I hate Micro$haft

[TitanTiger 20,483]

I used Internet Explorer as a computer newbie. It was already on my Windoze box so it was convenient. But the longer I used it, the less satisfied I became with it. I eventually switched to Mozilla and just kept IE around for the occasional website that was built almost exclusively for IE. But make no mistake, it's a rotten piece of bloatware: Way to large, too integrated into the Windoze environment, full of gaping security holes. Other browsers are quicker, have more convenience features, take up less space, don't expose your computer to all sorts of attacks and malware, and best of all, they introduce competition and force all companies to make their web products better instead of allowing Microsoft to forcefeed their vision on everything.

Anyway, this is a rather long article, but the tech-heads around here should find it interesting.

Think the web browser wars are over? Think again. World War I was dubbed “The Great War" and "The War To End All Wars.” Alas, that was an optimistic prediction; WWII followed in short order. The browser wars are coming back, and this time the whole World Wide Web is at risk, not just a few browsers and their vendors...

...Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web. The new browser war may appear to be about the emergence of Mozilla and friends with their polished eye-candy interfaces, but it's really about Microsoft versus the W3C. Internet Explorer is Microsoft's blocking tactic—never to be properly web-compliant, never to give the W3C a day in the sun—and Longhorn technology is the big-stick alternative being built. One of the purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it.

The web is used to provide a variety of services and communities. Part of the Longhorn strategy is to extract from the web all of the services with any profit model at all: web magazines, auction sites, news, online retailers, and so on. When Microsoft tempts these organizations and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts. Over here will be the standards-based web, with a gradually shrinking set of web sites. Over there will be the future Longhorn-based proprietary global infrastructure—a global version of the early Novell NetWare, a sort of stock market/CNN fusion for content delivery. For Microsoft, the best possible outcome is for the standards-based web to be reduced to the profitless: a few idealistic hippies, some idle perverts, and the disaffected. Few others will want to go there; so every day there will be fewer traditional websites, every day less relevance.

This is a fundamentally different attack from that of the browser wars, round 1. Instead of fighting for control, the new browser war is a fight for the survival of the web itself. In this new war, the eye candy offered by new and polished browsers is a necessary but insufficient response to the stonewalling of Internet Explorer as a precursor to Longhorn. It's the presence of standardized data in web content—whether current standards such as XHTML or some yet-unknown future standards, perhaps based on XUL—guaranteeing that the web will remain a global commons, an information highway, and a free marketplace. The alternative is a corporate Diaspora and a tollway...

http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfr...ly.asp?p=174156

[Guest AuNuma1]

Window$ service pack 2 is supposed to bring "improvements" to IE like popup blocking and things like that. While that is good news, it sounds to me like they're playing catch-up. Most browsers already have that stuff, plus some. Why is M$ just getting around to this stuff, especially when they tout IE as "THE" browser of the internet?

[BamaGrad03 0]

WAAAAAH WAAAAAH! Microsoft suuuuucks! They are the standard...okay so they develop a product and some people copy it and come up with some cool ideas to improve on it...so what. It is still the standard. They can't make it 150,000% compatable with every NON STANDARD thing that hits the market.

Sorry if I sound a little jaded...but man i get sick of people bashing microsoft because its the cool "techie" thing to do. If Red Had was the standard more people would be complaining about it than Microsoft...and Titan, if OS X was the standard...people would be writing more viruses for it than windows. Thats just how it is on top.

And don't let Numa fool you...he used to actually LIKE microsoft.

MS technology even helped him pay the bills for a little while

And for the record...Firefox is EXTREMELY slow on my work box and home pc.

[autigger 0]

Speaking of Microsoft sucks.....my outlook express wont open b/c msoe.dll cant be loaded can someone help..

[TitanTiger 20,483]

WAAAAAH WAAAAAH! Microsoft suuuuucks! They are the standard...okay so they develop a product and some people copy it and come up with some cool ideas to improve on it...so what. It is still the standard. They can't make it 150,000% compatable with every NON STANDARD thing that hits the market.

Sorry if I sound a little jaded...but man i get sick of people bashing microsoft because its the cool "techie" thing to do. If Red Had was the standard more people would be complaining about it than Microsoft...and Titan, if OS X was the standard...people would be writing more viruses for it than windows. Thats just how it is on top.

And don't let Numa fool you...he used to actually LIKE microsoft.

MS technology even helped him pay the bills for a little while

And for the record...Firefox is EXTREMELY slow on my work box and home pc.

Actually, the whole point of the article is that what Microsoft is producing ISN'T standard. There are standards in place and Microsoft simply wants to leverage their market position to create a new standard out of thin air. I repeat: Mozilla and the others ARE standard. It is IE that is NON-standard.

And while I agree that Mac OS X would have more viruses written for it if it were the standard, they wouldn't do near the damage that a typical Windows virus does because OS X is simply more secure right out of the box than any incarnation of Windows. So was Mac OS 9. Microsoft has given lip service to security for years and has reaped the whirlwind because of it. If I didn't know better, I'd swear IE and Outlook actually produce viruses all by themselves.

And BG, I don't bash Micro$haft because it's the cool techie thing to do. I wouldn't really qualify as a techie anyway. I bash them because I've used their OS, their Office suite, their website software, and so on and find much of it to be sorely lacking in intuitiveness and stability, not to mention security. Excel is the only Microsoft program I simply couldn't do without because none of the competing programs from other companies do the things it does as well. But you name me any other MS program, and if I've used it, I can name another program from someone else that is far superior, usually for less money, and the only thing that makes MS a player AT ALL in some of those areas is their market dominance in the realm of OS. I'll admit I haven't used everything they make, especially as you get into the more hardcore programming areas, but I've used quite a few over the years.

I can't speak for all users, but all I know is that Firefox, while taking longer on the initial startup, is MUCH quicker than IE on the Mac. And the person in the office next to mine, who is on a brand new P4 Dell running XP Pro, says the same for her system. Firefox not only renders pages quicker, it is much more stable.

[TitanTiger 20,483]

Speaking of Microsoft sucks.....my outlook express wont open  b/c msoe.dll cant be loaded  can someone help..

This would be the biggest help :

Absent that, have you tried rebooting? That's a pretty good cure all for just about any computer. If that doesn't work, try downloading Mozilla Thunderbird or Eudora and importing your mail into those programs. The user interface is pretty similar.

[autigger 0]

yeah ive rebooted bout 3 times.... ive installed all critical updates....ive looked on the IE website for troubleshooting......nothing is helping... it just started a couple of hours ago before then it was working fine....

[BamaGrad03 0]

Speaking of Microsoft sucks.....my outlook express wont open b/c msoe.dll cant be loaded can someone help..

This might help...scroll down past the junk that is right after the initial question.

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Applicatio...Q_20612877.html

[stoic-one 1,544]

Try these...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...265&Product=oex

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...480&Product=oex

[TitanTiger 20,483]

tig,

If for some reason none of that stuff works, of if it's too much techie meddling for you, here are the links to Thunderbird and Eudora. Download them and play around with them and see if they'll work for you:

Mozilla Thunderbird

Eudora

One thing about these: Thunderbird is completely free. Eudora has three levels, one is a pay version that's fully featured, then there is a mid level one with some of the same features but it has an ad panel, the free version is just your very basic email client. I'd try Thunderbird first myself.

[Guest AuNuma1]

I'm not bashing M$ because it's the "techie" thing to do. I've seen first hand IN THE WORKPLACE that IE does not follow standards as well as others and we've had to make our customers install Mozilla so they can download raw ACH files. I'm speaking from experience, not the cool factor.

The point is, M$ is lacking in the browser wars and they are just now catching up to the real standards. It sounds a lot like the hype with the movie Troy, being billed as an "Epic" and all but in reality, it's full of holes and lacks any real character development.

[autigger 0]

I fixed it last night with a quick uninstall reinstall....all is well in outlook express world again....

[TitanTiger 20,483]

One other thing I'll point out though...if you get a lot of junk email, Thunderbird has the hands-down best Junk Mail filter available for a Windows email client. And it has a ton of customizable options from how you want to view your mail to the look of the interface.