More crap from Microsoft

Well it has been a while since I bothered to post anything here but the time has come again.

Microsoft has exceeded all previous attempts to screw up something that was starting to look promising and I'm talking about Internet Explorer 9.

All they had to do was bring IE up to meet current standards; primarily HTML5.

Instead of that they had to mess with everything including the user interface.  Are they ever going to listen to users?  The answer is a resounding NO!

They don't care what you and I think about anything they do, after all they are Microsoft - Kings of the jungle so people will take whatever garbage they want to push our way.
Try the "New" search feature in IE 9.  I don't know about you but when I search for a term I want to see what I searched for show up in the search field of my preferred search engine (certainly not BING) but instead they have to send it with the URL encoding.  Is that serious?  No but it certainly is annoying.  I know what %20 means but does everyone else?  No they don't.  Do search engines understand plain text without the encoding?  They certainly do or they would be long gone.  Fortunately I only installed IE9 on one of my operating systems, Windows 7.  After an hour of trying to customize it to work the way I want it to I spent 2 minutes ripping it out by the throat.  Forget about sending feedback because they are not accepting any more comments from the users, unless of course you like it.

The above is only one example of several things I found to be irritating.  Now don't get me wrong here.  There is no such a thing as the perfect browser and I'm not yet ready to go with something because it's prettier and I certainly don't intend to install any of the current "geekware" browsers.  I'm just going to stay with IE 8 for now even though it's not HTML5 compliant.

This did draw something I have been considering for a while to the forefront though.
I've toyed with the idea of dropping support for all Microsoft software from my web site.  I think it's a good time to start working on that.  I will be replacing it with pages where you can vote on a User Experience index based on what you think of any individual piece of MS software by version.  I'm probably not going to make it so you can leave comments there but the votes will continually be tallied and charted so they are displayed on the pages.

I can see where I won't even stay with Microsoft software for much longer.  Each generation seems to get worse and with Microsoft making a move towards cloud computing it will soon be time to make the switch.  I've never had a problem working comfortably in any OS so for me it's not a problem to make the switch in fact I very often use a linux distro to fix Windows issues.