I hope MS pays you for making up excuses for them.
I agree; I cannot stand using Firefox or Chrome on the SP3. As an adamant anti-Internet Explorer user, I caved in and use the Metro IE exclusively. It's a wonderful browser for touch-based material (just wish I could get AdBlock on it).
What you need is this:
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
It blocks known ad and malware domains/IPs. Speeds browsing up much better than AdBlock plugins. Thank me later.
Yeah really office only has four to six functions... Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and a selection of Outlook, Access, Publisher... with sundry add-ins. should only take two weeks tops.When you think abut it, isn't all about money. When enough of these Surfaces get out sold, the demand will increase for good quality metro apps. I think we all can agree that desktop apps that are rebuilt as a metro app, work better and take more advantage of the Surface hybrid computer features. I haven't had an orgasm over the metro blocks interface (start page) but perhaps as time goes by all true metro apps will make better use of these blocks. Desktop apps certainly don't. Right now I wouldn't mind having my the metro front end look and play like the desktop.
Designing heavy weight metro apps must not be easy. I think Microsoft has been at rebuilding Office into a metro app for several years now and still haven't completed it. So perhaps heavy weight apps take a lot of time and that's why we don't see a metro Firefox or Chrome. Maybe their aren't any good high level programing tools out yet for building a metro app. I think it's way too early to kill metro yet. I guess when you think about it IE11 is the only killer heavy weight metro app around.
When you think abut it, isn't all about money. When enough of these Surfaces get out sold, the demand will increase for good quality metro apps. I think we all can agree that desktop apps that are rebuilt as a metro app, work better and take more advantage of the Surface hybrid computer features. I haven't had an orgasm over the metro blocks interface (start page) but perhaps as time goes by all true metro apps will make better use of these blocks. Desktop apps certainly don't. Right now I wouldn't mind having my the metro front end look and play like the desktop.
Designing heavy weight metro apps must not be easy. I think Microsoft has been at rebuilding Office into a metro app for several years now and still haven't completed it. So perhaps heavy weight apps take a lot of time and that's why we don't see a metro Firefox or Chrome. Maybe their aren't any good high level programing tools out yet for building a metro app. I think it's way too early to kill metro yet. I guess when you think about it IE11 is the only killer heavy weight metro app around.
As far as I know metro apps are designed in wpf; I know wpf. I'm planning on finding out how hard it really is to write metro apps.
You can write Metro apps in WPF, but you can also write them in HTML5 and javascript. The biggest thing coming from a WPF background is that it is using a different framework. Instead of .net it is WinRT and that takes a little getting used to. Plus a number of WPF elements are not available in WinRT.
I also come from a WPF background and I started working on my first Metro app. What I found the most difficult is the design constraints. Microsoft has released a 300+ page document of "best practices" for the Metro apps. This ensures that all of the apps look similar, which is a plus for the consumer, but a negative for the developer. The problem is that the UI is unique to the Metro platform so porting existing iOS or android apps is more difficult because you still have to make a number of UI changes to conform to the Microsoft way. This adds to time of the project and ultimately the cost which is why I believe Metro is not taking off as quickly as it could.
Just my .02...
Mike