How can anyone still use Internet Explorer?

I haven't really used Internet Explorer as my everyday browser since 2006, but until recently I hadn't really realized how bad it is. Back then it was IE 6 and Firefox 1.5, if I'm not mistaken. I preferred Firefox, but still used IE because there was at least one site I had to access, which didn't really look okay in Firefox. When I no longer needed to access that site, I made the full time use move to Firefox and never looked back.

Recently, however, I have been working on a couple of sites and applications which I decided to test with all browsers. You can't imagine my surprise when I found out that the sites looked and worked perfectly on all browsers, except Internet Explorer. (They are fine in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome.) I tried IE 8 in both its native and "compatibility" modes and it not only wasn't able to properly display the sites' images which use alpha-channel for transparency, but the speed for executing the Javascript was ridiculously slow.

For one small website, I redid the layout and got it to work okay on IE. For the applications I just decided that I won't support Internet Explorer. It is a seriously flawed product and I for one am not going to loose my time by trying to make it work as it should. That is what Microsoft should have done.

I haven't tried windows 7 yet, and I don't really care anymore

Earlier this year, when Microsoft announced that it would make Windows 7 beta available for testing I was quite excited. I had hated Vista, as soon as I came into direct contact with it and my newly acquired notebook came into the very broadly defined "Vista Capable" set of computers in which you could install the system, but could not use the new interface. The idea of trying out Windows 7 was appealing as it was promised as being a version that would makeup for all negative points of vista.

So I spent a while downloading the DVD image, burned it into a DVD and started the install process. That was when I found out that you can't install Windows Vista side-by-side with XP. You need a freshly formatted partition. Okay, I had started the move to my MacBook as my main computer but I wasn't really prepared to just kill off my Windows notebook. I had some work software and persona items such as photos, documents which I was still using on it and I didn't really want to have to reinstall everything on the notebook. So, I decided that testing Windows 7 wasn't so important after all. I could wait for the final version to do it all at once.

Well, now Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing and should be out in its final version in October and according to Walt Mossberg's recent article, on The Wall Stree Journal, if you are running XP you still need to reformat the hard disk to install it. Well... In light of that, guess what? I've figured out that I have no desire to run Windows 7 on my notebook.

I've come to the conclusion that there is nothing, no particular feature, that I'm looking forward to having or using, in Windows 7. I'm not saying that I won't use it, which was definitly the case with Vista, and I might end up getting a new Windows notebook for my Web development later this year. In that case I'll even make sure to wait until I can get it with Windows 7, instead of Vista, but I can really say that I'm not particularly looking forward to it.

Considering that I have been a heavy user of all versions of Windows up to XP (including the server ones), it is an interesting sign of just how far off Microsoft has managed to drive my interest, that I am more keen to try out the next release of Ubuntu than I am to try out Windows 7. Perhaps even more astounding is that I can actually install Ubuntu side by side my Windows XP, to do this, but I have to remove it to try out Windows 7.

Google's Chrome OS is so much steam

Google has recently announced its intention of releasing an new operating system (OS) in 2010. This OS will be called Chrome OS and will run on both x86 and ARM based systems. While this news is generally interesting, it essentially amounts to vaporware.

At the time of the announcement, and up to this day, Google didn't show so much as a single screenshot of the Chrome OS. While I do not dispute the existence of Chrome OS, the fact that nothing has been shown of it clearly states that Google is a long way from having a usable operating system.

While it is too soon to speculate about what effect a new OS from Google might have in the general market, I don't see it posing any sort of threat to OS X, as Apple customers might be hard pressed to exchange an OS that is tightly integrated with their hardware for a more basic experience. As Google's own stated target is primarily in the netbook space, I would say that both Windows and Linux tend to loose some market share when Chrome OS comes out. How much exactly will depend heavily on how good a user experience Google can deliver.

All that we can do now is wait and see what comes out of Google's labs, but with release date estimated for the second half of 2010, we might have to wait quite a bit to see anything of interest.

Opera wants to make your computer part of the cloud

Opera has recently announced a new software/service offering called Opera Unite.  This is included in a beta version of the Opera 10 browser that you can download directly from the company's website.   With Unite Opera plans to help you bring a piece of the cloud home with you, by allowing you to simple and almost effortlessly host content for public consumption, within your own computer.

Opera Unite will work as a platform, allowing new services to be added to the browser and thus adding new functionality for the end user.  What interest this platform will stir up amongst developers is still too soon to tell.

While the concept is rather interesting whether or not the implementation will prove to be useful, or even usable, also remains to be seen.  The main drawback to proposed approach is that while more and more people have permanent broadband connections to the Internet, even more people have notebook computers which they carry around all the time and which are thus unavailable to serve content on-line.  This can, however, prove to be a powerful tool for people working in small distributed groups or that are part of tight communities such as college students.  

My first contact with Unite has me interested but not yet overly optimistic about its usability.  I will continue to follow the product's development, and even more importantly to follow what new services are added to this platform Opera is introducing.

What do you think of Opera Unite?

The incompatible IE 8

I haven't been using Internet Explorer for a long time. I think I made the full time switch to Firefox back in 2006, when I left employment at a company whose website only worked on IE. That need to use I to check on the website was the only thing holding me back from using Firefox for everything and on leaving the company I made the switch without even thinking about it. I just stopped using IE all together.

Earlier today I was making some updates to my one-page website, which lists the different blogs I write and I decided to try it out on IE. Turns out that it looked terrible on IE 8 and only on IE. I tried it on Chrome, Firefox and Safari and they all showed exactly the same thing - what they were supposed to.

I had had some compatibility issues with IE7 and 6 in the past, but you'd expect that things would get better, not worse as time passes. Firefox got better and better. Safari has improved markedly and Chrome takes advantage of all the work that has already gone into WebKit to make Safari work well. That leaves IE on the outside.

The thing that bothers me the most is a simple question: Why does Microsoft sink money into creating a browser that is less compatible with all the others, than the previous version? It's not like it is doing anything else better than all the others.

I made a small change to the website, just so it would not look too bad on IE and in order to do that I sacrificed some of the design that appeared on the other browsers. Even so, the site in IE still looks different from what it looks like in all the other browsers I tested it on.

I've spent quite some time thinking about this today and I've come to the conclusion that Microsoft is more and more becoming a company whose products I don't care about. That seems very weird to me as I used to be a fervent defender of some Microsoft products such as Windows and Office. Both great products that Microsoft managed to break in their latest releases. They didn't just add new features or make some improvements. They changed the products and made them incompatible with hardware (in the case of Windows Vista) and with their own previous version (Office).

Looking into this compatibility issues in IE 8, I came across some discussions that suggested that even some Microsoft owned websites had some compatibility problems with version 8 of Internet Explorer. Weird, to say the least.

Looking at the sort of things Microsoft has been doing and at something like the Wave product that Google demoed yesterday, I get a feeling that the sun is really setting for Microsoft as a trend setting company.

A little bit more reflection brings me to the perception that as I work on my latest book, there isn't a single piece of Microsoft involved in the process. For the first time in the fourteen years I've been been a writer nothing I'm using comes from Microsoft and I hadn't even really noticed that.