I am not sure it's open source, but like WPF or WinForms, I believe you can simply call it as a documented interface. I am not sure whether or not you have to include the library. You might need to in Vista, but not in 7.
It shouldn't be any different than calling Cocoa or Winforms licensing-wise.
Why wouldn't they just call the native interface, since it's provided with Windows? It would be really awkward and slow to do that...
I suppose a Windows "Camino" would be more of a fully integrated Gecko browser with an interface written in modern WPF that adheres to the Windows 7 UX Guide. The only browser I can think of that meets any of these criteria is K-meleon, which is at least Windows-specific.
Usability research showed that the ribbon interface cost productivity for about a month, then improved it thereafter. Anyone who was not very familiar with office before the Ribbon was more productive afterwards.
It's definitely a trade-off-- it's actually a more accessible interface, but very different.
Firefox will provide a simple means to disable it, in any case. Firefox doesn't hide that much functionality in its menus, so I wouldn't be surprised if it were used to expose contextual functionality you would usually get from selecting screen elements.
That's where Ribbon was successful was in exposing useful but rarely used functionality.
That's really clever. The Ribbon is fully available to any application that doesn't compete with Office... I would have never thought about a web browser as being within that fold, but it most certainly is. IE is not part of the office ecosystem. This is smart move towards integration and a clever way to utilize the platform. However, there likely will be some backlash from purists. Might I suggest a branch of Firefox not unlike Camino for Mac? Perhaps a Windows-centric version of the Mozilla browser would be in order to better provide for the range of needs and interests in the community.
The Office 2007 ribbon is very effective for exposing contextual functionality, but it's also capable of being a lightweight interface. I am curious to see how Firefox implements this. I wouldn't anticipate it being nearly as wide open as Office's ribbon, with much of its functionality likely hidden in the globe.
Alongside some Windows 7 integration, these features could go far towards making Firefox more of a native browser and less of a competing visual element in Windows.
The embedded market? Microsoft doesn't target nearly the same ground Linux does in that market. You're just cherry-picking situations where people use Linux because it doesn't compete in the workstation market.
Yes... and why are people using those "countless single-purpose archaic unix servers"? Because Microsoft perpetuated this archaic model in the 1980's and 1990's when it decided to follow that model with NT, rather than any of the more modern approaches.
What more modern approaches? The only other "modern" systems I can think of from the beginning of the NT era are Amiga and eventually BeOS. Can you detail a more modern approach to a desktop system? Unix is still a couple decades behind NT in architecture.
Microsoft's lack of vision and innovation in the 1980's and 1990's is responsible for why we still program in C/C++ and use UNIX-like kernels.
Can you name a better language for writing kernels? C is basically the optimal language for writing system code. You haven't presented a revolutionary alternative yet.
It took Sun and the Java community to drive managed languages, garbage collection, and virtual machines into industry and server applications. It took Microsoft a decade to catch on to that one.
Virualization is big because UNIX is too awkward to work as a multi-role server, so you use virtualized myopic UNIX servers to replace what could otherwise be done by Java EE or
"Comparable" only in the sense that both of them are obsolete junk. But since I have to choose one or the other, I prefer the cheaper, simpler, open source junk.
One system is designed and has a unified vision and architecture, the other is a haphazard collection of incomplete and inconsistent subsystems written largely by amateurs. The difference between them is drastic. If you can't grasp this, then your requirements from your systems must be very superficial.
Anybody whose time is valuable would be a fool to run Windows: any serious computing on Windows is a bottomless time sink. On standard hardware, Linux just works.
I have never owned a system where Linux "just works". Most users purchase computers with licensed and customized operating system images. Replacing these with a hacked together 1970's operating system designed to work over dumb terminals is simply beyond retarded-- Linux on the desktop is a non-starter. Its marketshare reflects this.
Wii Sports is a lot of fun... and a lot of good cops have fallen to its dangerous and seductive powers. What can society do when Wii is in the hands of the very people sent out to protect us from it?
Right- which is why the way this is implemented could represent a critical different in the security situation. Is it webkit or is it webkit within chrome within IE?
It seems an awful lot like an HTML 5 Flash or Silverlight to me.
What will a home user do with an 80 core, 1TB RAM sysetm? Ray tracing?
Sometimes I need a giant mirrored ball as a pick me up when I'm down, or a photo-realistic digital recreation of a bowl of fruit. What's wrong with that?
Protein folding?
They're not going to fold themselves.
Local weather prediction?
I don't trust the NWS, though. I generally try to run my own weather models at home every morning before leaving for work. I have to do something with these petabytes of NASA satellite data.
Yes, it has, and Microsoft is chiefly responsible for that regression. In the 1980's and 1990's, Microsoft had an opportunity to deliver truly modern operating systems and development environments. What did they give us instead? Another bloated C/C++ kernel, GUI libraries written in C/C++, bad imitations of visual programming environments, and (lately) a Java clone.
Wait, what? What would you write a modern system in? Are you some sort of functional programming zealot or something?
If I have to use 1970's operating system technologies, at least I'm going to stick to the open source technology with the simpler architecture, instead of the overdesigned, overpriced, marketing driven corporate bloatware.
Enjoy your 1970's computing.
If Microsoft actually ever starts delivering 21st century software and software that isn't just a badly executed clone of someone else's ideas, then I'll give them another try.
Given your passionate defense of Linux as somehow comparable to the Microsoft platform, I'm going to assume your time is pretty worthless to you. In this case, what you do with it should be of no concern to anyone.
You haven't given a single fact in your diatribe, all you do is state your religiously held beliefs as truth.
If it's also hacked to pass the CSS 2.1 test suite, then that should be just perfect.
All browsers have that-- Safari's is famously large.
I'm not a full-time web developer but I used to be contracted by a university for web stuff for a while. From my own experience I can tell you IE's support for CSS 2.1 is so shitty that I had to spend 3x extra time writing eye-burning special hacks that shouldn't have been there in the first place. The "main" CSS file of the site, which strictly adhered to W3C CSS 2.1 standard, works perfectly right out of the box for every fricking browser out there except IE. And I had to maintain a whole bunch of "hacked" (still standard-compliant, just plain ugly) CSS files for different versions of IE because each of them sucks its own way.
I was talking about the current IE version, IE 8. It has the most complete CSS 2.1 support. That's all there is to it. This isn't a blanket claim about IE. It didn't have very good CSS 2.1 support before then.
Yes, what would those narcissistic onanist web developers know about the relevance of the canvas tag to creating... web applications?
I don't see how canvas is relevant right now. It will be when it is finished, perhaps. For now, target Flash if you need that functionality. Right now, it's just another twinkle in the HTML 5 clique's eye.
I haven't gotten snarky yet, but perhaps I will when you explain what "webtrash" means. I certainly hope it's not your term for someone who actually has a working understanding of the issues we've been discussing.
Web trash = Web developers; not really designers, not really software engineers. Trendy, braindead, and useless in any real industry. They're responsible for such brilliant technologies as "ruby on rails" and other poorly designed frameworks that blow away collective millions of dollars of investor cash on energy and hardware in order to save them tiny amounts of time and make their code trendier. They're the sort of people who would complain that their job is too difficult because they have to target a conservative feature set based on the real-world deployment of unstandardized technologies.
That's *awesome*. With IE 8, we can now say that after 8 years of lagging behind, the browser created by the world's richest software company marginally edges out Firefox 3 in a feature-by-feature comparison CSS 2.1 features! Gives you a surge of pride, right? Why, if it constituted the most commonly used version of the product, that'd almost be the same thing as giving the world back all the man-hours spent trying to work around the support that wasn't there until this year!
Yeah, I was correct. Get over it.
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. -- Bertrand Russell, "Skeptical Essays", 1928
