A little late, but:
Brian Weeden wrote:
On 5/12/05, warpmedia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:<snip>
BS, the damage is done because everyone uses an admin account to run IE and thus can make system wide changes. Something that could still plague any browser using say Java or Flash.
Failing to do so? That's going a bit far Brian, no?
Hell no. How long has M$ been in the browser business? How many new
innovations have they come up with since they trounced Netscape and
won the browser war? How many standards do they support fully? How
have they complied with the court order to de-couple IE from the OS
which would make a lot of the browser hijacks less damaging system
wide? I for one am pretty damn fed up.
You can say the OS relies on IE to provide features but that will be less so in the future IMO. The new IE 7 is supposedly not tied into the OS BTW.
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1765128,00.asp
All browsers broke some standards or created defacto ones over the years, IE being the worst but that how things change for better or worse.
None of this is (nor will) removing AOL from desktops and there's quite a few of that type of idiot. PEOPLE have to change and software has to be better thought out/written whether it's complicated or simple to use is secondary.
I know of 18 people who have personally asked me to help install Firefox and/or installed it themselves. 10 were former AOL users. That is just a grain of sand on the beach, but that is just my personal experience. I think the numbers are bigger than you imagine. And you are wrong about the simple to use being secondary. It is primary in a world with many products all competing for the same niche or where you have a single entrenched product.
AOL users are inherently less sophisticated or they wouldn't be on AOL. The few that more sophisticated are the exception not the rule.
Take TIVO for an example. If you look at the user feedback, the #1 comment that people like about it (the non-techie housewife types) is that it is easy to use. They don't care about hard drive capacity, broadcast flags, streaming ability, kernel versions, or any of that stuff. They want it to do the one or two things they bought it for and they want it to do it simply. Of course implicit in this is that the object actually works and does its job well, but if this is the case it is invisible to the user.
TIVO is not interpreting code nor taking user add-on code. Using a browser can be dicey business if you try and use it like an appliance with no understanding of how it works.
Fine but the premise was one of more secure which has been driving the john q public downloads. This is not as true and in fact can be less than true given that everything is on or off feature wise even without activex problems. They are fixing problems quickly but they're were not supposed to have the problems to begin with given their stance of more secure than IE.
I agree that FF might have been a bit oversold by the developers. But if they had come out and said, "here is out software, it is more secure from an activex and blah blah blah standpoint, but just as insecure on blah blah blah" would people have installed it? Nope. I will take a little exaggeration of the truth in marketing to ensure that people actually go out and try it as long as you continue to improve your product, which they are.
Yeah, yeah, over hype rather than sell the truth is the bane of selling things. Problems start when you set the bar too high and it comes back to bite you on the ass.
I'm using it, I like it, but I am not thrilled with some of the problems and missing features.
