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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: damniseedemons who wrote (17426)	2/12/1998 12:09:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

Gee Dan, IE4 makes a lot of changes to the OS Sal, that's one way to describe it. I've been describing it somewhat differently, of course. Microsoft somewhat arbitrarily declared that everything done to Windows95 since the retail release is "part of IE". They even changed the name of the Win95 development team, right? I just checked the IE4 download folder, it was 31 mb, I think the whole OSR2 distribution was 80mb. (I used to keep that on disk too, but I seem to have deleted it). Then you have NT, where the whole i386 subdirectory of the 4.0 ws release is 77 mb, and the uncompressed sp3 directory is 73 mb. Now there's an upgrade for you! Throw in ie4 on top of that, there's probably not much left from the original NT4, and it's only a year and a half old. Of course, I've never said that "IE4" didn't have OS components bundled into it, only that the the dividing line between browser functionality and OS is not as mystical and incomprehensible as claimed. When convenient, Microsoft is always saying how modular all this stuff is. I know, that's out of context. Leaving aside the (hyper)Active Desktop (please!, to paraphrase Henny Youngman), what I mostly see is these little browser things coming up for all the folder Windows, which I'd say is overkill. Shades of Unix "ls -abcdefghijk...". Then there's the other issue, that people in general don't particularly want OS upgrades once they have a stable system running. After you've been around computers for a while, it's like going to the dentist. Except if you're an administrator, then it's more like a root canal or something. Of course, with the "dll hell" model of indeterminate runtime library updates getting loaded all the time, a stable system is a little hard to identify. Time for some version control "technology". As a technical guy, what I'd like to see from Microsoft is some clear documentation of what lives in the application level runtime support and what the equivalent of the "kernel interface" is, the stuff that runs in privileged mode on the processor. Like section 2 and section 3 of the Unix manuals. I'm not holding my breath on that one. Or maybe it's all explained somewhere, if somebody wants to point me to an informative link at www.microsoft.com, or anywhere else, I'd check it one. I'd even make a purchase from Microsoft Press! Cheers, Dan.