ivucica blog

Although Firefox did make it personal, what Microsoft just did by starting another Get the Facts campaign is shamelessly full of lies.

Claim 1: Internet Explorer 8 takes the cake with better phishing and malware protection, as well as protection from emerging threats.

Personally I enjoy protection built into Firefox . As far as I know it’s provided by Google, and it works great.

Claim 2: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering help Internet Explorer 8 claim privacy victory.

Chrome doesn’t have this? What about Chrome’s anonymous browsing?

Claim 3: Features like Accelerators, Web Slices and Visual Search Suggestions make Internet Explorer 8 easiest to use.

Accelerators are annoying me: I select the text I read to concentrate easier. Web Slices don’t work for me. And what the hell are Visual Search Suggestions?

Claim 4: It’s a tie. Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium’s CSS 2.1 test cases than any other browser, but Firefox 3 has more support for some evolving standards.

It’s nowhere near a tie. You’re getting there, IE, but don’t lie.

Claim 5: Of course Internet Explorer 8 wins this one. There’s no need to install tools separately, and it offers better features like JavaScript profiling.

Yes, yes, Microsoft, interesting. Now how do I see AJAX requests and how do I run YSlow? Nobody approached Firebug with this. And nobody can claim that their browser is superior because it’s shipping developer tools built-in because nothing can approach Firebug here. And besides, Mozilla could just bundle Firebug and solve their problem.

Claim 6: Only Internet Explorer 8 has both tab isolation and crash recovery features; Firefox and Chrome have one or the other.

Chrome restores my pages very well, thank you very much.

Claim 7: Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you’d want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 – right out of the box.

Why does Chrome have a tick for customizability? It’s not customizable, period. And again, addons are addons and if IE’s got stuff out of the box … then those are not addons, they’re built in stuff.

Claim 8: Internet Explorer 8 is more compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser.

[citation needed] In other words — “what you say?” (somebody set us up the bomb, perhaps?)

Claim 9: Neither Firefox nor Chrome provide guidance or enterprise tools. That’s just not nice.

Don’t provide guidance? Perhaps they don’t need guidance. Enterprise tools? What the frakk? Define enterprise tools and why does home user need them.

Claim 10: Knowing the top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.

Performance of browser is not the same as time needed to achieve stuff with the browser. That said, my personal experience says IE8 can’t measure even closely to Firefox 3, and the distance to Chrome, Opera 9, Opera 10 and Firefox 3.5 is even greater. No, Microsoft, it’s not a tie. FF and Chrome deserve a tick, but IE does not.

Now their MythBusters section:

That’s why our Accelerator, Web Slice, Smart Address Bar, and Visual Search features make it faster, safer, and easier than ever for you to do what you need to do on the Web, giving you an overall better experience.

As already said Accelerators are annoying, Web Slices don’t work for me at all, Smart Address Bar — do they mean what Chrome did perfectly, and Firefox almost perfectly, and what IE is just poorly emulating? And again, what the hell is Visual Search?

Are they honestly trying to push all those suboptimal solutions as superior solutions?

My 0.02 cents (that is, 0.0002 EUR) that contribute to the hell that is the intarwebz.

If anyone has any idea what the hell is Skype doing with Office’s library file MSOXMLMF.DLL please let me know.

First they hijack my port 80. “omg we want to forward stuff but routers and firewalls don’t let us through”; yes, Skype, precisely; they’re letting an HTTP server through, and hijacking my port 80 and blocking Apache from starting is not a good way to make my experience simpler and it’s doing the exact opposite.

Now they’re suspiciously using an Office file. Are they using it in an attempt to parse my Office files? If so, why are they doing it?

I know very little of this, except I spent about 2 days trying to get MSSQL2005 to work on my machine. A lot of googling, a lot of reinstall, and a lot of thinking that it was perhaps caused by low disk space condition, then perhaps that it was caused by me not having IIS installed (because it was recommended by installer).

A blog post like this surely happened many times before. And numerous people will find it annoying, irritating and will ask themselves why the hell do I even bother posting it. I would be the first one.

Doesn’t matter. I feel like having to type this off somewhere, and why not save this for reading later on.

Once again, a time has come when I feel terrible and awful. A time has come when I’m feeling totally down, depressed and oppressed. Numerous beliefs I hold are being questioned, scrutinized, and I’m doubting them.

The need for mathematics. I had a firm belief that in my line of work, I won’t encounter it a lot. But I’m being continously convinced, with increasing quality of argument that this is not so. That computer graphics indeed needs a lot of mathematics. Worst of all, I’m coming to such a realization; and what is moving recently is the line of where the need begins. Lately, it has come dangerously close to “all I was ever taught”. It’s still not that way, but hey, that’s precisely why I’m having these doubts.

If it turns out I’m wrong about this, what else?

It might be, for example, about quality of Microsoft’s technologies. Previously, I was holding strong opinions against Vista. And .Net. And I had several experiences to hold on to. Today, I’ve talked to an acquaintance of mine, and he told me that his experiences during a month of using Vista were pretty good. Same for .Net framework.

Linux, on the other hand, seems to withstand all my torture, including being 98% full on all EXT3 partitions almost all the time, but apparently not without consequences. Same with installing a large amount of packages. There’s a price for everything. So after one and a half year of active use of GNU/Linux, I’m actually beginning to think that Windows might not be that awful as in what I accepted as my dogma.

Primary reason why the nearby future is still penguin-shaped for me is morals. Although Microsoft offers free Visual Studio and Windows to students on FER, that’s actually one of the reasons why I consider it an immoral company, and do not wish to provide it with another user — myself. Microsoft does not deserve anyone else.

That got me thinking, however. Am I letting such trivial philosophical questions get in the way of my productivity, profits and in the end, career?

Finally, the main reason why I’m actually torn by these two questions is very practical. Finishing second year on FER, I’m on a crossroads. Choose maths or choose Microsoft. Because that’s what they offer; either be annoyed with C# for a few years, or be annoyed with maths. I don’t like either, and I have to choose between those.

There’s no way I’ll ever like maths, so I probably won’t go in those directions. What I fear is that I might start to like Microsoft after being brainwashed.

Depressive: the system around you forces you into submission to Microsoft whether you like it or not. As the acquaintance I mentioned said, the only way to survive without drowning will be: “Go with the flow.” I don’t want that.

Sad is a world where the greatest monopoly in the world, greatest tyrant and greatest brainwasher is succeeding, and in fact, anyone who wishes to oppose it must be very careful and determined. Do I have what it takes to take on Microsoft’s brainwashing?

I may be a lone soul and everyone including me considers me expendable, subaverage and unneeded; it just depends whether they say it or not. But this war is waged for every soul, like any brainwashing battle. Because only through purity of totalitarian mind control can the monopolist achieve it’s ultimate goal, the ultimate monopoly.

And that is, ladies and gentlemen what Microsoft is all about ever since it was founded. Sadly, it found its tactic in the last eighteen years. Fear, uncertainty, doubt, embrace, extend, extinguish. Sometimes even reverse embrace (see Mono and Moonlight; a dark Mono-polistic future, where not Moon will provide Light; a vile tactic to be able to claim Linux support while in fact undermining it by being incompatible in the future and closing the openness deal).

And if all these arguments are successfully battled by the simple fact that Microsoft might be making good technology, well then, it seems that it’s really something good. (Yet I won’t forget the time Vista took on one machine to open network configuration dialogue, and three lost days before I figured that Compact .Net Framework 2.0 without SP1 had a broken serial port support. Awful.)

Microsoft appears to like Linux? Take a look at this post:

Exciting news; the Windows Rally Development Kit was publicly released today on the Windows Rally technologies website! This porting kit is royalty free and provides full source code for an embedded Linux (yes, you read that correctly) reference implementation. Although Linux was used as a reference, this code is designed for easy porting to other platforms, which has been demonstrated by a number of vendors already. (…)