116
submitted 11 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot with Edge::Microsoft Edge is full of fantastic features, but the tech company makes it hard to appreciate them.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca 21 points 11 months ago

I've been using Microsoft products since the early days of DOS, and the only product that truly impressed me was NT; it was a breath of fresh air as a developer, with its new kernel and much improved stability. Finally, we could develop for windows and not have the OS crash!

Everything else has driven me nuts, and their quality had definitely gone drastically down hill. Their software now is a bloated mess of ugly, especially windows. How did we get to an OS that installs so many gigs of files? Holy crap!

I try to always use Firefox and never use Edge.

[-] orclev@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

Windows XP 64 bit edition was Microsofts peak, everything has been downhill from there. Microsoft Research (a child company of Microsoft proper) does some really cool stuff. Everything interesting/good to come out of MS in the last couple decades started there, and then the main Microsoft company got ahold of it and inevitably cocked it up.

For a brief period of time I was hopeful that MS had turned over a new leaf when they started to opensource their dev software like VS Code and typescript, but that's always been a bait and switch. They're handing carrots out to developers while simultaneously beating their normal customers with sticks.

[-] umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

i never believed their heart open source phase, and i still think they are trying to figure out how to eee stuff like linux

[-] Buffalox@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

the only product that truly impressed me was NT

I hated Windows NT from day 1, any driver or update could potentially brick your system, and there was no command line to boot into to fix it. It wasn't until service pack 3 that it became reasonably stable. I simply don't understand how Microsoft could ever be considered a maker of professionel software. The most impressive thing about Windows NT was the stupidity of it, and the completely outrageous claims Microsoft made about "security" features.

[-] YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca 5 points 11 months ago

Yeah maybe I was thinking of NT 3.5.1. Whatever version it was, it was our first experience of a Windows version that was stable. It was a long time ago, my memory isn’t great. I think we were forced to develop on Windows 95 until we could get the NT licenses and hardware.

[-] Buffalox@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

That would make more sense IMO. If you used Windows 95, It probably wasn't the original Windows NT, because that came out in 93 and was called NT 3.1.
Windows NT 3.5.1 came out in 95, I admit I looked it up to support my memory. I still didn't like 3.5.1 although it was better, Although it came out later the same year, I liked Windows 95, it finally got long filenames, which annoyed me tremendously that DOS/Windows didn't have before Windows 95. Obviously Windows NT 3.5.1 still lacked the ability to boot to console, and have a full set of tools to fix things when they went wrong. Also most games didn't work on NT. 😋

[-] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Windows NT 3.5 (and later 3.5.1) was far more stable than the desktop versions of Windows (Windows 3.11 and early Win95). If you need help remembering NT versions visually, NT 3.X still used progman.exe so it looked like Windows 3.1. Windows NT 4 was the first one to use explorer.exe (with the Start button) like Win95.

Win95 gold release was a hot mess of crashes and shaky drivers. The "stable" version of Win95 didn't arrive until OSR2 (aka Windows 95B).

[-] Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Yes admittedly Windows 3.5.1 was more stable than DOS/Windows. But I still hated the design of it, and the lack of ability to boot into console in particular.

[-] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

I'm thinking back to those times fixing broken NT 3.5 machines. I can't think of many times a console was needed that didn't have alternate methods to accomplish the same thing. There's really only two times I can think I'd need what we use a console for today.

  • display drivers wrong/bad - VGA mode existed for this where you could get a very ugly 640x480 16 color display that worked on all VGA cards irrespective of driver. You could get into the OS (even authenticate!) and make any changes to the OS needed.

  • mass storage controller change/ driver fix - Running through the setup again from floppies (F8 to use new driver) and you'd be back into the OS.

What else did you need a console for?

[-] Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I think mostly for correcting config files, and because I didn't like VGA mode, it was a waste of time to have to boot into.
To read logs and disable drivers that caused problems.

[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago

Are you me? Get out of my brain!

NT changed everything.

Windows 10 is labelled NT10 internally

[-] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

Linux is soooo much nicer on the daily.

this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
116 points (83.0% liked)

Technology

59710 readers
3569 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS