Tag: Microsoft

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IE6As reported all over the place, Microsoft has reversed its previous plans and will be releasing a new beta of Internet Explorer this summer instead of keeping it locked to the next version of Windows.

About frelling time.

Of course, there’s no word on whether they’ll actually improve page rendering—all the statements so far have focused on security, anti-phishing, and the like—so we web developers will probably have to continue using hacks to work around buggy rendering and missing features that are so much easier to build for Firefox, Opera and Safari. And even if they do fix things in IE7, they’re focusing on Windows XP (we might get it in Windows 2000, if we’re lucky), and there are still people using on Windows 98/Me who will still be stuck with IE6.

Of course, unlike Microsoft, Mozilla hasn’t stopped working on their browsers. By the time IE7 is out, Firefox 1.1 or 1.5 will be available, and they may be well on the road to 2.0.

Congratulations to Mozilla and Firefox for convincing Microsoft to get back to work!

Competition is good.

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I saw this CNET headline — Microsoft battles piracy with free software — and my first thought was that they were using some GPL’ed/BSD’ed/etc. tool for tracking or some such. No, they’re just giving away free software to people who will let them remotely verify that their OS installation is legit. Which makes perfect sense once you get out of the open-source/Free software (with a capital F) mindset.

In other news, I feel like I’ve spent the entire month of October rebuilding, recovering, restoring, repairing, reinstalling and retrofitting computers.

Strike that. I have spent the entire month doing that. *Sigh*

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I had to reboot one of the Windows servers on Thursday, at which point the GDI+ checker installed by Tuesday’s security fix popped up a message explaining that there was still some software with the JPEG vulnerability. OK, fine, I’ll run it again and see what’s missing. So I clicked on, well, OK, and it pulled up Internet Explorer.

More to the point, it pulled up Internet Explorer 2.0.

You see, that machine has some leftover files from a previous OS, and somehow the GDI+ utility picked up on that copy of iexplore.exe. Of course, it could barely handle the vulnerability info page — no ActiveX of course, and it even displayed raw JavaScript code at the top of the page because it wasn’t hidden inside a comment! (Even Lynx can handle that now!)

But once I fired up IE6 to actually run the test, I figured as long as I had the old one running, why not check a few site layouts? Or some browser sniffers, and see what it claimed and what it could handle?

Almost nothing, as it turns out. It couldn’t even find any of the sites I tried. And from the way it couldn’t find them, I realized exactly what was missing: it couldn’t handle virtual hosts. Continue reading →

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Microsoft responds to Apple’s contention that portable video isn’t a big market:

“Ask kids in the back of a car on a two-hour trip, ‘Hey, would you like to have your videos there?’ My kids would,” Gates said. “I guess Steve’s kids just listen to Bach and Mozart. But mine, they want to watch ‘Finding Nemo.’ I don’t know who made that, but it’s really a neat movie.”

Yeah, who was that?

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Cliches aside, it appears that as a result of the trademark suit by Microsoft, Lindows is now going by the name Lin—s (LinDash) in parts of Europe.

Lindows — or Lin—s if you prefer — is a company that has been selling an ultra-user-friendly version of Linux. Criticized by many for lax security (they’ve chosen many of the same convenience vs. security trade-offs that have made Microsoft products so vulnerable) and for odd business practices [archive.org], they’ve nonetheless managed to get Linux into new places — like on cheap Internet-ready computers sold in Wal-mart, or pre-installed on Seagate hard drives. For all their baiting (face it, picking a name like Lindows is just asking for trouble, like opening a burger restaurant called McDowells), dumbing-down the software to the point of making it dangerous, and (in some people’s views) “tainting” the Linux philosophy with — gasp! — money — they’ve at least come up with new distribution models and gotten some form of Linux out there where “consumers” — the average Joe who just wants a computer and doesn’t care what the OS is, as long as it lets him use the web, email, and a word processor — can see it.

All that said, I’d never actually buy, use, or recommend their product. If I wanted a very-user-friendly Linux, I’d probably end up with Lycoris, or maybe Xandros.

For myself, I’m happy with Fedora Core — though I may take a serious look at the upcoming double-digit Mandrake release and the latest version of SuSE. I’ve tried out earlier versions (mostly of Mandrake), but I just kept coming back to Red Hat.