by Geoff George Paxton

Created on: March 30, 2010

Potential problems with IE9 — which won’t be backward compatible with Windows XP

Dearly belovèd Microsoft® is in the process of doing it again. Shooting themselves in the foot, I mean.

Who needs Microsoft anyway? Linux does everything and more than Windows ever did, and its free.

To be more specific, who needs Internet Explorer 9? In Windows there is a plethora of Internet browsers available, which all work better than IE. Opera have just launched 10.5, which is seven times faster. Mozilla Firefox is awesome. Then there is Netscape. Mozilla Firefox is, I believe, the most prolific browser on the web.

I spend much of my time designing web sites, all done in Linux. Before publishing I test in a wide selection of the Windows browsers. Invariably, if there are problems, IE will be the one to encounter them. That is not because it is the best, but is the worst.

Look at Microsoft’s sorry history:

Microsoft seems to have developed a skills set of which they can be justifiably proud. They have teams competing with one another to see which can make the most complicated, user-unfriendly, machine-hostile operating system. It is the only company ever seen in the history of the industrial age and beyond, that seeks and actively encourages mediocrity – no, that is too mild – putrefaction.

Just look at their fine history. Not much more than two decades ago, they announced, with a major fanfare, the amazing GUI (graphical user interface) operating system. Its main computer operating system, DOS, was going nowhere except downhill, so this was the guru’s answer. I short order we moved to Windows 3.0™, then 3.1™, then Windows 95™ (remember the blue screen of death?), then Windows 98™. This was when the internal competition hotted up. They had also had, for commercial networks, Windows NT™. The competition was fierce. One team worked hard to produce ‘a new generation’ Windows ME™ (Millennium Edition) while another worked frantically to get the prize with Windows 2000™.

Dogs – the lot of them. They made lots of money for the bankers bank-rolling their work, as their hype suckered millenia of people to buy this junk. Fortunately most of them still had their floppy disks with 95 and 98, so they had an escape route.

Fortunately their was another group of people working in the company who weren’t part of this competition. They worked along in the background and produced

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