[thelist] win users poll

Ben Henick persist1 at io.com
Sat May 4 02:17:01 CDT 2002


On Fri, 3 May 2002, john-paul wrote:

> greetings all,
> I am new to this list, so... hello!
>
> I'd like to ask a little favor of all the windows users on this list. If you
> could take a minute to answer the following questions, it would REALLY help
> me out. I'm trying to determine the default, out-of-the-box setting for this
> option, for a site I'm working on, and I can't find the info anywhere.

Errr...

If you're wondering about out-of-box Windows environments, this list ain't
the best place to ask IMO (unless of course Web designers and developers
are your market).

As some of the data have indicated, Web developers tend to run
highly-tweaked development environments for the benefit of stability, and
don't necessarily have a lot of equipment set aside for testing.  And even
when you do test, "it depends."  (This last is the unofficial motto of the
professional user-experience field, AFAIC.)

I would suspect that you're going to find, for example, more people here
running IE5.5 than in your normal population of Windows early-adopters.

Why?  Because IE6 is a memory-leaking pig.  (Yes, it is MS's most
CSS-compliant browser to date, and has much better scripting facility than
Opera, its closest competitor in terms of CSS support.)

Likewise, Netscape 6 (Mozilla) is popular because it allows pop-under
denial and is quite a bit more secure than IE - both of which features are
important to folks who can't afford to get h4x0r'd, or have their time
wasted.  I've damn near switched for just these reasons, but resist that
change because I'm (sigh) comfortable with IE5.5.

> What is your text size is set to in Explorer (under View --> Text Size)?

"Smallest" ((screen.width == 1280) && (screen.height == 1024))

This last datum is extremely important, as the relationship between
resolution and size rendering is quite valid.

> Is this the default setting, or did you change it (if you remember)?

The install started life at "Medium" size IIRC.

> What version of Explorer are you running?

5.50.4807.2300

SP2 installed

> What version of Windows are you running?

Windows 98


--
Ben Henick
Web Author At-Large              Managing Editor
http://www.io.com/persist1/      http://www.digital-web.com/
persist1 at io.com                  bmh at digital-web.com
--
"Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?"
"I think so, Brain, but... (snort) no, no, it's too stupid."
"We will disguise ourselves as a cow."
"Oh!" (giggles) "That was it exactly!"





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