Friday, March 07, 2008

Why Microsoft can't learn from Mozilla?

"It is strongly recommended that you choose "Restart now" to allow setup to finish. Some programs may not function correctly until your system is restarted."

This is the message you get when you press "Restart Later" button after "installation" of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. And mind you this restart is system restart not IE restart! Damn it. You download a 14.4 MB exe which will again download God (and MS) knows what for five minutes and then it will check my system for "malicious software" for what seems like an eternity and then install the software. My system is slow (Eclipse is running!) but half an hour for an installation? No way!

Compare it with Firefox which will prompt you for an upgrade, a one click process will upgrade the browser and restart it with your session intact. Not even 5 minutes. And Microsoft can't even give a link to the the IE home page in the IE tool bar, forget update messages and quick updates!

What's more, on the IE home page I clicked to see the demos of new features in IE 8 B1 and guess what instead of a Flash or Silverlight video, you get a .wma file which will be downloaded on your system! Are we living in the Jurassic age still?

And guess what, I was wondering why doesn't Microsoft release this browser for Non-Windows operating systems. I don't know the answer but now I wish they never do that!

5 comments:

Vaibhav Choudhary said...

Ah lot many .... you have just counted few.

The best of mozilla:

-restore session, i don't know why not in IE till. MS has the habit to copy good features quickly.

- embedded tabbing

- undo tab close.

- no bug in tabbing and i am telling you IE has lot.

Again, no comments.. :)

Waterfox said...

Hey no, I remember seeing restore session in IE. However I don't remember why it appeared!

Anonymous said...

Posts such as this vindicate my decision of moving to Firefox FULL TIMEover 3 years ago. IE8 is as bad as its predecessors, after all bad habits are tough to let go off!

Waterfox said...

Manu I don't think it's right to reject IE completely. It may not be best but does have some good features for layman.

Anonymous said...

ironically ... the comment page doesn't get rendered for me correctly

on Firefox ... FYI IIRC IE used to be there on Mac.