After reading your post last month? I switched to Mozilla and Thunderbird. Thanks! Best ever surf/mail experience.

Gack. Please spare us the whole evangelical “Macs rule Windoze drools” drivel.

I get really sick of the insufferably snotty tone that so many Mac people get (Luis, it’s worth noting you don’t usually fall prey to this) about the superiority of their machines.

Frankly, folks, if they were so friggin great, they’d have more than a 3% market share. There’s a reason that PC/Win boxes are so hugely dominating. (And spare me the “monopoly” talk- Apple’s far worse about trying to be a monopolistic gorilla throwing its weight around than Microsoft is.)

I’ve used both machines, PCs and Macs, for a long, long time. In fact, my first computer was an Apple- IIe, to be exact. I used the original Apple IIs way back in the day- getting a floppy disc drive for our machine at school was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Macs are great machines, and definitely have a lot of things going for them, but they’re just not nearly as neato as the Machead crowd *thinks* they are. There’s a large large factor of “we have the cool machine” groupthink in the whole Machead evangelistic preaching.

I own a PC, and frequently use MSIE. Why?

Well, the sheer dominance of the market has a lot to do with it. Everything worth having, just about, is made for the PC. I never have a worry about file compatibility. Web sites are designed and set up for IE.

Firefox handles some types of cookies incorrectly- I still can’t get it to handle my bank’s web site properly. It displays some pages weird. It handles some functions differently than IE, and doesn’t do some of the style sheets like IE does.

I use both- I’m posting in Firefox right now. I use Firefox for a lot of my browsing- it handles some pages a lot faster than IE.

But I couldn’t get by without IE, because of the issues and sites that just don’t work well with Firefox.

My advice to folks is this: Try both. Use both. Use what works *best for you*, not what anyone tells you is better *for you*.

Paul

So your main gist seems to be that Firefox is inferior because it doesn’t imitate IE precisely, because banks and other institutions gear their sites specifically towards IE. Essentially, you’re not saying that IE is better, but rather that’s where the crowd is going. Moo. If banks and other sites geared their sites for Firefox, then IE would appear inferior. It’s not quality you’re talking about, it’s proprietary design and market share.

We’ll have to disagree on the PC/Mac point. The 3~5% market share (depends on whom you talk to) is due to past factors primarily–for too long a time, Macs were way too expensive, and the company mishandled. That and software availability issues hobbled it from the start. Today, the price/value ratio is competitive with PCs, but it’s too late. You say,

“And spare me the ‘monopoly’ talk- Apple’s far worse about trying to be a monopolistic gorilla throwing its weight around than Microsoft is.” You speak of monopolies here as values because you compare Apple’s practices to MS’s, that Apple is as bad as MS–but you miss the point. Yes, Apple gets very proprietary and tries to lock people in to using only Apple stuff, but that is meaningless in the overall PC/Mac market share discussion. Monopolistic practices don’t let you dominate the market if you start with a 3~5% share.

You yourself prove the point: you say you prefer the PC exactly because “the sheer dominance of the market has a lot to do with it.” Essentially, if Macs held 95% of the market, you’d go for them, right? Same reason so many use IE–because everyone else does. That’s exactly what I said in the post.

Macs are simply superior in design. Try to do a “find file” in Windows and then in Mac OS X, and then try to open a folder two steps higher in the hierarchy than the target file that was found. On the PC, it takes far more steps than the Mac and can be confusing. Windows is less intuitive; for example the “CTRL-F” keyboard command is active only when a window is open, and to finish your session and shut down you have to use the “Start” button. Windows is less accessible; for example, if I want to type a “yen” mark, I just type Option-Y, just as easily as any non-standard character, directly accessible from the keyboard; on MS Word, you have to go to a Symbols dialog box. Macs have better functionality and elegance of design. I teach a computer class, and to show things to students on the TV monitor, I have to zoom in. You ever tried to use the zoom feature on Windows? Ugly as hell, the implementation is badly done. Only the top half of the screen zooms, and sloppily so, leading to confusing images; I could never use it for my class. The Mac OS X zoom feature is so beautifully and sensibly done, I actually use my Mac to teach Windows instead of a PC. I just bought Virtual PC and show them Windows usage on that.

When it comes down to it, almost any PC/Windows/Microsoft advantage comes down to “everybody uses it.” And that’s the self-fulfilling feedback loop responsible for Windows dominating the market: they dominate the market because they dominate the market. Not because they’re better.

Could gab more, but the debate’s starting!

Actually, no, I’m not saying Firefox is “inferior”. I’m saying it’s different, and in some ways it’s inferior, and in some ways it’s superior. Firefox is faster with many pages and doesn’t hang on some events like IE does, but IE handles cookies for some sites better. (Like I said. Before.)

Some of your examples of how Windows stinks are illuminating, because what they illustrate is that you haven’t *learned* some things about Windows. Plenty of people have a two-key-shortcut for commonly used but non-standard characters, like the yen symbol. They simply define them one time and from then on, they can type ’em instead of going to the Symbols dialog box. Finding files and then jumping back a folder or two is easier than you make it out to be as well.

The point is that Macs *used* to have many of the advantages you mention, but over the years Windows has caught up in some of those areas.

Plus, a Windows machine has two buttons on the mouse, which really helps when you’re playing “Quake”. 😉

Seriously, the Mac evangelist lines about how totally and completely superior their machines are is old and tired. The Macvangelists ignore many, if not all of the improvements that Windows has seen; to listen to them, you’d think that they haven’t used anything past Win 3.11.

The two machines are *different* but one is not automatically (and in every way) “better” than the other. So try ’em both, and use the one that suits you.

Just remember, there’s probably some pretty good reasons that the market shook out to have such an overwhelming majority go for Wintel boxes.

Paul

Some of your examples of how Windows stinks are illuminating, because what they illustrate is that you haven’t *learned* some things about Windows. Plenty of people have a two-key-shortcut for commonly used but non-standard characters, like the yen symbol. They simply define them one time and from then on, they can type ’em instead of going to the Symbols dialog box. Finding files and then jumping back a folder or two is easier than you make it out to be as well.Oh no, I’ve learned these things all right–I teach Windows, in fact. I know you can customize keyboard shortcuts for symbols, but like I said, you have to go to the Symbols panel first. What I’m saying is that these are preset in the Mac and easy to access, while in Windows one has to know exactly how to set up such things–ergo “less accessible.” I’ll bet you a good deal of money that a large majority of people using Windows don’t know about and never learn the customization for special keys, meaning they have to resort to using the symbol panel each time–and even if they do know the customization, they still have to go through that process every time they find a new symbol they need. Harder, far less intuitive, and most people never learn it. And let me ask you this: how would you go about typing a yen mark in a file name from the Desktop?

As for the finding files process, I’d love to hear about an easier way to do it–but I don’t think it is easier than I have laid out, I believe that it’s more likely that you simply don’t know how easy and intuitive it is to do on a Mac using OS X. 😉 There’s a search box on every open window, just type a few characters–you don’t even have to hit “enter”–and bam, the list shows up. Click on a found item, and a folder hierarchy appears in the bottom of the window, and you can open any folder in the hierarchy directly from there. Three steps. Compare that to Windows, where you have to activate the search feature in the first place and then specify what kind of search before you even get the chance to enter a search term. Enter the search term, hit “enter,” and the list shows up. Right click to get a pop-up menu, click “open containing folder,” then click the “next highest folder” button twice. Eight steps. And a lot clunkier.The point is that Macs *used* to have many of the advantages you mention, but over the years Windows has caught up in some of those areas.Maybe some, but absolutely not all–and not nearly with enough style. Windows is always catching up, mostly by imitating the Mac years after the fact. Have you seen the Mac’s implementation of “Exposé”? Absolutely beautiful–nothing like it on the PC, and I don’t know how I could work without it now. How long has it been since you’ve used a Mac and learned its tricks? Have you even used OS X yet?Plus, a Windows machine has two buttons on the mouse, which really helps when you’re playing “Quake”. ;)I haven’t used a one-button mouse in a helluva long time. That’s another myth about Macs that PC users don’t fully understand–the Mac can use almost any mouse the PC can. Right now I’m using a four-button mouse, in fact, with Exposé keyed to activate in different ways using the third button or the scroll wheel button. Sure, I had to buy the mouse separately, but that’s what I did with my PC as well–the mouse you get with the machine is usually a piece of junk anyway.Seriously, the Mac evangelist lines about how totally and completely superior their machines are is old and tired. The Macvangelists ignore many, if not all of the improvements that Windows has seen; to listen to them, you’d think that they haven’t used anything past Win 3.11.I teach W2K and W-XP and am quite familiar with them. I am simply not impressed. Have you used OS X and do you know its features as well as I know Windows?Just remember, there’s probably some pretty good reasons that the market shook out to have such an overwhelming majority go for Wintel boxes.Yeah, prices during the late 80’s and early 90’s. That’s pretty much it. And after that–as you pointed out yourself–market domination spurred buying decisions. But Windows never beat out the Mac in terms of ease-of-use or functionality, I can guarantee you that.