News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.
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Mail Starting 4/30/97 | |
I agree! This is my thinking: immense power comes from an environment that behaves consistently. The web interfaces today are anything but consistent. Imagine the horror of this mess moving onto everyone's desktop! I can see where Microsoft is coming from, but all I see is chaos.
From: julian@mps.co.nz (Julian Harris);
Sent at 5/1/97; 9:39:59 AM;
Re:I Might Like You BetterAll of this business about browser wars brings up a question for me: 'what would it take for Microsoft and Netscape to work together?' All of this resistance they're creating for each other is very time-consuming, expensive and self-serving.
Perhaps one day Microsoft will take the step of being a leader in its communities rather than dominating and ruling by fear.
IMHO 100% pure Java is simply so that stuff will run on the much hyped Java Physical Machine :)
From: limey@best.com (Richard Scorer);
Sent at 4/30/97; 10:37:58 AM;
Re:I Might Like You BetterA browser should be like a word processor which should be like an operating system: a small kernel that can dynamically pull in other elements when needed.
From: fen@comedia.com (Fen Labalme);
Sent at 4/30/97; 10:35:38 AM;
Re:I Might Like You BetterJava offers this dream. A smaill virtual machine that can pull in an HTML browser when I need one, or a GIF viewer, or a VRML engine, or an emailer, or a spell checker, or....
The Mac was supposed to be this way: a collection of tools that could easily interoperate. But companies have tended toward bundling things together into monlithic monstrosities such as Word, that has it's own spell checker rather than using the one in the global toolbox environment.
Will Java suffer the same fate? One can hope that finally the OO-paradigm may be strong enough in the minds of enough people that we might finally get it right.
But then there's Microsoft...
I am still excited by the original intent of Java: write once, deploy everywhere. I am excited by the potential of a language designed to flourish in the heterogeneous wilds of the internet.
From: james.e.hoburg@lucent.com (James E. Hoburg);
Sent at 4/30/97; 12:57:43 PM;
Re:I Might Like You BetterThe amazing thing about HTTP and the growth of the web is that it supported global information sharing *regardless* of the particular proprietary doorway you might have sitting on your desktop. Java has the possibility of being a (now) obvious next step in that same direction.
You wrote, "Does Java really have an answer to the security problem?" Relative to other technical proposals, yes. You then asked, "Is there any value in Java's cross-platform promise?" Was there any in the web's?
IE4 lasted about 35 minutes on my machine before I got rid of it. Uninstall was pretty straightforward, except for the fact that the "shell" piece (the one you seem to dislike as much as I did) won't disappear from the Add/Remove programs dialog. I feel that it is lurking somewhere in my system, but I can't nail it down. That freaks me out a bit.
From: mccarron@raydirks.com (Jamie McCarron);
Sent at 4/30/97; 12:37:18 PM;
Re:I Might Like You BetterI have to admit that I was immediately turned off by the whole thing when I installed it. I don't want to re-learn how to operate my system. I want things to work the same. I want improvements, but don't force me to re-examine the basics, like browsing a disk. It seems that MacOS 8 is a good example of how usability and other improvements should be integrated into an OS. MacOS 8 is subtly different in look and feel and does provide some interesting utilities that will make it more efficient, but it maintains the stance that I am already comfortable with as well. I can still double click on folders, have them open up and expect to interact with them in ways that I am used to. Now, if I want to use the contextual menus, the pop-up feature, etc. I can, but I can get to know them at my own speed, I'm not forced to.
IE4's active desktop forced me to think very hard about what I was doing as I was browsing a directory. I especially didn't like the way that icons would highlight as I passed my mouse over them. You wouldn't believe how long it took me to figure out how to select something! In fact, I was forced to go for help. I've used most of the GUIs that have been and are available, and I had trouble with IE4!
I like Netscape Communicator. I'll hold off on Netcaster. Chalk up a big no for IE4, I just don't like it.
Hi Dave -- to get rid of Internet Explorer, go to control panel, dblclick on "Add/Remove Programs", and remove Internet Explorer 4.0. BTW, you can use IE 4.0 w/o the Shell Extension part -- I think it is a better browser than 3.0, even in beta is seems faster because it doesn't do cache validation at start up...
From: joelong@MICROSOFT.com (Joe Long);
Sent at 4/30/97; 9:27:44 AM;
Re:I Might Like You BetterI may be wrong on this, but I don't think that's what 100% Pure Java is about. I think it means 100% Java *bytecodes*. You don't have to write the stuff in Java; you just have to not include any processor-native code (like ActiveX). That's an advantage of Java; whether you love it or you hate it, you can get the portability benefits without using the Java language (theoretically). It wouldn't surprise me to see Visual Basic compiling to Java bytecodes soon. --Wes
From: wesf@comm.net (Wesley Felter);
Sent at 4/30/97; 11:12:54 AM;
Re:I Might Like You BetterI'd like to contribute a few points to the discussion here. These are issues that are important to me and those of us who believe that broadband distribution pipelines will change the playing field ONE MORE TIME.
From: marc@canter.com (Marc Canter);
Sent at 4/30/97; 8:26:43 AM;
Re:I Might Like You BetterWhat seems to be missing from all this is rollover buttons, streaming media, proper layout control and in general - what we used to call multimedia system software. Netscape doesn't care about this - but it's a major critteria of Steve Capps' new designs for IE and the future of Microsoft's desktop.
The evidence is the ridiculous price they payed for WebTV - which is basically just Steve Pearlman's patents. Needless to say WebTV is not selling and Microsoft coudln't care less about some box built on a weird RISC processor. What they care about is anti-aliasing text on an interlaced display. That's because PC TV is coming!
So any discussion about the future of operating systems, desktops and the browser battles has to include the stand-off over multimedia which Microsoft is embracing and moving forward with, and which Netscape couldn't care less about - unless it makes their banner ads prettier.
Marc Canter
P.S. We all know how cheap Microsoft is - so why would they pay $450M for an unsuccessful box?
P.P.S. I really wanted to put in rich text into this email message- but again - the current standards are so lame that I can't even do that!
P.P.P.S. Devorah used to go to art school with Deborah - the woman who sings that song. They're from SF and used to play the Mubahay Gardens (on Broadway) all the time.
Generally speaking, there isn't a look-and-feel to Solaris. While there is a CDE (Common Desktop Environment), the majority of applications are pre-CDE. The X Windows heritage means that there is little in common between applications and UI's.
From: combee@techwood.org (Ben Combee);
Sent at 4/30/97; 10:57:28 AM;
Re: I Might Like You BetterThe most common UI is Motif, which most users dislike. I run Solaris with a window manager that makes it look like Win95/NT 4.0, but beyond the shell and window widgits, each application is free to make its own unique interface. I like that freedom, but it not the best choice for users that value uniformity.
Java could do well in the Unix workstation environment where it was developed because there are no standards for it.
I've been singing the same song. If a "browser desktop" is the model for a new computer UI that were all suppose to dig, I'm gonna go work in a coffee shop.
From: enzo@micron.net (Ron Bearry);
Sent at 4/30/97; 9:05:02 AM;
Re:I Might Like You BetterCheck out the http://www.news.com/ site. Remember the image maps for navigation along the left side? A pretty rendering of text, but a pain to change. This morning, I noticed that the word gifs have been replaced by words.
From: dave@sherm.com (Dave Sherman);
Sent at 4/30/97; 7:57:02 AM;
Back to text....Perhaps this is no big deal. But as much as I like good graphic design, it's a pleasant surprise to see major sites reduce their sites' bandwidth and return to text.
Why is Sun reinventing Netscape's software? Because from a Java Beans perspective, Netscape did it wrong. It's monolithic; its componentization is at the application level, not the component level. This is a moot point for users, but not engineers. Now the next question is, why not let Netscape be the ones to re-develop their application-style components in Java, and let Sun concentrate on the platform? I hear a few of the new modules in the Netscape suite are actually being written from the ground up in Java. (The answer to that, of course, is that Sun doesn't fully trust Netscape, and Netscape doesn't fully trust Sun. There's a danger that the leaders of the Revolution against the Empire may be getting mired in internecine bickering...)
From: alex@earthweb.com (Alex Chaffee);
Sent at 4/30/97; 9:47:56 AM;
Re:I Might Like You BetterYou said:
From: dbw11@cornell.edu (David Weingart);
Sent at 4/30/97; 9:58:30 AM;
Re:I Might Like You Better"I don't want the browser to take over my desktop! Please, a web browser is just a way to display formatted pages of text and graphics. It's not an excuse for engineers at Microsoft, Netscape and Sun to rewrite the rules on how I use my computer."
Exactly! People who are experienced in using their computers will not want "true desktop integration." I already know how to use my Macintosh. I don't want to relearn how to use my computer. Luckily, I think it's only Windows users who will be inflicted with a total takeover of their computers. (btw, I think you can turn off the "desktop takeover" part of IE4. I don't use it, so I'm not exactly sure how)
I do think it's funny though, that Microsoft is trying to make using your computer just like using a browser. Isn't that the interface that the Java NC's are aiming for? It's also pretty funny because some parts of a browser's user interface just aren't very good at all. See Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column for good discussion of web user interface issues, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/
I'm personally going to stick with Navigator 3.0 for the forseeable time being. Sure, I downloaded Communicator and tried it out. Didn't take too long for it to crash, and it gobbles enormous amounts of RAM. I won't use it when it comes out. I have heard rumors that they are going to distribute a version that is just a web browser, not any of the other stuff that I simply don't use. The mail and news options are not as good as Eudora and Newswatcher. And I sure don't need any "groupware". It seems like Netscape has really conceded the home market to Microsoft, and gone after the "Intranet" groupware crowd. That's fine. It's not like Navigator 3 will magically stop working.