Need some pointers....

[johnnybee]

Hi again, chaps and chapesses; now and again I have a blue fit and go charging round doing updates on all the PC's in the house, and this unusual mood took me last week when I upgraded them all to IE8 from IE6. Let's face it, when some web pages won't even display and ask you to "install a modern browser" it's time to DO something!
Right, all on IE8 and so far so good; not much difference apart from some irritating nannying popups, but happy enough.
Now I'm wondering about changing to IE9 - anyone got any comments on that idea, or experienced any problems with it?
In passing, I've tried most of the others, and to be honest I can't get on with 'em - I guess it's what you get used to!
Ta, folks!

[Lynnrose]

Sorry, I use Firefox

[elvisuk]

Me too

[mikkh]

Interesting blindness you have there :-p IE8 and especially IE9 are so far removed from 6 you might as well be using a different browser. So the concept of 'what you're used to' is a bit null and void really. I've seen the same in the past with Microsoft Office too, especially the radical changes that occurred with Office 2007, but were accepted by the majority because it was what they were used to as well !

Sorry if this sounds like a lecture, but it never ceases to amaze me how changes in Microsoft software mostly go unchallenged and people still stick with it for some reason.

I suppose I take it to extremes the other way by using Linux, but of all the people who pop in and ask to 'borrow' my PC for checking something on the internet, most don't realise it's not Windows they're using and several have inquired where they can get the " cool theme " I'm using.

*dismounts soapbox* what was the question again?

Oh yeah IE9. I still maintain Windows on my daughters PC and my totally unbiased (!) opinion, is that it pretty much sucks. IE has been slowly gravitating to a more Firefox like interface for a while I think, which makes me wonder why you can't get on with other browsers. It's significantly more bloated than previous versions, but then so is Firefox just recently. It's got to the stage where I no longer use it, Firefox that is. I have a fast modern PC with lots of RAM but I notice the difference and now use Chrome almost exclusively ever since I found out I could have 'adblockplus' in that too. Stick with IE8, especially if you have older hardware

[johnnybee]

Thanks, Mikk, appreciate it.
FYI, I've still got my 'old' Athlon 2700+ rig from 2004, which now runs Sabayon 4.5 and a load of O/S apps - helps with comparisons across the divide.
The odd thing, as I see it, is that my server's dual-booted with Server 2008 and RH10 enterprise edition - I think, can't remember exactly what the O/S OS is, don't look at it that often - and even with two dualcores onstream with 16G of RAM backing up it isn't THAT much faster than my Phenom rig upstairs.
That said, I do notice that some apps run a lot faster on the 2700 system than they do on the Opteron setup - there doesn't seem to be any real correlation between the potential and actual performance of either machine, which is a tad mystifying.
As for browsers, Firefox3 was a bloody nightmare at the outset, which led me to bin it after a week; Maxthon looked more like an old FAT16 retroapp and Chrome caused so many "peripheral" problems that it went the same way shortly after installation.
Trouble with all these 'outsider' browsers is that you HAVE to commit your system to their way of doing things or face down constant conflict warnings - and that isn't my idea of seamfree surfing, sorry!
I'll give IE9 a try, after installing Vista Ultimate x64 on one partition of my server - IE9 will not work with XP, courtesy of Micro$haft, which forms part of my posting re. the internet, ten years on.
Thanks again, M8.

[mikkh]

I quite like Sabayon, but it's very greedy and adopts the everything including the kitchen sink approach to how much software it thinks you must have. I'm using Stella Linux as my main OS at the moment - It's an offshoot of Centos/RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise) but tailored more to desktop use. i'm pretty impressed with it and have been using it for several months now.

Firefox has forgotten it's roots, it started life as a light alternative to the full Mozilla suite now called 'SeaMonkey' in Linux but discontinued for Windows. But now it seems to have a bigger footprint than what it evolved from, which is a little crazy to say the least