jim wood wrote:DC9 wrote:I appreciate your replies guys. Yes we are already on .Net 4 so I suspect it is (sigh) the Javascript engine. I am not very optimistic about improving things. Its just hard to believe that IBM are actually recommending Firefox as the browser of choice..thats the answer I got from them.
It's not hard to believe really. Microsoft are a competitor. Why would they recommend IE? I think they would move away from Excel if they had a choice. (BTW IE is horrible, I wouldn't recommend it either.)
It is, but a quick search of Google will show any number of articles about how Firefox is bleeding marketshare. (Predominantly but not exclusively to Chrome, which I use out of necessity (alongside Firefox; long story) but don't particularly like. Actually I use IE for some things as well.) I saw a chart recently where the share looked like metaphorical lemmings going off a cliff.
Part of this, I suspect, is the thing that was discussed
here; it's hard to take a browser seriously
for corporate use (I emphasise) when it's not only releasing a new version every few weeks (making testing an effective impossibility) but has a history of randomly breaking its add-ons when doing so. I do however grant that this seems to have been less of an issue in the last umpteenth releases. I can't remember when the last time I got a "This add-on won't work with Firefox any more, too bad, sucker, we'll do what we like" message was. And the last few versions seem to have been more stable than earlier ones which I for one found were crashing on a regular basis.
IE suffers predominantly from the "Can't trust the user, why don't we go out of our way to endlessly irritate them?" mindset that seems to have permeated MS since Vista. Pop-ups which have "Do what I'm suggesting right now" and "Ask me later" buttons but no "Get the **** out of my face forever" button, I'm looking in your general direction. Doubly so when you go to use TM1 Help (such as it is, in its 7 separate silos (they're really never going to fix that, are they?)) and get the message "To help protect your
security (ug! sekuritee is magik-word, it excuse any amount of stupidity if you say 'sekuritee'), IE has restricted this web page from running scripts". To which I click to tell it to run them, just as I always do. And get an "Are ya sure, are ya sure, are ya really really sure?" dialog, at which point I need to ensure that I do not have a loaded weapon in reach and calmly click the button that I see in my mind as saying "Yes, I'm just as sure as the last seven thousand ******* times I told you to run it". (Yes, there is a setting to prevent this problem under Internet Options -> Advanced -> Security -> Allow Active content to run in files on My Computer... IF it's not restricted by IT department policies.)
However, its one redeeming virtue, from a corporate perspective, is that each version stays around for quite a while. You can therefore fully test your web based applications against it, knowing that a bunch of cowboys (and I'm not using that expression in an entirely derogative sense, at least for personal use software) aren't going to come along 6 weeks later and change something so that it breaks your functionality.
Also, I still have un-fond memories of the last time we deployed Web under 9.1, and websheets displayed correctly on IE but were an abomination on FF.
It's in
that context that I agree with DC9 about it being a surprising suggestion.
The context in which I agree with Jim is that some of us are well aware of the seeming anti-Microsoft crusade going on inside IBM, which the "Oh let's put everything on a web canvas and try to get people off Excel" direction of 10.1 was a manifestation of. (And which Steve Vincent wrote a scathing and highly accurate critique of elsewhere in these pages.) As I've said before, every time IBM takes a shot at Microsoft, the shot usually passes through them and hits the end users. Recommending a browser like Firefox which is great for end users who can put up with a bit of quirkiness over a slow changing, relatively robust browser like IE for use in a businessplace is another example of this.