> Microsoft forced people to install their browser, and other tasteless things.
> Windows 95 was also heavily about choice.
I recently received a tech support phone call from my mother because her "computer was showing an error that she only has one drive working, and it's really slow. I need all my drives!" Windows computers are throwing errors now if you don't have OneDrive configured. Tasteless. I'm so sick of this.
I don't want OneDrive, I don't want Teams, I don't want a 3d Objects folder. I don't want my computer to schedule its own restart, I don't want my (supposedly) sleeping computer to randomly play an "error" sound. I don't want my login screen to default to PIN instead of passwords. A young version of me considered Microsoft superior because unlike Apple, I felt like I could make choices about my environment. I just gave my mom a laptop with Linux Mint installed, I changed all of the mint icons to windows icons, I renamed Libre office programs to their Microsoft office counterparts. We'll see how this experiment goes.
As someone who did that for my mum, it will go reassuringly fine until she tries to do something not permitted like watch CraveTV. Or install something her friends have.
But hang in there man, youre fighting the good fight! I had my mum and dad on Linux from 2005-2014 when a gift from my sister (garmin running watch) exposed my lie!
> I don't want my computer to schedule its own restart
I understand it's annoying, but as someone who deals with spam, I prefer that Microsoft forces people to apply security upgrades on their home computers.
It's possible to keep security up to date without imposing the tasteless crap I've non-exhaustively listed. I would save time and pain if the only problem Microsoft gave me was that I had to manually run security updates.
I like this remark from the first page under “history”:
> Somewhere around this point, people began spewing mindless drivel about how browsers would somehow magically replace operating systems eventually, and how in the future all applications would be "web based". This, of course, got Microsoft's attention.
Interestingly, MS is embracing the web now with MS Teams whereas Apple, which has started iOS with web based apps, is almost discontinuing their usage.
Indeed. Safari, once very forward thinking, now lags behind every major browser in features and compatibility. Apple saw progressive web apps first as a revolutionary feature that could drive iPhone sales, and then second as a revolutionary feature that would eat into their app store revenue.
That‘s a misconception. Apple added the progressive web apps feature to early iphones because people asked to develop custom apps. But rolling out a complete custom app platform is a heavy task so web apps was a very easy target to implement. Maybe the early iOS didnt even have a sandbox to run untrusted apps, who knows.
Wouldn't many companies embrace open platforms while they have a small user base and that help them grow and after that lock their users behind proprietary platforms?
There's something beautiful and odd about reading the page about how much "Windoze 98" sucks, in 2020, from a computer running Xubuntu with the fabulous Chicago 95 theme[1] that brings back the old aesthetic.
This theme really rocks. I've used it for quite some time.
I still miss some gotchas from Windows 95 UX (1 pixel width things, no overuse of shadows/highlights, concise color pallette, etc), and started to respect it even more after reading this article: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
>Somewhere around this point, people began spewing mindless drivel about how browsers would somehow magically replace operating systems eventually, and how in the future all applications would be "web based".
From you:
>a desktop environment made with Electron today.
A browser DE would be great. ;w; A crossplatform shell with the same tray and file manager and everything? Wherein I can open a browser and play crossplatform browser games[0]?
What would really be interesting is a library that uses the browser for only the UI, and is otherwise basically language-independent. So like Qt or GTK except let the browser do all the gnarly platform-specific parts.
Then the UI is compiled to javascript, which means it's portable and looks the same on every platform, but you can actually write your program in a less brain-damaged language like Rust or Python (or C or whatever you like).
However, at least in Win 98 SE, PostScript drivers finally worked… sort of…
Fun fact: Up to NS4 / IE4, you couldn't print a JavaScript generated HTML output, which was a major restriction in the days, when "the Internet" was commonly printed by a assistant for the benefit of a higher echelon, for whom the Web mostly came on paper. However, for whatever reasons, with a PostScript printer you could. (Generally speaking, pages were reloaded and reflowed for printing and JS generated content didn't work well with printer drivers which did also RIPping. Apparently, the process was somewhat different with PS printers.)
> However, at least in Win 98 SE, PostScript drivers finally worked… sort of…
> Fun fact: Up to NS4 / IE4, you couldn't print a JavaScript generated HTML output, which was a major restriction in the days, when "the Internet" was commonly printed by a assistant for the benefit of a higher echelon...
Fun fact: printing web pages today is a PITA. The only browser which some years ago made a decent job was Opera. Firefox, Chrome and IE are total disasters.
There are probably a lot of period specific things that only worked in ~90s Windows due to the lack of alternatives and therefore the specificity of development for Windows. I mean, that's why there was a successful antitrust lawsuit levied against Microsoft.
If you told me 5 years ago that in 2020 I'd have to argue with my engineering team to get them to test in more than one browser I'd have laughed in your face, yet here we are.
A deeper evil... for all the hate IE got, at least it didn't try to track and monetise its users nor treated them like idiots (compare the options dialog of IE to Chrome for a stark contrast, and then with Edge for even more sadness.)
Initially, IE was only ever evil for Netscape investors. It was great for users, a free browser! And it was great for developers, it spearheaded DHTML and browser based application development with powerful for the time ActiveX controls. If you didn't mind that stuff being non-standard, and as a dev I just liked doing cool stuff with tech.
It wasn't until 2005 when they stopped caring about making browsers better and it started lagging behind Firefox in all the new design fads at the time - transparent PNGs, rounded corners - and the dev tools couldn't keep up with Firebug. That is when IE started to be annoying, in my opinion anyway.
> Initially, IE was only ever evil for Netscape investors.
Not true. IE was part of the embrace-extend-extinguish campaign when Microsoft wanted to win computing and the nascent World Wide Web. Thankfully, the antitrust case threw them for a loop and they never realized their dream.
I'm convinced that if they'd have won that case they'd have squashed Google, Apple wouldn't have had its chance to thrive, and the web would look like a Microsoft version of AOL.
We'd be using MSN messenger, Hotmail, and Windows Mobile.
Balmer lacked the tenacity and the vision of Gates (you can see it in the historical stock price), and the government forced them from building an unstoppable empire.
We need the DOJ to revisit antitrust and direct it at Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. They're using their power and platform to disenfranchise and steal, just like Microsoft wanted and historically enjoyed:
- App stores need to stop being an exclusive gate and required tax.
- You can't lie to your customers about ad impressions or views, nor can you disregard robot and fake account activity when it benefits your bottom line.
- You can't control the world's most popular browser and be the default search engine, most widespread ad platform, and most popular mobile operating system.
It's all bad behavior that hurts small and independent business as well as the web.
Microsoft has played surprisingly nice recently, and Nadella is absolutely killing it. There's no reason the other giants can't be more open. Google doesn't need Chrome as a moat.
We'd be using MSN messenger, Hotmail, and Windows Mobile.
With Messenger, the official client wasn't that bad, and MSNP was a surprisingly nice and simple protocol --- plenty of third-party clients were available, and I wrote one too.
Perhaps if Microsoft got Windows Mobile out first, it would be more like WinCE and not the locked-down iOS/Android clone that it tried to chase after.
Microsoft has played surprisingly nice recently
I wouldn't call their user-hostile spyware/adware OS "nice", nor let all the stuff they're open-sourcing[1] distract from the fact that MS is tryng to head towards being a Google too.
[1] The fact that people have been modding DOS/Windows and applications for literally decades without source suggests the value of it is not as high as the FSF and so forth would believe.
Modding DOS/Windows and other closed-source applications is really not comparable to having the fully commented and documented code along with the full VCS history. It's also almost always treading the line of copyright infringement and it's practically guaranteed that you are going to be dealing with a hostile upstream that will try to sabotage your modding attempts.
Microsoft’s PR department is seriously doing the best job, it‘s insane.
Anecdotal evidence suggests they are now almost beloved. In the tech community as well as enterprise (where they have always been). They are almost never mentioned in Antitrust discussions. Many seem to hate/distrust Google, Facebook and to some extent Amazon.
All the while MS has the highest market cap and is integrating and consolidating right, left and center.
I can only imagine it is because they have fewer touch points with consumers. They rake in insane amounts of cash with Azure, almost automatically. They don‘t have to deal with republicans accusing them of “liberal bias” or end user privacy in general. Even though WIN10 has telemetry just as deep as Android.
Life sure is nice when your main source of revenue is enterprise.
I like all of these products as well. Well not Bing, but yeah.
That’s just it though. Microsoft kind of has the luxury to solely focus on their paying clients. They only have to consider their needs.
Google (and Facebook) have to juggle the needs of advertisers and users. That’s why cloud is so important for them. They really need to lower their reliance on ad revenue.
>Google (and Facebook) have to juggle the needs of advertisers and users. That’s why cloud is so important for them. They really need to lower their reliance on ad revenue.
>I'm convinced that if they'd have won that case they'd have squashed Google, Apple wouldn't have had its chance to thrive
I am not convinced that would happen and even if that would happen, I am not convinced it would be a bad thing.
Google spying on people and selling their data is worse from my point of view than anything MS did. Also, Apple has a far greater lock down on their products than MS ever dreamed of.
> Google spying on people and selling their data is worse from my point of view than anything MS did. Also, Apple has a far greater lock down on their products than MS ever dreamed of.
But it is no (so much) worse than what MS does with telemetry.
> browser based application development with powerful for the time ActiveX controls
These were Windows-only. They had all the security of Flash, but at least you could run Flash on Mac and Linux. If ActiveX had won out as the default web authoring platform, non-MS smartphones would have been crippled from launch; they wouldn't be able to run "real web pages" containing ActiveX, and relegated to a WAP-like second class citizen status.
The lack of transparent PNG support was awful for a while. I believe IE8, maybe even IE7 supported it, but IE6 was still everywhere in the wild at the time, and your site could look strange without transparent PNG support.
I’m honestly grateful for where we are at right now with major browsers and web standards.
More like browser --- or two, if you count Firefox...
and web standards
...are being wielded as a weapon to maintain a monopoly. The fact that it's a standard means nothing more than... the fact that it's a standard. The ones in control are still those at Google, and they can change the standards however they want.
At least the stagnation of the IE6 times meant that most pages were designed specifically to a more lowest-common-denominator, which also helped greatly with accessibility and letting the even smaller minorities of browsers be useful. These days far too many sites are being turned into JS-heavy SPAs when they absolutely don't need to be, because a lot of web developers are assuming everyone has/wants(?) to use a monster-browser like Chrome.
You can replace Chrome with what? If you try to use Firefox tons of recaptchas would be triggered for the crime of not using Chrome and even clicking on second or third page on Google search results will trigger anti-bot response. YouTube will start acting funny, too.
>If you try to use Firefox tons of recaptchas would be triggered for the crime of not using Chrome and even clicking on second or third page on Google search results will trigger anti-bot response. YouTube will start acting funny, too.
I'm using Firefox with some pretty paranoid privacy settings and I actually didn't have all that many problems with recaptcha recently. I agree that it was pretty bad for a while though.
Yes, but that's only Google. Remember, that Firefox (and Chrome) have beaten inertia where you had default browser shoved into your face at every step. It still worked.
Meanwhile, Apple decided to prevent anything like that happening from the start.
Not really. Chrome is closer to Safari, since it uses Blink, which is a fork of WebKit (which in turn is a fork of KHTML used in Konqueror). Firefox uses Gecko, which comes from Netscape.
In defence of IE: it's the only browser that's able to view YouTube videos in 1080P without stuttering, on my rather old laptop running Windows 10. Firefox, Vivaldi, and Blink-powered Edge, all tend to stutter. At best they run with higher CPU usage.
YouTube tells me they will soon be retiring support for IE, though.
IE had 94% market share at around 2001. Chrome, even including all the Chromuim-derived browsers, doesn't come close to that level of monopoly, thanks primarily to Apple Safari and Firefox. But anyway they have majority and it is bad.
As an operating system though, Windows has never been as bad in human rights department as Android or iOS. You could always (and still can) install/uninstall any program, and modify the system all you want. Not so with Android. A lot of crap spyware can't be uninstalled at all.
Similar story for the office suite. Microsoft keeps a lion share of the desktop market trapped using their office software by using anti-competitive practices like switching to new formats like docx, xslx, etc. once other office software successfully reverse-engineered the formats like .doc because they know if they lose the office software market they’ll slowly lose the desktop OS market.
ODF (the format used by OpenOffice and later LibreOffice, as well as other open source applications) was standardized first. Instead of using, and/or improving an existing standard they created a new one, which as I understand it is much longer and more complicated. Thus harder for competitors to implement.
Microsoft's XML office formats were in the 2003 release of Office, which predates ODF's submission to a standards body by a couple of years. A few months later Microsoft's formats were also submitted for standardization.
There were a few reasons the OOXML spec was quite a bit longer than the ODF spec. The main were:
1. ODF has a cleaner and less verbose markup.
2. ODF was very underspecified. For example, the spreadsheet spec didn't say much about formulas beyond that they should exist. The OOXML spec, on the other hand, had hundreds of pages defining spreadsheet formulas and the functions available.
One problem with ODF was that Sun wanted ODF to have just what it needed to support StarOffice and nothing more. There were proposals to make ODF better able to represent documents from other systems such as existing Office, Word Perfect, and Lotus, but Sun had sufficient influence to stop that.
HTML, CSS, and JS are also standardized but IE & Edge go in their own direction whenever it suits them. Show me office software that has perfect compatibility with Microsoft’s office software and I’ll retract everything I’ve said.
Given the market share of how many (cross platform, cross architecture) exploits can be delivered through pdf payload... I would say yes, Imho I totally have the same complaints about pdf.
>because they know if they lose the office software market they’ll slowly lose the desktop OS market
Why? You think that people will enjoy having subpar desktop experience by using Linux? Or they all afford to pay 2x or 3x for Apple products compared to a regular PC?
Not to mention that there are vast quantities of Windows-only, often custom, business software that keeps the world running. The only way Microsoft is losing the desktop is if they throw it away, which to be fair does appear to be what they're doing.
> Windows 95 was also heavily about choice.
I recently received a tech support phone call from my mother because her "computer was showing an error that she only has one drive working, and it's really slow. I need all my drives!" Windows computers are throwing errors now if you don't have OneDrive configured. Tasteless. I'm so sick of this.
I don't want OneDrive, I don't want Teams, I don't want a 3d Objects folder. I don't want my computer to schedule its own restart, I don't want my (supposedly) sleeping computer to randomly play an "error" sound. I don't want my login screen to default to PIN instead of passwords. A young version of me considered Microsoft superior because unlike Apple, I felt like I could make choices about my environment. I just gave my mom a laptop with Linux Mint installed, I changed all of the mint icons to windows icons, I renamed Libre office programs to their Microsoft office counterparts. We'll see how this experiment goes.