As a part-time web designer I find IE8 has gone from the extreme of earlier issues to the other extreme in terms of using web-standards. My web-design software puts special code into pages to allow for the foibles of earlier versions of Internet Explorer. Now I find that even using the latest updates from Adobe to create code the CSS on my sites doesn’t render correctly in IE8 without clicking on ‘compatibility view’ which I’m not using.
Who-ever in Microsoft invented ‘compatibility view’ must have had a very strict upbringing, it’s a completely unnecessary discipline. Firefox has been the recommended tool for checking websites and I find nothing has changed.
Microsoft also upset some people by enforcing use of the Outlook Connector on Hotmail accounts. It forced me to tidy up my e-mail accounts and it was goodbye to Hotmail. If you own domains you can use forwarding addresses so changing isn’t difficult.
The latest version of Windows (Windows 7) is out tomorrow and seems to have had good reviews to date. I’ll let it settle as Vista seems pretty good now. Although I wonder if we’ll ever get to the time when you turn on your PC and start work immediately. My Quad core Vista PC takes minutes to boot up.
With the digital switch-over I’ll miss terrestrial TV teletext in that I can put on the TV and go straight to the football results in seconds – unless it’s one of those multi-page ones. The BBC Digital Text on Sky takes about 2 minutes to come on and switching it off is something else. Maybe using mobile phone web is the faster answer but it costs. We step bravely into the future and it seems like walking in mud, overly complicated mud.
What about older folk. It wasn’t too bad once just turning a switch to operate the TV. We once had a TV with a little box screwed on the back containing a fairly substantial metal rod which you pulled to get ITV. Set top boxes aren’t new.
Oh no, just remembered we turn off our Sky Box as a ‘green’ measure but find that after switch on it takes 5 minutes to find all the channels. Teletext will be so missed. It’ll be 5 minutes to get the channels, 2 minutes to get to the text. Then another couple of minutes to load the page. So it could be 10 minutes to get the football results with a Sky Box. Need to think about that!