The computer labs at school have Windows XP Pro, and of course student accounts don't have the proper privileges to install software. For whatever reason, the IT fucknuts at the university have decided not to install Firefox or Opera or Sea Monkey. The only available browser is IE. I'm not sure what version it is, because I don't keep track of IE at all, but it has tabs, if that tells you anything.
Since I have been using Firefox/Mozilla exclusively for the last few years, I figured I would report on how how I find IE nowadays. It's marginally functional - I give it a C-minus. Which doesn't sound that bad, until you consider that every other browser available except Links and Lynx gets an A.
First, there's this thing called the notification bar. Other browsers have one too, they just don't name it and then talk about it in endless dialog boxes. When it blocks a popup, it lets you know - this is fine, it's normal. But this notification bar tells you a lot of other stuff that it probably doesn't need to. Like the fact that there is "mixed content" on an Amazon page. Or that this forum sets a session cookie. One thing it told me was that it had generously prevented me from downloading software that could be harmful to my computer. Thanks IE! Oh, except that wasn't a trojan horse, but good old phpPGAdmin from sourceforge, and I actually wanted to download it. I don't care if you don't recognize files with a bz2 extension, give me the goddammed file!
Like I said before, it's got tabs. But it seems to think this is some sort of brand new thing that nobody has ever heard of before, because MS just invented them yesterday. When you open a new tab, it displays the empty tab page, just like it's supposed to. But in girlscoutized Windows, the empty tab page is a message informing you "You've just opened a new tab! Isn't that cool?" It's the intellectual equivalent of the Crayola human interface that XP just scratched the surface of (and Vista tries to drown you in), and it makes me want to slap the screen.
You may have noticed a pattern here - the program doing things for me that I didn't ask for it to do, don't want it to do, and becoming angry that it is doing them anyway. This is my real beef with Windows. I really can't be bothered anymore by registry hijinks and dll hell and licensing fees and non-customization and closed source and insecurity, because that stuff isn't what I do all day on the computer. Those are the kind of things that should just be taken care of, without me having to know about it. They should only come up when there's a problem, and really, it's not a problem in Windows nearly as often as you might think - especially when there's an industrial firewall and login controls in place. No, the real problem is that Windows thinks I am 4-years-old and retarded, and wants to hold my hand while we cross the street together. I've been using computers for 20+ years now, and Windows isn't really that difficult to master. So I find the messages and dialog boxes and forced decisions insulting and annoying. I spend half my Windows time silently screaming "I ALREADY FUCKING KNOW THAT!!!!!!!!!" or something similar, and it's really anti-productive - not to mention ulcer-inducing.
As a final word on why IE gets such a low score even compared to Netscape, take the following test: click on this link:
http://www.macports.org/If that loads a web page, then you are clearly not using IE. WTF is that about? Considering that I had problems at MacPorts and SourceForge, I'm wondering if there isn't something deeper than really awful browser development going on here. And before you ask, no sites are blocked by the network.
