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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."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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).
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.
It's ff killer only if it runs on linux and bsd (seriously).
Linux is slowly, but certainly gaining ground, so will alternative browsers.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
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.
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.
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!
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??
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.
Culture is more than commerce
> 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.
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!"
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.