Insanity Rediscovered

Hmm, I am attracting a lot of flame (on IRC, in comments, even on chat!) for criticizing Microsoft for not making good sites (forget about decent browsers/applications) and also for making my site non-fully-compliant in Internet Explorer. The main point I want to make loses the focus. My protest is not making a site that validates as per the standards or does not work exactly the same in all the browsers. Making a site like MSN/Yahoo so that it validates in W3C validators would practically double the resources required. Also, if you use proprietary technology and does not allow access to it to other companies than certainly you can’t expect for a totally compatible web portals. But redirection to a totally different page when the original site works in the browser in question! That is totally insane and unacceptable.

I might have removed the hacks from the CSS file put in to cover up the lack of CSS compatibility that Internet Explorer provide us with, but still it does pretty good in that browser. Nothing is hidden from the user! Only alignments of certain elements are lost. This I would call graceful degradation, not blocking out!

The new versions of MSN and Hotmail does pretty much OK in Opera so I believe Microsoft is learning the fact that there exist a third force, a force that is extremely loyal to what they believe in and what they chose. This is pretty much apparent by the fact that the new MSN portal has another stylesheet added for the version 7 of Opera (http://a.sc.msn.com/css/home/home-opera7.css?v=1) to its awful collection of other browser specific stylesheets. Some images are still not displayed as compared to Internet Explorer but I think I can live with that. MSN Search Engine is turning out to be pretty good so I believe I would like it if it works with my choice of browser. AllTheWeb already supports Opera; LookSmart added its support pretty recently so I think future is bright. Also heard on the IRC that Opera just recently signed some pretty good deals with some major players in the market especially in the mobile handsets category. So, whether you like or not, the next cell-phone or PDA you buy just might have this awesome software bundled with it. And perhaps when you will use it, you will then know why some of us are so passionate about it.

Enough about the technology shit. An upgrade alert. I just installed the latest mouse drivers from Logitech and saw the BSOD for just the second time in the last 6 months. Beware! It works ok now. But I don’t find anything special except for the fact that middle click auto-scroll feature is a bitch now.

Downloaded the trailer of the next Spiderman movie. It’s going to release on 2nd July and I hope to catch it when it comes to India. The trailer though begun on a rather sentimental note but be surprised to be overwhelmed with the bits and pieces they show in it. I believe it would be one of the best sequel ever (I am not a LOTR/Star War series fan) and would a real biggie. Shrek 2 trailer was good too, but Spiderman 2 blew me off. The good thing this is that the trailer is available in downloadable version while most of the other trailers on the Apple site are now stream only which really piss me off. Bandwidth is precious. And they just don’t understand this!

Enough of bitching for the day. Time to shut the hell up. Comments are still open!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2004 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Fun, Movies, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Tags: Apple, India, Internet, Microsoft, software, TRAI, Web, Yahoo