Well, Internet Explorer 8 is in the beta phase only, so it may be to early to judge it and make any conclusion. Anyway, I have some thoughts I want to share.

I’ve been a long time Firefox user, even though I cannot say anything bad about IE, unlike some other people who always tend to whine about it, I was just used to Firefox, anyway, I decided to try IE 8 Beta 1 and now I’m using Beta 2. It looked very promising to me. It passed the Acid2 Test, it has the Developers Tools and a built-in JavaScript debugger. So, Microsoft intends to release a more developer oriented browser that may surprise many web developers who have a bad opinion about Microsoft as a company that produced a very crappy browser and simply don’t care much about web standards and web at all. It’s not right, of course. More...

Do you remember your first experience of using a computer? It doesn’t matter whether it was DOS with Norton Commander or Windows. Anyway you had to learn how to find the necessary applications, how to execute them, once again it doesn’t matter whether you clicked on the folders and files on the blue background or used the Start menu. It’s important that you learnt the definitions or metaphors; you learnt that icon is an application or something else; you learnt that you have to click twice on it to open it and so on.

Having got used to those metaphors, we easily use a computer unless we face an application with a non-standard interface that confuses us because we have to learn again. More...

I was in the store the other day paying for my mobile phone. There was a middle-aged woman in front of me who was trying to pay for her mobile phone with the payment machine. This payment machine was recently installed, so it was difficult for some people to get used to it. Even I saw the machine for the first time. Anyway that woman was nervously trying to pay, however she even couldn’t go further than entering her phone number, since I hadn’t any experience with that machine as well, I advised her to read the manual that was under the button in the bottom of the screen. She got angry when she heard my advice. Then I noticed that she just didn’t fill in the region code, I told her about that, she didn’t listen, got angry and went away. More...