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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."
IE PNG hack
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
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.
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!
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!