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(Megarant) One of those few good ones...
Apr. 13th, 2011 10:13 pmAs many of you know by now, I am still pretty much a Microsoft fanboy. Not because Microsoft has a decent reputation, not because their software is leagues better than their competitors, not because all that money can design something decent (because, let's face it, it can, but they won't)... Essentially I still pick Microsoft because as many folleys as they've committed, their suite still suits my tastes best, I still prefer Windows over other operating systems, and at least they're not being hypocritical about their money abundances (O HAI CRAPPLE, ALSO GOOGLE!).
It probably also isn't a secret Microsoft has been dropping in my polls, over the last couple of years. They finally molded that whole Windows-95 look-a-like set of re-releases into something decent when they brought out XP, and yet they managed to ruin that in twofold: Once by releasing XP-SP2, which was an insult to every gamer and wannabe gamer out there, and then they release Vista, a good premise, but in practise, about as flawed as an OS can be. Then they state that as computers get better, Windows should be able to gobble up more system resources to look pretty (as in, polish a turd, it's still a turd). Yet another insult to people who want to get the most out of their PC's, and I can relate why many people switched to Linux there. Hell, I can understand some people discarding their system for MacOS, something which, if Vista had never been released, would've been an unforgivable sin.
Adding insult to injury (I've been wanting to use that phrase for a while, yay for me!), they released IE7... A log. Slow as shit (although in reality, using the right settings, still faster than Firefox!) and riddled with security holes, they tried to patch it up reasonably quick with IE7.1, a nice try, but there was something that bugged me about IE7 that they didn't fix in 7.1 Effectively, they've never really fixed it, just released a workaround. See, with XP SP1, there was this new feature in your taskbar, called grouping. It collected all your windows from a single program (usually IE/misc browser or Windows Explorer) and basically made it pretty annoying to pick the right window. Opera (OK, technically a few lesser knowns preceded Opera by roughly 12 years...) and soon other browsers adapted this principle into tabbed browsing, a nightmare from which there obviously is no return. Quite the contrary, obviously, as IE7 followed suit.
And sure, sure, there's always a workaround, options, tabs, disable... But a company as Microsoft (who, let's face it, are good at copying and pretending they didn't - then again, who isn't anymore?) should really have noticed that tabbed browsing was already possible by grouping your icons in the task bar, to keep everything as organized as possible (you're tabbing your browser windows, then why wouldn't you want to tab anything else?). "But Alex, that's not tabbed browsing!" No, I realize that full well. The naming is different, but the end result is the same, except there's less depth. Everything is within a click's reach, which is as efficient as it gets. As for the rest, tabbing only creates chaos.
And then came Seven. From Vista, a step in the right direction, but let's face it, if I want to get back home from New Zealand, EVERY step I take from there is a step in the right direction, if you follow my drift. And this wasn't the tour over Japan! I'm not saying it was the worst way to go, but it's not the most user-friendly either. It's just showy and they re-organized everything, which, after 15 years of drilling, admittedly is a little hard to get used to. No moreso than that hulking new Office suite, which, I hope we all can agree on, looks crap. Everything under one button. So what if all the menus are hidden under new buttons now? Look! We can see one extra line of text in Word! I get a whole extra row in Excel and my presentations are a whole 3% bigger! Big whoop! I could work perfectly well with 97%, and if I needed something better, I could always get a bigger screen. I just want my shit to be accessible and quick, like Windows had been leaning to until XP!
What was even worse was that I don't really mind software suites, but when I took a quick look at Office 2010 and wanted to roll back, I got stopped by the fact that it was SO intertwined with Windows that I couldn't fully remove it anymore, and couldn't properly install OfficeXP afterwards! I had to fare on OpenOffice for a while (a good suite of programs nonetheless! AND it stayed normal, not following Microsoft's design frenzy), until I decided on a complete reinstall, because Windows 7 was slowly corrupting itself without a proper cause!
BUT! With all that passed, apparently Microsoft has still learned a little bit of a lesson. IE9 is (though still redesigned and sleek-looking) a LOT quicker than IE8 (which in terms of speed was not unlike IE7 - although quite the bit safer, apparently), and with that, rose another notch on the rankings for me compared to Firefox (as many of you will know by now, in my book an overhyped waste of disk space). Maybe they've learned their lesson, and maybe Windows 8 will be a bit more epic, performance-wise and compatibility-wise.
One might wonder what the point of this entry is... Nothing really, just wanted to get that off my chest. IE9 is looking good so far. XD
It probably also isn't a secret Microsoft has been dropping in my polls, over the last couple of years. They finally molded that whole Windows-95 look-a-like set of re-releases into something decent when they brought out XP, and yet they managed to ruin that in twofold: Once by releasing XP-SP2, which was an insult to every gamer and wannabe gamer out there, and then they release Vista, a good premise, but in practise, about as flawed as an OS can be. Then they state that as computers get better, Windows should be able to gobble up more system resources to look pretty (as in, polish a turd, it's still a turd). Yet another insult to people who want to get the most out of their PC's, and I can relate why many people switched to Linux there. Hell, I can understand some people discarding their system for MacOS, something which, if Vista had never been released, would've been an unforgivable sin.
Adding insult to injury (I've been wanting to use that phrase for a while, yay for me!), they released IE7... A log. Slow as shit (although in reality, using the right settings, still faster than Firefox!) and riddled with security holes, they tried to patch it up reasonably quick with IE7.1, a nice try, but there was something that bugged me about IE7 that they didn't fix in 7.1 Effectively, they've never really fixed it, just released a workaround. See, with XP SP1, there was this new feature in your taskbar, called grouping. It collected all your windows from a single program (usually IE/misc browser or Windows Explorer) and basically made it pretty annoying to pick the right window. Opera (OK, technically a few lesser knowns preceded Opera by roughly 12 years...) and soon other browsers adapted this principle into tabbed browsing, a nightmare from which there obviously is no return. Quite the contrary, obviously, as IE7 followed suit.
And sure, sure, there's always a workaround, options, tabs, disable... But a company as Microsoft (who, let's face it, are good at copying and pretending they didn't - then again, who isn't anymore?) should really have noticed that tabbed browsing was already possible by grouping your icons in the task bar, to keep everything as organized as possible (you're tabbing your browser windows, then why wouldn't you want to tab anything else?). "But Alex, that's not tabbed browsing!" No, I realize that full well. The naming is different, but the end result is the same, except there's less depth. Everything is within a click's reach, which is as efficient as it gets. As for the rest, tabbing only creates chaos.
And then came Seven. From Vista, a step in the right direction, but let's face it, if I want to get back home from New Zealand, EVERY step I take from there is a step in the right direction, if you follow my drift. And this wasn't the tour over Japan! I'm not saying it was the worst way to go, but it's not the most user-friendly either. It's just showy and they re-organized everything, which, after 15 years of drilling, admittedly is a little hard to get used to. No moreso than that hulking new Office suite, which, I hope we all can agree on, looks crap. Everything under one button. So what if all the menus are hidden under new buttons now? Look! We can see one extra line of text in Word! I get a whole extra row in Excel and my presentations are a whole 3% bigger! Big whoop! I could work perfectly well with 97%, and if I needed something better, I could always get a bigger screen. I just want my shit to be accessible and quick, like Windows had been leaning to until XP!
What was even worse was that I don't really mind software suites, but when I took a quick look at Office 2010 and wanted to roll back, I got stopped by the fact that it was SO intertwined with Windows that I couldn't fully remove it anymore, and couldn't properly install OfficeXP afterwards! I had to fare on OpenOffice for a while (a good suite of programs nonetheless! AND it stayed normal, not following Microsoft's design frenzy), until I decided on a complete reinstall, because Windows 7 was slowly corrupting itself without a proper cause!
BUT! With all that passed, apparently Microsoft has still learned a little bit of a lesson. IE9 is (though still redesigned and sleek-looking) a LOT quicker than IE8 (which in terms of speed was not unlike IE7 - although quite the bit safer, apparently), and with that, rose another notch on the rankings for me compared to Firefox (as many of you will know by now, in my book an overhyped waste of disk space). Maybe they've learned their lesson, and maybe Windows 8 will be a bit more epic, performance-wise and compatibility-wise.
One might wonder what the point of this entry is... Nothing really, just wanted to get that off my chest. IE9 is looking good so far. XD
