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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."
Real competition. Good.
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.
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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.
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.
It wasn't the tabbed browsing, or extensions like adblock, or better standards compliance that I switched to Firefox. It was getting infected by a piece of spyware that used the same security hole I was pissing about with THREE MONTHS BEFOREHAND that I saw it on a security bullitin, and despite being fully up to date on my patches it still infected me.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
I believe that mozilla did implement the proposed standard but put it in their own namespace for now because it isn't a standard yet and they didn't want to be accused of "embrace and extend" the way that Microsoft does.
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.
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 -
And Microsofts PR machine has a history of successfully turning around 180 degress. Just thinks of the events that lead to the first browser war.
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.
You're talking about enlightened consumers. I'm sorry to say that bsed on my own observations, it seems they're a small minority.
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.
That's why web standards should be followed, so you don't end up with spagetti code trying to support different browser versions. Admittedly I don't know everything that goes into creating a standards compliant website. Nor do I work on them other than my own, which I haven't worked in way too long.
Along the lines of web standards, I liked Jeffery Zeldman's "designing with web standards". I would of liked it if there had been projects to work on in it though. I only learn and retain by doing, if I don't do it I don't retain what I read. At least he includes references to other books some of which have exercises or projects.
FalconShould there be a Law?
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 !!!!!
Putting an ad-blocker (pop-ups are fair game) on something as popular as IE would cause very serious disruptions to many, many websites (ie their revenue stream gets completely cut). Not to mention the inevitable lawsuit if doubleclick.net was in by default.
I think the request for it being GPL'd is wishful thinking too. Maybe you need to calm down?
"In this case, I take it "Anonymous Coward" is a corollary to "Microsoft PR Rep"?"
There should be an ammendment to Godwin's Law for people who resort to accusing others of working for the bad guy.
Though I don't believe it's "Goodbye FireFox", you cannot honestly say to me that IE7 doesn't have the potential to disrupt FF's market share.
"Derp de derp."
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...
The problem is that if the standard changes before it's released then you've got a lot of nonstandard implementations out there with no easy way to distinguish between them. (incidentally, AFAIK -moz-border-radius isn't entirely in line with the proposed recommendation. i still use it, because it's nice)
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.
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
"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."
I'm a little irritated at the overrated mods slapped onto this post. (if you think he's misguided, hit the reply button instead, folks!)
He has a point. Though FireFox is getting better and better, IE still is still the best supported out there. Sometimes I have to use IE from time to time due to lack of support for the browser I'm using. Admittedly, MS would have to do a hell of a lot of work for me to use IE7 exlusively, but I can certainly understand this guy's point of view.
"Derp de derp."
I'm glad to see Internet Explorer doing something right, even if inadvertently. See, I have this nice 19" monitor, and people who insist on making tiny little pages that fill the top-left corner of my screen make me leave their site as quickly as possible. I spent good money to have a lot of screen real estate - please don't try to take it away from me.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"FF will have advanced way beyond what IE can hope to achieve from typical corporate development."
Are you an idiot?
It took the Mozilla project nearly five years to build what Firefox is today. Hell, Mozilla didn't even surpass IE4 until 2002, five years after IE4's release.
Microsoft went from not having a browser to having the *best* browser in two years.
If they have to, they will build a standards-compliant, fast, extensible browser.
The only question now is whether they will have to. But it already looks like the popularity of Firefox has answered that question.
The Mozilla Foundation has a lot of great talent. But they don't have 300 full-time developers. Microsoft has plenty of bright people - and plenty of money. Don't sell them short.
They are complacent, not stupid.
This is exactly why I never use those stupid parsing bugs to "trick" IE into rendering the right thing... I'm scared to death that the resulting non-standard "tag soup" will break some obscure browser somewhere -- like IE7.
What I do is, I design a very simple design in Firefox, then I check it against IE that it renders "nicely" (nicely meaning, if IE renders it wrong, the mistake doesn't affect readability or anything). The idea is, my website designs are "so simple, not even IE could screw them up".
It really limits the possibilities, but at least the resulting pages are simple & elegant.
The newest IE for Mac doesn't even try to render it. Safari for OS X 10.3.9 does worst than Firefox. Camino and Firefox both yield the exact same results for me.
I'm curious how they know for sure it looks that way if no browser does it right? I mean, it's possible that they made a mistake in designing the character?
If designers didn't rely on obscure parsing bugs like the one in your post, that wouldn't be a problem. There's nothing elegant or clever about exploiting parsing bugs to fix another bug. In an ideal world the browser developers would fix both the parsing bug and whatever other bug the parsing bug is designed to work around. Since we're never gauranteed of this, why take the risk? If you're a professional developer with past projects in the hundreds when IE7 hits the streets, can you then afford to turn back the clock and revisit most of them because you relied on parsing bugs, rather than more concrete methods. (Ahem, conditional comment style sheets) You'd be completely screwed. If you don't fix your client websites, your reputation will go the way of the dodo. If you do you'll have weeks upon weeks of unpaid work.
IE may have miserable CSS support, but at least it provides some very clear, built-in work-arounds for its problems. (JScript, behaviors, conditional comments, all that propreitary garbage that we can use to fabricate something resembling standards support).
"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...
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.
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!!!
Hold the Control key while clicking Refresh. Clicking Refresh without the Control key does reload the data "from the URL", but all the other URLs referenced by the page you're reloading (images, stylesheets, external JavaScript, etc.) may not be (especially if you're behind a caching proxy server). The reason for this is, if you don't need to reload all the bazillion other files and only need to reload the main content of the page you're looking at, clicking Refresh is MUCH faster than it would be if you reloaded everything.
The equivalent in Netscape/Mozilla-based browsers is Shift-Reload. In IE for Mac, Option-Refresh.
In Safari for Mac OS X, clicking the Reload button twice in a row does it (the first time reloads the page only; the second time reloads everything). I'm not sure if this sends the same headers Mozilla does with Shift-Reload though, so it may not work perfectly behind a proxy; I know it didn't, and Dave Hyatt told me he'd have somebody look at that, but I'm not sure if it actually works now or not.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Funny, that. I always thought they were being a service to their shareholders, and them alone.
Since Microsoft doesn't actually make any money from IE users, you can't expect them to follow a user-centric point of view. The only way they can make any money from their users (apart from Windows licenses, which they will get regardless of whether or not they use IE or another browser, or even switch to Linux after buying a new PC with Windows pre-installed) is from advertising revenue on sites like MSN.
Hence, allowing ads is the only way they can perform a service for the shareholders. Oh well, that's why I use Firefox instead.
-- Dramatisation - May Not Have Happened
I won't deny that they have the capability to add those kinds of features, but I do think that there isn't any way to get the same potential feature set Firefox has without bloat/constant updates specific to what a given user wants without an extension system. I don't think MS will add one, and if they do it won't get the support that Firefox's has, for the same reason there isn't the abundance of skins for WMP that exists for Winamp.
In any case, there's a lot of features that I think Microsoft won't implement rather than can't. I'd be surprised to see them add anything like AdBlocker, since they run websites like hotmail that make their money from ads. And can you really see them integrating BugMeNot into their browser? Seems pretty unlikely to me.
That's why web standards should be followed, so you don't end up with spagetti code trying to support different browser versions.
Most of the time, when I hack my way around browser bugs, I do it by taking standards-compliant HTML that validates at validator.w3.org but looks wrong in a particular browser, and changing it into different standards-compliant HTML that still validates but looks the way I want.
Please don't tell web designers to "just follow the standards". It's REALLY not that simple.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
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".
Hell, IE7 isn't even supported on Windows 2000.
Yeah, like that will happen. Might as well ask for the Windows source code while you're at it.
Second, please don't default load to the msn page, WTF.You do realize that Microsoft gets revenue from MSN Search, don't you? And is it really that hard to change your default?
Third, could you actually put something in there to block ads and popups.Have you not heard of this new SP2 thing? Try it out. Blocks popups. As for ads, if they did that they'd piss off every web advertiser in existance and probably get class-action sued.
Fourth, last time I looked default IE has over ONE GIG of cache in the settings.Tools, Options, Settings. Change it yourself.
Fifth, could you actually make it work with java?Every Java app I've tried works. Gotta download the Java plug-in first. Blame Sun and their lawsuit for that.
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.Paranoid much? There are probably a dozen third-party apps that do this already.
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!!!Hold down Control when you hit F5 or press reload.
Eigth, can't you natively render PDF's. Why do I half to deal with all this over bloated adobe crap?I have a suspicion that Adobe would take issue having PDF rendering part of IE without any Adobe app. As for Reader bloat-ware, go bark up Adobe's tree.
Ninth, please put something in there that makes it easy for me to "steal" (GASP!!!) someone's "intellectual property".Uh huh. Why not just add a "warez" button which takes you right to your favorite IRC channel too?
-David
> The latest trend is to use Javascript ... never rely on bugs to implement features
Except that nearly every javascript useragent detector makes huge implementation-specific assumptions that are almost certain to break when new browsers come out. They're one big bug waiting to happen.
Sometimes I have to use IE from time to time due to lack of support for the browser I'm using.
This is why I exclusively use a non-IE browser (and the fact that I'm in Linux most of the time, but I digress...). Getting a stranglehold on the web and forcing people to use proprietary applications to exchange information is like adding new words and conventions to a language and charging people to use them.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
You still need tables, but with CSS you can use them for what they were actually made for (displaying formatted data) and not for layout. If you need to represent data in a table use a table. If you need to handle page layout use CSS.
But if the standard is actually a draft and subject to change, how can they possibly implement it and guarantee compatibility? That's exactly the kind of mess that IE got itself in with CSS, XSLT and DOM where they ploughed ahead when the draft hadn't been finalised and consequently became non-standard in the process.
In order for it to take away FF's marketshare it would have to be unsucky enough for people running windows and Firefox to switch back to ie.
No, it merely has to be unsucky enough for people to not switch to Firefox next time they get a new computer (or probably if they upgrade to Longhorn).
You have a very short term perspective. Have you considered a career in banking?
I dunno, from here it looks like alot of designers have problems designing a site that will render if you don't use the exact software and monitor and settings they used. .8 through 1.0). And many sites lock the font size under IE and the collum widths are fixed by pixel count or inches or some other stupid absolute measurement without any need, usually such that the sum of the collum widths is NOT a typical monitor width (I've seen sites that are to wide for 800x600 and too narrow for 1024x768?!?!?).
I've seen sites that can't even survive re-sizeing the font. Slashdot won't for example fit width wise when the font is enlarged (at least not under FF
I really wish people would stop over fixing the layout of thier sites so they could be view without exactly matching the designers preferences, and wierd ideas of proper page width (I'm assuming whatever fits inside the toolbars of his design tool).
Used to be web pages were viewable because almost all markup was proportional, not absolute, and it didn't matter that much what browser you were using or resolution.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
But this is changing, it is the latest meme. Spreading through media, TV, radio, word of mouth. I have talked to technophobes who have switched merely because a friend did. I have even met a few moms who did.
Internet cafe's are disabling IE, businesses are switching to Firefox internally. It is spreading and people are waking up to the fact that there ARE choices.
And once they realize that there is another choice for their browser, they will also begin to wonder if there are other choices for their other products like the OS, Office apps, media players, etc.
Once the browser begins to fall (as it already has), people become aware that there are choices and once they are aware that there are choices, they will begin to make them.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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.