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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 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?
an important factor is security
well, that's never stopped them before...
Take off every sig. For great justice.
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]
"and don't let me catch you installing any other browser or it's the clink for you!"A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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*
I told her Firefox was IE 7 and she's been happily been using it for months, and thanking me for upgrading.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
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.
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
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]
The ______ Agenda
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).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
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?
Well no Frenchman will have to worry about that, as ä isn't in the French alphabet. *shhh*
But you have a valid point.
Be relentless!
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.