LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Daniel Callan <danhome@dataline.net.au>
  To  : linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
  Date: Sat, 27 Nov 1999 19:29:03 +1000

Re: [OT] IE5

At 15:44 26/11/99 +1030, David wrote:
>its name. I have my opinions on MS the company, their business practices,
>and the stability of their products. I also think that MS word is the most
>userfriendly and easiest to use word processor out of Word, Word perfect,
>and Word Star, for trying all three products, and having to use all three

I quite agree with this about Microsoft (products in general) whilst still
having my own personal hatred of IE5 (Indiscriminent Exploder is one of my
favs).

I cannot bag MS for everything (although, as David said, their business
practices
and general attitude can be grating), however I have been watching the birth
and rise of IE since its feeble beginnings on the early releases of Win95a. 

This first version that was bundled into the communications packages
(I called it ver 2, even though in system properties it was always
confusingly 
listed as ver 4.0012345XXXXXXXXX) was just a poor clone (if not copy) 
of the NCSA browser that was released that year (and interestingly whose
sources
were available to any student who wanted to play with them for non-release
purposes).
I'm serious, it was so close that the only difference I can still rememeber
was that 
they had changed the logo image in the top right corner. It barely
supported all
HTML tags and the proxy setting in options was hopeless. I can remember
thinking
at the time how much Netscape would kick its arse...bummer how fate works
out ;-)

Anyway, I digress, point is that I haved loathed IE ever since it snuck into
the back of the queue of the browser market and then promptly apply its unique
brand of "if we can't do the standards as well as the competitor, and we
can't 
buy the competitor, we'll just have to embrace & extend the standards to suit
our coding ability...then justify it with some more wizards and other toys".
IMHO what they have done to the whole webserver/HTML industry has probably
set it 
back a decade in the areas of uniformity of code and also polarised the
proffesionals
of the industry into the UNIX/Apache/Netscape vs NT/FrontPage/IE5 camps.

You don't even want to get me started on all the little "enhancements" of
IE5 ;-)
(anyone who has had to tech support IE5 users should know what I mean)

What frustrates me most about all this is that MicroSoft have a pretty
strong hold on the desktop market (no matter what the Linux movement gets
up to,
this isn't changing en masse in big hurry). I don't even begrudge them for
this
as they having been releasing the most popular OS's for desktop machines
since I was
a kid (I'm even counting MS-DOS here), and they are fairly good at it too.

Where am I going with this? 
Well,
Why do they waste so much time and money on the server/internet market when
they could be concentrating on making Windows2001 a REALLY decent product???
And I don't mean more bloody features either, I mean getting ALL the bugs out
and actually doing their own beta-testing instead of letting users find them
and fixing them in the next version.

They can have the desktop market if they can be bothered to do it decently,
I just wish they would leave the net to UNIX.

<slowly absails down from mountainous soapbox>

Sorry for waffling but it was marked as [OT] and I couldn't stay away
from this one.

Cheers,
-Daniel


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