Posted on 06/02/2005 7:09:51 PM PDT by Panerai
Microsoft has drawn some criticism after confirming that it will not make the next version of Internet Explorer available to users of its Windows 2000 operating system.
In a blog posting at the end of last week, a Microsoft employee confirmed that the company would not be releasing IE 7 for Windows 2000, as this would involve a lot of work for an operating system that is in the later stages of its lifecycle.
"It should be no surprise that we do not plan on releasing IE 7 for Windows 2000. One reason is where we are in the Windows 2000 lifecycle. Another is that some of the security work in IE 7 relies on operating system functionality in XP SP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000," according to the blog posting.
Although Windows 2000 will be supported until 2010, at the end of June of this year Microsoft will no longer accept requests for design changes or new features for the operating system.
A number of Microsoft blog readers were unhappy to learn that IE 7 would be unavailable on Windows 2000.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
I could care less; my Win2K box at work has Mozilla installed.
Mo is da bomb!
ping!
What is this IE you speak of?
I have Firefox 1.0.4 and Maxthon 1.3.1 installed on my Windows 2000 Pro (SP4) system, so the new features of Internet Explorer 7.0 are not needed for me.
I have a Win2k box at work. I use Firefox on it too, so I could care less about whether it will run IE7.
I usually stick up for Microsoft, but if this is true ... it sucks. The new editions of IE need to be backwards-compatible.
( Sigh! )
Just another reason to learn Linux. And I hate trying to have to teach myself another OS, but between this, and MS's new licensing schemes, I guess I'll have to.
They really are shooting themselves in the foot with this stuff.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
There is surprisingly many people who still use Win95/98. I even know a guy that still use his DOS based Word Processor.
I've said this many times before that MS is still the better OS in terms of ease of use and software availablility. If Linux really wants to compete they need to seriously address their 'dependency' issues. If they do not, then MS will continue to totally dominate the PC operating system market.
Don't know for sure- it can't be Longhorn since it's not yet on the market. I hear from users of OS's newer than mine ( Win2000 ) that they pay an annual fee, or get limited numbers of re-installs, or that if you swap cards or internal parts, you get grief from the OS. It just sounds like too much unnecessary hassle to me.
You have a good point about Linux- my first experience with the SUSE release was so annoying enough that I sent it back for a refund. Tried Mandrake 9, and between the wife giving me grief ( My files! Where are my Files? ) and lightning killing the modem, the new modem not being recognized by Linux, and the fonts being too small for these old eyes to see well, I just gave up on it. I put the two home PC's behind a hardware firewall and that stopped the virus/highjacker problems, so I lost my main motivation for switching.
Linux needs to do two things to be ready for prime time- be as easy to install as Windows ( pop in a CD, and follow the prompts ), and be able to work easily with Windows applications. A lot of people- like my wife- bring home tons of stuff from work, and they need to be able to use work with it without jumping through hoops.
I'm not particularly partisan about operating systems- I use Win2000 because it does what I want to do mostly well, and was fairly cheap to upgrade from Win95/98. But if they make it too expensive, or too annoying, to use I will certainly look elsewhere again.
I have WinXP, Win2k, .Net and Win 2003 installed on different PC's and don't have this issue. I think this may not be true.
between the wife giving me grief ( My files! Where are my Files? )
My wife had a similar problem, her law firm used Word Perfect and my PC only had MS-Word. Drove her crazy until they got rid of Word Perfect.
Appreciate the information- come to think of it, Mrs. B's office upgraded to Win2003 a while back and I can't recall her mentioning any annoyances like those I wrote about.
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