(no subject)

[torkell]

I apparently have two choices when it comes to computing:

a) stick with obsolete, buggy, insecure programs that actually work and actually have a sensible user interface

b) upgrade to current, less buggy, marginally more secure programs that don't work and have truely awful user interfaces

This is why I still use IE6 (the IE7 interface sucks under XP), why I still use a 15-year-old FTP client (nothing else actually does what I want), why I still use mplayer2.exe (clean, simple, effective) and why I still use an 8-year-old cellphone (it Just Works, damnit). Sometime in the past few years almost all of usability and practicality went out the window in favour of shinyness and buzzwords.

This rant brought to you by discovering that RealPlayer 11 only lets you resize using the bottom-right corner of the window.

Comments

[link077.livejournal.com]

I don't know why you just don't switch to Firefox if you don't like IE7. It has an interface comparable to IE6 and is faster, more secure, and less buggy, and can actually handle modern web design standards.

[torkell]

I try it every so often, but have never really liked it. It suffers from the usual "hey let's ignore this perfectly good windowing toolkit the OS provides and write our own one instead" problem of cross-platform stuff, it has severe problems with the trackpoint scrolling feature on my laptop, it runs everything in a single process which leaves you completely screwed if, say, that process gets stuck in kernel mode due to a buggy driver (the unix equivalent would be uninterruptible sleep), and it forced an update on me the other day.

Opera is much better, and the only reason holding me back from Opera is that it also runs everything a single process and so is vulnerable to the same buggy driver problem.

[pteppic.livejournal.com]

Google Chrome.