Herbert Graf wrote: > On Thu, 2008-09-04 at 21:52 -0600, Nate Duehr wrote: >> Giant Panda wrote: >>> Yes, google chrome is pretty nice! >>> It worth a try. >>> It looks lighting and fast. >>> Chrome is more faster than IE7 and have a obvious speed at start up. >> My opinion: The world needs another browser like it needs a hole in the >> head. > > Frankly I'm astonished you'd say something like that. > > The fact that IE was so dominant is the reason so many websites either > don't work on other browsers, or just look wrong. IE didn't follow > standards, MS just came up with what they thought would be easiest and > most useful for themselves and used their dominance to force everybody > else to follow along. Classic monopoly behaviour. They get bashed a lot for this so-called "monopoly" but I always had more than just MSIE back to the very first Mozilla loaded on every machine I've ever owned. The problem never was a "monopoly", it was education... and another factor... the "it does what I want it to do" factor. MSIE did more than 80% (from the 80/20 rule) of what people wanted, and was pre-loaded on the machine. Realistically, that never should have been the reason used in the courts to hang Microsoft. (Trust me, I hated their monopoly just as much as the next guy, having grown up with the great CHOICES of the 80's in personal computing, and being a Tandy guy myself. I just thought it took a wrong turn into the ditch somewhere when people started blaming the BROWSER for their OS monopoly. People weren't being honest anymore at that point, not even the court.) > Never mind the fact that IE stagnated so badly in browser design because > they had NO drive to better it. They created things -- not the greatest things (certainly not for SECURE computing) like ActiveX and what-not. They weren't sitting on their laurels, ever that I can remember. (I can't believe I'm being such an MS apologist here, but really -- you're coming off as highly emotional and throwing out things that just aren't accurate or true, Herbert.) > With Safari and Firefox showing the world what they'd people had been > missing, sites FINALLY started following the standards. The prevalence > of more and more mobile browsers is further pushing sites to forget > about only supporting a subset of browsers and simply supporting the > standards that have always been there. Let me pause for a moment and roll my eyes here. Opera was out there before Safari, and there were others. Lynx even, if you want to go back that far. The ultimate HTML-only browser, so to speak. Not all that useful today on the "feature rich" websites that have virtually no HTML on them. There always have been "standards-based" browsers. They've never been what the majority of people use, so developers develop for the others. Firefox really got traction by GREAT MARKETING mostly. Safari, because it's the "monopoly" browser on Apple systems. The geeks and tech have always known about the alternatives and used them. Aunt Tillie still fires up whatever browser came with her machine. Today that is about a 1 in 10 chance that it's Safari, and growing. Thankfully, I might add. EVERYONE has ALWAYS given MS a serious run for their money -- Apple and maybe to a lesser extent Firefox have been the only ones to create something compelling enough to move people in the real-world, not the geekdom. > Only a few years ago MANY of the sites I tried to view either reported > they wouldn't work with anything other then IE, or simply didn't work. > These days pretty much all sites I use work with pretty much any browser > I try. This is a GOOD thing. I still have internal company sites that require MSIE 6! (They don't work at all with MSIE 7.) My employer is grossly shortsighted (as is the company that makes the software we're using -- Siebel, I'm looking at you here!) about things like that. Sure wish I could use MSIE 7, and I did at home for a while, but when VPN'ing to work... it's easier to use what work uses. So the machine has MSIE 6 and FF 3.x (default) browsers, as well as Safari on Windows on it. I find myself in FF or Safari for "personal" browsing, and MSIE 6 only for work-related things, but I'm not sure that's because ANY of them have any compelling reason to use them in particular, other than the minimal plug-ins I use on FF (many of which died in the 3.x upgrade, and still haven't been rolled up for use on FF3), OTHER than tabbed browsing. THAT feature is one that I can't live without, nowadays, and MSIE 6 therefore takes a back seat. MSIE 7 when I had it on here, did that just fine, however. > While Safari and Firefox are both far better then IE, they still have > many issues. Firefox in many ways has been stagnating of late, adding > pretty eye candy, but ignoring the fundamental problems (performance, > resource usage, stability). Chrome seems to be aiming at Firefox's > weaknesses very hard, and that can only be good for consumers. Bah. Just another browser. Haven't seen any good reasons to subject myself to testing their software for them (beta). Let me know when Google releases anything as non-beta... that little cutsie tactic of theirs is getting old. Hire some code testers with all that capital, Google. Another browser. Yawn. Call me overly-pragmatic, but who cares? When it does something WAY better than the others who are crowding my hard drive, let me know... I'll be getting stuff done in Safari or FF, or maybe even MSIE... until then. Nate -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist