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New IE7 Information Announced
Brandon writes "Looks like the IE team is trying to catch up to some of the major OS browsers. They have finally added proper PNG support and have fixed numerous CSS bugs. The full post is on The Official IEBlog." From the post: "We're doing a lot more than this in IE7, of course, and we're really excited that the beta release is almost here - we're looking forward to the feedback when we release the first beta of IE7 this summer. Stay tuned for more details as we get closer to beta."
My pet peeves with IE that make my life harder when I write web pages:
Sounds like they are fixing the .pngs for sure. I hope the two css tweaks that I want make it in.
Thanks for playing.
You lose.
Welcome to the twenty-first century Microsoft. I guess someone will have to update this page. Will IE7 have a central repository for extentions/plugins?
Real competition. Good.
The only reason I use Firefox and not IE is due to middle-clicking for tabbed browsing. Once MS adds that into IE, I'm going back. All of my video plug-ins work instantly with IE, but not without some tweaking for Firefox. I already switched from Thunderbird to Outlook 2003, so I'm excited to see what bells & whistles MS can put in IE7.
Instead of implementing a vendor-specific tag, why not support the proposed CSS3 border-radius property?
there's more than one way to do me.
This is why MS's brand of 'innovation' is bad and real competition is good. Remember when they halted development on IE6 because all the other browsers were 'finally dead'? Now that Firefox is pissing in their hard-won territory, they're actively hunting again. This isn't just good for Microsoft, but it's good for Firefox and good for us too.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
too late
are people still using that old browser?
Fixing those bugs will not show customers that their product is good. People now have the name Microsoft associated with insecurity. It took them only 8 years to update their browser and since then people have been screaming for support, better features, etc.
No... Microsoft burned quite a few bridges with alot of people and unless they can turn that PR machine around 180 degrees, people will continue to see them as bullies who are looking out for nobody but themselves.
Even if IE7 turns out to be the best product ever created by mortal man, people will immediately assume it sux (minus MS zealots of course).
They need to reinvent themselves in the eyes of the consumer, the business and world.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The biggest problem with IE in my eyes, if that your install of IE goes bad, you have to reinstall the whole operating system, as opposed to Firefox, where you can uninstall, remove the Firefox directory and start over.
Without software like Firefox, their would be no reason for Microsoft to ever make a better product, just look at how long IE's been in version 6! Now that Microsoft's starting to feel their browser dominance threatened they're playing for attention to their own product. Clearly competition benefits the end-user.
about open source vs proprietary apps, like IE vs Firefox, here.
So shall weall complain active X is still included when they ask for feed back? We could slashdot them with "feedback".
I like muppets.
I guess it's kind of a niche product, eh?
there's more than one way to do me.
I find it hard to believe that many people will switch back to IE from FireFox (or others) after IE7 comes out. It'll probably get picked up by current IE6 users or corporate IT depts. But it would take some pretty spectacular changes to get me to switch.
"Supporting exciting new standards in which life improving spyware bring you more features than ever before!" *sulks* I tried.
Download Opera 9 (in the BETA forum)
Internet explorer actually treats width and height as min-width and min-height. Very annoying if you don't want it, but you can use it like this:
select {
min-height: 100px;
_height: 100px;
}
IE will (mysteriously) ignore the underscore prefix and parse the second style, while compliant browsers only recognize the min-height style.
This shows that the important question is in fact not "how many CSS bugs will IE7 fix?" but "how many CSS bugs will IE7 keep?". These bugs are currently needed to make IE6 behave properly. If IE7 fixes the rendering bugs but keeps the parsing bugs, we'll have to figure out new bugs to update the IE6-only hacks with.
All of my mozilla plugins required some fiddling to get them working. But you know what? I did the tweaking once, about 10 months ago, and it's still working fine.
Even if IE implements everything that the basic Firefox installation has and then some, they still won't have the strong community of extension developers that Mozilla does. Will the next IE have anything like AdBlock, the web developer toolbar, or any of the countless little tweak extensions I like? Will I be able to easily change detailed settings like I can with about:config? I doubt it.
They have finally added proper PNG support
I am so happy to hear this. In this IE6 world a webdesigner cannot use transparent pngs, because roughly 90% of your viewership's browser would not render them correctly. One was then forced to either use transparent gifs (which only support 2 level of transparency, i.e., on or off) or else try to fake it (which is difficult because IE and Gecko don't always render colors the same.) Hopefully they'll finally implement some more CSS2, like allowing the hover pseudo class to be used with any object, rather than just links. Oh, and perhaps they could finally fix the box model.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
We have NOW seen what MS will do once it believes it web browsers, it will do nothing. It will ignore our requests for improvements, it will stop developing, it will ignore it's users. Since it started doing that, what have we seen? Improvements! Of course, not from MS that decided to ignore us, and ignore it's feature request tools. Now that MS has realized that people aren't going to stand for it, they are trying to come back, my only hope is that people don't flock to IE7, because we've already seen what they will do if we go back to them! Boycott IE7 until MS makes a serious promise to it's user base not to let this kind of thing happen again. In the meantime, sit back and practice mouse gestures with Opera...oh damnit, right click up, down! not down, up, now I just closed that window...oh well.
That essentially forces my hand at picking FireFox.
If IE were supported on Linux and Solaris, I might be able to consider it; and then it'd make the windows users happier.
And its part of the OS of course, so you will need to install the .NET framework, service pack, and then run either XP or longhorn. If they really wanted to be dicks it will take product activation too.
Not trying to flame M$ but ... most of the reason I junked IE was security issues. Once I made the jump, the other improvements like graphics-handling were nice, but not critical.
Would putting better graphics on the Titanic's deckchairs have kept anyone on board?
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
IIRC, the *original* release of IE was based heavily on Mosaic. This always struck me as kind of funny, since even Netscape 0.9 was faster and had more features than any version of Mosaic 2.x.
At any rate, Microsoft should put their resources into making one killer browser. Make it as lightweight as Netscape 2.0 was, yet support the latest CSS kung-fu. Implement all of the latest widgets and hoohaws as plugins so I can remove ActiveX support if I want. And above all, make it cross platform. Use a library like FLTK so it can be used just about anywhere.
Doesn't Microsoft realize they could easily make the end-all browser that'll end up running on almost every palmtop, cell phone, set-top-box, automobile, and personal computer?
Microsoft! Please fix your HTTP implementation. The current one is really gruesome!
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
I daresay they'll find a way to make it unuseable, even with tabs and proper CSS support.
Now THAT would be ironic as it would quash profits down at hotmail.com
Seeing as how i develope on a Mac all my sites seem to render perfectly in Safari - Firefox - Mozilla - and Opera. It usually takes me about a day to crank out a page. Then i have to leave myself 2 days to make that page compatable with IE 5 - 5.5 - and 6 with assorted javascript hacks and what not - even though IE 7 sounds like it might be a nice fix to many of my CSS issues, it's still gonna take years before everyone is running IE 7. I've actually opted into giving my clients a price cut if they just let me throw in a sniffer that excludes IE. + i can sell them on the fact that they are actually helping their clients by making them drop support for an awful product :)
No... Microsoft burned quite a few bridges with alot of people and unless they can turn that PR machine around 180 degrees, people will continue to see them as bullies who are looking out for nobody but themselves.
They got caught with their pants down in 1993-4 with the internet and TCPIP revolution, too. "It's good enough" certainly does sound framiliar. This was a multibillion dollar company that somehow MISSED THE WHOLE INTERNET THING. They pulled that one off and came out of it smelling like roses.
They got caught with their pants down AGAIN in 1997 with the widespread acceptance of Java and the beginnings of true cross-platform computing. They pulled turning that event into a stillbirth and came out of it smelling like roses.
So, here we are in 2005, and they've been caught again with a stagnant product in IE. Not just caught, but being actively made to look stupid by comparison by the third party browsers, and on top of all this, they have OSX and Apple breathing down their necks. I think the wake-up call has been heard.
I'm not a betting man, but I know where I'd be putting my dollars.
..don't panic
Well, since almost 90% is still using IE, it is logical to assume that most of the exploits, etc etc are targeted towards it. I personally know of many people that use alternative browsers just because of that. Being part of the minority in that case makes you a somewhat more difficult target (not invincible though). So even if IE7 becomes better than firefox or opera, it won't matter. If it is going to be used be the average user, many people will avoid it because of that .
I believe this might greatly slow down or even reverse the switching of browsers for a lot of people.
IE7 might just be "good enough" for people to warrant not switching to Firefox. For people who are new, and perhaps not computer savvy, getting plugins to work with Firefox on Windows is non trivial. This isn't Firefox's fault because development focus for most plugins is still on IE.
But then again, it might be good news for us. Competition is good, this might ramp up Firefox development and bring more innovations for the rest of us.
ALIVE! Huhahahaaa!!
- Save a tree, eat more woodpeckers
"Pay no attention to IE, we purposely developed it wrong... as a joke."
This just in...The new Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 will be Firefox rebranded to IE.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
They may have solved the consistency problems, but the standards supports is in great part unimplemented. IE is still far behind its biggest competitors as can be seen easily by doing a quick comparison. The user might not care, but the developer does.
Microsoft will start patenting all the innovations that the other browsers have developed over the years.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
First quit stuffing this proprietary crap down my throat, at least have the decency to put it under the GPL.
... excuse me!!!!
.... no I mean the real java from Sun. And the same with the "real" javascript too now that I'm thinking about it.
... eg ... overwrite the blocks on the hard drive with random data. Get it!
... and the same with crapromedia now that I'm thinking of it.
Second, please don't default load to the msn page, WTF, google.com would be much nicer.
Third, could you actually put something in there to block ads and popups, and any other crap that I don't want on my screen. Al least temporairly. Eg NO AD.DOUBBLECLICK.NET !!!!!
Fourth, last time I looked default IE has over ONE GIG of cache in the settings
Fifth, could you actually make it work with java?????
Sixth, don't renember all my crap - I want privacy and security - and when I close the browser I want the option to not only take out the cache, cookies, and history of web sites visited, but also want it to TRUELY ERASE IT
Seventh, oh and this really pisses me off, PLEASE PLEASE when I hit the reload button - I want it to actually reload the data from the URL over the internet not reload a bunch of cache!!!
Eigth, can't you natively render PDF's. Why do I half to deal with all this over bloated adobe crap????
Ninth, please put something in there that makes it easy for me to "steal" (GASP!!!) someone's "intellectual property". Yeah I know that's hideous to you, but that's what I want so get with it or get over it and get lost.
Actually, forget this, mozilla's not perfict, but at least it's going in the right directions.
IE will catch up to Firefox 2 years after Firefox already had all these features. By the time IE7 is done, FireFox will have many more features, not to mention tons of extensions, that are the real key to it's power. By the time IE gets to where FF is today, FF will have advanced way beyond what IE can hope to achieve from typical corporate development.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Gecko polls servers for changed content when moving through history. As far as I know, Opera is the only major browser that gets that part of HTTP/1.1 right.
http/1.1 specificationthere's more than one way to do me.
GET.FUCKED.ASSHAT
You know, rah rah rah, go team! and stuff. Your cheerleading has nothing to do with my point.
Let's be more concerned about what MoFo can do to make people change from IE and less concerned with celebrating a victory that has yet to happen.
there's more than one way to do me.
Oh no you don't ... the only people who would mod this parent a troll would half to work for Microsoft! I'm sorry if they don't like the facts as I see it, but that's not my problem .... please go read the moderator guidelines.
IEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!
Anyone know more details about this test and what browsers do pass it (I'm guessing IE6 doesn't, I don't have it so can't test it)? I'm surprised Firefox didn't, not because I'm a fan boy or anything, but because I presumed Firefox was in accordance with most of the standards.
This is the test and this is what it should look like. Here's some info about how it works.
Safari will still be the best browser on the market.
*snicker*
This comment is probably worth nothing on Slashdot, but they have earlier announced IE 7 will have further security improvements since the initiative they started with it in Windows XP SP2. You may already know this, you may not, but please don't assume just because a few more details were announced, none else had been.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Die you worthless, buggy, unstable, virus ridden, crappily coded, operating system wanna be!
Long Live Linux!!!
Is there a BugMeNot login for that?
-I like my women like I like my coffee - tied up in a sack and brought to me by Juan Valdez.
They forgot to mention that the new IE will render the letter "K" as the letter "O", and vice versa.
This feature should be easy to deal with, so long as pages are designed with it in mind. Unfortunately this will cause some confusion when trying to use the expression "O.K." or the boxing term "K.O.".
The new feature that causes the letter "e" to appear as a tiny version of the explorer logo is now slated for version 7.1, it had to be delayed due to technical problems. Consumer research shows that people think that the explorer logo is cuter than the letter "e".
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
...we use 2nd minor version for bugfix releases like from the above mentioned list. e.g. MSIE 6.01, not 7.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
" ..but lets not forget that they're still the big dog in the software market."
Your opinion. Some of us smart folks would never even consider running Windows because it is nothing but junk.
"They won the first browser war and they're ready for another."
Again, your opinion. Microsoft lost the browser war to Mozilla and Firefox.. and M$ lost horribly.
Wow, M$ did a good job of brainwashing you.
"Would putting better graphics on the Titanic's deckchairs have kept anyone on board?"
Uh.. what on Earth makes you think that's the only thing they're working on? Given all the black eyes Microsoft has taken in the last couple of years, do you really think proper PNG support was their big to-do item with everything else as "would be nice"?
"Derp de derp."
I don't use IE, but I hate cleaning up spyware from the machines of people that do. Any improvement in it helps network traffic and possibly cuts down on the number of zombie machines if nothing else.
IE comes free with the OS, so people will use it - just like the timebomb that will eat all your email once it hits 2GB that they call outlook express.
Sorry, but you desperately need a reality check. You are talking about probably the largest and most successful software company in the world. If the management wanted to, they could probably divert/recruit sufficient resources to implement every single popular extension to Firefox in IE, within a matter of weeks. The fact that they haven't (at least, not yet) says more about the business case they see for it than their ability to do it.
This is why competition is good: Microsoft are now losing market share, which means there is a business case for them to improve their product to compete. They will aim to do so in what they believe is the most efficient way to get users back, whether that is security, improved CSS support, ad-blocking or whatever.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
IE lay dead for several years before they decided to do anything with it. Competition is the order of the day. Firefox starts taking marketshare and now they add tabs and popup blocking. I believe it was only late last Fall they said their customers weren't asking for those things. I guess a lot has changed since last Fall. Anyway, I hope Firefox keeps stealing 'share.
a world in progress...
only old Korean granparents
I don't recall any mention of Tabs in TFA. Did they announce that earlier or are tabs still considered useless?
>please don't assume
Please don't assume that assumptions were made.
The article and the developer's blog to which it links (by "the lead program manager for the web platform in IE") talk a lot about CSS and PNGs and very, very little about security. They therefore talk very, very little about the biggest reasons people give for dumping IE: Security problems that cost time & money.
If in fact IE7 will fix these problems, then would it not be prudent for the leadpromanblog to mention it prominently?
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Oh, and perhaps they could finally fix the box model.
You are four years too late. They fixed it in 2001 when they released Internet Explorer 6.0.
Why is it that whenever a web development story comes up on Slashdot, there's always some ignorant moron that whines about the box model?
just sign up, it's free
I would like for it to be possible to tag any file downloaded from IE. The filesystem supports it. Essentially any file downloaded from the net via IE or Email gets the evil bit (remember that RFC? LOL) Anyway .. basically .. if it';s downloaded from IE .. I never want it being able to log keystrokes, auto start, become a service, or mess with internal settings. At least this will give time for the AV's to get updated and kill it off.
As far as I know Microsoft aren't releasing a version of IE7 for Debian Linux. Looks like I'm stuck with Mozilla then. Oh what a crying shame.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
I am so happy to hear this.
Let's not jump the gun here. There's been no beta released yet and honestly how long is it going to take for everyone who is using IE6 to adopt IE7? To illustrate my point, let us step back a few years...
Do you remember the rendering bugs in IE4? What about IE5? Then came IE5.1, 5.5, and 6. The only reason IE6 is now a majority market share browser is because most average computer users are using Windows XP. I dare say, but it really wouldn't surprise me if there are still a number of 5.x installs in use by those who are using Windows 2000. IE7 adoption won't hit a majority of the market until Longhorn is released and even then, how many people are going to be purchasing new computers right away? I remember when XP came out--the number of people still using IE5 two years after the fact was pretty incredible.
So before anyone gets incredible excited over this, take a moment to realize that the adoption of IE7 (assuming it actually does fix the bugs that have plagued IE before) is at least a year or two away. This isn't going to be an overnight thing--people have to buy new computers if they're not technically inclined and even then a very small minority of the almost-but-not-quite technically inclined will bother to upgrade. So, unless the upgrades are enforced by ISPs (through hand out discs, pre-configured packages, etc.), I encourage web developers to sit this one out.
The upshot? Don't plan on using PNGs with an alpha channel until 2007 or later. (Unless Longhorn is pushed back again, which means we could be waiting another FIVE years. Ah, and if you didn't detect it, yes that was mild sarcasm.) Remember, even CMSs like Plone still have CSS work arounds for Netscape 4.x--and how old is that?
Keep the stone tablets, my friends, this new "paper" thing is still buggy.
He who has no
Microsoft have proven - repeatedly - that they're going to ignore open standards and are unable to approach a technology without their classic "embrace and extend" asshole tactics. There's a reason for this - if they fully support open standards, competitors will be able to perfectly replace their products. And they will lose.
Their only hope is to keep making deliberately flawed products - and keep their consumers hooked. The consumer knows their products are bad, but nobody else (at least, nobody with a sense of self-worth and pride) is willing to produce a broken product.
For example, if IE 7 and Firefox supported the exact same standards, people would use Firefox because it does the things that Microsoft dare not do - free source code, cross platform (they're still stuck on IE 5 for the Mac), platform neutral plugin support and far faster turnaround for bugfixes since the community has so many eyes on the code. Small wins for Firefox, but they are wins nevertheless.
The only good version of IE was version 3. It was going up against the well-established Netscape. They manged by making it leaner, faster and better. They had no legacy customers hooked on their product - and had to prove that they were worthy. Today they are lazy and their main goal is to maintain their supremacy and suppress the peons - not to wow them back into the fold.
The worst example of this would be, as far as I'm concerned: ActiveX. The tech might have sounded cool on paper - but in practice it was a disaster. It introduced a new type of executable to uninformed and uneducated users who were simply unable to comprehend how dangerous it was, and a raft of thieves and liars who were trying to take advantage of it. As far as security goes: Worst. Feature. Ever.
Putting ActiveX in a browser capable of accessing the internet is like storing apples in a bucket of medical waste: you'll be infected with something nasty and be completely fucked within a very short space of time. But Microsoft didn't care, so long as they had more corporate buzzwords to achieve platform lock-in with clueless customers.
And this corporate character oozes out their products. If Microsoft was a person, he would be a compusive liar, thief, bully and control freak. He would be unable to hold a conversation without trying to take something, and would be instantly hatable.
I use Microsoft Windows XP because I am forced to and am held hostage by the platform - but I am a bitter, angry hostage with brutal vengeance on my mind. Unless Microsoft makes a radical change to it's corporate attitudes, I will never willingly use IE again.
That's an awful lot of convincing that they have to do. I just wonder if their deep pockets will be able to support it when sales keep falling.
But are their sales falling any more than other companies?
FalconShould there be a Law?
nt
I wonder...perhaps it's better for use to keep IE as dominant browser. After all crackers and advertisers come with popularity...currently I'm using Firefox (well, right now on Opera because of lack of ram on this machine), and I'd hate to abandon it because the browsing experience changed to worse (and I'd miss few extensions...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
"most of the reason I junked IE was security issues"
What did you switch to? Mozilla?
I don't think that Mozilla is exactly a model for security. At my company, we've had to deploy three complete updates since the release of Firefox 1.0.
It's clearly not "perfect".
Of course, IE is far from a model citizen, but IE6-SP2 is much better, and *security* is the focus of IE7 according to the developers.
I think that Microsoft can build a competitive browser. They just need an incentive to do so.
Now they have that incentive. Firefox has given it to them.
I, for one, welcome the new browser wars.
As compared to Linux and the various window managers, yes Windows is easier, but MacOS in it's tyme was the easiest and while I haven't used OS X much I think it's okay.
FalconShould there be a Law?
But how many people are going to switch? People will still use IE6 for a while forcing developers to keep the old hacks for a large percentage of their viewers.
In truth IE7 may give Web Developers more work as opposed to less, depending of course on how strictly they abide to CSS standards. Given Microsofts track record, and the lovely base they've created out of their lazyness in adhering to standards, I would not be surprised if there were still some parts that don't strictly follow CSS rules.
Of course Microsoft by its own lazyness is also in an unfortunate position. If by some miracle IE7 is fully compliant with CSS standards, then I can bet there will be a number of websites which simply will not render correctly. The point they're at now they either break a bunch of sites with IE7 so they get fixed, or they just screw standards over again and keep things compatible. Either way, Microsoft isn't in a nice position.
Of course regardless of how IE7 turns out, there'll still be people working away on IE5.x, so no matter what, Web Developers like myself will have to do just as much work as usual.
Now where's the CVS repository?
>What did you switch to?
Assuming that you are asking for information, and not just for effect, the answer is: Safari and Firefox. Again, I don't want to make this an attack on IE's vendor, but the fact is, keeping up with security updates, constantly having to run popup killers and all that other stuff, just got to costing me so much time that it was cheaper (using the old formula "Time = Money") to just buy a new PC every year and park the old one in the basement. This impelled me to jump to a competitor, thereby saving lots of Time=Money. Where I absolutely *must* use one of the old Win machines in the basement, Firefox has been o.k. for my capitalist-piggie, money-grubbing purposes; of course YMMV.
>I think that Microsoft can build a competitive browser
No doubt, but can they build a competitive browser within their comprehensive business model? If so, great!
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
they obviously heavily filtered the user posts. every one was insipidly positive, with lots of cute positive encouragement.
it felt like the care bears were posting.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Internet Explorer is the mspaint of web browsers. The only purpose of it's existence is to be there so lazy people don't have to look straight for alternatives. The day ie is ripped out of windows and made completely separate, is the day we will see more updates and less security holes. Why should they update, they own more than half the web browsers only because they are lazy. If the users HAD to make a choice, they no doubt would make a better one than ie. MS knows this, and that is the reason they are so reluctant to take ie out of windows. Why update more than they have to?
If MS wanted me to use a new version of internet explorer, they'd also need to prove why I should switch back to XP from linux. I haven't even been running it for a week and I like linux better than windows.
One poster has already mentioned peripherally that the box model might also be considered to be fixed. For me, this is the worst part of IE's CSS1 implementation, period. The box model is much lower level and basic than even absolute/relative positioning perfection. CSS folks will understand. So yes, let's get PNG alpha channel support; great. But if we can't rely on proper placement of objects from browser to browser vis basic elements like div and span... well, seems like that should be fixed first. (Admittedly, seems like a much harder, backward-comapatibility-breaking fix.)
"Improving CSS support consistency" means that CSS in IE is going to be consistently broken.
Truer words have never been spoken in regards to IE. Version 2 was a pathetic joke, lacking anything useful. In comparison, Netscape 2.0 introduced the world with frames, Java, and Javascript. IE 3 was the only browser ever made by M$ that even attempted to have anything useful. After the Active Desktop chaos introduced in IE 4 (which rendered other browsers inoperative once installed and rendered Win 95 and NT unusable once IE 4 was uninstalled) I never looked back at IE. I thought for sure they shot themselves in the foot when that happened, but bundling it in Windows 98 only made consumers ignorant of the existence of competition.
Satan works the same way, thriving on ignorance.
somehow I think they missed part of the blogging concept here
"more consistent", well, it depends on what they're trying to be consistent with. Consistent with other browsers, that means they're working towards standards compliance. Consisten with past versions of IE, well, that's not so good...
Would putting better graphics on the Titanic's deckchairs have kept anyone on board?
Keep in mind that a lot of people bought tickets to sail on the Titanic.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
just like the timebomb that will eat all your email once it hits 2GB that they call outlook express.
Don't you mean Outlook? That's exactly what happened to me with Outlook. Once your e-mail store hits about a gig and a half it starts losing mail. I don't know if OE did that because none of my folders ever got that big. Outlook 2003 though kept everything in one file so after importing all my messages from OE, I found a bunch of them missing.
I finally solved the problem by using Thunderbird. I'm convinced Microsoft hates me.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I'm about as disaster prone as anyone when it comes to X thing not working, but I've never had to mess with any of my browser plugins in Firefox.
Quicktime, Real (well, Real Alternative), and amazingly, even WMP work perfectly with Firefox for me.
My pet peeves with Firefox have to do with its memory footprint and how it doesn't render some IE-designed websites correctly. The latter isn't even Firefox's fault really, since it's more standards compliant than IE.
I only touch IE when I use Windows Update.
I don't know if it's changed since I had to do it 3 or 4 years ago, but back then I used the add/remove control panel. When started it gives the options to uninstall or repair.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I think Microsoft is worried about the way Firefox is being extended and turning into a true thin client. Just look at what Google has done with maps, GMail, etc. With AJAX (or whatever they are calling it), FireFox becomes a serious long-term threat to Microsoft. And the folks there aren't stupid. As Bill Gates said in The Simpsons, "Homer, I didn't get to be the richest man in the world writing checks" (or words to that effect). Microsoft has a bunch of nerds on the payroll too, toiling away. They see the looming threat and are responding now instead of waiting (like IBM did when it failed to recognize a similar looming threat from Redmond ;-) ).
I would like to hear points/counterpoints, if any.
It's the only thing in the whole world I want. Why IE doesn't support it, I don't understand. IE generally does pretty well with a lot of things.
I guess there are two things in the whole world I want. The second is for IE to show me a big nasty error instead of my web page if it is not compliant with the DTD. If browsers worked that way the whole web would be in better shape.
Then you woke up, looked at IE and realized it has not changed much since 1993 and the invention of the WWW when M$ bought a browser. My ass would be perfect if beer came out of it. If I were microsoft, I'd tell you to eat my shit anyway. Wake up and smell the coffee. Some things will always stink. People still using Winblows will pay money for them.
Doesn't Microsoft realize they could easily make the end-all browser that'll end up running on almost every palmtop, cell phone, set-top-box, automobile, and personal computer?
So could you. You have Mozilla, konqueror, dillo, links and dozens of others as models. Versions of them already run on all of the above mentioned hardware. You also don't have to sign a NDA or buy some stinking SDK to compile.
Why do you care about IE? It's like paying for water at a beer fest.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
One idea for an effective grass-roots movement to terminate the dominance of IE would be to automatically reject browsers that identify themselves as IE from viewing the page. This can be done in 2 lines of code with PHP, and if users consistantly see "This page does not render property in IE, please use Firefox/Opera", then the message will get out to those who don't necessarily follow technology (ie, the masses).
The risk of course is losing 90% of the potential viewers for each web page, which is why we need a coordinated effort.
Just a thought from the master consipriator =P
There will be new security holes and exploits for everyone to enjoy!
that they'll make IE7 nice and standards compliant but break all the hacks we use to accomodate IE6 like the Holly Hack et al.
This would make it impossible to support IE6, IE7 and other standards-compliant browsers while still allowing them to (rightly) claim that they're compliant. Would they do this ? Hopefully not.
A vaporware announcement is not an improved product. It's not beta and what's announced is not as good as freely available alternatives. If if were a fifth, I'd be drunk all the time.
During the browser wars I used Explorer instead of Netscape because I really did like it better. Certainly they have the hackers and the resources to make the best browser if they want to.
Some people sleep on nails, go figure. They have the money for a mattress but prefer the pain of broken CSS, PNG, no tabs, with all the ease of 0wnership Winblows brings.
With stuff like Mepis which installs on any hardware in twenty minutes, is there any reason to run Winblows?
If Microsoft really does release a product better than Firefox, it will be sad to see the underdog lose, but really the consumers will win.
Microsoft has never released anything better than anyone else and that's not about to be changed by another silly promise. Their stated business plan is to buy into, "mature" to avoid development costs and being a "loss leader." Do you really think M$ will deliver next year what you can enjoy right now in free software? The developers left long ago so there are no more "loss leaders" for M$ to fuck over. They may have hired a few extra people last year to try and make up for it, but that's like pissing into the free software tsunami. If Sun and AOL were to pull the plug on OO and Mozilla, Microsoft would still be wiped out by the thousands of developers working on KDE, Gnome and dozens of other alternatives.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
seriously, "fixed numerous css bugs". pardon me while i laugh until i shit my pants.
unless they re-write it from the ground up, it will be the same, bloated, slow-ass browser, out-performed by almost every other on the market.
anyhow, most people i know use alternatives for better security, and because IE is almost incapable of parsing dhtml/css anywhere near correctly. this is not to mention the fact that cookie management, pop-up control, and many other features that IE will either never have or will never function as well as jsut about any alternative.
i'll be happy to eat my words as soon as the little magic gnomes come out with a version of IE that isn't a waste of hard drive space. until then, any change to IE will only ever be for the worse, no matter how hard they try.
Even if it's only more consistent with itself, that's a step up.
Right now, IE has a lot of bugs that make no sense. Something will work in one way, but a small change will make it work completely differently. This is a pain in the ass for developers.
They got caught with their pants down AGAIN in 1997 with the widespread acceptance of Java ... and came out of it smelling like roses.
Put your glasses on, you are looking at a sphincter not a rose. Sometime in 2007, with the release of Longhorn, they will have a root user. It won't be your account, of course, but their bowser, email client and other userland programs will still have the ability to install malware for you. It's all part of the, "you only have a non transferable right to use this unless we think otherwise" mentality. M$ smells like ass today and will tomorrow.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
This must be the least read topic in Slashdot. Everyone's moved on to Firefox :P
>
Do you remember the rendering bugs in IE4? What about IE5? Then came IE5.1, 5.5, and 6. The only reason IE6 is now a majority market share browser is because most average computer users are using Windows XP. I dare say, but it really wouldn't surprise me if there are still a number of 5.x installs in use by those who are using Windows 2000.
I'm one of those still with IE 5.5 though I don't use it much. I used to use Firefox some but haven't reinstalled it since I had to reinstall Windows earlier this year. Now I use mostly Netscape 7.2. About the only tyme I use IE is when I want to save a webpage, IE includes the url of the page saved whereas Netscape doesn't. Oh, and I'm using ME right now though I also have NT. I rarely use it though because it's installed on an Alpha box and M$ doesn't support Alpha anymore. I also couldn't get many apps installed on it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Firefox is great. For tabbed browsing.
Otherwise, thi integration with the operating system, as a developer is second to none. The speed is brilliant, and everything else is perfect. Fuck XUL, bring on shit like powerweb livecontrols. And make it easier for us by bringing one, proprietry system where we can all do good, make money and change the world while we're doing it. Open source is great, but the new shit is always gonna be owned, and make money. I, for 1, am doing the best I can in all respects but fuckit I'm gonna make some money doing it and I'm gonna fucking change the world through making my shit marketable and not giving it a name like the GIMP! Phoenix rocked, firefox is gonna lose.
AC
Just give me an actual dotted border and I'll be fine.
All of IE was rewritten by the time IE4 shipped. IE is not based on Mosaic.
umm.. why?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Please don't tell web designers to "just follow the standards". It's REALLY not that simple.
I know just following web standards isn't the answer. I'm currently in school with a major of "web programming". I'm planning to transfer though into a multi-discilinary program, with either IT or EE as a base.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If you removed "the *best*" from your sentence, it'd be the simple truth.
Some of us consider Opera to be (and always has been) a superior browser from the start. Firefox currently is better than IE.
Now, take a look at your timeline... Anything been going on at all with IE since 2001? How about Opera? Firefox? Safari/Konqueror?
It's very easy to say "They went from nothing to something" - going on 10 years ago. What have they been doing lately (other than saying they'll be coming out with something Real Soon Now)?
There is only one update they need to do to IE, and they will never do it.
They need to abandon zones, put the application in charge of the security of a window, and NEVER let a window open, launch, link to, or reference a "more trusted" object than the one the link, embedded object, what have you is referenced from.
That means IE would be a hard sandbox. If you want to use ActiveX components that aren't sandboxed, you need to run a separate program.
Yes, that means that Windows Update would need to be a separate application shell around the HTML control. That's a teeny tiny problem compared to these sneaky damn zones.
It will be same old shit with the same old bugs, but with tabs and marketing campaign behind it.
Sorry, MS. You've had YEARS to address these issues. I've switched, and won't be coming back. You should have listened to your users before now. And no, I don't really care about your newest "beta".
Third, could you actually put something in there to block ads and popups, and any other crap that I don't want on my screen.
I don't know if you know of them or not but you can use a host file to block many ads, such as those from DoubleClick. They don't block popups from popping up but the ads itself is blocked if the address of the server is in the host file.
Seventh, oh and this really pisses me off, PLEASE PLEASE when I hit the reload button - I want it to actually reload the data from the URL over the internet not reload a bunch of cache!!!
On Windows a way to force the browser to reload from the server is to use [ctrl][F5].
FalconShould there be a Law?
Should be:
from the still-polishing-a-turd dept.
I've been using [ctrl][F5] to force a reload/refresh of a webpage for years and I've never had a problem.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Grandparent is overrated.
Avant is an IE extension that supports tabbed browsing. http://www.avantbrowser.com I actually like the tabbed browsing controls in Avant better.
Regards,
~Joshua Norton
...they need to add in features (in addition to the proper PNG graphics rendering and improved CSS support) like those used in the Maxthon or Avant Browser "shell" programs for IE.
Having used Maxthon since Version 1.12 (they're now up to 1.2.4), it is a very nice program that adds a lot of nifty features that Internet Explorer by itself lacks, particularly tabbed browsing, RSS support, easily changeable "skins," and the very powerful AD Hunter feature that blocks out many ads, pop-ups, Flash animations, and even most ActiveX objects, which results in a very fast browsing experience even on dial-up connections.
The test certainly doesn't *seem* standards-compliant...or even functional.
Tell me, WTF is "data:application/x-unknown,ERROR"? Why would *any* browser know how to handle that?
And a 404 on the middle of the page?
Standards testing should be conducted with feature-intensive *standards-compliant* data, not by checking to see what a program does when it gets illegal/broken/standard-incompliant data...
Luke-Jr
iNet Tabs was IIRC the first mshtml based browser with tabbing, a bit more primative than newer tabbed browsers but i loved it at the time.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
How can that possibly be flamebait? That's a valid complaint about a lot of sites and not something you need to silence.
I hope MS fixes all the outstanding security vulnerabilities listed on Secunia.com before releasing IE7.
Good lord, when has *that* ever stopped them from embracing and extending - heck, they're doing it RIGHT NOW when it comes to implementing protocols on .NET.
Now, don't get me wrong, some cases, the standards are *VERY* thin on detail and could lack features that could be deemed important - hypothetically, a wireless protocol that doesn't have a secure enough encryption algorith as one example of this.
With that being said, the lack of improvements, and a sudden surge of interest in developing IE further has NOTHING to do with all altruistic stance by Microsoft, but more of a reply to the threat from Firefox.
Firefox by itself isn't a threat, but when you take into account Microsofts long term view of their long term view of .NET, XAML, their application server technology, remotely hosted applications, delivered to the webbrowser, using IE specific technologies (as apposed to the current thin client/dumb terminal model) - you can see how Firefox could turn out to be a royal pain in the ass if they don't box it in, and reserve it to the alternative platforms.
Being the dumb little shit that you are.
Sure, they could make such a browser, at only somewhat more than an order of magnitude more developement effort than has gone into Mozilla... Oh wait, that would be about two orders of Magnitude above IE6.
Seriously, even MS couldn't do that. Not if they focused all the resources they have for a considerable amount of time. Sorry, browsers just aren't that simple anymore.
All my comments get moderated +-0, spotless.
You can get around this by just making sure that your inbox (or any other mail file) never gets that big. The problem is a consequence of putting the index, messages and attachments in one big binary file - as distinct from every other email format on earth. They re-invented email badly, and not even for the purposes of vendor lock in since those third party tools were written by others that worked out the file format.
The big problem with Outlook express and to a lesser extent Outlook is that they are almost abandonware - considered good enough to not update and overwhelmed by years of changes - like businesses changing from dial up to broadband thus email volume increasing. IE was abandonware for a while after the team was disbanded, but isn't now.
We can use Firefox and avoid a good portion of the crap on the internet but Windows users we are still vulnerable in less obvious ways. A lot of Windows apps (Steam for example) use IE as part of their interface. So if IE has security issues and an app uses IE then the app suffers from the same issues.
Mod me down with all of your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
It was great until I started geting spycrap through it too. Now I only use it when I feel like tabbed browsing.
I just hope that, in the end, they can do away with the hamhanded security kludges like the Local Machine Lockdown and its contingent fixes like the ridiculous "Mark of the Web" and such.
It's one thing to try to secure your browser. It's another to become a paranoia caricature.
vk.
That's exactly what I thought when I read the article. They have cited two areas where they plan "become more consistent." That's a marketing phrase. It means nothing. I've heard a comment attributed to someone in the IE design team suggesting that Microsoft didn't want to fully accept the W3C standards for reasons I don't remember. They claimed the standards would restrict them. I claim they restrict us poor saps who have to find work arounds for a funky box model and simple CSS2 applications like dynamic nested lists.
I've been anxiously awaiting more info on IE7, hoping it would turn around and embrace the W3C recommendations. Instead, this news worries me simply because it is so limited.
Of course IE7 has potential to disrupt Firefox's share. However I doubt it will affect share much at all.
In order for Microsoft to steal share from FireFox it needs to improve and innovate to a point that surpasses Firefox. Right now, I believe that IE7 is playing catch-up to FireFox and Microsoft will not introduce anything innovative enough to bring share back to IE7. Microsoft will only be able to slow the tide of people leaving IE.
Remember, people are using FireFox fo the following reasons:
In the first two cases, IE will not win back any share. The feature crowd will only return if Microsoft truly innovates(doubtful in my mind.) The last group of people will only return to IE if they can trust Microsoft to fix all of the problems. Considering Microsoft's record since they made "security their number one priority" over a year ago (or has it been 2?) I also doubt this happening.
And remember, the reason IE has the most share is because it was on the computer when the user got it. People resist change. That same fact will keep some user from changing from Firefox back to IE. So, no, Firefox will probably not lose much share unless development stops on it over the next 4 years. (Ooops, who did that before?...)
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
IE6 is often not the real troublemaker as it has doctype switching and you can use .htc files to fix some of the bugs. IE5 is the problem.
New IE7 service pack announced...
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the Netscape 8.0 solution to this problem. Basically, Netscape 8.0 uses the mozilla/firefox rendering engine by default, but loads an embedded copy of the IE rendering engine within the netscape window if the web page is detected to be "IE only." The decision as to which sites are IE only is made by consulting an internal whitelist, periodically updated.
I think this is the best of both worlds. Most web sites load up in the mozilla/firefox rendering engine and your computer is safe from all of the IE-specific malware. A small whitelist of known IE-only sites will load up in IE. The whitelist is of course vetted to ensure that the web sites belong to legitimate companies (in most cases, major companies) who won't attack you with malware. In the meantime, you get all of the netscape benefits like tabbed browsing and standards compliant rendering.
The only real disadvantage is that this forces Netscape 8.0 to be windows-only, or at least only able to use this particular technique on windows.
Now that companies like SAP have started putting out support notes advicing their customers to use Firefox instead of IE, Microsoft may start to take things seriously. For example take a look at the following support not from SAP (note 828595 for those with access to OSS):
Symptom
When you are using the SAP GUI for HTML in the Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, the "progress bar", which describes the load progress for the page, may in some cases continue to display activities although the page is fully loaded, and it never confirms that a page has been completely loaded.
Other terms
Microsoft Internet Explorer; IE; HTMLGUI; load; webgui; login page; status bar; status bar; loading progress; blue horizontal bar;
Reason and Prerequisites
This is caused by a visual error in the Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Solution
SAP has consulted closely with Microsoft, to eliminate this error. Unfortunately, Microsoft is not prepared to implement a correction and suggests workarounds that can be implemented in SAP software (SAP ITS). All workarounds proposed by Microsoft are not acceptable due to the considerable quality-related risks posed for all SAP customers using the ITS. There is therefore no solution for this error, other than changing Browsers (the problem described above does not occur with Mozilla / Firefox).
IE blends PNG images with an alpha channel against their default background color. When there is no default, it uses one of the system colors that happens to be the default for GDI surfaces.
You can give IE a better (but still solid) color to blend against by having pngcrush write in a bKGD chunk with the desired color. This doesn't help you if you are trying to blend against a texture, but it's handy if, as in your case, the image is blended against a solid background color anyway.
Now, tell me, what difference will this actually make? Except for all the website developers being happy to get yet another browser on their compatibility list, who is going to download and use it?
Somehow I can't believe that the 80something percent (yeah, sure, depending on the site we're talking about) are going to miraculously switch to IE7 so that all our problems as webdesigners suddenly go away.
IE7 may be a good product, it may really be a very good product (and with all the competition that MS is facing right now I'd be really surprised if they didn't produce something fairly good) but it won't make up for all the crap MS has thrown at us with the last versions of their browser.
charon
So finally IE will be properly supporting 24-bit PNG graphics, years after they announced they would support it. It's anyone's guess what they took years to write a program someone could write in less than a day.
I have held back on a lot of my creative ideas for web sites, because of lack of PNG support in IE. I made a design that used a transparent layer scrolling over a static background. It rendered flawlessly in Mozilla, but the scroll rate was diminished. Mozilla could use a faster implementation of what it uses to blend bitmaps.
Expect to see some clever scripts that use transparent layers to animate graphics. If they simply added a scroll rate property to CSS, one could display a multi layered parallax video game, similar to the SNES side scrollers.
It's about time browsers start getting more rendering capabilities, without relying on Flash to do the complex animation.
SproutWorks Software Design
This is good. Windows get better support for various web standards, meaning that web sites will actually be able to use it.
I wonder what else will they add to it in terms of extensons and usability features (tabs, adblock, better popup killer, security control, etc.).
If they don't do much, firefox will continue to gain momentum and perhaps overtake the market (as you still have to download IE7, it's not preinstalled for now).
Who cares ?
Anyone who doesn't understand that a web browser should NOT be integrated into the guts of an operating system deserves all the problems that IE will give them.
Have they changed this major flaw in this release ? No. So only use it if you're an idiot.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
It seems like the IE7 developer team didn't even manage to make a blog validate to HTML 4.0. How can this be possible?
Why has IE7 taken so long to be released?
So if they could just click their fingers and fix the PNG bugs like that, WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY ALREADY!
I love this line! Particularly as it's not only funny but insightful. I also thought of a variant:
Begun, this browser war has.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
In other news, my car is "Not a car" because it has a non-functioning headlight and therefore would not pass the standards set down for a "car" by the government of the area in which I live.
Please spare me with this stupid analogy. Of course is a car a car if its light is broken. There is no standard (as HTTP) which defines what a car is regarding the status of its lights (even if its illegal to drive without a working light in certain countries).
There is however a standard which defines what a webbrowser must do to fulfill it's duty as a webbrowser. IE does not even try to do it. And even if this document I pointed to is factually shaky, the HTTP implementation is absolutely unpredictable! I checked it out myself. For me IE is no webbrowser, but a bad joke with a massive userbase.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
What about the constant stream of Firefox updates? And you do realize that IE has a popup blocker built-in, right?
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Microsoft adds PNG support to beta version of Internet Explorer:
Microsoft spokesperson: "We're really excited about it! This is another example of the kind of improvement we can bring to our end users when we are left free to innovate. Helping people is really what we do best!"
He explained that Microsoft has not been sitting idly by the past several years. "Some people have the impression that Microsoft stopped, or slowed, development of Internet Explorer a few years ago when it was perceived we had won the so-called 'browser wars'. Nothing could be further from the truth. We've continued to pour billions of R&D money into customer surveys, focus groups, and case studies to really get to the heart of what our customers want and need in a browser. And what we came up with was, um, this PNG thing."
that they invented tabbed browsing. They'll probably give it a fancy buzzword name too, something like "XPTab" or whatnot.
I don't think that Mozilla is exactly a model for security. At my company, we've had to deploy three complete updates since the release of Firefox 1.0.
Firefox isn't a model for security, but it is adequate for most of the users, IE is not. Most people don't wat to exchange other qualities by security improvements if it is already fine.
Of course, IE is far from a model citizen, but IE6-SP2 is much better, and *security* is the focus of IE7 according to the developers.
MS developpers have been focusing on security for years now, see what they have done. Yes, IE6-SP2 is safer than IE6 (could they create something less safe than IE6?) but is far from secure yet. MS have the balls just to fix a few easy bugs, not to rewrite features or to change a flawed design. While they keep acting this way, people would better stay out of MS products.
Rethinking email
Way to go, moderators!
Safari looks just as bad as Firefox on my computer. OS X 10.3.9, Safari 1.3. It doesn't look anything like the pics on his blog.
Constant stream? They're up to 1.0.3. That's it. IE just doesn't get any version number increments when they patch it. Even completely unsupported for years, how many MS updates have there been? A bit more than than three...
This sad sack is an assfaced Microsoft lackey. Please examine his post history, and also note the signifigant amount of Bill Gates Pre-Cum(tm) dripping from his fat lips!
Do you sit on the TV and watch the couch?
No offense to the IE7 development team, but as usual this just seems like the standard Microsoft ploy.
They stopped all IE development and let the browser utterly stagnate because they had no real competition; there were many complaints about the insecurity of ActiveX, the refusal to follow the w3c standards, the refusal to provide proper PNG alpha support, and the amount of work involved in trying to get sites rendering the same in IE as they did in pretty much any other browser around.
Microsoft have had *years* to address these issues, and selectively chose to do absolutely nothing about them, because they couldn't care less about the customer, just about stifling competition and making money. (Granted at engineer level you may well have people taking offense at the suggestion that they don't want to make a better product for their customers, but that clearly isn't the corporate policy.)
Now all of a sudden along comes Firefox, which provides an amazing base, and doesn't have any of the IE issues. Microsoft have some competition in the first time in a while, and suddenly they're back to how trumpeting about how wonderful they are, and how they're implementing all these brilliant new features, like popup blocking, better (but still not perfect) CSS compliance, proper PNG alpha support, and all the other things that people have been complaining about for years, and the things that other browsers have had since day one.
Sorry Microsoft, but I find your claims insincere. You had years to implement this stuff, but you didn't bother your ass to help your customers out until you had a whiff of competition come your way. I'll stick with FireFox.
I don't think that Mozilla is exactly a model for security. At my company, we've had to deploy three complete updates since the release of Firefox 1.0.
Compared to Internet Exploiter (IE), i'd say its exponentially more secure.
Just check out http://secunia.org/ for a comparison of Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Internet Explorer (versions 5.0 to 6.0):
-Found: 138 Secunia Security Advisories
-Found: 2257 Viruses
Mozilla Firefox (versions 0.x to current 1.0.3)
-Found: 39 Secunia Security Advisories
-Found: 7 Viruses
Of course, IE is far from a model citizen, but IE6-SP2 is much better, and *security* is the focus of IE7 according to the developers.
I wonder how many people actually upgrade to SP2? I know I havent, and I probably won't until I'm positive it wont break any of my games/apps.
The bottom line is that pages that use tables for detailed control of tabular markup are a lot more likely to remain correct during the transitional period while CSS settles down (and it'll probably be a while... IE is still pretty far back in the back for just vanilla CSS, and CSS2 is no walk in the park for any browser!)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Major in web programming? Sure, that's one of the degree programs at the collect I go to. The problem I see with it is that the college is only a two year college, and I have yet to see a help wanted ad that didn't require a Bachelors and at least a few year experience. The college does offer majors in Visual Basic, but though I looked at the online catalog I didn't see one for Shell Scripting. The closest I see is Windows Networking or MCSA.
I'm glad to see you have the good sense to move to a more generic, multi-discaplined course. Web development is simply software development. If you learn to be a software developer you can do web development, but it won't work the other way 'round.
At one tyme, years ago, my major was Computer Engineering with minors in Physics and Mathematics. To get the minors all that was needed was to take two additional classes in each so I figured what the heck I'd go ahead and take them. However that all changed several years ago after I survived a bad accident, I suffered a serious injury and now am a survivor of a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. Those commercials about using drugs "This is your brain on drugs" showing scrambled eggs. Well that's my brain. After I left the hospital and moved into a rehab house I tried to do some simple problems in both physics and calculus and realized I couldn't as I couldn't recall how, my memory is BAD. While I no longer want to follow that path even if I did I know I'd have to start all over again and repeat all those classes.
As for web/software development, that's not really what I want to do professionally, the closest I can come with to what I want to do is international development and I believe IT can help in that. So I'm thinking doing the multi-discilinary approach with a basis of IT or maybe EE with business and maybe communications as other areas of study will be beneficial.
FalconShould there be a Law?
And isn't this the point of competition anyways? Kudos to Firefox, and kudos to MS.
Define "had to".
Yes, there have been issues found with Firefox. The differences?
1) Compared to the severity of exploits found in IE, the FF ones have been relatively minor
2) They are patched extremely quickly
Typically, by the time MS gets around to patching IE for something, it's because a few thousand computers a day are getting 0wned as a result, being turned into spam-zombies or being rendered unusable due to spyware/adware. A FF fix, on the other hand, seems to involve patching some theoretical exploit that, if the stars are in perfect alignment on the 3rd Tues in March on a leap year, could be exploited. But you don't tend to see any exploits actually in the wild.
Basically, it boils down to a quote I saw somewhere that went like this:
What would you rather have? 100 litterbugs or 10 arsonists?
There's nothing a bug in IE can allow that a similar bug in Firefox couldn't.
In theory, vulnerabilities in IE and Firefox have the same effect, but in practice, the development models differ such that a Contributor will check in a patch and drivers will get a new build out before crackers get a chance to widely deploy exploits. In addition, MoFo doesn't use security holes to upsell paid product upgrades, unlike Microsoft which still hasn't patched at least one critical security hole in the latest version of IE for Windows 2000 except by charging $three figures for the upgrade to Windows XP.
Sandboxing it would be smarter and probably require less pointless hacking around
ActiveX controls are native Win32 programs. How do you sandbox a native program other than by running it with the different set of access privileges assigned to a different user?
HTML Tidy, while it won't substitute a non-DTD-compliant page with an error for anyone's pages, at least you can nearly immediately see some issues.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
...and as if to prove my point just a few days later, Microsoft even says that their sales are down. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/29/122023 0&tid=109&tid=187&tid=98&tid=1
now who are you going to believe?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
If and when IE7 comes out, I'll still use both that and FF (and sometimes Opera) interchangeably as usual.
When a page needs a specific browser I'll use that one. Otherwise, I'll just use whatever's closest to my mind and mouse.
I haven't had big problems with IE these days. If I'm really scared I'll just turn off teh ActiveX and such nonsense. Or use Firefox.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.