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Microsoft Is Planning To Renew IE Development
jm.one writes "In his weblog the Mozilla developer Gervase Markham (aka Gerv) points out that Microsoft is re-constituting the Windows IE team. You can save Mozillazine's bandwidth(they've been /.ed every day this week) by directly checking out this post at Dave Massy's WebLog at MSDN.
They even have set up an IE Feedback section in their channel9 wiki."
From the blog:
I can say though that somewhat vague requests for "better standards support" are not as useful as a specific example of what you'd like to see changed and specifically why it would improve things.
Jooleem. Get Addicted.
It's called the MPL
Just check out those links. That`s what (among others) is discussed in the wiki (I guess also in the forums, but I had no time and will to go there.
Dear Microsoft, Don't bother. I have Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, Camino and Thunderbird and they are all wonderful browsers that allow me to experience the web to its full extent. They are not integrated in the OS, so I don't have to worry too much about security issues with registry changes, ActiveX controls that do stuff I didn't ask for, spyware, adware and what have you. You can stuff your disregard of standards, where sites "created for IE" won't render properly in my browsers of choice. You can keep IE and put it where the sun don't shine. O, and keep Longhorn too 'cause I'm happy with my Linux and OSX. Regards, Cow
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
IE PNG hack
Until mozilla.org updates the browser to block the news ads and once again mozilla users are ahead of the curve and windows users have to wait until the next OS from Microsoft.
I've been using a firefox extension that stops all flash animations from starting and replace it with a box to click on to start the animation so I don't get any anoying flash ads.
And themes.
On the simple end, you can set a bitmap as the background of IE's toolbars. On the complex end, you can completely rewrite the UI (see MyIE2, Avant Browser, etc.).
And software plug-ins that block images.
There's no technical reason such a plugin doesn't exist today. IE exposes an interface that you can use to capture and modify/deny a request for everything it loads, including images. If you prefer going all out, IE itself can disable all images.
And making it possible to use the address bar to search from Google, *not* MSN.
Easily done. How else do you think all that spyware out there hijacks your browser's default search preferences?
Making it so that if I click on the back button while posting to Slashdot my post is still there.
Tools > Internet Options > Temporary Internet Files > Settings... > Change the value from "Automatically" to "Every time I start Internet Explorer".
You've got a couple valid points with your other items -- the ActiveX one in particular is already addressed in XP SP2, in fact.
NO CARRIER
Please keep things the way they are, thanks.
I gotta say, as much as people bitch about popups. The one popup we have to have on our site (damn sales) is by far the most successful ad we have.
Until people somehow become more intelligent, SPAM and Popups are not going to go away.
Advertisers wouldn't find ways around popup blockers if the popups didn't prove profitable.
I'm just saying, I hate them too, but hey if they work, they work.
-- taking over the world, we are.
5% might not sound like big competition, but it's growing, and it's starting on the software developer end, which is a cause for concern.
I'm using Linux (Fedora) and Mozilla Firefox right now. Thunderbird for email. And I have Windows XP, Office XP, Visual Studio.NET, etc. and have barely touched them since my switch to Linux. I use Visual Studio when required for homework assignments, and Microsoft products at work, but that's it.
OpenOffice is a little too slow for me personally. I use it when I need to, but Abiword and Gnumeric can serve most of my needs.
Most of the CS students I know at my college have switched to Linux. So 5% is pretty serious competition when it contains nearly half of the demographic that decides the future of software development.
I love it, so there goes your theory down the drain.
It's heavy, granted, but it's very cleanly done (specially when compared to MS-Word and Wordperfect, not so against Lotus' WordPro).
It's pretty by himself (though heavy, as I said), but one can make it look even better (see projects to adapt it to Gnome and KDE).
Could it be lighter? I don't know, but not loading the entire suite would help. MS-Office, besides the Windows startup pre-load, doesn't load Excel when Word is summoned up (or at least I've read so).
Will it be lighter? I believe so, just as happened to Mozilla in recent times...
Anyway, everyday new machines get mightier and old ones die, you know...
NOT a bullshit. Right, in the begining, it's clearly GoodEnoughWare. But later, when I found lot of functions which helped my productivity, I fell love with it.
Yes, I still want to load it faster, take less footprint in my system, be with more apps, be more correct, support much of Microsoft closed doc format. BUT I know that If I will (or at least 5% of those people who use it everyday) will help developers with bug reports and suggestions, I think it will succeed and everyone will love it.
So, actually, you are wrong. I love it because I see what it can became. In other corner, Microsoft Office have been stagnating for years. And each next version requires newer Windows version for perfect work, etc.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
what I see looking at the Google Zeitgeist is a steady upward trend for IE 6 since 2002 and overwealming dominance in 2004.
Dear Fellow AC,
:-
I could not disagree with you LESS.
Open Office does EVERYTHING I ask of it. However, the dear MS Office solution has a few minor problems (that Open Office doesn't). This includes
a) The ability to draw objects (circles/lines/etc.) that don't jump 20 pages away
b) The ability to count the correct number of pages (page counting??)
c) A normal.dot that works on any system i've ever seen
d) Reliable compatibility between different major revisions of Microsoft Office [eg. 97/2000/2003 are not very compatible with each other]
e) An open standard such that I can recover my document by renaming it to x.zip - and opening it with any ZIP program (eg. WinZip) to view with a TextEditor (eg. notepad)
f) The ability to generate PDF at the click of a button
Now, if you're going to tell me that Open Office suffers from these problems, I'd say "You obviously haven't tried Open Office" - as your comment strongly suggests.
To Joe Average: If you love pretty icons and bloatware -> Use Microsoft Products
To Anyone Else: If you prefer a tool that is flexible and easy to use -> Use Open Office
Sincerely,
Fellow AC
PS Please, please don't continue with the "compatibility" myth. I am forced constantly to change docs between Office2k and Office97 for work. Conversion success rate is LESS reliable than Open Office!!!!
IE really only has one major design flaw -- that you when you are the "local machine zone", there's no sandbox and anything goes.
Interesting point! And why is that? It's because they "integrated" the browser into the OS. Functions that used to be separate in the OS were integrated into the browser components. It makes a certain amount of sense; why duplicate the code that displays bitmaps? One for the browser and one for the OS; instaed, use the same for both. Except that when a vulnerability in the bmp display routines is uncovered, as one recently was, the vulnerabiltiy puts you smack in the middle of the OS, with unlimited access, because the browser is calling the same routines, at the same level, that the OS uses to display bmp icons on the desktop, fer chrissakes!
And this is a prime example of what needs to be redesigned, IMHO. And the entire class of these problems have a root cause; Microsoft didn't make these decisions based on anything except political reasons! They need to base decisions on good engineering, good software design practices, and throw the fscking politicians out of the coding process!
When IE5 came out, it was one of the most W3C standards-compliant browsers on the market. It was the only browser that had ANY reasonable support for DOM. CSS. and XML, and it's popularity is the many reason anyone cares about the W3C at all.
I suppose you'd be happier if MS pulled a Mozilla and spent 5 years writing the perfect browser -- in the meanwhile we'd be stuck with the mess left by IE4 and NS4.
More interesting is the fact that it was IE that first introduced the favicon idea...