John
What you say may be true but the problem is that most users in the world use an MS OS with IE as their browser. You may not like it but there is no other standard as far as I can tell. This tiny forum is not and never will be the real world (meaning larger) in how forums work.
As for a stable OSs XP was and so was Vista and Win 7 and now Win 8. As far as I can tell OSX is perhaps 15 % of the total market for computing. Maybe more maybe less. When I tried to use Open Suse for audio 64 bits I had nothing but problems. I found that Windows was easy and stable and things just worked. No one supported the kind of hardware I use for audio under linux and I am not in the market for any Apple product even if it were given to me.
I like Windows and trust it. I don't use IE and like Opera. I have the option to use a buch of browsers if I choose. But when it comes down to it their a lot of companies out there that hate MS and don't help in assuring browser compatibility. Java was created by Sun Microsystems to help them in their ongoing battle against MS. It was not allowed to be used by MS in their browser. What all this means is us the end user gets screwed.
What should be done is a commission setup to create standards for browsers independent of any corporate interests that we the end user can rely on.
One last thing to keep in mind. Before MS decided to bundle its browser with the OS most browsers cost money. Sometimes a lot of money. Now we choose our browser at no cost to us.
Hey John,
No offense, but I'd like to offer just a few clarifications.
Java is just a programming language that runs in a Virtual Machine. The VM's were set up to offer web programmers a real programming language to offer applications via a browser. The problem between MS & Sun arose when MS (ironically the company soooo concerned about people not paying for software) did not want to pay Sun for their usurpation of Sun's intellectual property. If you install Sun's Java, it functions in IE just the same as in FF or Chrome or Safari. You just don't have a MS Java engine and rightly so.
As for standards, W3C (http:/www.w3.org) is the consortium set up to be the manufacturer independent standards group of which MS is a member. It is unfortunate that MS doesn't adhere to those standards despite the wealth of real developers who are trying to program to those standards. I've spent the last two years working on a new web-based application development platform that works in every browser without modification except for IE. The big joke is that IE stands for IF...ELSE which need to have all over your code to maintain IE compatibility. I don't hate MS, I just don't care about MS any more because of their own unwillingness to comply with the very standards which they helped to create.
As for OS stability, the next time you feel your system is running stable, open up the Event Viewer (eventvwr.msc) and check out the number of warnings and errors that have occurred for which you have never been informed. On a Windows server, these can sometimes be severe errors indicating imminent failure that the end user doesn't find out about until said failure. I've actually found hard-drive bad-sector errors in the log that were never presented to the user despite their prophecy of impending catastrophic failure. Check out Microsoft's Services applet (services.msc) and look at the list of running services (half of which are irrelevant to a DAW) that are eating precious CPU cycles and occupying memory. I wouldn't recommend shutting them down if you're not sure of what you are doing, but suffice to say that there is enough bloat to be able to gain significant performance advantages is those services are disabled. Don't get me wrong, XP was one of the best OS's from MS thus far and Vista (properly patched) and Win7 were pretty good though I wouldn't call them stable, just more stable than previous versions.
In regards to browser availability, Netscape Navigator was always available for free download even after being taken over by AOL. After MS' big faux pas (missing the importance of the online paradigm shift) they decided to create their own non-standard standards in a typical anti-compeitive antagonistic attempt to take over the entire online industry rather than work with the already established businesses and standards at the time.
Lastly, your statement about "most people of the world using Windows" may have been the case, but the winds of change are upon us. People are getting more and more tired of having to pay big money for being MS' beta testers. There are plenty of companies and municipalities (both nationally and internationally) switching to to some open-source solution including some type of Linux desktop and OpenOffice, that are more than purely anecdotal at this point. As an example:
City of Munich makes the move to open source on desktops ... I don't really care which company wins, just so that the real winner is the end-user.
Best,
guitardood