IE7 Details Emerge

Varg Vikernes writes "Microsoft Watch has a story about new features we can expect in IE7 (code named 'Rincon') which they gathered through Microsoft's key partners. Apparently we can expect 32 bit PNG support, native IDN support, new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE and, of course, tabbed browsing. The new browser also will likely include a built-in news aggregator. Apparently an important factor is security."

Comments

security

[Eric Smith]

Apparently an important factor is security.

Though for real security, you'll have to wait for IE10, code named "Urysses".

Re:security

[listerine reborn]

Apparently an important factor is security. They talk the talk but they don't always walk the walk.

Re:security

[stfvon007]

There concerned with security because other more secure browsers like firefox are becoming more populer. They want a more secure position for their market share. Microsoft can be innovative, but they only do so when outside factors that threaten their market share force them to be.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically since Firefox is gaining ground in the browser war, Microsoft is forced to release IE7 in a hurry up mode. And in SE that means more bugs and security flaws.

Re:security

[Pandora's Vox]

my concern here lies with the implementation of IDN support... a solution has not been found for the browsers that already implement it (other than turning it off - not a reasonable trade-off for those who want to use IDN sites).

the original idn exploit:
http://www.shmoo.com/idn/

unicode draft technical report on security and UTF8:
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/tr36-2. html

Re:security

[LiquidCoooled]

Actually, a fairly reasonable visual tradeoff could be to display all extended characters in a different color.

For instance, if the extended characters were displayed in purple, but the normal characters remained black, then you could continue using it, and KNOW that its a mixed domain.

Infact, just typing that gives another solution, have mixed domains (std and extended) come up in a totally different size/style.

That way, all normal domains look normal, and all extended domains also look normal, but those using a combination are glagged as such.

just a thought.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

Security has always been an important factor.

Due to the lack of it!

Re:Security

[welshbyte]

blocked ActiveX & Java by default was a good move

For the sake of accuracy, its ActiveX and Javascript, not Java, that were blocked by default. Any removal of Java from IE is going to come years in the future and is due to a court decision and a very relaxed attitude to the timescale by Sun. Getting back on topic, i don't think a simple browser should even have to worry about a thing like permissions. This should be done at a higher level closer to the OS. If security is an issue with IE they need to strip any security handling from IE and put it where its most effective.

Re:security

[Pandora's Vox]

that's a very reasonable way of doing it, but i wonder if maybe making the location bar a different colour as FireFox does for secure sites might be a better - in the sense of more obvious - solution.

it's kind of funny, though, how it is essentially our (as in the mostly-north-american-and-western-european readership of slashdot)'s lack of familiarity with the writing systems of the rest of the world that are getting us into this particular pickle.

add that to bad eyes from gazing into a CRT for too many hours, and designers with predelictions for ever-smaller fonts, and you have quite the character set predicament.

Re:security

[Grishnakh]

Microsoft can be innovative, but they only do so when outside factors that threaten their market share force them to be.

No, they can't; they've never shown this before.

What you're seeing now isn't innovation, unless you're using some alternate definition of the word. They're simply implementing features that already exist in other browsers. That's "copying".

They may be "performing well", but don't confuse that with "innovating". You can do a marvelous job at implementing someone else's ideas, but that doesn't make you an innovator.

Re:security

[rikkards]

I think you would find that if there was only 1 provider of any product the company would not be motivated to spend money on improving it. Why spend money when no one is going to go elsewhere to get an alternative. Competition is the best thing for the consumer.

Re:security

[colnago]

Doesn't that make them non-innovative? i.e. adding secure features because someone else already did?

Re:security

[coopaq]

Apparently an important factor is security.

Wait... so you're saying it won't allow itself to install?

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

you are a fucking idiot.

Re:security

[LiquidCoooled]

I actually think it needs to be extended a little further. We could be on the right track with this, but certainly cannot be solved instantly (hence the delays in fixing within FF etc)

Its not just unicode wildly extended characters that need catering for, it is all characters which can be alternatives to standard characters.

We used to use full ascii, and unicode to allow us to have "normal" looking nicknames in the chatroom where I used to hang out, but still kept unique short names - for instance "liquid" can be entered as "líquíd".
To the passing eye, they are identical, but they have been modified.

At what point would you cut it off, and how would you determine the domain characteristics.

The original paypal.com example can be modified numerous times to similar effect.
paypál.com or paypa1.com.

If the bar changes too often, then the user will ignore it.
If it doesn't display often enough, then things will be missed.
Hence my original show the various types of characters in various colours (extended further)

Black = Normal flat 7bit text.
Blue = Numerics.
Red = 8 bit ascii.
Purple = extended Unicode.

You could even put a throbber on for mixed type domain words.
We cannot rule out colorblindness, so would have to come up with some alternative to cater.

Re:security

[ockegheim]

Don't knock "Urysses". He returned after after twenty years and almost single handedly killed all his wife's suitors. So if IE went to the wilderness a couple of years ago, say, the competing browsers will have a lot to worry about in ummm... 2023.

Re:security

[AlphaSys]

Pay attention. He said they *could* be innovative, not they *are* here. You're conflating the two. They have shown innovation (not all of it good, but nonetheless...).

Re:security

[snorklewacker]

So basically you want numerics to show up as the link color, unicode to show up as the visited link color, and you want people to just differentiate this stuff at a glance? Fabulous.

Maybe banks and other sites need to implement real goddam security instead of the rest of the net having to do it for them. Passmark, securid fobs, validators compiled into the client, something other than a bloody username and password.

Right now, these sites want us to authenticate to them, well how about them authenticating to us? Then I don't care how similar a domain name looks.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent ideas, but I think you have to break down unicode into language blocks for it to really work.

Under your scheme there could e.g. be an all-cyrillic unicode IDN that looked identical to an all-korean unicode IDN (both all purple!).

OK - I know that specific example won't work, but you get the idea... you have to make language blocks look distinct from each other as well as from ASCII!

Re:security

[BitwizeGHC]

Fact: Microsoft has lots of money.

How many Alan Kays or Tim Berners-Lees could be hired with the immense pile of wealth they've reaped off the Windows/Office juggernaut? A lot. Lots of money means the potential to be hella innovative by hiring the right people.

In fact, Microsoft already has some top-notch researchers working for them (the inventor of Haskell, I believe, is among them) and they *could* turn that stuff into product; they choose not to for profitability and empire-maintenance reasons. Should their empire crumble they would by necessity go into shark mode: move forward (innovate) or die.

Re:security

[Ithika]

If you mean Philip Wadler, he works at Edinburgh University. He lists himself as the "principal designer".

Re:security

[LiquidCoooled]

I agree wholeheartedly that secure sites should be secure, but I am attempting to put a voice to a simple idea.
Making changes to firefox or the browsers will surely be easier to impliment than going to each and every website out there and telling them to change all the code they have up there at the moment to something that hasn't been confirmed as globally viable to the customers.

Miss one site, and the spammers will hit that one.

The address bar is the only place in your browser that IS static, that IS a flat color. I'm not talking about coloring the links as they are displayed on the page, but in the address bar at the top.

I want to be proactive and give myself a fighting chance at not being a victim.
I don't personally do much financial stuff online, and certainly not without checking the company out first, my idea just allows ME to instantly identify a possible problem at a glance.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't the people. Microsoft hires smart people, from the creator of the Delphi programming language or an ACM graphics genius. (The C# has nothing on Java or Delphi *cough*.) The problem is the work environment. It is not a suitable research ground for these bright new hires. Somehow, these brilliant people don't continue the research they love and are instead guided by the opinions of marketroids and other less-talented idiots. Instead of researching and developing ideas that could eventually revolutionize the industry, these people end up forced to develop lack-luster gimmicy software that will end up as fads. These products may turn a short-term profit but will not withstand the test of time.

Re:security

[LiquidCoooled]

Your right, I'm thinking from an English perspective, and 99.9% of the domains I will ever visit will be 7bit ascii.

Perhaps it would be possible to link it to the current code page - domains in the page of your country are displayed just as the 7bit ones are on my machine, but "foreign" pages are the ones displayed differently.

Its the same principal as me automatically blocking spam from Eastern IP ranges - it works perfectly for me, because I know nobody from that part of the world, and if people are contacting me from there, then its not wanted.
Somebody in Chine would have the opposite situation where most local mails will be from the Eastern IP ranges, but (for instance) American mails could possibly be flagged.

The more I talk about this, the more I think a FF extension would be in order.
I should perhaps go hide away and see what I can come up with.

Re:security

[thisisauniqueid]

...and for real standards compliance, you'll have to wait for IE20. Or maybe IE21. By that time no web developer on the face of the planet will have any hair left.

Re:security

[datafr0g]

Hey, Microsoft does innovate.... they innovate crap!
Where'd you think the talking paperclip comes from?
Too bad it's more annoying and offensive than any other piece of software in existance, but it's still innovation.
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/innovation.sh tml#talking

Re:security

[datafr0g]

Oops... looks like that was stolen too.. oh well.

Re:security

[jejones]

"Rincon" is Spanish for "corner."

Re:security

[superyooser]

That is a not a good solution.

Re:security

[LiquidCoooled]

Thank you :)

I have just about worked out the similar problems as the linked article raises, but still feel that in my personal case I will do something.

The article is right about users getting confused and disabling it, and its not a clean cut problem.
The glyphs displayed are complex, and in my eyes difficult to differentiate. Without *something* to help I fear I may fall victim.

By implimenting something as a firefox extension, I could allow those people who want protecting to have a fighting chance at spotting things :)

Re:security

[DA-MAN]

Actually, a fairly reasonable visual tradeoff could be to display all extended characters in a different color.

I'm color blind you insensitive clod . . .

Re:security

[plague3106]

You mean like Ma Bell?

Re:security

[Pandora's Vox]

right on topic: bruce shneier, my favourite security wonk, just wrote a great piece about the failure of two-factor identification, especially when it comes to fishing. a very worthwhile read, as is all his stuff that i've read :-)

Re:security

[LiquidCoooled]

You aren't not totally blind though, look here

You could even put a throbber on for mixed type domain words.
We cannot rule out colorblindness, so would have to come up with some alternative to cater.

I'm not insensitive :)

Re:security

[Pandora's Vox]

as in "backed into a corner", one might suppose :-)

Re:Security

[Dalroth]

Clearly you have no idea how to write secure software. Security is a concern that must be taken into account everywhere, every step along the way.

It's either built into your DNA or it isn't and if it isn't good luck retroactively fixing your DNA.

Security belongs in the browser, in the OS, at the door when you walk into the building, everywhere, otherwise it simply doesn't work.

Bryan

Re:security

[garroo]

IE? Security? Does this mean they are ripping ActiveX from the browser/engine?

How long before a Mozilla-based browser gives me the ability to rip out MSHTML from the OS!?!?

That's what I'm talking about! Security through OS modification!

Now, if we can only get the Mozilla folks to abandon the idiotic name "SeaMonkey" and call it something cool, like OpenMozilla.org.

Hell, while they're at it, why not make composer into a fully fledged Word Processor. We need another of those, right? no?

I digress. I seriously don't see how MSIE v.whatever can ever be considered secure, so long as they retain ActiveX and non-standard rendering.

Re:security

[KarmaMB84]

But since everything in the tech sector moves faster, IE should've been back a few months ago. In fact, IE may very well come back and kill MS itself after the extended absence.

Re:security

[AgntOrnge]

An exactly how is that any different from any other browser on the market? The most 'innovative' thing I have seen since Cello, that is readily user identifiable, is tabbed browsing. Everything is a copy of something else.

Re:security

[_merlin]

But what's a normal character? What if they try spoofing a Cyrillic URL with a Greek character? Maybe a different background for each script? And choose colours dynamically, depending on the scripts present in the URL?

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, just like how FireFox "innovated" the Information Bar feature when popups are blocked are plugins are required. I bet Microsoft "copies" that feature from them.

Re:security

[gad_zuki!]

> empire-maintenance

As a side note, I wouldnt use the word "empire" when not referring to government. The MS situation isn't pretty, but its hardly geopolitics regardless of how strongly geeks identify with the issue.

On a more related note, yes, MS isn't so much a software company as a monopoly maintaning machine. Certain changes and innovations that could potentially hurt its monopoly status get tossed out the window and fast. This is also why so many talented people dont work as MS. MS's R&D department isn't comparable to other companies that court talent like this and the talent knows their work will be for nothing unless it actively helps lock customers into the MS-only path. At least in general.

As far as the "empire crumbling," well, I personally doubt they'll become more innovative. I would think they would become more restrictive. Less interoperability, more proprietary stuff, etc to keep their customers to keep from hemorraging more.

Case in point: IE7

First off, it wasnt supposed to happen. Now its happening.

Secondly, its still IE. We're not seeing MS, say, announce that activeX wont be supported in x amount of years. Even though it would be in everyone's interest if the activeX system was dropped in a planned fashion because of abuse and because its pretty much not needed when you consider what Java and web services can do. But its not going away. In fact its tied into the uber-critical windows update page. This is typical MS monopolistic control.

MS can and will only go further down the proprietary spectrum. More activation stuff, more big discounts if your organization goes all MS, more big discounts if you dont sell competing OS's, more embrace/extend/extinguish, etc.

Re:security

[AhBeeDoi]

Money != Innovation

If the next version of IE comes out with tabbed browsing, pop up blocking and support for cascading style sheets, would you call that innovation? I would call it a monopolist trying to play catch up after being caught flat footed and unprepared for real competition after leveling Netscape.

If history repeats itself, MS's contribution to "innovation" will be in the form of MS only extensions designed to lock out all other competing products. There are still a number of IE only sites on the web. And don't be surprised if MS files with the US Patent Office to protect their "innovative" IP.

Re:security

[mr100percent]

Not just any english "corner", but a corner of like a room, and not a street corner (that would be esquina).

Re:security

[sp5]

The question is will they take any steps to separate IE from the OS?

They would have gains in the security by doing so, but at the expense of possibly losing their strangle hold on what 95% of users use to browse the web. (I wonder which is more important to Microsoft?)

From a sys admin perspective tying the browser to the OS scares me. I'll patch it up completely (critical, important patches) but I'm always wary of IE updates because it a partial OS update too... what system files does IE want to poke around with? And what will break?

Lastly, why are they turning their backs on Windows 2000? Surely they can make IE 7 available to that OS too... if Win5.2 (Win2003 Server) and 5.1 (WinXP) can get it, surely Win5.0 (Win2000) should be able to.

-sp-

Re:security

[Nefarious Wheel]

Hello, I'm Bob! I'm here to help get the most out of your Office!

Re:security

[Lew Pitcher]

FWIW, I'm of the opinion that this "IDN exploit" that shmoo.com publisized has been overblown. While I agree that the "exploit" is certainly serious, I do not concur that it is isolated to IDN. Instead, the "exploit" is common to all DNSname processing.

With the right (or wrong) font, http://slashdot.org/ and http://s1ashdot.org/ look like the same URL. But they are not. And neither of these two URLs are expressed in IDN.

The key is that the two URLs look alike, and this is an exposure with all URLs.

So, is IDN at fault for the shmoo.com "exposure"? No, since the "exposure" exists without the use of internationalized URLs.

Re:security

[frankenbox]

MS will never be "safe" in any form. Too many unhappy campers. Seems there is a generation of basement comandos who have nothing better to do, than chip away @ Bill. IE6 is probably the only real reason MS came out with sp2. It's all about the lack of security... Bottom line? Hopeless. But if it's marketed to the clueless....... We will make a patch for that too. (: Go Wolverines!!

Re:security

[OblivionExpress]

"...How many Alan Kays or Tim Berners-Lees could be hired with the immense pile of wealth they've reaped off the Windows/Office juggernaut? A lot. Lots of money means the potential to be hella innovative by hiring the right people..." Throwing money at a problem doesn't usually result in innovation. More likely, just more people getting paid to look busy. Welcome to corporate america.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

"no cross-domain scripting and/or scripting access"
Solves 3/4 of the problems with IE.

Re:security

[SnapShot]

Gestures in Opera was innovative, I suppose. Not that I'm a big fan, but innovative != univerally pleasing.

Re:security

[10bt]

true innovators are rarely ever in the spotlight, if they even get the spotlight in the first place. they usually toy away in anonymity, come up with an awesome invention, and then have more business savvy (i.e., greedy) people copy or steal their invention to reap fortunes.

do you think mozilla invented tabbed browsing? who was the first person to ever write a popup ad blocker? i don't know. it's all a vicious cycle of copying and refinement, microsoft and mozilla are just a part of it.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're seeing now isn't innovation, unless you're using some alternate definition of the word. They're simply implementing features that already exist in other browsers. That's "copying".

Tell that to the apple zealots.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

you can argue that bundling a browser into the OS is innovative... look at how many linux distros now include a browser with them ;P
-
fact is microsoft innovates people just dont look at it that way.

Look at how many tags IE has over standard HTML, but when people use it they accuse them of "not using standards" I for one when coding HTML find formatting my page with IE much easier than coding it for firefox(or standards HTML if you argue), with firefox i have to use so much more lines to do little things that I can with IE.

Re:security

[afidel]

Dude, MS is big enough that they push empires around. Or do you think that the DOJ really won something against MS or that MS isn't a major player in the brute forcing of software patents being done in the EU? Once you get to a certain size monopoly you are big enough that even the people temporarily in charge of the empires start to listen.

Re:security

[KaledZeCamelII]

There IS a difference between innovation and creativity. Innovation :
The act of introducing something new.
Creativity :
having the power to bring into being
While I would not contest that Microsoft is innovative, I do not believe that Microsoft is creative.

Re:security

[DrEasy]

Check out research.microsoft.com and tell me that Microsoft isn't doing top-notch research.

It might be true that their research investment isn't translated into great consumer products, but that's certainly not because Microsoft coerces its brilliant minds into doing menial development.

Re:security

[Cap'n Steve]

"You can do a marvelous job at implementing someone else's ideas, but that doesn't make you an innovator."

I think it does. If you improve on someone's idea and make it better than they could, that's still innovation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Netscape pretty much invented Javascript, although they never seemed to implement it as well as Microsoft. Navigator 4.7 is widely regarded as the crappiest browser of modern times, but for some reason schools and businesses seem to love it. And you can't tell me that MS's CSS filters aren't just plain cool.

Re:security

[mysticgoat]

Microsoft hires smart people, from the creator of the Delphi programming language...

Nicklaus Wirth is now working for Microsoft???

Re:security

[Master of Transhuman]

"Lots of money means the potential to be hella innovative by hiring the right people."

Right - so why did they piss away $37 billion in a one-time stock prop scheme instead of spending it on something useful like advancing the state of the art in software?

Answer: Bill doesn't give a shit, that's why.

Microsoft has NEVER hired the right people. They hire 25-year-olds out of Computer Science 101 who haven't a fucking clue how to write software.

And while they're at it, Bill has said, "We can hire two women for every man and they'll do the grunt work because they're just women."

That's how billionaires get laid, I guess...Worked for Hugh Hefner...

Oh, wait, sorry, forgot that getting laid is irrelevant here...

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it'd be sensible to restrict DNS in such a way that any domain name can only consist of 1 character set, whether it's Hebrew or Mandarin.

What kind of legitimate organisation would have their domain name consist of ASCII, UTF-8 & Cyrillic characters? How would a legit user type that into their address bar?

Putting this restriction in place will take care of all existing English-only domain names, and will make color-flagging easy.

Re:security

[aichpvee]

They've definitely got innovative ideas about getting market share and holding on to it. Put out a crappy product and still own the market? Who else can innovate like that?

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Bob uninstalls Windows? SWEET!

Re:security

[PyroMosh]

A Google search for that quote returns nothing what so ever.

Can you cite anything as evidence? Any credible journal or publication? an MP3 or video clip of him saying it in a speach or interview?

Re:security

[Master of Transhuman]

It's in one the bios of him - can't remember which one, I read it some years ago. "Hard Drive", maybe?

Re:security

[gsasha]

Just to notice, this is not the original report on the issue. The first publication was a CACM article "The Homograph Attack", which featured a spoofed version of www.microsoft.com. See details here:http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~gabr/papers/hom ograph.html.
Funny thing: at first, I included only the "here" as the text of the <a> tag. But then I thought: why should you trust to click a link if it can be homographed...

Re:security

[x_theory]

This, I find hilarious. Wasn't M$ saying just a little while ago on C|Net that tabbed browsing wasn't important to users, based off their "feedback" or lackthereof, seeing as how I searched everywhere on Microsoft.com and found no place to submit feedback for anything. M$ is a joke. They really don't "innovate" anything. In fact, this is no different from when they stole the whole Windows concept from Jobs...not to mention that the original DOS was not their own creation, but a OS they purchased secondhand and attempted to tailor quite poorly until 5 versions later.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

> monopoly mainta[i]ning machine

As a side note, I would't use the word "machine" when not referring to a mechanical device. The MS situation isn't pretty, but its hardly technical regardless how strongly engineers identify with the issue.

On a more related note, yes, MS isn't so much a
software companay as a top-predator.

oh..wait....

Re:Security

[m50d]

As we saw yesterday, Java allows permission elevations via single click from the user, and even with this new focus it's hard to imagine MS making it harder to do something than with its competitor in order to improve security.

Re:security

[Ulric]

While two-factor authentication doesn't solve everything, the essay incorrectly claims that it doesn't solve anything. It does a pretty good job of solving the problem it is supposed to solve. It does not solve the new problem of attacks that work around the authentication.

My bank requires separate authentication for every transaction. I don't see a problem with that.

Re:security

[Eric Smith]

True, but that wasn't the "Urysses" to whom I was referring.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

I can recall Microsoft promising an 'unparalleled browsing experience'. Is there anybody that can find anything in that feature list that is new or innovating?
Just sounds to me like Microsoft is blowing a whole lot of hot air just to postpone regular users massively switching to another browser.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

And while they're at it, Bill has said, "We can hire two women for every man and they'll do the grunt work because they're just women."

I wasn't buying your piss-poor drama-queen speculation there until you said that, but oh Bill Gates is just concentrated evil isn't he?

Next thing you know he'll stop giving sizable chunks of his personal worth to charity (oh wait) and God forbid, go back to running his business!

Incase you haven't noticed, Microsoft are the industry leaders. Tell me why, exactly, they should plough capital into "advancing the state of the art in software" just to satisfy your fat arse, when they're already leagues ahead of the competition? What purpose would it serve?

Perhaps the reason why they're not following your armchair industy-expert advice is because they actually know what they're doing? Admittedly, I've only got two facts to back this claim up, but one of them happens to be that they're worth billions and billions of dollars, and the other happens to be that you're bitching about them on slashdot.

But then maybe i'm stating the obvious.

Re:security

[hiroko]

my concern here lies with the implementation of IDN support... a solution has not been found for the browsers that already implement it (other than turning it off - not a reasonable trade-off for those who want to use IDN sites).

Firefox has not turned off IDN's, instead opting temporarily to display them in punycode, with the option of fully enabling them.

Re:security

[Bert64]

They are ahead in marketshare only.. Their products are often leagues behind the competition and their propriatory and incompatible nature is the only thing stopping most of their customers from dropping them like a bad habit.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

Copying? Kind of like the entire Linux market, eh? How about you get of Linus's dick and grow a FUCKING brain...

Re:security

[Bert64]

I wouldn't call netscape 4.7 a modern browser, or ie for that matter..
As for the css filters, i assume you mean things like "alphaimageloader" etc - a nonstandard kludge where other browsers implement png properly. Things like this should not exist, rendering features should be standardised and not implemented in any browser until they are a defined standard and netscape is as guilty of doing this as microsoft.
All i ask is that people follow standards, so that i have FREEDOM to use whatever browser i choose. Surely freedom is important? Having large portions of your life controlled by a single corporation is just as bad as having large portions controlled by a dictatorship.

Re:security

[Bert64]

So by creating pages which require ie, i hope you send microsoft an invoice for your marketting work.
If you truly value those features, then convince microsoft to open up the specifications and submit them to the w3c as standards. Until then, such features should not be used on principle.
You are trying to force people to use a particular browser, not only that but a browser which would cost me money to obtain legally. This is actually a form of discrimination. And i'm sure you wouldn't like it if people imposed conditions on you for an activity you used to do freely, or perhaps you'd enjoy living in a dictatorship and being told what to do and what to use? Maybe you should visit myanmar(burma) or north korea.
I value my freedom and will resist anything that restricts my freedom to choose.

Re:security

[Bert64]

What really disgusts me is that microsoft have the nerve to brand an os as suitable for use as a "server" when it has a mandatory browser and email client.. Such user-oriented applications have NO PLACE on the average server, and only introduce and additional headache for the admin.
On a unix machine you could remove everything except the service your using, so you pretty much only need to patch that service and the kernel.
A browser by default on a workstation os makes sense, tho you should ALWAYS have the ability to remove it.
And while we're on the subject of patching, windows really needs a centralised package management system, on my debian or gentoo boxes i can update everything i have installed, the kernel, system tools, daemons, all in one go from one place. Windows on the other hand lets me update the os and bundled components, but then every third party app has it's own binary installer and it's own procedure for applying updates or uninstalling.

Re:security

[Xiaran]

It would seem to be Hard Drive

A quote from the amazon editorial review is

The first two female executives hired at Microsoft in 1985 were recruited to meet federal affirmative action guidelines so that the company could qualify for a lucrative Air Force contract. One source says,"They would say, 'Well, let's hire two women because we can pay them half as much as we will have to pay a man, and we can give them all this other crap work to do because they are women.' That's directly out of Bill's mouth...." Gates treated one of these executives so badly that she asked to be transferred away from him.

Re:security

[wheany]

How about this: http://koti.mbnet.fi/wheany/phish/

Hover over the colored letters. Works in Opera and Firefox. You could add some kind of "Do not warn about this domain ever again" to the UI.

Re:security

[c0p0n]

Nah, that's not the point. The article is clearly wrong:

fornicator@c0p0n # emerge --details IE7
!!! Error: Go fuck yourself.
!!! 2005 Gentoo Quality Team

Re:security

[Admiral Lazzurs]

Ok, this is not something I would usually care about, however how can this post be modded insightful......amusing maybe but it does not provide any insight.

Re:security

[drsmithy]

Microsoft has NEVER hired the right people. They hire 25-year-olds out of Computer Science 101 who haven't a fucking clue how to write software.

Like, say, Dave Cutler ?

Re:security

[Darren Winsper]

Err...you do know a difference between Javascript and DOM, don't you? The Javascript engine was about the only thing that *was* carried over from the old codebase.

Re:security

[golgotha007]

Why do you think MS is waiting so long before releasing a product to compete with Firefox? It's all about business tactics.

You see, MS knows that if their browser contains all of the same features as a third part browser, they will regain market share, and fast. Their browser is already included in the operating system. Why should someone like my father go out of his way to download and install a peice of software when it's already included in his OS?

MS wants to be the underdog in this deal. They don't care about losing web browser market share. They are confident that when they finally release a browser that contains similar features to the leading third party browser that they will win over the market again (like with Netscape).

Right now, they are slowly becoming the underdog in the web browser market. Just think of the headlines they will make as their new IE7 begins to redominate the web browser market. Think of the happy investors that see MS gaining ground again.

MS is making a bold move; they just might pull this off. If they do, it's win/win for them.

Re:security

[TedCheshireAcad]

Microsoft has NEVER hired the right people. They hire 25-year-olds out of Computer Science 101 who haven't a fucking clue how to write software.

It's difficult to get a job at Microsoft. I've tried. Even if they hire you, you're still just a tester.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

"... Well, let's hire two women because we can pay them half as much as we will have to pay a man, and we can give them all this other crap work to do because they are women"

Lack of tact, perhaps. But true nonetheless.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

Please get serious. IDN is completely at fault.

With IDN, it's not a matter of right or wrong font. The letters are freakin IDENTICAL.

IDN has broken the web. It was begging to be exploited. If you don't think it's an exploit it's time for the loony bin for you. Black is white and up is down in your world.

Re:security

[Zeinfeld]

How many Alan Kays or Tim Berners-Lees could be hired with the immense pile of wealth they've reaped off the Windows/Office juggernaut? A lot. Lots of money means the potential to be hella innovative by hiring the right people.

They just hired Ray Ozzie, you know Notes, Groove etc.

Microsoft has far more Turing award winners than anyone else, Hoare, Lampson, etc.

Back in the 1990s when UNIX was first making it beyond academia in a major way the most frequent complaint was the lack of reliability and security. Standard UNIX did not support ACLs in those days, shaddow passwords were not widely supported and you were lucky to keep a UNIX box running for more than a week. There was a reason that the Sun SparkStations had to be sold at a discount to slower machines from DEC.

Firefox is now a big enough target that the spyware gangs have begun to target it. Linux botnets have been around as long as the Windows variety, longer in fact because Linux machines were more likely to have a high speed broadband connection. The main reason that Macs don't seem to be targetted as much is that there is a disproportionate number of laptops and the gangs only want machines that are always on.

It only takes one unpatched vulnerability for a hacker to win. Microsoft have been doing a lot to improve their security and all I hear from the FOSS-fan community is complacency as if there was some immutable law that said that when you make the source code available all the security bugs fall out. As someone said at the RSA conference it is close to impossible to get programmers to review their own code, let alone someone else's. The number of people who do that for fun is much less than the number you need to check three million (and growing) lines of code.

Besides which I don't rate someone as a FOSS supporter unless they actually write code, documentation do design, or something else useful. The FOSS movement has the same problem that the little red hen had, there is no shortage of people wanting the finished product but almost nobody helping to make it.

Re:security

[orasio]

As a side note, I wouldnt use the word "empire" when not referring to government. The MS situation isn't pretty, but its hardly geopolitics regardless of how strongly geeks identify with the issue.


Bill Gates tried to talk Brazil president Lula into changing his government decisions.
Of course, he didn't even agree to a meeting, but that has some resemblance of someone seeking world domination.

Re:security

[Cyn]

You're close - but you run into the 'multiple extended characters' problem.

The solution - is to color RANGES the same. Your standard latin characterset stays the same, because that's your baseline these days already. Then, each new range of character sets gets a new color. What's the result? Any legitimate websites name will be a single color, any illegitimate websites name will be a rainbow mishmash (or, at least, notably strange).

The one thing about this though - it shouldn't necessarily be on the text. It might be better to stagger the domains encoding cacaphony of color across the background of the location bar - similar to how firefox displays a yellow backgrounded bar on ssl.

I dunno, none of these sound optimal still - but something has to be done, that's for damned sure.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution - is to color RANGES the same. Your standard latin characterset stays the same, because that's your baseline these days already. Then, each new range of character sets gets a new color. What's the result? Any legitimate websites name will be a single color, any illegitimate websites name will be a rainbow mishmash (or, at least, notably strange).

That does not work.

For example, Japanese as commonly written can, perfectly legitimately, contain characters drawn from half a dozen distinct Unicode ranges. But within each of those ranges, only SOME of those characters are valid in Japanese! For example, the "CJK Unified Ideographs" range contains many characters that are only used in Japanese, and many more that are only used in Chinese, all jumbled together.

And, of course, there is still the problem of similar-looking characters within a range. For example, U+3070, U+3071, U+307C, and U+307D (hiragana "ba", "pa", "bo", and "po") all look extremely similar at typical address-bar font sizes; in some fonts, "ba" and "pa" are completely indistinguishable. But they're right next to each other in Unicode!

Also, your proposition would cause "paypaI" and "paypa1" and "paypal" all to be displayed in a single colour - i.e. there are still a huge number of false negatives where fradulent domain names would be misidentified as "legitimate". This is not typically considered a desirable aspect of any proposed "solution".

Re:security

[Haeleth]

Nicklaus Wirth is now working for Microsoft???

Delphi owes about as much to Wirth as C++ owes to Ritchie.

That is to say, while it's possible to write Wirth-style Pascal in Delphi, most of the code in an idiomatic Delphi program bears no more than a superficial resemblance to it.

Re:security

[M_de_A]

From Dictionary.com

Rincon (in Spanish) = Corner (in English)

Re:security

[LiquidCoooled]

Excellent!

That works perfectly (yes, I know its a hard coded example with fixed markup).

I wonder now if we could expand the actual firefox address bar with something like this, or if we would need to completely re-impliment it as a colored overlay?
(Incase your wondering, I work mainly in VB, sad I know, but it pays the bills and all this XUL/extension coding is a little over my head at the moment)

If you don't mind keeping it on your site for a short while, I am going to use your excellent example as the proof of concept for explaining the idea.

You deserve a beer!

ps. there are multiple Body tags in there ;)

Re:security

[wheany]

If you don't mind keeping it on your site for a short while, I am going to use your excellent example as the proof of concept for explaining the idea.

Sure, I'm not that strapped for space.

ps. there are multiple Body tags in there ;)

Well, that's what you get for copy-pasting and not validating your code...

Re:security

[Master of Transhuman]

"What purpose would it serve?"

Er - being "charitable" perhaps?

"Leagues ahead of the competition" - well, if that's what you want to call a convicted monopolist who uses coercive contracts to gain advantage over other companies' superior products...when they aren't "borrowing" the technology directly...

Not to mention that Bill's "charity" is a stock laundering scheme run by his father to influence other companies by investments - just like any major rich person's foundation is.

Moron.

How's the weather up in Redmond, shill?

Re:security

[Grishnakh]

True, most innovators remain anonymous, but the problem is that Microsoft is constantly trumpeting their "innovation". They wouldn't be getting blasted so much about their total lack of innovation if they were just honest about it, and instead touted how they "deploy more integrated solutions", or "build more robust solutions", or some such.

As far as I know, none of the automakers claim to have invented the car, but they all claim to make the best ones. MS's problem is that they're trying to revise history.

Re:security

[mysticgoat]

Mine was a throw-away remark. I've not done any work with Delphi in the last 6 years and it may have evolved in all kinds of ways since then.

When I last used it, Delphi was a hierarchy of library objects sitting on top of an advanced Pascal that was descended from Turbo Pascal. Now I see its COM being described as "... [allowing] you to create COM objects that are not specific to any language, and in some cases, even platforms." So perhaps today's Delphi has become independent of any particular procedural language.

Wouldn't mind hearing further comments.

Re:security

[stonecypher]

Just because IE hasn't been innovative doesn't mean that Microsoft hasn't been innovative. Come on, we've all done this dance before:

• TehAngar (302512): Microsoft is evil and they've never done anything good. They copied everything and stoole the rest.
• Normal (58176): Actually, though they've done a lot of horrible things, they've made dramatic pushes in UI, essentially created the modern office suite, are responsible for lots of very interesting rendering and typography research, and deployed the first instance of the current generation in standard game networking platforms.
• TehAngar (302512): Microsoft is evil, they stole all their interface stuff from Apple
• TehOtharAngar (89194): Apple stole their UI stuff from Xerox, who stole it from Vannevar Bush, who stole it from Victorian England, who stole it from Maltheos the Destroyer, who stole it from The Elves, who rendered the first interface from the silmaril embedded in Morgoth's Forehead, so Microsoft is clearly Morgoth
• TehMoron (883245): First Post Hot Grits Apple Suxkszorz
• Normal (58176): But really, Microsoft did do a few good things
• TehAngar (302512): OMG YOU ARE SUCH AN IDIOT WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING YOU ARE A FALLACY MOD PARENT DOWN

Yeah yeah yeah. Microsoft has shown quite a bit of innovation, and nobody over seventeen is fooled. There is no honor in pretending that the people inside Microsoft which actually are doing good things aren't, just because Microsoft's advertisers and lawyers are the scum of the earth. Grow up.

Re:security

[stonecypher]

Why not? It's common.

You really should look a word up before criticizing someone else's use thereof. The word empire has nothing to do with government. The word empire, from emperor, from old french empéror, from latin imperatorium's nominative imperiator, is not a governmental title at all. The word means "commander," and was adopted only after conferred by a vote of the Roman military onto a successful general. There could be more than one imperator at once, until Julius and then Augustus adopted the title as a show of solidarity with the military, presumably to secure loyalties. Note that Tiberius and Claudius rejected the title after Julius and Augustus had taken it on; as military they felt it needed to be earned.

The title "emperor" was applied to Asian monarchs by the West during the middle ages specifically because it was not a royal title, but rather a military one; the issue was to suggest that the Asian monarchs did not have the royal blood which at the time was seen as a semi-holy thing in Europe (qv. divine right, etc;) it was in essence a way to exclude Asian monarchs from "royalty" by word use.

With respect, the word "empire" does not apply to most countries. An empire is not a large country, but something acquired and held by conquest. The United States is arguably an empire thanks to the Spanish American war, but the term is typically applied to territory acuired mostly through conquest instead of in small part, such as was the case with Russia (the original nation) and the USSR, with Britain and Portugal and the European colonial powers, with ancient Egypt and Rome and Macedon, with feudal Japan and ancient China and Mongolia, the Aztec empire, and so forth. By contrast, you would not apply these terms to Canada, to the Inca, to non-WW2 Germany, etc.

With that observation, it becomes quite clear that the word "empire" does in fact apply quite well to some financial institutions - particularly those characterized by hostile takeover, marginalizations, and so forth.

Re:security

[stonecypher]

That last one is infeasable. By design the net takes any client; a basic security premise is that any client, with enough resources, can be mimiced or compromised. You can't rely on things which have been compiled into the client; they're not in your control and are therefore unreliable.

An easy set of introductions to how badly wrong that notion can go come in the form of discussions about game clients on public networks, where sniffing can get around the client removing information from the player's use instead of it being done by the server.

The short version: on the public network, you cannot trust a foreign binary.

Re:security

[mike2R]

Well if you are planning to write a Firefox extension, I won't feel too guilty about suggesting things that "someone" should implement. The thought that occured was that people will mostly get spoofed by immitations of sites they have previously visited - their bank, paypal etc.

You could check the url against urls in the browser's history, and look for domains that almost match - this being defined as only differing by characters that appear similar. If it is an almost match, flag it to the user, who could whitelist it (I do think having an option to flag all non-ascii urls is a good idea though).

So páypal.xxx would flag up a warning if the user had previously visited paypal.com (although I suppose that a blacklist would be better for commonly spoofed sites, ideally).

As for matching the characters, I found this, which can be downloaded from here - there's a file called chars.xml in the zip which has all the letters in the alphabet in nice xml.

If/When/(have they already?) non-standard characters start to be used for many comercial sites, this system would cope without many false positives, since it would only signal the user if they had visited an almost matching version first.

This is by no means foolproof I guess - a dodgy paypal sign up link could fool a non-paypal user if they wanted to buy something for example. In theory though this could be combined with a blacklist of high-risk domains, which would always be flagged up. (List should maintained by "someone".)

Just an idea, and maybe a bad one, but I thought I'd suggest it since I'm far too lazy to try to do it myself..

Re:security

[10bt]

They wouldn't be getting blasted so much about their total lack of innovation if they were just honest about it, and instead touted how they "deploy more integrated solutions", or "build more robust solutions", or some such.

unfortunately that is probably marketing 101. until there are more geeks than non-geeks in this world, MS and like companies will continue to attract non-geeks who don't know better. in rare cases, if you get really good at it (think steve jobs), even the geeks will eventually buy into the hype. apple products are pretty good, but walking out of a jobs keynote speech you'll think they're the best in the world.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that Bill's "charity" is a stock laundering scheme run by his father to influence other companies by investments - just like any major rich person's foundation is.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA That's the stupidest thing I've read thismorning. Can you cite a source for that? Or is it from the same place as your last "fact" (the quote about his attitude to women)? Let me guess. You read think you remember reading it somewhere one time although it might have been a dream. Or I'll tell you where you got it from. Your pissant drama-queen psyche made it up for you because you absolutely have to hate this man because he's concentrated evil and everything has to be black and white for you. It's delicious because you can't prove me wrong.

How's the weather up in Redmond, shill?

Why don't you crawl out your bunker and have a look, you fucking cretin?

Re:security

[LiquidCoooled]

The problem with foreign characters in domain names will remain throughout the western world.

The problem is this:

I cannot easily type unicode addresses into my browser, so how can any company expect to advertise/use them when so many people would have problems?

I agree that this does not solve the rest of the worlds problems, and disabling IDN entirely is bad for the few sites you may need to visit in your life, BUT a normal western person never needs to go onto any "common" bigname site that has IDN characters. I don't want to simply disable IDN, because that doesn't solve anything (paypa1.com type scams would still work)

Simply flagging those sites which break that simple premise will give most westerners peace of mind.

Sorry if that doesn't help Asain countries, but I'm more concerned about myself and everyone I know.

I already have a full proof of concept JS function in place, which identifies strange sites and gives a simple, easily understandable traffic light status of the site (with more information about the actual mismatch), and am just gearing myself up to building it into an extension.

I would rather give millions of people the *ability* to differentiate simple domains from complex ones than sit around for months discussing somebody elses problem while (possibly) my friends/relatives get ripped off.

Re:security

[AlphaSys]

You're modded +2 funny, but you're onto something. The thing is, they have been slowly improving some of those crappy products.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

You say they don't innovate they just copy...
But no matter what they do people complain...

They use non standard schemes to do some things that to THEM is innovation...
to you it's MS just not paying attention to some standard someone else uses....

They do things that they feel are BETTER and INNOVATIVE in their opinion...

but because it's from MS it's not innovation it's dictation...

You can't have it both ways...

Re:security

[boky]

Oh, really?

And what constitues as "normal"? ASCI? ISO-8859-1? What about ISO-8859-2 or ISO-8859-* that share most of the letters?

Will you be displaying a-z in black and all others with dictational marks (for example, german letters with umlauts and such) with purple?

That's a funny way of looking at the address :-/

So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Firefox... from last year?

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

so basically they will strip firefox, and make a new less secure version of it, and force it upon windows users, no thanks, id rather use netscape navigator from 5 years ago

Re:So, basically...

[rpozz]

It doesn't need to be any better than Firefox - it just needs to be sufficiently good enough for 'normal' people not to want to bother with using another browser.

This, is why a monopoly shouldn't be allowed to bundle software.

Re:So, basically...

[Tim C]

id rather use netscape navigator from 5 years ago

I actually used NN 5 years ago. It was a buggy, slow, crash-prone piece of shit that couldn't handle even moderately complex nested tables without slowing to an absolute crawl and needed to reload the entire page to resize it(!), and I speak as a former ardent Netscape user (I have *never* used IE as my primary browser).

I'd rather user IE6 than NN 3/4 if I had to choose; it's simply not worth that much pain.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, if it was the same as Firefox from last year it wouldn't render 90% of pages correctly.

Yeah, your comment was just as dumb and childish.

Re:So, basically...

[gnuman99]

I'm an internet user using the internet browser since windows 98. What is this 'Firefox' you speak of?

Re:So, basically...

[mzieg]

It's Firefox... from last year?

Minus Linux support...minus Mac support...minus AdBlock...

When you add it all up, it does cast rather a negative light on things.

Re:So, basically...

[WIAKywbfatw]

Or Opera from several years ago? Please, don't fall into the trap that all those features (including tabbed browsing) that you love in Firefox are original: most of them are quite unashamedly inferior implementations of features premiered by Opera.

Fortunately, the good people at Opera aren't software patent-crazy. If they were, Firefox wouldn't have half the features that it does.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Puhleeze. Opera people seem to believe Opera invented the web. Guess what? Opera took most of those features from elsewhere, too. I was using gestures before Opera had them. Tabbed interfaces? Also not new.

Re:So, basically...

[toddestan]

That's strange, considering that Netscape never released Netscape Navigator 5 (skipping straight from 4.78 to 6.0).

Re:So, basically...

[TheBurningDog]

How is making a product good enough for normal people not to bother with something else a monopoly?

By your comment, it sounds like they should only be allowed to bundle crappy software with their OS.

Re:So, basically...

[Elwood P Dowd]

Plus configuration via GPO, support for UNC based file:// links, support for Windows integrated security, and centralized updates.

Firefox is a tradeoff, not a fucking panacea.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

You people talk about nothing other than Netscape/Mozilla and IE when the subject of browsers comes up. You're just as bad as those users who equate IE with the internet. There are other browsers out there, like Opera, that are better and faster than Firefox or IE.

Opera's been ahead of the curve for years, and the only reason it's not being used more is because you so-called geeks are just as clueless as the so-called lusers.

Re:So, basically...

[naylor83]

Yes, I believe NetCaptor was first with tabs.

Re:So, basically...

[nuggetman]

He didn't say he used NN 5

He used NN 5 years ago, as in 5 years in the past

Re:So, basically...

[i wanted another nam]

I love slashdot. If a company you don't like were to use a law (software patents) for their own benefit, you'd find the biggest soapbox you could find. If a company you like uses it, it's for the protection of their INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY that they own. If they don't use it, it was a gracious act by a good natured person.

The whole idea of software patents is screwed up anyways, and I'm not sure I understand it. From my understanding, a patent is for the process, not the product.

Re:So, basically...

[mdew]

the opera fanboys only bring it up because it was before firefox

Re:So, basically...

[dextr0us]

So... i'm against MS as much as every other *nix lover out there, but how do you reasonably define a monopoly?

Verichat, a well known app for palmos and blackberry handhelds, might be getting undercut by t-mobile when t=mo releases updates for the blackberry. Essentially, they'd be doing a similar thing to bundling software. That is anti-competitive... isn't it? So how is a company able to bundle software? Are there a set of "ethical" bundling practices established?

I'm not trolling, or even being sarcastic, but as I was thinking about this, I didn't understand how anyone can logically bundle software without running into these anti-competitve issues.

Re:So, basically...

[badmammajamma]

Opera people think that Opera invented the web?? lol...Opera may not have invented a lot of the things it has but it sure as hell was the first to bring all of it together and it sure as hell had this stuff LONG LONG before Firefox. In fact, it had most of this stuff before Firefox even existed.

Also, Opera was not the first to do tabs, but it was the first to do them right. Oh, and Opera was the FIRST browser to have mouse gestures. It was also the first to allow me to restore my previous browsing state after a restart.

Start correcting the Firefox fanbois before you go after the Opera ones. They do have more reason to brag.

Re:So, basically...

[rpozz]

It's not that making a product that's good enough is a monopoly, its that as long as a bundled product is reasonably acceptable, the laziness of the normal user means that other companies don't get much of a chance to compete, even by producing a better product.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

The "5" goes with "years", not with "NN", Mr. That's Strange...

Re:So, basically...

[rpozz]

Well, you're right, it's a difficult question. But I think it's quite clear that Microsoft is a monopoly, and that when they bundle products, it stops other companies competing with similar products. Let's face it, what they did to Netscape was not right, by any stretch of the imagination.

Re:So, basically...

[angle_slam]

MS tries to get people to go to MS Money all the time. Never works as Quicken has a much larger market share.

Re:So, basically...

[TrappedByMyself]

Brilliant isn't it?
Firefox becomes a research and development team for Microsoft. And since the open source community won't patent their stuff, MS is free to steal the ideas that worked.

When it arrives, IE7 will be praised by the press as a step into the future.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's because it's either payware or adware. Basic software like browsers should be Free.

Re:So, basically...

[Moofie]

No, when they're a monopoly, they shouldn't be allowed to bundle anything.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus configuration via GPO,

Available with the GPOConfiguration extension for people like you that demand such frivolities.

support for UNC based file:// links,

Available with the UNCLinker extension for people like you that demand such frivolities.

support for Windows integrated security,

Available with the WinIntegron extension for people like you that demand such frivolities.

and centralized updates.

Already present in FireFox with the UpdateCheckerPlus extension for people like you that demand such frivolities.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

If they put MS Money into the OS that comes on pretty much all new computers, how many people do you think would buy quicken?

Quicken's market share would dry up pretty quick.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

If my steering wheel company is being put of business because car companys are bundling 'good enough' steering wheels with their cars, do I have a right to complain? Some people would argue that an a browser is an integral part of an OS.

Re:So, basically...

[Moofie]

"support for Windows integrated security"

WTF?

Re:So, basically...

[Elwood P Dowd]

Sweet! I don't demand that stuff, but it means I can use Firefox a whole lot more.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

If MS is a monopoly, then Apple is the dictator of the earth -- Apple controls every step of the process from building the machine to writing software to including iEverything on their OS. Anywho, MS bundling software does not stop competition. If you don't like the software MS puts on there you buy it from someone else...it's that simple. Just because MS includes IE and Media Player (which are pretty much the only things they include with windows) doesn't mean that other companies can't come up with something better.

Re:So, basically...

[Moofie]

Umm, Slashdot is not a person. It doesn't have an opinion. There's no "you".

There is no hive mind.

I happen to be opposed to software patents. Other people might have a different opinion. That doesn't make Slashdot hypocritical.

Re:So, basically...

[rikkards]

Which funny enough is made by Intuit that Microsoft bought a couple years ago.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

The steering wheel analogy doesn't cut it, try car stereo.

Re:So, basically...

[IthnkImParanoid]

but how do you reasonably define a monopoly?

There's an actual legal definition of monopoly, and a court of law determines whether a company is or is not a monopoly. This definition probably draws on numerous laws and precedents I have no hope of wading through, but perhaps googling for 'monopoly legal definition' will help.

If you're looking for non-legalese, this may help:
"A monopoly can set prices artificially high because it has no serious competitors to force it to do otherwise. It can also arbitrarily limit the supply of the good or service it provides to create scarcity and drive prices up. In either case, the monopoly collects a "rent" on its domination of a particular sector of the economy. "

Re:So, basically...

[naylor83]

How true.

Re:So, basically...

[rikkards]

Using MS ACLs to limit who can access web pages and what they can do there. Not exactly something you would necessarily use on the net but can be handy on an Intranet.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah well Tabbed browsing was a copy of Windows 3.1 Program Manager

(just trolling)

Re:So, basically...

[ScytheBlade1]

Windows domain login credentials, I do believe.

Nice attempt at a troll, but, no.

Group Policy is a 100% must for a windows envrioment, and current FF does NOT natively support it. It will through a customized login script, among many other hacks to get it to "work", but it's still not a true native method of support group policy.

Trolls beware, parent have a very, very good point. Several of them.

Re:So, basically...

[rainman_bc]

Minus web developer plugin. IMO FF is the best thing since sliced bread because of those web developer tools. Smart move - appeal to the web developers and the rest will follow.

Re:So, basically...

[Look KG486]

And we get the features we want in whatever browser we choose...eventually. Why bother with patents? Those take time and money to secure and enforce. We win no matter how you slice it.

Re:So, basically...

[shutdown -p now]

Actually, it was Opera.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

well, Adobe are already preparing for IE7, releasing acrobat reader 7 :)

Re:So, basically...

[fermion]

Realy netscape in 2000 wasn't so bad. It only had real problems when tring to browser pages generated by MS software. This was made worse by the number of people who knew no better than use MS generated pages. And that would put it around IE 5, which was a real POS.

What I did try to use was Opera, but they took too long to create a usable mac product, and camino came out, so there was no reason to spend the money.

I found and find IE on MS Windows and Mac platforms to be consistantly inferior in most catagories and try not to use it. IE is expandable to be a usable platform, but I often just want to work out of the box. Ie does not.

Re:So, basically...

[MerlinTheWizard]

Patents are not the answer to everything. Just because OSS stuff is not patented doesn't mean you can use it as you please. You're legally bound by a license. I guess if the Firefox team thought Microsoft was stealing core ideas, they would be entitled to sue. Even more so than OSS is basically the most public exposure you can get - which means, you have the more IP protection possible. So no, MS is *not* free to steal ideas. If there is a clear document from the Mozilla foundation lying around which talks about tabbed browsing, for instance, and well before MS shipped IE7, Mozilla could sue them. Contrary to a popular opinion, patents don't particularly protect intellectual property better. And no, MS *could not* patent tabbed browsing itself now, for instance (even if no one else has), because it was publicly exposed long ago in several software packages, both open and closed source.

Microsoft (and a lot of other companies) does use public research (in which we could categorize OSS, in a way) to make software, but they also give back by supporting research in a lot of areas. I'm not saying everything is all right, but let's get some perspective. If anything, MS could make donations to the Mozilla foundation (who knows if they don't already), and that would shut everyone's mouth...

Re:So, basically...

[Martin Blank]

The sale fell through. Intuit is a completely separate company. If Microsoft owns any part of it, it's a tiny minority share purchased through regular market channels.

Re:So, basically...

[MattJakel]

But in the meantime, Firefox will continue to get better and MS won't catch up with new features in further versions of Firefox until IE8 which, based on the current release cycle, shouldn't be out for quite a long time. Until then, nerds will continue to convert their relatives and friends, who will in turn convert even more average people. In the end, Microsoft will be screwed.

The bottom line is that the open source development model works too well. New features that users will love can be implemented in an open source project much too fast for Microsoft to ever catch up.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape screwed Netscape. Anyone with intelligence equal or greater to that of a trombone knows it.

You, on the other hand, may want to write it down.

Re:So, basically...

[snorklewacker]

> Group Policy is a 100% must for a windows envrioment, and current FF does NOT natively support it.

Far as I can tell, GPO's are more advisory than mandatory anyway, since one can always subvert them with their own executable that does what it pleases, but if it makes the IT fellas happy, I suppose it's worth it.

So, out of curiosity ... how hard would it be to support them? Is there a public API for GPO's and a way to test creating them without needing an AD server? Might be a "fun" project (for some masochistic definition of fun).

Re:So, basically...

[kubrick]

how do you reasonably define a monopoly?

I'm willing to follow the courts on this one.

Re:So, basically...

[op12]

Even if that is true, that means Firefox will always be a step ahead of Microsoft in the browser game.

Re:So, basically...

[wootest]

Overly grim, and perhaps overly true to the extent that the press will see it as a giant step forward for IE - which it is - but also a giant step forward for web browsers - which it ain't.

Furthermore, the "open source community" simply can't patent "their stuff" because it isn't their stuff. Tabbed browsing, for all I know (there are millions of variants of these stories), started out in NetCaptor, an IE shell (do I smell irony?) before Opera made the move from just plain MDI to something looking like a tab bar. Extensions are a nice idea, but there's lots of prior art. Type-ahead? Maybe barely invention-worthy as it's not been applied to links specifically before, but I didn't see anything about it in IE7 either.

Re:So, basically...

[pauljlucas]

Just because OSS stuff is not patented doesn't mean you can use it as you please.

As long as you don't use source code, yes you can use it as you please.

You're legally bound by a license.

The license only covers source code.

I guess if the Firefox team thought Microsoft was stealing core ideas, they would be entitled to sue.

No they wouldn't since only a patent protects an idea.

Contrary to a popular opinion, patents don't particularly protect intellectual property better.

Uh, yes they do.

Re:So, basically...

[noidentity]

And since the open source community won't patent their stuff, MS is free to steal the ideas that worked.

*cough*OpenOffice*cough

You mean Firefox is going to have these features removed??

Re:So, basically...

[Elwood P Dowd]

Awesome troll, man.

If this shit ever does get made, I'll be able to use Firefox for just about everything.

Re:So, basically...

[cgsamurai]

So, using your analogy, your mom letting your friends do her in the butt for money is just plain wrong??

Sorry dude, it is a capatalist country we are in.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually used NN 5 years ago. It was a buggy, slow, crash-prone piece of shit... ::chuckle::

Which is not to be at all confused with a "Bug Ridden Crash Prone Piece of Junk".

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

No. If you consider the context then he was responding to why no one talks about it. We don't talk about it because it's adware or spyware. Same as I wouldn't talk about my mom letting you do her up the butt for cash.

Thanks for the BMW payment tho.

Re:So, basically...

[keytoe]

Dammit, people - can't you see that it's working?! Microsoft is having to compete! Even if that competition is just bringing their browser up to par, they're still competing. Mozilla does it's job simply by existing and is now to the point where it has forced Microsoft to play catch up.

Saying that the whole Mozilla effort hasn't been given a chance to compete is simply bogus. They have succeeded in creating a growing market of converts and forced a convicted monopolist to get up and respond. That sounds like competition to me.

It doesn't have to be 50-50 to be competitive.

Re:So, basically...

[mingot]

Interesting definition. From all of the slashdot articles I read about various country/county/states forcing microsoft to lower ITS prices, using linux as leverage, I would guess that they no longer hold a monopoly.

Re:So, basically...

[halltk1983]

how are you gonna get to the 'net to download firefox, then?
I say that it should all be included, but modularized, so that it can be disabled.

Re:So, basically...

[krappie]

It doesn't have to be 50-50 to be competitive.

Yes, it does.

Re:So, basically...

[russellh]

If my steering wheel company is being put of business because car companys are bundling 'good enough' steering wheels with their cars, do I have a right to complain? Some people would argue that an a browser is an integral part of an OS

You can't drive a car without a steering wheel. This is not an example of bundling.

Re:So, basically...

[M51DPS]

Firefox becomes a research and development team for Microsoft. When it arrives, IE7 will be praised by the press as a step into the future.

Hey, it worked before. Just replace "Firefox" with "Apple" and "IE7" with "Windows XP".

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox does support this.

Re:So, basically...

[XMyth]

How are you going to get on the internet to download another webbrowser without a webbrowser?

I can see how TECHNICALLY it's not the same concept as his steering wheel example...but I think PRACTICALLY it is the same.

Re:So, basically...

[WIAKywbfatw]

Opera could have chosen to go down the route of clobbering the competition (including Firefox) by patenting everything it developed and then enforcing those patents vigourously. It could have ensured that its product was superior than the rest by this method, but it chose not to because it favours competing in its market on merit rather than on points of law.

Now, I don't know about you but I think this is commendable, especially as Opera has to make a profit from its browser whereas the majority of its competitors (MSIE, Firefox, Safari, etc) do not and are either subsidised or supported by donations.

I agree with you that software patents are a bad idea but I'm afraid that they're the reality of the world that we live in. Most companies wouldn't (and don't) hesitate to use software patents to their advantage. Opera choses not to go down that route and, in this day and age, I find that highly commendable.

Re:So, basically...

[returnoftheyeti]

I cant belive this didn't get modded down.

How to downlad a web browser without a webbrowser.
1) start/run/cmd
2) ftp
3) open ftp.mozilla.org
4) anonymous/getaclue@slashdot.org
5) cd pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0.1/win32/en-US
6) get firefoxsetup.exe

Wow! No I just got a web browser, without using a web browser.

Re:So, basically...

[AstroDrabb]

How are you going to get on the internet to download another webbrowser without a webbrowser?

So you have _never_ downloaded anything off the internet without a web browser? Come on now, this is not a tough one. I have tons of scripts running on production boxes that download a lot of stuff and never once use a web browser. Lets see, some use an ftp client, some use wget, etc.

It would not be hard for MS to have a selection at install time asking a user what web browser they want to use and let them pick from the top 3-5 browsers out there based on market share.

Re:So, basically...

[AstroDrabb]

...But in the meantime, Firefox will continue to get better and MS won't catch up...

I agree. At the fortune 500 I work for, we have 140,000+ employees. Here are the home login stats over the last few weeks. I certainly can see a non-IE trend.

Week Logins Non-IE-Logins Non-IE Percent
11/01/2004 - 11/07/2004 62,777 4,363 6.95%
11/08/2004 - 11/14/2004 78,298 5,521 7.05%
11/15/2004 - 11/21/2004 78,576 5,816 7.40%
11/21/2004 - 11/30/2004 79,973 6,107 7.64%
12/01/2004 - 12/07/2004 69,855 5,675 8.12%
01/21/2005 - 01/28/2005 79,593 7,146 8.98%
01/28/2005 - 02/04/2005 82,167 7,781 9.47%
02/04/2005 - 02/11/2005 83,202 8,054 9.68%
02/11/2005 - 02/18/2005 85,038 8,645 10.17%
02/18/2005 - 02/25/2005 84,776 8,743 10.31%
02/25/2005 - 03/04/2005 92,920 9,873 10.63%
03/04/2005 - 03/11/2005 83,812 8,730 10.42%
03/11/2005 - 03/18/2005 52,326 5,561 10.63%

Re:So, basically...

[MerlinTheWizard]

As long as you don't use source code, yes you can use it as you please.

That is just not true! And especially not if you're a commercial vendor. Most OSS licenses forbid to distribute any software based on the open source projet in question without the source code to the whole, whether you have made modifications or not. Most vendors don't want to do that. Some OSS licenses would allow modifications without having to give them away (such as BSD-like licenses, I believe). Some forbid to even redistribute any binaries! Then, there are OSS licenses that forbid any commercial use of the software at all. And so on... So NO, you can't use it as you please. Not quite. Even though, as a random end-user, that's how it feels most of the time.

The license only covers source code.

Again, not true. The license covers the whole thing. The source code is an integral part of the "deal" with OSS, that doesn't mean only the source code is covered by the license.

Maybe you should read the whole recent thread about GPL violations to begin with... As for patents, no they are not essential to protect intellectual property. Copyrights are. Patents are other beasts with their own rationale. That would be interesting to start a new thread about patents... but then again, this is a recurring topic here, so we're going to have one any time soon...

Re:So, basically...

[DavidTC]

I don't know in what universe Firefox couldn't support this. If you access html files via a file system, you can only get to what you can get to. It's not like programs need to be specifically programmed to respect file permissions.

Now, if people are talking about using domain passwords via NTLM, which doesn't really have anything to do with 'ACLs' per se, FF can do this just like IE.

In fact, it does it in a saner way than IE, sometimes...in IE, sometimes you need to specify in what domain you're logging into, whereas FF seems to be able to figure it out. I.e., on IE you can get prompted to login as 'username', when in reality you sometimes have to change that to 'DOMAIN\username', whereas in Firefox you're also prompted to log in as 'username' and it works. (And the the rest of the time both IE and Firefox prompt you to login as 'DOMAIN\username', which works.)

Presumable FF is using whatever server you used when you logged into Windows. But I'm not going to call that an advantage until I can figure out exactly when and how it does this and IE doesn't, though.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that stores it's settings in the registry can be easily managed with group policy.

A hack solution woudl be to just load and dump the prefs.js file into a registry key when FF starts or quits.

Re:So, basically...

[gad_zuki!]

>And since the open source community won't patent their stuff, MS is free to steal the ideas that worked.

Oh, like tabs? Predates firefox.

Oh perhaps pop-up blocking. Predates firefox.

Maybe that little info bar in FF 1.0. Whoops, that was shamelessly copied ffrom IE SP2.

First off, Firefox isnt all that original, its just a good implementation. Secondly, its the LACK of patents that keep Mozilla going. Imagine if Netcaptor (or whoever it was) got a patent on tabbed browsing. Whoops. You think they'd politely share? Yeah right. Not to mention, if the OSS did patent stuff, then it would kinda defeat the purpose of going open source. No OSS developer has the ideological spirit to turn down a million dollar check from MS, not to mention most OSS developers arent going to drop 5 grand down for a patent and defend it (more legal fees!) because they felt like making and sharing some software. Goes against the whole DIY and share approach.

Re:So, basically...

[snilloc]

Not in the true sense of competition. On the economic front, they crushed their main opposition (Netscape) and relegated Opera (and any others that I can't think of) to a very minor role.

Their "competition" from Moz is a charity case from AOL, the Moz people, and maybe a few general-population contributors, with most outsiders contributing no more than bug reports. Opera is minor in the desktop market, being forced into embedded/portable stuff, and STILL has to give away an ad-supported version for free.

The long and the short of it is that nobody can make money on browsers, and MS can ensure that ninety-whatever percent of desktops have IE installed.

Re:So, basically...

[Dan Ost]

You lack a crucial insight to understand the GPL.

GPL is based on copyright. Therefore, the GPL has no reach beyond the reach
of copyright. Copyright does not extend over intent, meaning, or function
of something, just the expression of it. If you read GPL'd code to understand
its intent, meaning, and function, you can still safely write your own code
to do the exact same thing as long as you don't copy the GPL'd code, adapt
the GPL'd code, or otherwise derive the expression of your code from the
GPL'd code.

Re:So, basically...

[SQLz]

I know because those back, forward, and reload buttons are so complicated normal people can't figure them out.

Re:So, basically...

[AstroDrabb]

How the hell is a custom login script a "hack"? We have 140,000+ users and have a custom login script that runs. Are we l33t hackers now?

Group Policy is a 100% must for a windows envrioment

That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. So if I went to a small company with 2 servers and 5 desktops I "MUST" setup a GP? I wouldn't even build a domain for such a small network.

Trolls beware, parent have a very, very good point. Several of them.

Judging by your UserID, you are very new here. The parent post doesn't have a "very, very good point". And how in the hell do you come to the conclusion that the parent has "Several of them"? Here is the parent Were are the "several" points?

Re:So, basically...

[alexandreracine]

and, of course, tabbed browsing

Excellent! Now all they have to do is patent tabbed browsing. Because, everyone know that they invented it. Right?

Re:So, basically...

[pauljlucas]

Most OSS licenses forbid to distribute any software based on the open source projet in question without the source code to the whole, whether you have made modifications or not.

Again, we're not talking about source code. Microsoft is free to look at the features of Firefox as an end-user would and copy any feature they please to exacting detail. As long as they do so without using any of Firefox's source code, it's completely legal.

As for patents, no they are not essential to protect intellectual property.

I never said they were. There are also trademarks and trade secrets that are also used to protect intellectual property, but they're irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

Copyrights are.

For a computer program, copyright covers only the source code. Period. OSS licenses are based on copyright and use copyright as their legal mechanism. Again, Miscrosoft can look at Firefox's features and UI and can copy it feature for feature and there's not a damned thing Firefox's authors can do about it. If stronger protection is wanted, well that's what patents are for.

No offense, but you have no understanding of how copyright, OSS licenses, or patents work.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we're talking about NTLM hashes, which are called "integrated security" in the IIS console.

As for the DOMAIN thing, it's really up to the server config. My guess is that FF works without because it is falling back to cleartext passwords.

Re:So, basically...

[PReDiToR]

So you have _never_ downloaded anything off the internet without a web browser?

Just to be pedantic here, but if I gave my Mum a copy of Windows 3.11, the last OS I used that didn't have a web browser incorporated, how would she download a browser, FTP client, a Linux ISO to get wget with?

Until recently I was forced to use IE to update the system from WinUpdate and download Firefox.

Re:So, basically...

[nachoboy]

Any app that seriously wants to have more than a passing glance by Fortune 500 Windows shops needs GPO support. It's not difficult - true support means reading preferences from the registry in a location like HKCU\Software\Vendor\Application\Version\ and policies from a mirror location in HKCU\Software\Policies\Vendor\Application\Version. The application must use the policies if present, but also respect the user preferences if policies are absent.

Then all that's left is to create .adm files that describe the actual registry keys for administrators to import on their servers.

There's nothing magic about GPO. Technically you could test it by manually setting keys in the \Policies tree, no AD environment required, although you would probably want to get some environment testing before blindly releasing.

Re:So, basically...

[ScytheBlade1]

Yes, since we all know for 100% SURE that UserID is porportional to overall knowledge.

Off that alone, I don't think I have anything else to say to you.

No, on second thought...

A "hack" isn't always a "bad thing". Quit thinking it is.

As this guy said, it's a complete MUST for a Fortune 500. Ie, when the admins of a Fortune 500 look at firefox, if it doesn't have GP support, it's going to be passed over because it can't be supported.
Oh, that's right, we can always login script it. I'm not saying that it doesn't work, but there's a difference between writing up a file on login and a program reading read-only registry keys. I quoted the "work" as, imo, it is not a complete and correct method of GP implimentation.

I'm not talking a "small network of 2 servers and 5 desktops". I'm talking a decent sized shop where they have a domain (worth using, that is).

Oh, and excuse me for saying "parent" while meaning "grandparent".

Re:So, basically...

[RenatoRam]

Well, duh...

ftp ftp.mozilla.org

get firefox-installer.exe

how do you think people did back when browsers were not integrated with the OS?

Re:So, basically...

[m50d]

That wasn't my experience at all. It worked fine, and looked a little better than IE 4 (I think that was the version I had) on however pathetically little colour I was running at (4-bit?)

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Give her a floppy/CD with the necessary tools (ftp client, etc). It's not like it's brain surgery.

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, it looks like MS is the one racing behind someone else. I guess on the browser front MS has never had the initiative, but this time the competition is far more slippier.

Google (and its services) is another example where MS doesn't have the initiative.

Now, when will this happen with office applications and OS?

Re:So, basically...

[jez9999]

But then, an ftp client would have to be 'bundled' with the OS.

Oh, FTP is more important so it's ok for it to be bundled, but a web browser isn't? How do you draw the distinction?

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

God you're stupid...

Re:So, basically...

[RenatoRam]

A command line ftp client is one of the basic tools every OS has.

A GUI browser, OTOH, is not.

However you could argue that these are opinions... but course nobody (few people) would complain if the bundled gui browser could be uninstalled.

Re:So, basically...

[jez9999]

I'm just saying that, for 'basic tools', you should read 'bundled pieces of software'. Then consider why THIS bundling is more acceptable than web browser bundling.

Re:So, basically...

[LittleBigLui]

well.. i got mine like this:

$ sudo emerge mozilla-firefox-bin

Just shows the superiority of linux, i guess. :)

Re:So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

If my steering wheel company is being put of business because car companys are bundling 'good enough' steering wheels with their cars, do I have a right to complain?

Yes, as long as the car company in question is Folvoperraritoyotazdaab, the car monopoly.

Re:So, basically...

[Fussen]

What a refreshing mindset! And very true. Mozilla has some serious teeth showing right now. 10% of the pie is a HUGE piece! Even if Microsoft is preparing their IE7, I'm sure other companies / organizations are learning through open source.

Sounds like significant movement in the jungle.

Re:So, basically...

[Bert64]

The fact they include it isn't the problem..
The fact that their tools intentionally violate standards to try and force people to use them IS the problem. IE encourages people to write nonstandard sites that don't work on other browsers, which prevent many people from using other browsers. So even if someone else comes up with something better, many users will be unable to use it because of the intentional incompatibility.

Re:So, basically...

[Bert64]

Infact, i think bundling is fine but that bundled apps should be REQUIRED to open their specifications and follow open documented standards (even creating and publishing those standards if necessary)

Re:So, basically...

[Bert64]

Your using gentoo and yet you install firefox from a binary? Shame on you!

Re:So, basically...

[Ohreally_factor]

Since for most people, the OS comes from a box maker, like Dell, HP/Compaq, lesser names, etc. The box maker can put firefox or whatever on the machine.

They probably should be doing this, anyway. I'm sure it would cut down on customer support calls and save them money. However, they probably don't want to risk the ire of Microsoft. If the Justice Department took on MS, convicted it of unfair business practices, and still failed to rein in MS in any substantive way, what chances does anyone else have of taking on MS?

No, the only chance is for it to happen from the grassroots, from the OSS community slowly extending itself to the common user. It will be slow going, and there are no guarantees, much as we like to play cheerleader.

Re:So, basically...

[RenatoRam]

You can use a browser to force proprietary standards, technologies and products to promote vendor lock-in (think ActiveX, Passport, broken css "designed for IE" and vbscript embedded in pages).

Try that with a command line ftp client.

THAT's the difference.

Re:So, basically...

[drsmithy]

here's an actual legal definition of monopoly, and a court of law determines whether a company is or is not a monopoly.

Indeed, and the silliest thing about that definition mostly worthless (from the perspective of *not* being found guilty of "monopoly abuse") is that you don't actually know you're a monopoly until *after* the court finds you guilty.

Personally, I don't think Microsoft are - or ever were - a monopoly. That puts me in disagreement with the courts, so be it - it's not the first time and I doubt it will be the last.

Re:So, basically...

[drsmithy]

You can't drive a car without a steering wheel.

Sure you can. You just can't turn corners.

Re:So, basically...

[Vince Mo'aluka]

This, is why a monopoly shouldn't be allowed to bundle software.

No, I'd rather win by working hard, not by crying to government to tilt the playing field. If you can't win through voluntary means, then can you really win at all?

So get the hell out of the way and let Firefox stand on its own merit. If Firefox truly is better, then it will succeed. If you'd open your eyes, you'd realize this is already happening, without the "aid" of government.

Re:So, basically...

[drsmithy]

So, out of curiosity ... how hard would it be to support them?

Technically, probably not hard. The roadblock will be philosophical - GPOs perform their configuration magic via the registry - so for Firefox to become centrally manageable via GPOs, it has to start storing that confiiguration information in the registry (ie: where it belongs for a Windows application).

Probably the foremost reason people want this manageability is to specify proxies. Fortunately, newer versions of Firefox have an "automatic" setting that just grabs the proxy settings from IE - and hence from Group Policy - but it's still just a half-arsed workaround.

The two things stopping me rolling out Firefox at my previous job were a) its poor manageability and b) the lack of an *official* MSI installer (and easy MST creation tool for localisation).

Re:So, basically...

[Knuckles]

A CLI ftp cient ("ftp") was part of Win 3.1 and still is in XP.
Granted, a CLI client is not newbie safe. However, ftp is a protocol that is understood by Windows Explorer. While ftp:// is currently by courtesy of the browser embedded into Win, this does not have to be so.

Re:So, basically...

[Knuckles]

Plus, when I went online with Win 3.1 I simply recieved a CDROM from my ISP with all necessary software

Re:So, basically...

[XMyth]

Good god, you live in a freaking cave, don't you? You do realize that the VAST majority of users are NOT capable of that. Did you not see my emphasis on PRACTICALLY in the post you replied to?

Re:So, basically...

[Aeron65432]

They crushed Netscape not because of market share of browsers. MS couldn't give a damn what kind of browser you use. It's one reason why they aren't terribly worried about Firefox. They killed Netscape earlier because of the files. Netscape had a different system of files that threatened Microsoft-proprietary formats. If programmers started developing programs for Netscape not IE, that could lead to a whole new Operating System.

Re:So, basically...

[LittleBigLui]

Yeah, shame on me. Seriously: IIRC, when i first emerged firefox there was only the binary package. And yes, i'm too lazy to unmerge that and emerge the source package.

Actually i didn't even know that a source package exists until i did a emerge -s firefox just to see wether "firefox-bin" was the right packagename so i don't post crap to slashdot (and that was a good idea, as i was wrong and would have been flamed to hell).

Re:So, basically...

[keytoe]

On the economic front, they crushed their main opposition (Netscape) and relegated Opera (and any others that I can't think of) to a very minor role.

I don't consider roughly five to ten percent of a giant browser market minor, and I think it's odd that you do.

You do realize that five to ten percent of the whole Internet is a fucking lot of people, right?

Re:So, basically...

[snilloc]

Netscape became a free as in beer product in the late 90's. (I recall downloading Communicator in 97 for free.) I would be interested to know what percent of Opera is free(w/ ads) vs paid. Konq is free. Safari is free to Mac users (right?). And all of these add up to about 10% of the browser "market", which is a pretty dysfunctional market since nobody really pays for browsers.

Interesting Codename...

[Megaslow]

rincon is Spanish for "corner"... Perhaps a not-so-Freudian-slip on what they want to do to the browser market?

It will be interesting to see what else (other than tabbed browsing & RSS aggregation) will be "inspired" by Firefox and other browers, say perhaps, easy plugins and themes?

Re:Interesting Codename...

[papercrane]

Or it could be that they're trying to *turn* a corner and do things right.

Of course, we all know that will never happen.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Anonymous Coward]

More like Firefox backed them in to a rincon

Re:Interesting Codename...

[weighn]

that's so close to Ring-con it makes me shiver.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Rude Turnip]

Microsoft likes to use codenames based upon the names of mountains. XP was Whistler for instance. There is a "Rincon" mountain range in Arizona.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Anonymous Coward]

their first choice was maricon but that was a little too obvious.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[mzieg]

"Cornering" can connotate "fast and nimble handling," as well as "exceptional stability," when used in the context of cars.

Not that I anticipate that in this case...

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and "Eck" is German for corner. And "hoek" is Dutch. Which will match the sounds most users will make when trying to upgrade.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, all of their codenames are taken from the names of Resorts and Mountains in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[shird]

And if Rincon meant "Great browser", I suppose that would be a freudian slip for describing every other browser other than IE? You can always twist something in your favour if you put it into whatever context you like.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[zumajim]

I hope they change the codename so I don't end up associating IE with my favorite surf spot in Santa Barbara. I'd prefer another oil spill to that.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Augusto]

unlikely, rincon in spanish means just that corner, but "turn a corner" is a phrase that doesn't exist in spanish.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[ackthpt]

Microsoft likes to use codenames based upon the names of mountains. XP was Whistler for instance. There is a "Rincon" mountain range in Arizona.

Hmm..

St. Helens, Vesuvius, Etna, Krakatoa...

'hey, this security really blows!'

Re:Interesting Codename...

[yossarian dent]

I can't wait for M$ to realize their snide codename was too obvious, make the next codename "monopoly" in Arabic so fewer people will understand it...then get investigated by the FBI for possible terrorist ties.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they're targeting this release for the Japanese market and wanted something to suggest American luxury equipment

Re:Interesting Codename...

[marcansoft]

Actually, it does. Corner proper is "esquina", but "rincon" is the word you would use for a small place near a corner (on an interior) or so. "Turn a corner" would be "doblar una esquina" (although "doblar" is closer to "fold" than "turn", but that's just the way the phrase is). "To corner" does exist as "arrinconar" (verb form of "rincon")

Re:Interesting Codename...

[rtb61]

So what would longhorn be ( to me it brings to mind "It not what goes in that counts - our money. It's what comes out - M$ = BS").

Re:Interesting Codename...

[ElGanzoLoco]

I came to a slightly different conclusion: Maybe they feel "cornered"... Alas, I think your interpretation is probably more accurate :(

Re:Interesting Codename...

[bunratty]

There's Rincon Point in California. It's a favorite among local surfers. Get it?

Re:Interesting Codename...

[CohibaVancouver]

Actually, all of their codenames are taken from the names of Resorts and Mountains in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

...and *bars* at the base of mountains in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada :)

Take "Longhorn" for example...

http://www.longhornsaloon.ca/home.htm

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Tavor]

Or maybe Firefox has them backed into a corner, and they finally realized they had to update IE.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Tumbleweed]

I'd vote for St Helens...cuz it's gonna look like ash.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[eturro]

I think you'll find Megaslow was referring to "cornering" the market, not "turn a corner".

Re:Interesting Codename...

[rebelcool]

a ski slope in canada.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[jp10558]

Ummm, IE is already themeable AFAIK - that's what Maxathon is for instance. Also, easy plugins is what BHO's are... IE6 has had these since day one, before FF came out.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Anonymous Coward]

"turn"? I think you misspeled "cut".

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are the Longhorn mountains?

(Google didn't turn up much.)

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Dorsai65]

And what do skiers tend to do?

Crash!! (which may well be what IE7 does - or so we can hope)

Re:Interesting Codename...

[snorklewacker]

I suppose the next versions we can expect will be Nob, Telegraph, Russian, Sutro, Potrero ...

Funny thing is, Rincon hill is as flat as a pancake. It was scraped away to fill the bay.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[binner1]

I actually read it as 'rimjob'...

-Ben

Re:Interesting Codename...

[rlds]

Rincon is a name. Yes it means corner or nook, but to corner (verb) would be arrinconar. The only "innovations" you would see in IE7 would be the ones that would sink lazy developers into more proprietary Microsoft hooks. The rest of IE7 would be just to catch up with Firefox.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Osty]

a ski slope in canada.

No, Longhorn is a bar between two mountains at the Whistler ski resort in Canada. The symbolism is obvious (or was when they chose the name) -- Longhorn is a short stop between Whistler (XP) and Blackcomb (the other mountain at Whistler ski resort, and the codename of the post-Longhorn version of Windows in development). Of course, Longhorn has taken on a life of its own, almost as if the developers were getting drunk at the bar and decided, "Screw it, let's not ski Blackcomb and just stay here at the Longhorn and get smashed." Or something like that.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Anonymous Coward]

well - really shit and first time skiers do. I'm not good, but I rarely crash when skiing.

thats a pretty lame flame, fanboy.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Gothic_Walrus]

Alternate take:

Microsoft is feeling backed into a corner by Firefox. ;)

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Augusto]

It doesn't have the same meaning as in Spanish.

---
(b) [Fig.] To advance beyond a difficult stage in a
project, or in life.
---

Doblar una esquina means literally to turn a corner, it doesn't mean the same as the figure of speech they seem to imply.

Arrinconar means putting something in a corner, to chase somebody, and a couple of other meanings. But none of them mean the english phrase of "turning a corner"

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Anonymous Coward]

Rincon isn't the real codename, the real codename is secret. I'll tell you what is is, though: rimshot. Boink. Ka-boom, ching.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[rekenner]

Ever look through Hijack This logs?
BHOs are also a nice way to attach spyware to IE. Not that FF couldn't have the same thing done, with bad plugins. However, FF makes a bigger deal over installing a plugin, compared to surf-by BHOs.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[The-Bus]

Well, it also has some connotations. Sort of like the dunce in the corner, or "our little corner of the world" -- seclusion, individuality.

So basically, it's IE saying "Well we have this area covered, we don't care what you guys do" etc. etc.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[marcansoft]

ok, then it was my english at fault regarding "turning a corner". Arrinconar does mean "to corner", which is what I meant on that one.

It's funny when the same words don't mean the same things in two languages. My favorite example: "constipado" in spanish means a cold, not constipation. Typical joke implied, no one needs to tell it again :P

Re:Interesting Codename...

[nachoboy]

Maxthon isn't really a theme on IE. It's a separate 32 bit executable, written to look strikingly similar to IE, that hosts a trident (Internet Explorer) frame to display content. Microsoft wants to protect the Windows/IE brand, which is why theming support is so limited.

For the record, I'm not trying to knock Maxthon, it's my preferred browser of choice at home and at work for over a year, but it's important to understand what it is and isn't.

Re:Interesting Codename...

[Anonymous Coward]

The name is not a very good omen. I hope that the people doing rincon
are better at progrogamming; choosing names there are a real disaster.

There should be "arrinconados" (put in a coner); from (arrinconar)

Re:Interesting Codename...

[lengau]

Doesn't that make IE6 Kilamanjaro? It's supposedly able to do lots, but it hasn't done anything in human history.

Okay. Both my comment and yours were mean, but I do get the joke. And yes, I would love for M$ to codename a product Krakatoa. I would go hysterical (sp?) over that.

hmmm

[eobanb]

an important factor is security

well, that's never stopped them before...

Re:hmmm

[buswolley]

Perhaps if slashdot just ignored Microsoft for awhile Microsoft would go away.

Re:hmmm

[Koiu Lpoi]

I tried that with my ex. Believe me, it doesn't work.

Re:hmmm

[Koiu Lpoi]

Oh, what the hell, I won't lie. I'm a slashdotter - I have no ex.

Re:hmmm

[SunFan]

Microsoft and Slashdot are both chronic infections. One gets in your holes, and one overwhelms you with trolls.

Re:hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone notice the sheer irony in "Security is an important factor" statement.

No no no... its not just the statement it self; its the fact that they JUST HAD to shimmy it in at the last minute there. :p

Anyway, being serious for a moment, I'm sorta PO'ed at the fact that IE7 STILL doesnt obey standards and to top it off they stole tabbed browsing. I mean come on! Picture a world where Mozilla/Firefox never existed... would M$ really have come up with tabbed browsing on there own? Probebly not. It's probebly been suggested but just now implemented when good old Billy Gates discovers its popular with the kids these days. Only reason there is an IE7 AT ALL is because they feel pressure from Firefox. I heard that microsoft's original plans were to keep IE6 all the way through Longhorn infact, but then they started feeling pressure with there numbers sinking below 90% market share in the browser wars ... so what do they do? New browser boys and girls!

Re:hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

...and if we put (well, ask somone to) a Fatwa on them... somone may bomb them from the earth's surface... right down to hell where they belong...

Re:hmmm

[gahzinia]

Yeah, but if slashdot ignored Microsoft for a while, then slashdot would go away.

apparently?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, increased security? No way dude!

nice code name

[xv4n]

(code named 'Rincon')

What? that's spanish for "corner".

Re:nice code name

[Anonymous Coward]

What? that's spanish for "corner".

And it's "Lincoln" in Korean.

Tabbed Browsing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummmm... the article says that microsoft had no comment on tabbed browsing. It didn't even *hint* that there would be tabbed browsing.

Looks like Slashdot editors missed one again.

Re:Tabbed Browsing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't even *hint* that there would be tabbed browsing.

From the article:

'Sources say that IE 7.0 - which is code-named "Rincon," they hear - will be a tabbed browser.'

Does that constitute hinting?

Re:Tabbed Browsing?

[Anonymous Coward]

IE developers confirmed tabbed browsing in their blogs.

Re:Tabbed Browsing?

[tarquin_fim_bim]

Have they also confirmed a Linux port?

Re:Tabbed Browsing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you now use it if they made one?

Secure

[ackthpt]

Apparently we can expect 32 bit PNG support, native IDN support, new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE and, of course, tabbed browsing. The new browser also will likely include a built-in news aggregator. Apparently an important factor is security."

Yes, it will feature the reintroduction of Clippy, who will be wearing a policeman's hat, of appropriate costume for your region (e.g. uk get a bobbies hat) Clippy will also take certain cues from the current political climate...

It looks like you wanted to visit some heathen site unassociated with Microsoft, you would like to do the following:

Return to MSN

Remove all related items from cache

Submit your bookmarks for review

Block all futher access to [www.google.com]

[YES] [OK]

"and don't let me catch you installing any other browser or it's the clink for you!"

Re:Secure

[Auckerman]

If history is any lesson, Microsoft will do exactly what they are doing with their security initiative for Windows: Stop releasing updates on a timely basis except to the government and those pay for them (partners)...

I can't wait.

Re:Secure

[weighn]

(e.g. uk get a bobbies hat)

But I thought Bobbie's role was to check your code against accessibility guidelines?
Therefore he would have no place in IE!

Re:Secure

[sTalking_Goat]

and don't let me catch you installing any other browser or it's the clink for you!

Can I go to the Hoosegow? I hear they have better facilities.

Security?

[A beautiful mind]

"Apparently an important factor is security."

We've heard this many times. Let's just wait for it and then make claims.

Re:Security?

[ackthpt]

"Apparently an important factor is security." We've heard this many times. Let's just wait for it and then make claims.

Security is claimed as a top priority for many things, by many people for varying reasons.

ActiveX (nuff said)

Personal information in the hands of CALPERS, ChoicePoint, Nevada DMV, Nexis Lexis, et al.

T-mobile Sidekick

Unguarded ammo dumps hundreds of miles from oil fields

In all cases security has had problems and some spokesperson states the obvious, that "security is very important to us", but leaving out, "before the sh!t hits the fan."

In short, it pays to be vague. Who'd trust you or give your their money if you came out up front and said, "Nope, no better than a hen house built over a foxes den."

Re:Security?

[Shadow Wrought]

A very good point. The phrase "...an important factor is security," doesn't tell how the "important factor" of security is balanced against all of the other "important factors" that go into a major software application. Sure its important, but it is more important than say, profit margin? Exactly where on the priority chain security exists would be a much more telling answer. Which is, of course, why we're not likely tog et one;-)

Re:Security?

[A beautiful mind]

Beg my pardon? Redundant? This was exactly the 11th post out of 700something, i found it pretty hard to believe that it could be called as redundant.

IE7 to corner the browser market?

[Spacejock]

Rincon = 'corner' in spanish. Maybe Microsoft do have a sense of humour after all.

Re:IE7 to corner the browser market?

[Anonymous Coward]

does
Does have a sense of humour

Re:IE7 to corner the browser market?

[batkiwi]

Does it have the same connotation as in English though regarding monopolies?

If not, you could also think that they're hoping to "turn a corner" with this release, offering real usability with tabs/png/etc.

Re:IE7 to corner the browser market?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the many differences between UK english and US english is that in the UK, it is common practice to refer to a company in the plural form.

It makes sense if you were to replace the term with something similar, for example: replace the term "Microsoft" with "those convicted monopolists" and the Spacejock would be saying:
Maybe [those convicted monopolists] do have a sense of humour after all. Which would make perfect grammatical sense.

While I have never been to Australia, they might have similar manner of speech (I am, of course, assuming Spacejock is posting from Australia, as he has a .au homepage). Failing that, it is still entirely possible that he simply emigrated from the UK to Australia, seeing as they have a similar culture and a shared history.

I'm surprised you weren't bitching about how he spelt "humour" with a 'u'!

Re:IE7 to corner the browser market?

[Spacejock]

Spot on, including my emigrating to Australia from the UK.

I'm Simon, BTW. Hal Spacejock is the character in my SF novels, but I use his name because he needs all the publicity he can get ;-)

Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[msully4321]

Since they crushed Netscape, Microsoft has not had to improve their browser any significant amount. It seems the threat from Firefox is forcing them to innovate and improve in a market they once took for granted.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

forcing them to innovate and improve

If by innovate you mean "copy or buy someone else's work," then you are correct.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[fm6]

Firefox is not so much a threat (its market share is still tiny) as an embarassment. It's evidence that Microsoft is way behind in figuring out what kind of software people need and getting it out the door. That's always been an issue (remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor?) but when they screw up with something as conspicuous as a web browser, people notice.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

Since they crushed Netscape, Microsoft has not had to improve their browser any significant amount. It seems the threat from Firefox is forcing them to innovate and improve in a market they once took for granted.

Isn't that the whole essance of competition? Personally, I don't give a crap's pants about Firefox. I use it because I think it's better then IE, but if IE7 turns out to be better I will definently use it.

I look at all things this way. I'm not a fanboy of any kind; I use what's better at that time.

Think of it in another way; If IE7 turns out to be better then what the competition is offering, they too will have to improve they're product.

No matter who loses, we (the consumer) win.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[RoadWarriorX]

It seems the threat from Firefox is forcing them to innovate and improve in a market they once took for granted.

Have you RTFA? Tabbed browsing, IDN support, RSS news aggregator all available in Firefox in some form. So, where exactly is the innovation? Possibly anti-spyware integration??? That's like a mouse setting a mouse trap for itself.

Additionally, Microsoft's "improvement" is really their way of saying that they are now in "catch up" mode.

I don't mean to flame you, but customers should not look forward to the next version of IE in six months or so, when they can get virtually the same features today with Firefox.

All I need to say is "Why Even Bother".

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Chatmag]

According to today's stats, IE is used by 83.1 % of our visitors to the site. Firefox is used by 6.9 %. (The rest spread out, using Mozilla/Netscape/Opera, etc.)

Considering that a good proportion of our site visitors are newbies, that tells me Microsoft has already lost those people. That's the threat, when new Internet users use Firefox rather than IE.

Two months ago, Firefox users were around 5%.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[fm6]

Yeah, I had previously noticed that Firefox seems to be gaining a little less than a percentage point a month. But unless and until it sustains this growth long enough to climb out of the single digits, I don't think anybody in Redmond is going to shit their pants.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mean to flame you, but customers should not look forward to the next version of IE in six months or so, when they can get virtually the same features today with Firefox.

All I need to say is "Why Even Bother".

One thing that irks me about FireFox is how sluggish it feels. I'm not talking about startup times, but actually using it. And I don't care if you're going to say "well it runs well enough for me!", I've seen it run sluggish compared to IE on all the computers I've had. So why bother? Because there are people who still dislike FireFox.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor.

Are you criticising edlin? I won't hear you skip ill of the dead so.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[kz45]

I don't mean to flame you, but customers should not look forward to the next version of IE in six months or so, when they can get virtually the same features today with Firefox.

well, for starters, firefox still doesn't render certain websites properly. If all websites rendered as quickly and as well as IE, I would use firefox exclusively. Until them, I need to use both. Security matters, but to the end user, usability is more important.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, it renders them properly for the most part. It just doesn't handle mangled HTML as well as IE does, which is understandable considering the HTML was mangled inside IE's fine list of quirks by people testing on a non-compliant browser.

Personally I tend to develop in Firefox then onward-test in IE and Opera. If I run into any of the IE "show stoppers" in CSS I tend to hack around them enough that IE looks acceptable, but if it means IE looking slightly worse than Firefox I'll tend to do it that way. As long as the IE design is acceptable to the client I think it's a much better idea to offer improved browsing experience to people using browsers that aren't broken.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

Please keep in mind that since IE is used by the majority of the public that most web sites have to be designed to comply with "IE's standards" and not necessarily the W3C guidelines. When I develop websites, I make them so that they are almost an exact match when viewed from IE and Firefox. In my opinion, Firefox gets it right when it comes to proper rendering. Alot of rigging needs to be done to make IE work (especially with CSS.)

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[SunFan]

Innovate, innovate, innovate, innovate, innovate, and innovate.

One thing missing from that sentence is Microsoft. Their only real innovation is a business model, which, hopefully, is merely temporary in the IT industry.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[dankow]

remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor?

Yeah, and I also remember when Windows ME shipped without a decent operating system.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless IE7 offers Flashblock, Anidisable, and BugMeNot, I will not be switching back.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Nasarius]

remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor?

Sure. That would be all of them, right? Don't tell me you thought EDIT.COM qualified as "decent" in a time when vi and Emacs were around? :-)

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[NutscrapeSucks]

It's really not the browser marketshare that matters, it's the platform technologies. As long as XUL and Java Applets aren't getting popular, FireFox could have 50% marketshare and it wouldn't affect Microsoft much at all.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[insert_username_here]

Funny... for me it was _always_ the other way around. I can't stand vi or emacs (I've recently learned enough weird, hard-to-find commands to _tolerate_ vi, but I wouldn't say I like it), but I always liked edit.com. On Linux, I use pico or a graphical editor wherever humanly possible.

Of course, saying that round these here parts may get yourself lynched.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[fm6]

If Firefox had 50% marketshare, lots more people would use XUL than do now. (Java is another issue, not worth going into.) But even if that weren't true, Microsoft would lose a lot of control over the way the Web works if most people were using other browsers!

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[10101001 10101001]

That's like a mouse setting a mouse trap for itself.

You know, that's not such a bad idea.

<User moves mouse towards Internet Explorer icon>
*snap*
<Mouse and hand caught in mouse trap>

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Junior J. Junior III]

Not innovate, catch up. Name one true innovation in IE7.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[kz45]

Personally I tend to develop in Firefox then onward-test in IE and Opera. If I run into any of the IE "show stoppers" in CSS I tend to hack around them enough that IE looks acceptable, but if it means IE looking slightly worse than Firefox I'll tend to do it that way. As long as the IE design is acceptable to the client I think it's a much better idea to offer improved browsing experience to people using browsers that aren't broken.

aren't broken? regardless of whether IE follows the standards, it has basically set the standard for internet websites for the last couple of years. I would say IE usage is still around 80%, which means if you are a developer, making it look "just acceptable" in IE will make your clients think that your work is just that.

I am a developer, and out of all my clients, maybe 1 has even heard of firefox.

I think you are making a mistake.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[pmike_bauer]

remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor
Windows has also failed in this regard. Notepad is hardly a decent text editor.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[NutscrapeSucks]

I guess my point is that having the most browser marketshare is a largely useless boast. MS has had 90%+ for years and they really don't have much control over how the web works. The only direct benefit to having high marketshare is selling advertsing on your homepage.

However, a browser can be an important wedge into other markets like devtools or servers.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Guppy06]

"remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor"

What? You mean there were actually versions of MS-DOS that didn't have the beloved edlin?

ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR!!!!!

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry to burst your bubble but firefox/mozilla didnt innovate tabbed browsing

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you RTFA? Tabbed browsing, IDN support, RSS news aggregator all available in Firefox in some form.

Actually you could use MS's Visual Studio (since late 2000) as a tabbed browser.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

He isn't making a mistake, he's working to help fix the problem.

You, on the other hand, are simply helping to purpetuate the problem.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[ciroknight]

remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor?

Yeah, and I also remember when Windows ME shipped without a decent operating system.

Yeah, and I also remember when Dell (and others) shipped boxes without a decent operating system. Oh wait...

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[drsmithy]

That's always been an issue (remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor?) [...]

Compare that to how many versions of Linux ship/shipped without a decent UI, though...

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

You say its tiny when it fact it is around 8%. That's millions of users all of whom have one major reason less for using Microsoft products in any way shape or form.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[kz45]

He isn't making a mistake, he's working to help fix the problem.

You, on the other hand, are simply helping to purpetuate the problem

if you think about it, he is really the one using non-standard practices.

This reminds me of the people that decide to send their resume to possible employers using a format other than MS-word (or that cannot be read by microsoft word) because they don't believe microsoft is the standard. More than likely they won't get the job.

I guess I shouldn't be complaining, it just means that my work will look better to the customer.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[stonecypher]

remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor?

edlin builds character.

Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate

[HishamMuhammad]

Did you ever try mcedit? It's shipped as part of mc, the old-school Midnight Commander file-manager. It's "friendly", less limited than pico, and, on the Linux console, even shift-arrows work.

Apparently an important factor is security?

[Bnonn]

No kidding eh...

Are they basing it on the IE6 code? If so, why? If they're completely rebuilding the Windows code for Longhorn, wouldn't it be smart to do the same with IE?

Re:Apparently an important factor is security?

[Anonymous Coward]

And whose ass did you pull that little tidbit out of? If you think they're rewriting Windows from scratch for Longhorn, you've obviously got some problems with the whole "perception of reality" thing.

Re:Apparently an important factor is security?

[malraid]

yeah right, a complete rebuild did wonders for netscape back in the day. giving some credit to microsoft, most people that actually do something "practical" have a practical mentallity, and rebuilding from scratch isn't normally an option. you can refactor, improve, optimize, whatever....

Re:Apparently an important factor is security?

[Bnonn]

Right, so that's the practical mentality that brought about the rewrite of Windows, I suppose? Perhaps I'm wrong, but wouldn't rewriting IE be a pretty trivial task compared to what Microsoft are undertaking with Longhorn? And, wouldn't it seem like a logical step to take?

Re:Apparently an important factor is security?

[mabinogi]

Microsoft are _not_ rewriting windows.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if Longhorn identified as Windows NT 5.2 (or 5.3 if 2003 already has 5.2).

They're doing a whole bunch with the UI, and of course there's the WinFS stuff, but underneath, it's still NT.

printing

[Phil246]

"new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE"
in other words, theyve fixed it so printing from IE isnt as retarded?
how hard can it be to print a page without chopping parts off

Re:printing

[Rude Turnip]

A print preview mode like Firefox has would be nice. That way, if you need to print only certain pages of a large document (like a Form 10-K) you can specify with ease which pages you'd like to print.

Re:printing

[Anonymous Coward]

What I'd like to see is more web authors using the powers of CSS to print pages better. Every web page should have a separate stylesheet for media="print" to render the contents appropriately. I mean, those side-columns with a gazillion links are annoying enough on screen, but they have absolutely no use on a sheet of paper. A few judicious uses of "display: none" would make printouts much more useful.

Re:printing

[Hobadee]

I actually find that IE printing is great. Firefox, and Linux in general, tend to chop off things right in the middle. (Maps for example) IE does a good job of making sure things stay together like thier supposed to.

(Note: I'm still not anywhere near advocating IE - just pointing out a single thing that Firefox could improve)

Re:printing

[owlstead]

Yes, and don't forget that HTML was build specifically to be shown on different media. But no, MS needed to print out a retarded screen shot instead. Sigh.

Re:printing

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, they made web page design the equivalent of taking screenshots of Front Page and rendering it over the Internet.

Re:printing

[nickos]

I think the fact that you don't see this used much shows how ignorant many web developers/designers are these days. How many times have you seen a "Show printable version of this page" javascript popup? Shudder...

Ive heard that before

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive heard "security is a priority" from microsoft before, it gave us 98, then ME then XP.

Microsoft innovates again!!

[Anonymous Coward]

By uh... by...uh...stealing from other platforms!

Maybe they can innovate by adding clippy to it...

so

[Anonymous Coward]

so basically its gonna be a firefox clone except with microsofts typical excellent coding. I give it 15 mins after the 1st release to find some hole.
Give it up bill, you can't win. We're not your sheep anymore!

Lets not forget..

[Renraku]

Lets not forget about the OS-crippling bugs and security holes big enough to drive a DVD-full of arbitary code through.

many useful features...

[nick-less]

but nearly one will ever install it unless MS forces them via autoupdate...
I bet I IE5 and IE6 will still annoy us for many many years...

Re:many useful features...

[PeteQC]

I HOPE it will be forced through auto-update. So we'll be able to create web site with many more possibilities and 90%+ people will actually be able to see it (Potential IE7 + Firefox users)

Re:many useful features...

[Patrick Mannion]

many many many years. It's really annoying when IE5 popups and forces you to sign up for MSN when I format my HD reinstalling the annoying Windows Me. Then, I set it up and I have to download Firefox, then sometimes I have to switch over to IE for some websites that don't work well with Firefox and then the crappy Windows Update comes up and rubs IE 6 in your face, and you have to seperately download the damn thing. I'm just glad this is only XP-wise, I don't want to be force-fed another IE.

Re:many useful features...

[MikeFM]

It doesn't matter to me. I have /mostly/ given up testing my websites with anything but the newest versions of browsers. If people then have trouble I can just tell them it's a bug on their end and suggest they update. Ahhh - that time doing tech support really paid off.

Even then that leaves IE, Safari, FireFox, Opera, and Lynx to test at the bare minimum and often you need to test each of those browsers on different OSs and with different screen and font sizes as defaults.

THEN you get into the fun of testing on the browsers that come with various handheld devices. That is especially fun as most of theose browsers are to retarded to actually use the stylesheets for handheld devices. My phone brilliantly uses both the screen and handheld stylesheets which makes everything look horrible. :)

I'll be especially glad to see IE finally, I hope, have decent PNG support. Now if only IE and FF would both support APNG/MNG so we could fianlly get rid of GIFs life might be swell.

Re:many useful features...

[Anonymous Coward]

You still use Windows ME even after having to re-install it? Dude...

from the article...

[jotux]

"The first beta of IE 7.0 isn't expected for a few more months."

Does it really take than long to download firefox, change the spinning icon in the top right corner, and relabel it IE 7?

Re:from the article...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

It's not really that easy. They have to backport all the security holes form IE6 until it passes a regression test :)

Re:from the article...

[philipmather]

Not if you're the US military, in which case you'll be able to have it a month in advance. I can just see Clipy now...

It looks like your visiting Iraq, would you like to do the following:
<UL>
<LI>Invade a neighbouring country?</LI>
<LI>Install a new government of your choice?</LI>
<LI>Uninstall all natural resources?</LI>
<LI>...or activate a trade firewall to inhibit all and any competition?</LI>
</UL>

Re:from the article...

[y0saph]

cmon, they're working at microsoft, it's not like they actually know what they're doing...

Name change for IE7

[Matt Perry]

I guess that IE7 will have to change its name.

And about MS's product: I just hope they fix all their CSS issues and add support for CSS 3.

Re:Name change for IE7

[Anonymous Coward]

I just hope they fix all their CSS issues and add support for CSS 3.

Me too. I hope they add COMPLIANT support for CSS 1 and 2.. Don't push your luck with CSS 3 though ..

Re:Name change for IE7

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be happy if they got all of CSS2 in there...but then I hope that's what you meant anyway

Re:Name change for IE7

[stonecypher]

CSS3 isn't standardized yet. Anyone who's used VC6 knows how bad an idea it is to ask Microsoft to implement software to a spec which hasn't been formalized yet.

for (int i=0; i<10; ++i) {} int i; // Incorrectly flagged as redeclaration for SEVEN YEARS

It's also the name of a Casino in San Diego

[Uptown Joe]

Roll the Dice for Security!

Security

[Swamii]

Apparently an important factor is security.

Good for them, it's about time. SP2 was a step in the right direction: blocked ActiveX & Java by default was a good move. I'll be interested in seeing how they deal with .NET applets that want to elevate permissions. I know that .NET code is sandboxed over the web, but from what I've read, it seems they plan on allowing permission elevations via a single click from the user. Let's hope they really focus on security and really lock down all non-verifiable 3rd party code being run through the browser.

Well...

[NeoChaosX]

Apparently an important factor is security

Does that mean they're removing ActiveX?

Re:Well...

[xENoLocO]

I think that means you have the option to not install it. :)

Re:Well...

[Exatron]

Hopefully, it means that they're extracting Internet Explorer from Windows.

Better popup blocking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell me they're going to close the loophole (heck, I almost think it's an exploit) that allows web sites to bypass the popup blocker by just waiting until the user clicks on something inside the page...?

I thought...

[kryogen1x]

I think I remember someone from MS saying that their users don't want tabbed browsing, therefore IE will not get tabbed browsing.

I guess he's wrong.

Re:I thought...

[kryogen1x]

Hate to reply to myself, but here's the article

From the Article:

"English reiterated that features such as tabbed browsing are not important to IE users."

Re:I thought...

[hkmwbz]

When they say that people don't want this or that, or they want this or that, they aren't talking about you and I, or other individuals using Windows (if you are a Windows user, that is). Microsoft representatives keep talking about how they listen to their customers and get feedback from customers. When they say those things, they are talking about major corporations and development partners. Those are the customers Microsoft are listening to.

Re:I thought...

[kelnos]

Ah, I remember that one. It's funny how literally *every* (former) IE user that I introduced Firefox to went absolutely nuts after I said "now hit ctrl+t". Really, everyone loves tabs.

Security

[JakeD409]

Security? Why?

But.......

[Patrick Mannion]

will it run on Linux? Hmmm. Appearently, Microsoft has finally began to consider Firefox a threat because *cough*tabbed browsing* is a Firefox feature and so is PNG. Finally, IE learns they need to include PNG. Though, just because it has all these ""new"" *cough*ripoff*cough* features doesn't mean I'll use it. I'm insecure as it is running on Windows Me!

Re:But.......

[mbier]

*cough*tabbed browsing* is a Firefox feature and so is PNG

I use Firefox; I love Firefox...but Oprea had tabbed browsing before there was a Firefox. PNG is a W3C standard, not a Firefox feature.

Re:But.......

[The Bungi]

*cough*tabbed browsing* is a Firefox feature

There have been IE wrappers written to use tabs since at least IE5 was released and the ActiveX control stabilized enough. Heck, that was one of the first things I did when I first played with the control and wrote my test "browser". That and a better "favorites" service.

Mozilla didn't invent tabs - even if we discount IE clones Opera had tabs/MDI before that as well. Mozilla actually didn't invent a bunch of things that they claim as "innovations" - most of them were simply copied from Netscape, who did innovate for the simple reason that they pretty much defined the platform.

For all the fanboy blabbering that goes on around Mozilla the reality is there isn't much innovation to speak of. Not to say they're not good browsers, don't get me wrong. But there's a big difference between evolutions and revolutions.

and so is PNG

PNG is an image format that is standardized through the W3C, it's not a "Firefox feature" anymore than JPG is.

Re:But.......

[Patrick Mannion]

I know PNG is a standard, I'm just saying that IE has finally chosen to display it correctly.... I know tabbed browsing isn't a "firefox feature" either but still, Firefox to me seems to have more users than Opera, so I just generalized it.

Re:But.......

[Patrick Mannion]

I know that. Opera had tabbed browsing before Firefox, but Firefox seems to have more users and it uses PNG, a W3C, while Microsoft has finally chosen to display it correctly. I mean, I don't think they considered Opera a threat so they never tossed those features in until now when Firefox has "popularized" by having so many users.

Re:But.......

[plague3106]

PNG is an image format that is standardized through the W3C, it's not a "Firefox feature" anymore than JPG is.

Um, how is displaying an image format NOT a feature of FF? It can't display PCX currently...if FF were to gain support, would that not be one of the features?

As others have pointed out, MS has no intrest in tabbed browsing until FF starting gaining steam. Its irrelevent that Opera had it first, FF was the one that made it popular.

Re:But.......

[nickos]

Microsoft doesn't have to fix their PNG implementation to remain competitive. Seeing as IE has a dominant share of all browsers, most web designers will not use PNG files with alpha channels because IE is broken and will render the images badly. Users will only care when they see funny looking web sites and then they will most likely blame the site not the browser...

That said it would be so nice if MS could fix this!

Re:But.......

[The Bungi]

Um, how is displaying an image format NOT a feature of FF?

I took the OPs meaning that Mozilla had somehow invented PNG.

MS has no intrest in tabbed browsing until FF starting gaining steam

Mozilla had no interest in creating unobtrusive popup blocker notification cues until they saw the one that shipped with XPSP2. Funny how that works, eh?

Its irrelevent that Opera had it first

No, it's not irrelevant for the simple reason that I was talking about innovation. Popularity != innovation.

Re:But.......

[plague3106]

I took the OPs meaning that Mozilla had somehow invented PNG.

Understood, but I think that was the wrong way to take it.

Mozilla had no interest in creating unobtrusive popup blocker notification cues until they saw the one that shipped with XPSP2. Funny how that works, eh?

Huh? FF had popup blocking well before SP2... Mozilla might not have, but FF certainly did.

No, it's not irrelevant for the simple reason that I was talking about innovation. Popularity != innovation.

I'd argue that unless your 'innovation' gains popularity, you did something wrong innovating it. What good does it do if no one knows about it?

Not too keen on Standards

[PineHall]

Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0.

Microsoft still wants to be the one to set the standards

Re:Not too keen on Standards

[sharkey]

They might be shooting too high. Maybe they should start with getting CSS1 support into IE first.

Re:Not too keen on Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless MS includes a detect lousy 6.0 only code any attempt at MS to adopt a more CSS browser will result in many sites puking in IE 7.0. Web masters and end users will blame MS and many they will download *GASP* a third party browser...

So standards support in IE7 will drive people away!

Re:Not too keen on Standards

[Tumbleweed]

HTML 4.01 support would be good, too.

Re:Not too keen on Standards

[sootman]

Hey, c'mon, CSS 1 is barely a decade old. Give'em time. :-)

Re:Not too keen on Standards

[sharkey]

Demo using CSS1 only.

Re:Not too keen on Standards

[sootman]

Awesome! Even better! Thanks!

Re:Not too keen on Standards

[booch]

Actually, they DID set the CSS 2.1 standard. See Tantek Çelik's name there, under Editors at the top, right next to where it says microsoft.com? He also contributed a lot to the CSS 3 specs. Microsoft won't even comply with the standard that they helped build. That's probably the most asinine part of the whole story.

Built-in news aggregator

[SlashThat]

Built-in news aggregator = Advertising platform?

Re:Built-in news aggregator

[SnprBoB86]

No, mod parent down...

The news aggregator applies to RSS feeds

Re:Built-in news aggregator

[SlashThat]

Hey man, you have to expect the worst from MS's "built-in features". You may be right, or you may be wrong.

Re:Built-in news aggregator

[Anonymous Coward]

No, mod parent down...

The news aggregator applies to RSS feeds

Maybe you should try to understand what this moderation system is all about. You can't mod down a question because somebody quite unimportant believes the answer is "no".
The question is interesting, anyway, while your answer is simply wrong.

Re:Built-in news aggregator

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, why rely on third parties to infect IE with spyware when they could simply bundle it themselves?

Fanx, Firefox

[Laconian]

How much do you want a bet it was the excitement surrounding Firefox that woke the beast up from its nap? Yay, the browser wars are truly back!

Re:Fanx, Firefox

[xENoLocO]

no no no.... MS isn't worried about firefox, remember?

Great News!!!

[NerdConspiracy]

Mmmmm, can't wait... tabbed browsing...png support...and printing too! And they are even considering supporting CSS!

How come nobody else could think of those features until now? Well done Microsoft!

Tabbed browsing.. yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Am i the only one that immediately disables this annoying feature immediately after installing a new browser?

Thats what the taskbar is for... quit screwing with my head!

This sounds great but...

[bmw]

Is anyone else screaming WHAT ABOUT CSS?! IE is the single largest reason I don't enjoy doing web development. If they could somehow manage to actually support some accepted standards (other than their own) it would make life oh so much better for all of us.

Re:This sounds great but...

[Khomar]

Is anyone else screaming WHAT ABOUT CSS?!

This was mentioned in the article, and it is not exactly great news:

Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.

Which features are they not going to support? Given my experience with them, it will probably be the very ones that I would actually like to use. :-) Why is it that they are so loathe to adopt standards? Is their code that flaky, or is it truly their monopolistic tendencies?

Re:This sounds great but...

[falcon203e]

I think I'll go about blissfully assuming that standards compliance will be a complete given for the next version (seeing as these are _standards_ and whatnot). Then it'll arrive and will work even worse with the CSS sites I've built. God damn you, Microsoft!

Re:This sounds great but...

[angrytuna]

If they could somehow manage to actually support some accepted standards (other than their own)...

The funny thing about that is, they're the ones who granted the patent to the W3C to use in the first place.

Re:This sounds great but...

[Auckerman]

If they actually cared about developers, which they don't, they would make absolute, float, and hover work as expected and on arbitrary elements. For those of you who don't know of these issues, check out this for some nice examples of stuff IE can't handle. It's also work looking at the Zen Garden too.

Bad CSS support in Windows is the main reason I use IE7 (no, that's not from microsoft).

Re:This sounds great but...

[LichP]

Actually, IE6 in strict mode, although still heinous, is reasonably good in terms of CSS. The box model is largely OK, although not entirely without faults. The floats model is still a bit buggered though, with various spurious margin bugs and soforth. Overall, IE6 in strict mode is sufficiently functional that cross-browser development is for the most part fairly straightforward, unlike IE6 in quirks mode, where the broken box model makes life hideously dificult.

If they can get strict mode cleaned up for IE7, sort out the doctype switching to allow for XML declarations, recognise the XHTML MIME type, and generally get the CSS implementation properly in line with CSS2.1, then things will be good.

I find it a little ironic that much of the CSS work has already been done within the Microsoft camp in the form of IE5 for the Mac, which in my experience has the most CSS2 compliant rendering engine of all the major browsers (excluding Opera, which I have practically no experience with). It's certainly the case that Gecko and KHTML lean much more towards the more practical CSS2.1, and sometimes oddities in CSS2 can actually spring the odd surprise in their manifestation within IE5 Mac.

Re:This sounds great but...

[dwoolridge]

In the mean time, Dean Edwards gives us the gift.

Re:This sounds great but...

[BorgHunter]

Why is it that they are so loathe to adopt standards? Is their code that flaky, or is it truly their monopolistic tendencies?

Nah, it's not that. They're just lazy, and it's not like CSS2 makes a good selling point for Joe Blow. They want to put in the flashy things like tabbed browsing to compete (NOT a bad thing, I remind you all), but ignore core components that Average IE User doesn't really care about, e.g. CSS2. Why spend time on boring old CSS when you can work on tabbed browsing? But really, I want to know if Microsoft is going to make IE as extensible as the other browsers out there, especially Firefox. I doubt it, but one would think that a skinnable and extension-ready IE would be a major selling point.

Re:This sounds great but...

[mczak]

Well I'm happy if they support position:fixed as a start. There are lots of web pages which are emulating that through a javascript which moves the element which is really meant to stay at the same position around. But of course you can see it scroll around a bit, and it causes high cpu load too. Every time I see that I'll instantly think "gah that stupid IE workaround on that site too..."

Re:This sounds great but...

[SunFan]

Is their code that flaky, or is it truly their monopolistic tendencies?

Yes, and yes.

Re:This sounds great but...

[mpcooke3]

Perhaps some of CSS2 requires updating the windows widgets to support more styling effects - I could see that being a bit of a pain.

Anyway realistically they only need to improve IE enough to supress firefox growth. I'm sure they don't really care that much about CSS support. For advanced web-applications they'd much rather people use the proprietary Avalon stuff soon to be released in 2009*.

(* Give or take a few years)

Re:This sounds great but...

[w42w42]

It would make life better for the rest of us, and thus encourage html/xhtml development for web applications. I wouldn't be surprised though if msft by not supporting CSS is trying to make xaml into the next big webapp platform. The deal there being, if people have failed to learn from history and bite, they'll be locked into Windows yet all over again.

Re:This sounds great but...

[IndigoDarkwolf]

"Between two years and never"

Re:This sounds great but...

[Rie Beam]

#elm { width: 200px; } ...Would of course produce a bear.

Re:This sounds great but...

[Mardak]

What is IE supposed to do? Is it supposed to fix all the CSS hacks and break those pages that were depending on the hacks? Things should be okay if they completely fixed everything to work just like other browsers, but if things are partially fixed, there'll be more broken stuff that require new hacks.

Re:This sounds great but...

[jp10558]

I ask again, isn't Maxathon basically an advanced IE skin + extension bundle? And aren't BHOs the same as extensions?

Re:This sounds great but...

[51mon]

What is IE supposed to do? Is it supposed to fix all the CSS hacks and break those pages that were depending on the hacks?

It is suppose to fix the hacks, and keep the old ones working.

Quirks mode anyone.

Re:This sounds great but...

[JoshRosenbaum]

Yes, I definitely agree with this. This was the only thing I was looking for in the new browser. The real crappy thing is that by not supporting it in this new release, we get to wait another ten years before we can drop the old methods. Also, by doing a half-assed effort as the article suggests they'll do, we get the bugs and crap that us web developers hate with a passion, and will cause us headaches in the future. Oh how I hate Microsoft. They definitely tricked me into thinking they were developing the best browser, and they'd keep developing it, and then they just stopped innovating after they crushed Netscape. Bastards.

Re:This sounds great but...

[Anonymous Coward]

opera copies a couple of ie oddities but supports more of css 2 than any other browser.

Re:This sounds great but...

[plague3106]

Its supposed to fix the hacks, and then all the 'broken' stuff should be made standards complaint, not hacked badily again...

Re:This sounds great but...

[nickos]

Ooh yes, that would be nice. Think about all those sites that still use frames because position:fixed doesn't work...

Re:This sounds great but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Perhaps some of CSS2 requires updating the windows widgets to support more styling effects"

Not really.

Both Camino and Safari have native widgets instead of Firefox/Mozillas ugly almost-Windows-like widgets. The likelihood of a website not working because the widgets aren't green or red isn't that great whereas the likelihood of it not working because of IE not supporting position:fixed, a working box model or PNG32 support is much greater.

The Non-native widgets in Firefox are butt ugly, which is why many users replace them on OSX with nicer ones - http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16118

Re:This sounds great but...

[mattpalmer1086]

It's not that they're lazy. Microsoft have done a tremendous job in getting developers to create software for their platforms, creating tools and superb documentation, even before they were the de facto standard that they are today. But only for platforms that they control and which incidentally form a huge part of their cash flow.

The danger to Microsoft is rich client applications which can run on any platform through a standard browser. They are not going to do that if they don't have to in order to stay in the game. That would be like asking Turkeys to vote for Christmas.

Sad, but true.

Re:This sounds great but...

[mpcooke3]

Thats true and I agree they should fix major things like the box model and PNG support first. But I was talking about the difficulties of implementing *full* CSS2 compliance.

I expect the widgets are maintained by another team ;)

Re:This sounds great but...

[Nurgled]

Getting their CSS support up to par isn't an easy job. Lots of it is broken because it is just mapping CSS properties onto parameters for old rendering code, which is why there are lots of little quirks in the box model support. Lots of it is unsupported and would require massive changes to the rendering engine to implement.

I'd much rather that MS save CSS fixes for a time when they are able to do it properly and completely, otherwise what we'll end up with is another version of IE that's differently broken to the previous ones, so the IE-specific hacks that people end up using will be further complicated by differentiating between the two versions.

Of course, I've been telling people for years that using IE6-specific hacks is just committing yourself to lots more work at the next release. If you're sure you'll be around to do it then, go ahead... but I think it's far better for most people to just compromise their design so that it works in IE without the hacks. You still get the freedom to re-evaluate your position later, but you're not forced to.

Re:This sounds great but...

[drew]

my suspicion is that they will implement most/all of the new css properties that weren't implemented in ie6, but all existing incorrect behaviors (e.g. float model, boxes auto-expanding to hold contents) will stay as they are in the name of backwards compatibility.

which would suck, but it would be inline with the way they normally do things like this. unless they add a new render mode switch for documents that are served as application/xml+xhtml.....

Re:This sounds great but...

[stonecypher]

IE doesn't use Win32 widgets, and hasn't since IE3. The way Win32 widgets work, things begin to drag when you have two hundred and fifty buttons on the same form. That's not even marginally unreasonable on a web page. If IE used Win32 widgets, things would be dog slow on complex pages.

Whereas everyone loves to whine how slow Netscape 4 was, anyone which remembers Netscape 3 will sagely nod when I tell them the biggest factor in that speed change was their own stepping away from standard widgets.

Besides, look at what IE widgets already do, which is way more complex than what Win32 widgets do.

Re:This sounds great but...

[mpcooke3]

Why do they float on top of everything else then? I always assumed that was because they were native/heavyweight.

security.

[jotux]

"Apparently an important factor is security"

So they're re-writing the code for another platform?

Hehe...

[Anonymous Coward]

You said innovate.

But...

[Mr.Progressive]

Yes, but will it be digitally signed?

sounds like they're not saying much

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bet Microsoft has some bigger things than this up its sleeve, at least so they can make a flashy demo when it comes out. Maybe a configurable meta-search bar that aggregates from google, MSN and a search of your local disk drives or browser bookmarks or something like that.

Help me understand

[overshoot]

MS has been telling us for years now that they don't offer tabbed browsing because their customers don't like it.

So, I'm confused. Does this mean that they add features that people don't want?

Re:Help me understand

[Lehk228]

So, I'm confused. Does this mean that they add features that people don't want?

MS has been including features people didn't want for a long time now.

Re:Help me understand

[discordja]

Like "Windows XP"

Factor this...

[dallask]

When MS says that "an important factor is security" what their really saying is "We know the linux community will rigorusly test our product and find our bugs for us... when they do, we'll fix those bugs immidiately... or at least in a few months."

Re:Factor this...

[Patrick Mannion]

Or in five years when IE 10 is out...

Re:Factor this...

[AgntOrnge]

The Linux community LOL!! Should be reworded; people who have nothing better to do with their time but pursue a personal vendetta against a faceless giant for reasons they can't even substantiate. Leave the FOSS community out of this. It's zealots like you that give it a bad name.

Re:Factor this...

[l3v1]

when they do, we'll fix those bugs immidiately... or at least in a few months

Yup, right, and you say that based on similar M$ behavior in the past ? That would be quite hard to do. So you'd have to express your own hopes on the matter, which is nice, but entirely unrealistic. And, yup, that _is_ based on past M$ behavior.

xp/2003 only?

[nurb432]

So is this when they finally cut off ( and piss off ) all the *millions* of users that still have 98/NT/2000?

Users that cant upgrade unless they get newer hardware. Users that know what they have now does the job and have resisted the 'upgrade scam'.

Re:xp/2003 only?

[Patrick Mannion]

WHAT ABOUT US ME USERS BITCH! But yes, I'm pretty sure this is when they really dump us! Although, I'm pretty sure they did that a long long time ago.

Re:xp/2003 only?

[optimus2861]

So is this when they finally cut off ( and piss off ) all the *millions* of users that still have 98/NT/2000?

To be fair to MS, 98 and NT are already past their mainstream support phases if you look at their support site Linky. However, in the case of 2000, you're dead-on; it's really taken the shaft compared to XP, even though it's still in its mainstream support phase until the end of June. No back-port of any of the XP security changes made for SP2, and of course no back-port for this either. Puts the lie to that "mainstream support" claim, doesn't it?

Re:xp/2003 only?

[grolschie]

Patrick, I think you forgot to tick the "post anonymously" option. No real ./ readers use Windows ME. If they did, they would never admit to it. ;-)

Re:xp/2003 only?

[nurb432]

Problem is that i still have paid support for 2000 server ( and workstation ) that is STILL in effect.

Would be nice if they continued support for it since I paid for it and my time hasnt expired.. From the looks of the article, im just out of luck.

Re:xp/2003 only?

[Airconditioning]

Likely they really want 2000 to die, it's very stable, excellent hardware support and doesn't use product activation which makes it rather popular for people who don't require an OS preinstalled for them. There's no real control over it for Microsoft. The only logical move for them is to leave big gaping holes in the OS that will scare everyone into upgrading.

Re:xp/2003 only?

[stonecypher]

It's been eight years, and you're talking about something that's still not going to happen for a year or two. Most auto manufacturers don't make parts for a car model that far out of date, and cars weren't as rudimentary by current standards seven years ago as computers, let alone nine or potentially ten.

This isn't as unreasonable as you want it to seem.

I'll be the first to Admit

[Deliveranc3]

Firefox is done.

We had 5 years of Microsoft laziness to inovate and take over and we blew it. We suck.

I will still use Opera, and I guess we can wait for security holes again... but they stole our tabbed browsing. It's all over people.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[camcorder]

Untill IE7 will have support for FireFox extensions, firefox won't be done.
For me, tabbed browsing is not a major goodie for firefox, but it's adblock, spurl.net extension, foxytunes, dictionary search and alot more. And three of them does not have any equivalent for IE and not even opera.
What makes firefox strong is the extensibility and the open source, which made it browser of all time.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[bzeichick]

They may have stolen tabbed web browsing, but don't forget that the main developer for Firefox, now works for google. So I think we still have a fighting chance.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[mbier]

but they stole our tabbed browsing. It's all over people.

Now, now. Throwing around "theft" so carelessly diminishes the charge when it is really warranted. Opera had tabs before Firefox--did that mean that Opera was done when Firefox came out? Should browser vendors ignore such innovations? IE7 doesn't mention lots of good things including skins, extensions, and lean code. Many doubt the security as well--but nobody can know anything about that for a fact since the code doesn't exist. Firefox is only "over" if the developers working on it give up.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[Locke2005]

Perhaps your sarcasm would be a lot more obvious if you just said "Netcraft confirms it: FireFox is dying!"

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[y0saph]

Not until IE runs smooth on Linux, and for that to happen, Microsoft will have to learn how to write programs, it may take a while

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[the plant doctor]

I see this quoted often. Serious question, who had tabs first, Mozilla or Opera? I can't remember.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[Adrilla]

We had 5 years of Microsoft laziness to inovate and take over and we blew it. We suck.

No matter when it was developed, 2 years ago, 1 year from now, next monday; It's popularity is what made MS make this move and when that threat was posed to IE is when Microsoft would've taken this action. IE7 wasn't supposed to be released until Longhorn, but the sudden popularity of FF made them have to take this action now. They couldn't wait until Longhorn's release and risk losing a lot more marketshare in the browser field.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[womby]

Opera. I cannot tell you if Opera had tabbed browsing before we had tabbed text editors and tabbed terminals in KDE but it was long before Mozilla.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[mbier]

Opera. http://tinyurl.com/6x9mm

"The browser [Netscape 7 Preview Release 1] also includes two features first seen in Opera: tabbed windows and a one-click search."

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[Anonymous Coward]

Lotus Notes had tabbed browsing before all of them (R5 1999). And everyone knows that Lotus Notes is where all the really good UI ideas are ripped off from :)

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[p-hawk42]

The extensibility and open source make firefox a kick-ass browser. They do not guarantee a large installed user base. For you, those extensions are major goodies, but how many people whose geeks installed firefox for them are going to spend time installing extensions? Not too many. The sheer inertia of regular users tilts the odds in favor of IE7, especially when those same regular users buy a new Longhorn box.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[Deliveranc3]

Replying to my own post (Yuck!) But notice IE7 comes out when major news outlets start commenting on new security holes targetting Firefox?

Looks like Advertisers and hacksters have started targetting Firefox, when it was below 5% usage it was no threat but faced no security threats, now it will do both for a time.

I wish it had gotten to 30% then we could see if the security of open source could stand against closed source.

Browser wars are funny :)

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[l3v1]

For me, tabbed browsing is not a major goodie for firefox, but it's

I have to agree, there are many FFox extentions which make also my life easier and - besides the very good other features of FFox that I can appreciate as a developer - I couldn't easily drop using them. I currently have about a dozen very nice extentions installed which all by themselves make FFox - for me - high above than others in usability.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[l3v1]

first seen in Opera

First seen in Opera that is first seen implemented in a web browser. If you take away that bit, tabbed browsing is actually quite and really old. A good one, still, but the Opera guys just brought over an old idea and put it in. Just like M$ is doing now, and for ages.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[Nurgled]

Opera had an MDI interface which, with windows maximised, acts almost exactly like tabbed browsing. It has the advantage that you can display your "tabs" side-by-side if you want to, which isn't an option with Mozilla's tabs.

However, more recent versions of Opera allow the user to choose between full MDI, Mozilla-style tabs or one page per top-level window. I still use MDI, personally.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[Anonymous Coward]

What, so MS can dominate in the 4% Linux market? I can only hope that you are joking. I hate MS as much as anyone, but be realistic. MS can continue to ignore that statisticaly insignificant market share owned by Linux, with no fears. I wish it were otherwise, but face it, Linux is still a long way from being mainstream.

Re:I'll be the first to Admit

[stonecypher]

Actually, Xerox PARC had tabbed text editors five years before Apple existed, and we had tabbed text editors on dead trees like two thousand years ago. I've never understood why people thought tabs were innovative - NeXT's window manager allowed you to put non-tabbed things into tabs just because you said so. C'mon.

Re:Abe Vigoda

[Anonymous Coward]

I came home one night tuned my t.v. in
My favorite show was about to begin
As I was scanning across the dial
I saw her read the news with delectable style
Then I was sure that within a while

I was stuck
Stuck in a pagoda
With tricia toyota
I'm stuck
We were watching abe vigoda
Then every thing will be fine

Later that night we went for a drive
And I can say I never felt more alive
Taking in the sights of old tokyo
With tricia by my side and money to blow
I knew then I never wanted to let her go

Chorus

Lead

Chorus

Always in a daze always in a dream
Always find that things are not what they seem
A little asian goddess came from up above
I thank you nbc for sending my love
And tricia is the one I've been dreaming of

Chorus

Meh

[Ryvar]

Apparently an important factor is security.

Even if I don't hold out much hope for their success, I wish them the best of luck - consider the millions of spyware infested /trojan-infested hosts throwing out spam these days. Even if they only reduce that by 75% with these new efforts, it'll be a big, big help

--Ryv

/. Pisses Me Off

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sick of this constant whining about IE6 and the constant Firefox preaching.

Yes, IE6 is an insecure piece of shit. Yes, it's unstable. Yes, Firefox has much better compatibility with standards, is more stable, etc. etc.

But you blind fanboys just don't understand a couple of things. Firefox is bloated. It renders slower than IE. It takes *ages* to come out of swap after you minimize it and go play a game. It uses insane amounts of RAM.

*Both* browsers could use some fixing up. Firefox is not the be-all, end-all of browsing.

Being a Firefox user myself, I don't use IE6 at all (except for the occasional Windows Update), but I'm not going to strike IE7 off as a POS before I even see it. I've read the first 15 comments here, and most of them are already making stupid fun of IE7, saying shit like "Isn't this Firefox from last year?" or "Is it that hard to re-brand Firefox?"

No, you fucktards. If anyone is capable of making a BETTER browser than Firefox, it's Microsoft. Do not underestimate Microsoft. If they want to do something, they can. They have the money and the people.

Shit. I'm going to have an aneurysm reading the retardity that comes from your keyboards.

Re:/. Pisses Me Off

[filekutter]

I"ve been using Firefox at winderz update without a problem.. is a lot of fun too when I remember the early days of Mozilla and microcrap blocking alternative browsers.

Re:/. Pisses Me Off

[onlyjoking]

I agree in part. ALL Gecko-based browsers are insanely crippled on Mac OS X. Whether it's Firefox, Mozilla or Camino as soon as I hit a page with a bit of Flash or dynamic content 'top' shows the Gecko browser hogging 98% CPU and the my G5 starts revving -up its engines.

Re:/. Pisses Me Off

[filekutter]

Anonymous, with your oh-so incisive dissection of the relevancy of matters of interest in this thread, and your careful choosing of vocabulary and imagery you have titillated me beyond the pale. I'm sorry i'm not gay, but for you, well.. * blush * maybe I'll consider it, since if you're hetero, you are the most embarrassing example of it I've seen in a long time.

Re:/. Pisses Me Off

[Anonymous Coward]

You saw imagery in my "cockfag" insult? No comment.

Re:/. Pisses Me Off

[dustinbarbour]

Doesn't IE have a protected little place in memory that is dedicated to IE? I think I read that somewhere. If such is the case, that would explain why IE comes "out of swap" so quickly. It doesn't have to! But I might be wrong. Thus, your argument is fallatious.

Oh yeah.. now I remember.. IE is integrated with the OS so tightly that you're always using parts of IE just to browse through your damn hard drive.

Re:/. Pisses Me Off

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's why browsing my hard drive in GNOME and KDE is so slow. Yep, the sword is double-edged, I'm sorry to say.

At least Windows as a whole feels faster than a modern Linux distro.

Re:/. Pisses Me Off

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox comes out of swap slowly because it has a braindamaged design. See Bug 76831 .

Re:/. Pisses Me Off

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop using GNOME and KDE. Try another window manager instead...

I love to say i told you so

[Prophetic_Truth]

the prophecy has been fulfilled

Correction

[springbox]

IE6 (and 5) already support 32-bit PNGs, but they don't render them correctly. The browser draws them over the background color saved in the file instead of the page for some reason, although they got it right with the transparent color in GIFs!

The article says PNG "transparency" but it's actually opacity or translucency. Sorry.

Re:Correction

[dubbreak]

My question is if they have finally implemented full proper rendring of PNGs will they backport it to previous versions of IE? If not we'll be stuck with binary transparencies since most online users will be running IE 6.

In related news

[NoGuffCheck]

MS to register the trademark "I337" Internet Explorer Edition Seven.

Spammer heaven

[filekutter]

So, the printer will be interfaced automatically... I can't wait to see the spammers as they take advantage of that!!! The automation has been the achilles tendon for Micro$oft's security.. they know this, and obviously still haven't learned a thing. They don't want people to learn how to use their rigs,but to remain stupid, dependent, and continue to buy M$ product.If people HAD to select print and setup even just a LITTLE bit, their understanding would blossom and become a starting point for further understanding of the computer.

Not being an IE User

[kc0re]

I haven't used IE for several years. Is this good? I would hope they would build in RSS support so it can compete with Tiger's Safari.
Oh wait... Didn't Microsoft say they aren't making a Mac IE?

Re:Not being an IE User

[kryogen1x]

Let me get this straight. You're asking Slashdot if IE is good?

Re:Not being an IE User

[dauthur]

That's what I think I got out of that too. I'm only asking myself why would he ask if he hasn't been using it for years?

They better not!

[the_skywise]

" it seems they plan on allowing permission elevations via a single click from the user"

How many security violations have there been already by the simple "A script is accessing some software (an ActiveX control) on this page which has been marked safe for scripting. Do you want to allow this?"

[YES]

SPYWARE INSTALLED YOU HAVE B33N 0WNED LUZ0R!!!

Why do they bother?

[idlake]

It sounds like Rincon will basically be a clone of Mozilla Firefox and/or Konqueror. Frankly, why do they bother? Why do they keep wasting money on this?

It's pretty clear at this point that attempts to make the web a Microsoft-proprietary space have failed. The freely available rendering engines does everything they need, and they can put some of them into whatever products they like under liberal licenses. Microsoft could do what Apple did with Safari.

I think for Microsoft, pride has long clouded their judgement. Not-invented-here perhaps works as a business strategy for a software company if you are in complete control of a market, but that is less and less the case with Microsoft.

Re:Why do they bother?

[xENoLocO]

Or maybe they just want to catch up to technology a bit? Good god, man.... take a pill and relax a bit. :)

Re:Why do they bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, why do they bother? Why do they keep wasting money on this?

Because it is people like you that normally complain that MS doesn't have features that Mozilla and Konqueror have. So why wouldn't they make a version that does, it just makes good business since.

Re:Why do they bother?

[idlake]

Why does it make "good business sense" to spend millions of dollars on developing software they can get for free under a license that permits commercial usage?

Re:Why do they bother?

[idlake]

Or maybe they just want to catch up to technology a bit?

Yes, IE7 needs to "catch up", but I was questioning why they bother with IE development at all. Their entire platform can "catch up" much more quickly by simply discontinuing IE altogether and shipping Mozilla instead, and they would save money as well.

The question is: why are they duplicating the browser development effort. At this point, that serves no obvious business purpose anymore.

Good god, man.... take a pill and relax a bit. :)

My question wasn't a "foaming-at-the-mouth" kind of question; Microsoft's behavior just really doesn't make any sense, other than as an expression of irrational pride and the typical not-invented-here syndrome of large companies.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to seem like a total newb, but why does microsoft need to have a internet browser. I mean, people will buy windows anyways.

Re:Why?

[nickos]

Marc Andreessen (from Netscape) once said that Windows was essentailly just a buggy device driver. If the only piece of software you need to run locally is a web browser (because all your software is run remotely) it doesn't matter whether you're running Windows, Linux, OS X or a Sinclair QL.

As a result, Microsoft believe they need to control the browser on Windows.

In other news...

[jotux]

Though the beta of IE 7 will not be released for several months, there are already 3 secutiry patches for the browser which microsoft strongly recommends you install.

Re:In other news...

[Horrortaxi]

That's good marketing on their part. "Get the patches before the browser is out so that you'll be ready!" It's just backward enough that it might work. They might even be able to charge for the browser now. Microsoft can parlay crap into fortune with just this kind of thinking.

Andale! Andale!

[Joey Patterson]

Microsoft está intentando colocar Mozilla Firefox en la esquina! Debemos ahora separar Firefox antes de que sea demasiado atrasado, mis amigos!

Entire damn thread is Redundant.

[winterdrake]

If they want me to care about IE7, they're going to need to give me something that Firefox doesn't already give me more of. They could start with Adblock...that much at least is required before they're even under consideration.

Microsoft seems to be having trouble lately with new products actually doing something new. Longhorn for example - what exactly is supposed to be new in that again? They had three things they were hyping, none of which was terribly revolutionary to start with, and all of which have since been dropped or will be available (eventually) as an upgrade to existing OSes.

Re:Entire damn thread is Redundant.

[WillAffleckUW]

If they want me to care about IE7, they're going to need to give me something that Firefox doesn't already give me more of.

Have to agree. I read thru the article and I was going "is that all?" to each thing they mentioned.

Wake me when it has Automated Penguin Mapping protocols, or something to turn off scripted image cycling by ads. Until then, I see no reason to switch.

Innovate???

[Horrortaxi]

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say they'll innovate. Innovate means they will break new ground and offer something you haven't seen before. They'll offer what all the other browsers have had for 2 years and that's it. No innovation, just keeping up with the Jonses. Now maybe they'll have some innovative marketing plan or some innovative predatory practices that will allow them to rincon the browser market again. That's where Microsoft really innovates.

Re:Innovate???

[Lehk228]

2 years? i remember using inet Tabs (an mshtml based browser with popup blocking, cookie controls, and tabs, but missing security against activeXploits) about 5 years ago.

Re:Innovate???

[Horrortaxi]

True. I don't know how long those things have been around. I have been using those features for 2 years--starting with the day I stopped using Windows.

Re:Innovate???

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey bud, you're on an American website and here we use the words the way God wanted us blessed Americans to use them. "Innovate" means whatever Microsoft puts out, no more, no less. Understood?

Re:Innovate???

[somethinghollow]

Innovate means they will break new ground and offer something you haven't seen before.

I've NEVER seen a Microsoft-released browser with tabs, or a secure Microsoft-released browser, or a Microsoft-released browser with full PNG support.

They'll probably be quite innovative within their company... ;)

Re:Innovate???

[KaledZeCamelII]

There IS a difference between innovation and creativity.

- Innovation : the act of introducing something new.

- Creativity : having the power to bring into being

While I would not contest that Microsoft is innovative, I do not believe that Microsoft is creative.

Idiot programmers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Without CSS, it'll still suck.

Rincon?

[game kid]

That's where my dad was born! Sweet (bitterly of course with IE's reputation).

What one should be scared of is the "IE 7.0 will feature international domain name (IDN) support" part -- can an IE user disable it like Firefox has (should he desire to use IE of course) before someone *ahem*rincóns them with a bad IDN?

Re:Rincon?

[KarmaMB84]

I doubt they'd include it if they didn't have some sort of solution to that problem. Even if it is just a hack.

Details emerge, exploits to follow shortly

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably even before /. posts the obligatory dupe.

This is all they need to do to maintain dominance

[winkydink]

Implement many new browser features that have caught on in Opera, Mozilla & Firefox. Secure it up a little. As long as its bundled with the operating system, and they pay a little lip service in the press to improved security, Joe User will continue taking the path of least resistance, i.e., IE (pun intended)

Getting rid of the surprize factor

[ad0gg]

"Sources say that IE 7.0 - which is code-named "Rincon," they hear - will be a tabbed browser."

Wonder if Microsoft will pull an Apple and sue Microsoft Watch. Seriously think about it, information on MS products are leaked on to the web everyday.

Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor

[Anonymous Coward]

information on MS products are leaked on to the web everyday.

So is information from MS products.

Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor

[Locke2005]

Seriously think about it, information on MS products are leaked on to the web everyday.Heck, occasionally even MS source code is leaked on to the web...

However, since Microsoft's modus operandi is to pre-announce products themselves many years in advance to discourage competitors from coming up with competing products, I doubt if they would get upset about anybody pre-announcing features. Bear in mind that feature set can and will change in the final release...

Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor

[jisatsusha]

I doubt it, it's worth more to them in the long if people think they're actually doing something. It might help hold off the hoards of people switching to other browsers if they think IE might have a new version soon.

Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor

[cowscows]

Yeah, this sure does suck for MS. Now all the other browser makers will hear about these new technologies and beat them to market. Oh, wait...all the other browers already have tabbed browsing? What? The other browsers have been updated over the last five years?

There's nothing surprising in that feature list.

Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor

[idlake]

Neither is there about small form factor desktop machines: they have been around in the PC world for at least half a dozen years.

Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor

[Circlotron]

Huh? Has MS taken out a patent on telling fibs, and does it think MS-Watch is telling the same but without permission or licence?

Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor

[Sentry21]

The difference is that Microsoft never announces anything exciting or innovative, in stark contrast to Apple.

Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor

[Absentminded-Artist]

As far as I understood it, Apple isn't suing the sites for what they printed. Apple is suing those three sites for access to the names/emails of the people who broke their NDAs because those sites refused to turn over the names on their own volition. The issue is centered around trade secrets and Apple's right to keep them secret in order to stay competitive vs. the rumor sites right to free speech.

Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor

[StikyPad]

Innovative? The iPod was hardly innovative. Done well, perhaps, but hard drive MP3 players were already on the market. The MiniMac? iPod Flash? Both of these have been done before. Apple just added some flair which, as it turns out, people are willing to pay for. Especially non-geeks.

As for exciting.. that's purely subjective.

Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor

[m50d]

They won't, they've never done anything like that. Slashdotters refuse to believe it, but apple is now more evil than MS.

Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor

[nordicfrost]

It is not quite like that either. The rumour sites are not sued initially, they are subpeonaed in a lawsuit against John Doe who have leaked info to the rumour sites. Apple don't care that much about rumour sites, when they stick to rumours. when they publish trade secrets that are a violation of an NDA, things change. Have a look at the court documents here.

As for the free speech issue, it doesn't come into play in this case since there has been committed a crime against the uniform trade secrets act.

But can't journalists protect their sources even if a crime has been committed, to reveal the greater truth? Why, yes. Yes they can. But as the judge has ruled (And he is smart. He doesn't even bother with the "are bloggers journalists" issue), when the news have no actual news value to the public the journalistic shield doesn't apply. And as he said, not everything the public is interrested in is of public interest. Furthermore, ThinkSecret has made a trade with the leaker, thereby violating the UTSA.

This is a bad, bad, bad case for the EFF to get involved in. Even though I don't like Microsoft, I would have the exact same opinion if they were in Apples spot. If ThinkSecret wins, NDAs are worthless, trust and honor are out the window for an employer and new draconian security measures have to be set in place. After all, you can just dump the NDA and leak everything to a journalist and it's OK, right?

Remember, this isn't about a toxic spill, insider trading, employee abuse. Apple has done nothing (at least in this case, there are probably valid EFF cases against Apple) that should be revealed under journalist shield acts.

Now, I work as a journalist myself and I would never, ever, publishe these news in my paper. Why? because in my opinion: they have no news value, they could do damage to the company without doing any greater good, they were illegally obtained and there will be hell to pay. However, if the news was that and this is jut an example) Jobs routinely beats his employees to make them work faster, THAT would be news worth breaking NDAs and risking it for.

what about the real important stuff....

[MoFoQ]

what about the real important stuff....like real RFC and W3C compliance and not "pseudo"?
Examples: digest authentication is not implemented correctly in IE hence most webservers use a work-around to make it work, which also happens to make it not be truly digest authentication...or the fact that if u gzip-encode all files and you have zip files, IE will convienently forget that the zip file was gzipped, leaving a file that most zip programs like Windows own built-in Zip Folders can't handle (WinRAR will correctly ungzip it before processing the zip file).

Of course, alpha-blending support for PNG would be nice...as well as CSS2 support (for those dynamic pulldown menus that can be done purely in CSS).

FF killer.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Well, they are looking for (and will likely succeed in building) a FF killer. Doesn't look good...

Re:FF killer.

[bmw]

If Microsoft can manage to put together a browser that is even half as good as anything Mozilla based then I will be happy. Nothing is going to completely kill Firefox anyway but nothing is going to dethrone IE as the world's main browser either until Windows is not the defacto standard for a desktop computer. So I personally would prefer MS did put out a quality browser regardless of how it hurts Firefox's market share. Oh and for the record I absolutely despise Microsoft.

Re:FF killer.

[A beautiful mind]

It's ff killer only if it runs on linux and bsd (seriously).

Linux is slowly, but certainly gaining ground, so will alternative browsers.

Re:FF killer.

[[cx]]

If anything we will have a large group of people using Firefox out of spite for Microsoft even if IE7 is an indefinately better product.

I think this isn't really a bad thing for anyone, when Microsoft turns it on in the "innovation"(see: copying and re-implementing with 10x funding) department, they really encourage their competition to try hard. And in retrospect their lack of effort in previous IE releases encourged their competition to try hard.

So either way, the Firefox developers will be ramping up their development to either take back lost market share, or to supercede the next effort by Microsoft should it fail.

But there's always enough plebes to keep the best looking worst product around.

[cx]

Re:FF killer.

[LuxFX]

It's ff killer only if it runs on linux and bsd (seriously).

And since IE7 won't even run on other versions of Windows, I think ff is safe. (XP Service Pack 2, or 2003 Server only!)

Re:FF killer.

[SQL Error]

I don't think they'll ever manage it.

Compare, say, Dungeon Siege to FF X. Dungeon Siege looked good at first, but it was a pain to play (bloody donkeys!) and I doubt that anyone remembers the storyline.

FF X, now, there was a game.

Re:FF killer.

[rootbeertapper]

FF Killer? The Doctor Doom of browsers!

Re:FF killer.

[aeroelastic]

This reminds me of a story I heard about a quick brown fox and some lazy dogs. Although the fox is a different color, I think the outcome will be the same.

Re:FF killer.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Very good! +3 Funny.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Apparently an important factor is security." PFFFFF

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.

Way to go Microsoft! Half-assed all the way!

CSS2 or Fight!

[fm6]

Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.

We have got to find a way to make MS fully support CSS2. Hold Bill and Melinda's cat hostage or something. It's a trivial amount of effort on their part, that would make life a lot easier for web developers.

Re:CSS2 or Fight!

[sootman]

"We have got to find a way to make MS fully support CSS2."

Make'em support CSS 1 first.

Re:CSS2 or Fight!

[vertigo]

It must be easy to find. Probably a white persian one, right next to his monocle.

Re:CSS2 or Fight!

[ByteMangler_242]

After the cat is kidnaped, mail bits of the cat back on the hour, every hour. Show them we are not to be trifled with!
My first idea was to send a crack suicide squad, but this sounds better. I hope nobody has beaten us to the idea...

Re:CSS2 or Fight!

[aeve]

I'm a CSS junkie and most of my sites are hacked to hell to work in IE. If they fix the bugs that the hacks depend on but not the bugs that necessitate the hacks I'm looking at a lot of unpaid work. Yeah, it's my own damn fault for coding that way.

That said, greater CSS support would definitely be a good thing but I think the problem is that it's not a trivial amount of work. The IE rendering engine does weird things--check the 'has layout' property or 'doctype switching' in MSDN. The IE cascade seems tortuously complex and changing even small things could possibly have unexpected results.

I'm psyched that they're supporting PNG alpha transparency and hope they can fix their float model but suspect all CSS advancements will be trivial. Number #1 on my wish list is proper support for height/min-height and width/min-width--even that would probably break a lot of web sites.

Re:CSS2 or Fight!

[Anonymous Coward]

Its simple, develop your code to W3C standards. If people complain, direct them to contact their browser developers, as YOUR code is compliant. If they don't like that answer, give them a list of compliant browsers. MS will comply when their users demand they comply. As long as developers allow the Scum of Redmond to do this shit, they will continue to do things their way.

All I want is standards compliance.

[stephenisu]

No more, no less.. OK, and tabs. And maybe some decent plugins.. and maybe.. Nah, screw it. I'll just keep messing with Firefox.

A new browser on the market

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, Microsoft is planning to introduce their own web browser. I wonder how it will fare against all the existing, feature-rich, web browsers...

Will IE eradicator work?

[bogaboga]

The creators of IE Eradicator http://www.litepc.com/ieradicator.html should sharpen their tool. Currently it can get rid of IE on a number of Windows systems. On the other hand, expect M$ to entrench IE deeply into Windows, and to also design Windows in such a way that systems that have a dis-functional IE are also broken.

My concern is M$ might put out an advisory that goes to the effect that Firefox does no good to the Windows environment, and that a user is well advised to avoid it all together.

Our PHBs will ignorantly comply I know.

Re:Will IE eradicator work?

[Phil246]

microsoft already have.
You try getting rid of the thing in Xp systems.

MS didn't say they'd *do* anything about security

[Anonymous Coward]

They just said it's an "important factor".

And they're right. It is an important factor.

As in "Security is an important factor that steers anyone with half a brain away from IE."

I'd say the burden is on Microsoft to prove otherwise. And I'll let someone else be the guinea pig, thank you very much.

Its a name of band

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was japan last summer all the kids were listening to a band called "rincon park" whoever they are.

new features WE can expect

[Anonymous Coward]

"new features we can expect in IE7"

I personally do not care much about new features in IE: in 2 months our company is moving most of its desktops to Linux and IE does not run on Linux, regardless of the features.

Besides, Firefox is simply a better browser than IE by far.

Built on the old IE base?

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

If MS is developing it this quickly (public beta by summer), we can assume that IE 7 is not a rewrite of the browser, but simply more functionality tacked onto the old Trident engine (which originated in IE 3 or 4).

I'm really glad about the PNG support, and hopeful that they will get the CSS box model right this time. But I will expect that security will continue to be an issue for IE until MS takes the plunge and does a full rewrite.

The history is there, dude

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the history of Microsoft, code naming a product "corner" in any language is highly suspect.

And code naming it "great software" would be a pipe dream. Of epic proportions.

Wishing that history away with a /. post ain't gonna happen - no matter how much M$ pays for the astroturf.

32-bit PNG Support

[zapf]

It's about fucking time.

can't compete with OSS

[kebes]

There are some features that Firefox has that IE simply will not be able to reproduce. Why? Because Firefox is built by people who care only about the user having a good web experience, whereas IE is built by MS, and ultimately they have to make money. So somewhere, they will compromise on quality in order to make some cash, and the user will eventually notice this.

For instance, Firefox blocks popups and a simple extension makes it blocks ads everywhere. IE7 may block popups, but do you think they will make it easy to block all ads? Considering that MS needs those ads all over the web to sell their products, I doubt it. I don't think they would want everyone checking their free hotmail and surfing MSN without seeing all those ads all over the place. Plus, other big companies would put pressure on MS (whereas Mozilla is largely immune to such things).

I'm sure there are many other examples. Of course, I'm not so naive as to think that Firefox's market share will grow to 95% over the next year, but for the users who enjoy "quality of web browsing experience" and who have already switched to Firefox (or will do so as soon as they try it out for a week!), IE7 will have nothing to offer.

MS definition of security

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Keep *us* locked in and the competitors locked out.

No doubt IE7 will include further steps to tilt the playing field.

Not Totally

[ChefInnocent]

My ignorant boss is still going to want me to support all the way back to Netscape 4.

-- Daniel

Re:Not Totally

[bmw]

My ignorant boss is still going to want me to support all the way back to Netscape 4.

Ya know... such a decision may not be entirely based in ignorance although I don't doubt that your boss is in fact ignorant (most are). There will always be people using old systems and software and those of us that want our stuff to be available to a wide audience will always be stuck supporting it. Hell, even Microsoft has a huge problem with this. A lot of the broken stuff in their products remains broken not because they don't know about it or don't want to fix it. It remains broken because people come to depend on this behavior because they've already encountered it and have had to work around it. This is just the nature of software development I'm afraid.

Re:Not Totally

[Black.Shuck]

Tell your boss that to support standards properly is to support 100% of web *devices*, not just 80-90% of desktop *browsers*.

Standards-compliant code can fall-back gracefully in Netscape 4, or any old browser.

Re:Not Totally

[merreborn]

I always loved how microsoft.com is inaccessible from a fresh install of windows NT4 via the bundled version of IE. If anyone was going to write their pages to support legacy versions of IE, you'd think it'd be microsoft.

Re:Not Totally

[Anonymous Coward]

personally, i think that there is a difference between hunting a wide audience and pedantic support for a user set so wildly marginal as to be outside reality-based expectations of your customer attraction ability.

Re:Not Totally

[eraserewind]

They want you to upgrade, not keep the same old version you are not paying for anymore.

Re:Not Totally

[Anonymous Coward]

That was a problem even when NT4 was the CURRENT version. "Please upgrade to IE4.0 so that you can download IE6.0". Dumb webmasters, or evil masterplan, I have no idea.

Re:Not Totally

[cpeterso]

Somehow I doubt people who use Netscape 4 in 2005 are big-spendin' customers. So how much time and dev costs are really worth supporting them?

Re:Not Totally

[Just Some Guy]

Considering that IE 6 is a free freakin' upgrade for anyone running at least Win98 (and maybe even Win95 - I haven't tried it), I say cut those people loose. Seriously. I can't think of a single reason to support Netscape/IE 4 in this day and age, considering that pretty much everyone can upgrade to a newer browser for free.

Anyone who can't be bothered to download something more recent - and using IE in the first place implies that they have a network connection - is either running an ancient POS out of poverty conditions and can't afford your product; is just plain stubborn and would be a pain-in-the-neck customer that costs you more in support than you'd earn off them; or is technically illiterate and using a system their kid set up for them in '96 and probably won't be buying from the Interweb anyway. I don't think badly of people in the first and third categories, but the economic truth is that you're supporting them at a net loss to your own profits.

It's just too expensive to support those who can't or won't maintain their own system and who probably aren't your target demographic anyway. Why keep throwing good money after bad?

Re:Not Totally

[truespin]

But NN4 will still display the content - just the layout may (read: definitely *will*) look incorrect if the site uses a linked to stylesheet.
This is how backward/forward compatibility should be thought about by web designers - create good standard code that displays your site correctly in the current (and slightly old) browsers and this will ensure that the information displays in the uber old browsers (NN4 et al) as you have used standard html tags and even NN4 knows how to display text/images in p tags...

UI concept

[kisrael]

I've only dabbled with tab browsing, but it's interesting that so many people find it so appealing. This kind of ties into UI preferenes, like OSX Dock vs. Task Bar + Start button, but I don't like it...I think of each browser window as a seperate activity I'm involved in and want to return to, so I like having each take its own one click spot on the taskbar. (though I guess if my only or primary activity at a given time was browsing, it wouldn't be so bad, and the other windows would still be a click away.)

Re:UI concept

[Tumbleweed]

I like having each take its own one click spot on the taskbar

So you have each take its own one click spot on the tab bar.

Tabs are generally an option to use, not something you're forced to use. You can run Opera and FF in non-tabbed mode if you wish. It's great to have the option.

Re:UI concept

[51mon]

Whilst I sympathise,

I usually have two copies of firefox open with about 5 tabs in each at work, I don't have the patience to hit alt-tab that often. Tabbed browsing is almost necessary in the ISP business, I can't imagine life without tabbed browsing and the web developer plugin.

In Firefox I'd like the search box to clear on opening a new tab, and maybe other times, it is still in memory if I start typing the first word for goodness sake.

Like death and taxes

[b_w_duncan]

How long before they have patent on tabbed browsing?

Re:Like death and taxes

[oDDmON oUT]

Prior art has been established by the Norweigians, if no one else.

Re:Like death and taxes

[MaDeR]

Dudes from USA Patent Office thinks "prior art" is kind of food. Seriously, many times they approved patents on things what exists for many, many years. Why brother with "prior art"? They get money for approving patents without consequences... no penatlies for bogus patents at all... a x mega$ fines from few lost processes over patents should give them lesson. If actually they can be punished for approving that kind of patents!

Tabbed browsing

[Locke2005]

But, what's to keep open source browsers from copying this Microsoft innovation, just like they do all the other innovations Microsoft has put so much work into?

Oh wait...

Re:Tabbed browsing

[l3v1]

Oh wait...

Yup, this summs the whole thing up quite well, should also be put on M$'s flag or something and replacing M$ release dates.

Native IDN support

[Tzarius]

Wasn't there that whole kerfuffle about how IDN can be used to imitate domain names? Wouldn't it be wiser to leave it off by default, or will another bad choice be made, then patched later?

Re:Native IDN support

[KarmaMB84]

There are methods for "fixing" the IDN issue.

oh yea, and

[Nept]

lots and lots of service packs. That's about the only thing I would expect.

ActiveX?

[thesaint05]

If ActiveX controls are still going to be allowed in IE7, I'm really not sure how much more secure this version will be over previous versions. Unfortunately, since there are so many websites out there that utilize ActiveX controls (for good and evil), there is little hope that it will be that much more secure. As far as innovation is concerned, of everything I've heard that's coming about in IE7, it is merely a rehash of Firefox and Opera. Despite the fact that I'm a dedicated Firefox user, I can only hope that they do add features the others don't have. It's those types of things that drive competition.

Re:ActiveX?

[KarmaMB84]

We mean like how Java can be used to own the user in Firefox (and Opera)? If people didn't click "Yes" on any dialog that pops up, ActiveX and Java might not be as big a problem. However, from the sounds of it, the default may be to turn ActiveX completely off (hopefully) for untrusted sites.

Um...WTFN?

[bonch]

No so fast. IE7 still won't be standards-compliant. That won't matter to most end-users, of course, but it matters to me as a web developer.

From article:

Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.

My only question is...um, why the fuck not? Even Apple's Safari is already plunging ahead with preliminary CSS3 support.

I predict IE7's "additional support for CSS2" will really just mean fixing the major box model and table width bugs and not changing anything else.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[rainman_bc]

Browsers like KTHML, Galleon, Safari, Opera and Firefox can try as they might to implement new standards. If 90% of the market doesn't support them, web developers can't use them.

Not only that, but even today, some companies still force Nutscrape 4 support - a six year old browser IIRC.

I've been absolutely pining for improved css2 support so we can use css selectors. It'd make a lot of tasks much simpler if we were able to use all the css selectors available in the spec.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Duck1123]

"additional support for CSS2" means that they will fix the '* html' problem, and leave all of the problems that designers have been using that trick to hack around.

You can't change IE's box model. That would break too many "coded for IE" pages. Microsoft want's backwards compatability. If that means never updating their rendering engine, then so be it.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[wootest]

Actually, IE's box model will *currently* - in IE6 - change when put into standards mode, meaning you have one of a few (hardcoded?) doctypes at the top of your page (omitting any xml prologues). It doesn't even have to validate, just carry the correct doctype. Sadly, I agree with the rest of your comment, including the * html bug, which I hope they leave in. That or invent conditional comments for CSS.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[ff1324]

Like it'll make a difference...

Why not fill out the Microsoft Suggestion Box Form at http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.as p?from=cu&fu=/isapi/gomscom.asp?target=/mswish/tha nks.htm

What do ya have to lose? Ask for everything.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[hswerdfe]

not to troll or not but since when did Saffari (KHTML) have good CSS2 support?

Re:Um...WTFN?

[jejones]

My only question is...um, why the fuck not? Even Apple's Safari is already plunging ahead with preliminary CSS3 support.

Because standard conformance is a loss for MS. The more lazy and incompetent web page creators they can keep making non-standard conforming, IE-only web sites, the better for MS.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[wezzul]

Just as non-standard browsers are stupid, so are non-standard designers. This is one of the VERY FEW things that there are where there is actually a defined and accepted standard (that of the W3C). IMO, Microsoft is just being lazy here, or selfish.

They want to define everything in their terms, when in fact, this is not something they invented. They should make the browser work "correctly".

When I saw this was posted, I quickly did a find for "CSS", and was upset. I've been doing alot of CSS based layouts lately, and I've had to make a stylesheet that only works in IE so that people that are still living in the days of cavemen can see the page (somewhat) correctly. Since when has being lazy been an acceptable reason for stifling progress?

Re:Um...WTFN?

[davegust]

I thought the CSS box model was fixed in IE6 four years ago. Use the strict doctype.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[beejay54]

EXACTLY! Like WTF?!!!?

Any serious web developer knows that while Microsoft's IE is one of the most dominant browsers out there, it has to be the worst for standards compliance. If your a web developer that means your pages function in either IE and nothing else or everything else and not IE. I can't even imagine how much of my time is wasted trying to produce web apps that aren't a compromise just to get them to work in all browsers. It's really limiting. And with Gecko/Netscape based browsers pulling ahead quite a bit in compliance you really have to wonder what the heck the guys at MS are doing ... I would have expected a big push for compliance with the whole .NET campaign they are pushing, a lot of it revolves around web app creation, but who wants to create expensive .NET enterprise class web apps is the delivery method isn't standard?

What it's done is limited web developers to compromise after compromise which is really slowing down the evolution of the presentation layer on the web. But that's just my opinion of course.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[tmasky]

Simple answer: Avalon. DHTML tech is pretty bloody good at the moment. If Microsoft allowed it to get better then it really doesn't matter which OS you use. Same tactics with OpenGL/DirectX, Exchange, etc. You have to keep in mind that they are not innovators. Their competitors have superior technology most/all of the time. Locking people in is the only way they can sustain profit.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[NutscrapeSucks]

> omitting any xml prologues

The irony is that the standards nazis make an XHTML page (not even supported on IE) and accidentially knock IE into standards incomplance mode. If they just made a nice HTML4 page, almost all their CSS would work properly in IE.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Tarqwak]

> not to troll or not but since when did Saffari (KHTML) have good CSS2 support?

If I interpret this CVS commit comment correctly then it does have quite a good support (even if buggy in corner cases).

At least KHTML from KDE 3.4 betas has showed my moderately complex standards compliant (XHTML, CSS, DOM, ECMAScript) pages exactly as they look and behave in Gecko & Opera.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Luke-Jr]

At least since KDE 3.3, likely even earlier... I've found FireFox's lack of CSS support (compared to KHTML's partial CSS3) to be somewhat annoying, also.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good is a relative thing. KHTML still lags behind Gecko and Opera, but it's still in the top 15% of all HTML rendering engines in use on the Internet.

If you take Trident and Tasman out of the picture, KHTML is suddenly at the bottom of the class.

Some would call that good. I wouldn't.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[plague3106]

Except that people are moving to FF anyway...which hopefully is forcing more lazy webmasters to make their sites standards complaint.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[plague3106]

I'd consider myself a serious web developer, and I've not had any problems writing for FF and not having it work in IE.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[DavidTC]

Isn't IE6 also six years old?

Re:Um...WTFN?

[rainman_bc]

No, it's four - at least accord to that site anyway.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[kfractal]

Why would they want to be standards compliant? That's nuts.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[AstroDrabb]

I would have expected a big push for compliance with the whole .NET campaign they are pushing, a lot of it revolves around web app creation

MS's .Net sends down different HTML depending on whether you are making the request with an IE browser or a non-IE browser. It is one of the things I really _hate_ about .Net. I actually like C# a lot and use it every day, I just can't stand how MS tries to lock out everyone.

For example, in a .Net web app, you can add validators. So if you have a text input, you can validate that it is not empty when a form is submitted. This is _very_ simple JavaScript. However, with .Net, if you are using an IE browser, you will get an error message without going to the server. If it is a non-IE browser, it requires a round-trip to the server. How crappy is that? Like the people at MS could not write some simple standards compliant JavaScript to check if a freaking field is empty or not before a form post.

That is just one example. There are tons of others with the "built-in" web controls with the .Net framework that have all been made to work well in IE and have limited functionality in non-IE browser.

Because of crap like MS does with .Net, it has made me use Java/JSP for web apps. At least then I can control how well my applications can work with different clients and not be subjected to MS trying to make the world MS-only.

I really don't know what is wrong with MS. I mean, not all of their products are bad, and I really like some of MS's products. If they would just _compete_ and stop listening to their marketing/business @ssholes MS probably would not be too bad. All MS needs to do is compete and allow others to try to compete. MS needs to stop _all_ of their lock-in crap.

Seriously, look at the amount of dedication that OSS programmers show. MS could have that same loyalty if they just gave a _little_ back to the community. I am not talking about their crap "shared" source license or the wimpy XML setup wizard they released. I am talking a few major contributions of their code that they let a _community_ improve could make a world of difference to MS and their reputation.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd consider myself a serious web developer

As opposed to a "non-serious" web developer? What makes you "serious" vs. "non-serious"?

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Ogerman]

No so fast. IE7 still won't be standards-compliant. That won't matter to most end-users, of course, but it matters to me as a web developer.

Yes. This is why it's extremely important that FF continue to offer something that users can't get with IE7. There are countless stories of websites being re-designed to be more standards compliant since FF began to rise in popularity. Users complained about breakage and companies were forced to respond to the demand. Up to this point, tabbed browsing and reduced spyware risk were the primary reasons for casual users to use FF. Now we need something else to lure them. (well.. assuming the security of IE7 is actually improved) May I humbly suggest some innovations in the way bookmarks and history are handled? How about a bookmark start page like Galeon's but not ugly and disheveled? Maybe even create a portal-like start page. Or what ideas can we borrow from Opera?

Re:Um...WTFN?

[cyberwiz01]

Even Apple's Safari is already plunging ahead with preliminary CSS3 support.

Speaking of Safari, there's something wrong in the world when there is an IE for OS X but no Safari for Windows. Apple has ported Quicktime and iTunes, why not safari. They could probably hook a decent percentage of internet users on it's looks alone, not to mention that it has basically all the advantages of Firefox except for being open source (which I guess matters to many here). But still, it's fast, easy to use and looks nice, isnt that what most users want?

Re:Um...WTFN?

[pinchhazard]

Product: Windows

Help us target our improvements efforts. Choose one or more of the following areas that correspond to your suggestion.
[x] Installation or Deployment
[x] Ease of Use
[ ] Customization or Preferences
[ ] Interoperability or Integration
[ ] Security
[ ] Other
[ ] Performance
[ ] Networking or Connectivity
[x] Help and Documentation
[x] Accessibility
[ ] Localization

Describe what you would like to accomplish or the limitation you have found in the product.
you should fart in a bag then smell it

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Anonymous Coward]

Browsers like KTHML, Galleon, Safari, Opera and Firefox can try as they might to implement new standards. If 90% of the market doesn't support them, web developers can't use them.

That's not true. 90% of the market doesn't support the opacity property, for example. It doesn't mean I can't make something slightly translucent when dragging it to another place on the page. If a browser doesn't support it, it's no big deal. But if a user is using a conformant browser such as Firefox, they get a nicer interface.

If you'd stop thinking that something is broken if it looks different in different browsers, you'd be able to implement some very nice effects using the specifications that Internet Explorer doesn't support.

I've been absolutely pining for improved css2 support so we can use css selectors.

It's not possible to use any non-inline CSS whatsoever without using selectors. Internet Explorer supports many forms of CSS selectors. I agree it's a real pain in the neck that Internet Explorer doesn't support some of them, such as attribute selectors, but that doesn't mean that you can't use CSS selectors today and have them work in Internet Explorer.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Anonymous Coward]

since when did Saffari (KHTML) have good CSS2 support?

It's had much better support for CSS 2 than Internet Explorer since the day it was launched. Things that simply don't work at all in Internet Explorer (e.g. attribute selectors, display: table-cell, etc) have worked in KHTML since before Safari was even launched.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[mrchaotica]

I really don't know what is wrong with MS. I mean, not all of their products are bad, and I really like some of MS's products. If they would just _compete_ and stop listening to their marketing/business @ssholes MS probably would not be too bad. All MS needs to do is compete and allow others to try to compete. MS needs to stop _all_ of their lock-in crap.

You really don't get it, do you? Being "marketing/business assholes" is the very foundation of their company! That's all they have ever done, going all the way back to the legendary screwing over of the QDOS guy. Here's a hint: their chief business/marketing asshole is Bill Gates himself! Gates's talents have never been programming talents; what he's good at is marketing -- convincing everyone from IBM to Joe Six-pack that his products are better when they really aren't.

If you took all the "business/marketing assholes" out of Microsoft, there'd be nobody left.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[RupW]

If it is a non-IE browser, it requires a round-trip to the server. How crappy is that? Like the people at MS could not write some simple standards compliant JavaScript to check if a freaking field is empty or not before a form post.

No, they're just being cautious. They can QA ASP.NET against IE. They aren't going to QA ASP.NET againat every browser under the sun. If Jox Sixpack gets a script error reading an ASP.NET hosted site, who's he going to blame - the browser or the site? The web dev can't force a new browser on Joe Sixpack - all they can do is complain to MS.

You can, so I've heard, convince it to serve complex javascript to mozilla and firefox by adding the user agent strings to web.config.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[wootest]

*Real* standard nazis use HTML4 as well as XHTML. I think the phrase you're looking for is *pretentious* standard nazis. ;)

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come one, get the quote right. With a name like Luke you ought to. "I find Firefox's lack of CSS support disturbing".

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been reading the IE BLOG for some time, and they have [IE Developers] mentioned that they will try and implement as much of the standard as possible - But at the same time they can't release a browser that is going to destroy the "evils" of the past, because it will cost millions to redevelop those sites...

I think a good solution would be to implement the IE6 rendering engine, as a default ... But, if I page includes a certain DTD, or flag that the browser would shift into 100% compliant mode...

wouldn't that be wonderful?

Re:Um...WTFN?

[tankbob]

If you check http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/ it contains how to update your web.config to better detect other browsers and send out richer content.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Mant]

You need to update the browser capabilities in the machine.config file to tell the webserver what the other browsers support.

Try here for some updated xml.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Bert64]

It's not the site authors fault that ie doesn't support a documented standard that is supported by every modern browser.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Bert64]

Servers shouldn't discriminate against particular browsers, they should serve up standards compliant content and it is the browser's author's responsibility to ensure his browser can follow standards.
If you do follow standards, your pages will be readable even with text based browsers or old browers, you may lose the fancy graphics but you'l still be able to read the content.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[griblik]

Not only that, but even today, some companies still force Nutscrape 4 support - a six year old browser IIRC.

I found a nice answer to this problem. In the UK, under the disability discrimination act, a company and it's agents (ie the new media company they hired to do it) have a legal responsibility to make their website accessible to everyone; I think the wording is something along the lines of 'a reasonable effort'.

Netscape4 compatible code doesn't get through the w3c's html validator, and I don't think anyone can argue that using valid html is unreasonable.

So when someone tells me a site has to work in NS4, I tell them that doing so would leave them (and us) open to lawsuits, examples of which have been fought and won by people with disabilities who rightfully feel that they've been discriminated against. I give the project manager a choice between legal liability and an extra tiny fraction of a percent market share, and I haven't had to break standards compliance for years.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good example but actually its worse than this. For most of my career I've developed with MS technologies and about 2 years ago I got a job as a lead developer for a fairly large .NET project. The project was to deliver an intranet app across a large number of different parts of the organisation all of whom were running Internet Explorer 6. We built the thing, with remarkable speed it has to be said, making heavy use of .NET's built in controls to the rather complex UI. Only when we got to the latter stages of testing did someone mention that quite a large of our target users were actually not on IE 6. They were on 5, or even 4. And ASP.NET was producing HTML that didn't work with IE5, or IE4. We did manage to overcome these problems but by the time we had something that worked the code really was a horrible mess. And despite everything you may have read about how wonderfully well .NET scales and how the performance is way better than J2EE it doesn't and it isn't.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[ricotest]

FYI, since you have the italic tag at your disposal, there's no need for _underscores_ :)

Re:Um...WTFN?

[bjprice]

Your standards-compliant code should work fine in NS4.

That is, it should degrade gracefully, with the content still accessible to all. If it doesn't look so pretty, then so be it. Content is king.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[smallguy78]

You can change this behaviour in the web.config file, by adding a browserCaps section: msdn

Re:Um...WTFN?

[ptlis]

Or, being as this is a discussion about web standards, and he's trying to put emphasis on the word, he could just use the element to give emphasis to that specific word ;)

Re:Um...WTFN?

[rainman_bc]

If only I could mod you up - that's a great idea...

Re:Um...WTFN?

[Anonymous Coward]

If 90% of the market doesn't support them, web developers can't use them.

Wrong. We (federal government) develop all of our work to the W3C standard. The legislation that we are bound by decided that their standards would be the ones that were followed. If it doesn't work in IE, well that is an MS problem, not a site problem. If clients get mad, we suggest that there are other browsers on the market that are W3C compliant.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[JohnnyBigodes]

My only question is...um, why the fuck not?

Because it's what will keep sites being IE-only. 90% market share for IE, therefore websites have to be designed with IE in mind, hence we can't follow the standards. That in turn keeps people using IE, which leads to a 90% market share. Therefore websites [... repeat ad infinitum].

Shameless monopoly exploiting at its best, my friend.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[AstroDrabb]

I happen to like _underscores_ better than italic ; )

Re:Um...WTFN?

[AstroDrabb]

That still doesn't fix broken JavaScript. For example, have Firefox spoof being IE and watch all the JavaScript errors you get.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[AstroDrabb]

I have had about 10 people reply with this same message and I have replied with this same message ; )

That still doesn't fix broken JavaScript. For example, have Firefox spoof being IE and watch all the JavaScript errors you get.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[AstroDrabb]

I have had about 10 people reply with this same message and I have replied with this same message ; )

That still doesn't fix broken JavaScript. For example, have Firefox spoof being IE and watch all the JavaScript errors you get

Re:Um...WTFN?

[plague3106]

I've made my 4+ year career doing web developement and making things work in both IE and NS or Safari.

Re:Um...WTFN?

[NutscrapeSucks]

It is their fault if they choose to bitch about IE's "broken box model"(sic), or spend a lot of time working around incompliance mode issues. Obviously their desire is to use correct CSS.

(IMO, IE7 should just drop the old box model, but we'll see.)

Re:Um...WTFN?

[stonecypher]

Because web applications threaten microsoft. That's why the things which are broken are broken: position, complex display, complex layout. If you use the set of javascripts called IE7 (god, I hate that name, but they're really good scripts) you find that in fact IE7 has all of the support it needs for the various missing things. IE6 could in fact be made into a standards compliant browser by injecting a few hundred lines of JavaScript.

Microsoft just doesn't want to.

Now, without putting on your tin foil hat, take a look at the specific things which are missing. Take a look at the things which are broken. Ask yourself, "if those things worked and were portable, how close could one get to the kind of interface a person expects for an application?"

They're not going to fix the box model bugs. They're going to polish them up just enough to get good PR, but leave them broken enough to screw with application development. They won't touch the problems with positioning, the width bugs, the bugs with auto, the bugs with -min and -max, et cetera. HTML is a much bigger threat to the application wagon circle than Java ever was. That's why their XSLT is still broken, even though they were the first to market; that's why ActiveX has the barriers it has to things that don't want to behave like DLLs; that's why their RFC2557 support in "web page archives" is so badly broken; it goes on and on.

They're going to take the parts of CSS2, and maybe even of 3, which in the long run don't matter, but which get naüve eyeballs. They'll put in text rotation, and transparent colors, and drop shadows, and stuff like that. They'll embrace all of the complex functionality for anything which is convenience-only but doesn't actually change things, and they'll get all of that 100% correct: the layered background support, the layered border support, stuff you can do right now with some extra <div>s.

But the things which really matter, which lead to the mammoth hacks you see in well developed CSS like in MediaWiki's MonoBook or at sites like TheNoodleIncident or PositionIsEverything in order to get something which should be trivial to work in just this one browser, which have been broken for years, which have been shown to be trivial to fix?

None of that will change.

They're going to implement 85% of CSS2. They're going to implement a big chunk of CSS3. Everything you'd see on geocities - the bastard children of <blink> and <marquee>, the things which nobody actually needs to threaten applications, the things which weirdos that try to explain songs to each other in blogs use to excess.

The things, in short, which would make someone shallow switch over CSS standards support.

They're going to turn their biggest weakness into their biggest strength. You can expect to see huge tracts of CSS2 and CSS3 supported. Just not the stuff which is already broken.

That stuff has to stay broken, until they can't wait any longer. That's what Avalon is about - they're scrambling to fold HTML into the UI experience so that by the time they have to give up the ghost and make IE do what it should have years ago, they can "make it a compelling new way to think about application interfaces."

They're making sure that nobody can beat their OS to the punch by breaking IE until they've had a chance to make their own first entry, and it's a damned good strategy. OSX' interface architecture is a mess; there are a billion different ways to do any one thing and none of them are as elegant as CSS is slowly becoming. The various Unices and Linuces don't have a dominant WM, and certainly don't have a dominant interface architecture; they won't organize in time to beat Avalon to the punch, which is only a few years away. XUL was a good try, and almost made it, but you have to have a mozilla install, and it's a giant hassle to use as a developer, so nobody's really taking advantage. Besides, until recen

Re:MS didn't say they'd *do* anything about securi

[tomhudson]

An important factor, but, to MS, not THE most important factor.

Microsoft has shared publicly that IE 7.0 will be focused primarily on improving security

... and ...

no cross-domain scripting and/or scripting access;

... can't be reconciled with customers who make IE-only sites that require cross-domain scripting. I've seen financial/banking sites that use cross-domain scripting. Fucking idiots. They can't fix it, either, because their monkeys don't know how to write.

There'll be an option to turn these "security enhancements" off.

Too Little, Too Late

[SteelV]

I wish they had done this a while ago. I've stuck by Windows long enough! I'm staying with alternative browsers from now on (like FireFox), and may even move to another OS.

Don't be so sure.

[stealth.c]

IE 7 is a catch-up operation. They'll bring IE up to speed with FF, and the rumor elsewhere in this thread is that tabbed browsing may not make it into IE.

So IE 7 will sit for another few years and FF will never have stopped, rocketing ahead again. And IE will *still* be the platform of WWW annoyances. I suspect the debut of IE 7 will be proof of the sluggish bureaucracy MSFT has apparently become.

Re:This is all they need to do to maintain dominan

[kjamez]

sp2's security center will report to me a popup saying 'you are not using a secure web browser' whenever firefox is running ...

even if you 'remove' IE from XP 'windows explorer' behaves just the same, and i've never ever been able to fully remove outlook from any xp machine.

Nice roadmap

[the real darkskye]

But I wonder if this will be built from the ground up or just a series of patches and fixes applied to the current code base.

Writing something like IE from the ground up would be a major task indeed, but it would help in improving security and removing the OS integration, but can we really expect to see this?

We can all dream can't we?

OT: sig

[legLess]

OK, I'll bite. What part of "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" do you not understand?

Re:OT: sig

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I'll bite. What part of "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" do you not understand?

militia != military
well regulated != state sponsored
you idiot.

How the fuck else could we possibly overthrow an oppressive government if only said government was allowed to bare arms, heh? Would you enlighten us?

If the Founding Fathers had your insight then we would still be a British colony.

--
------ What part of "the right of the people".."shall not be infringed" do you not understand you moron ----

Re:OT: sig

[ak3ldama]

i'll bite as well.

by the way, mod the parent down, and mod me down too! i would post anon just to be zero'd, but that'd be shameful.

i think a response to someone's sig deserves more than a one liner. besides, who is to say that people that own guns (i'm assuming that is what you are bitching about) are not well regulated. most gun owners fire their weapons regularly, keep them clean, and are quite familiar with the responsibilities that go along with their freedom. it is very much in the security of a free state that people own guns and are ready at a moments notice, to do that which is right for their country. if you disagree, i'd like you to meet alot of people, that i know, that are very responsible citizens that own and bear arms.

and now here is the text in full, which you seem to not want to completely read: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." i don't think that that is very confusing. as so many text books dealing with very complicated math theories say: we'll leave that as an excercise to the reader. also notice amendment ix to the bill of rights, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." do you and others not see that the bill of rights are for the good of the people, why take away from the pure beauty of this?!

anyways, that was unnecessary, completely pointless, and trolling (by the both of us). we are both merely feeling political/patriotic in our own way, just disagreeing. have a nice day legLess.

Re:OT: sig

[Anonymous Coward]

If the Founding Fathers had YOUR insight then we would be an even more lunatic, gun crazy, and power hungry nation than we already are.
If the founding fathers knew how out of wack the conservaties today were taking their gun law, (and knew that guns would turn into handheld automatic killing toys you can buy at a pawn shop), I doubt they would agree with you or Bush.

To Mr. Bush supporter: Enjoy your now legal assult weapons, and thanks for "spreading freedom" around the world and making everyone hate America.

I have never understood the logic of guns=safer. Perhaps you can also explain to me why assult weapons are now legal to buy and own in America? Is that part of the 2nd amendment, and part of making the world "safe?"

Re:OT: sig

[Anonymous Coward]

If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

(and police of course, but that's not much of a benefit if the only other people with guns are outlaws)

References, please

[SweetAndSourJesus]

On what do you base the statement that Linux is gaining ground?

Re:References, please

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably on the fact that he isn't living under a rock.

Seriously, use Google or any other news source. Linux is already a major server operating system, and it is growing fast on clients.

Re:References, please

[rikkards]

And looking at said rate, I would expect my great grandchildren to be able to see the fruits of the labours. Linux is gaining ground but Firefox is a lot more successful than Linux and it still is peanuts compared to the behemoth that MS has on the browser market.

(as I post from FF)

Re:References, please

[Dan Ost]

It all depends on what you define as gaining ground, I suppose.

In absolute numbers, there are definately more Linux users now than at
any point in the past. There are more Linux servers than before and there
are more desktops than before.

In relative numbers, the question is whether Linux use is growing faster
than computer use in general. I have no hard data, but every day I see
Windows users learn more about Linux and, every so often, one of them switches.
I've never seen a Linux user switch to Windows (although I have seen a couple
move to Plan9 or *BSD). If the migration trend is one way, then Linux will
gain (relative) ground on Windows, at least until the early adopter effect fizzles.

Just my take on it.

Security...

[Geek of Tech]

>>The new browser also will likely include a built-in news aggregator. Apparently an important factor is security.

Which is precisely why it was the last thing in the writeup... :P

Naming convention

[Picass0]

Microsoft likes to use codenames based upon the names of mountains.

Then they should name it St. Helens, because it's only a matter of time before it blows.

and, of course, tabbed browsing.

[y0saph]

Whoa that's new. never heard of it... no, but seriously, wonder how they can destroy that concept...

CSS Support

[33degrees]

Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.

With their self-proclaimed focus on developers, why aren't they taking CSS support more seriously? Do they realise the amount of ill0will they've generated towards themselves from web developpers who are fed-up with having to produce hack-filled css files so that their sites will display correctly on IE?

Re:CSS Support

[Tumbleweed]

"Those are not the developers you're looking for."

Re:CSS Support

[l3v1]

With their self-proclaimed focus on developers

No, no, no, their self-proclaimed focus on their developers, that is those who click-and-build a website/service with MS tools and don't care what the generated code looks like (I've seen quite some folks "developing" like this) and who ever test their codes only with IE and they're done with it.

[offtopic]Quickly on a really sidenote, I just recalled an event where a MS guy came showing university kids aps.net capabilities, .net, the tools, vs.net2k3, etc etc. I went just out of curiosity, to see what's up. At the end there was a Q&A session and one of the kids asked what about the crappy html&js code that was generated (the MS guy made a working aps.net example during the presentation), what about making it cleaner, better formatted, less bloated, etc. The answer: it will be fixed in vs.net2k5. Yup, _THE_ MS answer to all problems.[/offtopic]

Untie it from the desktop

[oDDmON oUT]

Simple solution, but modular independence in components is antithetical to Microsofts "ease of use" paradigm, so I predict that it won't happen, and that despite assurances to the contrary, new ways to suborn the system will be available within days of its release.

pretty hard, apparently

[SweetAndSourJesus]

How hard is supporting png transparency?

When you work for Microsoft, that shit is tough.

Not as funny as it sounds

[nurb432]

While im sure you meant it as a joke, there is some truth to you statement..

We did have an opportunity to take back some market with all the user discontent that was breeding out there.

But instead we clambered around arguing what desktop environment was better... and not actually *doing* anything that the public knows about.

Re:Not as funny as it sounds

[Mornelithe]

But instead we clambered around arguing what desktop environment was better... and not actually *doing* anything that the public knows about.

...

Because all the shmucks around here with nothing better to do than post in KDE vs. Gnome flame wars all day are well qualified to write highly polished software for their respective desktop environments?

Re:Not as funny as it sounds

[Deliveranc3]

Not funny read sig. :(

Redmond, start your photocopiers!

[idsofmarch]

Or the same features coming in Safari when Tiger is released in April.

The RSS news aggregator was announced at WWDC nine months ago.

Re:Redmond, start your photocopiers!

[generic-man]

Why in the hell do you need an RSS aggregator in your web browser? That's almost as preposterous as needing a mail client or an HTML editor bundled in. A web browser is great at viewing documents; let an RSS reader wrap around the browser, not the other way around.

It's not surprising that Safari 2.0 (in the developer builds) crashes even more than Safari 1.2 does. I'd like to see them fix the horrible reliability of Safari before bolting on useless features.

Re:Redmond, start your photocopiers!

[16K Ram Pack]

I agree. To me, the logical inclusion of an RSS aggregator is in with your mail/news client. That's where all the stuff that I might consider "occassionally polling and collecting" goes on.

I know there are more functionally rich ones, but I'm pretty happy with the RSS reader in Thunderbird.

Re:Redmond, start your photocopiers!

[RupW]

Why in the hell do you need an RSS aggregator in your web browser?

IE already supports scheduled downloads and pages to watch - it's just a logical extension of that, I guess. Integration would also let you grab RSS links from pages very easily.

Remember MS is now well on the RSS bandwagon - there are hundreds of employee blogs to give them a more friendly face and they offer feeds for new downloads, security bulletins, developer articles etc.

Re:Redmond, start your photocopiers!

[l3v1]

Why in the hell do you need an RSS aggregator in your web browser?

Actually, I also thought the same back when they implemented it. But when I saw how good it actually works and how fun it is to actually have a bookmark folder with my favourite news sites all listing the news items as subfolders, I come to love the stuff. I find it much more useful than any other e-mail client implementation I ever used.

RINCON Anagram?

[Evil W1zard]

RINCON = Really Its Not Changed Or New

Written in C#?

[shadowmatter]

I heard awhile back that the next version of IE would be written in C# -- thus eliminating exploits caused by buffer overruns. (I further heard that a lot of Longhorn apps would be rewritten in this fashion.) Does anyone know if this will indeed be the case? Perhaps that's what they tout as 'security' (but real security will be when they throw out ActiveX).

- shadowmatter

Re:Written in C#?

[Maxim Kovalenko]

What I am also wondering is what kind of code base this shares with the C# tabbed brower that was a do it yourself project on MS a while back. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/dnvs05/html/browserexpress.asp

Re:Written in C#?

[ender81b]

I've heard the same thing from a buddy who works at microsoft. AFAIK *ALL* of longhorn will be written in C# (i'd guess except for some low level kernel things) thus eliminating buffer exploits. Microsoft seems understandbly willing to eat the small performance drop for this increase in security. Makes ense to me.

Re:Written in C#?

[rabtech]

My guess is that IE7 is just an update to the existing codebase and not a planned C# rewrite/upgrade (which one would presume might be IE8).

Re:Written in C#?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way to get rid of ActiveX is to throw it into an active volcano during a full moon on the winter equinox. Otherwise, it comes back everytime. In the dark, and while you sleep...

Re:Written in C#?

[art123]

Riiiiiight. And a buddy of mine who works with Linus said *ALL* of Linux kernel 3.0 will be written in Ruby and Java (or was that JavaScript?), except for some low level things of course.

Re:Written in C#?

[Nasarius]

Heh. Of course, that's completely true, because all of the kernel is "low level".

Re:Written in C#?

[KarmaMB84]

Some of the new components and apps might be in C# or Managed C++, but rewriting everything would be supremely stupid and probably impossible to do in what time they had to do it. I believe the buffer checks in newer MS VC++ compilers and XP SP2 / Win2k3 SP1 DEP probably already block most buffer exploits anyway. IE6 still has problems in other areas.

Huh?

[filterchild]

I find it difficult to believe that security is a concern and they plan to implement IDN support.
Didn't the Firefox team decide to disable IDN by default because of the security risks?

Freud

[Quo_R]

Misread that as "Microsoft Watch has a story about new features we can exploit in IE7"

Works for Them

[Doc Ruby]

The current MS CTO, Ron Markezich, was asked in NYC last month "what good does all your in-house testing of IE do, when it's so insecure that Firefox can catch up in a few months?" Markezich's reply (literal quote): "It works for me." He explained that MS is "surprised" by the insecurity of IE, by new exploits. He had also described how airtight is their firewall. I wonder how long they can go on producing products when their "burn in" is so out of touch with the experience of practically all their customers.

Rincon, hmmm..

[sleighb0y]

Why am I suddenly reminded of this.

Microsoft have no other option..

[Paska]

I really think it's best for Microsoft to implement a standards based compliant browser - if they don't they will shoot themselves in the foot, and it will really hurt this time around.

This is not a case of "...well we could make it standards compliance but who cares". Some big companies are taking up Firefox, Acer for one as bundling Firefox as default. Sure Acer are not 'huge', by all means on the international level, however small yet signification changes like this will damage Microsoft.

Who bundled Opera, Mozilla or any other free browser in Windows, 1 year, 2 years ago? Noone! Who bundles it now? Acer, Australian's 3rd largest PC Manufacture - The local high school near me get's new Acer's every 18-24 months, in that time 1,000 students will be surfing the web on Firefox! The local computer deal near me, recommends Firefox. Our family company bundles Firefox, the company I work for bundles and recommends Firefox.

Microsoft have a problem, if they stuff up this time with support for standards, and CSS2 all hell will break lose.

Re:Microsoft have no other option..

[BenjyD]

Plus, Firefox 1.1 will be out by the time IE7 *beta* is ready. They'll probably be getting near FF2.0 time by the first IE7 release.

Re:Microsoft have no other option..

[16K Ram Pack]

I thought Acer were something like #4 or 5 biggest PC builder in the world now.

Oh, and I'm about to put Firefox on 3 machines. A friend of mine has asked me to fix their machine for the 2nd time in a month for all sorts of crap on there.

not even

[Tumbleweed]

Without a full commitment to CSS2, this in no way comes even _close_ to FF, even the FF from last year. Pathetic.

And when you take into account the vast amount of tab control you have in FF when you have 'Tabbrowser Extensions' installed, no way is IE going to approach that level of functionality.

Looks like there may still be a place for the 'real' IE7 . *sigh*

Re:not even

[wezzul]

Even that jS class can't make up for IE's shortcomings though. Still lots and lots of CSS issues arise, even when using that...

Re:not even

[trenton]

And when you take into account the vast amount of tab control you have in FF when you have 'Tabbrowser Extensions' installed, no way is IE going to approach that level of functionality.

But when you install IE Tab Extensions, it has the same level of functionality as Firefox with Tabbrowswer. WTF? Let's compare vanilla installs of IE to Firefox, here. Anything is possible with add-ons.

Re:not even

[KarmaMB84]

CSS2 isn't really the reason people are switching to Firefox. Security is. MS could probably just release IE 7 tomorrow, claim they fixed the security issues and be set. Added features would just be an extra nicety.

Re:not even

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? Have you seen the level of tab control you have with Document Explorer or Visual Studio? Multiple horizontal and vertical groups of tabs, documents can be torn into freefloating windows and then redocked as tabs and documents can be docked to any of the four sides and stacked on each other. FireFox, with or without "Tabbrowser Extensions," comes nowhere near that. Frankly, TDI in FireFox is pathetic.

Re:not even

[gad_zuki!]

And do you really think people who have switched are going to switch back anytime soon? Do you really think they'll go "Okay, looks like microsoft fixed that security problem" like it was some trivial bug?

MS has been claiming their products are secure and security is their #1 job for a couple years now. People can smell the bullshit, that's why they jumped ship. Another MS release a la SP2 isnt exactly going to make them go back. I'd say two very important things happened this year:

1. End users now understand what a browser is and there is more than one in the world.

2. Many end users got sick of IE and switched to FF, Moz, or Opera. Some got so sick of MS they bought lots of shiny new Apples.

Now MS can't go back to 2001 where Apple was hurting and everyone was using IE; with a slim minority using NS4. That's a good thing. Not because I necessarily give two shits about OSS or the Mozilla foundation, but its good for standards and that's good for everyone. The real question isn't how secure IE7 will be (it wont, its still massively targeted and its still MS), but if MS will finally get on the standards bandwagon.

Re:not even

[pipingguy]

I'd like to be able to drag-and-drop (i.e., reorder) Firefox tabs the way AvantBrowser does.

Re:not even

[Tumbleweed]

Get the FF extension "Tabbrowser Extensions," it does that.

Re:not even

[Anonymous Coward]

CSS2 isn't really the reason people are switching to Firefox.

Are you sure? I'm a web developer, and I've been getting people to switch for no other reason than I'm fed up having to support a browser that doesn't implement nine year-old specifications.

Re:not even

[aaqubed]

But when you install IE Tab Extensions, it has the same level of functionality as Firefox with Tabbrowswer. WTF? Let's compare vanilla installs of IE to Firefox, here. Anything is possible with add-ons.

Yeah, because we all konw how many decent add-ons IE has...

Come on. One of FF's biggest selling points, at least to myself, is the idea that there are so many new little extensions developed for it all the time. Many of the extensions aren't reallly that good, but personally, I've really gotten used to Tabbrower Preferences and FoxyTunes.

Re:not even

[gsasha]

Mod parent up. Posted here, can't moderate. Seriously, the AC is right. FireFox has a reasonable implementation of tabs, the extensions are there and are OK (though I just cannot understand why tab drag&drop is not in the base install), but to say that they are the best implementation of tabs and that nothing more should be done in that area is a *HUGE* stretch.

Re:not even

[pipingguy]

The ability to re-order tabs? I have that extension and cannot find that feature. Maybe it's buried somewhere that I can't find. Thanks anyway.

Or similarly...

[Hamster Lover]

IE does have a print preview, but of course it does not differentiate between frames in print preview mode. It would be nice and more intuitive if it delineated the frames and let you choose to print the specified frame rather than right clicking in the frame itself and selecting print.

And I ageee with the parent comment that IE needs a page scaling feature. Firefox has had the "shrink to fit" and "page scaling" options for sometime now.

Re:Or similarly...

[Rude Turnip]

I guess I should clarify. Firefox inserts page numbers into the printout you see in the print preview mode. That's how I'm able to know which pages to print.

They can take our Tabbed Browsing

[WillAffleckUW]

But they can never take our Freedom!

Well, ok, maybe they can take it, but only if we let them ...

but they stole our tabbed browsing. It's all over people

could be

[SweetAndSourJesus]

or it could be, you know, a thing that aggregates news.

Wait, no, it's Microsoft. Must have some nefarious purpose.

Microsoft is innovating...

[vistic]

...again!

How do they come UP with these mind-boggling features out of thin air like that!?

Seriously though, is there anything actually new they've come up with and not just ripped off from Mozilla or Opera (or is a bug they should have fixed a long time ago, like their PNG support)?

SHHHHHHHH Don't tell my Grandma

[Skraut]

I told her Firefox was IE 7 and she's been happily been using it for months, and thanking me for upgrading.

Re:SHHHHHHHH Don't tell my Grandma

[AnamanFan]

I went further with people and switched the icons so that the Firefox shortcuts had the IE logo and renamed them "Internet Explorer".

For most, I tell them that Firefox != IE, but it will still do what they want to do and reduce the risk of malware infection. And all with out ointments or creams!

Re:SHHHHHHHH Don't tell my Grandma

[Adrilla]

I installed FF for my Gramms and she is happy that "All those screens stopped popping up" and asked me why I didn't install it earlier.

Re:SHHHHHHHH Don't tell my Grandma

[Kaki Nix Sain]

O.k, but your mamma already knows. We told her last night.

CSS3? Let's not get ahead of ourselves here...

[Tumbleweed]

It's not even _done_ yet - it's only in working draft status at this time.

CSS 2.1 would be a much more realistic goal for MS. Assuming they actually knew what they were doing, of course. Past evidence strongly suggests they don't, so I'm not holding my breath, even though I look stunning in blue.

And the engine is....

[Ray Alloc]

Gecko ?

Apparently an important factor is security...

[Perdo]

Wasn't it always?

Every time the same thing: most secure ever, complete security audit, SP2 is all about security, blah blah blah.

Well they certainly know that word in the marketing department.

Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, i use firefox but i used IE to download it. so without a bundled browser how would i go about downloading another browser? Last i checked i couldn't find firefox being sold in a store near me. so if i wanted to have a copy of it sent to me i would simply go to the site and order one. oh wait no browser!!!!

Re:Just what we need

[dusik]

Get an OS that comes bundled with wget.

Re:Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

ftp ftp.mozilla.org
anonymous
fuck@you (if asked for a password some mirrors don't seem to)
type I
cd pub
cd mozilla.org
cd firefox
cd releases
cd 1.0.1
cd win32
cd en-US
get Firefox Setup 1.0.1.exe

note: ftp.mozilla.org seems to be a round robin and it can take a few attempts to connect.

Re:Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see if we can make this actually work, and simplify it a bit:

ftp ftp.mozilla.org
anonymous
anonycow@goatse.cx
cd pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0.1/win32/en-US
bin
get "Firefox Setup 1.0.1.exe"

Re:Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, what's happening to this site. This is still a geek site right?

no way they'd do that

[r00t]

"additional support for CSS2" will mean everything except fixing the major box model and table width bugs.

In the Microsoft view, IE must remain compatible with IE. Even "better", stubborn Open Source developers will continue to be incompatible instead of changing or ignoring the standard. This means that many web sites will remain IE-only.

Adding support for extra features is fine though. You can count on Microsoft to do so.

Re:no way they'd do that

[Anonymous Coward]

So how come they fixed the box model a little in IE6 standards mode?

(And you can't argue that standards mode is inconsequential; stuff like espn.com renders in standards mode.)

I don't like MS but I would put IE's failings down to misplaced priorities rather than abject hatred of standards. I'm preparing to have my hopes for IE7 crushed in any case.

Re:no way they'd do that

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

""additional support for CSS2" will mean everything except fixing the major box model and table width bugs. "

Dunno about the "table width" bug (you shouldn't be using tables for layout anyway), but the box model seems mostly compliant in IE6 when you run it in standards-compliant mode.

Re:no way they'd do that

[RenatoRam]

Actually there is a little known trick that switches on the "almost-standard-compliant" mode in IE6, as opposed to "completely-broken" mode that is default.

You only have to declare the DOCTYPE correctly (that is, according to some weird ms rules), as explained here

If only this thing would be a little better known web designers'd have less headaches.

Re:no way they'd do that

[sharkey]

... the box model seems mostly compliant in IE6 when you run it in standards-compliant mode.

Check this out. Look at it in a standards-capable browser, then in IE. "Mostly compliant" is still not compliant.

Re:This is all they need to do to maintain dominan

[LiquidCoooled]

Click the Favorites menu at the top of ANY Windows Explorer window, and browse to a bookmark.

Lo and Behold, your magically clean XP with no Internet explorer returns in all its glory. All security exploits intact and enabled as before.

"Iexplore.exe" on XP is nothing more than a wrapper to the core IE engine.

Hint: You can't get rid of it totally without killing the system.

From MS site, you get the following:
NOTE: Internet Explorer 6 is preinstalled by default in all versions of Windows XP. To provide computer manufacturers greater flexibility in configuring desktop versions of Windows XP, Microsoft has made it possible for OEMs, administrators, and users to remove user access to Internet Explorer while leaving the Internet Explorer code intact and fully functional to ensure the functionality of programs and operating system functions that rely on it. For example, Windows XP supports an "IEAccess=off" switch in the Unattend.txt file, and Internet Explorer has been added to the Add/Remove Windows Components section of the Add/Remove Programs tool in Control Panel.

OT": PI

[bstadil]

What is the idea behind the wrong PI?

Just curious, I tried to memorize first 100 digits once and at least I still recall the first 8

Sarcasm?

[vigyanik]

Apparently an important factor is security.

Is it just me or did someone else also notice the sarcasm?

Er? yeah amazingly innovative features there

[t_allardyce]

So basically its going to be like firefox? except firefox is already here now and has been all year. I must say im looking forward to png support as a web designer its pretty sad that this format has been totally ruined because microsoft fucked up the display on the worlds biggest browser.

Re:Er? yeah amazingly innovative features there

[KarmaMB84]

It'll be like Opera. You didn't think Firefox was being innovative, did you?

Re:Er? yeah amazingly innovative features there

[stonecypher]

You've gotta love how Opera users think they invented things from Xerox PARC which were commonly used in Smalltalk-V and Hypercard.

competition is good for FF

[RandomWordGenerator]

FF took off because of the gaping hole in the market for a decent browser. Right now FF is just entering the general consumer conciousness as a 'possibly OK' product, enough to wake the slumbering MS giant.
This is GOOD NEWS!
Regardless of the policies and merits of the respective companies, as soon as any corp. thinks 'hey, we have this business licked ' it all goes pear shaped. FF could have become victim to complacency without competition. Seeing a big competitor in the rearview sharpens your thinking right up.

Microsoft is behind... Good

[richman555]

Well I think this proves one thing. That Microsoft will still be lagging far behind Firefox. Developers know it already, average people are beginning to realize it as well. Unless there are some facts we are missing, I think I.E. 7 could be a huge bust if Microsoft isn't careful. People will dump it if it sucks. The browser turnover will continue. By watching Mozilla and Firefox over the years, you know what it takes to build a lean mean browser. I see this as a opportunity for the knock out blow especially if Firefox exceeds the capabilities of a brand new IE 7.0 browser.

I Wonder

[magicRob]

If they'll just take the FF source, modify it so it fits into the Kernel and pass it off as IE7, a la Cherry OS.

- Rob

end of PNG?

[spir0]

If Microsoft support transparent PNG files, it certainly means that they are embracing and about to extend.

Keep an eye on the patent sites.

cutting rincon

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought they meant they were going to "cut corners" like half-assed CSS2 support and traditionally mediocre security.

seriously

[SweetAndSourJesus]

Linux being a major server operating system wasn't the claim, and is completely irrelevant.

The parent says it's growing slowly, you say it's growing fast, but neither of you have pointed to any evidence to back it up. I'm not the one making spurious claims, therefore the burden of proof is not on me. If it's so easy to Google for solid evidence, why have you not done it in support of your claim?

Re:seriously

[oliverthered]

information is only a google away.

According to CNET Linux had 27% of all server shipments in 2000 up from 25% the previous year.

IT facts says 'Linux server revenues grew 54.6% in Q2 2004 and unit shipments jumped more than 61% while Windows server revenue grew 13.2% and unit shipments up 25.3%.

Re:seriously

[KarmaMB84]

Server shipments has zero to do with web browsers...

Re:seriously

[oliverthered]

it does when some of the software that runs on the servers uses ActiveX and requires IE.

Re:seriously

[mysticwhiskey]

Since not every IIS-served site requires ActiveX-aware clients, doesn't it seem pointless to quote such statistics without knowing exactly what proportion of MS-served sites require ActiveX? Sure SOME do, but how much is 'some'?

Re:seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is my empirical evidence. I switched from Windoz to Linux, on all three of my home machines. I did it because I was sick of MS security issues.

I don't know if that equates to fast or slow, but right there Windoz lost three licensed machines, and Linux picked up three.

As for browsers, no more IE for me. And I have talked at least a dozen people at work into changing their browsers. None of them has looked back.

What does it mean, who knows. All I can take from it is people who didn't even know there was an alternative a year ago, are changing away from MS. I do not know anyone who changed back to MS/IE after trying the alternatives.

Re:seriously

[dylan_-]

Well, it's obviously difficult to get desktop numbers, but of commercial offerings, IDC predicts about 16 percent growth over the next couple of years.

If you look at stats from w3schools.com, Linux hits increased from 2.2 percent to 3.2 percent over the past two years which is a 45% increase.

Five years ago, there wasn't a single UK Linux magazine, now there are three.

I think these suggest that it's growing fairly rapidly.

Re:seriously

[oliverthered]

more than none, there are several time keeping packages used in large munti-national companies that require IE, that's a hell of a lot of desktops dependant on IE for an ActiveX contol on a web server.

Every company that migrates there servers from Windows to Linux or starups that start with Linux chip away at the use of windows tied desktop products.

Microsoft Exchange is another clasic example, I'm tempted to wrap up MAPI with Wine so that Linux clients can access MAPI and Exchange.

CSS

[oliverthered]

just do a link rel media=print and use css to set all the page noise invisible.
I use it on my site to remove the menus and some formatting and stuff, and prints are nice.

I also use CSS to display extra menus and reorder the page so that clutter comes at the bottom for screen readers so I can get AAA without inflicting large text on everyone.

Firefox R&D for Microsoft?

[hkmwbz]

Pray tell... What R&D has Firefox done "on behalf of Microsoft"? What fresh Firefox ideas are MS about to "steal"? Please be specific.

Re:Firefox R&D for Microsoft?

[rock_climbing_guy]

tabbed browsing

Re:Firefox R&D for Microsoft?

[Shippy]

Tabbed browsing is a concept that was first put into implementation by NetCaptor. Even Firefox copied it. *gasp!*

Re:Firefox R&D for Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let the foolish children believe FF is the greatest thing since sliced bread and that its -not- copying every single feature (possibly besides adblock, which is an extension anyways) from another browser such as Opera or NetCaptor :P

Re:Firefox R&D for Microsoft?

[myowntrueself]

Yeah, but I bet Microsoft has a *patent* on tabbed browsing.

Re:Firefox R&D for Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera has had an equivalent of AdBlock for years. Yes, it's not quite as simple - you have to modify the filter.ini file directly instead of clicking within the browser window - but the end result is the same.

Re:Firefox R&D for Microsoft?

[saskboy]

For one, changing the name of the browser every year would be a good start.

IE7 will be known as Microsoft Interweasel.

2000 professional NOT supported?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the stupidest decision I have ever heard. They are practicly driving everyone with 2000 and lower over to firefox. It's like giving a present to one child, naturaly the other will be pissed as shit and not like the parent. Microsoft is digging themselves a hole, not only in the browser world but also Operating System.

The school I go to is run completely by Windows 2000, negating the Macs.
There is NO WAY, they could afford coppies for XP much less run it on the ancient hardware which is strained under the excessive crap in 2000.

98 ran fast, WTF happened?!

Re:2000 professional NOT supported?

[KarmaMB84]

Unlike Win9x, the NT line are REAL operating systems. Might be all that "crap" like proper memory management and that kinda thing...

Re:2000 professional NOT supported?

[sp5]

This is the stupidest decision I have ever heard. They are practicly driving everyone with 2000 and lower over to firefox. It's like giving a present to one child, naturaly the other will be pissed as shit and not like the parent. Microsoft is digging themselves a hole, not only in the browser world but also Operating System.

I'm also surprised that they won't make IE 7 available to 2000. Since XP and now Win2003 Server are minor upgrades to 2000 (5.1 and 5.2 respectively) one would assume it would not be too much more work to "port" it to Windows 2000.

One might also reasonably assume that since they will likely continue to issue critical fixes to IE 6 on Windows 2000, Microsoft could actually $ave money on security by having one current supported browser.

-sp-

Re:2000 professional NOT supported?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are several MSIE bugs that are not fixed and will likely never be fixed because SP2 is currently resistant to the exploits. MS is relying heavily on their buffer overrun protection to prevent buffer overrun exploits from working rather than actually fixing the overrun hole itself. As for porting IE 7 to Windows 2000, someone will probably do it. I doubt it will be quite as easy as the two byte patch used to make Doom 3 run in Windows 9x but it shouldn't be that hard for someone to patch around the Windows version checks and add in the handful of new API calls needed.

Re:2000 professional NOT supported?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does IE6 already have XP specific items in it. I am now working at a location that uses XP SP2 and it seems that IE6 is a bit more updated than the version on my Win2k machine. Kind of like how MediaPlayer 10 does not run on Win2k also.

No CSS2

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft makes their money selling 'thick' clients, the prospect of thick servers and thin clients (aka the web) is the biggest threat to their business model. This is why dominating the browser market and stopping any innovation that would further threaten their thick client market was so important and worth going to court over.

Web-based applications like maps.google.com scare the hell out of them, and rightly so. If you can recreate the interface of locally running software using a server/client over the web then why bother having a thick client. Any OS will do.

They are only improving IE because they have to. If people start questioning their browser software they might start questioning their other software. They'll be kicking and screaming before they submit to full CSS2 and DHTML.

Re:No CSS2

[IntlHarvester]

I gotta call bullshit here. ASP.NET is probably their most popular developer technology and they make an enormous amount of money off it. Client/Server is DEAD even in Microsoft-land.

Web-based applications like maps.google.com were possible in Internet Explorer 4.0 back in 1998. Until very recently, nobody was near them in DOM/Javascript functionality, and they still have an enormous amount of proprietary clientside stuff that FireFox hasn't matched.

The thing MS has finally seemed to realize is that XHTML and CSS actually helps them -- it would make their developer tools work better which in turn makes them more money. Realize that IE is just a tool for them, not an end in itself.

Re:No CSS2

[plague3106]

I doubt that client / server is dead. In fact, it may be coming back. .Net supports a 'click to download' where an exe will auto update from a server to download a 'think' .net client. This ensures that the latest code is always on the clients (simply running the app auto installs updates) and you don't have the horrid UI that some try to build in a web client.

Use a web app and then use a desktop app...the controls on a desktop app are simply far supieror to that of a web page.

Re:No CSS2

[IntlHarvester]

OK, not "dead", but "dying". For all the pain with using webapps, people keep coming back and asking for more of them. I predict this .NET download thing will be about as popular as Java WebStart which does the same thing.

I think one of the big reasons MS put so much work into client-scripting technology is because you really can build an webapp that's 90% as good Win32. They have been around a while, but they are only just showing up in public (like Google Maps).

Re:No CSS2

[plague3106]

They ask for more because the click to download for .net is relatively new.

Java WebStart probably didn't take off because running Java apps on the desktop never took off.

You can't build a web app that's as good as 90% of Win32 apps (or linux apps) because you can't build an enterprise level system on top of a scripting language. It just doesn't work out...in the end you're left with huge amounts of scripts that you can't even be sure don't have object type problems.

Thick clients got to be a problem because rollout of said apps got to be a problem; now that .net takes you back to xcopy install and allows for auto installation of updates, I think we'll be seeing more desktop apps.

Of course the ideal is keeping one copy of the client on a server and simply sending the display to the desktop (ala Xwin). You get the benefit of having to only worry about one machine to install updates to, just like the web, and have the rich client app that users want.

No XUL? Bad news.

[dostick]

I am surprised that nobody is talking about XUL. It's worst news of all that IE7 doesn't have it.
XUL supposed to be the "next big thing", replacing awful Javascript UIs and stuff.
Only if IE could support it would be mainstream.
Microsoft holding up for proprietary again.

Re:No XUL? Bad news.

[noamsml]

XUL is far from being a net sandard, even if IE does support it, it would mean woe to opera and KHTML users.

Re:FF killer. Hardly

[div_2n]

I am a computer consultant. When I fix people's computer, I tell them under no circumstances should they use the blue "E" and to only use Firefox. I tell them "On the rare occasion that your online bank or credit card website doesn't work, go ahead and use it but otherwise DON'T!" Believe it or not, they listen.

I will continue to do that because IE will most likely still be insecure and a security flaw in it will likely mean a rooted system whereas Firefox most likely won't. Possible, but not near as likely.

Print Wizard? :)

[wo1verin3]

new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE

For those users who just couldn't figure out that incredibly complex button with the printer on it.

Cloning

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like they're trying to just clone FireFox.

looks like I'll have reinstall all that spyware.

[Quadfreak0]

"Apparently an important factor is security."
I recall they said that the last couple times they upgraded IE.

I'm willing to bet all that spyware will be conviniently imported from a previous install if not reinstalled by default, and firefox will be broken as a bonus feature.

Rebuilding Confidence In IE

[emericklaw]

Its gonna take a lot of persuading to get most firefox users to switch back. There is just too much uncertainty about how secure the new IE will be.

Also firefox has extensions that I could not live without now!

Final solution

[t_allardyce]

Im not inciting anyone to do anything of course but I think it would be beneficial if there accidentally happened to be a worm on the loose that converted people to firefox and disguised it as IE - just to push the un-washed masses into whats good for them. The greatest problem in the web industry is the lack of one single browser with one single standard and one set of bugs, firefox is the answer and unless IE 7 can do everything that FF can do _and_ is cross-platform its just not helping the issue.

Yes I can see the security issue with having everyone use one browser but at the moment its something like 70%/20%/5%/5% which means developers have to pull their hair out making things work in every browser and security holes still fuck everyone over.

Re:Final solution

[amliebsch]

I use Firefox. But in case I didn't: don't, for one second, ever think that you have the right to decide what's good for me, and I don't care how l33t you are.

Maybe you were joking, but I take these things seriously, because when people who think like you do gain power, people die (as I'm guessing you are probably aware of, by the title of your post.)

I'm sure it's been said already

[bubkus_jones]

but I just don't care.

Doesn't FF/Mozilla have all the features that MS is planning on including in IE7?

FF not the only dead duck

[misterlump77]

With integrated RSS aggregator/reader, kiss goodbye to Newsgator, Pluck, FeedDemon and all of the other RSS applications.

Can they at least support HTML special characters?

[Anonymous Coward]

If not CSS2 as well... try this page in Netscape and then use IE and count how many more default box-like characters there are...

Maybe we could..

[Zeussy]

Use its guranteed security flaws against it, and write some site content to disable tab browsing after using tabbin' for a month or 2 of course. Then won't be able to browse without it. They will be hooked! and they will have to get FF. Muhahahah.

Ah!

[jav1231]

Ah, Microsoft. Where they take all of the cool features of the best software out there, implement it in their next release, and call it innovation!

Can Windows ever be secure?

[dtjohnson]

Improving the security of Windows will require a lot more than an IE update. Microsoft starts with basically insecure processes and then trys to plug all of the unintended uses (aka security holes) that they can think of.

For example, look at the standard Windows update procedure for Windows XP. First, you have to go to a website to download software that you then allow to run on your system looking for updates. Then, you have to let the software download a sometimes long list of self-installing 'updates' from some location that the Microsoft software selects for you. The download procedure gives the user very little supervisory control over the process and doesn't even do very simple things such as display checksum data to let the user verify the integrity of the downloads. There is also little, if any, indication of what the downloads will do or replace. Yet Microsoft considers this inherently insecure process to be their standard procedure for updating their flagship operating system.

Microsoft needs to change their entire philosophy wherein they think that they should be able to anything they want with your computer at any time while the bad guys are not supposed to use the same mechanisms to steal your data and your cycles.

Re:Can Windows ever be secure?

[KarmaMB84]

I've actually never heard of anyone exploiting Windows Update or Office Update...oh wait, those controls are for those websites only...maybe the user should stop running ActiveX on untrusted sites?

Re:Can Windows ever be secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is where linux fails:

"self-installing 'updates' from some location that the Microsoft software selects for you."

yes, average joe wants that, average joe does not care that he is downloading updateno23xxxx.exe which makes no sense to him. All he wants to know is that it is updating.

"The download procedure gives the user very little supervisory control over the process and doesn't even do very simple things such as display checksum data to let the user verify the integrity of the downloads."

Average joe wants to click a button and let the computer do it all for him. Average joe DOES NOT know wtf a checksum data is.

Re:Can Windows ever be secure?

[f0rt0r]

Linux is tough to update -
type "yum -y update"

Wait while it locates, downloads, and installs updates and dependencies ( while checking the checksums ) for all of the applications on your computer. While it is running and after, you can continue to use your computer, no problem. Afterwards, you have the option of continuing to use your computer, or rebooting if you miss the reboot you used to do after running Windows update.

If you are an advanced user, you can put that command into cron to have it run every night, to keep your computer up to date.

Re:Can Windows ever be secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple answer: No.

Windows is insecure by design and in future days will be used to demonstrate unequivocably that it is impossible to add security as a layer on top of an insecure kernel.

It will also serve as the textbook example of how programs should not have knowledge of other programs internals and how only kernel processes should run with kernel privileges. Break the rule and suffer the consequences (insecure, unstable)

"Windows security" is an oxymoron, it's a bad joke. Windows is a toy O/S for people who sadly know no better.

At this point I shall leave you Windows users to your spyware and virus laden zombie machines whilst I get on with using my computer.

Re:Can Windows ever be secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your scenario for Windows update is identical to Red Hat and other distros. I'm not sure what your point with that really was, but:

Considering that OS X and Linux have a continuous string of security related fixed on a weekly basis (Though Apple saves up 10-15 of them at a time on 3 month intervals) you sure are holding Microsoft up to some insanely high standards that no one else has ever matched.

Maybe they should be held to those standards, but until Linux is actually secure and not merely paying for lip service by advocates while Bug Track tells a completely different story, I don't think anyone here really has any justification for bitching about it.

Dissapointed

[oliverthered]

I just downloaded ie7, and I was really hoping that someone had rebranded FireFox so that JoeSix pack could just install IE7 [firefox]

Re:mod parent down, grandparent up

[smittyoneeach]

Genetically, Jesus, a Semite himself, would have been indistinguishable from a Muslim.
OK, it's off topic, and I fed a troll. Sorry.

catchup

[Capt_Troy]

So far this just sounds like catch up. Are they going to have any new ideas here? I think I'll just stick with Firefox.

don't go!

[XO]

Don't go and use our competitors products! Ours will have all their features, in a version or two!

Ambiguity in the English language

[Mystic0]

Hello,

You are experiencing the effect of ambiguity that is an inherent trait in the English language.

To learn a language that is unambiguous, please visit http://www.lojban.org/.

Tabs? They must be kidding!

[owlstead]

All the time they try to get away from tabs, favouring top level windows (which stack into the retarded XP taskbar). And now suddenly tabs? What's next? Finding out that personalized menu's are crap?

Funny thing to see Microsoft rewrite their entire GUI guidelines just to combat Firefox.

Longhorn system requirements:

[Anonymous Coward]

The minimum system requirements are a P4 3.7Ghz with 2GB of RAM and 120GB HD for the swap file.

forced install

[ppz003]

So when will microsoft start forcing people to install IE7 to upgrade/install something else? That's the last thing I want to download when working on dialup. Must remember to keep my usb stick updated so I won't have to.

Extraordinary Rendition

[kinema]

"appropriate costume for your region"

I live in the United States so does this mean that there's a chance that Clippy might get the CIA to kidnap me and take me another country, say Uzbekistan where they will have the local govenrment torture me until I renounce my FOSS ways?

If you don't know what I'm talking about search for the CIA's "Extraordinary Rendition" program.

In other news...

[Matilda the Hun]

Novell has apologized to developers of the IE7 team, since apparently their popular anti-virus software detected so many security holes in the work-in-progress that it tried to uninstall it.

"We're sorry for the inconvience", one Novell spokesperson was quoted as saying, "but I don't get why they're so suprised. I mean, the same thing happened when the last version of IE came out."

Microsoft developers are heard to be working on a patch that renders the holes invisible to antivirus software, rather than patching the holes themselves. "I mean, how are we supposed to get into your computer otherwise?", an inside source was quoted as saying. "Er, to fix things. Of course. What else would we do with glaring backdoors? I mean, wait. What backdoors? They're 'features'. Yeah, 'features'. Move along, nothing to see here."

Microsoft IE7 Security

[Anonymous Coward]

"Apprarently and important factor is security."

...which means you have to confirm a "Wanna download sexy chic pictures?" before the OCX formats your C:

they can keep it

[suezz]

they can keep their piece of shit browser - I code web pages to w3c specs and every every every time all the pages work in firefox, opera, mozilla, Epiphany, konqueror (most of the time), except ie - it is the biggest piece of shit lockin software that is out there and it should be made illegal.

and whoever invented active x - well off with their heads!

Fascinating

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, am fascinated by the dance MS dances with IE. It's hard to write a suspense novel like this.

IE exists because some loud-mouthed goofs at a startup called Netscape were making a lot of noise about the Web being the new Operating Environment. They said that as long as an application ran "on the web" it didn't matter what OS it ran on.

Microsoft adeptly applied their tried and true tactics to kill the loud-mouthed poster boys, and become the overwhelmingly dominant player in the web client arena. They made a better web browser than anybody else.

For a short time, they continued to develop and improve their web browser until it was better even than Netscape. Then somebody figured out that, although they had crushed Netscape, they were actually fulfilling the vision set forth by Netscape. Any solid standards-compliant web app had a very solid client waiting on the dominant OS of the day.

MS froze the development of IE, fearing that any more improvements would only make web development even more attractive to developers. They began earnestly searching for ways to extend web technologies in proprietary ways that would make the most clever web apps only work on Windows platforms.

They quickly found that they couldn't just build tricks into the browser and set out on an ambitious plan to rebuild an OS to be a platform for proprietary extansions to web technology. The new OS would make it possible to build incredible web applications, as long as everybody involved was running an MS OS.

This was a monumental undertaking, and has experienced its share of setbacks. But MS continues to work on the dream, and it is nearing completion. It should fulfill the original Netscape vision--except for the part about minimizing the importance of any particular OS.

Meanwhile, the web has become ubiquitous. It is more used than cell-phones, automobiles, or any electronic gadget except televisions. Soon, televisions will receive their content over the internet.

And IE, with as minimal improvements as MS can get away with, is proving inadequate to the demands of web users. Speed, features, and security of IE have become unacceptable, and users are wandering away.

So MS is in a race on a tightrope. They need to keep the loyalty of IE users by improving security, features, and performance of IE. At the same time they cannot risk luring more developers into the web arena until they have a proprietary "web platform" that can lock developers in while providing users the features they demand.

This is amazing drama for spectators. Will MS complete their proprietary "web platform" in time? Will they be able to maintain IE loyalty until the new platform can gain traction? Will the rebel Mozilla Foundation be able to gain enough ground to matter? Does anyone have an answer to the proprietary web killer once it has been completed? Will the police finally believe that there is a pattern and catch the culprit before he can kill the most important figure in the movie? Will I have enough popcorn to make it to the end? Wow! This is intense!

Re:Fascinating

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft adeptly applied their tried and true tactics to kill the loud-mouthed poster boys

Isn't this just more of the same old tried and true tactics: Pre-announce vapor-ware. This tactic has been one of their most potent. Windows was a revolutionary GUI for years while developers worked like crazy to develop something more than an artist's conception. Windows 95 was better than OS/2 for years before it was finally released.

Now they get two-for-one everytime they "leak." A better browser than Firefox, and a better OS than Linux. Everything will be better real soon now when they release this magic software that is better than anything you've ever seen before.

Don't bother using a better product right now, because Microsoft will have something even better "in just a little while."

Security? What security...

[TrickiDicki]

The article mentions support for International Domain Names. If they're serious about security then they'll pull the pin on this 'feature' quick smart. Otherwise, bring the Phishers....

position:fixed

[r00t]

I'll bet they add this. Leaving it out does not encourage IE-only web sites.

You can pretty much tell what changes will be made. Ask yourself if the change would increase lock-in or decrease lock-in. Missing stuff will be added, while blatent standards violations will remain.

DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!

[bradleyland]

Life easy for developers you say? Who at MS believes this is important?

Re:DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!

[fm6]

Sadly, you are quite correct. The MS attitude was neatly summarized by Petzold in Programming Windows, when he insisted that having to write 50 lines just for a simple "hello world" program was an indication of how powerful Windows is! I hope I never meet the dude.

Inconceivable!

[Coderifous]

While the ideas that made firefox awesome are not ground breaking (best trait was it's faithful support of standards) or even patentable (plenty of prior art for plugin-install-wizards, tabbed browsing, popup blocking, search toolbars, etc), the source code to firefox is protected under a bunch of different licenses, including the GNU GPL and LGPL. So Microsoft *might* be able to use it, but then they would have to pay Mozilla Foundation for it (LGPL I believe) and if they made any changes, they'd have to publish their work back to the community - which would violate the tenets of the "closed source is more secure" assault model they are employing against linux et al.

Re: the media - they recieved Firefox extremely well, what makes you think the UNbribed authors (in the know) won't be married to their Firefox by then, and be just as skeptical of IE's utility as an FF alternative as the /. beeeatches?

And as far as a (real) developer's standpoint, two things matter:

1)standards support
2)platform support

Call me when I can write a webapp using js/css/html/dhtml and it renders the same across windows and *nix under MSIE. See that catch? Yea, FF fills that niche quite nicely, IE is relegated to being monopoly fodder.

Peace and browser grease.

--jim

it's about time

[noamsml]

if Firefox wouldn't have any competition, it would not innovate as quickly.

He means PNG

[cgenman]

In case you don't know, the above poster is refering to PNG. PNG was supposed to take over for GIF when it was discovered that GIFs were patent encumbered. PNG also blows GIF out of the water in that it extended this to support an alpha channel in all images, allowing you to "fade" things with the background.

Think about it this way... You know those icons with drop shadows at the top of Slashdot? If they were PNG's, you could swap them across any background and the icon would look great, the shadow would fall correctly. You could anti-alias edges without worrying about what the background image is. You can layer multiple images on top of eachother so that the front page of websites don't have to be chopped up into millions of individual images. And it all just works.

And Microsoft promised full PNG support in I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, I.E. 4. They bragged that they were going to be the first to implement full PNG support. They're actually the last. By about 7 frick'in years.

As a rough guess I'd say their lack of PNG support has cost over a million hours of web designer headaches. But they couldn't afford to put one lousy intern on the task of adding alpha channel support to PNG support. Which they promised in I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, which they promised in I.E. 4.

They even have a perfectly suitable though terribly hacky series of workaround, using javascript. If they just fed their PNG's into their own functions which you can call through javascript, you're golden. But no, they've had to have broken PNG support for the last 7 years. Since I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, frick'in I.E. 4.

If there is any reason why webdevelopers hate Microsoft, this is it. PNG support. I would guess on a big project it would shave an hour off everybody's day, for everybody who works with images. Hell, people were shouting that they would pay Microsoft to do this. People volunteered to do this for them. But no, they "couldn't figure out how to do it," for 7 frick'in years.

Push it out to everyone. I don't care if they're on XP, ME, or OS9, proper Alpha Channel PNG support would save a ton of time. It's about bloody time.

Opera supports it. Mozilla supports it. Firefox, Konq, Netscape, Safari, iCab, and Omniweb support it. The Dreamcast and Web TV browsers support it. Everyone but Lynx supports it. Oh, that is everyone but Lynx and frick'in I.E.

[/Rant]

Re:He means PNG

[DavidTC]

They aren't actually the last. The gun went off, everyone sprinted down the road, crossed the finish line at nearly the same time, except for Microsoft, which decided to move to Akron and sell vinyl siding or something instead of finishing the race.

To be the last in a competition, Microsoft would have to fucking cross the finish line. They're not even last until then!

Re:He means PNG

[tobybuk]

For gods sake man stop waffling and tell us what bothers you.

Re:He means PNG

[carpeicthus]

Even IE for Mac has had full PNG support for many years. You should be embarrassed when you tarry that long in implementing something the boys down the hall figured out long ago.

Re:He means PNG

[Fortress]

Didn't IE4 have PNG support?

Re:He means PNG

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that IE does support the PNG alpha channel, but it renders it against the image's "default background color" (in the bKGD chunk) instead of the canvas below. I've long suspected that this is because way back when their multi-format image loader was only able to return a bitmap with 1-bit transparency, and they didn't want to update the image loader API.

The DirectX Filter hack works by blending the image on top of whatever element it's attached to, so it doesn't go through the normal image loader API. Even if they introduced a workaround which transparently used this filter, that wouldn't work for other places where images appear, such as background images.

Re:He means PNG

[Anonymous Coward]

Get with the program, the beta version of Lynx supports Alpha Channel PNG now.

Re:He means PNG

[eddy the lip]

Preach it, brother! If they fixed they're goddamned PNG handling, my life would be simpler, and our sites would look better. It's inexcusable that the only way to get PNGs to almost work right in IE is with a bleeding javascript hack.

The one thing I want even more, though, is a proper box model. CSS hacks (which only work because of other bugs in IE) remind me of the bad old days of v4 browsers and table layouts. Of course, it will still be two or three years before we can safely ignore IE6, but at least I'd have something to look forward to. (And if they fix the box model without fixing things like * html { } I'll be ranting for days...)

Neither of these things are really a big deal. I have no idea why they're so resistant to fixing them, except that it might confuse their FrontPage users.

Fix those two things, and suddenly almost all of the crappy hacks we currently have to use go away. Sure, I'll find something else to bitch about, like missing selectors or something, but I'll deal. PNGs and a box model. Tiny requests, and they seem to be the things that piss off the web development community the most. I wish they'd get over it and just commit to the damned things.

32-bit PNG Support... for real??

[Elranzer]

Finally, PNG support? With alpha transparency even? Finally, we can we get rid of that god-awful GIF format now that the browser that 90% of people use will have proper PNG support.

Re:32-bit PNG Support... for real??

[theworldiswatching]

And tell me, were you just using mozilla/firefox just for the PNG support?

Re:32-bit PNG Support... for real??

[wheany]

Probably not, but alpha-blended pngs can be used to make pretty things.

Re:mod parent down, grandparent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you. It is common knowledge throughout the civilized world that Jesus "Son of God" Christ was, in fact, a white man with blue eyes and blonde hair. Any other account is a flat-out lie by the religious zealots who want nothing more than to burn our civilizations to the ground.

The Equation

[dep01]

Firefox + Gayness - Efficiency - Extensions = IE7

Plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it possible to write a plugin that chould shoehorn CSS2 support into IE7? Sure, web sites that use it would have to make the plugin available, but they already do so for Flash when they rely on that.

Re:Plugin?

[schon]

Isn't it possible to write a plugin that chould shoehorn CSS2 support into IE7?

Yes., and it's possible to do it almost entirely in Javascript.

Next step:

[rhizome]

You can pretty much tell what changes will be made. Ask yourself if the change would increase lock-in or decrease lock-in. Missing stuff will be added, while blatent standards violations will remain.

I wonder, will IE7 be a Critical Update, or merely recommended?

Wow, you just described Linux to a "T".

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, what do you expect from an OS that is meant to mimic Unix, Windows and OSX? Innovation? And you pillory MS for the same thing.

Mr. Pot, let me introduce you to Mr. Kettle.

Mod parent "-1, Captain Obvious".

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, MS only spends money when they need to to keep making money. Duh.

The CD o' Doom

[Lifewish]

Security is, for me, one of the major reasons for installing Firefox. As a resident of a decent-sized campus type university, I regularly find myself doing tech support for friends' spyware-encrusted computers. That's why I carry the CD of Doom at all times.

Currently it includes Firefox, Zone Alarm (freebie version), Spyware S&D and AdAware. Wipes out 95% of spyware and prevents reinfections - it makes the chore almost fun.

Any thoughts on other stuff that could be usefully added to it?

Re:The CD o' Doom

[Anonymous Coward]

Any thoughts on other stuff that could be usefully added to it?

How about this?

Re:The CD o' Doom

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

I have a 1 GB stick of Doom, with the following:

a2 anti-trojan program
AdAware
Avast!
avg anti-virus
clamwin Antivuris
CWShredder
Kerio personal firewall
Soybot S&D
(I got a couple of antivirus progs on there because I'm still trying to decide which I trust more)

AND.....

W2K SP 4 and XP SP2 (cause thats a big reason peoples' computers are in the mess they are in)

Don't worry - Firefox and Thunderbird are in another folder on the stick drive and always get installed :)

They also get a free lecture from me on how they got infected and how they can prevent this in the future. Also note that all of the programs listed above are either freeware/GPL, or able to be used for basic functionality by a home end user at no cost. I'm trying to go into business for myself, so I wanna have a honest rep from the get go and not toss cracked software on customers' machines. Keeps us both out of court!

Re:The CD o' Doom

[wheany]

Add Microsoft Antispyware, Spybot search and destroy, HijackThis and this script on the disk. And maybe some tools against specific malware, like CWShredder.

Sorry, the comments on the script are in Finnish, but the script deletes all users' personal temp-directories, temporary internet files, temp dirs under the system directory and Opera's temporary files. One flaw in the script is that it assumes the system is installecd on c:\. And I could add Firefox's and Mozilla's temp dirs on it as well.

Learn to use HijackThis and the system explorers and hijack restore in MS antispyware. About:blank is not a good choice for start page, because apparently that can be redirected to a page containing more exploits.

And remember to activate only one product's real time protection.

No SVG?

[bicho]

what, no svg nor mng?

and here I was hoping IE7 would knock some sense into firefox...

Re:looks like I'll have reinstall all that spyware

[catdevnull]

Ya know, if I were a moderator, I'd mod this not funny but insightful (and funny). It's too true to not laugh nervously.

Embrace & Extinguish

[mpapet]

I seem to remember a time when Microsoft made a product announcement when they figured out that there was either a viable alternative to their product, or some computer hardware platform without a M$ OS.

Then when they released, there was huge press coverage with fanboy-like praise for a mediocre product and gigantic marketing campaigns (connection?) that left the underfunded competitor in the dust despite the competitor's superior product.

Like it or not, I see that happening again with IE7.

I'm also thinking someone at M$ has probably recommended IE7 to be a huge memory/bandwidth/CPU sucking hog with DRM hooks into the system as far as they can get them.

Then, Microsoft gets to say they are protecting their users because they delivered a more secure browser. And...

(Cue gameshow announcer voice now!)

The best way to enjoy more security is to buy a new Dell/Intel PC!!! Ohhh... Ahhh... (cue applause) Your new computer will have all these great Media Conglomerate entertainment "features" you couldn't get on your old PC because your old PC was just too old... wash, rinse, repeat.

Mod me flamebait/off-topic/whatever now.

Re:security -- Not just anglaphones

[darkonc]

it's kind of funny, though, how it is essentially our (...)'s lack of familiarity with the writing systems of the rest of the world that are getting us into this particular pickle.

Actually no. The problem is really just that UTF-8 is too powerful. There are half a dozen ways to encode something that looks like an 'a'. It can actually get worse for people who are multilingual -- A Frenchman who expects a site encoded with an accented A (ä) might then be sent a URL where a similar looking character (ä) is encoded out of some other page. In this case, both ä's will be marked as extended UTF characters, so there may be no easy way for a user to distinguish between the 'legitimate' site and the phish monger. You tell me which one is legitimate! (and, yes, they are different encodings in this posting).

IE EATS COCK!

[Anonymous Coward]

IE is a spyware ridden peice of shit you fucktard cock gobbling M$ whore

Petition to Stop IE7's Lack of Standards

[wezzul]

Stop Microsoft's Arrogance

Re:Petition to Stop IE7's Lack of Standards

[EnderWiggin99]

Hmm.

Should be informative but it's just funny instead..

If there was a Slashdot moderation for my feelings on this matter, it would be '-1, Sad'.

Re:Petition to Stop IE7's Lack of Standards

[markdowling]

This is pathetic. The IE team's blog entries seem to indicate their awareness of standards compliance and that their track record isn't stellar.

Can anyone tell me where signing an online petition was a direct cause of getting something changed?

Anyway, most Slashdotters would want IE to stay non-compliant so FF can keep their selling point. (And I'm posting this from FF1.0.1 so don't mod me down just coz I won't join the reflexive MS bash).

We don't use Firefox because of CSS. We use it because we don't want ActiveX.

Re:Petition to Stop IE7's Lack of Standards

[wezzul]

I use it because of CSS, because of tabbed browsing and extensions. However, there are alot of people that aren't really going to change to firefox, the people who don't even know there *is* another browser besides IE, or even what a browser is. Having to cater to these folks in web design is a pain in the ass, but is necessary due to the amount of people that use that browser.

There are standards for a reason.

Re:Petition to Stop IE7's Lack of Standards

[TheAwfulTruth]

How about doing something a little closer to home?

How about petitioning to stop Slashdot's lack of standards compliance?

Maybe we could come up with a petition to "Stop Slashdot's Arrogance".

If we can't do that, how (and why) should we bother with bitching about Microsoft and IE?

Re:Petition to Stop IE7's Lack of Standards

[wezzul]

That is perhaps one of the more foolish things I've heard in a while. Slashdot isn't used by around 80% of the American public? Slashdot being standards compliant isn't important, at all, in the grand scheme of things.

IE being standards compliant sure is.

Re:Petition to Stop IE7's Lack of Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like a true stone thrower. /. is the biggest internet glass house on the net! Until we get our own act togeather, what in hell gives us the right to criticize others?

Answer: NOTHING!

But what if?

[SteveXE]

What if Microsoft delivers a better browser and a more secure browser then their opensource counterparts? What then? Will you switch to IE as you did Mozilla and Firefox, or will you cry wolf and use the old standby "Microsoft is evil!" comment?

Re:But what if?

[inkswamp]

That, my friend, is the single biggest "what if" I've ever seen, and could only be topped by the slightly less likely "What if Microsoft's product became so good that they spread a warm glow over the face of the planet and brought about world peace?"

Re:But what if?

[xeno-cat]

Only if after having completed that big "what if" they also port it to Linux.

Re:But what if?

[Apathetic1]

Last year I was telling my friends and acquaintences to switch from MSN Messenger to Miranda, Trillian, GAIM, etc. because Microsoft's terrible security track record would turn around and bite them in the ass.

Fast foward to last week when I started getting "cute.pif" file transfer requests. I can't see this being any different.

Re:But what if?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if Microsoft delivers a better browser and a more secure browser then their opensource counterparts?

I will rejoice, as it will mean I can stop wasting hours every week working around HTML, CSS, HTTP, PNG and DOM bugs in Internet Explorer. Well, I'll be able to stop doing that in 2010, when everybody has upgraded.

Will you switch to IE

Last I checked, they aren't planning on porting it to Linux.

Re:But what if?

[l3v1]

No, I won't switch since for some of us support for other platforms (like Linux) is just as important as being standards compliant and secure.

Easy plugins?

[fmobus]

Blah It smells to me like an open door to malware. This doesn't happen in FF, but can you trust IE devteam to do something safely? I, for one, not.

great!

[CAIMLAS]

Welcome to the 21st century, Mr. Gates!

Imagine the splendor of advancement and innovation which is before us! The future!

The concern is with the *appearance* of security

[leonbrooks]

Actual security is entirely optional, as long as the nice customers trust Microsoft's software enough to keep shelling out for it... or for the other Microsoft software entailed by it. Heed this Douglas Adams quote:

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all his customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who by peddling second-hand, second-rate technology, led them all into it in the first place.

Varg, eh?

[Lord Faust]

The last handle I'd be using online is Varg Vikernes. He was known in the Norweigan black metal scene as a church burner, before killing his label owner and adopting a neo-Nazi philosophy while in prison. For more information on this puts, check out the book Lord of Chaos, or simply check out a few metal sites. Heh, of all the names I'd expect to see in an MS story...

Re:Varg, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of his beliefs and actions, his music kicks ass.

Re:Varg, eh?

[Lord Faust]

Have you heard "The Crying Orc"?

89%

[leonbrooks]

...and falling.

How sad. <leaps embellishment="clicks heels">

Re:89%

[NaDrew]

That was almost a big problem!

Let us Uninstall it = security

[Tuqui]

Let the user Uninstall IE for better security

Re:The REAL tragady of P2P

[sillybilly]

How about patenting someone else's ideas?

so in other words....

[DarkMantle]

... It's a firefox wannabe, with a big blue "e". My question is. what does an "e" have to do with surfing the web? At least the fox is running around the world. (A big fox, or a small world, you can decide)

When

[Anonymous Coward]

When they detache IE form it's core, I will look at M$ more seriously.

Corn In?

[StikyPad]

(code named 'Rincon')

Of Rincon Pak fame?

Interestingly, it's an anagram for "corn in." Corn in, corn out, I always say.

I walked into that...

[Lifewish]

For the record, I'm a linux man myself. Unfortunately, it's apparently not for everyone - the only non-techie person I know who uses it is only doing so cos XP won't install and everyone who has a clue is refusing to help him. One too many cracks about "linux-loving geeks", iirc...

Ahhh...G....where have we seen this before??

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Apparently we can expect 32 bit PNG support,

Firefox Already Has this...

native IDN support

Yep it has it, but it's turned off by default because of Phishing....do we really want/need this??

new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE

Um....ok..does it matter? No.

and, of course, tabbed browsing.

Big deal...have had this for what...almost 2 years now??

The new browser also will likely include a built-in news aggregator.

Firefox has it and it looks like Safari will to way before IE 7 sees the light of day.

Apparently an important factor is security

With integrated IDN? Well, I hope it's not on by default. Will it still do Active X? Of course it will and until this part is GONE or TOTALLY REWORKED and REWROTE security isn't going to be a true concern.

I hope they do make IE 7 better....by the time it's out, it wil be even further behind Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari.

Standards support improvements? Half-assed

[Dracos]

MS is doing as little as it can for its users. XP+SP2 and 2k3 only? Come on, they're just creating another excuse to keep the upgrade carousel turning.

It surprises me that they're going to improve PNG and CSS support at all. But being MS, we know there's going to be a catch.

• PNG: Something sinister, I dunno what (perhaps like positioning a 32 bit image over another one will result in trans levels showing up as colors), with alpha transparency will be done just wrong enough to make it a hassle.
• CSS: I would be surprised again (floored, even) if they fixed the box model. I think what they are calling "improved CSS support" can more accurately be called "improved DOM and event model support", like supporting :hover on elements other than links. They can't fix too much, because MS is famously afraid of breaking backwards compatibility. Any CSS support they fix will be little things that amount to a big list.

Call me a pessimist, but look at their track record. I don't see anyone at MS advocating putting a time warp in IE to bring its users (victims) from the 2001 web to the 2005 web in one fell swoop.

They're called homographs with good reason

[Kaseijin]

that's a very reasonable way of doing it, but i wonder if maybe making the location bar a different colour as FireFox does for secure sites might be a better - in the sense of more obvious - solution.

Some people think it's important that Yandex be able to register xn--ndex-k8d without being spoofed at xn--ndx-sdd1k (with Cyrillic Ye in place of the Latin E).

it's kind of funny, though, how it is essentially our (as in the mostly-north-american-and-western-european readership of slashdot)'s lack of familiarity with the writing systems of the rest of the world that are getting us into this particular pickle.

One need not know hanzi from Hebrew to identify both as Not Latin, but even a native Greek can't be sure whether a given circle is Greek Omicron, Latin O, Cyrillic O, or something else entirely.

Re:They're called homographs with good reason

[Cerberus7]

So, if we have Greek Omicron, Latin O, and Cyrillic O, all of which look exactly the same, could we not create a master character set, containing one instance of every character, and just have the specific character sets be pointers to the relevant entries in the master list? Yeah, I know, that's a big project to change everybody's character sets, but wouldn't it fix this problem?

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally... been waiting for this. :D

Re:mod parent down, grandparent up

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean he would be indistinguishable from an Arab.

Muslim is a religion not an ethnicity. There are asian muslims, african muslims, white muslims, arab muslims.

Transparent PNG support

[Sean Clifford]

Finally, transparent PNG support on by default without having to resort to js and css hacks. I'm disappointed that Microsoft (so far it seems) to not make IE7 available to Windows versions below XP SP2. There may be some reasons for that beyond "upgrade or suffer" (e.g. "security", incompatability), but I doubt it.

Re:Transparent PNG support

[Zarf]

How about the: "Wow, our browser is so amazingly complex that even with all our full-time programmers we can't reasonably support every possible platform in the universe" excuse? Lame, I know, but remember they aren't open sourced. That means if it's going to happen they have to put staff onto it officially.

Stinkin' open source and it's willy-nilly practices.

But they've been rich for a decade...

[Ars-Fartsica]

...and still the crap comes out. By the way, what makes you think rich companies can produce quality better than poor ones? Google was poor when it changed the search landscape. Kia was (relatively) poor when it started producing better quality (lower defect rate) cares than Mercedes...

Re:But they've been rich for a decade...

[zebs]

I guess the Kia I had was built during there poor period

Why? Did browser detection stop working?

[Ars-Fartsica]

Detect the user agent, and code as much browser-specific stuff as you want. Why again can't I engage a browser's advanced standards features?

Re:Why? Did browser detection stop working?

[Anonymous Coward]

Browser detection, either with javascript (which some people switch off) or something like php-sniff is always a hit and miss affair, especially if users spoof user agents. Plus, you also have to continue changing your browser detect code when new browsers come along.

For instance, as a Safari user, I've been to a few major sites, including BMW and Marks & Spencers that wouldn't let me in because I wasn't running IE or Netscape despite the sites working well if I spoofed as either of the two.

A level playing field and no browser detection is what we need to avoid these hacks.

Still, if IE7 fixes PNG support and the box model bugs, that's 90% of the bugs most CSS/XHTML coders come up against and then it's a couple of float issues and we're pretty much there. That leaves just the nice stuff in CSS3 that FF and Safari support which IE will contine to ignore but we'll continue to use so that their users will see it and IE users won't. (drop shadows, round corners etc)

Re:Why? Did browser detection stop working?

[rainman_bc]

I personally just want CSS selectors. input[@type="checkbox"] is a feature seriously lacking in IE css support right now...

And I quote from the summary...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently we can expect...native IDN support...an important factor is security.

Is it just me, or does anyone else see the irony in that statement?

IDN solution

[cryptoluddite]

The solution is pretty obvious IMO: when looking up the domain name get some other records such as the company name, contact address, etc and display them in the URL bar, window title, status, or some other place. Perhaps a firefox-style extra panel that appears and gives that info.

Who cares if the site says it is www.bank.com if you can easily see it is registered to Boris at his mom's basement in Russia?

Re:IDN solution

[Bert64]

Because it's trivial to put whatever crap you want into the WHOIS records.

Re:IDN solution

[rbarreira]

I think most people will care about/understand that information as much as they care about site certificates - nothing.

Re:IDN solution

[ricotest]

A whois lookup for every single domain visited is going to take a lot of servers to sustain.

Re:IDN solution

[cr_nucleus]

The solution is pretty obvious IMO: when looking up the domain name get some other records such as the company name, contact address, etc and display them in the URL bar, window title, status, or some other place. Perhaps a firefox-style extra panel that appears and gives that info.

Showing information that's completely irrelevant 99% of the time is not the awnser as the natural response from the users will be to completely ignore it 100% of the time.
I'm not sure if there's really an automated solution to this problem, but some kind of domain name black list could be worth something. I'm not saying that traffic should be blocked, but that at least the browser could give a warning. The problem with that is who's going to maintain the list ?

What would be REALLY great...

[Run4yourlives]

is if it spread using an active-x hole.

Re:CSS3? Let's not get ahead of ourselves here...

[DavidTC]

I think a more realistic goal would be Microsoft figuring out how to turn off CSS support, so at least it wouldn't fuck things up anymore.

If Microsoft were smart...

[MtViewGuy]

...They should license the technology developed by MySoft Technology's excellent Maxthon "shell" program for IE 5.x and later and incorporate it into IE 7.0.

What makes Maxthon quite good is their very powerful AD Hunter feature, which not only blocks most popup windows but will block many ads which load system-slowing Flash animation and/or spyware into your system. With AD Hunter fully enabled, surfing the Web actually becomes quite pleasant even with a V.90/V.92 dial-up connection.

Combine IE 7.0's own features with Maxthon and the demand for Firefox goes down dramatically.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Nothing but Vanity on Microsoft's part.

[WebHostingGuy]

Updating to include all this new stuff (new to Microsoft, not everyone else) is nothing but a vanity move. Why should Microsoft care if Firefox takes 100% of the market. It's not like they are making money on IE. Who cares if their market share is 2%? Microsoft really should let Firefox take the market and then concentrate on what brings in $$$ and let someone else do the work for them by maintaining the browser.

Re:Nothing but Vanity on Microsoft's part.

[Bisqwit]

Hooking. When people design pages for IE because "everyone uses IE", they're making it more difficult for people to start using other browsers, and in the end, other operating systems. And Microsoft sits on they moneypile and laughs.

Re:Nothing but Vanity on Microsoft's part.

[l3v1]

It's not like they are making money on IE.

No, it's not directly about money here. It's simple mind/thought control. They don't want their users to even think about replacing MS apps or the OS with anything else. They don't want Joe Sixpacks to consider anything to even exist besides MS or MS apps. That's what can give you power over your userbase, and give a bit of confidence that you can always feed your next loaf of bread with your flock. It also gives you a bit of time, because the momentum you have can be exploited to be able to be a bit late with your "innovations" since your users will wait for you.

Tiny fact

[Safety Cap]

I would guess that they no longer hold a monopoly.

Except for the fact that Microsoft is a convicted Monopolist. All the spin in the world won't erase the fact that they broke the law and were convicted.

Of course, thanks to the current big-business-iz-good administration, their punishment was abysmally lenient.

Re:Tiny fact

[mingot]

I'm not trying to spin anything here and did not say that they were never a monopoly. Just that they are not anymore.

Re:SHHHHHHHH Don't tell my Grandma either...

[cot]

She's pretty senile, so instead of trying to teach her to use a computer, I put her in front of the TV with a keyboard and mouse and she thinks she's playing a Matlock videogame.

WTF?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy hell! Bonch actually said something non-trollish. I think I'll dig out my poloroid and take a picture.

Re:WTF?!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a reverse troll. There's not really "major" problems with IE6's box model.

Re:security -- Not just anglaphones

[Anonymous Coward]

You're misplacing the problem. The true problem is that people are supposed to trust entities known as web sites by identifying them in a text bar on their browser by name only. In the physical world, physical location plays a key role in securing commerce. People remember where they shop by the location more than by name, because spoofing a physical location is hard. Spoofing DNS is very easy, and most people will fall for typo websites just as easily as true DNS spoofing or UTF-8 hacks. Web site owners have to buy up hundreds of domain names within a certain hamming distance of their true site and redirect them to the main site. It's a bad situation, and it's because there is very little in the way of tangible relationships between the different web sites on the Internet. If there was a clear(er) higherarchy of getting to places, people wouldn't be fooled as easily. Portal web sites hoped to make a killing off of providing such a service, and Google does a relatively good job of it as well. In a sense, Google provides some relavent relationship between web sites. If you search for a given keyword in Google, it's likely to return a list that is highly predictable from time to time. Of course, marketers are now exploiting that as well.

On the other hand, occasionaly people have no idea where they want to go, and simply click on the first site they can find that seems relavent. This is a prime opportunity for fraud, since the user is unlikely to be familiar with the set of websites that they are trying to access. If the Internet is to continue to make such random connection between vendors and customers possible, there needs to be a better infrastructure to prevent fraud outright, instead of relying on silliness like SSL certificates tied to an arbitrary (for the user) domain name. Who cares which character encoding a site uses, even if it's similar to another site? If the user didn't know which site they wanted in the first place, applying browser based restriction on IDN characters is silly, and it limits users to a subset of the Internet. It would be much better to establish a higher order level of trust, possibly with a web of trust design. Generally, people will shop where their neighbors and associates shop, because they will have more information about possible trouble or incentives for shopping there. A web of trust for online vendors is exactly the model the Internet needs to increase security and reduce fraud. Make user feedback an integral part of search engines and trust rankings. Abstract an interface for conducting online transactions so that they can be cryptologically verified and anonymized and made available for inspection by users. To buy a widget, search for vendors who sell widgets and have a high number of incoming edges in the web of trust as well as a high percentage of appropriately completed transactions. Make the system voluntary, and it will generally work out. The majority of people won't care and won't leave feedback, so a higher ratio of negative feedback to positive will result, but it can be offset by the company releasing lots of successful transactions. The negative transactions will all be listed, and the company will only have to release as many as needed to keep a favorable image (if possible) without subjecting themselves to too much data mining.

Now the browser market leader is following ...

[geo_2677]

the market. Strange indeed. A far cry from what used to happen earlier.
The competition from better alternatives like Firefox and Opera is showing its effect.
First they ignore you.
Then they ridicule you
Then they laugh at you
Then they copy you
Maybe now Mozilla guys can move on to adding more new features to the browser now that tabbed browsing is going to be the norm. Heck, how else can I say to the guy sitting next to me whats cool abt mozilla ;)

Re:security -- Not just anglaphones

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmmm, I looked at the source. Both of those accented A characters are encoded as &#228.

Re:security -- Not just anglaphones

[MarkRose]

Well no Frenchman will have to worry about that, as ä isn't in the French alphabet. *shhh*

But you have a valid point.

Aren't you rather missing the point?

[SuperKendall]

Yes, probably just about every feature FF has really came for elsewhere...

But that elsewhere is, by and large, not Microsoft. The real point is that Open Source in general really does seem to be doing the R&D for Microsoft nowadays.

Microsoft has a giant R&D center. But to speak of naming things, how many things in widespread use have really come from there? Basically it just seems like the Microsoft R&D center is there to provide the illusion of research for the people within, and make sure that NO ONE ELSE gets the benefits of the minds frozen there.

Re:Aren't you rather missing the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if Microsoft does have a giant R&D center, it still employs only a tiny, tiny fraction of the people out there who think about software. It should be expected, then, that only a tiny, tiny fraction of innovative ideas come from Microsoft. The odds are huge against any one company being truly and consistently innovative. The companies that have a reputation for innovation are those that know how to take good ideas developed outside the company and quickly bring them to market.

Re:Aren't you rather missing the point?

[NutscrapeSucks]

every feature FF has really came for elsewhere... But that elsewhere is, by and large, not Microsoft

There was a time when Nutscrape was busy inventing proprietary extentions, and Microsoft was the one implementing W3C standards like CSS and DOM1. (Not to mention the XML stuff.) In most cases, MS shipped their version years before the Open Source world got around to it.

Yea, Microsoft dropped the ball later on, but without their support for W3C specs, the idea of non-proprietary web standards might have just faded away. So, I think Mozilla/FireFox actually owes a lot to IE.

Re:Aren't you rather missing the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a time when Nutscrape was busy inventing proprietary extentions, and Microsoft was the one implementing W3C standards like CSS and DOM1. (Not to mention the XML stuff.) In most cases, MS shipped their version years before the Open Source world got around to it.

You talk about the Company once named Netscape, putting out their proprietary crap browser, trying their best to break standards, and then go on to talk about "the Open Source world" without mentioning a which open source browser(s) you are talking about.

Re:Aren't you rather missing the point?

[drsmithy]

The real point is that Open Source in general really does seem to be doing the R&D for Microsoft nowadays.

Turnabout is fair play, as they say.

New Market

[ShieldW0lf]

possible integration between IE 7.0 and Microsoft's Windows anti-spyware service, which currently is in beta.

Am I the only one that read that as "integration between IE 7.0 and Microsoft's Windows Spyware Approval service"?

Re:New Market

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:New Market

[Johnny5000]

Am I the only one that read that as "integration between IE 7.0 and Microsoft's Windows Spyware Approval service"?

actually yes, I think you are the only one.
That's some creative mis-reading right there.

Psychic Vision

[Anonymous Coward]

"will be focused primarily on improving security." Translation for those who can't read Microsoftese: "IE7 will have just as many, if not more, gaping security flaws, propietary and incompaible implementations of web standards, be further embedded into our OS so no stupid court order can remove it, and will now leverage WPA to guarantee you pay your computing tax to us every year or so."

Wow...

[Kause]

I know this has been stated more than a few times already in the threads, but Microsoft are big copycats! It kind of irritates me that a somewhat "off the beaten path" trend such as tabbed browsing is stolen by Microsoft and whored out just to try and make their useless software more popular.

NOTHING will make me go back to IE. From the first time I opened Firefox and started using Adblock and the download manager, I was hooked.

Sure, IE7's security might be better, but that doesn't change the fact that Internet Explorer is a malady as far as web browsers go.

Rincon?

[Morden]

Sources say that IE 7.0 - which is code-named "Rincon," they hear - will be a tabbed browser.

Rincon, Ablaham Rincon!

That's spin, too.

[rjh]

All the spin in the world won't erase the fact that they broke the law and were convicted.

Fact: Microsoft was never convicted of anything.

Fact: Microsoft could never be convicted of anything. No criminal charges were filed, after all.

Microsoft has been found by a court of law to be an abusive monopolist, that's true. They are not convicted monopolists.

Using the word "convicted" is, itself, a kind of spin. It makes Microsoft out to sound even more slimy and unpleasant than they are. If you want to be spin-free, then avoid using the word "convicted" in connection with the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit.

Re:That's spin, too.

[nickos]

"Microsoft has been found by a court of law to be an abusive monopolist, that's true. They are not convicted monopolists."

What's the correct word to use in place of "convicted" in that sentence? Saying "Microsoft has been found by a court of law to be an abusive monopolist" is a bit long in the tooth...

Re:That's spin, too.

[ciroknight]

But the definition of "convicted" is "proven guilty of a crime". Therefore Microsoft is a "convicted" monopolist. Just because you think the word "convicted" is too harsh, doesn't mean it isn't accurate.

Your own admittance that "Microsoft has been found by a court of law to be an abusive monopolist" proves that the word "convicted" holds in this case.

Next time, try to argue that the pot wasn't black in the first case.

Re:That's spin, too.

[Physics Dude]

... It makes Microsoft out to sound even more slimy and unpleasant than they are.

You and I both know that's not possible. ;)

Re:That's spin, too.

[wolfgang_spangler]

What's the correct word to use in place of "convicted" in that sentence? Saying "Microsoft has been found by a court of law to be an abusive monopolist" is a bit long in the tooth...

while we are at it...the phrase, "long in the tooth" is used to refer to someone who is old, or perhaps wise. Not to say that a phrase is a mouthful.

Re:That's spin, too.

[rjh]

Correct, the definition of convicted is "proven guilty of a crime".

But look at the complaint against Microsoft. It wasn't a criminal complaint. It was a civil pleading.

Re:That's spin, too.

[stonecypher]

And how does "convicted," the past tense affirmative of "conviction (strong belief,)" not apply there? That is what the word means in the legal, denotative and connotative senses. If a court finds you to be blank, you are a convicted blank.

Technically, if a court of law signs an affadavit that you are a samaritan, you would be a convicted good person. Just because a word has a foreboding connotation doesn't mean that the word is wrong in use.

Mod parent down.

Re:That's spin, too.

[rjh]

Look it up in Black's, please; then tell me whether the term 'convicted' is appropriate in a civil context.

Re:That's spin, too.

[stonecypher]

Ad verecundiam isn't impressive. Make an argument, not a reference, or kindly sit down.

Re:That's spin, too.

[rjh]

What do you think the law is except a large series of references?

You want an argument, but you're not getting one. You haven't met the prima facie requirements for argument. If you want to argue that the word "fork" really means "apple", then yes, you can be dismissed with nothing more than a "look it up in Webster's, and if you don't like it, take it up with them".

Likewise, if you want to argue that the definitions in Black's are not authoritative, are not definitive, are inaccurate, then you're going to have to present strong evidence that Black's is either lacking in authority, in definitiveness, or accuracy. Until you're ready to do that, you're just a troll.

Incidentally, I'm not the one who has to make an argument. You want to overturn two centuries of American jurisprudence in how a word is used? Great: the burden of proof is on you to show that it's wrong, not on me to show it's correct.

Re:That's spin, too.

[stonecypher]

What do you think the law is except a large series of references?

If we were discussing the law that might be tangentially germane, but we're not. I realize this is hard for you, so let me spell it out.

You, in a condescending tone, told someone else that they used a word incorrectly when in fact they had not. I pointed out the etymology and history of the word and said "I'm sorry, but they weren't in fact incorrect." You tried to refer me to a book in order to save face. I said "No, ass, don't pretend that a book will make your argument for you; if you want to pretend someone used a word incorrectly you have to be specific about why."

It really doesn't amtter whether the law is a litany of references, though in fact believing that it is shows a critical minunderstanding of the application of case law and the desperation to apply precedent to a disconnected argument in the hope of saving face. The issue at hand has nothing to do with the actual laws in question.

If you want to argue that the word "fork" really means "apple", then yes, you can be dismissed with nothing more than a "look it up in Webster's, and if you don't like it, take it up with them".

I dare you to tell that to a professional etymologist with a straight face. You couldn't have chosen a less authoritative group to hang your verecundiam on. Maybe you didn't realize this, but dictionaries aren't in fact a good way of getting the definitions of terms, especially with regards to the law where terms are rigidly defined by the law itself.

Likewise, if you want to argue that the definitions in Black's are not authoritative

They aren't. US law is not determined hinging on the definintions in Black's. Of course, I wasn't actually talking about Black's at all; this is a low-quality straw man.

are not definitive,

How could a definition not be definitive? Are we arguing in the same English?

are inaccurate,

You're putting words in my mouth in order to fabricate a mistake to argue against; I never said any such thing. I'll try again. "Do not rely on books to make your argument for you; that is the behavior of a small child, and tends to allow people which believe they know things that in fact they do not to rant at pleasure without any need to actually justify themselves, for as long as they believe that pompous verecundiam makes their bed for them before they sleep."

I'm not telling you there's anything wrong with Black's. I'm telling you that Black's has nothing to do with what I said to you, and that if you want to get on a soapbox you'd better be able to stand up for what you said.

Until you're ready to do that, you're just a troll.

Yes yes, make sure to tell me how wrong something I didn't say was, and then insult me over it; that's the way to win an argument like an adult. Something tells me you still won't actually support your own statements after this, preferring instead to ignore the perfectly solid etymological grounds which were presented now five messages ago in a clear and unambiguous fashion and prefer instead to make up arguments which were never made to rail against so as to feel correct.

Incidentally, I'm not the one who has to make an argument.

Luckily, nobody has asked you to make argument. You made argument quite some time ago. Now I'm asking you to be a big boy and explain how a perfectly good word is incorrect in use, without handwaving it away to a book, whether or not it is authority on the topic. I'm not telling you there's anytnhing wrong with Black's. I'm telling you there's something wrong with your inability to support your own arguments without it.

You want to overturn two centuries of American jurisprudence in how a word is used?

No. It's my position that you've simply accused someone wrongly.

Great: the burden of proof is on you to show that it's wrong, not on me to show

Giving birth

[bananahead]

It will be amazing to me if they can actually deliver a new release. Microsoft has a tougher and tougher time with every release of their existing software due to the bloat of features, the test matrix which grows exponentially with every line of code, and the overall mess that the internal development organizations find themselves in. They will, of course, finally give birth, but it's gonna be sloppy and wet with lots of crying and fainting, followed by a faint cry from the newborn IE7. And, my prediction... it will be HUGE! The mighty beast no long has the ability to deliver slim efficient code. Mark my words.

Try 8 years old

[setmajer]

Read again. Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4 will be celebrating its 8th birthday in June. Netscape Communicator 4.5 will be 7 this year, but that was little more than a maintenance release to squash some of the worst bugs.

Netscape 6 and 7 were based on the Mozilla Suite, a completely different browser.

Re:Try 8 years old

[rainman_bc]

Did you follow the thread at all? I was told IE was six years old. I replied it was IN FACT four years old.

I read it just fine thanks. You're talking out your ass.

Re:Try 8 years old

[setmajer]

Ya, I read the thread. And you replied to a message about companies demanding support for Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.x.

Get a grip.

Re:Try 8 years old

[rainman_bc]

lol i caught that after I hit submit lol... it's late... I'm tired... Been staring at too many terminal windows tonight ;)

Re:Try 8 years old

[Bert64]

But it may aswell be, 6 offered very little above 5.. all my css pages look equally broken in both versions.

Re:Try 8 years old

[setmajer]

And I was posting before morning coffee. Call it even. :-)

Rincon?

[adolfojp]

Rincon as in "corner"in spanish?

That's it! We've got em cornered! Now lets finish the job.

Cheers,
Adolfo

Question about IE7

[Maddog_D97]

If anyone at Microsoft is reading this, can you tell me if IE7 has better support for CSS2 than IE6?

The problem is...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with trying to make IE7 secure is that under the guise of a safer browser more people will start to use it, making it more worthwhile for people to find ways to circumnavigate the new safety features...

They should have just bowed out to Firefox on this one and wait for the hacks to come in rolling in when everyone switches over, then release an IE1024 that under 25% of the people will use and so their security problems would not be fixed, but they wouldn't be under attack...

For the record, Go OPERA

Software patents to the rescue!

[ArsenneLupin]

security...tabbed browsing...

They may be "performing well", but don't confuse that with "innovating". You can do a marvelous job at implementing someone else's ideas, but that doesn't make you an innovator.

If only we had software patents! Then Firefox could have patented its innovation, and prevented Microsoft from stealing them for IE7!

*duck*

Re:Software patents to the rescue!

[Lotunggim Ginsawat]

What kind of innovation Frefox has created?

Tabbed browsing? - The first browser that has tabbed browsing is Internet Explorer with its Netcaptor 'extension' (for those who speak Firefox language). Opera then copied it, then Mozilla/Firefox follows suit.

Pop-up blocker? - Internet Explorer already has this one via many 'extensions' such as Webwasher, Pop-up Stopper etc, since the later 90s.

Ad-blocker? - Same as above.

IMHO, Microsoft isn't stealing from Firefox in any way.

and its geek name shall be...

[Suchetha]

drumroll please....

drrrrrrrrrrr...... .... Rimjob

Suchetha

IE7 can work to our advantage.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a dedicated firefox user and find it fantastic. Unfortunately, no matter how much protection I put in to stop the execution of Internet Explorer (system policies etc) there are API calls that can still be used to utilize its functionality.

So I'll end up installing IE7 as a 'just-in-case' measure. Compatibility and security for the small range of products that make use of it.

Internet Explorer already supports crazy graphics

[CGameProgrammer]

While there is no current way to emulate all capabilities of a 32-bit PNG in IE, it does support a non-standard CSS property "filter" which allows for some cool and slightly useful graphical effects done client-side. This page demonstrates them... compare it in IE vs Firefox. It might seem useless but it could be used for interesting mouse-overs, and all of the effects (AFAIK) apply to text as well as images.

Re:This is all they need to do to maintain dominan

[nickos]

"Hint: You can't get rid of it totally without killing the system."

Have a look at the Mozilla ActiveX Control:

I have a binary that already uses IE, can I make it use Mozilla?

Yes, use the IEPatcher tool to patch the original binary

Informative? This pretty much proves it

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux will never overtake Windows.

Re:Internet Explorer already supports crazy graphi

[Bert64]

But most of the things ie can do in this nonstandard way can also be achieved in a standard way using css on mozilla, safari, konqueror and opera.
The difference is, the standard way will not work with ie.

Re:security -- Not just anglaphones

[ricotest]

That's because Slashdot is ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1), not Unicode like IDN.

Tortise and Hare

[beforewisdom]

This will be the second round in the new browser wars. It will be very interesting to see what happens.

In a way it is like the tortoise and hare.

The hare( firefox ), has the advantages of being able to get new end user desired features to market very fast and not being tied to the operating system ( albeit, that is not something non IT end users seem to care about much ).

The tortoise, IE, lately, seems to have wait for the next release of Windoze to "catch up". However IE has the tremendous advantages of coming with Windoze which comes with most end user PCs. As all regular slashdotters know, most people will just use what is on their computer instead of downloading something else.

IE also has the advantage of a huge amount of programming muscle on the payroll at Microsoft( not mention managers to manage hissy fits among the development staff ) and they can just sit back and let firefox do their market research for them. They can see which features work for firefox in terms of popularity and copy them into IE for the next release cycle

It will be interesting to see if IE 7 puts IE back up past 90% market share.

All these 'wonderfull' new features

[C0d1ngM0nk3y]

Still missing the 'unistall' option though.

Re:All these 'wonderfull' new features

[lengau]

That's near impossible to add though!!! Think about it. Our precious Firefox doesn't even... oh. wait....

Don't click on the blue E

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't click on the blue e. Nuff sed.

ActiveX - the only way to destroy it...

[markdowling]

... is to cast into the fires of Mount Doom.

Web-Killer App

[mattpalmer1086]

They have a focus on developers who create software that supports their platforms. Microsoft don't care about web developers per se. Web developers are creating applications that don't rely on Microsoft products. The web developers they like create web applications that use IE specific "features".

If Microsoft supported CSS properly, or submitted their new ideas to the standards bodies, IE wouldn't be required. And following on from that, Windows itself could go. Why do you think IE was made a fundamental part of the OS? Why has it not been ported to other platforms?

Eventually, with a rich enough, standardised feature set, maybe even some office type applications could be delivered via a web interface.

They aren't going to do it unless they control the platform. It will be very interesting to see what Avalon offers in terms of delivering rich client functionality remotely. I assume they see this as a web-killer app, as opposed to a web killer-app.

IDN problem solved by Opera, as promised

[porneL]

Actually the IDN problem is solved.

Check latest Opera - first of all it allows only IDN on domains where registrars don't allow mixed scripts. Then it allows only character combinations regarded as "safe".
Obviously these checks aren't 100% bulletproof, so additionally on secure sites name of the certificate owner is displayed next to site address and all that makes life much much harder for phishers.

E4X in IE7?

[galtenberg]

A big gain or loss, depending on M$, would be inclusion or exclusion of E4X (XML types in ECMA/JavaScript). It'd be no major effort or risk for them to include it, but a potentially serious fracturing of browser scripting languages if they don't.

IE7 - Give me Mozilla...

[twzop]

From reading the article, sounds like Microsoft is copying Firefox even though they claim that Firefox is not as secure as IE. Those guys' days are numbered. People are getting smarter about Microsoft's history of copying others' ideas and making an inferiror product.

IE not welcom

[porneL]

If they mess CSS2 like they messed CSS1 I'm not going to support IE on my websites anymore. I don't care about the market share. I'm going to be insane one way or another... IE lusers of my websites are going to see list of links where they can get "upgrade", just like IE-only sites did for years.

Mod Parent +Funny

[handy_vandal]

Don't knock "Urysses". He returned after after twenty years and almost single handedly killed all his wife's suitors. So if IE went to the wilderness a couple of years ago, say, the competing browsers will have a lot to worry about in ummm... 2023.

<Chortle>Damn, that's funny!</Chortle>.

I love it when classicists post to SlashDot.

-kgj

So it has...

[slapout]

...everything that should have been in version 6?

Re:So it has...

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean 5.5.. Those sould've been in 5.5...

Pop tabs

[sxmjmae]

With MS adding the popular features it only follows that the instigators of pop-up ads and other obtrusive ads will implant new code to take advantage of IE 7.0 'new' features.

Instead of having a pop-up ad appear when you navigate to a site the advertiser could simplify add a tab. Nothing like surfing to a p0rn site to get 500 million pop-up adds you could have 500 million tabs appear.

Once the advertisers know how to do this to IE 7.0 they WILL port it over to other popular browsers. I am sure everyone using a modern browsers have started to notice a slight increase in obtrusive ads designed to handle your particular browser.

Embrace & Extend

[Langley]

Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.


This is the kinda crap that really makes Microsoft look like an asshole.

Instead of just signing on with the standard, so that things can interoperate smoothly between browsers. Microsoft has to take its ball and go home, playing once again by its rules and only its rules.

What possible benifit do they have to creating their own cascading style sheet spec? Its just enough CSS2 so no one complains but not enough that they should even be able to call it CSS2.

Oh I know, this way people will conform to their 'standard' and they will once again dominate the browser market.

Re:Embrace & Extend

[La Camiseta]

If they really want to win the browser wars, why don't they jump the gun on the Firefox/Mozilla crew and implement full CSS3 spec support as well as CSS2.1?

If they don't, and as it seems, web developers get tired of having to write code just for the IE family of browsers (I know that I am, and just use IE7 right now to get it to play nice), how long do you really think that it'll be before you start to see a huge ammount of those "Get Firefox" buttons on the bottom of even some of the major websites?

That's because I was talking about now.

[SuperKendall]

When I talk about cool case desings, you can get today, I usually fail to mention nice IBM designs from the 80's because they are not relevant to the conversation.

Microsoft many have contributed something once, almost a DECADE ago, but I was talking about what they are doing today. Which is nada. Even XAML is warmed-over XUL!

Re:security -- Not just anglaphones

[stonecypher]

Sure there is. Find the most common codepage and report any characters which aren't in that codepage. The idea isn't to mark extended UTF characters. The idea is to mark characters which aren't in the primary codepage. That there's a primary codepage which we think of as ASCII isn't important - that's our default, not the only choice.

The appropriate thing to do, which many linguists raised during the standardization of UTF but who were unfortunately ignored, would have been to create an entire codepage for each language, explicitly choosing to replicate most letters. That way, even though French and English use almost exactly the same character set, it would be perfectly clear that what we were looking at was French, because it would be encoded right into the document, and so we could distinguish between a French R, a German R, or the Chinese letter which looks like a cursive lower case R, or whatever the hell.

Maybe more broadly, what we need to do is to begin to accept that our current language encoding scheme is an utter hack, a miserable security nightmare, and the worst thing which ever happened to portability. Worse still, the problem isn't UTF-* or UCS-* at all; the problem is actually in our component architectures. We should be able to swap character encodings out as easily as we do fonts. If we could do that, then something superior to Unicode could arise and take hold, and get rid of these problems once and for goddamned all.

It's not like 32-bit character sets are in any danger of running out of room in the human population any century soon, cough y2k cough. It's also not like it'd be hard to write a font engine based on references, so we could use the same glyph for R in each of the European languages. Furthermore it's not like we don't have very good searchable compressed text representations.

It really seems that the primary objection to moving to a much more versatile and flexible character encoding is the supposedly preposterous amount of space it'll suddenly take up, and oh my god our text is all going to inflate by 300% and hard drives will be the size of camels and my laptop is going to crush my spine. I'm calling bullshit. I'm old enough to remember how disk space actually works. I have a text file collection from the BBS days which I remain proud of to this day; I've got thousands of movie scripts, the complete works of (insert two dozen authors here,) construction plans for devices to scam telephone networks which haven't existed for 15 years, the whole nine yards. The whole collection, uncompressed, is less than fifty meg.

Now, let's be honest. There are a lot of people on SlashDot reading this post right now which, over thinband, download more pornography than that on an average night. That's less than a tenth of a CD. You almost can't buy SD cards that small anymore. In fact, if you use a text-specific compressor, you can almost get it small enough to cram onto four floppy disks.

For maybe a better sense of scale, I just looked at Project Gutenberg's FAQ as regards setting up a mirror; it says that the entire Gutenberg collection, which I suspect is probably the biggest flat text collection on earth, would need "a couple of gig" to host, but if that space is prohibitive, they'll allow you to store only the uncompressed versions. The way it's phrased isn't clear, but I believe that implies that the entire collection both compressed and uncompressed is "only a couple of gig," or probably just barely not fit on a single double sided double surfaced DVD (the room to spare is less than 400 meg.)

So, like, if you use a burner you can buy at Fry's for $300 and some media which costs $10, move to an encoding which would make every linguist on earth break down laughing, and used a compression program from the late seventies, you'd barely half fill the DVD.

The problem isn't that UTF-8 is too powerful. The problem is that UTF-8 isn't powerful enough. It's able to render all our letters, but it can't carry l

Re:Internet Explorer already supports crazy graphi

[CGameProgrammer]

Um, no it can't... did you actually view the link in IE?

pls mod parent up

[Sleepy]

While I previously understood the points the parent poster outlined, I think this is one of the more insightful posts I've seen here in a long time.

He could have simply flamed the parent like is so common to do.

Obligatory Jerry McGuire Quote

[f0rt0r]

You had me at 'Petition to Stop IE'

Yay! Tabbed browsing!

[talornin]

Its sad to see that it took them all this time to add tabs. Ive been using it wiht Opera for the past five years. Guess we will see mouse gestures in 2010.

The Opera way

[wheany]

I posted a feature request to the Opera user forums, and the future Opera way might be better than the method on my page. At the very least for IDNs.

Opera will only show a localized version of a domain name if the top level domain has a strict policy on the form of domain names. And Opera automatically converts all domain names to lower case, so the "capital i as lover case L" trick does not work quite as well.

Go tell MS you want CSS2!

[CokoBWare]

Go here to ensure your voice is heard by MS! Tell them you want CSS2 in their new browser!

Debatable solution to a different problem

[Kaseijin]

The problem is that UTF-8 isn't powerful enough. It's able to render all our letters, but it can't carry localizable intent, and it's that inability to report intent which is leading us to the multilingual scams which are now occurring on the 'net.

IDN homograph attacks involve multiple scripts, not multiple languages. Restricting each IDN to a single script (Latin, Cyrillic, etc.) or a commonly used set of scripts (e.g., kanji + hiragana + katakana + romaji) would be simple and effective, and it looks like the Unicode Consortium is going to recommend that at least for the short term. Your Multicode would add complexity (How do you distinguish the German 'Kindergarten' from the English?) without actually solving the homograph problem (Is Azeri 'a' Latin or Cyrillic?).

When is a homograph not a homograph?

[Kaseijin]

So, if we have Greek Omicron, Latin O, and Cyrillic O, all of which look exactly the same, could we not create a master character set, containing one instance of every character, and just have the specific character sets be pointers to the relevant entries in the master list? Yeah, I know, that's a big project to change everybody's character sets, but wouldn't it fix this problem?

Just because two (or three, or twenty) characters can look alike doesn't mean that they always will or should. If we could identify all possible homographs, we could perform reasonable checks at the application level without changing Unicode.

OT (Re:security)

[NaDrew]

"Rincon" is Spanish for "corner."

It's also Oakland-ish for "lost another lead for Hudson". At least, it has been for the past two seasons. Now that Hudson's gone, whose leads will Rincon blow?