If a installer really needs a certain application closed, it usually tells you which one anyway in my experience. I don't bother closing them all.

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Posted by GreyMaria

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But still, even if it is a joke article.

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It's satire.

Poe's laws applies though so I don't blame you still.

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Posted by Nina

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Posted by Kawa

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Which, just as an aside, brings me to mention that Java's Swing doesn't look native either, so if you're gonna whine about Winforms anyway, take it both ways please..

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Actually, it can. — it doesn't do a perfect job of it, but it -tries-.

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It does a well good enough job IMO, but with a few gotchas. The main being that the native look does not necessarily support everything that a proper Swing UI looks. Not to say that what functions each native UI set supports varies between desktop environment. My recommendation is to prefer Native as users prefer the familiar look, but at the same time only use native for environments where you have tested it in to make sure the program dosen't wind up being unusable due to a quirk of the desktop environment (which is also the reason why it's not default).

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Sadly, The sims 3 is the buggiest in the series which is a shame too. I downloaded a quite few mods over time to "hotfix" bugs in the game, for the longest time beds would make sims unhappy due to buggy moodlets (basically those mood buffs). Not to say that annoying quirk where the time freezes up in the game, games turns unresponsive but things within the game keep moving (like plumbomb keeps spinning). Can be caused by a lot of various things (sometimes goes away on it's own too), so not fun to troubleshoot that one.

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Maybe put the Windows explorer from Win NT 4 into XP and/or 2000. That is bound to be a lighter (but more basic) file explorer.

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First person!

Thirdperson is nice for platforming games but that's about it.

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I'm not sure! I suspsect that I was lead here due to finding out about ROM hacking through, maybe through "The Mushroom Kingdom" website, whose "level editors" sections still links to Acmlm's old URL (acmlm.overclocked.org). I do recall I lurked on Acmlm's board for years too, although I admit that I'm not sure for how long.

Posted by Gywall

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Are you happy now that I've fulfilled your request?

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Yes.

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Around 180 CM, too lazy to look it up in imperial system.

As a kid I used to be the tallest in class for a long time.

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Permadeath is fun. Losing everything gives you a intiative to actually stay alive than going with risky but lazy strategies.

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Personally I get kind of sad if it's a mainly a shooter game that is first person perspective (more immersion). Unless there is really a good reason for third person perspective. Plus it works better for multiplayer games (harder to surprise someone in third person perspective).

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Posted by Kiyoshi

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Posted by Gywall

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I see a general opinion from a fair few of "I'm happy with it, so I'll stay with it" in general.

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I encourage everyone to try all of the big 5, they are all different ways to experience the web.
It was an interesting adventure for me when I did

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When Opera and Internet Explores goes open source, I try em. Otherwise I stay the hell away, I always bias towards Open source unless the advantage of the propriety version is huge. Which I found to be overblown by people sometimes too.

I do agree that flash is a piece of shit nowadays. I would love to see HTML5 video totally replacing it (youtube have a HTML5 beta that works fine, but... it seems to be stuck in a typical google eternal beta phase).

I use Firefox, but I like the webkit engine as well.

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The only boxed games I bought in years was for my 3DS, otherwise it's all been digital purchases! The only time in the last... four years that I bought a boxed PC game was with Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the preorder bonuses. In retroaspect thought, I should just had gone with digital.

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Should probably split those two poll options up anyway, even if I admit that I order online if I can't get it digitally. :p

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Posted by Kiyoshi

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In my experience, free closed-source software often has much higher quality code, better stability, and a more consistent interface.

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Open or closed source is irrelevant to this. I seen horrible examples of UI and stability in both closed and open software. Main advantage is that it's harder to include a backdoor in open source software (it's pretty much isn't a secret that Skype have backdoors).

Posted by Kiyoshi

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The "many eyeballs make bug-free code"-effect of open-source has not only been debunked, but it often leads to an inconsistent software design model because you don't get a community of thousands of developers to agree on anything. Look at how many different looks Firefox extensions have, for example.

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Opera have extenstions as well. I doubt that they would all be consistent as well. Closed source software is not consistent itself to start with, there is tonnes of examples within Microsoft software of this, famously with how the open dialog can vary between different MS software for no reason at all.

Posted by Kiyoshi

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Open-source software is always made with IT enthousiasts in mind, that's why many people still use Windows, you need a solid company design model to keep software user-friendly.

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You certainly hadn't used a userfriendly Linux distro recently, as some of them they are made with some rather strict design models, and are a bit userfriendlier to install than Windows! Sometimes taking a direction I don't agree with that seems to produce actually less productive interface (Ubuntu) but then again it's not like closed source is innocent (Ribbon and Metro). Yes, some software are made for enthusiasts and clearly aren't catering to the average user. But there is also plenty of userfriendly stuff.

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Posted by Liliana

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The main problem is that open source is usually = cross-platform. And cross-platform applications tend to use an interface which may be uniform across all platforms, but doesn't fit with other applications at all.

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This depends on the application. I don't consider it even relevant though to open source. Some applications like well.. pretty much all web browsers does the native thing well IMO.

Posted by Kiyoshi

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Open-source software mostly has more security holes though. It should be the other way around when anyone can read the code, you would think.

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Citation needed. It's also possible that more security exploits are reported with open source software than closed source ones. How would you know? You do know that Windows and a lot of other software does base itself on open source, BSD is open source as well. They didn't replace the BSD TCP/IP stack in Windows until Windows Vista.

Posted by Kiyoshi

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Windows and Mac OS X both have a solid design philosophy, avoiding the fragmentation hell Linux and Android have.

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Err, have you made any native Windows applications? You probably find it's several layers of legacy basically. I would call it anything but solid. A lot of Windows code is really just hacks to support old software as well.

Posted by Kiyoshi

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Of course this won't matter to an enthousiast as you, but if Linux is ever going to want a serious market share, Torvalds will have to do things like making some tight design constraints, and make much more things work with just a mouse.

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Shows you don't really understand Linux, since what Linus Torvalds is responsible for is the kernel and nothing else. What you ask for sounds a lot like what Ubuntu is already doing (even if I don't really like the direction they're taking).

Posted by Kiyoshi

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Even with well-developed ones like KDE or Gnome you still need the command line and the package manager a lot.

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Er, honestly you don't ever need to use command line to set something up in Ubuntu if you use it casually. Keep in mind that any guides for Linux on the Internet does it the commandline way, cause that's faster to describe than making a whole guide with screenshots how to get around in the UI.

Also package managers are wonderful. So what's wrong with em?

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The browsers have been copying from each other for a long time now. Nothing new.

Posted by Kiyoshi

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I'm getting tired of linking Firefox Myths

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A source from 2006 is not very relevant. Keep in mind is that when Firefox userbase grew the most too. Chrome didn't even exist yet! I looked up the Firefox myths page and eh, if you use that source in any kind of browser wars debate then sorry it's just too outdated. It was correct in 2006 but not today.

Posted by Kawa

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"Functional" + no media element support = a good reason to whine whenever someone uses such an element, it seems.

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And HTML5 is awesome!

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The problem is that most arguments you used against Firefox was quoting the parts of Firefox myths that was grossly outdated. And some of the myths seems to be crazy fanboy ones that I hadn't heard myself (like Firefox having lower system requirement). Besides I have a hard time to take that page seriously after the "Firefox is a religion part" especially considering I seen Opera/IE/Chrome fanboys as bad.

Funny though, I have a system like that with IE 6. It's not a very pleasant browsing experience though.

Actually, since I feel like it I will counter most myths, the ones I don't note... well consider that I agree with them:
Myth - "Firefox and Mozilla are the same thing" - Example
Reality - Firefox started as "Phoenix" in 2002, an experimental redesign of the Mozilla Suite browser component. It officially became known as Mozilla Firefox in 2004. The name "Mozilla" in this case refers to the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation which develops Firefox and developed the Mozilla Suite. Official development of the Mozilla Suite ended in 2005 but continues as a community-developed product known as SeaMonkey.
Note: Fair enough, even if this is a bit to the point of nitpicking. I think most of us didn't confuse the Mozilla suite with Firefox though (hell I admit I hated the Mozilla suite), and looking the post he links... I guess the user in question meant to say "similar enough".


Myth - "Firefox is Completely Free"
Reality - "The truth is, while Mozilla Firefox is open source, it is not entirely free. Several elements are restricted by the EULA, including the trademarked Firefox name, artwork, and the proprietary Talkback crash reporter."
Note by me: This is true! However it's why browsers like Iceweasel exist, which is basically the Firefox browser without the brand. It's not really that much of an issue, although it's why Firefox forks have the generic globe at worst. I don't really consider it a problem, since if you fork you probably want to use a different name in the first place.

Myth - "Firefox is spelled 'FireFox' and abbreviated FF"
Reality - Firefox is spelled F-i-r-e-f-o-x - only the first letter capitalized (i.e. not FireFox, not Foxfire, FoxFire or whatever else a number of folk seem to think it to be called.) The preferred abbreviation is "Fx" or "fx".
Note: I don't remember seeing anyone spell it "FireFox", Actually to be honest I hadn't seen the Fx abbreviation used in years, so I guess it fallen out of use.

Myth - "Firefox has lower System Requirements than Internet Explorer 6" - Example
Reality - Internet Explorer 6 has much lower minimum System Requirements than Firefox'
Reality by Ailure: The article quotes system requirements to which I almost have a identical computer to! Almost, I have more memory (32 MB)! But it's very sluggish to surf with, so yes it runs but it's not very well (to the point that the system requirements should at least been late-Pentium gen level). Problem is that system requirements are kinda set what the vendor is comfortable with so it can vary a lot. Did he even try to run Opera on a 486 at the time?

Myths - *Something about memory usages*
Note - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108-13.html During use it seems that about all browsers are about the same. Opera is actually the worst at freeing up memory (see the -39 tabs graph). Nearly all modern browsers caches aggressively though if you have a lot of RAM, and why shouldn't they?

Myth - "Firefox is Bug Free"
Myth - "Firefox is Stable"
Note: This would be a myth with any software.

Myth - "Perfomance
Note: The browser that can claim being fastest switches constantly. It's a perfomance race between the browsers, which is a good thing for us consumers (assuming that.. they are not sacrificing speed for security).

His note - Internet Explorer 6 is still actively supported by Microsoft.
Counternote: IE6 is under extended support! But that's basically the software equivalent of it being on lifesupport, and it's intended for companies who insists with legacy. Microsoft themselves however wants you to use their latest software version of IE which... is understandable!

Myth- "Market share"
Note: Some of those myths is true now! Firefox have reached 25% marketshare before, and still is in some places (it lost some to Chrome). Depends on region a lot. Worldwide currently, Chrome, Firefox and IE have a quarter of the market each. My prediction is that mobile browsers will only increase for awhile too so that's a factor, and IE seems to be steadily going downwards in user share.

Myth - "Security"
Note: At the time the Firefox adoption was crazy. So with a increased userbase, the number of reported exploits increased. Actually for a well-tested browser that only had security updates over the years, 158 exploits is still a lot. Interestingly the "vulnerabilities" he links as unfixed are also listed as "not/less critical" by Secunia, meaning that even they consider it low priority to fix.

Myth - "Firefox is More Secure because it does not use ActiveX"
Note: Why is he defending ActiveX? It's always been really badly sandboxed unlike let say... a Java applet. I'm it's a tech that have died out.

Myth - "Firefox Extensions are Safe"
Note: It's near impossible to make a extension/plugin system safe if the extension/plugin is rogue. So that's true for anything with said functionality. Even with only HTML/CSS/JS access,you can still mess up stuff pretty bad, with some clever tricks you can easily make a password sniffer with HTML injection

Myth - "Firefox is a Solution to Spyware".
Note: This is related to the "Firefox is bugfree" myth. In other words, applicable to any software really that isn't properly sandboxed.

Myth - "Anti-phishing"
Note: No idea honestly how it's now. Other than Google are really good itself at warning about those pages anyway.

Feature myths:
Several of those are wrong and just gives away the author as a Opera fanboy. Opera is not the first tabbed browser, it was early but it wasn't first. Netcaptor was the first browser with tabs. Infact I'm pretty sure most of those features was in the various IE-based browsers that there were tonnes of in the 90's. Actually thinking on it, I sworn I read about one of the earliest 90's browsers having tabs (pre Windows 95 era).

Standard support:
All current browsers have incomplete standard support. And sometimes they support stuff before it's even standard (which was the case for HTML5 tags).

ACID tests:
Firefox passes them all. But ACID have been criticized for testing edge cases and not really being a useful benchmark, more of a bragging right.

Web Page Compatibility:
Oof, this is a case by case basis. Rule of thumb, if the site is standard compliment then blame the browser. Otherwise blame the page . Not as much of a problem anymore as recent versions of IE9 is at least supporting more recent stuff, and it's discouraged to design layouts around browser quirks.

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[07:03] <@KP9000> holy shit [07:03] <@KP9000> tuna scented piss [07:03] <@KP9000> that's a first [07:03] <@KP9000> not only that, shit and piss mentioned one line after the other [07:03] <@KP9000> I'm gonna have some nasty dreams

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