When I was a child, we briefly (and possibly regretfully) visited a Butlins holiday camp one Easter. Accommodation was in the form of chalets, graded according to how much you were willing to pay. Right down at the bottom was what was called Standard accommodation. The name implied that it was somehow in the middle of the range, but in truth it was pretty basic. Plastic furniture and bunk beds.
Our family stayed in what was called Standard Plus accommodation. This was basically the same as Standard, but without the bunks. There were five of us crammed into this tiny chalet. We had five beds and four of everything else. There was an electricity meter that swallowed 50 pence pieces, and had no sensitivities as to the time of day, who was in the bath, or the availability of additional 50p coins. It was fun in the same way that standing to eat your dinner is fun because there’s five people and only four chairs.
The top of the range was called County Suite. This sounded grand and was grand. The living areas had soft furnishings, the kitchens had breakfast bars, and the bathrooms had showers. They had pre-paid cards to operate the electricity meter. From what I could see through the windows as we walked past these admirable abodes, they even had a bunch of plastic flowers on the elegant coffee table. Real class, for the 1980s. If you could afford to stay in County Suite, you would. No question about it – this was the type of accommodation every Easter holiday maker dreamed of.
Internet Explorer 6 for Windows reminds me of that holiday. It reminds me of the chalet with five people and four forks. It reminds me of plastic sheets on the bed because customers weren’t trusted not to wet the mattress. It reminds me of the fact that although it covers all the essentials that I need, it does none of them very well and makes no attempt to easy my life or offer creature comforts.
With great browsers like Mozilla, Firebird, and Safari around, IE looks more aged and basic by the day. Yet IE remains the world’s most commonly used browser. I bet it’s not the most popular, however.
Why rent Standard Plus when you can move to County Suite for free? It’s baffling.
Comments
Goodbye IE.
I had an interesting conversation with a Mac OS 8.x user yesterday. He couldn’t load a lot of pages because he was using IE 4.5 and the pages are XHTML, default DW MX DOCTYPE. IE 4.5 for Mac really doesn’t like that ?XML part at the top.
But still, a mac user? You would think he knew better but no.. he had a clam shell and has never upgraded it. In fact he seemed rather worried about having to upgrade his browser because his computer just worked.. and he probably didn’t care how it could work better.
Its like cars. The most numerous cars are not the most popular, well built, customizable machines. They are minivans (in North America) or those little Vauxhalls (SP?) in the UK. Could be wrong about the UK, but my fiance has one and I always see 2-1 ratio of those things to other cars.
Most people’s lives don’t revolve around such small things as what browser will be best. If they have one and it appears to be working fine, it must be fine until they’re told it isn’t. MS knows this very well and *instructs* the uninitiated on what to use and when. They have the majority by the earlobes. So when they say, ”oh, Mr & Mrs. User, you must upgrade to this new OS, and get fancy new browser with it”, they say, ”oh, if I have to, I will”. Oh, yes, you must.
Do you shop for clothes at Walmart? Do you watch four hours of primetime each night followed by the evening news? No? There are millions of people who do each day and will continue to do so because that’s what they do and like it that way. Why? I’m not sure, but I don’t understand a lot of behaviors.
We try to do things better in our craft, but the masses don’t really care too to know about our web world in too much detail. ”My little nephew can figure it all out for me anyway. He knows everything about computers, even Photoshop.” Sound familiar?
”If it works, I’ll take it”, they say. Is there something better out there, of course! But it’s too much work to find out why. Unfortunately, that’s the attitude a lot of people have about many things.
Working as a technical support monkey for sometime now, I have encountered at least one user who was convinced the whole of the Internet was actually stored on their harddrive, and that Internet Explorer was the only application you could use to access it.
And Microsoft does its damnedest to keep users in the dark; most people look for that little blue E, and if it isn’t there, then the system apparently doesn’t have Internet access at all. Most will rarely-if-ever come into contact with alternative browser software (excluding AOL).
What I find most irritating about this MSIE-only mindset is that of all consumer products, personal computers are one of the big ”no-no’s” for your average Joe when it comes to fiddling; because of the kind of catastrophic failures possible through amateur dabbling (I still remember entering C: deltree *.* on my 486 for the first time...), people just daren’t touch the systems outside of the default installed Windows environment. Microsoft couldn’t be happier, especially when many users assume that to upgrade their copy of Windows, they will have to buy a whole new system. Hardware vendors are guilty of perpetuating this mindset further - it’s the life blood of the consumer PC industry; Microsoft is adding further support to it by withdrawing Internet Explorer as a free download in my opinion.
Me? I’m quite happy to watch MSIE die a slow, painful, unsupported death in the public domain, while Mozilla-based projects, Opera, et al experience a rise-on-rise wave over the coming months and years. In an ironic twist of fate, I think Microsoft have blown the browser wars wide open, after having them stitched up for years...
Me: Guys, we’re boycotting Internet Explorer.
Friend1: Why, I like Internet Explorer?
Friend2: Yeah, who cares?
I started to explain the problem, ”but IE doesn’t even have support of some of the—” I realized that to people who don’t sit on the computer writing code all day, or reading weblogs, they couldn’t give a shit less about the browser.
I think you may have got some where with those.