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Now don't flame me here I'm just playing devils advocate,
I'm as against one particular company providing operating systems as anyone but, I do want standardisation. I want this as an application developer I do not want to have to compile / re-engineer my application for many different platforms (Mac, Linux, ms). I'm aware that languages such as Java have been around for ages but I have never taken to java as a language, certainly not for developing desktop applications. The fact that MS have never truly adopted the language mean that distribution of my application is a real pain. Certainly beyond the ability of most users.
This aside the GUI elements of Java have always been somewhat lacking, this too until recent is a major criticism of Linux. Maybe its familiarity with an operating system, maybe not as I took to apple allot faster than Linux. I'm a strong believer that an interface should be "comfortable" and easy to use, "just because I can does not mean that I want to" , this is one of my criticism's of Linux in the past. Sure I can type several commands to modify some setting or other, id rather click a couple of buttons, it means that I don't have to remember many tedious commands. I'm personally not interested in the inner workings of how my computer works, as the majority of the general public aren't, I just want to use it to solve a problem.
Now on to browsers, Internet Explorer used to be rather terrible in terms of standard implementation, I know this as I cut my teeth building cross browser compliant HTML websites. The reason Microsoft gave for not being standards compliant is that the standards we not advanced enough, that the standards were holding back the internet in terms of visual layout. As soon as the standards improved ECMA script, CSS 2, Microsoft were welcoming in the use.
These days the current version of Internet Explorer, is reasonably comparable to that of Fire fox, regarding the way you need to code a web page. Certainly Active X is still a huge bug bare, but this is down to the designer, a MS browser can use Java, or flash as a replacement for Active X. It is lazy or narrow minded programmers, and corporations who would like to produce the cheapest option even if this means that it will only serve 93% of the population, these are the people who are to blame.
One of the common reasons that a site may display errors on say fire fox is due to bad coding not standards differences with IE. IE has always had the ability to ignore or bypass bad HTML errors (unclosed tags, etc), Mozilla based browsers have always been a little stricter. I believe this traditionally was due to the way they rendered the HTML.
Until recent I used to be a IE user, why did I switch ? Well basically I because of the recent security issues. I'm personally not interested as to what the badge the browser has on it, I just want something to view web pages with. IE is as good as any when this is concerned, and it comes installed.
Now im using fire fox, is it a great browser ? To be honest its just a browser it does what is says on the tin, that's all I care about. Sure I like the tabbing feature, besides that as long as I can see web pages I'm happy.
Now back to security issues, sure MS has been guilty of providing operating systems with a few holes, but let us remember that because Microsoft operating systems are the most common they are therefore going to be the biggest target for abuse. I would like to bet that if the same attention was paid to fire fox a few security holes would be uncovered.
Sure I'm against any company holding a Monopoly, and as far as browsers are concerned, do they affect the competition ? For one reason probably, I cant think of anyone who provides something better at the same price, after all its just a browser (please refer the the above paragraph concerning security).
Nic
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Nic
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