Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
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 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.
The concept of real competition entering the market is really an illusion. It's not a competition when 89% of the world uses your browser. What microsoft is doing right now is taking steps to make sure it doesn't become a competition. For people to switch, they'll need a good reason, a major thing that IE can't do. Right now there isn't one. There are little things that annoy the computer geeks and tech nerds but nothing your typical 60 year old grandmother or 16 school girl will care about. I applaud them for taking a step in the right direction, but lets not forget that they're still the big dog in the software market. They won the first browser war and they're ready for another.
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.
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?
I'm pretty sure that improving a product to maintain one's marketshare, even if it is the vast majority, is in fact competition already. There's no reason that Microsoft can't make IE7 good. 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. 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.
English is easier said than done.
"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."
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)
"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.
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).
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.
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.
"The reason IE is open to attacks by spyware is because the people who make spyware know that that's what most people use. As soon as people move to another selection, they'll simply target the new browser."
I would disagree with this. There are problems to be found in Firefox and other new browsers to be sure. The way things look it will be Firefox if anything that ends up with significant market share. To date, almost every Firefox vulnerability has still been related to the broken windows zone-based security model (read IE security model). The two big issues are ActiveX and that model. I believe that without ActiveX and that security model to ride on, NO BROWSER would ever carry the sort of spyware overhead we see today again. That includes IE, but I do not see Microsoft dropping their biggest market lockin 'features'.
I think Firefox will always be safe from spyware when compared to any browser with ActiveX. However, spyware was only one thing I mentioned. Everything else mentioned was a feature.
Big features from a user perspective.
-Spyware free weather status(any idea how many weatherbuggers there are?)
-Popup blocking that works (IE popup blocking does not 'work', largely thanks to popups launched by spyware.)
-Flashblocking (flash ads are notoriously annoying)
-Tabbed browsing. After browsing a link heavy site for two days with tabbed browsing, nobody will ever use a browser without this again.
Honestly I believe Favortism is the next biggest problem. The truth is that end users do NOT install functional software on their computers (although they will install cute little holiday related crap that breaks functional setups). Techs install software on their computers. If the local tech shop is still using IE, all of their customers will be using IE.
I once worked for a shop with a Microsoft bias. We were slammed with spyware problems and when doing a spyware cleanup I would routinely install firefox with a standard set of extensions. I showed people how to "open this page in IE" if they needed to and off they went.
If someone else did work for the user after that point I would get a call everytime regardless of the problem. The good ol' boy Microsoft techs would claim they couldn't work on these funky 'firething' setups. This included the boss. Finally I just gave up.
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
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.