Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-23-2010

[andrewducker]

• How Does Homeopathy Work? A simple explanation.
  (tags: healthcare homeopathy skepticism)
• Microsoft release their new "Choose what browser you want to run" page.
  I like the way that the options change order randomly each time.
  (tags: browsers microsoft windows)

Comments

[andrewducker]

Well, if people don't know and don't care then we'll end up with 20% market share for each of the top five. Win!

Not a fan of Opera on the desktop - but it's tbe best browser on my phone.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

It kind of goes against the idea that computers should 'just work' though -- that users shouldn't be faced with choices that are not relevant to them.

[andrewducker]

I'm all for giving people basic functionality - but MS deliberately attempted to squeeze other browsers out of the market, and was found guilty of abusing their monopoly to do so. This goes some way to redressing the balance.

Obviously it would be better if they just issued all new copies of Windows with Firefox rather than IE, but I don't think they were going to go for that :->

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

Is it really about the browser though? Unless I am missing something, Microsoft have little to gain financially from people using IE. It is essentially given away free - as are most other browsers. The value presumably lies in the ability to default all IE searches to Bing, to maximise the ad revenues they then get from people clicking on adwords or paid search results.

Firefox and Chrome both select Google as the default search engine on installation, something I am surprosed Microsoft have not pointed out and objected to.

[andrewducker]

This is the end(ish) of a 15 year battle. Microsoft was terrified that the web/internet would make the operating system irrelevant, because everything would happen online. Internet Explorer was part of the strategy for keeping people on Windows, because by including more features than anyone else you could make sure that developers would code applications to match your browser rather than anyone else's.

You can still see some of the side-effects from this with large companies that are having problems migrating their web browsers away from IE6, because they have internal (or unsupported bought in) apps that were coded for a browser rather than general standards.

[simont]

That's a lovely idea in principle, but rather falls down as soon as you have companies who have a vested interest in people making an 'irrelevant' choice a particular way. I doubt you could get computers to 'just work' in that way unless you had all software produced (or approved to stringent criteria) by a centralised authority and called by perfectly generic names instead of brands. And that would have its own set of unacceptable disadvantages too, of course.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

You seem to be describing Apple! ;)

[simont]

That hadn't actually occurred to me while I was writing that description, but it did occur to me shortly afterwards :-)

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

*strokes his just-works iMac*