January 22, 2005

• For those who do not see me every day, or who I do not discuss my
  digital bias with, I have forsaken Microsoft for greener pastures. That
  is right, I am now a Linux user, and decided advocate of the Open
  Source movement.

  My dislike for Bill and his software came and
  grew with my knowledge of computers. As I delved into Web Development,
  and learned about Web Standards, I
  soon realised that Microsoft's merciless pursuit of market monopoly was
  by far the largest stumbling block not only to Joe Developer making
  clean code, but also to the general progress of the Internet in
  general, and the smooth running of the various protocols located within
  it.

  Allow me to explain. I'm sure not many of you know this,
  but there is a single Internet standards committee in existence, who
  dictates all the standards for Internet protocol and programming. They
  are known as the World Wide Web Consortium.
  Their existence is completely necessary for the existence of the
  Internet, because of how the Internet works. There are millions of
  people out there, who simply allow you to access the files on their
  computers: this is the Internet. Everything from how you get data from
  these various sources, to the concept of Web Browsing itself, is
  reliant on the standards this group of people sets up. If we didn't
  agree on the standards, it would be chaos.

    As I'm sure
  you are all aware, 95% of all Internet users view the Internet through
  the lens of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Microsoft designed this
  browser so that it was almost
  compliant with the W3C. The idea is that if there are a few critical
  problems in the way IE understands code, ones that are easily solved by
  designing your code with IE in mind, most people will in fact design
  with IE in mind. The trick worked, of course, because everyone with a
  Windows OS has IE as their default browser, and most don't bother to
  get anything else.

  The problem with this, and the aim of
  Microsoft's design, is that in browsers other then IE, browsers that
  follow the W3C, pages will look funny. This is to make people want to
  use IE over all other browsers. Of course, developers caught on to
  this, and have gone to great lengths to put hacks
  in their code in order to make it work cross-browser. This,
  unfortunately, makes for less efficient code and much more haste. As
  well as forcing some things into the range in infeasibility.

  Allow me for a moment to plug Firefox.
  This browser is completely W3C compliant, offers more stability then
  Internet Explorer (read: will not crash as much), and maintains a
  similar feel and user friendly nature. It also boasts the ability to
  use Themes, as well as Tabed Browsing, and a myriad of other plug-ins
  for everything from checking your Gmail, to searching for for file
  downloads. These are plug-ins, not independent programs which
  infiltrate your browser and provide you with continuous access to
  pop-up adds. This is the browser of choice for the future of the
  Internet.

  Of course, this is not the only area Microsoft
  manipulates. Basically every time a new language begins to show that it
  can be easily implemented on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux without much
  changes (such as Java) Microsoft introduces Parsing errors that must be
  worked around by developers, though many times the programmes will just
  come out on Windows, because it's too hard and costly to make them
  cross-platform.

  It is true that Microsoft Windows is the most
  complete and user-friendly OS on the market right now, suited to do
  anything you would like a computer to do with the most ease, and
  supported by almost every developer. However, it is all ill-gotten.

  • 1:26 am
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