I don’t have the Flash plugin, very much on purpose, so in Internet Explorer, every page with a flash element embedded in it causes me to get a pop up dialog box prompting me to download the plugin. There is no “never ask me to download this plugin again” option. If I disable the prompting for such plugins altogether (flash or otherwise), get this, it then gives me a popup info box that informs me that “some elements” of the page “will not display properly.”
Mozilla and Firebird control for all this and more beautifully, but smash my fonts together so much I can’t read them without getting a headache within an hour.
Outlook sucks in so many ways I can’t even enumerate them. The User Interface designers for Outlook should all become janitors.
Outlook Express allows malicious code to be executed from the preview pane, negating what would otherwise be a great feature.
To read RSS in my email client, OE, I have to use nntp//rss, but because of the limitations of OE’s main hierarchy which is constrained to -by server-, I cannot categorize the feeds.
Clever Cactus solves many of these problems by treating RSS and email in the same way and having (i believe) a safe preview pane. But it has a clunky UI, cumbersome config dialogs, and a lack of basic options like font specification. It’s in beta, not to mention built by one guy vs. M$’s thousands, so we don’t get upset about these things.
No one seems to be able to create a decent UI for calendars. No one. No one has actually created a UI that mimicks the old-fashioned date book, with intuitively-placed buttons for additional electronic features like collaboration. Outlook might be 75% there in functionality, but it’s as ugly as fuck and somehow it’s email features don’t even match OE’s?! WTF?!
You’d think that the calendar, being 1000’s of years old, and letters, being 1000’s of years old, and email, being 20 or so years old, and the web, being 10 or so years old, would have decent applications with decent UI’s by now. But no.
Let’s not even start on operating systems. Windows Explorer still, after all these years, doesn’t have an option to only copy newer files from one identically named directory to another. You have to copy everything if you want to update a backup. Windows Commander has had that feature since, like, 1995 or something. I could pick on all of the OS’s, too.