Does chess.com work with windows 8?

I'm afraid to ask, since my next PC will undoubtedly come with Windows 8 MicroSofts latest attempt to wean us away from keyboards and mice and addict us to touch screen everything, even on desktop PCs...

So does chess.com work with Windows 8? If anyone out there is using Linux do you recommend Ubuntu and what Windows Emulator(s) if any do you use?

I believe Windows 8 supports browsers like Chrome, etc, so not sure why that OS would be a problem.

Chess.com is a web application. That ought to be independent from the OS. More important is the version of your browser. Chrome and Firefox are two very good browsers available on Windows and Linux. I never have problems with chess.com. It works all very smooth in Firefox.

I use Ubuntu, but I would only recommend it to people well known with some of the technology of computers. Ubuntu tries to be user friendly, but you will have to be able to adjust your system. If you are not afraid of using a command terminal and would like to know commands like 'ls -al', 'ps aux', 'chmod 660 -R /var/www' for instance, enjoy it. I will never return to Windows OS and will never leave Linux for the Mac anymore.

Windows Emulators let you connect to Windows OS. The only one I know is WINE. But why would you do that? Besides that it is a security issue is it unnecesairy. What can Windows do, what Ubuntu can not? Well, there are some things. There are broadcast companies who are so Microsoft minded that they require you to have Silverlight installed. That is Windows OS only. So there are programs you will not be able to see. And it seems to be that Windows is better in working with video's or something. Can be, don't know. I program in Java and PHP, both work better under Linux. Libre Office is better then Microsoft Office (and more user friendly in my opinion), TextEditor much better then Notepad. In the majority of the daily work is Ubuntu in my opinion faster, more reliable and easier to use then Windows. If however, you need to work with Windows, start it up directly, don't use something in between. You can also use a virtual machine by the way instead of an Emulator. I would prefer that, because you use the OS you need, but you do not have to leave the OS for daily use.

The OS factors in when you consider that Chess.com uses browser extensions like Java. However my experience with it has been the same as with windows 7. I think I remember reading that IE9 wasn't going to run plugins on Windows 8, but I know it does so maybe I misread, or they changed their mind. Another thing to consider is that the browsers (and a lot of software) have two modes, desktop mode and metro mode. They behave similarly, but in metro mode its more like mobile apps compared to desktop mode where it still shows the task bar, etc. I've never tried it, but perhaps pages render different in metro mode, though it seems unlikely.

I use ubuntu too and chess.com works fine. I have used Ubuntu on two of my laptops and apart from a few minor tweaks regarding screen brightness things have worked flawlessly after i installed nvidia and bumblebee together.

As for running windows... sometimes there are a few things that only a PC or Mac can do due to Apple being twirps and not releasing an iTunes for Linux, or in China where i live now, all the banks only seem to make their websites fully functional with Internet Explorer 8 !!

To get around these issues i don't use that awful piece of software called Wine... instead you can have a fully functional Windows without partitioning your hard drive by using VirtualBox.

VirtualBox is free and open source and is an excellent bit of kit as long as you have a .iso image of windows you can have windows running inside ubuntu in less than 15 minutes. I can sync my iPhone and use the prehistoric Chinese banking websites all day long on my Windows vbox!

I can second steve-matt's recommendation of VirtualBox; I use it myself to run Winduhs under OS X.

Additional benefit of virtualization is reduced vulnerability to malware (although nothing is perfect; search the web for, e.g., "virtualbox virus isolation" to get an idea).

So far, windows 8 will not run the "play vs. computer" app. I've tried IE9, Firefox and Chrome. There seems to be some problem with the java used to run the chess app. The chess.com support team is clueless about what to do.

@chrshale- what version of Java do you have? http://www.javatester.org

BTW, thanks for the reply!

Chris

Are you in desktop mode or start mode (with all the panels, etc)?

desktop