jesus X wrote:
>
> JTK wrote:
> > > Oh, but it is. Thet's common knowledge that when IE crashes it's very easy
> > > for it to take down the whole OS, necessitating a reboot.
> > It's a common myth the anti-Microsoft crowd likes to believe.
>
> But you see, I'm not an "anti-Microsoft" person.
Then you impersonate one rather well. You don't want MS to "make your
choices for you" (whatever that means), right?
> Honestly, I LIKE some of the MS
> operating systems. I use Win98 because I LIKE it.
NOBODY uses Win9x because they like it! They use it only because they
have no other realistic option, and nobody seems to be willing to give
them one.
> I like WinNT even more. Win2k
> is a nice upgrade from NT, but still needs a bit more work.
Needs work where? Why2K as I see it is the culmination of all the work
MS has put into all the various Windii over the years. It's the Windows
Windows should have been all along. At this point it'll be merely
window-dressing and minor tweaking to the Why2K base, until some new,
major computing revolution happens.
> WinME sucks.
You like Win98 but WinME sucks?!?! WinME *is* Win98, plus a boatload of
bugfixes. How can you like 98 and hate ME?
> WinXP
> is nice, but I'm reserving my final judgment on that until later in the year...
I have yet to even take a look, since what I'm hearing is that it's
Why2K with a little bit of that horrid Apple "Aqua" look to it. Yawn.
But whatever...
> While most technical people dislike MS OSes flat out,
Mmm, no, most zealots do that. Most technical people who think for
themselves know that MS OS's are the worst OS's available, except for
all the non-MS ones.
> I can give them their due
> credit for a lot of things. Now, A lot, most, of MS products I don't like.
> Office, for example. I just don't like it as a whole. Excel is nice, and VBA
> give it some really nice capabilities. Publisher I love, and have used since 1.0
> beta days. Word sucks.
Compared to what? If Word could figure out how to do bullets and
numbering sanely, like WordPerfect was able to do a decade ago until it
died around version 6.0, and lose the stupid "normal view" and "web
view", it'd be just about right. Who does better word processing than
Word?
> Access is just not worth it.
Never used it, and IIRC doesn't come in the package anymore unless you
get the "enterprise" edition or whatever they call it.
> MS's business practices I
> despise.
>
Only AOL could go to China.
> But IE _IS_ undeniably tied to the OS is it's default form, where some crashes
> necessitate a reboot.
>
IE is the Windows shell. So yeah, in a sense it's "tied to the OS".
And like I said, on the Win9x series, a crash of *any* program is not
unlikely to necessitate a reboot.
> > > There have been utilities
> > > created by users to help work around that,
> > Such as?
>
> There is one that I have used, which name I can't recall (of course), which
> allows the user to recover icons that should be in the system tray, but
> disappear after an Explorer/IE GPF.
I'm not sure how that would be possible. I know what causes that
problem, and it isn't really IE's fault, it's the program's, in that it
doesn't respond to the "IE has restarted, redraw your icon" message.
Admittedly I'm not convinced the program should *have* to respond to
such a message...
> Norton's Crashguard used to have a feature
> that when your browser crashed, it would remember the last URL you were viewing,
> and allow you to load that URL the next time you restarted the browser or
> rebooted.
That sounds about as useless a utility as they get. Then again, Norton
has been on a steep downward slide ever since DOS was taken off the
market.
> Utilities designed to help separate IE from the OS (such as TweakUI
> from the Win95/98 shell team). Etc.
>
How does TweakUI do anything like that?
> [No crashes]
> > No, I'm telling you IE has NEVER, EVER "killed my OS", as in having to
> > reinstall it, as Mr. Lag claims he has had to do.
>
> While I've never had a crash hose my entire OS,
Alright then. The Savior and I are in full agreement. ;-)
> I do recall that the beta's of
> IE 5 could not be uninstalled, necessitating a reinstall of the OS.
>
Beta. The Mozilla faithful want to use that excuse even though Mozilla
was released about six months ago, so I think it's only fair that you
give IE that same excuse when it actually applies.
Furthermore, I *don't* recall such a problem, and as I've said, I've
used all the betas and more. But I'm not in the habit of uninstalling
them (never had a reason to), so my memory may not be correct in this
instance.
> > but on WinNT/2K, even if the
> > *shell* instance crashes, it will automatically restart. And NT/2K has
> > never BSOD'd on me due to any user-mode program, IE's included.
>
> Well, we all know that Win2k inherits NT's VM structure, allowing much more
> graceful recovery from app crashes. I've had a couple poorly written apps BSD NT
> though.
User-mode apps simply cannot do so.
> Drivers galore too...
Drivers (i.e. kernel mode code) can. Bugs in the (again kernel-mode) OS
can as well, though I've never knowingly encountered one.
> But that's another matter (like how half of the
> programmers of drivers should be allowed to program).
>
I've done more than my fair share of driver writing, and let me dispel
that myth right now: If there are jobs in Hell, they're for writing
Windows drivers. You cannot imagine what an absolute horror writing
Windows drivers is. There is virtually no documentation on anything,
and what there is is about 50% correct, 30% misleading, and 20% just
plain wrong. *Experts* in the field, the ***guys that write the
books***, the guys with ***direct lines into MS***, will oftentimes tell
you, "yeah, nobody knows what that does, or how to do that".
I felt exactly the same way you do, until I had to venture into the
belly of the beast myself; and mind you, I am a well-seasoned embedded-
and Windows- software developer. It is *not* the driver writers fault.
The blame here rests solely in MS's lap. Having been there, it is in my
mind a miracle that there's any Windows system out there that is even
able to boot up.
> > Now Win9x/Me is a different matter, they'll bluescreen if the sun goes
> > behind a cloud, but the IE's have been no more guilty of that than any
> > other software. But yet again, NEVER, EVER have I had to reinstall.
> > Not once.
>
> I'm not saying you DID have to reinstall. But when NS4 crashes, it doesn't BSOD
> on me almost ever (I can't recall any, but that doesn't mean it never happened,
> just that it's rare if ever). Nor does it do something ugly requiring a reboot.
On WinMe, it does so for me to this day. I don't quite know *what* it's
doing, but if NC4.77's newsgroup reader decides to wig out on me, which
it does far too often, it wedges ME to the point where I have to
reboot. Fault: NC for crashing, ME for allowing a crashing app to wedge
it. Contrarily, OE's newsreader simply doesn't crash on me. But it's
not quite as good.
> On occasion I'll have to fire up IE for one site or another, and when it
> crashes, 75% of the time I'll have to reboot to get things right again.
>
And how often does it crash for you in comparison to NC4.x? Or Mozilla?
> --
> jesus X [ Booze-fueled paragon of pointless cruelty and wanton sadism. ]
> email [ jesusx @ who.net ]
> web [ http://burntelectrons.com ] [ Updated April 29, 2001 ]
> tag [ The Universe: It's everywhere you want to be. ]
> warning [ All your base are belong to us. ]
