Okay, so now...

...it's just me posting. :)

Anyway, I just wanted to rant a bit about the new Micro$oft technologies coming out.

First off, we have the "Award-winning" Internet Explorer browser. Okay, so maybe it was award-winning back in 1996 when it bested Netscape for features, but now the only awards that Internet Explorer is winning are the "Most Exploited," "Easiest to Pwn" and "Slowest Browser on Earth" awards. I must say that this holds true for IE7 which I have had the distict priviledge of testing the last couple of months. As far as I'm concerned, Internet Explorer 7 is the same piece of crap as Internet Explorer 6, just with a much less intuitive interface. I mean, the browser control buttons are freakin' located all over the place. I should call this browser Picasso because of how deformed it is. The tabs, while an improvement on the conspicuously missing tabs of IE6, are not as refined and neat as those in Firefox or Opera. In this day and age, a browser without tabs is like a car with only one door (which would be the BMW Isetta, for those of you who might be car buffs -- look up a picture and see what I mean.)

Internet Explorer is really only the beginning of the headache. The meaty, juicy part of the headache comes from the next version of Windows called Vista. I'm certainly glad they didn't opt to put a Buena in front of that because then we would be seeing news reports of Microsoft in purchasing negotiations with the Walt Disney Company, which is just wrong on so many levels.

Windows Vista is a huge, bloated, overly complicated piece of junk. Okay, so don't crucify me for being too critical of a yet-unreleased product. It is still in beta development. But, if anyone remembers the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox betas of a couple of years ago, we can easily be reminded of just how good betas can be. I remember reading in the technology press back before Firefox 1.0 when the press was urging people to install Firefox and turn away from Internet Explorer, an already well-established product. These were comments about a beta software. With Windows Vista, it's just the opposite. It makes the functionality of Windows 95 look pretty darn good. Vista is slow and clunky. Its rendering engine, while impressive, is an overkill. I mean, it's cool that you can increase the size of your icons to rediculously-huge size and they still look good, but it's just that: rediculous. Who needs a Recycle Bin icon that takes up half the screen? Don't even get me started again on the Administrative/non-administrative issues.

So, without further ado, I present Linux. It runs on your current Intel/AMD-type hardware and it's (mostly) free. Kill the bloat!

ps: This blog entry was created on Internet Explorer 7 running on Windows Vista build 5112.