Post #401,128
4/24/15 2:09:59 AM
4/24/15 2:11:30 AM
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The king is dead! Long live the-wait, what?
So, Microsoft have finally deprecated Internet Explorer. Well, not quite yet. But it's definitely coming. It'll kick around forever as the thing you use to work the corporate intranet and your timesheet entry web app, of course.
The replacement, only currently available to idiots like me who are on the fast ring* of the Windows 10 Technical Preview, is Project Spartan. New interface, new engine. And holy giddy fuck, is this thing fast. I'm not talking about benchmarks, but in regular browsing use. It starts up and loads pages way faster than anything else. I've got Chrome 42, IE 11, and FF 37 on this computer, and Spartan is, by a country mile, the snappiest of the lot.
(TBH, Chrome has fallen into that "fastest at benchmarks" category which is the "technically correct. the best form of correct" of software; it feels pretty sluggish these days compared to others)
The interface is very - oh no - Spartan, but right now I'm cool with that. It's a technical preview, after all.
* More frequent builds, more new features, more breakage. Obviously I've installed this on my regular PC.
Edited by pwhysall
April 24, 2015, 02:11:30 AM EDT
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Post #401,131
4/24/15 7:21:44 AM
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If it weren't the fastest, something would be wrong.
They write the OS, and have access to the underlying APIs, and can write new APIs, after all - of course a new browser they write should be the fastest. The fact that IE wasn't for so long was another indication of the brokenness at Redmond.
Here's hoping that Win10 isn't a broken pile of crap. Too many people have to keep using Winders - it would be nice if they could be forced to use something that actually works. ;-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #401,137
4/24/15 9:46:17 AM
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Eh, whev.
Fuck platform advocacy in the ear. It's boring. Windows works, just like OS X works, just like Linux works. Desktop OSes are literally just a matter of taste these days.
Apple converts have a habit of assuming that OS X is The One True Way, and let's be clear: it's really, really not. It's very nice and pretty and all that, but it's also expensive (Apple laptop computers start at £749**), circumscribed and comes with a very, very bad mouse* on computers that are, with the exception of the hilariously expensive bin, modestly-performing laptops.
The value proposition of a Mac is in the design, the build, the end-to-end integration (including with the phone), the OS and UX itself***. This stuff is clearly worth a lot to a lot of people, but there's a whole lot more people who make a different set of value choices; they have a limited budget, or they want performance, or they want a small form factor, or they want to Linux, or they want to play games. A Windows PC can meet all of those requirements (obv not the same PC, that'd be silly) whereas Apple go "Here's your Mac. It is what it is. Buy it. Sell it in three years when the AppleCare runs out, because it's not user-serviceable and it's going to cost you lots to get it fixed."
This is absolutely fine, and it's what I did for three Macs.
But it's not the only or best model for personal computing.
*Oh, man. Apple haven't made a mouse worth the steam off my piss in 25 years.
**Not counting the Mini, as in the previous iteration Apple made it clear they hate it and want it to die. Expect it to be discontinued RSN.
***Although it's increasingly obvious (iTunes, Photos, Safari, etc) that Apple regards the HIG (which once underpinned the enviable UI consistency of the OS X experience) as strictly optional. This sucks and should stop.
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Post #401,159
4/24/15 1:44:20 PM
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I'm not arguing against Winders.
We know that it's going to be around, and people will have to use it, whether something else is "better" or not. It's just the way it is.
Up until a few weeks ago, we still had a Vista Ultimate machine in the lab. It was horrible (it had some sort of memory leak in the networking stack somewhere that would slowly gobble up 1+ GB of RAM and slow the machine to a crawl via constant swapping. It had 4GB of RAM). 7 is pretty good. I hope 10 is pretty good because I know I'll eventually have to use it.
That is all. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #418,054
5/8/17 1:36:55 PM
5/8/17 1:36:55 PM
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"Desktop OSes are literally just a matter of taste these days."
Yeah, and Windows >7 is the butt-ugliest thing there ever was.
HTH! --
Christian R. Conrad
Same old username (as above), but now on iki.fi(Yeah, yeah, it redirects to the same old GMail... But just in case I ever want to change.)
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Post #401,183
4/24/15 8:36:04 PM
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High time.
IE 11 in Windows 8 is good but not great. I didn't last long with it on my newly purchased Surface before installing Opera. Oddly enough the problem I had was that it kept making Tweetdeck reload. Weird.
Whilst we're talking browsers, I installed Vivaldi TP2 on my work MBP. This is what Opera should've been before they decided to become a copy of Chrome. And made by the people who left Opera Software over that, too. Vivaldi is based on Blink, too, but boy is it fast!
Wade.
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Post #401,186
4/24/15 10:09:59 PM
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Thanks for the Vivaldi pointer. I'm downloading it now...
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