For the past two years, Internet Explorer has been vigorously innovating and pushing to the extreme levels of creativity in order to make the web experience much faster and perfect. Today, IE launches Rethink, a platform showcasing the efforts which have been put to create groundbreaking experiences such as Red Bull Rampage, Everest: Rivers of Ice and Contre Jour. Through Rethink, IE gives you an opportunity to reinvent creativity by these experiences and more such as the classing Windows 95 game, Hover with 3D graphics.
What is the aim of Rethink
Through Rethink, Microsoft has tried to showcase the origin of the Web and the kind of caliber an advanced browser like Internet Explorer possesses to explore that. IE’s 360 degree approach has covered all modern browsers and device platforms and also came up with the best touch-first browser for tablet users. Their out-of-the-box approach has really made IE make unexpected progress with people rethinking about Internet Explorer. People are now taking it as a challenge to really look at IE with a different mindset altogether. They are making videos, reinventing nostalgia through their IE memories and even giving out thoughts on Internet Explorer!
As far as new-age developers are concerned, yet again, Rethink has a lot in store for them, in terms of exploring new methodologies to make website building simple and efficient. For example, Atari Arcade was helpful in making a much easier CreateJS which enables building web games with HTML5 Canvas. Similarly, Contre Jour proved that JavaScript had the same ability as Objective-C, working around with concepts like polymorphism and more.
Have a look at the Rethink website, which was built with a lot of feedback from the developer community. So, in 2014, we should expect a lot of real-world web standards, some amazing 3D web graphics and touch-first experiences and do not forget joining Internet Explorer to Rethink What the Web Can Be.
All this Rethink waffle amounts to nothing while IE11 persists with its dreadful blurry font rendering.
It makes IE11 unusable on my desktops.
At least I have the option of getting clear text using Firefox, Chrome or virtually any other browser.
I was just *SUCH* a fan of IE for *SO* many years. But, you know, I was wrong. I’m sorry. I know this is a Microsoft-loving website, but I’m not anti-Microsoft, despite my sometimes harsh criticism of it. But facts are facts…
…and the truth is that Microsoft told the world everything it needed to know about whether or not to use Internet Explorer as one’s default browser way back in 1995, when its first version was released. Prior to that moment, Microsoft dismissed the very Internet, itself — or at least the Worldwide Web part of it — as nothing more than a fad, not believing that it even needed to make a browser. Netscape, by then — long before AOL bought it — had cornered the market and Microsoft was both unimpressed, and couldn’t be convinced to care. People forget those days (or were to young to remember). I, on the other hand, was there.
Then, when Microsoft finally realized, “holy, cow… this Internet web thing is serious, after all… we’d better make a browser,” it arrogantly charged forth like a bull in a china shop, completely ignoring the tried and true and tested standards that Mozilla, et al, had so painstakingly set; believing it could just waltz in and create its own version of HTML that everyone would just blindly follow…
…thereby making pretty much the whole of versions 1 through 4 of IE mostly incompatible with the real World(wide web). It wasn’t until Microsoft finally realized — a whopping (in Internet time) almost five years later — that it just wasn’t gonna’ be the industry leader and standards setter on THIS one, that it finally relented a little, and made IE version 5 even CLOSE to being standards compliant.
And even then, Microsoft STILL wouldn’t release its misguided notions of how things should be — mostly just so it could still try to wrest control from Mozilla, et al, just for control’s sake — and so IE5 was still a standards compliancy nightmare; it was simply better about it than any previous version.
If one takes a giant step back from their blind Microsoft love, and really looks objectively at IE’s history from there, it has just been one nightmare after another in terms of…
1) IE’s standards compliance, just generally; and,
2) Microsoft’s use of IE and its version to manipulate users into upgrading Windows, itself. (XP users can’t go above IE8; Vista users can’t go above IE9; and Win7 users wouldn’t be able to go above IE10 if Win8 hadn’t been such a dismal failure that Microsoft was forced to let Win7 users have IE11 because they weren’t budging from Win7 and moving to Win8!)
Then, along the way, there’s that whole nasty business of Microsoft so integrating IE into the bowels of Windows, itself, that one could literally not uninstall IE, lest one break Windows, itself…
…and all the lawsuits that THAT spawned, and the judge’s order, finally, to make Microsoft knock it off (which it has been loathe to do; and which it has slowly inched its way back from having undone-under-court-order with every new IE version). Remember that? Unbelievable.
In the meantime, the makers of Firefox, Chrome and even Opera, recognizing Microsoft’s folly, quietly made their browsers just work… on XP, on Vista, on Win7 and now on Win8. No discrimination.
And all of them with better-than-IE standards compliance, to boot! Microsoft has STILL not learned its lesson, and is STILL loathe to just give in and comply with W3C, HTML5, CSS3, DOM etc. standards… no, I mean the naked, non-browser-specific standards… as evidenced by these tests…
SEE | http://bit.ly/1jGXXK9 (Acid3)
SEE | http://bit.ly/1jGXzeB (HTML5)
…for example, just to name two… there are others. (By the way, my Chromium-based IRON PORTABLE browser, version 30.0.1650.0 (230000) (mostly because I’ve just not updated in a while), scores a 100/100 on the Acid3 test, and a 499/533 on the HTML5 test… just in case anyone’s interested.)
Additionally, you’ve got the whole security holes problem with pretty much every version of IE… it’s like swiss cheese, fortheloveofgod!
Couple all these things with that Chrome, for example, has probably the best selection of extensions (though, yes, I know that Firefox’s is impressive; and that Opera users think it has the best plugins/extensions; it’s just that I’ve actually kinda’ compared and, seriously, Chrome’s is best); and that IE’s world of Browser Helper Objects, by comparison, is laughable. The fact that one can’t get AdBlock-Plus for IE, and must, if one wants Easylist protection, for example, in IE, copy and paste it into IE’s Tracking Protection List (and then must manually repeat it with every one of Easylist’s frequent updates)… ohmygod… what a Kludge!
Then there’s Android’s impact on it all. Right up until I finally got an Android phone, I was still hanging-on to IE… albeit with white knuckles, at times. I just refused to use either Chrome or Firefox for anything other than webpage browser testing (or websites made by idiots who only allowed other than IE to view said sites). I was an IE loyalist.
But an Android smartphone — at least if you’d like to integrate what it does with your Windows desktop or notebook/laptop (or even tablet, now) machine — pretty much demands that one convert over to Chrome as one’s default browser. One can fight it for as long as possible, as I did, but eventually you WILL be assimilated! The “Chrome2Phone” and Phone2Chrome” capabilties, alone; coupled with cloud printing (at least if the printer doesn’t have it already built-in) will quickly get you moving over to Chrome, like it or not. Then once you’ve been stalled in, or pages haven’t properly rendered in, or you’ve been “accidentally” logged-out of the Google Play Store while using IE enough times, and next thing you know, you’re sitting there using Chrome one morning, thinking you’re in IE, and being surprised when stuff’s not where it’s supposed to be…
…and you suddenly realize that your browsing experience has actually been better then IE, and everything actually works, and the earth didn’t burst open and time, itself, didn’t stop.
I, now, would not more go back to IE than take a bullet in the forehead. I’m sorry. Microsoft has manipulated me, and made my browsing incompatible with web standards, and exposed my computer to security holes, for the last time…
…and I think back on it, I knew everything I needed to know about that that’s how Microsoft was going to treat me back in 1995, with IE version 1.
Couple all THAT with that by my using the Chromium-based IRON browser (portable to boot… good luck finding a good portable Chrome… with “good” being the operative word, there) so that all of Google’s privacy violating crap normally found in Chrome is just simply gone…
…and I suddenly realized I had the absolute best of all worlds!
Yes, Firefox is good; but it has succumbed to developer arrogance and misguidedness… not to mention that it has become a sluggish behemoth, with comparatively substandard plugins/extensions to boot. Only Opera can give Chrome (er… rather… for me, IRON) a run for its money…
…and, really, when you look really closely… yeah… not so much.
Add to all THAT that Google, just this month, made two huge changes to Chrome, to wit…
1) Google just changed the scrollbars in Chrome to make them touch-screen-like sliders, with no little arrow buttons on the ends; and,
2) Google just began rolling out a change about which it warned in December to make it so that no extensions may be installed into Chrome unless they come from the Chrome Store (in other words, no more downloading the .CRX file to the hard drive and then dragging-and-dropping it from Windows Explorer to the Chrome Extensions page as a means of installing it)…
…and said changes should make every Chrome user…
a) mad as hell; and,
b) convert straight over to either the Chromium-based Chrome-look-and-act-alikes IRON or COMODO DRAGON…
…forthwith.
But, hey… that’s just me.
Honestly, like an old Ford owner who just wouldn’t listen to reason, I stayed loyal to IE as long as I could; but, as you can clearly here see, the reasons to finally move over to Chrome are, taken as a whole, just too overwhelming.
Sorry, Microsoft. Be glad I still love Windows…
…though not Win8.
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Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com
Veritas nihil veretur nisi abscondi.
Veritas nimium altercando amittitur.