blowing it out of the water.

As for having bugs and security holes, sure they do. So does the competition.

i use mozilla as my main browser on windows and i find it so much better than ie. the tabs feature is amazing - only having to have one browser window open rather than about 10.

Agreed, and a multi-window metaphor (is that the right term -- MWM?) is one reason I bought Opera and installed it on both Linux + Win, but I like Mozilla's tabbing better and it doesn't have Opera's js shortcomings right now.

have only ever had it crash once in the last few months & i don't find it slow at all. then again i do have 1gb of ram

Maybe that's it -- this dual 866 *only* has 512!

- i think it's maybe not so good on a machine with not much ram. i've only come across a couple of pages which don't render properly in it - mostly microsofts msdn site.

Surprise, surprise!

I actually had decent luck with Mozilla 1.0, but occasional crashes. With 1.1, things went downhill to the point of unusability. I am trying to think of what else I might have installed that hosed things up.

If I can spend more time in my Linux desktop, I can maybe get a fairer sense of how much this behavior is specific to Windows, but, after uninstalling and reinstalling several times, I still have that feeling that something bad persists -- a DLL, reg key or something -- and that when I run various uninstalls that you can never be 100 percent confident that it really did uninstall everything. Eventually, the road leads back to "reinstall the OS again and start over!"

Oh, and I will keep working with Mozilla. I just felt the need to vent!

2. Netscape sucked. And still does.

Agreed. I can point to about 45 people who switched to IE from Netscape after I got through with them. Why? Netscape absolutely f*ed themselves with 6.0. I've never seen so many crashes and freezes in my life until I saw Netscape 6 on his box. 4.7 wasn't too bad, but still behind IE. Their solution to competing with MS was to release a product well before it was ready.


As for all the other stuff, I use MS products regularly, and just from a user level, Win2K treats me waaaay better than the Linux boxes I used in CS classes. I hated those things.

As for Word and Excel, I actually don't like them nearly as much as Wordperect and 1-2-3. But my old versions of Wordperfect don't work on Win2k, and 1-2-3 did some weird things on newer boxes as well.

Side note: the two biggest things missing from Word that are in Wordperfect:

1) reveal codes- wonderful feature that helps when you can't igure out what the crazy 'Word'-processor is doing

2) Make it Fit! - this has got to be the high school and college student's favorite feature. Write a half-assed paper, tell the program how long you want it (or how short, but it never goes that way), and Wordperfect will automatically adjust the margins, line spacing, font size, and whatever else you want until it reaches that length. Beautiful.

Agreed, and a multi-window metaphor (is that the right term -- MWM?) is one reason I bought Opera and installed it on both Linux + Win, but I like Mozilla's tabbing better and it doesn't have Opera's js shortcomings right now.

Just remember, not everyone will like every feature. Personally, I would hate that tabs feature, as I'm more of a keyboard-and-mouse kind of guy. I think I constantly have my thumb on Alt and my ring finger on Tab

I've never seen so many crashes and freezes in my life until I saw Netscape 6 on his box.

Yep. It took a lot to bother again to go back and look at Mozilla.

4.7 wasn't too bad, but still behind IE. Their solution to competing with MS was to release a product well before it was ready.

MSFT are certainly the market exemplars when it comes to this, but they are not alone. I think it became an institutionalized practice after the race between MFST and Novell to release Work/WordPerfect 6.

As for all the other stuff, I use MS products regularly, and just from a user level, Win2K treats me waaaay better than the Linux boxes I used in CS classes. I hated those things.

It's gotten much better, but I'd say Linux boxes still lag on ease-of-use and that they'd also be judged more harshly on feature-richness in traditional productivity apps. I'm actually a pretty non-demanding desktop user. I just want it not to crash!


1) reveal codes- wonderful feature that helps when you can't igure out what the crazy 'Word'-processor is doing

The fact that a word processor can rise to the #1 seller in the world without this feature (already present in the market) continues to astonish me (yes, good luck trying to divine some section breaks and such in Word). I think it says a lot about the success of MSFT's "suite" strategy, original pricing/licensing, and the grand promotion of suite-bound features like OLE that 98 persent of users never touched.

2) Make it Fit!

Word has half this feature -- you can tell it to squish things up if you don't fancy only using half of the last page.

I haven't used it for a while.

Does the WordPerfect version of this feature change the text to a crayon font and wildly vary the colours? It ought to insert totally irrelevant clipart, too. That's the traditional way to pad assignments, isn't it?

I like Mozilla's tabbing better

And Galeon's tabbing is even better. The one thing I seriously hate about Mozilla's tabbing is that there's only one close button, all the way to the right. Galeon has a close button on each tab, and you can close tabs without having to select them first.

Mozilla's pop-up blocking is pure genius. It only blocks window.open commands INSIDE of an onload or unload event. This get's rid of 90% of the junk and keeps 90% of the good content, unlike Opera where my only choice is to get rid of all pop-ups, and it is surprising how many sites use legitimate pop-ups.

Mozilla's DHTML support, i.e. layers and Javascript, is still very flaky though. I work on a website now that is, to my regret, IE only, and that is because Mozilla can not handle the extensive use of layers that we have, as well as many other small issues that individually I could fix but collectively would be a major headache(just for instance, doing a window.location to a PDF file does not work right for some reason). I try every new version when it comes out and look forward to the day when I can say it is just as good or better.

At least learn something before you spout off.

It is in no way illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to use that monopoly power in areas in which you have no monopoly. For example, your power company is likely to be a monopoly (albeit a government granted one, but that's irrelevant). But it would be illegal for them to tell you ``you have to buy Enron Long Distance telephone service or we won't sell you any electricity''.


But Microsoft does not have a monopoly on OS's or browsers so they can do that all they want.

In reply to:

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But Microsoft does not have a monopoly on OS's or browsers so they can do that all they want.

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Ooooh Ooooh, is it my turn to feed the troll today?

Microsoft has been found guilty in a court of law for being a monopolist exploiting their monopoly to gain entry into other markets. See the current front page of cnn.com or your-favorite-liberal/geek/conservative/homosexualy/catholic/atheist-biased new web site, most likely. So, by the legal united states definition, they have some sort of monopoly

They did use their desktop monopoly to take over the browser market. Could they have done it legally? Probably. But they didn't, they made you buy their browser with the OS, if you wanted it or not. If you think it should have been illegal or not is a compleetly different question.

Matthew

My point is that they don't have a monopoly on OS's. I think it is their right to choose to only sell them together, just like it is your right to choose to only sell your empeg & tuner as a package and not sell them seperately. However, there may be more than meets the eye on this particular issue than what is mentioned in #236, so I'm not claiming to be an expert on this particular situation.

I don't see how expressing my viewpoint on something makes me a 'troll'. Perhaps you can elaborate.

My point is that they don't have a monopoly on OS's.

That's something that you should take up with your friendly neighborhood federal circuit court judge. And the appellate judge above him.

Ha, I don't care that much.

In reply to:

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Ha, I don't care that much.

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This is why I call you a troll. You claim to have a viewpoint diametricaly opposed to the overwhelming majority of the board, and then say that you don't care when someone actually argues with you.

Matthew

That I don't care enough to go to court to argue about a multi-billion-dollar corporation's business regarding #236, in which I know relatively nothing about and doesn't even pertain to me, makes me a troll? I would say if anyone is a troll here, it would be you for starting a personal argument by calling names over something as petty as this.