Progression and Regression of Desktop User Interfaces

As this Gregorian year comes to a close, with various new interfaces out now, and some new ones on the horizon, I decided to recap my personal experiences with user interfaces on the desktop, and see what the future will bring.

When I was younger, there were a few desktop environments floating around, and I've seen a couple of them at school or a friend's house. But the first one I had on my own personal computer, and really played around with was Windows 3.

Windows 3 came with something called Program Manager. Here's what it looked like:




The basic idea was that you had a "start screen", where you had your various applications grouped by their general category. Within each of these "groups", you had shortcuts to the specific applications. Now certain apps like a calculator you only used in a small window, but most serious apps were only used maximized. If you wanted to switch to another running app, you either pressed the alt+tab keyboard shortcut to cycle through them, or you minimized everything, where you then saw a screen listing all the currently running applications.

Microsoft also shipped a very nice file manager, known as "File Manager", which alone made it useful to use Windows. It was rather primitive though, and various companies released various add-ons for it to greatly enhance its abilities. I particularly loved Wiz File Manager Pro.



Various companies also made add-ons for Program Manager, such as to allow nested groups, or shortcuts directly on the main screen outside of a group, or the ability to change the icons of selected groups. Microsoft would've probably built some of these add-ons in if it continued development of Program Manager.

Now not everyone used Windows all the time back then, but only selectively started it up when they wanted something from it. I personally did everything in DOS unless I wanted to use a particular Windows app, such as file management or painting, or copying and pasting stuff around. Using Windows all the time could be annoying as it slowed down some DOS apps, or made some of them not start at all due to lack of memory and other issues.

In the summer of 1995, Microsoft released Windows 4 to the world. It came bundled with MS-DOS 7, and provided a whole new user experience.


Now the back-most window, the "desktop", no longer contained a list of the running programs (in explorer.exe mode), but rather you could put your own shortcuts and groups and groups of groups there. Rather running programs would appear at the bottom of the screen in a "taskbar". The taskbar now also contained a clock, and a "start menu", to launch applications. Some always running applications which were meant to be background tasks appeared as a tiny icon next to the clock in an area known as a "tray".

This was a major step forward in usability. Now, no matter which application you were currently using, you could see all the ones that were currently running on the edge of your screen. You could also easily click on one of them to switch to it. You didn't need to minimize all to see them anymore. Thanks to the start menu, you could also easily launch all your existing programs without needing to minimize all back down to Program Manager. The clock always being visible was also a nice touch.

Now when this came out, I could appreciate these improvements, but at the same time, I also hated it. A lot of us were using 640x480 resolutions on 14" screens back then. Having something steal screen space was extremely annoying. Also with how little memory systems had back at the time (4 or 8 MB of RAM), you generally weren't running more than 2 or 3 applications at a time and could not really appreciate the benefits of having an always present taskbar. Some people played with taskbar auto-hide because of this.

The start menu was also a tad ridiculous. Lots of clicks were needed to get anywhere. The default appearance also had too many useless things on it.

Did anyone actually use help? Did most people launch things from documents? Microsoft released a nice collection of utilities called "PowerToys" which contained "TweakUI" which you could use to make things work closer to how you want.

The default group programs installed to within the start menu was quite messy though. Software installers would not organize their shortcuts into the groups that Windows came with, but each installed their apps into their own unique group. Having 50 submenus pop out was rather unwieldy, and I personally organized each app after I installed it. Grouping into "System Tools", "Games", "Internet Related Applications", and so on. It was annoying to manually do all this though, as when removing an app, you had to remove its group manually. On upgrades, one would also have to readjust things each time too.

Windows 4 also came with the well known Windows Explorer file manager to replace the older one. It was across the board better than the vanilla version of File Manager that shipped with Windows 3.

I personally started dual booting MS-DOS 6.22 + Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 95 (and later tri-booted with OS/2 Warp). Basically I used DOS and Windows for pretty much everything, and Windows 95 for those apps that required it. Although I managed to get most apps to work with Windows 3 using Win32s.

As I got a larger screen and more RAM though, I finally started to appreciate what Windows 4 offered, and started to use it almost exclusively. I still exited Windows into DOS 7 though for games that needed to use more RAM, or ran quicker that way on our dinky processors from back then.

Then Windows 4.10 / Internet Explorer 4 came out which offered a couple of improvements. First was "quick launch" which allowed you to put shortcuts directly on your taskbar. You could also make more than one taskbar and put all your shortcuts on it. I personally loved this feature, I put one taskbar on top of my screen, and loaded it with shortcuts to all my common applications, and had one on the bottom for classical use. Now I only had to dive into the start menu for applications I rarely used.

It also offered a feature called "active desktop" which made the background of the desktop not just an image, but a web page. I initially loved the feature, as I edited my own page, and stuck in an input line which I would use to launch a web browser to my favorite search engine at the time (which changed monthly) with my text already searched for. After a while active desktop got annoying though, as every time IE crashed, it disabled it, and you had to deal with extra error messages, and go turn it on manually.

By default this new version also made every Windows Explorer window have this huge sidebar stealing your precious screen space. Thankfully though, you could turn it off.

All in all though, as our CPUs got faster, RAM became cheaper, and large screens more available, this interface was simply fantastic. I stopped booting into other OSs, or exiting Windows itself.

Then Windows 5 came out for consumers, and UI wise, there weren't really any significant changes. The default look used these oversized bars and buttons on each window, but one could easily turn that off. The start menu got a bit of a rearrangement to now feature your most used programs up front, and various actions got pushed off to the side. Since I already put my most used programs on my quick launch on top, this start menu was a complete waste of space. Thankfully, it could also be turned off. I still kept using Windows 98 though, as I didn't see any need for this new Windows XP, and it was just a memory hog in comparison at the time.

What was more interesting to me however was that at work, all our machines ran Linux with GNOME and KDE. When I first started working there, they made me take a course on how to use Emacs, as every programmer needs a text editor. I was greatly annoyed by the thing however, where was my shift highlight with shift+delete and shift+insert or ctrl+x and ctrl+v cut and paste? Thankfully though I soon found gedit and kedit which was like edit/notepad/wordpad but for Linux.

Now I personally don't use a lot of windowsy type software often. My primary usage of a desktop consists of using a text editor, calculator, file manager, console/terminal/prompt, hex editor, paint, cd/dvd burner, and web browser. Only rarely do I launch anything else. Perhaps a PDF, CHM, or DJVU reader when I need to read something.

After using Linux with GNOME/KDE at work for a while, I started to bring more of my work home with me and wanted these things installed on my own personal computer. So dual booting Windows 98 + Linux was the way to go. I started trying to tweak my desktop a bit, and found that KDE was way more capable than GNOME, as were most of their similar apps that I was using. KDE basically offered me everything that I loved about Windows 98, but on steroids. KWrite/KATE was notepad/wordpad but on steroids. The syntax highlighting was absolutely superb. KCalc was a fine calc.exe replacement. Konqueror made Windows Explorer seem like a joke in comparison.

Konqueror offered network transparency, thumbnails of everything rather quickly, even of text files (no pesky thumbs.db either!). An info list view which was downright amazing:
This is a must have feature here. Too often are documents distributed under meaningless file names. With this, and many other small features, nothing else I've seen has even come close to Konqueror in terms of file management.

Konsole was just like my handy DOS Prompt, except with tab support, and better maximizing, and copy and paste support. KHexEdit was simply better than anything I had for free on Windows. KolourPaint is mspaint.exe with support for way more image formats. K3b was also head and shoulders above Easy CD Creator or Nero Burning ROM. For Web Browsers, I was already using Mozilla anyway on Windows, and had the same option on Linux too.

For the basic UI, not only did KDE have everything I liked about Windows, it came with an organized start menu. Which also popped out directly, instead from a "programs" submenu.

The taskbar was also enhanced that I could stick various applets on it. I could stick volume control directly on it. Not a button which popped out a slider, the sliders themselves could appear on the taskbar. Now for example, I could easily adjust my microphone volume directly, without popping up or clicking on anything extra. There was an eyedropper which you could just push to find out the HTML color of anything appearing on the screen - great for web developers. Another thing which I absolutely love, I can see all my removable devices listed directly on my taskbar. If I have a disk in my drive, I see an icon for that drive appearing directly on my taskbar, and I can browse it, burn to it, eject it, whatever. With this, everything I need is basically at my finger tips.

Before long I found myself using Linux/KDE all the time. On newer machines I started to dual boot Windows XP with Linux/KDE, so I could play the occasional Windows game when I wanted to, but for real work, I'd be using Linux.

Then KDE 4 comes out, and basically half the stuff I loved about KDE was removed. No longer is it Windows on steroids. Now KDE 4.0 was not intended for public consumption. Somehow all the distros except for Debian seemed to miss that. Everyone wants to blame KDE for miscommunicating this, but it's quite clear 4.0 was only for developers if you watched the KDE 4 release videos. Any responsible package maintainer with a brain in their skull should've also realized that 4.0 was not ready for prime time. Yet it seems the people managing most distros are idiots that just need the "latest" version of everything, ignoring if it's better or not, or even stable.

At the time, all these users were upset, and all started switching to GNOME. I don't know why anyone who truly loved the power KDE gave you would do that. If KDE 3 > GNOME 2 > KDE 4, why did people migrate to GNOME 2 when they could just not "upgrade" from KDE 3? It seems to me that people never really appreciated what KDE offers in the first place if they bothered moving to GNOME instead of keeping what was awesome.

Nowadays people tell me that KDE 4 has feature parity with KDE 3, but I have no idea what they're talking about. The Konqueror info list feature that I described above still doesn't seem to exist in KDE 4. You can no longer have applets directly on your taskbar. Now I have to click a button to pop up a list of my devices, and only then can I do something with them. No way to quickly glance to see what is currently plugged in. Konsole's tabs now stretch to the full width of your screen for some pointless reason. If you want to switch between tabs with your mouse, prepare for carpal tunnel syndrome. Who thought that icons should grow if they can? It's exactly like those idiotic theoretical professors who spout that CPU usage must be maximized at all times, and therefore use algorithms that schedule things for maximum power draw, despite that in normal cases performance does not improve by using these algorithms. I'd rather pack in more data if possible, having multiple columns of information instead of just huge icons.

KHexEdit has also been completely destroyed. No longer is the column count locked to hex (16). I can't imagine anyone who seriously uses a hex editor designed the new version. For some reason, KDE now also has to act like your mouse only has one button, and right click context menus vanished from all over the place. It's like the entire KDE development team got invaded by Mac and GNOME users who are too stupid to deal with anything other than a big button in the middle of the screen.

Over in the Windows world. Windows 6 (with 6.1 comically being consumerized as "Windows 7") came out with a bit of a revamp. The new start menu seems to fail basic quality assurance tests for anything other than default settings. Try to set things to offer a classic start menu, this is what you get:


If you use extra large icons for your grandparents, you also find that half of the Control Panel is now inaccessible. Ever since Bill Gates left, it seems Windows is going down the drain.

But hardly are problems solely for KDE and Windows, GNOME 3 is also a major step back according to what most people tell me. Many of these users are now migrating to XFCE. If you like GNOME 2, why are you migrating to something else for? And what is it with people trying to fix what isn't broken? If you want to offer an alternate interface, great, but why break or remove the one you already have?

Now a new version of Windows is coming out with a new interface being called "Metro". They should really be calling it "Retro". It's Windows 3 Program Manager with a bunch of those third party add-ons, with a more modern look to it. Gone is the Windows 4+ taskbar so you can see what was running, and easily switch applications via mouse. Now you'll need to press the equivalent of a minimize all to get to the actual desktop. Another type of minimize to get back to Program Manager to launch something else, or "start screen" as they're now calling it.

So say goodbye to all the usability and productivity advantages Windows 4 offered us, they want to take us back to the "dark ages" of modern computing. Sure a taskbar-less interface makes sense on handheld devices with tiny screens or low resolution, but on modern 19"+ screens? The old Windows desktop+taskbar in the upcoming version of Windows is now just another app in their Metro UI. So "Metro" apps won't appear on the classic taskbar, and "classic" applications won't appear on the Metro desktop where running applications are listed.

I'm amazed at how self destructive the entire market became over the last few years. I'm not even sure who to blame, but someone has to do something about it. It's nice to see that a small group of people took KDE 3.5, and are continuing to develop it, but they're rebranding everything with crosses everywhere and calling it "Trinity" desktop. Just what we need, to bring religious issues now into desktop environments. What next? The political desktop?

The failure of fragmented security

With recent attacks against SSL/TLS and certificates, everyone has been thinking a lot about security. What can we do to prevent security problems in the future?

The problem really stems from the fact that our different security components are separate from one another, and don't entirely see eye to eye, leaving gaps for attackers to walk right on through. The current certificate system for certifying the identity of a website is flawed in theory, and in its implementation in many browsers.

The current system works as follows: An entity submits proof of ownership of the domain(s) it owns to one of hundreds of certificate authorities out there, who follow some kind of verification process, and then proceed to give a certificate identifying the site to that entity. This certificate is digitally signed by the certificate authority itself using their private unknown keys. Since no one but the certificate authority itself has their private keys, they're the only ones able to sign certificates in their own name. Browsers ship with a certificate bundle identifying the certificate authorities they trust. In this way, when you see a site with a certificate signed by a known certificate authority, you know it's the site you intended to visit.

Except there's some flaws with this idea. If terrorists wanted to, they could attack a certificate authority's physical headquarters and steal their private keys from their server and sign whatever they want for whichever domain they wish. Or, hackers could hack into machines remotely and perhaps get lucky and find some private keys on them. Or, anyone could start their own certificate authority. It really isn't that hard. Once your new authority becomes trusted by the various browsers, you can proceed to generate certificates for any domain desired.

This entire system has multiple points of failure. Further compounding the issue is that several "trusted" certificate authorities also are in themselves ISPs or run various links in the vast internet. Having both components in your control allow you to impersonate any site for any information passing through your systems. America Online for example is both a trusted certificate authority and an ISP, and anyone who works there and has access to their infrastructure and private keys can view all HTTPS encrypted data passing through their network as unencrypted. Want to buy something with your credit card online? You might want to traceroute your connection first and ensure no one along the way is also a certificate authority your browser trusts.

In order to mitigate a certificate authority signing something it shouldn't have, they invented Certificate Revocation Lists. Where an authority can revoke specific certificates it once signed, since every certificate also has an ID number associated with it. But, some browsers don't even bother checking these lists. Further, some browsers which make use of CRLs and their friends, resume as if nothing happened if they couldn't access a CRL for some reason. Further, these CRLs are subject to the same security problems just described for domains in general. How do I know this is indeed the real CRL? Also, browsers themselves don't have CRLs for the root certificates they ship with, so they are unable to revoke a certificate of a rogue CA if they need to.

But in reality, this entire system is flawed from the ground up. It's so flawed, it doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense. Imagine the following scenario where my boss asks me to inform him of all purchasing details for our web presence needs, and explain why they're needed.

<Me> Okay, we're going to need $35 a year to register all the domains we want for our company, such as company.com and company.net and so on.
<Him> Sure, that's fine, what else?
<Me> Then we're going to need $200 a year for each domain for certificates.
<Him> Why do we need these certificates?
<Me> To prove that we own the domain in question.
<Him> Prove it? Why?
<Me> Browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox won't realize when they visit our domain that its really our domain, and not some hacker out there trying to impersonate us.
<Him> So if we don't buy these certificates, hackers will be able to get the domain names registered as their own instead of ours?
<Me> No, the domain names are protected by a central authority, they know that we own them, and we tell them to point the domains at our servers, but hackers in between our customer's browser and our server can hijack the connection and make believe they're us without a certificate.
<Him> I don't get it, why can't our customer's browser just check the domain registry and make sure the server they reach is the one we told the domain registry about? Why do we need to buy something from a 3rd party?

This seems strange to you? He's absolutely right. Why can't the hierarchy for domain management also distribute the public keys for our servers? The systems will need to be modified to combine several components and have encryption at each level, but does anything else make an ounce of sense?

Imagine you wanted to buy some property. You have your lawyer, accountant, realtor, and other people directly related to the purchase. After everything is taken care of, and you submit forms to city hall and everything else, you then go down to Joe's House of Fine Refrigerators and have him give you a signed deed that you indeed own the property in question. Makes a lot of sense, right?

Now you call a construction company down to work on your new property, say to merge it with the property next door to it. They want proof you own both properties before beginning. What do you do? You pull out your deed from Joe's House of Fine Refrigerators.

This is the exact state of internet security today. This problem is even pervasive down to every level of infrastructure we use.

Take cookies for example, the system it uses to match domain names runs completely counter to how the domain name system works. It's actually impossible for any browser to properly know for every set of domains in existence whether they're paired or not when it comes to handling cookies for them. It will either fail to submit cookies to some sites that it should, or submit cookies to some sites it shouldn't. Some browsers try to solve this problem with a massive hack, a list of domains that cookies should know are or aren't paired together, which is also incomplete, and needs never ending updates. Without the list, the only difference is that the browser is just wrong more often than without it.

Really, if the hackers were out there, we'd be in big trouble.

This just in, 20% of enterprises and most IT people are idiots

So, who still runs Internet Explorer 6? I do, because sometimes, I'm a web developer.
Along with IE 6, I also run later versions of IE, as well as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, Arora, Maxthon, and Konqueror. So do my web developer friends and coworkers.

The reason why we do is simple. We want to test our products with every browser with any sort of popularity. Or is a browser that comes with some sort of OS or environment with any sort of popularity. Same goes for browsers with a specific engine.

By playing with so many browsers, we get a feel for things which seem to not be well known (even when documented well), or completely missed by the "pros" who write the most noise on the subject at hand. After work, sometimes my coworkers and I like to get together and joke about how Google security researchers put out a security memo on IE, citing no recourse, while the solution is clearly documented on MSDN, or any similar scenario.

Perhaps we're bad guys for not writing lengthy articles on every subject, and keeping knowledge to ourselves. On the other hand, we get to laugh at the general population on a regular basis. Something which I'm sure every geek at heart revels in.

Here's a small sampling of popular beliefs that we snicker at:

• Internet Explorer 6 can't properly display transparent PNGs without resorting to fancy CSS+JS hacks.


• JavaScript event handling code can't receive the event handle with IE.


• Menus are required to be written in JavaScript to work with all browsers.


• IE is unable to receive multiple cookies in a single Set-Cookie field.


• Cookies is the (only) proper way to store HTTP state.


• IE is not the most advanced browser when it comes to text and typography (because it is, by far).


• SSL/TLS can never be used with multiple virtual hosts.


• Common examples of how to write proper cross browser code is accurate. (Such as common methods to support embedded fonts for IE and other browsers break Konqueror, when supporting all of them is a piece of cake. Or use embed tags for flash.)


• HTTP doesn't have native authentication abilities.


• JavaScript should be included in HTML head.


• SQL query parameters should be escaped.


• Faith in standards committees, large corporations, open source projects, or security researchers.


• That multiple versions of IE can't be run on Windows easily, especially older versions of IE on newer versions of Windows.

That last one is actually what prompted this article. 20% of enterprises say they can't upgrade to newer versions of Windows because they need to use IE 6. On top of this, almost every IT guy who had anything to say about this believe in this situation or mentions virtualization as an out. Heck, even Microsoft themselves are saying you need a special XP mode in Windows 7 for IE 6, as is every major article site on the net who comment on this situation.

Hilarious considering that you can install and run IE 6 just fine in Windows 7. There's plenty of solutions out there besides that one too. They've also been around for several years.

Anyways, experts, pros, designers, IT staff and average Internet surfers out there, just keep on being clueless on every single topic, some of us are having a real laugh.

Undocumented APIs

This topic has been kicked around all over for at least a decade. It's kind of hard to read a computer programming magazine, third party documentation, technology article site, third party developer mailing list or the like without running into it.

Inevitably someone always mentions how some Operating System has undocumented APIs, and the creators of the OS are using those undocumented APIs, but telling third party developers not to use them. There will always be the rant about unfair competition, hypocrisy, and other evils.

Large targets are Microsoft and Apple, for creating undocumented APIs that are used by Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, Safari, iPhone development, and other in-house applications. To the detriment of Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, third parties, and hobbyist developer teams.

If you wrote one of those articles/rants/complaints, or agreed with them, I'm asking you to turn in your Geek Membership card now. You're too stupid, too idiotic, too dumb, too nearsighted, and too vilifying (add other derogatory adjectives you can think of) to be part of our club. You have no business writing code or even discussing programming.

Operating Systems and other applications that communicate via APIs provide public interfaces that are supposed to be stable. If you find a function in official public documentation, that generally signifies it is safe to use the function in question, and the company will support it for the foreseeable future versions. If a function is undocumented, it's because the company doesn't think they will be supporting the function long term.

Now new versions which provide even the exact same API inevitably break things. It is so much worse for APIs which you're not supposed to be using in the first place. Yet people who complain about undocumented APIs, also complain when the new version removes a function they were using. They blame the company for purposely removing features they knew competition or hobbyists were using. That's where the real hypocrisy is.

As much as you hate a new version breaking your existing software, so does Microsoft, Apple, and others. The popularity of their products is tied to what third party applications exist. Having popular third party applications break on new versions is a bad thing. That's why they don't document APIs they plan on changing.

Now why do they use them then? Simple, you can write better software when you intimately understand the platform you're developing for, and write the most direct code possible. When issues occur because of their use, it's easy for the in-house teams to test their own software for compatibility with upcoming versions and fix them. If Microsoft sees a new version of Windows break Internet Explorer, they can easily patch the Internet Explorer provided with the upcoming version, or provide a new version altogether. But don't expect them to go patching third party applications, especially ones which they don't have the source to. They may have done so in the past, and introduced compatibility hacks, but this really isn't their problem, and you should be grateful when they go out of their way to do so.

So quit your complaining about undocumented APIs, or please go around introducing yourself as "The Dumb One".

Distributed HTTP

A couple years back, a friend of mine got into an area of research which was rather novel and interesting at the time. He created a website he hosted from his own computer, where one can read about the research, and download various data samples he made.

Fairly soon, it was apparent that he couldn't host any large data samples. So he found the best compression software available, and setup a BitTorrent tracker on his computer. When someone downloaded some data samples, they would be sharing the bandwidth load, allowing more interested parties to download at once without crushing my friend's connection. This was back at a time when BitTorrent was unheard of, but those interested in getting the data would make the effort to do so.

As time went on, his site popularity grew. He installed some forum software on his PC, so a community could begin discussing his findings. He also gave other people login credentials to his machine, so they can edit pages, and upload their own data.

The site evolved into something close to a wiki, where each project got its own set of pages describing it, and what was currently known on the topic. Each project got some images to visually provide an idea of what each data set covered before one downloaded the torrent file. Some experiments also started to include videos.

As the hits to his site kept increasing, my friend could no longer host his site on his own machine, and had to move his site to a commercial server which required payment on a monthly or yearly basis. While BitTorrent could cover the large data sets, it in no way provided a solution to hosting the various HTML pages and PNG images.

The site constantly gained popularity, and my friend was forced to keep upgrading to an increasingly more powerful server, where the hosting costs increased just as rapidly. Requests for donations, and ads on the server could only help offset costs to an extent.

I imagine other people and small communities have at times run into similar problems. I think its time for a solution to be proposed.

Every major browser today caches files for each site it visits, so it doesn't have to rerequest the same images, scripts, and styles on each page, and conditionally requests pages, only if they haven't been updated since what was in the cache. I think this already solves one third of the problem.

A new URI scheme can be created, perhaps dhttp:// that would act just like normal HTTP with a couple of exceptions. The browser would have some configurable options for Distributed HTTP, such as up to how many MB per site will it cache, how many MB overall, how many simultaneous uploads will it be willing to provide per site, as well as overall, which port it will run on, and a duration as to how long it will do so. When the browser connects via dhttp://, it'll include some extra headers providing the user's desired settings on this matter. The HTTP server will be modified to keep track of which IP addresses connected to it, and downloaded which files recently.

When a request for a file comes into the DHTTP server, it can respond with a list of perhaps five IP addresses to choose from (if available), chosen based on an algorithm designed to round robin the available browsers connecting to the site, and the preferences chosen therein. The browser can then request via a normal HTTP request the same file from one of those IP addresses it received. The browser would need a miniature HTTP server built in which would understand that requests coming to it that seem to be for a DHTTP server should be replied to from its cache. It would also know not to share files that are in the cache which did not originate from a DHTTP server.

If requests to each of those IP addresses have timed out, or responded with 404, then the browser can rerequest that file from the DHTTP server set with a timeout or unavailable header for each of those IP addresses, in which case the DHTTP server will respond with the requested file directly.

The HTTP server should also know to keep track of when files are updated, so it knows not to refer a visitor to an IP address which contains an old file. This forwarding concept should also be disabled in cases of private data (login information), or dynamic pages. However for static (or dynamic which is only generated periodically) public data, all requests should be satisfiable by this described method.

Thought would have to be put into how to handle "leach" browsers which never share from their cache, or just always request from the DHTTP server with timeout or unavailable headers sent.

I think something implemented along these lines can help those smaller communities that host sites on their own machines, and would like to remain self hosting, or would like to alleviate hosting costs on commercial servers.

Thoughts?

Why online services suck

Does anyone other than me think online services suck?

The thing that annoys me the most is language settings. Online service designers one day had this great idea to check the geographical IP address the user visited their site from, and use it to automatically set the language to the native one for the country they visited from. While this sounds nice in theory, most people only know their mother tongue, and also go on vacation now and then, or visit some other country for business purposes.

So here I am, on business in a foreign country, and I connect my laptop into the Ethernet jack in my hotel room which comes with free Internet access, so I can check my e-mail. What's the first thing I notice? The entire interface is no longer in English. Even worse is that the various menu items and buttons are moved around in this other language.

Even Google, known for being ahead of the curve when it comes to web services can't help but make the same mistakes. I'm sitting here looking at the menu on top of Blogger, wondering which one is login.

For Google this is a worse offense compared to other service providers, as I already was logged into their main site.

Google keeps their cookies set for all eternity (well, until the next time rollover disaster), and they know I always used Google in English. Now it sees me connecting from a different country than usual and thinks I want my language settings switched? Even after I set it to English on their main page, I have to figure out how to set it to English again on Blogger and YouTube?

What's really sad about all this is that every web browser sends each website as part of its request a "user agent", which tells the web server the name of the browser, a version number, operating system details, and language information. My browser is currently sending: "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11)". Notice the en-US? That tells the site the browser is in English, for the United States. If I downloaded a different version of Firefox, or installed a language package and switched Firefox to a different language, it would tell the web server that I did so. If one uses Windows in another language, Internet Explorer will also tell the web server the language Windows/Internet Explorer is in.

Why are these service providers ignoring browser information, and instead solely looking at geographical information? People travel all the times these days. Let us also not forget those in restrictive countries who use foreign proxy servers to access the internet.


However, common issues, such as annoying language support is hardly the end of the problems. In terms of online communication, virtually all of them suffer from variations of spam. Again, where is Google here? Every time I go read comments on Blogger, I see nothing but spam posts. Even when I go to cleanup my own site, the spam just fills up again a few days later.

Where's the flag as spam button? Where's the flag this user as solely a spammer button?

Sure Google as a site manager lets me block all comments on my site till I personally review them to see if they're spam, but in today's need for hi-speed communication is that really an option when you may have a hot topic on hand? Why can't readers flag posts on their own?

In terms of management, why doesn't Blogger's site management features include a list where I can check off posts and hit one mass delete, instead of having to click delete and "Yes I'm sure" on each and every spam post? Why can't I delete all posts from user X and ban that user from ever posting on my site again?


Okay, maybe this isn't so much an article why online services suck, but more about language and spam complaints, and mostly at Google for the moment. Jet-lag, and getting your E-mail interface in Gibberish does wonders for a friendly post. I'll try to come up something better for my next article.

What the heck is a PC?

So the other day a friend of mine comes over to discuss some business strategy. After chatting for a bit, he asks me if he could use one of my computers to check his E-Mail. Happily obliging, I log into one of my x86-64 machines running Linux/KDE, open up Firefox for him, and tell him to go check.

So my friend sits down, grabs for the mouse and keyboard, and starts looking at the screen with a weird expression on his face. After a couple of seconds, he clicks on the address bar, looks around a bit more, then he motions to me that he could use some help.

I asked him if he used a particular web based e-mail service, he answered in the affirmative that he uses G-Mail. So I typed in the address to G-Mail for him, which brought up the login page asking for his username and password.

He again looks at the screen, types in his username, then pauses again. He turns to me and tells me he feels really uncomfortable using this system, do I have a PC available that he can use?

This question made me completely flabbergasted. My friend is technically oriented, he's been using computers for a decade, he knows various operating systems exist, he knows various web browsers exist. He uses Firefox both at home and work. He even does some VBA scripting in his Excel spreadsheets. What in the world is scaring him about Firefox in Linux/KDE?

As the story continues, I turn to my friend and tell him this is a PC. He looks back at the screen, looks a bit startled, then seems to think for a few moments. Finally he turns to me and says, you know, Windows? So I reboot the machine into Windows XP (all my computers are minimally dual boot), and open up Firefox for him. He sits down happily and checks his E-Mail.

This experience left me thinking though. What the heck is a PC? It seems some people today have got it in their skulls that PC is a connotation for Windows. PC-DOS, PC-BSD, and other OSs must appear oxymoronish to these people if they ever saw them.

Thinking about it, I always for years viewed a PC as something IBM put together, most importantly containing an x86 processor. The basic machine changed over the years, but it was always x86. But then Apple released computers on x86 chips too recently, and they vehemently deny that they use PC hardware. Their basic difference being they don't use any classic PC BIOS.

Should we now take the term PC to mean x86+BIOS? Thinking more about it, a PC should probably be defined as a computer capable of running MS/PC DOS. Maybe even Apple decided to use their whole EFI setup just so they can classify their computers as not PCs. And thanks to dumb marketing, people are now thinking PC means running Windows.

So, do you know anyone who is scared of the same browser on a different OS? What do you think of when you hear "PC"? Has the PC definition changed? Should it change?

Mozilla is the new Microsoft

So who here loves Mozilla and their browsers such as Firefox?

I do too, but am I the only one finding Mozilla turning more into Microsoft every day?

To start off, lets point fingers at the memory issue. Notice how Windows' memory requirements have gone through the roof? Yet comparable desktop environments and windowing systems from other sources seem to be just as advanced as Microsoft's latest offering and don't use a fraction of the RAM. I'm told KDE 4 runs comfortably with only 512MB of RAM, and you can even get away with 256MB, while a friend of mine running Vista started with 1.5GB but said he had to add another 512MB so the system didn't get all slugish on him. Does Vista offer anything special that KDE 4 doesn't?

Compare that to Firefox these days. I open up Firefox with two tabs, one in a pretty ordinary text page with a single image on it, and another with some tables and a form, and it uses over 400MB of RAM. When mentioning it to Mozilla, they of course tell you it's a feature not a bug (sound familiar?). What feature exactly needs all that RAM? I'm told some nonsense about how it caches previous pages one went to, so they load quickly when you press back. Considering I just opened the browser, which pages is it caching exactly?

To further compound my bafflement of the issue, I even disabled that feature in about:config, and yet Firefox still eats a ton of RAM when I open it. I used to run Netscape Navigator on a machine with 16MB of RAM, and two whole browser windows opened, and it didn't eat a fraction of the RAM Firefox does now (and this was before Windows had virtual memory). Heck, even other web browsers such as Konqueror and Opera don't use that much.

Well, now you'll tell me, but at least Firefox started the whole standards revolution right? At least it's better than Internet Explorer, right?

While it's true that it's better than IE, I wouldn't even consider IE a browser, as it can't even get basic standards right. If you had a program which edited text files, and you have it open a file, and it comes up with paragraphs out of order, and some not even appearing, would you call it a text editor? Yet I'm starting to see Gecko (the engine powering Firefox and Seamonkey) go the same route. Try setting a background for a radio button with CSS in Firefox, it completely ignores it. Yet even IE, the non-webbrowser, can do CSS backgrounds for radio buttons (albeit it only changes the background color outside the radio button itself within its rendering square).

This gets worse when trying to couple some JavaScript with your pages in Firefox. The onchange event for select boxes only fires in Firefox when changing them with the keyboard when one presses enter. All other browsers fire the event as soon as you can see a change within the box, such as when one presses up or down. Now perhaps you'll tell me that's undefined behavior so Firefox can implement it differently than everyone else (sound like Microsoft any?), but now apply this to how it handles dynamic text. Say you want to take our example above and convert your onchange in a select box to an onkeydown, so it should fire for every up/down request in the box without the user needing to press enter. Firefox again fails completely here, since it won't update text on a page modified by JavaScript till the screen is clicked, or a button is pressed. Meaning if you have your onkeydown event for a select box call a function which changes some text on the page, to say perhaps the contents of that select box. You won't actually see those changes till you press a button, perhaps up or down again, showing you the previous value on your page from the select box, instead of the current one. Sounds like a real stellar browser, doesn't it?

Then there's the issue about how Mozilla is trying to make their browser the only platform out there. Why do most people today still use Windows, even when there's a better OS for the average person? It all boils down to the applications. Anyone who is proposed to switch asks, can I play my favorite games on this other OS? Does my digital camera's photo sorting software work on it? What about all the other applications that I use on a regular basis? As Microsoft's chief primate keeps yelling, it's all about the developers. People will be stuck using whatever runs their favorite apps.

Now of course we know that the internet in many ways is becoming the new platform out there, hence why Microsoft tried to crush it or control it all these years. So as long as your browser is standards compliant, if people develop for it, we should be okay, no?

Unfortunately it's not like that. GMail doesn't work on Konqueror unless Konqueror changes its user agent to report as Gecko. Meaning many sites lock out browsers just because they didn't test with them, not because it doesn't work for any particular reason. A similar problem exists how IIS servers gibberish to browsers reporting themself as Opera. Yet Microsoft only wants to keep it that way.

Recently Microsoft reported that the upcoming IE 8 will only go into standard compliance mode when websites include an IE8 tag in their code. Now most people who discussed this feature have totally missed the main problem. It's not about having to add an extra tag. It's that the default mode for any whacko out there writing a webpage is to render in IE 6 or IE 7 super-bug-filled-non-standards-compliant-mode, so webpages will continue to not become standardized. Of course Microsoft realizes this, they'll do everything they can to make sure the large majority of stuff coming out by the clueless masses only works on their platform.

Now I'm not talking about Mozilla making the web buggy like Microsoft is trying to (but I bet they'd like that if they could get away with it), but it's that they're trying to get people dependent on their web browser. How so? It's all about the extensions!
Mozilla invented their own language and format and ranted and raved about how everyone should be writing extensions for their browser, and how their browser is the de-facto standard of the free world.

How many of you using Firefox feel they need all kinds of extras that people write for it? How often do you sit down at someone else's Firefox and feel naked about a lack of certain features you tailored your browser back home or at work to?

Now while I could go on and on about all kinds of extensions, everyone has their own tastes, so it'd be pointless to, but I'll point out a couple of examples.

Some of the extensions I use regularly for Firefox, such as auto translations of pages in languages I don't read/speak, or user agent spoofing are built right into Konqueror, many others aren't available anywhere else, or only for certain browsers written specifically for them. I'm talking about the GMail/Yahoo/And whatever else e-mail notifiers that can tell you when you received new e-mail, or ForcastFox which can tell me mostly accurate weather info for the week for just about anywhere in the world.

Now these extensions I just mentioned are perhaps not anything to get addicted to, but what about Ad blocking? Now of course other browsers also have a Mozilla compatible ad block framework installed, how many of them allow you to install something like the "Filterset.G Updater" so you can have your blacklists automatically updated by others to hide all the new types of ads on the internet that come out, such as the "Download Firefox Ad" that appears on the right of this page?

Not only that, we can hardly forget the wide plethora of developer related things one can get for Firefox, such as JavaScript Console, DOM Inspector, and all the extensions such as the Web Developer Toolbar and who knows what else.

Am I the only one who now feels locked into Firefox and can't switch because their special browser software doesn't run elsewhere? Even when we realize what a horrible wreck Firefox is, and terrible on machines with little RAM available?

Furthermore, you know how Microsoft always forces their desires upon you? Take this picture of Bill Gates for example:


Notice how his own personal desktop is the default Windows XP background? Surely a man as technical as Bill Gates can figure out how to change it to something he enjoys, just like everyone else has.
Or perhaps Bill Gates never changed it, since the default Windows XP background was Bill Gates' personal background at the time? Of course leave it to a guy like him to force his personal desires on everyone else.

Now lets see how Mozilla does the exact same thing. Ever wondered where Firefox's logo came from? Who would think that an image of a fox conquering the world is a good logo for a browser?

Check out a picture of Mozilla's former CEO, Mitchell Baker:


Now what do you think came first, the Firefox logo? Or her ridiculous hair cut?
Still don't get what I mean? See this:


If you think you can point out how Mozilla isn't the Microsoft of the internet platform, please let me know, I'd love to hear how you came to your false conclusions.