Minor Dell WTF

[wrack]

@blakeyrat said:

@Someone You Know said:

If you buy from Macromedia Adobe, the terrorists win.

 

True dat. Of course, the terrorists in this case are Adobe, who are terrorizing the general populace with their godawful UIs. (It's unbelievable that only 3-4 versions ago, people used to praise Photoshop's UI as a good example for an extremely complex app. Now there's blogs like this one.)

The interesting part is the fact that Adobe actually adopted the Macromedia MX style dockable custom UIs in place of their old all-floating "Mac Classic shoehorned into Windows" style.
I, personally, find the "new" UI style way more comfortable, but I'm a long tem Windows and X11 user, and never liked Mac OS UI designs.

[badcaseofspace]

@blakeyrat said:

Now there's blogs like this one.

Really enjoying this guy's rants now, thanks.

[Zemm]

@OzPeter said:

I can potentially use USB/serial converters but depending on the converter brand they can be hit or miss in correctly working, so I am erring on the side of being able to do my job without issue.

The problem with RS232 is it is meant to be positive/negative - transmitters are supposed to transmit -12V/+12V. The cheap USB converters wouldn't generate the negative, nor would they bump up the voltage, so they would transmit 0/5V. Some electronics don't like that (the voltage near 0V is an invalid value, plus even if it were normalised, it would only be -2.5V/2.5V and the RS232 specs mention a minimum of -3/3V). Some will work, some won't, depends on the other end more than the USB thingy - though driver stability can have a factor too.

[dhromed]

@bannedfromcoding said:

I, personally, find the "new" UI style way more comfortable

 

As do I.

I mean, the alternative paletted shit featured the ability to put your stuff in random places. Seriously.

And to think I actually used to see people do this: put palettes all over the fucking place and moving them when they got in the way and still somehow believing that it was not a problem.

I haven't had the privilege of using PS-CS4, but it looks they managed to fuck it up.

[bjolling]

@Someone You Know said:

@dhromed said:

@bstorer said:

Well of course that's not cool.  Where's the spot to put the iPad?

 

Or his gun iPistol?

 

FTFY. The next-generation iPistol, being smaller, glossier, and more pretentious than its predecessor, can actually be stored inside an iPhone without loss of functionality. If you're willing to pay the extra $40 for the special dock adapter.

Smaller? How do you figure? The iPhone released in 2007 is 11.5x6.1 cm² in size. The iPad released in 2010 is already 24.3x19.0 cm². This leads me to believe that the formula to calculate sizes of future Apple devices is:

size in cm² = 130.5167 * release year - 261877

 

[bstorer]

@bjolling said:

size in cm² = 130.5167 * release year - 261877

130.5167 x 1983 - 261877 = -3062 cm²

Wow.  I never realized the Apple IIe actually gave you more space.  No wonder it was so popular.

[blakeyrat]

@dhromed said:

@bannedfromcoding said:

I, personally, find the "new" UI style way more comfortable

 

As do I.

I mean, the alternative paletted shit featured the ability to put your stuff in random places. Seriously.

And to think I actually used to see people do this: put palettes all over the fucking place and moving them when they got in the way and still somehow believing that it was not a problem.

I haven't had the privilege of using PS-CS4, but it looks they managed to fuck it up.

 

It's been fucked up for a few versions now. You're lucky if you haven't been exposed to it... around CS2, Adobe decided that they would never again use a single OS native widget and instead write their own for everything. Since then, they've:

1) Been (badly) covering up default window decorations, making all of their applications react about as quickly as molasses in January with tons of bugs to boot. (Menus open up on the wrong screen, hell windows open up on the wrong screen, the OS window decorations sometimes draw over the retarded Adobe ones, many window management features don't work right because Adobe is "faking" windows by drawing the border in one OS window and the controls in another one.) The windows usually still look active, even when in the background. Hell, sometimes the apps themselves forget which window is supposed to be active, and so when you choose "Print" it'll print out the wrong one. I find that particularly hilarious.

2) Have implemented 5-6 different styles of slider, all of which both look *and* behave differently. Various other widgets have alternate implementations for no reason as well, but the sliders are the most egregious because all of those 5-6 different styles appear in the same application.

3) Have re-implemented some of their panels/dialogs in Flash of all things, making them buggy beyond belief (my favorite is that if you click through radios too quickly, you can get 2 selected at once!)

4) All their new UIs are borderline useless-- take a look at the link I posted before, he compares one of the new gradient editors with the "older" one still in one of the apps. What took 5 clicks to accomplish in the older one takes something like 25 in the newer.

Note that all this rewriting hasn't happened all at once. They've been rewriting UIs piecemeal, bit by bit, so you end up in a situation where one dialog is still implemented with native controls and works pretty nice, then the dialog on the next menu item is one of the Flash UIs and works like shit boiled over. You can write a non-native UI and have it work well-- Firefox is my golden example there. It's not perfect, but it's close enough that you have to look *really* hard to see where it's buggy. Adobe simply does *not* have the talent to pull this off.

And that's just the UI! I don't even want to mention the *functional* bugs that have been happening. I mean, Macromedia's Flash interface was never great, but at least you didn't spend most of your time working around their fucking bugs. Now you have to keep track of 5-6 bugs just for using the timeline... and god help you if you screw up, some of them take ages to undo.

This is why monopolies are bad, people. Adobe simply does not. give. a. fuck. anymore.

[blakeyrat]

 BTW, this page is pretty awesome too: http://futurestack.com/jump/aebugs/ It's about After Effects specifically

[dhromed]

@blakeyrat said:

he compares one of the new gradient editors with the "older" one still in one of the apps. What took 5 clicks to accomplish in the older one takes something like 25 in the newer.

 

The gradient editors in all Adobe apps are incomparable. The teams, for some reason, don't compare notes.

The one in PS is great (CS3 anyway), the one in AI is good for acid reflux and has never been changed since version 2 or 3 or whenever it was first thrown into tha app.

[bjolling]

@bstorer said:

@bjolling said:

size in cm² = 130.5167 * release year - 261877

130.5167 x 1983 - 261877 = -3062 cm²

Wow.  I never realized the Apple IIe actually gave you more space.  No wonder it was so popular.

Firstly, I clearly said "Apple's future devices", which you conveniently didn't quote. And secondly, what makes you think the Apple IIe falls in the category of iThingies?

If you had try to match an iPod into my formulae, we could have had a decent discussion, maybe a bugfix but I would have certainly accepted a change request.

 

Now you're just talking nonsense :'-(

[dhromed]

@bjolling said:

what makes you think the Apple IIe falls in the category of iThingies?

 

Because it's the Apple iie, obviously.

[bstorer]

@bjolling said:

Firstly, I clearly said "Apple's future devices", which you conveniently didn't quote.

Fair enough, but you also started your extrapolation using a device from 2007 which, according to my advanced research, is not in the future.  So if the extrapolation goes backwards through time, where does it end?  DEAR, GOD, WHERE DOES IT END? @bjolling said:

And secondly, what makes you think the Apple IIe falls in the category of iThingies?

iIe seems to fit the pattern pretty well, don't you think?  But, if you insist, the iMac was released in 1998, giving it an area of -1105 cm².  Not exactly an impressive viewable area... or maybe a decent viewing area (at a 16:9 ratio, that's a -20" screen (or -18.9" at 4:3) (provided there's no bezel)), but in a negative direction.  I'm really not too clear on how it works; I'll just have to take Steve Jobs at his word and assume that it's totally awesome and completely innovative.

 @bjolling said:

Now you're just talking nonsense

"Now"?!  Are you new here or something?  I'm always talking nonsense.@bjolling said:

:'-(

Ew, looks like you still have something on your face from btk's visit last night.  Should've locked your windows.

 

[dhromed]

@bstorer said:

So if the extrapolation goes backwards through time, where does it end?  DEAR, GOD, WHERE DOES IT END?

 

Something with Q pointing out a puddle to Picard on a barren, desolate Earth.

iPud.

[Lingerance]

@blakeyrat said:

all of which both look and behave differently.

TBH, I'd rather they didn't look alike if the behaved differently.
@blakeyrat said:

This is why monopolies are bad, people.

QFT. I have a grand idea, let us all use the same company's products, that way it can get bloat, fat and apathetic. We could buy awesome widgets, and it'd just be able to make more and more awesome widgets. Then it'll start making cool things, and we'll buy more and more of those. Then it'll start making okayish thing-a-magigs by the truckload, and we'll buy all of those too. Eventually they'll start making ass-rapists, and it'll be the only thing we can ever buy, and the world will cry out because we have no fucking idea why we all have aids and some fat hairy queer rearranging all of our fucking porn so we can't look at anything other than their giant penetrating dicks.

[Guest]

@dhromed said:

@bjolling said:

what makes you think the Apple IIe falls in the category of iThingies?

 

Because it's the Apple iie, obviously.

I thought Apple iIE was Safari.

[bjolling]

@bstorer said:

@bjolling said:

Now you're just talking nonsense

"Now"?!  Are you new here or something?  I'm always talking nonsense.

At least you're a decent counterweight for dhromed's dick jokes@bstorer said:

@bjolling said:

:'-(

Ew, looks like you still have something on your face from btk's visit last night.  Should've locked your windows.

Ah... nevermind

 

[morbiuswilters]

@Lingerance said:

@blakeyrat said:

This is why monopolies are bad, people.

QFT. I have a grand idea, let us all use the same company's products, that way it can get bloat, fat and apathetic. We could buy awesome widgets, and it'd just be able to make more and more awesome widgets. Then it'll start making cool things, and we'll buy more and more of those. Then it'll start making okayish thing-a-magigs by the truckload, and we'll buy all of those too. Eventually they'll start making ass-rapists, and it'll be the only thing we can ever buy, and the world will cry out because we have no fucking idea why we all have aids and some fat hairy queer rearranging all of our fucking porn so we can't look at anything other than their giant penetrating dicks.

The problem with this is that if somebody started selling ass-rapists, you wouldn't have to buy it.  Just like you aren't forced to buy Windows.  Did Microsoft become bloated and apathetic?  I don't really think so, I think 4 things happened:

• They created more and more products.  Even if they were super great at what they did, some of these were going to suck.  Because they are the largest software company, their failures are magnified and endlessly analyzed.  And people would rather blame Microsoft for sucking than accept the fact that human endeavors tend to be error-prone and that statistically speaking, even a good company is going to have some stinkers.  Combined with...
• Microsoft became a very, very large company.  Managing a large company effectively is difficult.  As a result, quality slipped in a few places in the mid-to-late 90s.  Microsoft bumped up against the limits of size and scope that challenge even competent managers.
• Microsoft made some bad guesses.  They didn't see the web as being a big growth market.  As a result, their web browser languished as they put their efforts into other technologies.  This proved to be an error, although an understandable one; I don't think the web is a very good application platform, either, and I would not have banked on "web apps" being the future in 1996.  Because IE was such a visible, persistent failure it reflected badly on Microsoft, even though the areas where their efforts were directed were quite good, though they never took off.
• The world changed.  It went from a few people using computers professionally or as a hobby to being a major centerpiece of business and home life.  Expectations surged and the technologies just were not mature enough.  I don't think any other company would have performed much better than Microsoft.  In fact, despite the obvious shortcomings of Microsoft products in the late 90s and early 00s, nobody else was delivering a better product.  Some competitors might be more stable or secure, but they didn't have large enough market share to be the focus of malware, they didn't support a wide range of cheap (and sometimes flaky) hardware and they weren't compatible with the large number of software titles that Microsoft handled.

 

In short, Microsoft's market domination did little to actually restrict the choices available in the market.  Additionally, Microsoft's failures--when compared to their successes and the size and scope of their operation--were minor and not the result of ambivalence or ineptitude (although I'm sure some failures were) but instead the result of the difficulty of being number 1.

[blakeyrat]

@morbiuswilters said:

They created more and more products.  Even if they were super great at what they did, some of these were going to suck.  Because they are the largest software company, their failures are magnified and endlessly analyzed.  And people would rather blame Microsoft for sucking than accept the fact that human endeavors tend to be error-prone and that statistically speaking, even a good company is going to have some stinkers.  Combined with...

 

Yup, agree 100%.

@morbiuswilters said:

Microsoft made some bad guesses.  They didn't see the web as being a big growth market.  As a result, their web browser languished as they put their efforts into other technologies.  This proved to be an error, although an understandable one; I don't think the web is a very good application platform, either, and I would not have banked on "web apps" being the future in 1996.  Because IE was such a visible, persistent failure it reflected badly on Microsoft, even though the areas where their efforts were directed were quite good, though they never took off.

This one I kind of disagree with. Usually the people who argue this are the Linux geeks, who constantly crow about how Windows was late to the web party... but think about where everybody else was during the same period:

• TCP/IP and PPP were external plug-ins to Mac OS, and the OS didn't ship with either. (Ironically, the only way to get them was FTP. Or go into your local Mac store with a blank floppy... but anyway.) At the same time, Apple was trying to pimp their eWorld product, which was just as dumb to the rest of the 'net as Microsoft's MSN or AOL was at the time.
• Linux was completely unusable, and not even worth considering. Sure, it probably had all the software on the 16 disks it came packaged on in 1995, but since it didn't fucking *work* for anybody who wasn't a computer expert, it's hardly worth mentioning. 
• Amiga I admit I'm ignorant of, but it was also careening downhill at this point in history.
• OS/2 I'm also ignorant of.
  

So anyway, "Microsoft missed the Internet boat." Well, compared to *whom*? At the time, their major competitors were Macintosh and OS/2, and OS/2 was small beans then anyway. And Apple certainly wasn't embracing the Internet more than Microsoft was-- they also didn't ship necessary software by default, they also were trying to promote their own walled-garden software.

In short, that seems like an argument made in retrospect. At the time, *nobody* was embracing the Internet. When Apple gave up on eWorld, they might have beat Microsoft to packaging PPP and TCP/IP software by default, but not by years but by months.

Although now that I'm reading your bulletpoint, I'm not sure of what time period you're thinking of here. "Letting the browser languish" seems like the IE6 era, by which the Internet was firmly established and Microsoft was using it as an app platform as much as anybody else...? So ignore this long-winded reply if it's irrelevant.

@morbiuswilters said:

The world changed.  It went from a few people using computers professionally or as a hobby to being a major centerpiece of business and home life.  Expectations surged and the technologies just were not mature enough.  I don't think any other company would have performed much better than Microsoft.  In fact, despite the obvious shortcomings of Microsoft products in the late 90s and early 00s, nobody else was delivering a better product.  Some competitors might be more stable or secure, but they didn't have large enough market share to be the focus of malware, they didn't support a wide range of cheap (and sometimes flaky) hardware and they weren't compatible with the large number of software titles that Microsoft handled.

The other thing people forget is that none of the OSes at the time gave half-a-thought for interoperability. People give Microsoft flack for being incompatible with other OSes and "standard file formats" without realizing that other OSes were equally insulated from competitors, and standard file formats by and large didn't exist*. Apple didn't bother attempting to interoperate with DOS/Windows until they released PC Exchange in 1992, long after the monopoly OS issue was already settled in Microsoft's favor. (And IIRC, it cost a lot of $$$ at first.)

* Standard file formats still don't exist in most arenas, or if they do they're woefully underspecified. The problem is, with most types of application, the file format *dictates* the featureset-- you can't make a spreadsheet program with fewer features than Excel that is 100% compatible with Excel's file format. It cannot be done. Since none of Excel's competitors have 100% feature parity, and if they did they'd have it by different means (i.e. Javascript/Lua/Python scripting instead of VBA), coming up with a compatible, standrd, file format for spreadsheets is impossible. So the OpenDoc people so the dumbest thing possible, and specify a spreadsheet file format that doesn't even include FORMULAS!

Note, I use Excel as an example, but this applies just as well to, say, Photoshop or Illustrator, or 3D modeling apps (although most of those have good-enough feature parity to make a few formats work).

@morbiuswilters said:

In short, Microsoft's market domination did little to actually restrict the choices available in the market.  Additionally, Microsoft's failures--when compared to their successes and the size and scope of their operation--were minor and not the result of ambivalence or ineptitude (although I'm sure some failures were) but instead the result of the difficulty of being number 1.

They also had retarded competitors in a lot of cases. Companies like Quattro, Word Perfect, and Netscape literally just gave up their customer base as they went years without releasing software to meet their user's needs. (Quattro 1-2-3 was being designed for PhDs, with Mathematica-like features while completely neglecting the accountants that spreadsheets were build for in the first place; Word Perfect was wasting their time in DOS long after everybody moved on to Windows**; Netscape decided to "rewrite their browser from scratch" and turned out to be really, really bad at that.)

And in places where they've succeeded, in many cases they've taken existing technologies and adapted them for the business market. Which the hippies who invented that technology never thought of doing in the first place. The textbook example here is Sharepoint, which frankly is a pretty awful wiki system. But because it's a wiki system aimed specifically at business users, and doesn't require typing in arcane markup, it's also wildly successful.

And of course what bothers me as well is when the EU gets all pissy about Microsoft's monopoly. Hey, EU, what the fuck were you doing during the '70s when you had a chance to enter the OS market? Eating cavier? Making smelly cheeses? Jesus Christ, guys, you were completely asleep at the wheel when you had a chance to influence this, so no you don't get to control Microsoft's feature list, and no, you don't get to control the fucking Internet because you were picking toe-jam out of your feet while companies like Microsoft, Cisco, ATT, Apple were all making it fucking happen.

I mean, how fucked up is it that the most popular OS in France, Germany, Japan, China, India is made by a US company on US soil? You guys weren't even trying. Even Japan, which should have known better.

** Arguably, Microsoft tricked Word Perfect into this decision. Either way, "falling for purile ruses" isn't much better.

[blakeyrat]

@blakeyrat said:

Quattro 1-2-3 was being designed for PhDs, with Mathematica-like features while completely neglecting the accountants that spreadsheets were build for in the first place;

 

That's supposed to read "Quattro and 1-2-3". I'm not an idiot, I swear!

[morbiuswilters]

@blakeyrat said:

This one I kind of disagree with. Usually the people who argue this are the Linux geeks, who constantly crow about how Windows was late to the web party... but think about where everybody else was during the same period:

• TCP/IP and PPP were external plug-ins to Mac OS, and the OS didn't ship with either. (Ironically, the only way to get them was FTP. Or go into your local Mac store with a blank floppy... but anyway.) At the same time, Apple was trying to pimp their eWorld product, which was just as dumb to the rest of the 'net as Microsoft's MSN or AOL was at the time.
• Linux was completely unusable, and not even worth considering. Sure, it probably had all the software on the 16 disks it came packaged on in 1995, but since it didn't fucking *work* for anybody who wasn't a computer expert, it's hardly worth mentioning. 
• Amiga I admit I'm ignorant of, but it was also careening downhill at this point in history.
• OS/2 I'm also ignorant of.
  

So anyway, "Microsoft missed the Internet boat." Well, compared to *whom*? At the time, their major competitors were Macintosh and OS/2, and OS/2 was small beans then anyway. And Apple certainly wasn't embracing the Internet more than Microsoft was-- they also didn't ship necessary software by default, they also were trying to promote their own walled-garden software.

In short, that seems like an argument made in retrospect. At the time, *nobody* was embracing the Internet. When Apple gave up on eWorld, they might have beat Microsoft to packaging PPP and TCP/IP software by default, but not by years but by months.

Although now that I'm reading your bulletpoint, I'm not sure of what time period you're thinking of here. "Letting the browser languish" seems like the IE6 era, by which the Internet was firmly established and Microsoft was using it as an app platform as much as anybody else...? So ignore this long-winded reply if it's irrelevant.

I said nothing about the Internet, I was referring to the web and IE6.  When IE6 first came out, it was probably the best browser in the market.  However, it was allowed to languish for several years while Open Source Zombie Netscape surpassed it.  Microsoft didn't predict where the web would be (an error, but an understandable one--the web is a mediocre app platform) and instead focused on other networked technologies.  The ended up playing catch-up which took a few years and furthered their image as incompetent.

 

@blakeyrat said:

And of course what bothers me as well is when the EU gets all pissy about Microsoft's monopoly. Hey, EU, what the fuck were you doing during the '70s when you had a chance to enter the OS market? Eating cavier? Making smelly cheeses? Jesus Christ, guys, you were completely asleep at the wheel when you had a chance to influence this, so no you don't get to control Microsoft's feature list, and no, you don't get to control the fucking Internet because you were picking toe-jam out of your feet while companies like Microsoft, Cisco, ATT, Apple were all making it fucking happen.

I mean, how fucked up is it that the most popular OS in France, Germany, Japan, China, India is made by a US company on US soil? You guys weren't even trying. Even Japan, which should have known better.

Lord knows we should trust the business acumen of the people who brought you us euro.

[blakeyrat]

@morbiuswilters said:

I said nothing about the Internet, I was referring to the web and IE6.  When IE6 first came out, it was probably the best browser in the market.  However, it was allowed to languish for several years while Open Source Zombie Netscape surpassed it.  Microsoft didn't predict where the web would be (an error, but an understandable one--the web is a mediocre app platform) and instead focused on other networked technologies.  The ended up playing catch-up which took a few years and furthered their image as incompetent.

 

Ok gotcha. I still don't buy the argument, which assumes that Microsoft *should* be in competition with companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo. (Something which I don't believe.) Unless you're *only* talking about browsers, in which case:

Sure, IE languished, but what if it hadn't? HTML5 still didn't exist until long after IE development started back up. Was IE6 holding up the web by not implementing standards that didn't exist at the time?

XHTML didn't add anything that HTML4 didn't already have except geek-wank.

I mean, what does it boil down to? Transparent .PNGs, and some fancy CSS rules you can't use? Are transparent .PNGs so vital to the web?

What great feature did Firefox 1 have that made it *not* holding back the web? XMLHttpRequest? No, IE had that. CSS support? No, IE had that. Add-ins? Nope, IE had those too.

The only thing you can lay at IE6's feet is that it made web development harder. Boohoo, you wusses.

What really holds up the web is the W3C. They're fucking slow, their standards are shit and based in some pie-in-the-sky vision of the web which doesn't exist in reality, and the only hint of reform came from a group operating entirely outside of the W3C. (Until they adopted HTML5 as their own, they wanted to kill HTML altogether.)

@morbiuswilters said:

Lord knows we should trust the business acumen of the people who brought you us euro.

The brilliance there is that now the small EU coutries nobody cares about can spend until the cows come home, confident that sooner or later France or Germany (the EU countries with a vestige of functioning economy) will come bail their asses out. And, hey, they're World Bank members, so the US gets to bail their asses out, too! Score!!

[PJH]

@blakeyrat said:

@morbiuswilters said:

Lord knows we should trust the business acumen
of the people who brought you us euro.

The brilliance there is that now the small EU coutries nobody cares about can spend until the cows come home, confident that sooner or later France or Germany (the EU countries with a vestige of functioning economy) will come bail their asses out. And, hey, they're World Bank members, so the US gets to bail their asses out, too! Score!!

Spotted in the Sunday Times today (no URL, they've decided to commit web-suicide by erecting a paywall,) UK consultancy advise Greece to ditch the euro, reclaim the drachma, and renege on their debts. Followed by similar advice to Spain.

Not quite sure what France and Germany should be doing right now. Beyond stopping the bail outs that is...

[dhromed]

@blakeyrat said:

some fancy CSS rules you can't use [in IE6]?

You are downplaying the shit that IE6 is keeping us with as webdesigners have begun to learn how to make website layouts with CSS.

Fancy rules? I'm sure you're referring to opacity, background scaling, multiple backgrounds, dropshadows, child counting, rounded corners etc. These are fancy, I think.

But you probably know that IE6 has no support, partial support, buggy support or cumbersome/workaround support for basic shit like float, height, min-height (and cohorts), padding, margin, positioning, overflow, z-index, background-attachment, and outline, to name some. It would also sometimes completely discard size instructions on certain table cells.

@blakeyrat said:

What great feature did Firefox 1 have that made it *not* holding back the web?

Getting it all right with a proper layout engine.

Oh, and tabs. But now that every browser has tabs, I think we can can state that all browsers have just about the same shit, but Firefox's execution of the UI is better with much of that shit (I can list the ways, if you want). I mean, IE8 can't even open a tab instantly. It has to think about it for a second. (I'm anxiously awaiting IE9, actually. MS posted some JS stresstest thingies that they implicitly planned on having run smoothly in IE9. Some of those ran like fuck in FFX, Safari and Chrome).

@blakeyrat said:

What really holds up the web is the W3C.

+1

 

[bstorer]

@blakeyrat said:

What really holds up the web is the W3C. They're fucking slow, their standards are shit and based in some pie-in-the-sky vision of the web which doesn't exist in reality, and the only hint of reform came from a group operating entirely outside of the W3C. (Until they adopted HTML5 as their own, they wanted to kill HTML altogether.)

I'm thisclose to getting this on a T-shirt. I guess the main thing holding me back is that it would be ineffective to simply respond to posts with "read the T-shirt", and the gestures toward my own chest would be completely lost.

[blakeyrat]

@dhromed said:

You are downplaying the shit that IE6 is keeping us with as webdesigners have begun to learn how to make website layouts with CSS.

 

Yah, I am, because web designers make ten times more noise than their situation demands.

It is kind of difficult to make and test web apps because of IE6? Yes it is. Is it equivalent to the difficulty in making, say, a native app and publish on OS X and Windows? Nope. Or the difficulty of porting the same game to both the Xbox 360 and PS3? Not even close.

That's not to say it can't be made easier, nor to say that it shouldn't be made easier. But come on, web developers of the world, stop whining about it. You still got it better than almost everybody else out there doing development on almost every other platform possible.

Am I downplaying it more than I should? Possibly. But if so, it's only to counter the web developers who staggering around moaning and who don't realize that: hey, guess what? All software development is hard. Get over it already.

@dhromed said:

Fancy rules? I'm sure you're referring to opacity, background scaling, multiple backgrounds, dropshadows, child counting, rounded corners etc. These are fancy, I think.

But you probably know that IE6 has no support, partial support, buggy support or cumbersome/workaround support for basic shit like float, height, min-height (and cohorts), padding, margin, positioning, overflow, z-index, background-attachment, and outline, to name some. It would also sometimes completely discard size instructions on certain table cells.

And what application is that preventing you from making? What application can you make for Firefox 1.0 that you couldn't make for IE6?

Sure, maybe it won't look at pretty. Maybe it will run slower due to IE6's JScript engine. Maybe you'll have to spend more time developing and testing it. But you can still make the fucking app! I mean, demonstrably, Gmail can be made in IE6. So can Facebook. As can Google Maps. (I should test to see if their little JS Pac-Man game runs in IE6...)

Again, my point here is that things are not even close to as dire as web developers think it is, and IE6 is not nearly as bad as they seem to think. Also, I'm sick of the noise about it, which has long since passed from "valid complaints" to "bashing IE as religion." (Especially when people who have obviously never used IE8 start complaining about things it doesn't have-- which it does*.)

@dhromed said:

Oh, and tabs. But now that every browser has tabs, I think we can can state that all browsers have just about the same shit, but Firefox's execution of the UI is better with much of that shit (I can list the ways, if you want). I mean, IE8 can't even open a tab instantly. It has to think about it for a second. (I'm anxiously awaiting IE9, actually. MS posted some JS stresstest thingies that they implicitly planned on having run smoothly in IE9. Some of those ran like fuck in FFX, Safari and Chrome).

The problem is that now Firefox is the bloated mess. (Well, IE8 still is, but it won't be when IE9 comes out, if half the stuff Microsoft claims about it is true.) Except for some important GUI problems that Google refuses to fix because they're fucking idiots, Chrome beats Firefox in every category.

BTW, the lesson learned with Firefox add-ins, the one that open sores people don't seem to understand in the slightest, is that if a feature has a bad UI, then it might as well not exist. IE had the same feature, but it had a lousy UI. Nobody uses it except some spammers, and everybody forgets about it. Years later, Firefox "introduces" the same feature with a non-shitty UI, and blam! It's an instant hit.

* Our company was interviewing for web developers once, and one of them dropped in the interview that he didn't like IE because it didn't have tabs. Fair enough, except this was in 2008, fully two years after IE7 had been released. Guess who we didn't hire?

[blakeyrat]

While I'm in a rant-y mood today, browser makers who follow W3C specs so strictly that they won't take a shit unless the W3C's already approved it: also to blame.

How many lines of code would it take to alias "innerText" (IE's legacy implementation) to "textContent" (W3C-approved version of same.) One line of code? Zero? One extra test case? And yet Firefox, even when they were struggling with compatibility issues in the pre-1.0 era, refused to do it. Refused! The worst part of all of this is that Microsoft's ad-hoc version makes a hell of a lot more sense than "textContent", especially since "innerHTML" was already defined by the W3C.

So you have the pig-headed W3C refusing to use a DOM property name that was not only already established on the most popular browser by far, but made perfect logical sense as an extension to their own standard. Then you have the standards Nazis in charge of Mozilla refusing to add a single line of code for compatibility's sake, even while they were doing everything humanly possible to increase their compatibility with web apps.

At this point, I pretty much visualize the W3C and Firefox devs as this guy. There's no other explanation for the lack of rationality demonstrated by the above.

(And don't get me started on readyState, an excellent IE ad-hoc standard that other browsers refuse to implement, even though it would solve many, many problems with my particular JS app.)

[morbiuswilters]

@blakeyrat said:

What really holds up the web is the W3C. They're fucking slow, their standards are shit and based in some pie-in-the-sky vision of the web which doesn't exist in reality, and the only hint of reform came from a group operating entirely outside of the W3C. (Until they adopted HTML5 as their own, they wanted to kill HTML altogether.)

I'm this close to getting this tattooed on my dick.  I guess the main thing holding me back is that there would still be lots of white space left on my weiner, which is just unattractive.  I suppose I could enlarge the font size until it utilized all of the vast, available canvas, but the sizing and positioning would probably be all fucked-up for people viewing my dick in Internet Explorer.   Tracking software shows that 85% of people still access my dick through IE.  Do I really want them seeing text overlapping the foreskin or extending outside the borders and floating in mid-air?  I don't think so.

[bstorer]

@morbiuswilters said:

@blakeyrat said:

What really holds up the web is the W3C. They're fucking slow, their standards are shit and based in some pie-in-the-sky vision of the web which doesn't exist in reality, and the only hint of reform came from a group operating entirely outside of the W3C. (Until they adopted HTML5 as their own, they wanted to kill HTML altogether.)

I'm this close to getting this tattooed on my dick.  I guess the main thing holding me back is that there would still be lots of white space left on my weiner, which is just unattractive.  I suppose I could enlarge the font size until it utilized all of the vast, available canvas, but the sizing and positioning would probably be all fucked-up for people viewing my dick in Internet Explorer.   Tracking software shows that 85% of people still access my dick through IE.  Do I really want them seeing text overlapping the foreskin or extending outside the borders and floating in mid-air?  I don't think so.

I'm sure the kids at the public library aren't particularly concerned with how the text on your dick is rendered.  Their more immediate thoughts are along the lines of terror, confusion, and, ultimately, revulsion.  They won't be paying a therapist $1000 dollars per hour fifteen years from now because the background wasn't transparent.

[bjolling]

@blakeyrat said:

And in places where they've succeeded, in many cases they've taken existing technologies and adapted them for the business market. Which the hippies who invented that technology never thought of doing in the first place. The textbook example here is Sharepoint, which frankly is a pretty awful wiki system. But because it's a wiki system aimed specifically at business users, and doesn't require typing in arcane markup, it's also wildly successful.

I realize this is just a footnote in this discussion, but you're a bit harsh on Sharepoint there. Its chief feature is Collaboration... Collaboration and Content Management... Its main two features are Collaboration, Content Management ... and Portal.... Its *three* features are Collaboration, Content Management, Portal ... and Enterprise Search. Its *four*...no... *Amongst* its features.... Amongst its features are such diverse elements such as Collaboration, Content Management... I'll come in again.

[dhromed]

@blakeyrat said:

Sure, maybe it won't look at pretty. But you can still make the fucking app!

 

This is my main concern, as the application consists of server-side code and all (well, most) I require of the browser is to display the interface. If it can't do that reliably and comfortable even for basic stuff, AndAlso is still in fucking use, then I'm damn well going to whine because itcuts out a good portion of the fun of my job.

@blakeyrat said:

It is kind of difficult to make and test web apps because of IE6? Yes it is. Is it equivalent to the difficulty in making, say, a native app and publish on OS X and Windows? Nope. Or the difficulty of porting the same game to both the Xbox 360 and PS3? Not even close.

Perhaps you're right. I don't do desktop app development, and I'm not that aware of the hair-pulling stuff that developers may go through when trying to multi-platform their big app. Hey maybe we should cut Adobe some slack lolz hah no of course not.

@blakeyrat said:

* Our company was interviewing for web developers once, and one of them dropped in the interview that he didn't like IE because it didn't have tabs. Fair enough, except this was in 2008, fully two years after IE7 had been released. Guess who we didn't hire?

Oh! Oh! I know! You didn't hire... the tab-horny guy! :D

@blakeyrat said:

Chrome beats Firefox in every category.

Well, that's how you feel, but I find Chrome to be very sparse. Safari too. And besides, various Firefox features and extensions have really enhanced my online experience and I wouldn't choose to do without them. It's largely the way common things work. Firefox, as I see and use it, has better tabs, better scrolling, better zooming, better bookmark management, better history management, better location bar etc etc. The devil is in the details. In a large part, it's the zoom, which I use a lot. Those pinnable tabs in Chrome seem like a nice innovation, but as I don't use Chrome because it doesn't do enough, it's kind of a moot point.

A point of suck in Firefox is certainly it startup time. It doesn't feel right that a browser rivals Photoshop for launch time on my machine (though the clear loser here is Illustrator. Wow. I mean... wow.) Other than that its "bloated mess" is totally invisible. I really don't care about its memory usage. It's not slowing things down for me at all -- though I admit it could be a problem on slightly older or mismanaged machines. I recommended Chrome to my mother because it ran faster ans she has no need for the fancy shit I use.

@blakeyrat said:

BTW, the lesson learned with Firefox add-ins, the one that open sores people don't seem to understand in the slightest, is that if a feature has a bad UI, then it might as well not exist. IE had the same feature, but it had a lousy UI.

Wait. Doesn't that mean the open sores people actually do understand it fully as FFX is open sore and IE is not?

But I agree that interface is, for some reason, often skimped on in favour of some kind of ideal engine or programmatic algorithm. They forget that to the user (even advanced folk like us) the interface IS the app.

 

AH, DISCOURSE!

[blakeyrat]

@dhromed said:

This is my main concern, as the application consists of server-side code and all (well, most) I require of the browser is to display the interface. If it can't do that reliably and comfortable even for basic stuff, AndAlso is still in fucking use, then I'm damn well going to whine

 

What specific thing are you talking about? What specific bit of interface is IE6 not displaying reliably? I think you're full of shit, since you've already dodged giving an example once, but here's another chance.

Look, there's nothing Firefox is doing that IE6 isn't. It's just prejudice.

@dhromed said:

because itcuts out a good portion of the fun of my job.

Oh poor baby! Tell you what, go work behind the counter at McDonalds, because that doesn't require you to think at all.

@dhromed said:

Perhaps you're right. I don't do desktop app development, and I'm not that aware of the hair-pulling stuff that developers may go through when trying to multi-platform their big app.

Textbook example of what I'm complaining about. All web developers have this horrible inflated opinion of how difficult their job is.

@dhromed said:

Well, that's how you feel, but I find Chrome to be very sparse.

What does that mean in practical terms? "I don't like Chrome because of... vague feeling!"

I can tell you why it bugs the shit out of me. If you scroll halfway down a site, then click a link to a new page, then click Back, the last page will be scrolled back to the top about 50% of the time. It doesn't remember the scollbar position reliably when following links. If they fixed this, I'd have no use for Firefox, IE or Safari. (See what that was? It was a specific complaint! Not a vague unsettled feeling! Here's another: Chrome's download bar is pretty easy to miss, causing me to frequently click the download link twice thinking nothing happened the first time. Google badly needs soem UI testers involved.)

@dhromed said:

A point of suck in Firefox is certainly it startup time. It doesn't feel right that a browser rivals Photoshop for launch time on my machine (though the clear loser here is Illustrator. Wow. I mean... wow.) Other than that its "bloated mess" is totally invisible. I really don't care about its memory usage. It's not slowing things down for me at all --

Mis-managed machines my ass. My computer is pristine, and Firefox can't even run fucking overnight without causing a swap-fest. I don't care about memory usage either, as long as it's not causing swapping in other apps-- guess what? Firefox does that. It's the *only* application I have that does that on my work machine or my home machine. (Well, Adobe Flash probably would on my work machine, if I ever left it running long enough.) I don't even have that many plug-ins installed.

Oh and don't you love when you close Firefox, and the window disappears, then you click another link and it won't open because Firefox "is already opened." My ass, Mozilla! How about you make your program close in less than 45 fucking seconds, you fucking hacks!? Then you wouldn't have that error message which, BTW, is a fucking lie. (I hate software that lies to me.) It should read: "you can't open this link because Firefox is still closing from the last time you closed it, and it's too fucking stupid to spawn a new process to handle it."

@dhromed said:

Wait. Doesn't that mean the open sores people actually do understand it fully as FFX is open sore and IE is not?

Firefox is the *only* open sores product I'd say is developed well. Possibly Ubuntu, but they still have major regressions every version. Oh, and Adium is you own a Mac, although they spend an awful lot of time obsessing over features nobody actually uses.

BTW, as a person who does constant Javascript development, Firefox is just as fucking buggy as IE, just in different ways. Sensible pieces of code that work in IE totally fail in Firefox, like:

<code>var gebi = document.getElementById; gebi("test");</code>

Flawless in IE, as you'd expect. In Firefox, the JS engine retardedly sets the variable equal to the function object but forgets what parent object is was part of, causing an internal Mozilla exception. (I haven't read enough of the ECMAScript spec to know which version is "correct".) So you have to make gebi into a function call, and bog down your code with uselessness.

The nice thing about Mozilla is that they are one of the very very few open sores projects that actually reads and responds to bug reports. I put this one in recently: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563487 Now this is an utterly *retarded* bug. But at least it's fixed now. (No fucking clue how it survived into 2010, since Firefox is so proud of being "standards compliant." Hah! They didn't even read the fucking standards when they wrote this shit.)

[blakeyrat]

 Sorry, I don't know why that was so flame-y. Work up in a bad mood.

[bstorer]

@blakeyrat said:

 

Mis-managed machines my ass. My computer is pristine, and Firefox can't even run fucking overnight without causing a swap-fest.

Remember when Firefox was called Phoenix and it was intended as an experimental branch to develop a stripped-down browser in response to the obscene bloat of Mozilla?  I shudder to think of what Mozilla would look like today.  Here's an artist's rendition I just worked up:

[Guest]

@bstorer said:

Actual result is somewhat similar:

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/SeaMonkey.svg/200px-SeaMonkey.svg.png[/img]