Are you aware that Bing also collects data when you do a search with that? Yahoo, too?

Compworld is refering to the fact that the Chrome browser "phones home" and some people object to that. Two views:

[mattcutts.com...]
[lifehacker.com...]

I know. I've seen both those links before and they do a good job of explaining more.

I think part of what has been missed about how IE became popular was that it was pre-loaded in all versions of windows since windows 95 (or 98). At the time the other competitors were not free browsers yet, they were companies relying on profit from their browser sales.. There was even an antitrust lawsuit about it..

[en.wikipedia.org...]

Beyond that the average user typically just uses what came on their pc assuming that it must be the recommended software since it came with the pc. How many people use norton and mcafee for that reason alone? I cant tell you how many people I run into that still use internet explorer and have heard of google chrome, but don't know what it is..

Netscape was free when I first started using Windows in the late 90s. Your link to Wikipedia is the real reason browser competition to IE went bad.

The real question is, will consumers keep drinking the MS kool-aide while they wait for MS to get it right this time?

never happen !

Everything on windows and windows itself blew up in those days every time you moved a mouse or pressed a key. But I guess you know that ...

Not everything, just the stuff written by inept programmers.

Our product was run by many Fortune 500s, Congress, NSA and even ran on the desktop of The President himself and if it blew up all the time, we'd have really known about it, and it didn't.

Windows got past their earlier stability issues, more often caused by crappy software running in Windows causing it to destabilize than anything else, with MS's Lanman networking at the head of the list at the time.

However, MS overcame all that, they should be able to overcome this if they stay the course assuming people are willing to change to this crazy new UI.

My personal view is that Ms did the right thing bundling IE as part of Windows. If it doesn't have a browser, as a web browsing tool it is crippled. Expecting any company to ship software including apps by a competitor is just madness.

Why do we stop at IE? What about Outlook, media player, Word even notepad if we want to go down that route. Browsers is just one area where the competition cried fowl.

Currently MS does seem less relevant than it used to because we have a wider range of options. Everything from OS (Mac, Linux) to form factors (tablets)

I think MS became less relevant when they stopped being a leader and started following the pack. How many of you remember Bill Gates being interviewed and saying "Tables are the future"? He was right, but MS did nothing about it.

Ms are now in a position where they need to catch up. The market has changed, yet as a company MS still wants us to be sitting behind a desktop. For business this is still the case, but for consumers a handheld with 90% of the features will do.

Mack.

@mack, you miss a lot of what that whole story was about. A lot of it centers around Microsoft being a monopoly on the desktop. When you are a monopoly in an industry, you cannot do things that lock out competitors in a market. This is true in almost all countries.

Microsoft did many things to lock out competition by 1) not publishing software API information so competitors could run their well or at all, 2) would not sell Windows to computer manufacturers who included competing software 3) embedded IE into Windows in a way that it could not be removed and forced software to use it when opening certain files and web sites and 4) other things I can't recall at six in the morning.

I'll repeat what I said above because, after that short paragraph, too many people forget: Microsoft has been declared a monopoly on the desktop on two continents and you cannot restrict competitors in a market you monopollize.

The second thing I'll bring up is people inevitably say, "Well Apple does the same thing!" which means they totally ignored what I've said twice. Microsoft is a declared monopoly in the desktop market. Apple is not a monopoly on the desktop.

Then someone else will say "But what about phones!" to which I have to remind them, Apple is not a monopoly in the phone market.

I missed a lot abut that story because I don't want to take the thread to far off topic :)

Mack.

Microsoft needs replacements. All the guys who led all the teams imo are behind the times. Just look at IE for instance. So featureless.

Same goes for everything else, even the new Windows 8 is a letdown.

you cannot restrict competitors in a market you monopollize.

Actually what they got convicted for in Europe was abusing a (de facto) monopoly in one market (OS) to gain an unfair advantage in other markets (media player, IE). Having a de facto monopoly isn't illegal, out in Europe, abusing it qualifies for record breaking fines.

Microsoft needs replacements. All the guys who led all the teams imo are behind the times

Actually that behind the times thing is true for most of their products since they started. After all PC-DOS was a far inferior product that initially competed with CP/M on the original IBM PC. PC-DOS was cheaper and somehow won it in the market - but even today windows can't do some things that CP/M could back then.
The difference seems to be that finally more people seem to get the fact that MSFT has been holding back progress, Even if they still fail to see they've been doing this for a few decades now. It's good to see this instead of the hero role they got attributed by the press for years.

I had another lookk at windows 8 over the hoilday and man , I hope they change course . It is not fit for business use IMHO, nor would i use it at home, and I very pro ms windows.

Very much a Vista moment for MS I am thinking


Fortunately for them , the Linux crowd still don't have a clue, but Google and Apple do

Fortunately for them , the Linux crowd still don't have a clue

Don't have a clue about what?

A lot of people forget that Linux, and almost all distributions, are not companies. RedHat is.

For all the IE bashers, I just have to say, IE10 loads pages wicked fast compared to Chrome/FireFox -- especially if they have a lot of javascript and/or multimedia.

I use Chrome personally because IE got its act together so late in the game and now all of my settings and preferences are already tied into Google, but I can't bash IE10's performance. It's excellent. Much faster than Chrome and FireFox (latest versions) on my new high performance laptop.

As to Win8, I despise the Metro interface and wish it would go away, but all I had to do was install Classic Start Menu and avoid the top-right/bottom-right corners of the screen to forget that it's not Win7. Performance is great.

Fortunately for them , the Linux crowd still don't have a clue, but Google and Apple do

Google is the Linux crowd.

For all the IE bashers, I just have to say, IE10 loads pages wicked fast...

...IE got its act together so late in the game...

Loading pages fast does you no good when you load them wrong or can't load them at all. So many times people point to a site or pages and declare IE is as good as any other browser but that's like saying a Yugo is as good as every other car because it gets you from point A to point B while ignoring everything else.

IE10 is a Yugo. Technically inept. Incapable of using current, standard technology available in any other browser. It's the worst on the planet.

Google is the Linux crowd.

Really, do tell, are chrome an Android linux or unix sort distrib on gnu type licensing

Loading pages fast does you no good when you load them wrong or can't load them at all. So many times people point to a site or pages and declare IE is as good as any other browser but that's like saying a Yugo is as good as every other car because it gets you from point A to point B while ignoring everything else.

IE10 is a Yugo. Technically inept. Incapable of using current, standard technology available in any other browser. It's the worst on the planet.

Can you point out some instances where that's the case?

Like I said, I use Chrome, but I have to test all of the sites I design and build in all of the major browsers, and I've never seen my own sites (or the others I've visited) with IE10 that aren't rendered properly.

>> The Google crowd is Linux

Do tell

Yes, Android is effectively a Linux distribution (based on the Linux 2.6 kernel).

So actually, there are more people using some flavor of Linux than are using Windows or iOS or Mac OS. Currently across all computing devices, the consumer marketshare stands at

- Android: 42%
- iOS: 24%
- Windows: 20%
- Other: 14%

Since "other" includes some Linux users, we can even bump that 42% higher, like maybe to 42.01% or something if we include people using Linux as their desktop OS. In any case, Linux is closing on on running half of all consumer computing devices.

In addition to platforms you think of as Linux/Android based, the Kindle is either a custom Linux distro (kernel 2.6) or a flavor of Android (Fires are Android, the others not AFAIK). So you can add Kindle users to the stack of Linux users.

- [en.wikipedia.org...] (Android Linux info)
- [zdnet.com...] (Android vs iOS vs Windows marketshare)
- [forbes.com...] (Android vs iOS marketshare in mobile)
- [en.wikipedia.org...] (Kindle OS info - Linux kernel 2.6)
- [en.wikipedia.org...] (Kindle Fire OS info - Android 2.3)
- [en.wikipedia.org...] (Kindle Fire HD OS info - Android 2.4)

Ahhh, so Android is really an income denial weapon system ,

MS better take bing susccess more seriously, Ahh well, what do I know, Some clever boy decided Windows 8 was a good idea

Ahhh, so Android is really an income denial weapon system

I don't see it as that. It drives revenue to Google indirectly. Users = people to see ads = revenues.

Mack.

I always disliked MS for the way they killed small innovative companies early on, and gave away free versions of what the others did.

But then I do admire their Office products and I have always been a Windows man.

XP and 7 are great (love those bread crumb trails and the Windows key + left and right arrow1)

But I cant see a need to go to Windows 8 as I do all of my work on a desktop.

I can't see desktops or Windows going away for a LONG time.

Sure many people will just buy a tablet or a smart phone.

And of course as Windows and Office are now "mature" products there is very little that can be added to them.

And its Firefox for me.

@jonathanleger - This place doesn't allow links. Or at least not how I understand it. If you are only using basic HTML and CSS, most things will work. If you try to use anything within the last 3 years, it gets more iffy. For example, WebGL doesn't work at all and neither do CSS transitions. It's javascript implementation is poor.

Google for html5test, css3test for a quick check on how well your browser handles things. IE10, like all IE versions, is dead last compared to any other browser.

I think Balmer needs to to. He doesn't seem to have the vision needed to revive Microsoft. Maybe Gates could come back for a turnaround atempt?

Ha ha Gates
oups

Never happen! too busy enjoying the "Billions" he made with the rotten OS he made
And now windows 8 what a joke a commercial genius thats all he is.
The next version wil be better bla bla bla

I have all the distribs from dos 3.0 to W7
they all bug !

Did any body try Debian Testing? for a beta version its un COMPARABLE

Where is the future in Operating Systems
Forced selling of an OS with a new PC
$*%*L MS
BTW its illegal
At least in the EU

I just ran the css3test on IE10 and the latest versions of Chrome and FireFox. None of them did well.

IE10 was last at 54%, but FireFox only got a 55% and Chrome a 63% score. So saying that the other browsers are so much more compliant really isn't a fair statement there.

I also ran the html5test on all of the browsers. Again, IE was last at 320 out of 500 points, and Chrome did much better with 448, but FireFox only got 386. That's 64% for IE, 77% for FireFox and almost 90% for Chrome.

So yeah, the other two are significantly better when it comes to html5, though to be fair, html5 only became a recommendation in December of 2012.

From the numbers overall, though, none of the browsers do a great job of supporting the standards. Only Chrome got a 90% (and barely that, it was 89.6%) in html5. All three browsers would have gotten an F letter grade in css3.

So saying that IE is so awful while the others are so great really doesn't come off as fair to me.

Just to re-re-emphasize, I use Chrome, not IE, so I'm no IE fan, I just don't get the IE-bashing when the numbers show that none of the browsers are really that great.

My 2c.

Tests: the score doesn't tell it all.
First of all such tests usually are not 100% complete in coverage of what's tested. So since the tests are known developers can focus on just covering what is tested and leave all the rest untouched. That way you can score better on tests without actually being good.

Next missing out on a feature doesn't always have the same impact. There are e.g. a number of html5 input things that are marginally if at all supported by most browsers. But missing out on this means the browser falls back on what it does understand and that's good enough to get the job done - it's annoying, but no disaster. But e.g. getting a box model wrong well that is a disaster at every turn or twist - <sarcasm> not that IE has ever done that of course </sarcasm> ...

I think this year Bing will try to narrow the gap with Google by 5%. The online advertising industry is now huge and growing, so I think search is now as important to Microsoft as it is to Google.