Wednesday, April 29, 2009

One year after first post....

OK I need to put this in writing.  As anyone who has any interaction with me on a technical level knows, I have a very vocal dislike of almost anything that comes out of M$.  Most of this started because Redmond was squeezing my wallet with each new upgrade/release and I'm quite the cheepskate.  I soon found some very compelling free alternatives as Linux had just released the 2.0 kernel and Redhat was the new kid on the block.  Anyway enough history.

Jump to Today... I am required to use IE (more specifically version 6) at my workplace.  Seem's many of our 3rd party and internal web applications only work with (some just claim) these requirments.   OK I cheet and sometimes lie (Opera is pretty good at the lie part) and use whatever I like and if it won't work (in one or two cases it won't) I will use IE.   Well I've been working from home and our email is via a Cisco VPN to Exchange Server.  The Exchange server publishes the Outlook Web interface but only really useable via IE.  So much so that any other browser will timeout after a very short time (bet it's configurable but IT is using IE so why would they?).

So why all of this.  Only to say IE should win multiple awards for the worst product ever.  Why after version 7 do I always see 'done' in the status bar while it is still processing data?  It knows very well it needs more data.  I also can't phathom why a browser would not paint the elements it has until it has processed the entire document with formatting.  Is this an attempt to make it look slower than it really is?  

After several years of fighting some issues with Opera on linux I just moved to Firefox.  I think Opera is the superior product but with the bug open for 3+ years I'm giving up.  I've used chrome quit a bit when I'm on a Windowz box and will give it a try on Linux as long as they provide a native binary and don't pull the same crap as Picassa.

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