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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."
It's Firefox... from last year?
Apparently an important factor is security. They talk the talk but they don't always walk the walk.
"Apparently an important factor is security."
We've heard this many times. Let's just wait for it and then make claims.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
Slashdot: You will never find a more wretched hive of spam and zealotry. We must be cautious.
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?
"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
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...
Apparently an important factor is security.
.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.
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
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
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
Built-in news aggregator = Advertising platform?
1's and 0's should be free.
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.
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.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Not that I anticipate that in this case...
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)
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
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).
Well, they are looking for (and will likely succeed in building) a FF killer. Doesn't look good...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
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.
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.
-- Mihcael Bierman
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.
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.
Pray tell... What R&D has Firefox done "on behalf of Microsoft"? What fresh Firefox ideas are MS about to "steal"? Please be specific.
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
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.
liqbase
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.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
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!
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.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
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.
**** lying is wrong even for sleeping dogs
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!
if Firefox wouldn't have any competition, it would not innovate as quickly.
My new blog
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.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
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?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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.
Gorkman
> 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.
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.
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-
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.
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
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.
[signature]
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.
Yeah, right.
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.
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.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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.
A most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a bit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.