Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[Formfiller]

Great, now that there are signs that Microsoft is maybe finding back to sanity, Firefox caught the Nu-virus and follows NuMicrosoft and NuOpera.

If I want Chrome, I would use Chrome. Unbelievable that they are doing this after the debacle of the chromified Opera. There are only two browsers now: Chrome and IE.

Dang, this looks a lot like the Windows 8 style:

Watching the Firefox promos is like reliving the "Destroying Windows" blog phase before the W8 release.

"Australis has two primary goals: To make Firefox look and feel modern, and to create a unified look and feel (UI/UX) across every one of Firefox’s platforms — from Windows to Linux, from smartphones to tablets."

Hardcore deja vu.

"It is not a coincidence that the new main menu has big, touch-friendly icons — and likewise, the increased spacing between UI elements throughout the interface is for the sake of touchscreen users, not mouse users. Ideally, Mozilla would love to have a single codebase for the UI that can be easily ported between different screen sizes and platforms — Australis is a big step in that direction."

"The real story here, of course, is that Mozilla is trying to stay relevant in a field that is increasingly being dominated by Google and Apple." - Is there an unwritten law somewhere, that you have destroy your products to do this?

I am even reading already some "you're afraid of change!" posts in the comments! Life is great.

Edited December 11, 2013 by Formfiller

[JorgeA]

A little bit more about the shakeup in the Windows group:

Windows division loses two program management directors to Bing -- fresh blood on the way?

It's not just Steve Ballmer's position that is up for grabs at Microsoft at the moment, there are plenty of other changes taking place as well. Two directors who were involved in the changes introduced in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have left the company's operating system division and moved across to the Bing teams.

The duo are Ted Dworkin, who was involved in the development of the Windows Store, and Jensen Harris who was the director of program management for the Windows User Experience.

Of the two, Harris is probably the better known, largely thanks to the fact that he introduced the new user interface of Windows 8 and then Windows 8.1.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

I am even reading already some "you're afraid of change!" posts in the comments! Life is great.

Evidently there are some "change addicts" out there, who can't bear to live without everything around them getting constantly modified totally beyond their control.

"Change" is all we've been getting from Mozilla for the last couple of years, and at an ever faster pace. It's "change fatigue" they should be looking into, not fear of change. Leave it alone already!!!

We may want to start monitoring browser usage, the way we've been reporting on OS market share. It'll be interesting to see what happens to FF's popularity after they complete the UI makeover.

--JorgeA

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

These modern nitwits are either too young or, well, too stoopid to know that what goes around, comes around. Once they get almost everything looking barebones simplified chromeless and modern ( which itself is stolen from the past ) they will have accomplished one thing - paving the way for sophisticated and beautiful graphics to come rushing through and eat their lunch.

Talented people and actual programmers ( not HTML webslingers ) will take advantage of the massive GPU and CPU power at their fingertips, even on slabs, and create an "experience" that will make the Playskool Metro look utterly ridiculous, well even moreso than today. That is the reason Aero was killed by Sinofsky and Jensen Harris, competition even from within that makes Microsoft Tiles look asinine must be terminated.

As far as Firefox goes, expect the same responses from the public that they all got. The main difference being that Mozilla has to listen better than dictatorial Microsoft or Google ( and Opera is the anomaly who needed to listen, had piles of user feedback for years but simply never did ). They will catch hell if they ever plan to replace the standard browser with the Win3x version, rather than offer both.

But like I said, all they are really accomplishing is clearing the playing field of talent and replacing it with rookie league back benchers. It's like a baseball or football strike and substitute players. It's like going into The Louvre and every other museum around the world, burning the classic art and replacing it with our child drawings that we hang on our refrigerators. True madness. What happens after that is inevitable though, and they ain't gonna like it one bit. They will be sitting ducks for ads and commercials from new competitors that ridicule their basic interfaces, even the most simple transition effects and other graphic tricks found in an average slideshow maker will suddenly be an "oooh that's nice!" selling point embarrassing the NuGUI retards. Then they will have to reverse course yet again.

They're really betting everything on power consumption as the deciding factor, another bad guess on their part. GPU and even CPU tech isn't sitting still! Microsoft and her sycophants once again are busy designing and building for a moment in time, one that has already passed. By the time they finish their lurching movement back to low-power low-visuals for the low-intelligence customer, it will be a laughable memory as others exploit their new, completely voluntary position of weakness selling things that look silly, dated and cheesy.

It's hard to believe but they are positioning themselves at the bottom of the food chain, a big fat failure of their Apple-envy. If anything, it is a huge gift to Apple and probably Google who will be cemented above them. Customers will see Apple as high-end boutique classy and pretty, Google as customizable and/or pretty ( Android, Motorola, Nexus ), and Microsoft as the child-level toys with a DVD player interface fit for monkeys. And they are doing it entirely on purpose! Redmond literally mapped this out as their path! No doubt some of them are fans of Bauhaus related "art", and of course some earlier styles like Art Deco, but still had the chutzpah to call the most "modern" GUI style yet - Aero, as dated and cheesy. Art is a personal thing for sure, but I'm not the only one who thinks the Bauhaus related fad itself is dated and cheesy. It's come and gone several times already, lots of things in the 1960's that we cringe at today were of similar reductionism even though back then they thought they were being futuristic. What I'm really saying is that if you are crazy enough to select some period style as your official new image, you are going to look cringe-worthy after a short period of time. It's just dumb.

[JorgeA]

A provocative analysis, written before this week's revelations about Windows 8.2:

Tablet OSes killed Windows 8 and Microsoft with it

Highlights:

...The only company here that even tries to say that things aren’t awful is Microsoft, for some reason they see nothing wrong with a strategy that drove one of the most lucrative markets in the world into an unrecoverable tailspin. For them everything is going just fine, or at least they claim it is.

The main problem is that people HATE Windows 8. Worse yet this isn’t because of some dark conspiracy to slander poor defenseless and completely upstanding Microsoft, people hate Windows 8 because it is a fundamentally awful user experience. Everyone SemiAccurate has put it in front of has ended up buying a Mac or Windows 7 if that is still an option so it should come as no surprise that Apple Mac sales are more or less flat while PC sales are cratering. Coincidence? Microsoft sure says so but we doubt they believe their own PR.

.

...Microsoft has forced a tablet OS on to a PC where it just doesn’t work. They are not allowing OEMs to sell consumer products with Windows 7 even though the OEMs are desperate to do so, business PCs are not subject to the same restrictions in some cases though. The OS is violently awful, there is almost no one that likes it much less prefers it to Android or iOS, and App support for Windows 8.x has still not reached minimally acceptable level more than a year on. There are no signs this state of affairs will radically change in the foreseeable future, every promise by Microsoft in this area have been inaccurate. Worse still the gap to competitors is measured in orders of magnitude, not unit counts, and Android and iOS are extending that lead every day.

So why did Microsoft miss the boat? Because of the sheer awfulness of Windows 8? No. Because it had, and still has, no Apps? No. It is because Microsoft forced users to choose a tablet OS. Before the death march that is Windows 8 the users could choose between a real OS and a tablet OS, but the real OS option has now been removed.

.

Stop for a second and ponder the magnitude of this stupidity, the sheer negligence that has to be rife among Microsoft managers and senior executives to allow this. They knew what they were doing and did it anyway, Microsoft knows what users want and made the conscious choice to not only offer something different but to also deny customers the possibility of getting what they needed to work. Every objective third-party said it would be a disaster but Microsoft carried on. On top of this Microsoft gave users another choice, abandon your current Android/iOS apps, music, movies, knowledge, social links, and devices and come to our OS that doesn’t have any apps, music, movies, inherent knowledge, social links, or devices instead.

Worse yet by forcing the new miserable and counter-intuitive UI on people and not allowing legacy Apps on the new store or on WART/Windows Phone, they quite effectively told people you can’t take anything from your current Windows software catalog and knowledge base with you either. Developers had to recode their entire software base for something that had a vanishingly small marketshare and make something incompatible with the billions of PCs currently in use. For some reason they didn’t...

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

What might a new Windows Start Menu look like?

Mary Jo Foley gets the scoop again:

Since Thurrott's initial December 10 report on the return of the Start Menu, I've heard from my own contacts that this is highly likely to happen. Microsoft is, indeed, highly likely to bring back Start Menu. Supposedly it's being called internally "mini-Start," (as it won't be a full-screen Start Menu like in Windows 8), one of my contacts said.

.

Next-to-nothing, my contacts claim, has been determined by the team as to what this new Menu will look like. Will it include the same current category list (Documents, Pictures, Music, etc.) as Microsoft's current Start Menu on Windows 7? Will it be a menu of Metro-Style tiled apps? No tiles? Will it interact with the Start button that's on the Charms Bar in Windows 8 in some way? No word.

--JorgeA

[TELVM]

A provocative analysis, written before this week's revelations about Windows 8.2:

Tablet OSes killed Windows 8 and Microsoft with it

^ Just homeric!

[Tripredacus]

According to Foley’s sources, Threshold will see Windows 8.2 (or Windows 9 perhaps) split into three SKUs (stock-keeping units): a Modern/Metro SKU, a traditional desktop PC SKU, and a traditional enterprise SKU. The Metro version would be focused on the Metro interface, WinRT apps, and the mobile/touchscreen experience. The traditional desktop PC version would be a lot like Windows 7, but with Windows 8′s low-level tweaks.

This is a little confusing. It makes it sound like there will be one particular version of Windows that's Desktop only. Could that really be so?

--JorgeA

We'll see what this really means. It sounds more like a backtrack than anything. The only difference would be that the "Modern SKU" is the equivalent return to fill the void left by Windows Tablet Edition. One could argue that WindowsRT is the tablet replacement, except for the main difference that the OS hasn't been made available to OEMs, while Tablet was always available (even to Technet/MSDN guys) I think. I hope that the usage of the term "split" is in error and what ends up happening is that Windows 8 Core (Home Premium line edition) ends up being the Metro edition, Pro stays Pro (as desktop edition) and Enterprise staying what it is. Although I hope they actually brand the Core product officially.

[JorgeA]

The joys of life in the cloud, chapter 497:

Yahoo Says Mail Functionality Is Returning, but Some Users Might Be Missing Up to Two Weeks of Email

Ahh yes, webmail is SOOOOOO convenient.

Maybe the NSA can restore the lost e-mails to these users' accounts...

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

And now for Gmail fans:

Dear Gmailer: I know what you read last summer (and last night and today)

Embed in each message a viewable image—or if you're feeling sneaky, a nearly invisible image—that contains a long, random-looking string in the URL that's unique to each receiver or e-mail. When Google proxy servers request the image, the sender knows the user or message corresponding to the unique URL is active or has been viewed. In Moore's tests, the proxy servers requested the image each subsequent time the Gmail message was opened, at least when he cleared the temporary Internet cache of his browser. That behavior could allow marketers—or possibly lawyers, stalkers, or other senders with questionable motives—to glean details many receivers would prefer to keep to themselves. For instance, a sender could track how often or at what times a Gmail user opened a particular message.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

One of my PCs received a Windows Update today referencing some French CA issuing bad certificates. This must be what it's about:

French agency caught minting SSL certificates impersonating Google

Rekindling concerns about the system millions of websites use to encrypt and authenticate sensitive data, Google caught a French governmental agency spoofing digital certificates for several Google domains.

The secure sockets layer (SSL) credentials were digitally signed by a valid certificate authority, an imprimatur that caused most mainstream browsers to place an HTTPS in front of the addresses and display other logos certifying that the connection was the one authorized by Google. In fact, the certificates were unauthorized duplicates that were issued in violation of rules established by browser manufacturers and certificate authority services.

The certificates were issued by an intermediate certificate authority linked to the Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information, the French cyberdefense agency better known as ANSSI. After Google brought the certificates to the attention of agency officials, the officials said the intermediate certificate was used in a commercial device on a private network to inspect encrypted traffic with the knowledge of end users, Google security engineer Adam Langley wrote in a blog post published over the weekend. Google updated its Chrome browser to reject all certificates signed by the intermediate authority and asked other browser makers to do the same. Firefox developer Mozilla and Microsoft, developer of Internet Explorer have followed suit. ANSSI later blamed the mistake on human error. It said it had no security consequences for the French administration or the general public, but the agency has revoked the certificate anyway.

Human error, right -- if you believe that, I have some swampland in Normandy I'd like to sell you. How do you say "bu!!$h/t" in French? Methinks they simply got caught doing something they fully and consciously meant to do.

Good for Google on this one.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Rather than by releasing new versions of Windows, one way to push everybody off XP/Vista/7 is by making them unable to perform one of the major functions in computing -- using a browser:

I'm on IE8 on my Vista machine. I have declined to use IE9 because its UI is not as informative as that of IE8, and I find the flatter visual design to be boring. Chrome, on the other hand, is associated with Google and I remain suspicious of it. And Firefox keeps messing with the UI, not to mention the fact that they release a new version seemingly every couple of hours.

Over time, my browser choices on Vista (but also eventually on 7) will become increasingly annoying and restricted. :angrym:

In a different (though analogous) context, this comment in the forum thread seen in the screenshot above is apt:

It's as if oil companies decided to stop selling gasoline, so everybody had to junk their gas-powered cars and switch to diesel; then a few years later, they decided to only sell jet fuel, and everybody had to junk their cars and switch again. Or it's as if power companies decided to switch from 60 Hz to 50 Hz, then a few years later decided to switch from 120 V to 48 V, etc., and we had to keep buying new appliances or adapters to keep up with all the changes.

--JorgeA

[TELVM]

How do you say "bu!!$h/t" in French?

Connerie.

What do you think of this gents, $99 for activating XP after April?: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_xp-windows_install/how-will-xp-activation-and-validation-work-after-4/f9db3b1e-91b8-4227-9916-34c541f88fa4

[vinifera]

thats why I fake output browser string, as I'm using Opera 11 some sites block it coz it is "outdated" yet it isn't
so my fake output string is Firefox 25, then when I reload the page they let me in, or in case like this the annoying warning goes away

[JorgeA]

How do you say "bu!!$h/t" in French?

Connerie.

Ahh, thank you.

Wonder what Sir Sean might have to say about that... (I know it's not pronounced the same )

(source)

What do you think of this gents, $99 for activating XP after April?: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_xp-windows_install/how-will-xp-activation-and-validation-work-after-4/f9db3b1e-91b8-4227-9916-34c541f88fa4

Wow, that would really stink.

Comments as to what will happen if you try to activate XP after April 8 are all over the place, but my guess is that the Microsoft rep thought (mistakenly) that the guy was asking about some kind of official support after that date. See here and here. Here's another MSFT person on that topic:

You can go ahead and Install and activate Windows XP after 2014. Only the Support option would not be there after 2014 for Windows XP.

One way (maybe) to hedge against the possibility of the XP activation servers going offline would be this.

However, we would suggest making a full image backup of any of the PCs on which you want to be able to perform a clean re-installation of Windows XP. This will be faster than installing from scratch and all of the required updates will be in place without the need to download them again.

When performing your next clean re-installation, install all the available service packs and updates and then create the image (also known as ghosting) using software such as Acronis True Image. Create one for each different PC.

--JorgeA