Why I want Windows 7 to be a success.

[muddie@mac.com]

I once heard Bill Gates say that Microsofts biggest competition was their existing installed user base. Being a Mac fanboy I took umbrage at his statement but lets look beyond that for the moment at the truth of and repercussions of the matter.

What he was pointing out is that so many Windows users out there are perfectly happy running the same old software that they don't upgrade and that hinders Microsofts sales.
Now add to that the fact that Vista got such bad press that a large percentage of those that normally would have upgraded chose not to.

What do I care I hear you cry. Well as many windows users don't bother upgrading their system software they also by default don't upgrade their Internet Explorer versions. XP came with IE6 on the disk and 18.5% (Jan 09 stats w3schools) of internet users still haven't upgraded their browser. It boggles the mind I know that many Windows users don't even know that there are alternative browsers out there, let alone realise that they can upgrade there existing browser to a newer version.
I am a web designer, amongst other things, and this shits me to tears. IE 6 sucks, IE 7 is a bit better but not much.
Now we come to IE 8. Finally Microsoft have decided they should do the right thing and actually make a browser that is compliant with the W3C standards.

Now in a perfect world of course all those Windows users would buy Macs and we could all live happily ever after.
In a slightly less perfect world all Windows users would switch to Firefox as their browser of choice.
But in a, hopefully, more realistic world Windows 7 will be such a big success that all those old windows users will upgrade. This upgrade will bring with it, by default, IE8 and web designers all over the world can start using CSS the way it was meant to be used instead of bastardising and hacking it to work in crippled versions of IE. There are many great tools in CSS that can be used to control layout in much better ways than we are forced to do in order to maintain compatibility with IE. I for one am looking forward to the day when I can utilise these without fear.

So I know I'm being a bit selfish here but the success of Windows 7 would make my life so much easier for one reason and one reason only. Getting Windows users to upgrade their browsers!

[DagrtheSnide]

Is IE8 going to be released for XP and Vista or is IE8 only for W7.

[muddie@mac.com]

Originally Posted by DagrtheSnide

Is IE8 going to be released for XP and Vista or is IE8 only for W7.

You can download IE8 Beta for XP and Vista right now. So the answer is yes but that unfortunately doesn't mean all Windows users will upgrade. Some only upgrade by default when they upgrade there operating system.

[Bart Smastard]

Although I'm not a web developer I think we all will see the benefit of a common standard for all browsers.

My personal reason for wanting Windows 7 to be successful is to make Apple's marketing department come up with a better series of TV ads for the Mac that don't just sledge Vista. It was funny for a while but now it just seems petty and inane. Show the World what Macs can do not what the competition are doing (albeit badly).

[mitty]

I've installed Win7 on a spare partition on my home HTPC. I can see where in a lot of places they've copied stuff directly from Apple (the new dock style start bar for instance). But there are also some other stuff which are nice additions... for instance when moving the cursor over the programs on the start bar, you get a little preview and the full window shows up on the screen. Point is that OSX's goodness forces Microsoft to do better, which in turn forces Apple to do better as well, which is good for everyone.

[Dog Knight]

It would have other benefits. In any business, competition is good. It lowers costs and drives innovation.

The other thing is you have the corporate side. At my work the machines we use are still running Windows 2000. This only has IE 6 on it. I doubt they'll upgrade anytime soon and when they do it'll probably be to XP if I were to guess. Pretty bad actually.

[Rant]

Are we certain IE 8 actually supports standards, rather than believing MS when they say it does? Even Microsoft's greatest supporter, Paul Thurrott of Windows Weekly is speaking badly of IE8 these days. "It has serious problems."

According to him, there's nothing wrong with Vista now and Win 7 is nothing more than Vista 2.0 "Windows Vista and Windows 7 really aren't that different."

Are you seeing a pattern here? If you're prepared to put 18 months into getting Vista to work, everything's fine - the USUAL Windows story. If you know what's wrong with Vista, it's easy to go to the manufacturer's website and download the right driver… easy! See?

The discussion about Win 7 is exactly the same as every upcoming Windows release... sure there's problems, but they'll be fixed in the next version. It's incredible, but Windows users eat the same sh*t year after year and never change their menu.

I too hope a lot of people get Win 7 - it should be the last straw for Windows and everyone will move to Mac.

[pengu]

IE7 was pushed out through Windows Update automatically, I imagine 8 will be too, eventually.

as a web dev I will say this: IE8 is "better", but far from "standards compliant".

[Dog Knight]

Edit: IE6 being stupid. Double Post.

[muddie@mac.com]

Originally Posted by Rant

Are we certain IE 8 actually supports standards, rather than believing MS when they say it does? Even Microsoft's greatest supporter, Paul Thurrott of Windows Weekly is speaking badly of IE8 these days. "It has serious problems."

I have downloaded the beta and installed it for web design compatibility testing in VM Ware Fusion. So far it seems to treat code the same way Firefox and Safari do rather that the bizarre way earlier versions of IE interpret it. I am ever hopeful.

[muddie@mac.com]

Originally Posted by pengu

IE7 was pushed out through Windows Update automatically, I imagine 8 will be too, eventually.

If we could just get the users to actually run the update we would be fine!

[markpalavra]

I think it is imperative that Windows 7 is a huge success. Like others have said, it will push Apple to be more innovative, and hopefully produce even better products.


But Apple really need to take a good look at themselves in this economic climate. Especially in the laptop market... the price difference is just going to be too much for some people.

[pengu]

The biggest issue is the support in weird ways.

e.g.: all this work, and their goal is ONLY CSS 2.1.

For those that don't know, CSS 2.1 is a revised sub-set of CSS2 that was released as a standard, based on what most browsers actually implemented from the CSS2 spec.

And new things (like querySelector API) are also limited to CSS 2.1, and throws an exception on any CSS3 rules it encounters. this can be worked around but it's ridiculous in a supposedly "modern" browser.

[Lutze]

Originally Posted by Bart Smastard

My personal reason for wanting Windows 7 to be successful is to make Apple's marketing department come up with a better series of TV ads for the Mac that don't just sledge Vista. It was funny for a while but now it just seems petty and inane. Show the World what Macs can do not what the competition are doing (albeit badly).

Apple have mostly moved on from these. See the latest iPhone, iPod Touch and Macbook adverts.

[thatfilthyspringbok]

Originally Posted by muddie@mac.com

I once heard Bill Gates say that Microsofts biggest competition was their existing installed user base. Being a Mac fanboy I took umbrage at his statement but lets look beyond that for the moment at the truth of and repercussions of the matter.

Why take umbrage? If you look at the actual figures it's true. MS knows that it will not win Mac users away from OS X with Windows 7. There's no point even entering into competition there...they know they'll lose! Also having the biggest market share is no good to them when 80 or 90% of that market is using an OS they sold 8 years ago which they haven't been making any money off of since.

Windows 7's biggest opposition is in fact Windows XP, which is firmly entrenched in business and on the home computers of many many many people who won't change to Mac or a new version of Windows because they just don't know any different.

[muddie@mac.com]

Originally Posted by thatfilthyspringbok

Why take umbrage? If you look at the actual figures it's true. MS knows that it will not win Mac users away from OS X with Windows 7. There's no point even entering into competition there...they know they'll lose! Also having the biggest market share is no good to them when 80 or 90% of that market is using an OS they sold 8 years ago which they haven't been making any money off of since.

Windows 7's biggest opposition is in fact Windows XP, which is firmly entrenched in business and on the home computers of many many many people who won't change to Mac or a new version of Windows because they just don't know any different.

All points I agree with. I didn't go into that detail because that was not the point of the piece but that is certainly what I was talking about. I took umbrage because he wasn't even counting OSX as any form of competition.

[pengu]

Originally Posted by thatfilthyspringbok

because they just don't know any different.

don't forget there is also the fact that WIndows Vista is not everyone's cup of tea. I use VMs for testing Web Dev work and I currently use a mix of Win2000 (for IE 5/5.5 if i need it) and XP (for IE 6 - 8)

For many people XP is still faster/easier to use than Vista on the same machine.