Sick and tired of MS bashing
NickW posts an interesting snippet about IE7 and as usual with Microsoft related subjects the anti-ms/pro linux comments come back (rather than discussion of the topic)
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1503
It makes me sick.
As usual this thread will go into
- Ms is evil
- Linux is good
- IE is insecure
- MS is insecure
- Linux is secure
- Firefox is secure
- Blah
Booooooring. And wrong. But who cares, it's the "done thing" to knock MS and score nerd points with the /. community isn't it?
90% of problems with IE and windows are between the keyboard and chair. The same problems are there with other platforms but are not exploited as much or as publicly. Yes there are faults with IE, who HASN'T had a problem with IE? But that does NOT make IE bad. Nor do Windows problems make Windows bad, or any worse than Linux. Heck, maybe that is why MS will release a new version of windows and a service pack or two. What? Software with faults?? Who has ever heard of that! Gimme a break.
For the average user the experience of one browser over another is barely noticeable. Try it, get some numpty users to use IE then some other browser. Once you have held their hand through the differences in interface (even the most subtle can frighten a numpty) they will not really care much. If they get IE by default then that is what they will use and they will not thank you for putting anything else on instead.
Why these discussions always turn towards A) MS is evil and B) Linux is the dogs ^H I don't know. Have you ever tried taking a Joe Public users windows machine away and replacing everything they know and are comfortable with to some other OS? You don't just get minor difficulties like replacing browsers, you get tears (no kidding), anger, frustration, depression.
I really should stop posting to communities that degenerate into these sorts of discussions. I would, but ALL of them seem to. Even the ASP.NET ones. It seems nerds feel the need to boost their ego by bashing MS. It's sad.
Wherever I post people usually know that I have certain biases towards Microsoft. I make no secret of the fact that the last maybe 15 years of my career have been pretty much influenced by Microsoft software. In the same timeframe though I have used all sorts of platforms as my daily working tool. I was a SCO unix sysadmin, a perl developer, Borland C, delphi, Java, Smalltalk etc. My personal preference has always been for Microsoft software but I always respect others choices.
Why is it that when Microsoft is mentioned we have to have this debate??
To be fair to Threadwatch, I may have jumped the gun - the community there is a little better than ..uh.. some other webmaster communities but I have developed quite a twitchy trigger finger on this subject you may have guessed ;O)