so here's something that irritated the crap out of me recently. many of you have seen rants like this from me in the past, but with it being tax season and many folk in the thick of this crap, i figured i'd make a post here about yet another example of Lazy Programmers™ authoring tools with Idiotic Dependencies™.
folks who wish to use automated software tools in the processing or filing of their taxes are required to have Internet Explorer on their computer. Both of the two major applications in this market segment (Turbo Tax and H&R Block Tax Cut) appear to require this bloated piece of ass-ware to be installed... not just for purposes of filing things electronically with the IRS, but also to merely make the software function in any meaningful way under a win32 environment.
while this may not be a big deal for many folks out there, but for those of us who have been diligently and methodically replacing MSIE with Mozilla or FireFox on our relatives' computers over time, it's a huge pain in the fucking ass to hear everyone from Aunt Annabelle to Grandma May say things like "i couldn't file my taxes on my computer" or "i had to download and install IE from microsoft.com the other day" etc etc etc.
all the hard work of locking down and securing a windows system goes out the window when someone does a stock install of internet explorer. all the DLLs i've ripped out and all the registry changes i've made are all for naught if some bullshit application installs IE over again without even asking clearly.
how long do you think it will be before software vendors start treating internet explorer as an optional system component that not everyone has on their computers? do you think this will ever happen across the board? small companies are too lazy and stupid to bother to write whole applications anymore, borrowing IE components for script processing, table building, and data transfer over the 'net. large companies (like Intuit) i suspect are in cahoots with microsoft and will always require IE in order to force its presence on business machines that run tools like Quicken.
folks who wish to use automated software tools in the processing or filing of their taxes are required to have Internet Explorer on their computer. Both of the two major applications in this market segment (Turbo Tax and H&R Block Tax Cut) appear to require this bloated piece of ass-ware to be installed... not just for purposes of filing things electronically with the IRS, but also to merely make the software function in any meaningful way under a win32 environment.
while this may not be a big deal for many folks out there, but for those of us who have been diligently and methodically replacing MSIE with Mozilla or FireFox on our relatives' computers over time, it's a huge pain in the fucking ass to hear everyone from Aunt Annabelle to Grandma May say things like "i couldn't file my taxes on my computer" or "i had to download and install IE from microsoft.com the other day" etc etc etc.
all the hard work of locking down and securing a windows system goes out the window when someone does a stock install of internet explorer. all the DLLs i've ripped out and all the registry changes i've made are all for naught if some bullshit application installs IE over again without even asking clearly.
how long do you think it will be before software vendors start treating internet explorer as an optional system component that not everyone has on their computers? do you think this will ever happen across the board? small companies are too lazy and stupid to bother to write whole applications anymore, borrowing IE components for script processing, table building, and data transfer over the 'net. large companies (like Intuit) i suspect are in cahoots with microsoft and will always require IE in order to force its presence on business machines that run tools like Quicken.
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