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Is Firefox 3.0 the "Fat Elvis?"

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Lashiec:
People say the same thing every time there is a new version of a tool like this "oh no bloat!" "oh no, design over substance".
-iphigenie (April 15, 2008, 01:50 AM)
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With the new "native" themes, design has not won this time, brrr!

It helped early on to be tiny and lean and leave it all to the add on writers. That serves a geeky crowd well. Once you go for more market share (they didnt dream of that back then) this approach starts to backfire. Normal people installing FF just wonder what the fuss is all about, it is a "bah" product out of the box with no plugins.

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Really, the majority of people don't know what an extension is, which is pretty normal, after all not everyone needs so many extra functionality, and they're perfectly fine with the stock Firefox.

MS basically ruined that advantage with IE7 though, which starts about as slowly as a FF2 with plugins, and is very slow at opening new tabs.
-f0dder (April 15, 2008, 06:17 AM)
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Greatly fixed in IE8, according to the reports. Fortunately :)

I was also under the impression that this is why MS said it was impossible to remove Internet Explorer from Windows (not least in the anti trust cases in court) and why using the remove option in the default apps options (such as replacing IE with MSN Explorer or Firefox) doesn't actually remove anything at all but just hides IE from the user's view.
-Carol Haynes (April 15, 2008, 07:14 AM)
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Oh, you can, you can, is possible to remove IE6 from Windows, albeit not officially, and preserve the underlying components for other apps using the engine to work. Still, I think IE7 is far more decoupled from Windows than IE6. I hope they did the same with WMP, which is becoming less and less configurable with each version.

f0dder:
Lashiec: all the "get rid of IE6" does, afaik, is to remove "%ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer" - which is nothing but ~300kb worth of shams for the COM components.

Lashiec:
I don't really know, since I didn't have a real desire to remove it from Windows 98, but the utility uses INF files to specify what it's removing, so it can be checked.

You can also try it live... on a VM of course :)

Carol Haynes:
I hope they did the same with WMP, which is becoming less and less configurable with each version.
-Lashiec (April 15, 2008, 06:41 PM)
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Really I like WMP 11 more than previous versions. Maybe I am not very demanding but I think it works pretty well. I certainly prefer it to iTunes as a music and video player, and (at least on my system) it loads quickly (with about 30Gb of music and video in the library), has an instant search and sounds as good as anything else I have tried. Granted I don't use it for tagging (MP3Tag rules for that) - what else am I missing?

Lashiec:
Oh yeah, as a run-of-the-mill player is pretty good, but it bugs me that by default adds the media directories to the library, without asking first (even photos, why?), and that you can't remove "My Music" from the list of directories. I rarely use it, except for viewing DVDs with ffdshow as the decoder, but I prefer it to not index anything unless I tell it to do so.

At least, it does not rename music files like iTunes using strange schemes and with no good reason...

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