Slashdot Mirror
MSIE 7 May Beat Longhorn Out The Gate
Quantum Jim writes "InternetNews.com reports that a major upgrade for Microsoft Internet Explorer may be imminent. Apparently in response to the recent mass migration away from MSIE, top Microsoft developers have been soliciting for improvements in the old browser at a web log and at Channel 9, an aggregate journal previously discussed by /.. InternetNews.com speculates that improvements could possibly include support for tabbed browsing, better security, more PNG and CSS compliance, and RSS integration (which Firefox and Opera Mail already support). Go competition!"
The truth is that he's right.
The vast majority of users have no idea what HTML, CSS, PNG, or almost any other 'computer thingie' is. All they know is that Internet Explorer is The Internet.
Of course, the fact that they're right doesn't mean that this is a good excuse for not writing secure software. Even if users don't care about security (many don't even care if their computer ends up as part of a botnet), they could at least write secure software.
I think what Iliad is saying here is that consumers really don't care if their browser supports de facto fringe standards. I wish CSS and PNG support (as well as some stable ECMAScript, etc.) were supported, but that's not the name of the game. As long as MSN and Google and ESPN and Craigslist and Slashdot (insert longer list of highly traffiked web sites here) work in IE as-is, there is no reason for IE to change. And there is no reason for those sites to change unless IE changes. (Here I open myself up to charges that increased usage of other browsers like FireFox and Safari could force those sites to change... that's another discussion)
Until recently, security really wasn't an issue for typical web users. I've had people send me credit card information and passwords over standard email. I've pointed out to other people that the web form with which they're submitting their personal or financial information is not secure. I've always tried to get my friends and family to use other browsers because using IE just isn't safe. In all these cases, I generally get a vacant stare, because unless their credit card number is stolen, or somebody assumes their identity, they don't care. Those millions of users Iliad mentions are part of that vacant-stare category. Sure, if Microsoft had a corporate culture more like Google's, they would have internal pressure to fix these problems and be standards-compliant. But MS only feels the pressure when there are financial reasons for doing so.
Web developers would prefer to code web pages in one cross-platform, cross-browser syntax, but thanks to Microsoft's indifference in the matter, web developers have to endlessly tweak things so it looks OK in IE as well as whatever browsers their target audience may be using. Given that the target audience for most web sites are IE users, and given that proprietors of those commercial web sites are more interested in making money than some philosophical desire to be standards compliant, whatever MSIE supports becomes the standard.
Slashdotters know that universal support for CSS would be good. We also know that PNG is a legally pure image format. But in the world of PHB-controlled e-commerce sites and the typical demographic that visit their sites, PNG and universal CSS come second (or third, or forth,
In any event, it seems that the reason Microsoft is going to release 7.0 before Longhorn is because of security concerns. CSS and PNG aren't necessarily related to that.
I remember Microsoft making the statement that IE6 would be the last standalone version..
Guess control of the market is more important then sticking with your promises...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How did this get modded up? Carnot Cycle engines are the most efficient heat-cycle engine there are. Until you come up with something to replace it (ie. a process that generates electricity from fuel directly, that is more efficient than a Carnot Cycle engine), it is the pinnacle. There is and cannot be anything better.
More info here
Quote:
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Actually, the easiest 'fix' I can think of for MSIE would be for them to release an update that merely includes IE7.css as the default CSS file (read before it reads any site's CSS file). That would fix the vast majority of CSS compliance problems (and PNG, too, if I recall correctly). They also need to pay Dean Edwards a million bucks for this thing, too - not even a rounding error to MS, really.
Well, MSDN front page has an article with code to build your own custom web browser with tabs and an integrated link to a search engine.
You don't need to buy anything for this. Visual C# express is a free download
actually many people i know (non-tech types) have switched because they like tabs, popup blocking, and no more goddamned mother fucking purple gorilla
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Opera had this first, didn't they?
FYI, Hixie is one of the main Mozilla developers.
As the W3C says:
Cheers,
Jason
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
here's a list of what gecko (the rendering engine of Mozilla) supports, and what not.
> (a) why this happens
It's an error in some min-width computation code in Gecko.
> (b) why it only happens occasionally
Because it's only an error in the incremental reflow code; if the initial layout happens early enough, the problem is not hit.
> (c) whether anyone is working on fixing it?
It's been fixed in trunk Gecko since April. It's not fixed on the stable Firefox branch yet, and probably won't be because the fix leads to problems of its own on some sites.
And notice that he doesn't say to not use XHTML in that document, he does say that, in his opinion a) it's not worth the trouble at the moment because of the bad support for it in browsers b) don't do it unless you're going to do it correctly (and it's not as easy as many people think it is).
But how do we ever expect to get the browser makers on board if we don't use it? I'm currently using apache's content negotiation to serve out strict XHTML1 as text/html (for IE) or application/xhtml+xml (for non-IE) as described here, and it works nicely on both gecko based browsers as well as IE6.
IE hasn't been based on mosaic since 3.0. 4.0 was a complete rewrite.
Also, as a developer, you have complete access to the DOM via COM. There are a variety of third party tools that give you this capability. IE was a more developer centric than Netscape was, until the advent of mozilla. The script debugger alone was a thing of beauty. Not to mention some niceties if you were stuck developing an IE only intranet solution (behaviors, etc.).
And XUL isn't so novel as to be claimed as an original thought on behalf of the developers of mozilla. It's a fairly natural advancement of HTML, although, arguably, it could be designed a little more simply. But to say Avalon is a rehash of XUL is pretty dumb.
When slashbots say "Code to Standards!" they really mean "Code to Standards that Mozilla supports." (Some of us can recall when CSS was unpopular in this crowd because it was "IE-only".) Anyway, it's perfectly possible to build a "standards-compliant" site that doesn't show a pixel in Mozilla.
I concur entirely. I wrote a website that rendered well in IE, and even passed the W3C validator. When complaints arose over poor rendering in Moz, I had to go out of my way to haxor the code so that it would render in Moz. When it rendered fine in Moz, IE rendering was haxored apart.
Long story short, I spent 4 hours tweaking the site to a happy medium between IE and Moz, while still maintaining W3C Compliance.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Do you mean something like the Mozilla ActiveX control?
And it works in IE like any other ActiveX (the webpage is not that clear as you can use the control in any Windows application), we did some tests for a project some months ago.
Additionally, even in June, it should be noted that Mozilla has regained substantial marketshare, nearly reversing the losses that the Netscape codebase had suffered since 2002. Way to go.
Mozilla is doing well in all its forms. The Google figures if you look closely, indicate a general increase of Internet Explorer 6 is mostly at the expense of other versions of IE. Mozilla and "Other" are actually slowly gaining.
AND this was before the latest security advisories hit.
AND Netcraft has issued an advisory indicating that banner ads could be used to spread malware.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Both my mozilla and opera say they are IE6.
Why? I use both Mozilla and Opera and I rarely need to make them masquerade as IE. Make your browsers say who they really are, this'll show up in access logs and make webmasters pay attention.
Having said that, mass migrations involve non-techy users. Most regular users won't bother to change the browser's ID. If people really are switching to other browsers (I know a couple who have), it will show up in server stats.
You see if you examine your opera useragent string closely you will see that the word Opera definitly is there. I myself filter it out to get some really usable statistics (IE users vs IE pretenders) and I doubt I am a better coder then Google.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ever heard of cross-browser compatiility? It is possible to achieve, and if you are failing to do that then you are myopic at best, at worst lazy in you approach and I sure as hell would never hire you.
"It's not just what you say, no it's mostly how you feel it." - Tim Buckley.
I never used Hypercard, but I don't doubt it was influential. However, according to the original proposal for the WWW, TBL was more inspired by his earlier work with Enquire in 1980. This was seven years prior to the first release of Hypercard and the hypertalk programming language. I think that JavaScript and the DOM event model have more in common with hypertalk than the original vision for the WWW. And what about the contributions of Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. Surely they were more influential!
Well, I really disagree! JavaScript is a wonderful programming language. Little things like dynamic typing, Self-like prototypes, and object/dictionary equivalence makes it easy to do really powerful things. I find it a real pleasure to work with.
You're describing the Internet as a whole. The WWW is mainly about document-like information; that's what most of it is! Web apps are a relatively small part. (Note that there are hybrids, like /. and similar forums.)
Isn't that how the W3C works? Companies submit their "paradigm" to the consortium. The W3C works on a compromise. Companies implement the compromise along with their "paradigm". And due to a recent (long overdue) change in their policy: when there are at least two implementations, the compromised paradigm becomes a ratified specification. I still don'w understand: what's your beef?
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome