Hello Richard:
On Sun, 25 Mar 2001 12:18:29 +0200 (CEST), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Richard
Menedetter) wrote:
> Hi
> 25 Mar 2001, "Samuel W. Heywood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> SH> Does anyone ever really wonder why so many of the big-time webmasters
> SH> are promoting some really inferior web browsers as being so much
> SH> "better" than others? Hmmm . . . .
> We have to see the reality.
> Over 2 thirds of the internet users are using M$ Internet Exploder.
> That's a fact. (and the number is still _rising_)
We have to see the reality. Almost all the patrons and supporters of the
fine arts will agree that Pavorotti is better than Elvis, but which of the
two has sold more records and have had more adoring fans? Even if one were
to evaluate the singing abilities of these two artists by objective means,
such as by analyzing the sound wave patterns and harmonics in an
oscilliscope, we all know who would show up as the real winner in such
a comparative study. Just because Elvis may have been a better swinger
doesn't mean he is a better singer.
> It's not the big companies bribing the diskjokeys, but the users calling
> the jokey (on port 80)
That is because they feel a need to connect with the website, and to do so
they can use no browser other than the one(s) for which the website is
specifically designed. All others are excluded and referred to a page
urging the user to download the latest and greatest stuff. This is about
as absurd as listening to a disk jockey telling you that you aren't cool
and you will be shunned by everybody who is really hip if you don't go out
right now and buy the latest hit recordings. You might feel forced to
listen to him anyway if his is the only station you can tune in for
frequent updates on the news and weather and the latest announcements on
school and workplace closings due to floods and blizzards. Any old radio
that can tune in the station's broadcast frequency will work just fine, but
not just any old browser that can connect with port 80 can display the
website. To design a commercial website that will work only with
special browsers is about as stupid as designing a commercial-supported
broadcast radio station that would require would-be listeners to buy from
the radio station a receiver equipped with a proprietary descrambler needed
for understanding the transmissions. Such a radio station would soon go
out of business because the would-be sponsors would simply hire a normal
radio station to broadcast their ads. I don't understand why so many
people who want to advertise their products on the internet don't hire
website developers to produce just normal webpages that will work with any
browser. They don't really need https and they certainly don't need
JavaScript. For browsers lacking such capabilities the webpage could
simply refer the internet shopper to a simple page displaying a catalog of
the products and list some telephone numbers to call for placing an
order. I simply cannot understand why any commercial website developer
would want to exclude any customers from his site unless there were some
money in it for him to promote special browsers and to disparage others
as being "out of date" or "bad" under some contrived standards issue and
other false concepts and pretexts.
> And to be honest IE is not that inferior.
> It implements most standards better than Netscape.
> (Not as good as Opera though)
> IMHO the bigest problem is, that it's simply UGLY ...
> and I don't like the concept and the company :)
I don't think MSIE is any more ugly looking than NetScape. I wholeheartedly
support the concept of the boycotting of companies that are engaging in
monopolistic and unethical business tactics. I personally prefer Opera's
user interface over that of both MSIE and NetScape. Furthermore, Opera runs
much faster than either of those two because she is not so full of bloat.
> Another sad fact is Netscape 6 which is pure CRAP ...
> and much more unuseable than IE or Opera.
> (I hope that they will fix the bugs and instabilities rapidly)
I don't like either NetScape or MSIE because they are both resource
hogs and they slow down your aging machine more and more with each
successive upgrade. This is not at all the case with Arachne. Almost
all of the Arachne upgrades have resulted in an overall true improvement
over the older version. These improvements truly qualify the new versions
to be referred to as "upgrades". I hope Michael keeps up the good work.
Furthermore, Arachne may be installed in such a way so as to run on a
relatively small RAMDISK and she can run most remarkably fast, even on a
very old machine.
All the best,
Sam Heywood
-- This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/
