New Windows Version to be called Vista
Longhorn is no more. (Well, it is, but it won’t be referred to as Longhorn from now on!) Microsoft has announced the new (well, upcoming) Windows version is to be called Windows Vista.
It would be nice if there was just one new feature — and by that I don’t mean new to Windows — that wouldn’t be hard — that isn’t already in use by other operating systems, like Linux and Mac OSX. In fact, part of the reason the release of Vista has been so delayed is because MS have had to play catch-up.
Except — they never will. Likely by the time Vista is released, the other OS-makers will have updated their OSs to introduce yet more features. But MS will still have the greater market share for some time to come. Most consumers are simply afraid of change, especially related to technology: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” So they continue to have no idea just how broken MS products are. Ironic, huh?
Sadly, web designers have been informed that while one or two concessions have been made for web standards, the Vista browser Internet Explorer is still going to ensure that its users (the majority of web users) have a degraded internet experience, especially as more and more designers are embracing web standards. There are just lots of neat things that web designers can do in standards-compliant browsers that IE users will never see. And IE has a lot of catching up to do in relation to browser features too, but again, users who never try anything else will never know that.
