I look forward to your 24 hour comparison of your normal tab and browsing behavior using Chrome and then Firefox (or vice versa).
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Iām not going to weigh in on how useful or good IE is, instead Iām going to state the obvious, that if it was maligned it wasnāt because it didnāt work, its because improvements only came long after its competitors had left it in the dust.
And thatās not the fault of the technology, Microsoft is famous for this.
Any new browser released by Microsoft will still be a Microsoft product, I donāt have much faith that this ānew browserā (still waiting to see how new it is) wont be a bloated mess or wonāt become one in short order.
Now, let me propose the idea that we donāt really need a new browser. Do we? (Itās debatable, I know. Itās just that if its as good as FF, Chrome or Safari, its still not a big deal), but itās still going to have to deal with having to render all the stuff that was made to work with IE. After all, it has to take over at one point or another as the standard.
Now that I wrote that, Iām struck by the idea that maybe Microsoft doesnāt want to continue being the standard. Maybe, this isnāt about gaining market share but unburdening itself. The browser certainly isnāt the thing thatās going to keep you on a Windows environment, so why bother?
I only use Chrome for reading Pewfell, as Iāve somehow b0rked the siteās ānextā button in FF with a combination of Noscript and Ghostery, I think 
Our district is not that clever to come up with that punishment. And even if they did, they wouldnāt because theyāre too afraid of the possible lawsuits.
This district just about ALWAYS* gives in the parents at one particular HS because they donāt want ANY negative publicity.
*Will arrest for drug use, but is too timid to adequately punish habitual cheaters. I am not exaggerating. One set of parents of one high achiever threatened to sue district because their child, while attempting to become the valedictorian, cheated (multiple times). When the possibility arose that the child would no longer be valedictorian, the parents claimed that nowhere in the handbook does it state that valedictorians canāt be cheaters. The district took the threat seriously enough to reinstate the honor, and that would have been the end of it EXCEPT that the teachers at the school threatened to walk.
Edited to add last four sentences and fix a verb agreement.
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What is your logic here?
Avid is weird because was intended to be used on these massive, custom built, Avid only work stations. Weāre talking specific peripherals for many of the key functions, 6 different types of monitor, tie ins to massive online edit systems with servers located world wide, big racks of decks, and tele-cine converters for digitizing film stock. And they only ran avid, like an ATM. It might have been windows underneath but you turned it on and it was just Avid. Iāve never even seen on of the damn things, donāt know if they make them anymore, but Iāve been told they started at $50k. Since most non-linear editing moved to more standard desktops and house built work stations it kind of seemed to have trouble adapting. They never really cleaned it up so that it work well with keyboard and mouse at a regular edit station.
I have worked on a big complicated Avid work station with a lot of bells and whistles though. It just wasnāt one of the space shuttle-esque monsters movie studios were rumored to use when it first came out. Its a lot easier to get along with if your using every possible doodad and a keyboard with like 60 extra keys.
Of course this could all be something they told us at film school to scare us away from Avidā¦
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Itās not surprising. Internet Explorer always had a ātry as hard as you can to understand without breakingā attitude, with much more importance placed on that than matching any particular standard. So you get the end result where users are pissed off at firefox for not viewing the website they want to see correctly, and they switch back to Internet Explorer which sticks its fingers in the leaky holes.
Then you have a web ecosystem filled with thousands of websites that donāt really run correctly under any specific standard, but might run correctly under the condition of undocumented internet explorer fix #15283, ā¦ etc. Creates a crufty nightmare. But, at the end of the day, people just want websites to work; they donāt care about specs or ideal design solutions.
Because users are sluts for the most part when it comes to foreign code being run on their machines. Theyāll get some nasty VD onto my nice clean network if I give them Admin privileges. They just donāt need that kind of power to do their jobs. They donāt need to put their iTunes library on their work machine. They donāt need to play slots on their work machine. They donāt need to browse most of the web. If they want to play words with friends, they can do that on their personal phones.
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Uninstalling IE can be a horrific ordeal. Mainly because itās built into the OS. Trying to get rid of IE in Windows 7 is like trying to remove all the insulation from the walls of your house. But only through a single 6"x6" hole in the sheetrock located in the bathroom in the basement.
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Ha. I have Steam installed on my work machine. You know what, my boss does too.
I do too, but Iām midnight Helldesk. I get special treatment because my job is sitting around with nothing to do 6 out of 8 hours a night.
My users work during the day, have stuff to do all day, and are āartistic typesā who canāt be trusted with a single ounce more power on their machines than what they need.
Iāve had to write scripts that go through all the machines in the corporate HQ and just uninstall freaking Ask.com and Bing toolbars.
Iāve also had to repeatedly disinfect several chronic gamblerās PCs. Theyāre executives. Theyāre supposed to be having big ideas and crap like that. But this one user I have, without fail gets his machine infected at least once a month. But I canāt curb his permissions any further, since heād fire me.
My company is a high-end retailer, but our infrastructure, honestly, is crumbling. We have Dell poweredge 2xx servers running our stores fershitsake.
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Look for work!
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Most of the work (beyond answering the phone and troubleshooting) Iām supposed to do involves remoting into peopleās machines after hours to do various kinds of troubleshooting and maintenance.
Unfortunately, when the current machines were put out into the field, nobody bothered to turn on Wake On LAN in the BIOS. So I usually am able to cover a few machines, then I hit the wall where the rest are in sleep mode and inaccessible. Iāve been working on a few tools to try and set WoL remotely, and Iām actually nearly ready to push it out with BigFix.
Itās just an ugly setup. We have practically no documentation, and I spent a long time early on getting more and more frustrated because I kept being told to call up people for help with certain types of problems. That would work wonderfully except most of the time, those problems crop up at 11PM, nobody wants to hear a call from me just to help one or two retail managers balance their financials, or have their HR site password unlocked (Iām not allowed or even given access to do that type of unlock.)
Biggest problem: My company is nearly 100% dependent on Software as a Service. So when most problems crop up, the vendor Iām supposed to call isnāt going to answer after hours anyway, I have no access to fix the problem myself, and nobody in the company with higher level access is going to be available to help anyway.
My manager is always on the ābe proactiveā train, but thatās pretty much bullshit when we donāt really manage any of the software we use, and itās hard to be proactive without knowing what all is available to me in the organization, and Iām working at a time when I canāt even interact with most of the users to figure out what people are having trouble with, and what they would like to have.
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New Windows systems didnāt all ship with IE until 1997. In 1995 you still had to buy āMicrosoft Plusā to get IE on your Windows 95 machine.
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Donāt even joke about that. .NET bloat and dependency hell has already infested non-Win systems, thanks to Mono. The *nix world doesnāt need any more contributions by or inspirations from MS.
I donāt work in IT, but I do get the āpleasureā of delousing machines belonging to co-workers, their spouses and children, after they have thoroughly messed them up. Things have improved a bit since I started leaving notes documenting what I found, what it did or was capable of, and how it likely got there. Once upon a time I enjoyed the challenge of outsmarting malware, or fixing a broken OS ([rant] IME, Windows tools like System File Checker, System Repair, etc, are next to useless on broken installations, failed upgrades, etc. They really should work on that.[/rant]) but now it comes as a relief when I realize that it is a company machine they have brought in. āSorry, itās locked down and the hard drive is encrypted. Call the helpdesk.ā
The average computer user, corporate or otherwise, only needs admin access occasionally and for a limited time. Hell, the average user has no interest in computers at all and would be better off with an internet appliance like a tablet, suitably locked down. Software developers may require exceptions if they are to do their jobs efficiently, but those exceptions are just that. Just about every major corporation now uses standardized OS images, with a standardized list of added software, and another list of optional software, all of which can be pushed out to company owned hardware on their tightly controlled networks, which are becoming less and less tolerant of non-conforming machines.
Yes, this, so so so much this. All the mess we had back in the win9x/NT4 days and now it is better with a lot of stuff being able to run properly with in userland permissions. Sorry the one entire weekend I spent running restores was enough because the idiots didnāt know any better to not click on random .exe file from an obvious spam message.
IE11 actually has a totally new user agent string, so that old sites that were hacked together to work with IE7, etc no longer recognize it as IE (because those IE7 hacks actually break rendering in IE11). As I stated above, though, IE11 is perfectly fine for the majority of web users these days, and is definitely better than Chrome, at least, when it comes to resource usage. I canāt really say, in comparison to FFox. The days of āOMG IE is teh sux0rzā are long gone. And new browsers are always good, because if thereās no competition, you get stagnation. Which is why Chromeās appearance was so awesome, it spurred Firefox to stay relevant.
The thing about Chrome (in windows, at least) is that it can be hard to figure out exactly how much memory itās actually using. Looking at task manager, I currently have 17 Chrome processes running (with 9 Chrome tabs open). And actually, I just did some googles and found out about chrome://memory-redirect/ in Chrome. Shows you the current memory usage of all of your browsers currently running. Thatās neat. FFox and Chrome have both been running for days on this machine, Chrome for personal browsing (Gmail, Inoreader tabs always open, more tab churn on BB and other sites) and FFox for my dev work (MUCH more tab churn). Total memory footprint? Chrome: 1,100,087 Firefox: 406,925
Guess I should restart Chrome, yikes.
But did it really work? For example, did MS ever fix IEās inability to cope with transparency on PNGs? Thatās what I mean when I talk about stagnation, the lack of desire to fix anything other than the seriously bad security bugs. Talking about security, ActiveX was a nightmare.
I am grateful for Firefox and Chrome as they broke the MS monopoly on the internet and it finally meant that they had to fix things.
I agree. IE6 was the leaded fuel of internet browsing.
Or know a guy who had copies of OEM SR1. 
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