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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!"
It's somewhat ironic that the competitor Microsoft thought they had killed, Netscape, is now again, in the form of the now open source Mozilla and it's variants, the biggest threat to IE.
And, also, the re-rise of that competitor is bringing out the first major feature additions to IE in years...
Well, firefox was able to grab my interest before IE. Even with the new features, I will stick with firefox because of the community that maintains it.
I totally hear that. Browsing is definitely an area where innovation is to be embraced, not quarantined and hardened. The promise of always being ahead of IE technology is enough to keep me with Mozilla.
But I don't understand the point of "The Browser Wars".
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Microsoft is finally making some long over due improvements.
But........
If everyone stops using IE and moves to Mozilla/Opera/whatever, Microsoft's loss in revenue is exactly zero.
If everyone abandons other browsers and uses IE exclusively, Microsoft's increase in revenue is exactly zero.
So what's the point of all this?
If MSIE 7 runs on each of those platforms, I might consider supporting it too.
The June Google Browser graph shows an interesting turn in IE's share. Now, is it like previous "bumps" where IE quickly rebounded, or is this the sign of an actual turn? I hope they release the July figures soon.
Joe Consumer says, "Why should I upgrade now to the Firebird/Fox/Whatever thing, when Microsoft *promises* to release a new version of IE soon??"
I didn't buy their request for user feedback. I'm sure they know exactly what is wrong with their browser. They're not stupid, just evil.
It doesn't matter whether they add tabbed browsing, RSS feed integration or any other interface improvements as long as they support XHTML1.1/CSS2 and the recommended modules of CSS3. If users want features they can easily switch to Opera but as a web developer I have no choice but to make my pages work in IE. So until IE fades out of common usage or it is updated to support current standards, the development of the web be halted and we'll be stuck with 1990s web technology.
People don't care what's under the hood ... if they did, we wouldn't be using hideously inefficient Carnot Cycle engines to run our vehicles and most of our power plants after all this time. It's good enough that the car starts every morning and gets them to work on time.
HOW automobiles (or any other piece of sophisticated technology) actually work will forever remain a mystery to the bulk of the population. However, a manufacturer whose cars had a reputation of being to be easy to break into might have problems in the marketplace.
I think that is what is happening to Explorer. I have had an increasing number of people in recent months start asking me questions about Internet Explorer, security in general, and alternatives to Explorer in particular. I think that's great, and I do what I can to get them thinking about the subject. The recent rather well-publicized CERT recommendation to switch away from IE certainly had a lot to do with it. So don't completely underestimate the ordinary computer user: the problem is more lack of awareness than anything else.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I mean, exactly what is it about marking a site that makes it "favorite"?!? Consider for example doing research on euthanasia (sp?)... would that someone sits down to use your browser and sees that you have five references to sites describing or providing "howto's" for euthansia. Are these really semantically "favorites"? I don't think so. It's really an example of how cute MS gets, but doesn't get the semantics. Netscape, Mozilla, and all of the other browsers got it right when they provided "bookmarks". The metaphor is apt, and not overreaching.
Just my $.02, and probably offtopic.
My problem is that there is not IE stanard. There is no such thing as making a site MSIE compatible. You can make it work with the exact version on your desktop and test on others but if you are outside the w3c specs and a FEW very limited things that ms says it supports then you are dealing with quirks and the quirks tend to be very specific in too many circumstances.
So far I have found the best way to actually get a page to render acoss a large various of MSIE 5.x and 6.x systems is to write the pages to xhtml 1.0 strict and css 1 and just use the subset of css that IE actually supports. The reason for the xhtml 1.0 strict is that then you can run a simple checker on the document and make sure every tag is properly closed. I know with html soup that IE renders a document as that it should not matter but it does in practice. Well formed html just renders more consistently across the range of IE browsers.
It is stuff like this that web designers want everyone to follow the standards. It is a pain in the neck to program for each browser quirk especially when it changes so much between even minor bug fix versions. At least for opera, konqueror, mozilla, safarri, firefox etc I can write xhtml 1.0 strict and CSS2 and have it render nearly identically in all of them with only a few things that can't be used due to bugs. MS not adhering to standards makes sites cost more to write, more to maintain, more to test etc.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
So there's a mass migration away from IE.
From the stats gathering we do on our site, I have yet to see that. Oh sure there's a slight rise but that's not enough to convince marketing etc. Mind you, the 3rd party we use is crap for browser analysis but we're stuck using it because everyone in the industry does.
Are there some reliable browser metrics out there? Your own site stats don't count...
Otherwise, as another poster stated, people will simply wait for MS to level the field with the rest of the browsers and keep using what they have.
Interesting questions, interesting challenges... Are there enough resources? Is there enough people/creativity/motivation/discipline (no bickering, forking and what not) to keep MS at bay? Can the F/OSS community focus on the users and develop widely accepted, non-controversial(*) extensions?
Exciting times - I can hardly wait to see what happens!!
(*) The reason I mention this is because FireFox has this ad blocker... Which is good and all, but at some point someone will point that out as something bad. Even if it still hits the advertiser's servers... Joe Consumer will be under the impression that this is not a "good" browser, developed by "good" people. Remember, chances are Joe Consumer does not care about adverts. And companies may find an excuse to indulge in more yummy FUD :( Fear the media, people...
The revolution will not be televised.
I'm a mozilla fanboy myself, but I'd have to say that this is a welcome update. It always felt a bit odd that MS didn't update their browser - almost as if they weren't allowed to do so by DoJ.
Incidentally, that little factoid about the mass migration away from IE? It's not true. At least not according to my website statistics.
To say that "Firefox is compliant" is a joke. Firefox aka Gecko is more compliant, but don't be fooled into thinking that it renders everything right all the time. It certainly doesn't. Not to say IE is better.. it's not.
Unluckily, the W3C has made a complete mess of web standards. To the point that there are so many barely used, misunderstood, unclear, ambigious, and depreciated standards that figuring anything out at all is an accomplishment of some scale.
If Microsoft's IE team comes up with a nifty new feature that makes surfing the net easier, I can see two possible scenarios: 1) Microsoft patents the feature making it exlcusive to IE 2) the feature is quickly copied into Firefox by either the MozDev team or an enthusiastic extenstion developer. Without patenting features, how can Microsoft keep Internet Explorer superior to its competitors feature-wise? I suppose plug-ins exist for IE to include mouse gestures and tabbing and such, but are these as much of a threat to Firefox and Opera?
As a web developer / designer, I've been using Mozilla and the like for a long time. But what interests me is what the majority of people use - I need to design stuff that works for everything. Since Explorer has ALWAYS been a pain when it comes to CSS compliance, myself and every designer out there have had to bend over backward to write code that has all these little IE fixes built in. I'm sick of having to play with code and then check both Netscape and Explorer for consistency. Please, oh please, give IE 7 some decent fricken CSS compliance!! That way, I will KNOW that it will all look the bloody same, just like it should for pete's sakes.
I'm not sure why some enterprising mozilla/firefox nut hasn't made an activex plug-in for IE that causes the browser to render all pages using a "gecko plug-in". For example, if I came to slashdot (using IE like I normally do) and the page prompted me to install the "Gecko HTML rendering engine", I'd do it. Just like all those the masses that install spyware because they don't know any better.
As a side note, the only reason that I don't use Firefox is that it locks up when I access slashdot (on both home and work PCs, unfortunately). I'd use Mozilla but it just doesn't look/feel like a Windows app. I guess that I'll keep waiting.
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If you can come up with something better than "Uhhh Firefox sucks!" then the Mozilla developers would love it if you could tell them about your problem.
I'd bet any issue you can come up with is either difficult and being worked on, something which is totally unused and therefore possibly lacking dots on is or not even complete but still implementing 99% of it all
Unfortunately Slashdot isn't the place to get anything done on Mozilla but a lot of the devs will jump to fix a bug in bugzilla with a simple testcase that explicitly demonstrates the problem. We look forward to your contribution.
and somehow IE7 will introduce exploits through malformed CSS, and PNG streams! Can't wait for a "hole" new set of flaws!
Hey MS, do us all a favor and at least make "100%" mean 100% in the CSS spans.
There's an analogy here to do with Xerox and the photocopier, which I think is quite relevant:
When the photocopier was first developed and Xerox began marketing it to businesses, it took a lot of effort because the bosses couldn't see the point. From a PHB's perspective, there's not a lot of point in having a machine to duplicate documents. After all, whenever a boss wanted a copy of a document they would hand it to the secretary who would re-type it, perhaps with a few sheets of carbon paper.
Xerox eventually sold it to businesses by proposing to simply install the photocopier for free, and only charge for the copies that were made using it. Many more PHB's then accepted it, and it immediately became a fantastic tool for the secretaries who no longer had to struggle through typing and re-typing entire documents just to make identical copies. It was only at this point that its usefulness really became apparent to a lot of bosses, who realised that the availability of a photocopier was letting their staff spend time on other things. Really the end customer (PHB) wasn't interested in the photocopier, but by providing it they made someone else's job much easier which resulted in a better service.
I guess if Microsoft wants to market standards compliant CSS and PNG support, they should be marketing it at the people to whom it'll mean the most. ie. The developers. Those are the people whom it's going to benefit most immediately, after all: not the end customer. If there are enough websites and web applications out there that require IE7 and assuming Microsoft makes it easy to get, it really shouldn't be much of a problem.
The Zeitgeist is from June, before the major effect of the advisories was felt. On my site, IE has slipped a couple percentage points in the past couple months (and it's not a tech site).
At the library where I'm tech-support, I've installed Mozilla and it auto-launches to the library's homepage on reboot.
I've also posted an explanation on the desktop entitled Read Me.
I have left IE on the desktop for the diehards, mostly to keep the complaint level down.
What I've found: Some people love it (there are one or two who want Opera) . Others just use what's in front of them. Still others re-arrange and delete the Mozilla icon (which re-appears on reboot).
*Shrug*. We've got some people who do online banking and ebay and whatnot and insist on IE. It's not like the IE fans haven't been warned.
These computers also have OpenOffice. There have been *O* complaints, just questions whether it will open and save Word files. Yes...yes, you can!
Shameless plug: Deep Freeze. Let them screw with the computers to their hearts' content. Power-cycle or soft reboot and it goes back to normal.
--
BMO
1. Printing. They've never fixed the problem of text overflowing the right margin and getting cut off, leaving a worthless print.
2. While it's a minor thing, how is it that IE can eventually forget every site icon? I mean, really...come on guys....
The Real way to get to a browser war is if developer's simply started coding web sites with only Mozilla/Opera/Safari Compliance in mind.
Just like in the old says, when we had the Netscape Now buttons.
But no one is going to hurt their ROI just because they want to hurt microsoft.
But i dunno if some major news sites, were like, you need Mozilla to view this site. Who Knows?
Problem is the people CSS is intended to save. Dial up users. How can they get their hands on Mozilla. AOL needs to use their CD distribution program for something good. i.e Mozilla!
Of course whenever i say mozilla i mean firefox.
So in IE7 slashdot will be screwed up and displaying over to the right hand side inside a black background with black text?
Speaking of which, does anyone know (a) why this happens, (b) why it only happens occasionally, and (c) whether anyone is working on fixing it? I would have guessed that Taco and Jamie and so forth use Firefox, but maybe not. [shrug]
May we never see th
That "filthy' khtml is the base for Konqueror web browser. This browser treats anything available as a KIO slave the same.
Once I wondered why on earth a browser would have "tar this file with ark" in the actions submenu. I clicked it just to see what it would do. It downloaded the file, zipped it, then attempted to upload it (but failed as I didn't have write access to the site).
So.. it seems like KDE has the ability to do what you want, anyway.
The Windows API has had two MAJOR updates in the past 20 years (from Win16 to Win32 to .NET) and many minor ones.
Best Buy can have you arrested
No, use CSS whenever you need (or want) to say how something's displayed. Use Javascript whenever you need (or want) a page to be dynamic (but don't use it for things that you can accomplish with CSS/HTML!). And yes, as you say, HTML 4 still works. Just make sure your html is semantic.
It was originally designed that way, but now it is quite useful for documents, small programs (like rot13ing text, or something on a similar scale) and web applications (where a user interacts with a program that is actually on the server by means of a web browser and an html interface)
The other stuff you wrote was good, though.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Really, why do Slashdot story submitters have to have such completely and deliberately inaccurate stories?
Because they want the bragging rights of having their story published. They believe the wilder the story is the more likely it'll go to the front page. The editors like wild stories because, well... Slashdot's simply become "News at 10" minus the sex.
Yeah, I've been dealing with cross browser compliancy for the past month and have spent an equal amount of time slamming my head against my monitor for firefox and IE. Granted, Firefox was a lot more compliant than IE, there were still several things that bugged the ever-living crap out of me, namely funky rendering of padding on div's that have a width of 100%.
:(
:( even if its crappy rendering all around the house
To add another degree of fun, I then decided to test my site in opera... and safari... and IE for the Mac... and KDE...
Everything renders fine now... but my code is so fubar that I'm glad I'm using a template engine to output data
I sure do wish people would stick to at least some standard...
So where are the Slashdot browser stats? I'd be very interested.
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is Firefox locking up when you use ctrl+shift+tab?
2
if so it'll be this: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24352
You're describing the design goals for Java or the X Window System. However, that's not for what hypertext was meant. The World Wide Web is about transferring documents - not programs.
*sigh*
Do you know the relevant history behind the development of the WWW? Do you know why web browsers show a little hand with a finger pointing out when you hover over a link even today? It's because of the software the web was modelled after. Hugely influential and revolutionary software by Bill Atkison. Software for creating little 'page' (card) based 'applications'. That was where the initial inspiration came from.
Like many others I'm sure I was creating networked, linkable and editable wiki style 'sites' with it before the WWW, the only major difference was it was with proprietary software. TBL saw HC and was inspired by it. I think it entirely possible he wouldn't have bothered with creating HTML had HC not been proprietary.
Today, web applications are all around us. They are revolutionising the way we live. They are a big deal. The only reason TBL's implementation is not is good at allowing people to create web applications as Bill Atkison's inspirational software is that TBL didn't know how (or have the resources/inclination) to implement many of the relevant features, and they missed the boat on having a half decent scripting language so Netscape assumed dominance with the god awful JavaScript to fill a niche, by then it was too late, we were stuck with a Turkey.
People are spending vast amounts of time and money building web apps. Huge financial resources are put into it each year by corporations building web apps for customers, online stores, B2B and users build web apps just for fun. So much futile effort and man power could be better spent if we just had a decent implementation of a standard for that, but we don't so expensive investment in working around this gaping whole in the current technology is the norm. It's really quite insane, especially when you've experienced a highly equivalent way of doing the same thing that's so much better.
The WWW is not about simply 'sharing documents' (do not listen to your inner hobgoblin who tells you otherwise), it's about sharing information - the exchange of information - and that's a two way process, and for that, you need an interface that facilitates that.
Oh and don't worry - I know how Internet standards bodies like the W3C typically work and I think it's surely painfully obvious to those who still don't get it that its a poor way to make standards. I know many will disagree, but to them I point out the result of the current system - we live in a world of half baked web and network standards the implementations of which are rarely actually compatible.
The sad testiment is that today, proprietary reverse engineered solutions are usually better at providing interoperability that competing platforms are at implementing identically functioning standards based systems!
It's a shameful mess for a technically competent society to be in.
As the bunny icon used to say '"Subvert the dominant paradigm!"
The WWW has alas been crippled by a lack of vision since the W3C's inception. It's too bad there are not more Bill Atkinson's to go round.
They seem to be under the impression that PNG alpha and CSS support are solely in the interests of web developers.
I am no professional when it comes to web design - I'm not going to tailor a site for IE, so if they start to support accepted standards it's purely a bonus for the visitor (or "customer")
Also, if I was a Microsoft customer I would be inclined to find the statement from the article insulting. Back when I was a MS customer I did want things like CSS and PNG support - that's why I used Mozilla. That they assume a zero level of knowledge just because I use their products is probably why I stopped using their products.
Bottom line: Standards support? Don't bet on it - Microsoft didn't get where they are today by supporting open standards, they prefer to invent them.
I am a web developer and we DO tailor our sites for IE. When 95% of your viewers are using IE...
It would be stupid not to at least make sure a site works/looks right in IE. But that doesn't mean it can't also be standards-compliant and work in other browsers.
The motto on one of my sites is: Best viewed in a standards compliant browser, but also works in IE. After making it standards compliant, I then made the necessary tweaks to work around IE rendering quirks... and yes, the motto is there to be funny, but it's funny because it's true.
I just find it funny that, since IE 4.0, no major features have been added, and many bugs/quirks remain. Having the majority of the market there was no reason to innovate, until now (hell, IE is about the only browser without tabbed browsing and popup blocking). Competition is good...
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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.
I have to wonder if the average user really understands these advisories though. I mean, they always refer to an Outlook exploit as an "email virus".
Even worse, and almost made me sick, was when my cousin said the other day: You're still using Google? Didn't you hear about the Google virus? I just banged my head on my desk for a while until he went away...
Though I have noticed more and more people on Firefox lately, I think most users don't understand the concept of a "browser", and rather than being scared of Microsoft software (as they should) they are scared of the Internet and computers in general.
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The example I gave was just that - an example. For every measuring method you can suggest, there is a way that usual usage skews the data.
To use your example of counting only the results page: Internet Explorer screws up HTTP. RFC 2616 states that hitting the back button should show exactly what the user saw last, and should not reload the page. Internet Explorer, at least under some circumstances, reloads the page.
What this means is that, for a typical scenario of a user searching for something, clicking on the first ten links in turn, and then hitting the back button after looking at each one, an Internet Explorer user is going to register as eleven hits compred with a single hit for a browser that conforms to RFC 2616.
And one other thing, I also feel you are being derelict in your duty if you do not do the utmost to explain to your clients the benefits of developing for cross-browser compatibility, after all even 1% of 100 million potential users is not a small number of alternative browser users, let alone 5%. IE may have the market share, for now, but it is not the be all and end all of browsers, in fact it's crap, and it's reputation is slowly but surely being eroded away In a few years time when we all finally see the alternatives take over, you'll be wondering where to plug in your activex controls.
"It's not just what you say, no it's mostly how you feel it." - Tim Buckley.
What are you gaining by using XHTML if you're just jumping through more hoops to make it work? You can only serve documents as text/html while they meet the compatability profile (does the W3C validator check that you followed *that*?), which basically tries to keep it looking to browsers like malformed but parseable HTML 4; and that's exactly how they handle it. How is that better than having them handle well formed HTML 4.01 Strict sent with the proper MIME type with no extra complications dealing with Accept headers and content types?
For the record, I once bothered to do it properly. HTML 4.01 Strict to most clients; XHTML 1.1 to clients which claim to accept it. Costs a bit of string matching, a small XSLT and a lot of testing.
The benefit? Uh, well, I got on the X-Philes and learnt some stuff about XHTML; namely that it's not really worth using in most circumstances.
amen, brother!
There are some things that are kinda tricky to get working in Lynx, but when you have them working, you often have a page that is better thought-out, and where the markup makes more sense for what you're trying to do.
Don't be fooled: IE6 will remain a pestulance for many years after IE7 debuts. There will be many people, influential people, who won't downloand IE7 because it's too big. Even if IE7 pulls some miracle and implements good CSS compliance, you're going to have to sense IE6 and below, and comensate for the damned thing.
Web apps might be a bit hackish, yes, but they're quite useful. Look, for example, at an airline booking site--that's a web app. So are eBay and Amazon. Can you think of any other reasonable way to allow everyone to book flights or buy stuff online? Web apps also drastically reduce the cost of developing and distributing the program in a corporate intranet.
Also, they're hackish because the languages used (namely HTML) weren't designed with web apps in mind and thus are missing a number of features that would be good for them. whatwg is trying to remedy that.
No, I didn't. Thank you. :-)
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.