Firefox Continues To Cause Grief at Microsoft
In an ongoing, amazing development, Firefox is clobbering Internet Explorer. It's far from the end, but there are signs all is not well in the browser department in Redmond.
Information Week's 7 April 2008 issue has the market share report for Internet Explorer.
| Month | % Share |
| Jan 2007 | 88.7 |
| March 2007 | 86.0 |
| October 2007 | 80.1 |
| December 2007 | 77.7 |
This just pleases me to no end. Granted, it's not just Firefox but other browsers such as Opera and Safari. But any dent in Microsoft's armour is a good thing. Every time Bill gates has stress, I lose a little of mine. When he has a bad day, I have a good one. Between Firefox and the EU, perhaps he's developing an ulcer.... :)
Oh and let's not forget Open Office. I have no idea why it won't hit critical mass: it does everything Office does and more and it can read/write Office documents just fine. We've installed it at work with no issues. Though I will admit we use Word/Excel type documents only and haven't tried the other modules except to play some Powerpoint training slides. Try it at your company. It comes in all flavours Mac, PC, UNIX, etc.
The article makes some special points "... IT departments are moving to support [Firefox] in the enterprise Web apps. That should be less than reassuring to Redmond."
The article also talks about how IE8, forthcoming soon, will break a number of web applications even though it is supposedly more standards friendly. Many non-commercial sites, such as mine, don't even test to IE specifications because they simply aren't standards. Web standards are just that: standards. IE is a collection of crap that makes writing a site to be compliant a pain. I've made sure my corporate site works with IE -- that is you can view it -- but it looks and works much better in Firefox. It makes me angry I have to do even that.
In other amusing news, Microsoft is already readying the replacement to Vista. So despite their claims, it's obviously not going as well as they'd like. No spin can fix that except to a true moron.
Labels: Computers, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, Open Office, Technology, Vista
posted by Rev. CMOT TMPV @ 4/12/2008 04:03:00 PM (permalink)
Stumble It!
2 Comments:
I mostly use the Writer/Calc modules of OpenOffice, but I have some experience with the others, most notably the database and presentation. The database, last time I tried to use it, still couldn't touch Access, no matter what db engine you're using. That said, it's noticeably better every time I play with it. I'll try again when version 3 is released.
The presentation bit has gotten very good with the last few versions. A couple of years ago, I had to do a group presentation and we actually managed to compile a working presentation from pieces done in OpenOffice and PowerPoint for Windows and Mac. More recently, I had to teach a class at work and I created slides with Office 2003 and edited them on both my work machine and my laptop (which has OpenOffice 2.2.something loaded) several times.
I've also done a bit of document conversion and I'll say that the filters for older M$ products like Works are better than the filters for Word.
I sound like a shill for OO.o, but I've been using it since the first versions (ok, since StarOffice 5), and it's an excellent program. The word processor smokes Word, the spreadsheet is as good or better than Excel in most respects and the presentation bit is as good as PowerPoint. And the pricing kills Office, as well. Even if you buy StarOffice from Sun.
The reason more companies don't use it is because they're afraid.
OO is up to 2.4 and it's a bit faster now than the 2.2 version I was using before. My big complaint is speed in the Calc module. I run INTENSE and LARGE spreadsheets. It works, but not as fast as I'd like but getting better (on the PC -- Mac speed a-ok).
Are the bugs? Yeah. I've found a few but the same goes for Excel so we'll call that a wash.
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