And Google really, really badly wants to change that. By far they're succeeding too. http://gs.statcounter.com/

And Google does the same too, even wanting to create a replacement to JavaScript. They promote sites that say you are required to have Chrome to access it. It's much worse than IE.

And yet Google making a whole OS where Chrome is the only browser.. no, the ONLY PROGRAM allowed is acceptable?

And yet it is included on the commonly used distros. You can ignore that fact and go lalalala. Yes, it's not included in every distro, but on those that have any market share it is. And I too use a distro that doesn't have it installed for default, but if I used it in desktop I really would want it to have a browser, just so I can download Opera. If you want to to provide good OS to users, do you honestly think they would appreciate your effort in NOT allowing any browser within the OS and requiring you to use something like wget + text editor to find out the download link. Wtf is wrong with you?

With Firefox. And seriously, any modern OS should have a browser installed by default, if only to download your favorite browser. Hell, Google wants to have an OS that is only the browser!

Welcome to world where you do what's good for you at the moment. It's not like this is a new concept for US either. China practically owns US now, and in 10-20 years it will start to really show. In the end, they will probably fall again, but it will be China who controls the world soon (again). It's the cycle of life.

It's a good sign of a failing country. US fucked up their economy and many Asian countries took advantage of that by providing real, actual goods to people. The only thing US still has is entertainment industry, so it's not a surprise they're trying to protect that. But eventually it's a lost game, just because people got lazy and spend a lot more than they can, while other people (banks) tried to sell sell sell all those people loans. In the process many people got really rich, but it's not something you can do endlessly.

Google does exactly the same, via Analytics. On Slashdot too. They just have a larger market share on it (because Analytics is installed in so many pages).

Yeah, either you're seriously ignorant or just trolling.

And China didn't either. You're ignorant if you think they did. The tank driver DID NOT go over people. The man in the picture did not get pulled over by the tank.

Well like I said that effect could be reduced by prioritizing the apps I actually start myself. But like previous poster noted, it seems like MS actually tried that. However, just being able to start up browser and other lightweight tools and use it without feeling that slowness would be step forward. It's always the first thing I load and use it anyway, so the OS could load rest of the programs in the background while I go browse my usual websites.

There are actually two kind of performances, which are both important. The real, actual performance, and how well the OS can make the system feel even under load. It's important to have a snappy feel even if the system underneath is working hard, and this is especially true now that the amount of cores in CPUs and multithreading are increasing. Say what you want, but just the feel of speediness is an important factor. This is why the boot up time is looked at so much too - it's great to quickly get to the desktop, and let the OS load up while you're already started working.

One thing I've noticed with boot up times (and this applies to all operating systems) is that the OS tries to load all programs at once. Usually the limiting factor to this will be hard drive. It's less true with SSD drives, but it's really noticeable with 7200 RPM and slower drives. It usually leads to the whole system crawling for a few minutes after desktop shows up. It would be great if the OS would measure the different loads and UI response times, and actually limit the startup programs. This way you could open your browser and other tools and those would be given priority upon startup process.

I tested the developer preview version briefly and it sure seemed a lot faster and snappier. The startup time is remarkably faster. And according to this PCMag test, seems like the overall speed has been improved a lot too. Good job MS!

.NET is almost like Java, but significantly better.

Poker is also just a game based on pure luck. In the long run you will only end up losing and the casino collects the rakes and profits. The cards that come out are random, the cards that other players have are random, and the cards you have are random. If hit and play until end of the hand, it's completely random which cards come out. You can't win the game with skill, so it's almost like lottery. You can only increase your changes of winning, like in lottery if you buy more tickets. But in the end, the house always wins. You cannot control it.