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Win32 annoyances

lachoy on 2002-08-09T19:51:17

A few trivial and stupid things I've come across while using Windows as a desktop the last two weeks. (At a client site, no choice, etc.). This is on NT 4.0, so some of these might have been fixed. (But I'm amazingly bored right now, so whatever.)

  • I really miss tabbed browsing, much more than I thought I would.
  • Why do certain 'system' windows not have an entry in the task bar? For instance, opening up the 'Control Panel' brings up a taskbar entry, but the panel entries 'Data Sources', 'Date/Time', 'Keyboard' (among others) do not, while the 'Desktop Themes' one does. Similarly, if you accidentally double-click on a bunch of files that are selected and don't have a default file type, you'll get n 'Open With' boxes that don't have taskbar entries and will quietly hang around under all your other windows until you notice them.
  • The built-in shell (cmd) has strange ideas about going back and forth in your history. If I run commands, A, B, C, then up-arrow twice to re-run B, an up-arrow after I run B will bring 'A'. I think I prefer the dumb stack.
  • If I open up a file in IE served as text/plain (for example, 'ProcessThatData.pm') then 'save as...' it will not only bowlderize the name to 'ProcessThatData_pm.htm' but also add opening and closing XML headers to it.
  • I also dislike how you can't at least symlink at the root level (as a drive letter) a directory within a share.

MSIE gripes

wickline on 2002-08-10T00:32:05

> a file in IE served as text/plain

and MSIE can't render text/plain documents as text/plain if they
appear to contain html markup

-matt

Re:MSIE gripes

vsergu on 2002-08-12T15:49:15

And MS actually consciously designed that bug into it. You see, text/plain is supposedly an "ambiguous" MIME type, meaning IE can assume it knows better than the server that's actually giving it the file.

Re:MSIE gripes

lachoy on 2002-08-12T21:09:24

Another one I just remembered: IE doesn't remember the last directory from which you opened an HTML file, defaulting to 'Desktop' every single time. Not even in the same freaking session!

Re:MSIE gripes

lachoy on 2002-08-14T18:15:57

I found another one: if a site isn't found due to misspelling, 404 error, etc., it shouldn't go in either the history or completion listings. Blech!

Re:MSIE gripes

wickline on 2002-08-14T19:25:34

and if the 404 error message isn't heavy in kb, MSIE should not ignore it in favor of a "more helpful" version. I'd much rather have a 1kb page with only a link to a site map/search than the generic MSIE page not found message.

-matt

Put it on my tab

darobin on 2002-08-10T01:30:54

Mozilla runs on win, you should be able to get it installed (and it's not picky if you don't have admin rights to the box). There also is a version of IE (using the IE ActiveX control or whatever) that has tabs. Someone mentionned it here recently, a search might reveal it.