Tabbed browsing. On my last PC, I was happy to use IE 7 beta and
preferred it to Firefox in some ways; on this one I'm using Firefox
1.5.006 and that's meeting my needs.
Lack of tabbed browsing is reason enough for me to not want to go back
to IE 6, ever. I no longer need to open multiple pages now and read
them later (as I did when on pay-per-second dialup hell) but I still
like keeping related material together, and regularly have too many
tabs open to be visibly tabbed across 1024 pixels.
A typical "web binge" would start with a Google, kicking open the hits
as extra tabs, then reading those pages, kicking open any links of
interest in extra tabs. If I hit a Wikipedia link from the Google
search, I'll tend to open that in a new window as I often end up with
10+ tabs open just from a single Wikipedia article's links.
With IE 6, I'd have a flat mountain of loose windows, with no way to
see which is related to what. That's nearly as absurd as having to
save each sentence as a separate Word document file.
The "must upgrade" mantra is no longer feature-driven, i.e. no longer
"try the new version and we'll give you these new shiny toys".
Instead, it's driven by poor quality of previous versions, i.e. "try
the new version or the defects in our old version will let you get
exploited". This is a very real threat, and drive to fix, fix, fix.
Agreed. The best would be to stay on the Win9x of your choice, use a
NAT router if on broadband, avoid WiFi, and use updateable 3rd-party
products for all Internet-exposed surfaces (e.g. Eudora for email,
Firefox for web, Winamp for media, Open Office, etc.)
That can be fixed...
http://cquirke.mvps.org/9x/me-dos.htm
The last Win9x that was safe out of the box, without having to change
anything, was pre-IE4 Win95 SR2. Win98 SE is the next safest, but
needs "View As Web Page" and some IE excesses to be killed. WinME can
be as good or better, but only if you kick some of the problems flat.
WinME was a strange mix of finally getting things right, and floating
proptotypes for new technologies such as System Restore in forms that
bordered on unfit for use. Removing DOS mode was technically
pointless (i.e. zero benefit) but crippled it down to Win2000/XP
limitations so that the Win9x market would better accept XP.
Actually, no - not as at 2006. Native support for USB storage as a
generic class means that any camera, SD card reader or USB flash drive
will work without extra drivers, and that is a MASSIVE win over
Win98SE. Enough to drive WinME past Win98SE as 9x of choice.
WinME was stillborn, i.e. set up to fail, by the way MS released it.
First, there was no Resource Kit documentation, making it more
difficult for developers to get a handle on what had changed in the
OS, and encouraging the mistaken belief that it was just Win98 with
new paint, and that what worked in '98 would work in WinME.
Second, MS discouraged devs to commit resources to WinME, claiming
that it was the very last Win9x ever, soon to be replaced by
NT-everywhere, so as to entice more attention on Win2000.
Third, a number of pervasive and unavoidable changes were made, such
as System Restore, that made it easy for "deep" software to mess up.
These three issues may explain why Norton and McAfee products fare so
badly when on WinME, why Zone Alarm was such a pain, etc.
It's easy to think of WinME as a short0lived stop-gap, but check the
lifetimes of each OS...
1995 - 1998: 3 variants of Windows 95
1998 - 2000: 2 variants of Windows 98
2000 - 2002: 1 variant of Windows ME
2002 - 2007: 3-4 SP levels of Windows XP
If you break out each variant, then WinME has the longest tenure of
any Win9x. And yet there seem to be far more Win98xx PCs out there
than WinME; why is that?
One reason is that many users preferred Win98 SE to WinME thoughout
WinME's era, and some OEMs still shipped new PCs with Win98SE rather
than WinME. In contrast, all Win9x faded from new PCs almost as soon
as XP was released. By now, fast WinME PCs may have been migrated to
XP, while too-slow-for-XP (or "I prefer Win9x") systems have often
fallen back from WinME to Win98 SE.
Also interesting to note is that Win98 SE stayed on trade distributor
price lists after WinME had already vanished.
In short, it seems that no-one really wanted WinME. MS didn't want
it; they wanted you to spend more for Win2000 instead. Folks buying
into the NT/XP hype don't want it; they want XP. Folks not buying
into the hype don't want DOS-broken WinME, they want Win98 SE.
Agreed. I know that MS wanted a common OS code base since the NT 4
days, hoping that Win2000 would fill this role. There wasn't even
supposed to be a Win98 SE, let alone a WinME; even as Win98 original
was being released, there were mutterings about "real PC users should
have switched to NT by now".
However, I can see why Win9x would not be suitable for new hardware.
To commit resources to building deep changes needed for generic USB
storage support, > 137G, 1G+ RAM, drivers for 9xx-generation chipsets
etc. just doesn't make sense, given the dwindling need for what only a
Win9x can do - i.e. run Win23.x and DOS programs better than NT.
I do think removing DOS mode from WinME was a sop to marketing. MS
was happy to demonize DOS, to make NT look better ("NT has no DOS"),
and by naming the last Win9x "Millenium" rather than "Windows 99" plus
faking the absence of DOS underpinnings, folks may think they are
buying some sort of "NT Lite".
Once used to WinME's lack of a maintenance DOS mode, users wouldn't
find this missing in XP to be a new objection to the NT family.
The truth about Win9x is that it never did "run on top of DOS", and
that it was crippled more by the legacy of Win3.yuk than DOS.
Drugs are usually safe. Inject? (Y/n)
