Dan Herbert's

Due to an issue between Vista and Firefox, when doing development on localhost, Firefox has a serious issue with resolving DNS requests. This only happens on localhost, so this does not affect any development not being done on localhost.

The issue can only be described as “pages loading unbelievably slow” when localhost is being queried for resources under Vista.

Not to worry, however, there is a fix!

To fix this issue, you simply need to type ‘about:config’ into Firefox. You may get a cute disclaimer warning you to be careful. Promise you’ll be careful and then type the following into the filter:

network.dns.disableIPv6

Set this preference to ‘true’ by double-clicking it. Once this is set to true, your performance will instantly be dramatically increased.

I’m not sure if this is a problem on Vista or Firefox’s end, however Internet Explorer does not have this issue on Vista so my guess is Firefox is broken somehow…

I just took the annual ALA Web Developer’s survey. I missed it last year (I somehow didn’t notice it on their site,)  but this year I’ve contributed.

It allows A List Apart to gather statistics on the Web Development industry, which I think is an awesome idea, since I love knowing the state of my industry and what direction things are moving in with my industry.

Check it out!

Microsoft just released the results of its Windows Mojave experiment.

Windows Mojave is a marketing experiment Microsoft created to convince people that a lot of unwarranted negative press has been spread about Vista, giving it an undeserving bad name. The premise of the experiment is this:

Microsoft took average people and introduced them to what they claimed was a new operating system. Microsoft told these people that Vista was “Mojave,” which was a codename for a new Windows operating system. The created new packaging for Vista, they changed the Vista name to “Mojave” in the operating system, and showed people what it could do.

The result of the experiment was overwhelmingly positive. Average computer users (or so it seems like) seem to really like the new system.

I try to remain as objective as possible about Vista. I’ve read the good things and the bad things about it and I’ve tried it myself for a little while. Several people I know also use Vista and I’ve had to help them with their computers on occasion.

As an avid computer user, my experiences with Vista have been somewhat negative.

I can honestly say, as negative as people like to be about Vista, it is not so bad. It has a lot of good points to it. When I used it, I really enjoyed a lot of the features and changes made to the OS. You could say it is a decent OS. As I said, however, I have had an overall negative experience with Vista.

At a first look, to the average person Vista can seem “shiny” and have lots of cool new aspects that make it seem like a great OS. What I doubt Microsoft’s Mojave experiment would test is the long term satisfaction with the operating system.

The negative experiences I’ve had with Vista all come from long term use of the OS.

There are major memory and performance issues with Vista. I tried running it on a machine with 1GB of RAM (more than enough for an XP machine) and it could barely handle itself after a while. This is not just something I say because I saw the Task Manager chart show the system using large amounts of RAM. It comes from actual experience. I’ve tried running programs I normally run under Windows XP without a problem, and have been disappointed that Vista can’t handle itself when more than 2-3 programs are running. Admittedly, Vista should be slower on my old hardware, just like XP ran slow on my older computers that were upgraded from Windows 98. However, I put a lot of work into turning off features of Vista so that it was running at the minimum it took to run the system. I turned off Windows themes completely. I shut down all of the services I knew I wouldn’t need.  I made sure that nothing was running at startup other than what I absolutely needed (just the software for my trackball). With all of the “stuff” I turned off, I would have expected Vista to run reasonably well, however I was disappointed that I just couldn’t get it to go faster.

Aside from memory and performance, which can be forgiven since I lack modern hardware to test the system against, I have major issues with the Vista interface. The Windows Vista interface is absolutely the biggest flaw in the operating system. Out of every Windows OS I’ve used (and I’ve used every OS from Windows 3.1 onward) the interface of Vista has to be the worst.

From what I heard about Vista development, Microsoft hired a world class HCI specialist to give Windows a facelift in Vista. What came of it was in some ways better than what had existed in previous versions of Windows. In many ways though, Vista fails completely when it comes to HCI. Microsoft broke at least 2 fundamental rules of HCI with Vista:

1. When designing an upgrade for existing software, do not change what users are comfortable with. Seeing how Microsoft has 90% of the desktop market and Windows has such a huge influence in society, it is really disgraceful to see them completely change what everyone has gotten used to over the course of the last 10-15 years. This is something that Mojave doesn’t seem to show (for good reason). Users may think it looks cool and shiny, but once they begin using it for day to day tasks, in my experience people generally become frustrated trying to navigate around the Vista interface.
2. Keep your UI consistent across your entire system. This is a tough one to do. Windows is a beast of a project and it has a lot of different tools, applications, and dialogs included with it. To change everything over to the Vista “look and feel” is a major undertaking that has got to be hard to do. I can understand having a hard time getting around to every single thing Microsoft has developed, making sure it aligns with a new style guidline. What I can’t understand is how Microsoft failed to keep the Vista UI consistent. The average person would never think about an issue like this when a “new” OS (such as Mojave) is being demonstrated to them. That is the point. A user shouldn’t have to think “is this UI consistent?” It should just feel easy to use. If a UI is different in some part of a system, that means the user has to learn a new interface and remember it. Microsoft seems to have had a really hard time deciding what a menu should be like in Vista. Every program you open has a different menu, different names for commands, and just looks different depending on what you’re using. This is where Vista fails the most.

If it weren’t for the UI issues with Vista, I’d be able to proudly say it’s a good OS that I’d recommend to my mother. However, when you’d be required to learn a new interface just to use your computer for basic things, it becomes something I can’t recommend to people who just aren’t computer enthusiasts.

I’m glad Microsoft tried the Mojave experiment. Hopefully it will show people that Vista isn’t as bad as everyone says it is (it has its merits.) It still doesn’t address the issues with Vista, however it might help fix Vista’s bad name