Word compatibility? Only if it's a word processor. (Score 1)

Get, like, a grip, dude. Most programs have nothing to do with word processing. Even if you are talking about a word processor:

1. Word compatibility is not rocket science. Even abiding by the terms of the MSDN EULA, give me a couple of months and a lot of coffee and I'll reverse-engineer whatever's necessary to make it happen. In serious software development terms, this is so cheap as to be essentially free. I work with a guy who spends many of his days reverse-engineering data structures in the NT kernel, the better to write device drivers. Stuff like that is common. A file format is trivial in comparison. You're naive. Even in volunteer-driven free software terms, it's within reach.
2. MS is developing an increasingly stiff hardon for XML. Dealing with XML-formatted information is so easy it's not even fun.
3. Word compatibility is necessary only when Word is treated as a standard by the government. You're telling us that the government will not be compatible with itself because it doesn't use Word. Dare I question your logic?

As far as web browsing goes, Netscape is barely functional when compared to Internet Explorer.

Have you used Netscape? Can you quantify the alleged drawbacks? It displays HTML, it does Javascript, Java, and plugins, what more do you want? If it does ActiveX controls, I damn well want to know about that so I can tell it not to. That's executable code, bro, with no security. No thanks.


From a developer's standpoint, the only salient fact about IE is that it fucks up the common control libraries. They're releasing OS patches on a toy-application rush-rush development schedule, and that is not wise. Each new version has different bugs. Everything has to be tested on an ever-expanding variety of different "versions" of windows, each of which (pre Win2K) can have any given version of IE, or none. Windows development has always been partly a matter of deducing when the documentation is incomplete or wrong, and when the API is buggy, and yadda yadda, but IE has made this much, much worse, because the number of versions has exploded and the machine I'm debugging on is not even relevant to half the users out there. And guess what -- we pass the problems on to you, the consumer! Where I work, we're very damn careful and we test like madmen (and even so, we still goof now and again). Not everybody is so careful. Not everybody is willing to slip a release date by a week to make sure it all works, all the time.

Of course, since every Windows user now "freely chooses" to use IE in precisely the same way that geese in France "freely choose" to produce foie gras (but with less desirable results), there's absolutely nothing anybody can do about it. Except of course use an operating system that's not hopelessly fragmented. Which the Brazilian government seems to be considering. What was your point again?

Anyhow, this is a bill before the legislature, and it will not pass. Don't worry, nobody's going to hurt poor little Bill. You can go back to sleep now.