It reminded my of when I worked at Microsoft where the opinion unsurprisingly and almost-universally held was that “Microsoft is Awesome”.  This opinion is divergent from general consensus, but that’s not the point.  The point is that I deliberately said, “almost-universally” – not “universally”.  This is because this one guy on my team would always say with a sly smile, “Whoever designed Windows Restart is genius.  It’s one feature that fix all problem.  I want to work on Restart team.”

The really crazy thing is, there actually is a Restart Team.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been using Microsoft’s Virtual PC to run Windows XP on my Windows Vista laptop. Why would I do this? Well, Windows Vista doesn’t support their own development environment, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005, very well so I was forced to find alternative means of development that didn’t require me rebuilding my machine. I’m not going to get into the details, but lets just say it’s been one struggle after the other, and the phrase “Stupid Microsoft” has escaped my lips more than once.

That said, I’m starting to suspect that I’m pushing my frustration with using computers to Microsoft – and not always fairly. For instance, it is unclear if Microsoft could be held responsible for the fact that a mouse is a very annoying means of interacting with a computer. On the other hand, they might be responsible for the decision to queue and buffer mouse clicks. (That particular hold-over from the command-line days is, in my opinion, one of the principle flaws in the design of computers with Graphical User Interfaces. But, everyone seems to do this, so you can hardly single Microsoft out for that choice.)

I dread “Trash Day” because I always find myself being self-conscious about the fact that most of our neighbors bring out one bin with one or two bottles of wine or beer for recycling, and we had to order a fourth bin to hold all our empty wine bottles. Plus our four are the only ones big enough for wheels. Most of them look like small milk crates. I take this opportunity to I remind you that wine’s good for you and makes you live forever. Plus, your liver is the only organ that can actually grow back.

Back to the point, yesterday was Trash Day, and as I was wheeling the recycling bin out to the front of the house, it caught a wheel on the curb and slipped out of my hand, not only making a mess but also hurting my hand.

My reaction was to mutter “Stupid Microsoft” under my breath. I haven’t carefully evaluated the situation yet, but I’m guessing that Microsoft may not have deserved that one.

The metric that Microsoft chose was counting how many bugs were fixed by each company. This is awesome for three reasons. First, it assumes that all software bugs relate to security flaws. Second, it assumes bug tracking at one organization is done in the same way as bug tracking at another. Third, it assumes that both companies are equally committed to fixing bugs. Based on the fact that there are still bugs in Windows XP that existed in Windows 2000, I’m going to guess that Microsoft doesn’t bother too much with fixing bugs. They just call them “features” and move on (and the users should, too).

I didn’t read the whole report, but it appears Microsoft concluded that since Mozilla fixed more bugs than Microsoft in 2004, Microsoft’s browser must be more secure. As Mozilla’s Mike Shaver said, “Just because dentists fix more teeth in America doesn’t mean we have worse teeth than Africa.”

This is inspiring me to adopt the following software development philosophy: I will never fix another bug, thus making all my software 100% secure.

This is a very detailed process, and requires carefully going through the entire product and tying down all loose ends. Every software product undergoes this process, and some companies are better at it than others. Apple seems pretty good at it and Microsoft seems to consider this process “a waste of time”. This made me think about how differently Apple and Microsoft are perceived by the community.

Lets call a spade a spade and recognize that all software has flaws and could be easier to use or be a little more flexible. I know this is true because I have no piece of software on my computer which reads my mind and is 100% reliable. I’m a bigger fan of Apple’s products than Microsoft’s, but I’d be fooling myself if I were to pretend that Apple products don’t have flaws and aren’t sometimes as frustrating to use as Microsoft’s products can be. Conversely, despite all their problems Microsoft has some great products that make my professional life much easier, such as the .NET Framework and C#. But there is a huge disparity between how the developers at each company are perceived by their users.

Users of Apple products generally perceive the developers in Cupertino to be working their honest little butts off, selflessly devoting their lives to building the best software possible to serve our lives better. Each developer at Apple has a halo over their smiling heads and have pictures of every Apple user pinned up in their cubicle.

On the other hand, users of Microsoft products generally perceive Redmond to be a balmy 5000°F, and the developers there have spiked tails and carry Voodoo dolls of their users around with them, just in case they need to let off some steam. I know the guy who built the Visual Studio’s debugger has mine and hates my guts.

I remember when Safari was released for Windows, I had a discussion about it with a friend who happens to be a loyal Apple user. I complained that Safari is nothing more than a pain in my ass because all it does is give me one more browser to develop against without providing key functionality that can’t be found in Firefox. His reply? “Yes, they do their best to be standards-compliant, but I agree they aren’t quite there yet.” If we had that conversation about a Microsoft product, it would have ended with us forming a mob and carrying torches over to Redmond.

First of all, they’ve “improved” the security model. Administrators are no longer really Administrators. This is the Microsoft solution to their security problems. Rather than making a stable OS that doesn’t have security flaws, they don’t let the person using the computer use the computer. Brilliant. I think in a future security patch, they’re going to disable the power button so you can’t turn your computer on. After all, a computer that isn’t running is a secure computer. Maybe that patch will rename the OS to Windows Placemat.

Installing software and starting programs is, truly, just like the Apple Security commercial. I used to laughed at this commercial, chuckling at how cleverly Apple was exaggerating the behavior of Microsoft’s new OS, blissfully unaware that this is actually precisely what using Windows Vista is like.

Apart from “borrowing” Apple’s notion that operating systems don’t have to be ugly and their revolutionary concept that using a computer doesn’t need to be a miserable experience, Microsoft has also mimicked Apple’s Exposé feature. Exposé is one of my favorite things about OS X. When you push a specific key on OS X, Exposé spreads out your windows on your screen so you can see what you have running. You can then click a window to choose it and Exposé puts all the windows back with the window you chose on top. Vista has a similar feature, which I’m guessing is called “It’s Hosed, eh?” In typical copy-cat fashion, their version is almost completely useless. Rather than spread the windows out in a way that lets you see all their contents, it displays them at an angle, obscuring most of the windows. In a fit of design brilliance, it also shows your desktop at the back, just in case you forgot that there is a desktop. The windows, since they’re at an angle, are impossible to read with the ones in front covering the ones behind them.

This is a typical Microsoft “enhancement”: The widows all slide into place beautifully, things fade in and out, and – most importantly – it doesn’t actually do anything. The way the windows are displayed and unreadable, it doesn’t provide any information not already available through the task tray, which Windows has had since Windows ’95. But I’m certain an entire team was built around it, gobs of money was pumped into it, and a whole lot of people in Redmond feel awfully satisfied with themselves for building it.

When I was working at Microsoft, I shared an office with a guy who had a great sense of humor about Microsoft. He always joked that whoever designed the restart “feature” was a genius: one feature that solves all Windows’ problems. He wanted to work on the “Restart Feature Team”, he would joke. One day he Googled it, and it turned out that Microsoft actually had a team working on a feature called the “Restart Manager” for Vista which could restart parts of the operating system without having to restart the whole shebang. So, rather than build an OS that doesn’t need restarting – like OS X and Linux – they’re making a restart manager.

Well, there should be some points for consistency.

I have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and while it’s not like Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets, it is bad enough that when I get something stuck in my head it’s curtains until I finish it. In fact, Michelle experienced this while I have been working on this post:

Michelle: “Hey, Frank. You want a beer?”

Frank: *glare*

Honestly, who glares at their partner when being offered a beer? I need medication. But the beer will cover it for now. Vicious cycle.

Back to the point, I have no Earthly reason to build this plugin other than that it bothered me that I had links to photo albums in my posts which, if my readers are anything like me, don’t get clicked on. But I definitely want people to see the photos so having the photos in-line is the solution. And, because I’m I’m in the software development business, I am not about to use a service like Flikr for managing my photos. I want things the way I want them, not the way a service dictates I should want them. That feels very “Microsoft” to me.

The more detail-oriented (and dorkier) readers among you may have noticed that I’ve silently been testing my plugin in my blog. Instead of seeing the links to my photo albums (Photo Album: {link}), the photo albums are shown embedded in-line in the post, like this:

You can view a live demo and download the plugin on the plugin’s home page at http://dutchmonkey.com/wp-plugins/dm-albums/.

Nerd Alert: The rest of this post (after the jump) will not include any more English, and will consist entirely of GeekSpeak. But read on, it’s good for you.

The photo album uses the Internet’s most powerful asset: a technology called AJAX. The reason AJAX is so powerful is that it takes existing browser capabilities and combines them to build web pages that don’t “blink” – meaning they don’t require a round-trip to the server every time the user wants to interact with the web page. Traditional web applications (a web application is nothing more than a web page that does something other than simply displaying text and images) were designed using a “post back” which collected information from – for example – a form, then cleared the web browser’s screen, processed the information on the server, and finally spat back another page. This provided a very choppy experience – the screen shows information, you click something, the screen goes blank, and then a new page is shown (blinks). This process was doomed to limit the utility of the web browser as an application platform: the choppy nature of the application-user interaction was very different from how desktop applications such as e-mail and word-processing applications behave, thereby confusing users and creating a sense of distrust.

In those days, the only way to have a web application that didn’t “blink” was to use a browser plug-in. A browser plugin is a third-party application that users had to download and install in order to use the web page. Common plugins are the Java plugin or the popular Flash plugin. But, there is a big problem with plugins: they have to be downloaded and installed, and they have to support the type of operating system the user is using (Apple OS X, Windows, or Linux), and updates have to be installed by the user every time a new version is available. This is a problem because (a) most users are distrustful of downloads, (b) users can make mistakes when installing software, (c) there are a billion-kajillion settings on a user’s computer that can mess up and interfere with the plugin, and (d) most users are not good at keeping up with installing updates to software they already installed.

In short, any software that relies on user-interaction to maintain it is a management nightmare for software developers.

AJAX, however, combines existing browser capabilities in a novel way to provide web applications that have seamless interaction with the user very similar to desktop applications. And, because it relies on capabilities the browser already has, there is no need to install a browser plugin to support the functionality. It is this distinction that gives Internet applications the ability to provide truly powerful web applications that can rival desktop applications in behavior and functionality.

DM Albums™ uses AJAX to provide smooth interaction while viewing the photo album. DM Albums™ is different from other photo management applications in that it strives to provide the highest-resolution photos possible to the user. Simply upload full resolution images to your web site, point DM Albums™ at the directory they are located in, and DM Albums™ does the rest, scaling the photos to the perfect size to fit the user’s screen. As if that’s not good enough, it also caches that size of the photo on the server in case it needs to use that size again. The next time it needs to scale the photo, it doesn’t automatically go back to the original, full-sized photo; it will find the photo in the cache that has the nearest size bigger than it needs and scales that one instead, improving performance and lightening the load on your server.

This behavior can be seen right here in this blog post: the photos are scaled to fit the area where the album was embedded in the post. But, if you click “full screen”, the photos will be scaled to fit your screen, whatever your screen resolution may be.

There is an interactive demo on the plugin home page, http://dutchmonkey.com/wp-plugins/dm-albums/ where you can adjust the various settings available to users of the plugin, as well as download the plugin to install on your own server.

One last thing: in this case, “plugin” does not refer to a browser plugin, but instead refers to a WordPress plugin. Where a browser plugin is a piece of software you, the user, needs to install on your computer, a WordPress plugin is a piece of software that an administrator of a blog can install in their WordPress blog – it doesn’t require the user to do anything or install any software.

To my surprise, several fairly significant events occurred of which I had absolutely no idea at the time. While I laughed and joked with my parents while using equipment that could permanently alter my physical and/or mental configuration, some seriously important events occurred. Here’s a brief outline and my understanding of the events and their consequence. They are listed in order of importance.

1. Paris Freed. Apparently the U.S. Corrections department has as much difficulty with arithmetic as Paris does. Someone was unclear on the use of imaginary numbers and added twentyteen to 45 to get 22. She celebrated by eating a pink cake and getting a hair cut.
2. iPhone Released. Ok. I’ve been really stoked about the release of the iPhone. That said, I have to say I’m repulsed by the way people who just shelled out $600 for a phone are acting like they just accomplished something other than demonstrating consumerism at it’s most idiotic. Seriously. They felt like rock stars? They made that up, right? Gigantic crowds did not actually gather outside Apple and AT&T stores to cheer and applaud people buying iPhones. Right? (By the way, how does this blog look on your iPhone?)
   
3. Cyclists Doped. Jorge Jaksche admitted to having used drugs throughout most of his rather mediocre career, claimed everyone else did as well, and that his teams knew and supported the practice. Even more shockingly, his teams and former teammates then denied his claims. Alessandro Petacchi was suspended for having asthma.
4. Entourage Continues. Two episodes. I missed two episodes.
5. Sump’n Hella Bad Happen in England. I really still haven’t gotten to the bottom of this one. Apparently two car bombs were found and disabled before they went off in London. One of the cars had been towed. I don’t really like it when my car gets towed, either, but come on. The tow guy is just doing his job. You don’t have to rig your car with explosives just to get even with him. And a third car bomb exploded at Gasgow airport? All this and no one got hurt? Sounds like Amateur Hour.

So, apparently the world had the great distaste to continue to generate news-worthy events. How rude.

I would delete this post if it hadn’t taken me so much time to write. I wrote this a few days ago when Safari for Windows was released, and I’ve been sitting on it since, knowing it was enough to make even a highly caffeinated reader pass out cold. I’ve quite honestly even bored my self to the degree that I, the author, can’t really get through it without falling into a few narcoleptic fits.

What I decided to do is summarize it here, and then, if you’re feeling particularly masochistic, you can read the unabridged version after the jump.

Summary: Safari doesn’t quite make the bar as far as adhering to standards goes. Safari for Apple is borderline sucky, but at least it integrates nicely with OS X. Safari for Windows simply sucks. I don’t know why we need another sucky browser since the dozen sucky browsers we already have to choose from provide plenty of headaches for users and developers alike. The iPhone is going to rule, but is probably the culprit behind Apple’s release of Safari for Windows.

That’s amazing. These five sentences faithfully sum up the gist of what I was getting at and it’s still boring.

I’m the first to admit that Apple rules. As soon as I can manage it, I’ll try upgrade my mobile phone service to include high-speed internet and jump on the iPhone bandwagon. That said, I have really never been a fan of Apple’s Safari browser. I am a firm believer in having one browser and email client on all my computers. For me, that means a browser and email client that runs on both Windows and OS X; in my case it’s Mozilla Firefox for browsing and Mozilla Thunderbird for email. I do this in order to minimize incompatibilities and differences between the the various systems, and it minimizes any adjustment I have to make when using these tools from different computers and operating systems. So, in principle, I’m trilled at the idea of having Safari available on Windows and I could theoretically drop Firefox as my main browser and use Safari instead. But the bottom line is, Safari is just not a great browser. It’s not fully standards-compliant, and it’s missing many of the sophisticated features that Firefox and Internet Explorer have that, for example, let users edit their blogs in editors that look and behave much like Microsoft Word. (Safari users may have noticed that they only have the “Code” tab available when editing their posts in Safari, whereas Firefox users have a nice, visual editor.)

In my spare time, I have been working on several AJAX web applications for my personal and family use. The technologies and names change, but the biggest problem developers and designers face when building applications designed to run in a web browser has stayed the same: cross-browser compatibility. No matter how much experience I have building cross-browser code, there is always some issue that comes up that costs me hours upon hours of struggling with idiosyncratic issues before the application works in all the browsers. Since Firefox is my main browser, I use it to test the code I’m writing, and then I check if it works in the other browsers and do my best to resolve any issues that come up.

I ignore anything but the most popular browsers. Before Safari came along in 2003, that meant I was developing for Firefox (or Netscape before that) and had the annoying task of getting my application working in Internet Explorer (which, in code, I refer to as Internet Exploiter, by the way). Internet Explorer has never been standards-compliant, and although it’s gotten better, it is still a disaster. For my personal work, I generally take a “good enough” approach to IE: if it’s works but it’s not pretty, that’s good enough. And, besides, I always attach a message somewhere that says something like, “DutchMonkey Productions Recommends Firefox”. I call that “fair warning”.

Enter Safari. I would never, ever go so far as to say Safari is another “Exploiter”, but it is not nearly as good as Firefox from a standards perspective. In fact, the ugliest hacks I’ve ever had to put in place to get my code working has been in Safari. And that hurts, because I don’t like to think of Apple that way. Now, I’ve never really researched the root cause of some of these issues, and I can’t say for certain whether the issues lie with my code or with Safari, but the fact remains, once it’s working in Firefox and Internet Explorer, there is often a third, painful struggle to get it working in Safari, and it has on a few occasions resulted in an ugly hack. Admittedly, the struggle has been made worse by the fact that I develop on a Windows machine, and I could only test Safari on the Apple. Assuming that the application acts and looks exactly the same on Windows Safari and Apple Safari, that might be alleviated to some degree. That said, it’s pretty unlikely this will be the case since there are even minor differences between Firefox on Windows and Apples, especially in cases where the application relies on certain events firing in a certain order – or even firing at all.

Anyway, this is a lot of talk to get to my actual point, which is to ask why the world needs so many browsers?

What is Microsoft getting out of having Internet Explorer on the market? What does Apple gain by having Safari? Does having those browsers available increase sales of their operating systems? Maybe.

What do users gain by having so many choices? There are dozens of browsers to choose from, and the differences in capabilities such as tabbed browsing, bookmark, and download management are minor, but most offer limited capabilities as far as support for standards outlined by the internet’s governing body, the W3C. Firefox is the closest to supporting those standards, and the rest are in the mob: Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Camino, Sunbird, the list goes on. Who needs all those choices? Does having those choices somehow improve the quality of the user’s experience on the internet, and what the internet is capable of? Probably not.

Competition between browsers does not necessarily drive the capabilities and standards that are outlined by the W3C. The standards are clearly defined, and developers of browsers are expected to adhere to them, with varying success. There are various items that the W3C lays out as “future” standards where a feature is named, but no standard functionality or behavior is outlined. These are few in number, and this is where browsers really fight to come up with the best implementation which they then hope will be picked as the “standard” by the W3C. Here again, the minor players don’t figure into the battle, and it comes down to a battle between Firefox and Internet Explorer.

That’s not to say there’s no value in browser-browser competition. Some great features have come out of this: tabbed browsing and the in-line search box. (Incidentally, I believe we have Safari to thank for both of those features.)

The bottom line is that user’s experiences and the internet’s capabilities are not significantly driven by the capabilities of the browser; the user’s experience is driven by the quality of the application the users are using, and I believe the quality of these applications – both the number of bugs and the performance – would improve dramatically if every user on the Internet used one browser (I vote for Firefox). Ok, I understand that the Firefox developers would get lazy and the browser would start to suck, but lets ignore that and consider how competition between applications on the Internet is driving capabilities and not the browsers themselves.

Take, for example, the online Mapping services. Mapquest, Yahoo!, Google, and Live Local are some examples that come to mind. The competition between these services is fierce and the service as a whole is improving with leaps and bounds. Take Live Local and Google Maps. You used to just type in an address and get a static map back. Then AJAX came along and Google decided they could make their map more interactive and offer features like sliding the map around and zooming in without reloading the map. Major improvement, right? Well, now it’s gone so far that you can draw a route on the maps, check traffic and accident conditions, and even get weather or topographical information. The need for their application to be cross-browser compatible has not improved the service; rather, it has increased the amount of code required to make the service run, thereby increasing the number of bugs and slowing development time.

This is an incredibly long way of saying that Safari is not as good as Firefox and I don’t see the point in porting Safari to Windows. Is having another substandard browser really going to improve anyone’s experience on the internet?

Note: This post completely ignores the fact that Apple has also made their source code for Safari, called WebKit, open-source and provided an extension development API. The fact that Apple has made the source code open makes Safari different from other open source projects in that it is backed by big for-profit companies (Apple and Nokia) rather than by an nonprofit organization. The extension development API is a toolkit that allows developers to build extensions or plug-ins for Safari. Since Safari will not only run on Apple computers, but also on the Apple iPhone, that means anything built for Safari will now be available on OS X, the iPhone, and Windows. And that is most likely the reason Safari for Windows has been released.

Obviously, this is why Bill Gates determined in the early 90′s that this whole Internet thing wasn’t going to go anywhere. No painful, expensive, hardware-upgrade-requiring, error-prone installation for the users to blow their weekend on. I mean, where’s the fun in that?

For those who care, he said, “The Internet? We are not interested in it.” in 1993. And, because I can’t resist, he also said, in response to Java, “Anybody who thinks a little 9,000-line program that’s distributed free and can be cloned by anyone is going to affect anything we do at Microsoft has his head screwed on wrong.” A real fortune-teller, that one.

Basically, what “Microsoft Enhanced” means is that consumers will be able to bring all the unreliability and frustration of using a Windows PC to their television-watching experience.

I, for one, have always felt slighted when I wasn’t required to reboot my cable box every few hours to clear up any glitches or wasn’t left wondering why my TV’s online guide had suddenly frozen – only to unfreeze and unleash all the buffered keystrokes it had absorbed in the meantime while I was trying to figure out why the cable box wasn’t responding. Really. It made me feel unneeded. Needless to say, we were delighted to have this “convenience” available to us any time we were trying to unwind.

But, Comcast announced on Monday it would drop the Microsoft product and switch to it’s own software. That sounds like a Microsoft Enhanced bitch-slapping to me.

My favorite “feature” was the fact that if the DV-R finished recording a program while I was watching another recorded program, it would crash and give me the television-equivalent of the blue screen of death: static.

In all honesty, though, I will miss being able to smugly reply with, “Well, because it’s Microsoft Enhanced.” anytime Michelle says something like, “Wait, what just happened?” or, “Wait, where’d the menu go?” or, “Wait, why did it just do that?”

Why? Because it’s Microsoft Enhanced.