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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.
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?
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!
are people still using that old browser?
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.
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 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.
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 -
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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...
In this IE6 world a webdesigner cannot use transparent pngs.
This is not completely true. PNGs with 8-bit alpha channels render correctly. Google maps uses this trick to create the push pin drop shadow.
SYS 49152
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.
"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.
"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.
"Improving CSS support consistency" means that CSS in IE is going to be consistently broken.
Your assertion is misleading.
Firefox, Opera, Safari, and other "niche" browsers render PNGs correctly, with the use of the 8-bit alpha channel. IE6, on the other hand, ONLY recognizes boolean transparency in PNGs -- in other words, it treats them like GIFs. It is possible to force IE5+ to recognize the full alpha channel, but only with the use of a Direct3D filter command.
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
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 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.
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.
It is possible to force IE5+ to recognize the full alpha channel, but only with the use of a Direct3D filter command.
It's better (well, worse, actually) than that. You can add a Direct3D filter command to display a transparent PNG on top of an image.
So, for example, an image with transparency in Firefox, Opera, and Safari is simply:
<img src="myTransparentImage.png">
To make IE work, you cannot simply add an attribute or anything simply like that. Because if you do, your transparent image will display behind the Direct3D filter applied over the image, without transparency. So instead you must use:
<img src="infamousTransparentGif.gif" style="width: 32px; height: 32px; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader (src='myTransparentImage.png');">
(Not sure if the above really works due to spaces added to make it format better, but you get the idea.)
Again, this means you can can't simply add the IE-specific "code" to make the image transparency work. Instead you must jump through hoops to get it to display as properly, since you can either make it work in IE (by displaying a completely transparent image with the PNG image draw over that) or work in other browsers. Ultimately, this means either using IE's conditional comments or a JavaScript based solution so that you give the right code to the right browser.
Usually with special code to catch when it's really Opera and not Opera pretending to be IE so you don't screw that up too...
Note that you must provide the width and height of the transparent image you want to display in Internet Explorer, otherwise IE will scale it to whatever size the transparent image you use underneath. Plus, strictly speaking, the above <img> tags aren't HTML compliant, because I left out the ALT attributes.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Microsoft vs. the world? This should be interesting.
Will win what exactly? Customers win only when they have choice, not when there is one choice. Redundancy is what kept life going against all odds to this point, and now you're claiming having only one gateway, for yourself as a customer, to view the interweb from is a good thing?
I've been called a zealot or what have you before, but I just don't understand this mentality. At the very least it sounds childish. Here's what I basically picture...
For a significant part of their lives, the majority of the population that frequents sites like /. have relied on their parents for their needs. While this, in itself, is natural, the outside world does not mirror that process. To optimize, as we grow up we create the networks of friends of various statuses so that, ideally, we'll be able to rely on them throughout our lives.
Fundamentally, this is our environment today. It's engraved in us since birth, and it is part of who we are as a result. This creates a very different mental playing field. The very same playing field that corporations invest "R & D" in. The very same playing field where you watch the latest commercial of the newest chick with the biggest breasts, on the biggest car, with the phatest rims..... *ahem*. (Wow... that was so not why I coughed... weird.)
This is very recent. Before the last century, only a minority could actually afford to live like this. Parents were the most influential, sure, but people relied many others very early in their lives, and learned how to coexist in a very different social structure than that we have today.
To top it off, we have the big dogs, for which there are *no alternatives elsewhere. And they will "parent" themselves into population's lives. Creating a sort of "vision", they have us, by the masses, invest in their cause.
*There are, but you have to look for them. A task especially made more difficult by the big dogs.
I don't know about you, to me, this doesn't look sustainable. Frankly, I don't think that this is reality. So why childish? Because of the way we used to mature. Because of how we created our networks before. Today, it's simply a bombardment of messages catered to hit a nerve with the time frame where trust and love were more natural and given. So it is preferable, to various influential entities, to suspend the full human potential for maturation.
Might *seem minor, but just today, I've seen a national geographic. It was a statement about the environment (obviously). But more specifically, global warming. Now we both know that there are intense climate changes taking place as we speak. The cause: the global climate has gone up by 1 degree Celsius in the past 100 years due to carbon burning (mostly), and other miscellaneous causes.
*<tinfoil value="hat">Do you know who your "observers" are?</tinfoil>
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).
that they invented tabbed browsing. They'll probably give it a fancy buzzword name too, something like "XPTab" or whatnot.
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.