OK, what am I going to be missing out on?
Again, is this going to be like the Flash animation craze that went by and irritated every non-web designer in the world because they couldn’t get the informatino they wanted without having to sit through a 5 minute flash intro?
I can do without that, thanks.
They’re doing pretty damn well with it now, from what I can see. Everyone and their mother wants an RX-8.
CSS is nothing like Flash animation. It’s a formatting language that’s vastly more powerful than html - though it actually works in conjunction with html, not as a replacement. The biggest thing it means is that you can do website layout without gazillions of nested tables. IE6 does support the basic elements of CSS, but not the more advanced elements. Failure to support it will mean that elements on pages won’t appear where they’re supposed to, in the font they’re supposed to, etc.
PNG is a graphics format which offers lossless compression, somewhat analogous to the GIF format, but without the patent issues. PNG will almost certainly enter widescale use, which, if IE doesn’t support it, will mean broken images.
Ah. OK. Those things sound like features that will annoy me if they’re not added.
But you see where I’m coming from with the whole Flash intro thing…
blowero, I didn’t misrepresent your post (so there’s no kettle here), I misunderstood the intent and then answered based on that and then asked for clarification (and thanks for the clarification). You, on the other hand, wrote that I said something that I did not. I don’t see how asking you not to do that is an unreasonable request. I even asked nicely.
I agree, people probably won’t switch for features that they know nothing about, but they might switch if they hear about these features from a friend or relative who really enjoys using them. I think Evil Captor brought up one of the biggest reasons Firefox is gaining in the market. Add to that what Gorsnak said, and you have some fairly compelling reasons to switch.
Neurotik, yeah the Flash intro thing can be quite annoying.
Well, Neurotik, most geeks hate those flash intros & ads too. That is why one of them wrote the Flashblock extension for Mozilla & Firefox, that replaces all the flash items in a page with a button that says “Click to play.” Much less annoying overall.
I’ve got PNGs all over my web page, and they display fine in IE. All the CSS that I’ve coded also works fine in IE. I dislike it as much as the next geek (I’m a Firefox user), but don’t give the impression that it completely screws up CSS and PNG.
The reference is to the quote up in post 4, where the MS developer says no one cares about support for things like CSS or PNG.
I like fox but many of the sites I visit contain activex and it don like fox.
:eek: :eek: 
I do computer support at a large law firm. An awful lot of our users are not what you’d call computer literate. Their PC is a tool and the less that they need to know about how it works the better, from their standpoint. However when something doesn’t work we hear about it fast and hard.
Enter parasites. Major, major problem for us (Windows and IE shop) as well as many other firms out there. Absolutely plays hell with machines, hoses their browser, other apps, flings porn all over the place and really hits our bottom line. And because there’s no good enterprise-level prevention out there we have to clean machines and user profiles over and over again. We hate it (we’re talking at least one FTE just cleaning parasites), the users hate it and then we all hate it all over again when somebody gets more crap a day after having their PC reimaged (because frankly it is now faster to reimage a hard drive than to spend time cleaning, picking over the registry, etc).
The users do not know what ActiveX is and they don’t care. But when they find out that it’s something unique to IE and that other browsers don’t have it and so don’t get parasites they want URLs so they can download it at home (because they’ve got parasites at home, for months or years, and haven’t been able to get rid of 'em).
So there’s a technical detail that the average person doesn’t know or care about, but there’s a visible improvement when switching away and it’s a big deal for those people, and they will happily try a different browser. If you say “No ActiveX” nobody cares, but if you say “No parasites” they drool.
Some valid points, but still this will not compel enough people (IMO) to switch.
IE ships with the PC, the others don’t, therefore it will be a long uphill battle to overtake IE.
Also, one side note, most of the stats I have seen showing IE losing market share have been compiled from technical sites geared towards a technical audience, which, I believe, exaggerates the loss for IE.
Bingo. IE has an enormous advantage because that’s what comes with the OS. Most users don’t even know that there ARE alternate browsers, and they think that installing one is some arduous task.
However once people see the alternatives, their advantages, and what it takes to use them, many are eager to try.
I work with MS products day in and day out and I don’t think that they are the Great Satan, but IE, like some other MS products, is not a very competitive product technologically, it’s all marketing. A couple of good shoves and it’s over the cliff.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. You did exactly the same thing you accused me of doing.
Really? Sounded snippy to me.
I’m not apologizing to you - I didn’t do anything wrong. You obviously got upset because you mistakenly thought I was insulting your precious Firefox, which wasn’t what I was saying at all. I was just saying that I seriously doubt they are going to steal the market from IE, not as long as IE comes bundled on new PCs.
Am I missing something? Internet Explorer has the option to turn off Active X. So it can be configured to be equivalent to a browser that doesn’t use Active X, correct? So, all other things being equal, why would you want to download a new browser when you can easily reconfigure the one you have?
Do I have to say it? Cite please.
Go back and read again please, at no time did I write that you said something that you did not say. If you’re going to accuse me of something at least get your facts straight.
um…what are you talking about?
First of all, I didn’t ask for an apology (and wouldn’t really expect it from you if I had). And when was it that I “obviously got upset”? I certainly don’t remember being upset. I think I would remember a thing like that. While we’re on the subject, why would I think that you were insulting a piece of software? That makes no sense. I don’t care what you think of Firefox. In fact, I actually agreed with you that I doubted that Firefox could take the market from IE. And then I agreed with you again about the features thing.
Sounded snippy? All I can do is laugh about that. If you’re going to get bent out of shape when I try and ask you something nicely, well…there’s not much I can do about that. If you think that you’ve been maligned here feel free to pit me but I’m finished discussing this with you in this thread.
I’d like to apologize to the rest of the people in this thread for allowing this to get so far off the subject.
Whatever, Nurobath. I’m done with you. Goodbye.