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IE7 Will Have Tabbed Browsing
loconet writes that early yesterday morning, "Dean Hachamovitch, IE product unit manager, confirmed that IE7, like Opera and Firefox first did years ago, will have tabbed browsing as one of its new features. Asa Dotzler,from Mozilla, points out that Dean reminds IE users who have not upgraded to XP that tabbed browsing can be added to IE through 3rd-party add-ons." cryptoz adds a link to this InformationWeek story which says that the tabs will be very "'basic' due to fears from Microsoft that tabbed browsing might scare off too many users. The feature is only being included because IE is slipping in the browser share market."
Average IE User:
"My God! TABS! Eeeek!"
(runs away from computer)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
If M$ is listening (and for the sake of IE, I hope they are) the biggest need to save IE right now is an ability in XP to uninstall IE cleanly. I mean, one should be able to uninstall and install IE at his whim. No strapping it down to the OS crap!
My brother had his PC infected by a smart viral strain of CoolWebsearch, a nasty Browser Hijacker. I ended up spending a few hours trying to clean it and every time I thought I did, it would pop back up. I gave up, installed Firefox and asked him never to touch IE again. If I had the ability to go to the Control Panel, and nuke IE altogether, thereby getting rid of any unsavory plugins that might have been installed along with it, and doing a fresh install back again, I wouldnt have forced him to move to Firefox. I understand that Browser Hijacker has aspects outside the realm of the browser, but providing the ability to uninstall and reinstall gives power back to the user.
And this is totally understandable for a bad product. Obviously you want to strap it down with hooks in to the OS as deep as you could, preventing anyone from removing it, since if the user realizes that they could remove it, the first thing they would want to do is nuke it.
Rapid Nirvana
Pop up blocking, tabbed browsing and Anti-virus software. What will MS think off next?
Has Microsoft patented it yet?
Hopefully you'll be able to disable them completely - I for one don't use them in Firefox because they just don't jive with me.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
Ah the old Slashdot spin machine... actually if you read the IE Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/default.aspx the developers are clear that they made the WRONG decision in avoiding tabs the first time, and the tabs will be basic only at the time of beta, but they will be adding more features afterwards.
Jeremy
It will be 'an innovation'.
Personally, I don't se why they wouldn't have tabbed browsing.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I doubt very much they had to keep tabs basic to save customers from "becoming scared." Simply having two radio buttons in advanced preferences or something tucked away in several levels allowing people to enable more advanced features would have stopped anyone from 'being scared away' of the evil tabs.
No, this is simply so the IE programmers didn't have to program anything too complex. They wanted to do as little work as possible, and then claim that they're doing it FOR the customers.
I suppose Microsoft rapes me up the ass with their licence for my "protection" as well? To stop me from doing anything "dangerous" to a product I supposedly own.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/15/232720 4&tid=113
How soon until MS Office gets tabs? I for one often have up to a dozen Word and Excel documents open and having them all in the task bar is a pain in the UI.
a world in progress...
What, how come Mozilla didn't patent it? ;-)
IAAAL - I am actually a lawyer
...except that they can't because of the anti-trust settlement from the browser wars. Remember, Explorer is an integral part of the OS, NOT A competing browser designed to force Netscape out of the market.
Why the hell is it that right after I download a huge file in IE ... A dialog box pops up with a huge cancel button saying "copying from temp directory"?!? It's common I'll be typing something and press the spacebar by accident and it kills the moving file. Why the hell would I download a massive file and suddenly want to kill it at the last minute while it was being copied from the temp ?? Who wants such a feature??
This is really a stupid "feature" of IE. I doubt they'll fix it cause well quite frankly I won't be surprised if IE developers use FireFox.
side scrolling webpages...
yea, they're increasing in popularity.
I bet it won't be long before IE has other innovative features like plugins, and an ability to surf without leaving traces on your computer. This is a good thing, because it keeps the competition fierce. What other great features can we expect in Safari, Firefox and IE in the future? I'm looking forward to them!
-- Cheers!
The way Opera handles tabbed browsing and the way Firefox handles tabbed browsing are so different, grouping them both under the header "tabbed browsing" make little sense. But which of these methods will IE7 use? Or perhaps something completely different? (Personally, I think Opera's is great and Firefox's is half-assed and hacked-on. I can't imagine Microsoft following the Firefox way.)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The feature is only being included because IE is slipping in the browser share market.
Umm...and? I think there is some implied meaning in the above statement, but I'm not sure what it is. Isn't that what companies do? If they see trends in the market shift towards certain features/needs/wants of consumers, they respond with providing consumers with what they want.
A modern day witchhunt.
this InformationWeek story [...] says that the tabs will be very "'basic' due to fears from Microsoft that tabbed browsing might scare off too many users.
Microsoft just doesn't seem to get it. From an "ease of use" standpoint, the best software is designed so that it's easy for a novice to use -- by hiding the "scary" options and so on. But it's also designed so that a user whose comfortable with the software can learn tricks, customizations, and so on to make his work faster. In short, the software has to grow as the user's skills grow.
Very few companies actually get this. Apple has made progress in this direction, as has the open source movement. But they're both well off.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Hey, look! This funny browser has tabs, just like in Internet Explorer!
Did anyone else read that as "IE7 Will Have Tapped Browsing"?
But then again, that has been an official Windows feature ever since XP came out.
Wait for it: The moment it is released, all the little MS Press Drones will start to sing the praises of this wonderful new innovation, brought to you buy the wonderful people at Microsoft, the fact that we (Proper browser users) have been using this excellent interface for years now, will some how be not be newsworthy Compare: Win 95 a.k.a. Mac 88
This is NOT a signature.
Microsoft need to look at their browser marketing strategy. They are trying to bridge both advanced users and average users, and it will no longer work
Don't stay behind the curve and introduce a one-size-fits-all solution.
If Microsoft do this, they are only playing catch up and not leading the way. Most of all, MS won't have a feature advantage over Firefox. This strategy shows a lack of good marketing thought.
I suggest Microsoft introduce a browser that has two modes: regular and advanced. If you run it in advanced mode, it would look a lot like Maxthon with all options easily available. In regular mode, it would be much as it is now with the ability to turn tabs on or off. In this way, Microsoft will serve the best interests of all of their market.
Maxthon is now much better than Firefox in terms of options, configurability, usage. It has gone through 4 years of development and solved many bugs. Why don't Microsoft just buy it and restructure the menus to be consistent with other MS products? Why recreate the wheel? Maxthon currently has over 25 million downloads and they'll have a ready market for their new product.
I agree wholeheartadly, but the main reason Internet Explorer dominates 85 - 95% of the market (depending on who you ask) is that it is bundled with Windows, and not really removable. I've noticed that even when I recommend Firefox to Windows users, they eventually go back to using IE, partly because it's "just there" and won't sod off.
Because of this, and aside from the technical reasons, I don't think Microsoft have any motivation to enable IE to be uninstalled easily though Add/Remove programs.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
When MS came out with the 'un-removable' IE4, my roommate discovered that if you used the IE3 uninstaller on IE4, it uninstalled cleanly...
Yep... technical necessity.....
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
MS continues to innovate and innovate.
After only recently introducing the new killer feature "pop-up blocking", MS in all its glory continues its push to innovate even further with the introduction of yet an other killer feature "tabs".
This just shows that MS is, despite all the naysayers, still a force to be reckoned with when it comes to innovation and all out quality.
Now I only hope that they did already patent these great ideas, so that they can enjoy the fruits of their continues struggle for excellence, without being ripped of by some small Norwegian company or, worse still, some open source fanatics.
I cant wait for the press release stating this is another "innovation from MS".
haven't they announced this like ages ago?
or is it just me? I don't use tabs, never have never will, well unless I'm working on a 800X600 machine maybe :)
Honestly who really cares? It's a tiny tiny funtion that makes no difference to your daily browse considering you can get all progs of the same type to roll up into a single taskbar tab :)
My Portfolio
Where the hell is CSS2.1? or SVG? Or fixes for the problems which keep causing web developers to spend longer hacking their sites for IE than actually developing it in the first place.
And they're working on tabs?
OMFG, M$ is implementing tabs!? What will they think of next, customizable skins? Or even, [gasp!] security?!? Excuse me, I need a Valium now.
Resistance... is futile.
You mean, you tried to remove some spyware app, but because you couldn't it's therefore IE's fault.
The reason its 'part of the OS' is that the back-end http protocol handlers are reused by every application (well, those that don't want to reinvent the wheel) to connect to the internet. 'Remove' IE (and I guess you don't mean remove 'just the GUI') would cripple a great many programs out there.
Have you tried spyware removal tools? Or even a anti-virus program? Alternatively, just vape all the browser helper objects (search the registry, you'll find them) which sounds like what your problem was all along.
Mind you, I reinstall firefox regularly (every time a new version 'patch' comes out), and every time I re-install it, all my extensions are all there as before. Strange that. I guess if I was hit by some firefox malware then reinstalling it (in the same way you describe you want for IE) would have no effect. I think you'd best stick with IE.
I would have had first post but I have so many IE windows open it took me a while to find the /. one. They really should do something to fix that.
Not sure if it will work on IE (never tried, but I don't see why not), but I found that the equally annoying MSN messenger had an awfully hard time popping itself up unexpectely once I'd deleted all of its files.
...no two people are not on fire.
EP19950303789 19950602
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Loving firefox, flexibility of Extentions with stuff like mouse gestures makes browsing an absolute pleasure.
Everytime I jump into IE - only for corporate web apps that are standards broken, I feel the experience is slow in terms of mouse movements and also from a security point of view.
The main motivation for plugins to be created under IE are for commerical reasons, thus the average joe will suject themselves to possible security issues, viruses, and spam.
Its great that also IBM is stepping up support internally for Firefox.
But once as PC is infected, the hijacker could integrate itself into windows, and reinfect any program you uninstall the moment you reinstall it again.
Malware already rewrites deleted registry keys, restarts killed processes, and so on. The only reason this particular hijacker might not have the capability to reinfect IE is because it is almost impossible to remove IE anyway.
If a windows PC was infected, and you are not absolutely sure whether you have removed the infection, the only way is a complete reinstall
IE 7 having tabs, now leverages attackers to exploit flaws simultaneously.
Now users (especially me) will be wondering...
When am I going to get tabbed windows in explorer? It would be great to actually dock a word window into an IE window or what have you, instead of relying only on the tab bar at the bottom of the screen, which is retarded in scalability beyond about 5 buttons/tabs.
stuff |
I have to say, the browser tabs were the main feature that got me to switch to Firefox as my primary browser. Not that I'll switch back now that IE will have them. I've grown very accustomed to some of the other features of FireFox that IE still doesn't have, so I'm staying with it.
On the other hand, there are certain things I have to use IE for and at least those will be slightly less onerous tasks now that it will have tabs. So I'm happy it's finally happening.
...until they try to patent it?
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
Hm, what spin are you talking about exactly?
/. article.
/. article suggest, MS developers actually did something different, however, this is clearly not the case.
I can see nothing from your post that would suggest that there is a particular spin to the
You write:
"actually if you read the IE Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/default.aspx the developers are clear that they made the WRONG decision in avoiding tabs the first time"
While the blog is certainly informative, your sentence suggest that contrary to something the
So where exactly is the spin here?
Tabbed browsing?
Sounds like Microsoft is trying to inspire kids entering their thought thieves competetion.
Why is the "web browser" even considered a "market"? It's not like I pay any extra for IE. For that matter, most of these browsers are free, right? So what exactly is gained by having 98% of the universe using the same browser? AFAICT, this amounts to a "Mine's bigger" war between the browsers. Not flaming here, I really want to know.
Windows isn't the answer... it's the question. NO is the answer!
I used it not so long ago: I downloaded a large file in IE, thinking it wouldn't take long with the huge bandwidth. And I was right, shortly after the download was finished.
But the downloaded file for some reason had to be copied. While it was copying I couldn't use the computer, and after a while I wanted to get back to my work. I thought "I can download it during lunch break", so I cancelled it.
So the "cancel"-feature during copy itself is a useable feature. What I don't get is this: Why does it copy the file? (And when it is copied, there is only one file.)
Had I used any(?) other software to download the file, it would be ready as soon as it was downloaded.
I find the tabs in Moz too simple, and use this addon, Tabbrowser Extensions http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/tabextensions/index.h tml.en .
But I know that MS will make the tabs so simple that they are essentially useless, doing the common thing of dropping functionality to the lowest common denominator (much like movies and other products - companies are just too scared of potentially excluding someone because they "don't get it")
With firefox you'd not even need to reinstall, you could remove the profile from your home directory.. Assuming your running as an unpriveleged user who can't overwrite the firefox application files.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
i can't understand why tabs are more frightening than a taskbar full of ie windows?
maybe clicking the middle button makes it difficult...
I also express my fondness to this particular weed.
Due to the slashdot editors recieving a much needed sphincter bleaching, all editing duties have been relegated to the slashdot sLasH-Oh-MAtiQue Random Storie Editor v0.9. Cowboys mother apologises.
Avant uses IE's html rendering and already has tabs and more...
http://www.avantbrowser.com/
Are you crazy!! Or are you so removed from the real world??
Do you think the "Average Joe" cares whether the back-end http proto handlers are reused by every app or not? Heck, even if it is, the morons behind IE should have had the tiniest sense to ask themselves whether it should be that way...
And if you had any experience with some of these Browser Hijackers, you would know that spyware removal tools dont do shit. Both spybot and lavasoft did nada.
And searching and nuking registry entries is as painful as pulling nails out.. Why would anyone be subjected to that, when they can use an alternate browser??
I am not saying Firefox is the solution to everything and neither am I stating that IE is the worst. But the whole thinking behind the browser and how it has its roots in the OS is just poor/lame/immature design at best.
Rapid Nirvana
However it will not run on wine, most likely. So why should I care?
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
according to the BLOG someone mentioned earlier, IE 7 will have full alpha support for PNGs (except when dealing with MSTime, which I am not familiar with--anybody help me out here?). This is a major step in my mind, much more so than tabs.
Tabs are great, don't get me wrong, but they are a fairly minor issue compared to full PNG support and full CSS (1, 2, or 2.1) support. If three things from css get fixed only, I want to see position: fixed; right: x px; and bottom: x px; working properly. These alone would make my life much simpler.
I can only hope.
Oh, and that blog is here.
Enjoy.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Back in 1997 I got Lotus Word Pro with my windows pc. It had tabs and I used them a lot. They weren't used for different documents, but for sections within a document. It made browsing through a document a lot easier. (You could group them as well, and collapse or expand those groups.) I always wondered when MS Word would copy this.
I liked Word Pro a lot more than Word. Especially for layout it worked more precise and easier. I haven't used it for years though, for obvious reasons...
Will it support CSS1? Is CSS2 support scheduled for IE8.0 or should we expect that later?
If you remove IE - specifically, if you remove MSHTML.dll - all sorts of things will break. In XP at least (if not 2k) Windows Explorer will break. SQL Enterprise Manager (v7 was the last I used, I believe) will break. The Help Centre will break.
Lots of stuff, both MS and third party, uses mshtml.dll for rendering of HTML because it is guaranteed to exist.
What could be useful is the ability to return IE to an "official" condition, eg base OS install, SP 1, etc, in a single step. That would either require a read-only medium, or some particularly impressive voodoo magic to ensure the integrity of the installation files (whether cached or redownloaded).
Never forget that a machine infested with spyware is compromised. If you're sufficiently paranoid, you can't trust *any* data or executable on it any more.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
My father can hardly install his own software and calls me all the time with *simple* questions. When I moved him to Firefox and showed him the tabs, he thought that was the best thing about the browser. Once again Microsoft demonstrates that they are very out of touch with the average computer user.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Hooray!
If you revert to a version prior to Office 2000, you can have them right now. Never really understood why they did away with them in the first place.
It seems that GUI fashions are as circular as clothing fashions. It'll be inverse video next.
What's really baking my noodle is that I like tabbed usage for word processing, but for the life of me I can't figure out why I'd want tabbed web browsing - for some admittedly non-rational reason, I'm quite happy using multiple new windows with my web browser, but using multiple new windows with my word processor annoys me no end.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
IE breaks the web standards. Sites that aren't designed carefully do not work on anything but IE. If you can't use your favourite website, you can't switch away from Windows.
If M$ is listening (and for the sake of IE, I hope they are) the biggest need to save IE right now is....
... nah....
Heh, for a minute there it sounded like he was saying something about needing to save IE.... But, I mean, he couldn'ta been saying that
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
IE actually was the first browser to have tabbed browsing, in IE 3.x (and maybe in 4.x). It was dropped for usability reasons, just like any other MDI UI.
There's a registry hack that will stop it from popping up.
The reason its 'part of the OS' is that the back-end http protocol handlers are reused by every application (well, those that don't want to reinvent the wheel) to connect to the internet. 'Remove' IE (and I guess you don't mean remove 'just the GUI') would cripple a great many programs out there.
Why, back where I come from, we used to call that a "library" and it wasn't something we'd keep all warm and idling and share-y. Back in the day, every app could load up its own copy - they ain't so darned big that it matters a whole lot - and everyone goes away happy. This whole IE approach of tryin' to lash application code to this newfangled live executing library-like-but-not code reminds me of the time Poppa Burke was down at the mill and thought we oughta try to power the grinders from the engine on that old junk Chevy he kept settin' out around back. Sure it looked like a good idea, but when he got outta the hospital later that year, he admitted it didn't make no more sense than what yer talkin' about with this IE and "helper objects" and "registry" and stuff. Me? I'm a simple kind a feller and I'll settle for muh libraries the old fashioned way, thank you very much.
Spybot and Lavasoft remove most things. If they can't be removed with those, use HijackThis. Much easier and safer than browsing manually through your registry.
Maybe they'll starting working on standards compliance.
This space for rent
If I ever tried to remove MSN Messenger, delete the files and everything, like dark fucking magic everything would reappear and launch if I ever visited a MSN-site with MSIE.
I had to insert dummy-executables in the MSN Messenger directory to get rid of it. However, editing the registry to tell Windows that MSN Messenger wasn't there would also magically cause a reinstall just out of nowhere.
So I let Windows believe the dummy executables were MSN Messenger which were still techincally "installed". That and only that did it for me.
Seems like you got off easy, you lucky bastard!
The way windows constantly tries to battle the user, if he actually dares to defy the devine intensions of Redmond... *shudder* It's really all you need to know about the OS and the vendor.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Have you tried spyware removal tools? Or even a anti-virus program? Alternatively, just vape all the browser helper objects (search the registry, you'll find them) which sounds like what your problem was all along.
You've not had to deal with CoolWebSearch, I think. Whoever does the programming on that little piece of hell knows how to make life difficult. It's so deeply embedded that there are a few programmers that spend much of their free time researching only how to remove CWS.
I know people -- experienced people -- who prefer to just reformat and reinstall. It's easier and faster than trying to argue with CWS.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I started using Firefox on my Slowlaris 8 system at work and have since started using it at home. I have converted my wife a couple of my friends and am currently working on my dad. Its the tabbed browsing that gets 'em every time.
Devon in Denver
Why then can Solaris,Linux,BeOS, QNX access the internet without a integrated browser installed? Why could you uninstall IE 3 without serious harm?
You mean, you tried to remove some spyware app, but because you couldn't it's therefore IE's fault.
Well since ActiveX component technology is what allows these programs to become part of IE, I say hell yeah it's IE's fault, to an extent. A burglar is not the homeowners fault per say. But if you place a note on the door saying "no one is at home the key is under the mat", your doing everything short of asking known robbers to steal from you. The back-end http protocol handlers are reused by every application (well, those that don't want to reinvent the wheel)
A shared library is not a program! A DLL that cannot be changed or written over by any program would not allow a virus or malware and still provide your code reuse.
I've had tabbed browsing for a while now in Safari. I almost never use it, simply because I can't see any real difference between using a series of tabs and a series of windows to show multiple pages at a time.
Would someone please try to explain what's the difference, and what's the big deal?
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I've always disliked it when all programs of the same type roll into a single taskbar tab as it makes it harder to get to the window I'm wanting to deal with. On the other hand, if I had a separate taskbar tab for every single webpage I'm on, it would both overload the taskbar (making it useless to look for the tab I'm after), and means that all the tabs for browser windows dealing with the same subject are scattered all over the place.
;o)
;o)).
My prefered method of browsing is to open a separate window for each subject or website I'm browsing on, and then opening child pages as tabs of that window. This way, as I jump around from subject to subject, all I need to do it locate the appropriate window on the taskbar (of which I may now only have half a dozen), and then jump to the appropriate tab of that window (which again would probably average half a dozen).
This method, and tabbed browsing, is ideal for me seeing as I'm capricious enough that I'm often jumping around several different subjects at a certain time, leaving the "subject window" open for sometimes days at a time until I feel I've finished with it. I usually have a couple of windows open over an extended period of time dedicated to certain sites which I read daily (so that I can just walk in from work and hit refresh). Maybe my scatty nature isn't "ideal computer usage", but the computer should be my tool after all, rather than something that dictates how I live my life
In short, I hate being in a position now where I'm forced to use IE. It just doesn't work the way I do, and I suspect that that's the reason why a lot of people are getting excited about the new IE (although that energy would probably be better off going into getting Firefox
Don't take the above poster too seriously. He doesn't.
Not to complain but how is this really news? This has been on /. before.
Insert Sig Here
IE is absolutely rubbish and so out of date. I cannot believe that people still download and use it with so much other competition around. Firefox absolutely wipes the floor with it and I am not 100% keen on Firefox!
I have to use IE on my Uni PC's and it chuckles me when I see people click on a link and get blasted with new Windows and popups, it is an absolute joke and should be dumped by all. If there were awards for the worst pieces of software ever written then I believe the IE series would scoop the lot.
Internet Exploring for those who do not know better.
Quoth the BSOD
Windows still has a host of vulnerabilities and without IE, the end-user will be quite unable to install the host of Critical Fixes, that are available through the Windows Update Pages. (Since Windows Update refuses to work with anything, other then IE.)
Sure, there's the 'Automatic Update' feature in modern Service Packs for both Windows 2000 and Windows XP... Unless I am mistaken, that feature utilizes the core of Internet Explorer to be able to perform its functions.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
That InformationWeek article mentioned in the post doesn't say anywhere that "the tabs will be very 'basic' due to fears from Microsoft that tabbed browsing might scare off too many users." What it says is that this was the reason they didn't implement the feature before, when they really should have, and that they now admitted their short-sightendness and amended etc etc.
I'm no Microsoft fan, nowhere close. But I'm no fan of linking to a page and quoting what it doesn't say either.
I knew I should have patented those tabs when I had the chance.
safari - do i have to say more? and konqueror! in contrast, the friendly omniweb does not have classic tabs (well, a different form, but they tell you more about the content). so, your theory is not as silly as it may look!
HijackThis does not deal with all known variants of Browser Hijacks. I do not recall what I was trying to remove, but it was far nastier than CoolWebSearch or other popular Browser Hijacks.
Rapid Nirvana
f you remove MSHTML.dll - all sorts of things will break
4 /0382.html, which enables HTML rendering over Gecko will let us dump IE completely. It will depend on how many hidden APIs are needed by Windows, I suppose.
I wonder if the MSHTML.dll being built in WINE http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2005/0
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I'm guessing you have never gone up against CoolWebSearch. Its a horrible a trojan, and even with the spyware software detecting/removing it, it then manages to still install itself again.
It took me a good part of a day manaually editing files/registry to kill it enough so the spyware killer could take it out.
Having the option to uninstall IE would of cleared it right up.
tabs are cool, but much much awesomer is http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/ after installing a few greasemonkey scripts, i cant imagine using anything but firefox ever again.
The thing is, the way that Firefox is set up, many new users don't know that tabs even exist. I've tested it on my family. They treat it exactly like they treat IE. If you make the tabs available, but only really noticeable to people who know how to use them (a la Firefox), then no one could possibly be scared. How can someone be scared of a feature they don't know exists?
If you think the lack of Tabbed browsing is reducing IE's popularity, then I want whatever you are smoking. IE is getting unpopular due to spyware and drive-by-installs of malware. Why people are switching to firefox is to avoid those porn popups and phishing sites.
Security and geeks tired of fixing their in-law's PC's is the reason for IE's market share dipping. Oh, and faster PC's capable of rendering XUL fast.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Firefox should have a patent on tabbed browsing.
That would have been scarry... and could support Firefox developers or other OpenSource projects.
Please, please OpenSource developers, set up a foundation to patent all the OpenSource bright ideas and let M$ pay for them if they ever want to use them.
Feed them with their own medicin, please.
All good points. But how many users are smart enough to find the Add/Remove programs option. It's scary, but the number is lower than you might think.
Gnome, KDE, OSX all include browsers and share their respective html rendering engines (gtkhtml, khtml, and er... khtml). Yeah, they could "access the internet" without it, but an integrated html engine sure seems like the right way to go. I just with the IE one was... you know... BETTER.
Jeremy
I don't know much about MDI messasges. But I do know that Opera seems to do a pretty good job of it. (Course they may be doing it another way and just be faking the look and feel of a MDI interface.)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
"The reason its 'part of the OS' is that the back-end http protocol handlers are reused by every application (well, those that don't want to reinvent the wheel) to connect to the internet."
That's a lame excuse for a company who didn't even see fit to include a TCP/IP stack until around '94. Now that they have one, it's easy for every malware writer and his brother to hijack it, but nearly impossible for the rightful owner to upgrade it with something better.
This has nothing to do with efficient reuse of code. It has everything to do with Gates being a greedy sob who would fuck his dead mother's corpse if there was a buck to be made.
And a clue with it, please.
I switched to Firefox from IE, mostly because I loved tabbed browsing. But you know what? It's just a feature people! It's not the cure for cancer!
I've been using Firefox for nine months now, and there's not that big a difference. The fact that MS will include tabs means there will be even less.
I do not recall what I was trying to remove, but it was far nastier than CoolWebSearch
In your original post, you said it was CoolWebSearch. So what's the story?
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
A viral strain of CoolWebSearch.. not CoolWebSearch itself. Look at my original post.
CoolWebSearch can be removed by CWShredder. CWShredder didnt do *@#$ with what I had.
Rapid Nirvana
The funny thing in the tabbed browsing argument from the M$ guy is that it really is just so not credible, and those people really seem to think users and others are just idiots.
"Some people have asked why we didn't put tabs in IE sooner," Hachamovitch wrote. "Initially, we had some concerns around complexity and consistencywill it confuse users more than it benefits them? Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don't have?"
Big lie. The simple fact that they didn't even consider making it optional is because with the current IE codebase, it's just plain impossible. Everyone knows how M$ can't create modular softwares. It s not the Windows OS, it's the M$ culture and the poor programming and software engineering that is part of their habits.Well the fact that "everyone else" (OS X, KDE, GNOME) has since gone down that road would suggest is was a reasonably good idea. Code re-use generally *is* considered good programming, after all.
The reason its 'part of the OS' is that the back-end http protocol handlers are reused by every application (well, those that don't want to reinvent the wheel) to connect to the internet. 'Remove' IE (and I guess you don't mean remove 'just the GUI') would cripple a great many programs out there.
Http is not rocket science. It's actually pretty simple as far as protocols go. We're an application development outfit, not systems programmers, but even we've had occasion to implement HTTP using low level sockets. There are lots of details of course if you're aiming for 100% compliance (which our application didn't happen to need since it was a client). Providing an API for HTTP in the O/S is not a big deal, nor is it a concern from an anti-trust. Naturally, being able to replace the implementation is just good engineering.
What's really more the issue is HTML rendering. This is forcing a much bigger chunk of IE down the user's throat. HTML rendering is complex, Microsoft gets it largely wrong.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
CWShredder does a great job of getting rid of the various CoolWebSearch variants. I always start with the Merjin version, then update it, run it again, update it, etc, until I'm at the current version. Takes about 5 minutes (with all the updates and everything) and works great.
rm -rf
The inconsistent use of tabs in the Windows API is just one more example of the fact that MS doesn't "get" what an API friggin' does for user interfaces. It isn't just Office. It's everything. We're all the blind men with the elephant in this OS. Every part of the elephant is separately designed by an MS team that isn't talking to all the other teams.
The way tabs have been used in "Control Panels" over the years is a decent example. How many times have you looked at an open Control Panel tab with "OK," "Cancel," and "Apply" buttons, along with a little X on the upper right, all of which are going to do exactly the same thing, because the last change you made was on another tab? The developers seem to have gotten as far as "tabs save space!" without thinking of how they affect what the buttons do for us. DUH.
Not that anyone's perfect, but Microsoft is spectacularly bad at consistently implementing its own API rules, to the extent that they even exist. Get to a third party developer, and you may as well throw whatever you know as a user out the window... so to speak.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
only they just work for the same workspace
I don't feel like it...
Disclaimer (I prefer to use Firefox)
in IE 6 (at work use - gag) I can't stand the fact that when you have the favorites pane open, that you cannot right click on a favorite to "open new window". Instead, you have to CTRL-N then click the favorite. Annoying to me.
In firefox (correct me if I'm wrong), you start with no tabs, then you have to CTRL-T to open a new tab, then you can double click next to the tab to open new ones.
In Netscape 7 and Mozilla, you start with one tab, but then a double click would immediately open a new tab, no CTRL-T needed. I wish this one thing was in firefox.
Dupe of earl, dupe, dude, dupe of earl, dupe, dupe, dupe of earl, dupe, dupe.
Dupe, dupe, dupe
You're joking... Right?
-The BSOD
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
A shared library is not a program! A DLL that cannot be changed or written over by any program would not allow a virus or malware and still provide your code reuse.
Granted those Desktops & OS X have browsers but they can be uninstalled. They aren't integrated into the system. A shared library doesn't get infected by malware, browser do! When have you heard about a stdlib worm, or a gtkhtml,gecko data miner. Unfortunately, there are known DLL's that are part of Malware packages. But allowing programs the ability to write to the sys32 directory is asking for trouble.
tabs were one of the two reasons i switched from IE to firefox. (the other was the adblocker) does anyone else feel that microsoft, in its everlasting drive to dominate the market, stole another idea, the same way they stole the "recycle bin" from apple. you would think that with all that money and legions of programmers they would be able to come up with original ideas?
I don't get it. Really. I just don't get it.
Years ago, MS told us that the multiple-document interface was bad because users supposedly weren't able to deal with it. Then they stepped back and reintroduced it in their next office update. Now IE is going to get MDI in the only way that really is usable: with tabs.
But that's not the point that I'm not getting. Pondering the best, most usable solution is a good thing. Even if it takes a couple of years. Even if it's done by Microsoft. No. What I don't get is the apparent hypocrisy.
Whether a browser is safe and usable isn't only determined by such in-your-face features as boring ol' tabs. Have you ever tried to tweak IE's options? Whether you are a complete noob or somebody that has been admining Windows machines for the last ten years, the options dialog is one part of IE that makes you run away screaming for you mommy.
Options with labels that are hard to understand (to put it mildly) that are caved into a too small dialog that cannot be resized. I don't know how much of this is due to a very bad localization. But the German version actually features an option that you could back-translate to "Enable page transitions". Help item: "Determines whether Internet Explorer will blank the current page and display the next page when you leave a page." Huh?
If somebody really thinks that tabs might make IE a substantially better browser, he hasn't used it yet.
This inclusion of tabs in IE could be a blessing in disguise for the Firefox campaign. See, most people I know are reluctant to use FF because it's different. "Ooooh, but what does that do? It's too confusing..." etc. However, once IE takes it up, some users might gradually be introduced to a more Firefoxy way of doing things. Once this happens, it'll be easier to switch them. "See all those IE features? Well, if you use this program, you can keep them all but you won't get those annoying toolbars and malware! And it runs faster too!" In other words, by making IE more like Firefox, we make it easier to use Firefox instead of IE, as FF has all the features but less of the crap. Just my 2 cents.
> "fears from Microsoft that tabbed browsing might scare off too many users"
Why don't they turn tab support off as the default, with an easy way to turn them on (or ask user first time)? Safari has tabs turned off as default, and has a preference option to turn them on.
Sig Nature
Funny... MS has never worried about scaring the living shit out of users in the past.
// This is not a sig.
Who needs Tabs, when we have Alt-Tabs? For me personally, Tabs (multiple windows inside one shell window) are out of the question, since it is much easier to switch with Alt-Tab(multiple shell windows) then it is to switch with Ctrl-Tab (multiple tabs inside one shell window), because my thumb hurts less.
Besides, what's next? Are they going to stuff all office apps inside tabs of a single master app? Running IE along with Mozilla in the same window?? LETTING WEB PAGES CHOOSE THEIR OWN BROWSER??? Like Flash/Quicktime/etc. ???? Will there be a REVOLUTION in INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY and the INTERNET ?????
Nope. Sadly, it's just plain old tabs, that's all there is.
ah. '94. There was a year. Oh yes, I remember installing lanmanager and netbios on my OS/2 (warp mind you, not the old OS/2) using a whole stack of floppy disks. I think it was '94.. could have been '96 or '97 actually.
Memories of the good old days.. IIRC, no desktop PC vendors provided TCP/IP anyway, it was all Appletalk or IPX or Netbios or Banyan Vines.
Doesn't seem so far away, yet also seems like we've come a long way since then.
Now that's something I'd like to see MS do - separate out the API from the implementation, and allow the actual rendering engine provider to be configurable. That would allow you to use an API-compliant engine instead of mshtml.dll.
It would also probably mean the death of IE, of course, as probably most technically competent people would swap mshtml.dll out for a compliant Gecko or similar...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
the problem is, is that the IE control itself is embedded into many 3rd party applications. those apps generally don't ship it themselves and require it to be on the operating system. therefore, a COMPLETE remove of the application would have a substantial knock-on effect to other applications - so would probably be a bad idea.
personally, i just use firefox as default and have removed IE icon from my desktop. unfortunately, i still have to use IE every now and then for certain web sites - sure you can in some way blame microsoft for these web sites because they aren't standards compliant blah blah blah and IE renders them fine - whatever, fact, they exist and sometimes it is neccessary to use IE (my online banking, for example). so, there's another case not to totally remove it.
Except, I bet (not 100% sure) that OSx, KDE and Gnome are coded in a way that's easy to replace their current browser and its not dependant on a particular product, it only requires it to follow some standard. Probably Windows does that too, except that the standard is secret and cannot be used by anyone else except them (and now perhaps Sun?).
Kinda defeats the whole purpose, doesn't it ?
Imply that they invented tabbed browsing and all the rest. They'll throw the word "innovation" around a lot.
Even more depressing: watch the MS fanbois eat it up.
Even CWShredder doesn't always work. It's a constant war between those two, and sometimes it's not possible to wait for the next version of Shredder to come out.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
... ever care about.
They screwed up the windows MDI before y2k and they never figured out that tabs was as workable as opening multiple windows within other windows.
It would mean reworking most of their OS so it can work with a multitude of things.
Never happen until somebody drags them kicking and screaming into 'The Year of the Fruit Bat'.
Like their SQL's definition of N:M.
'It doesn't exist!'
'Its a NO NO' and
'Fuggedaboudit'
It doesn't exist because they are still too ignurnt to figure out that its actually simple to implement in SQL, as a table of rows referencing rows in other tables. [They'd have to define Relationships and keep track of them the same way that they're currently doing for objects/tables.])
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
You can uninstal Safari on OS X - but would you really want to uninstall WebKit? the HTML rendering framework? That would be bad news for iTunes, quite a few third party IM clients, Dashboard Widgets etc.
...doesn't like tabbed browsing?
Technoli
Since I've already modded in this story I can't post under my name so here are my comments.
One must remember that IE7 will only be available for users who run XP. If you're still using 2K as I do at home (or the agency I work for which has over 2K people), you won't be able to use it.
I'm sure there are tens of millions of people who still use 2K and some, like my parents, who still have a 98 machine which works just fine for them, who are now locked out of these 'new' features.
While it's nice to see Microsoft finally get into the 20th century as far as browser technology is concerned, this limitation shows why integrating a browser into an OS is a bad thing.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe if you have 2K you can run IE7. The last I read you wouldn't be able to so if I'm wrong someone please point in the correct direction.
I've been using tabs with IE6 for a while now. Anyone who uses Visual Studio .NET 2002/2003/2005 or recent MSDN versions will know what I mean. It works quite well, nothing grandeous but I'm guessing that's what we'll be getting in IE7 by default.
Ctrl + Page Up/Page Down to switch back and forth between tabs. AFAIK Ctrl + Tab only goes in one direction.
Chewie does not get a medal. Come on, George. Can a Wookie get a medal?
"The reason its 'part of the OS' is that the back-end http protocol handlers are reused by every application (well, those that don't want to reinvent the wheel) to connect to the internet. 'Remove' IE (and I guess you don't mean remove 'just the GUI') would cripple a great many programs out there."
The court would like to thank you, Sir, for coughing up Exhibit R that M$ is Pure Evil.
About replacing MS with Gecko: http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm
Back in '97/98 (can't remember exactly) I wrote a replacement front-end program for Internet Explorer 4.0 with tabbed browsing, because I was displeased with the bloated iexplore.exe frontend.
It also had a form of pop-up blocking, where I would force all new window request into a new tab, rather than letting new windows spawn.
I never finished it because I couldn't figure out how to get the IE control to inform my frontend whenever the URL changed, so I could update my address bar URL.
After getting stuck with the above problem, I must of went and played with something else, like writing another program that was never destined to be finished.
"It's the smell! If there is such a thing." Agent Smith - The Matrix
People might be afraid of not having MSIE on their system, you know... :)
Do you remember the time Bill Gates told us that this emerging Internet is not a real advantage, in fact people might be afraid of using it because this is some strange new technology, luckily there is Microsoft with their plan to build Microsoft Network in orbit, so everyone is going to be connected to Microsoft Network, and this strange technology that is already obsolete would remain confined to academic organizations?
If Microsoft says people are afraid of tabs, then people are afraid of tabs. If Apple says mouse doesn't need more than one button, then the mouse doesn't need to have two, nor three, nor any other number of buttons. One shall be the number of buttons, and number of buttons will be one.
That leaves out us, bunch of freakin' anarchists who use FLOSS software. Indeed we are lost lambs! My mouse has one wheel and four buttons. My browser can spawn as much tabs as I want. My KDE can have more than one desktop at the same time. I can have variety of Linux distros. My God, indeed I am lost! There's no salvation for me, for I do not fear such freedom of choice! :))
Abolimba already does this by wrapping IE. I think it has been out for at least a couple of years. http://www.autag.com/abolimba.php
My friend is a SysAdmin and he's installed FireFox and ThunderBird on his mother's PC so he won't get calls about the machine anymore.
It seems to have worked.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Sessions, Mouse Gestures, User style sheets, and SVG
Cool web search actually has an uninstaller. It's hidden from OS unfortunately.
Microsoft's anti-spyware identifies it after a full scan and it will appear in add/remove programs. A simple remove will get rid of it after that.
CWS is so last year now but yes, in the beginning it was worse than any virus out there. Basing a full browser removal on 1 piece of spyware is crazy imho. You're just avoiding the issue, not fixing the problem.
In the olden days, a lot of browsers stole their ideas from this guy . Here's wondering if it'll happen again.
Wouldn't surprise me, not even a little bit, if MS implements tabs in multiple rows. And when you click on one in the back row it will rearrange them all. That's the Microsoft way.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Tabbed browsing is irritating because it throws off window management.
I honestly have no idea why you think this. Maybe you have very different browsing habits than I do but I find tabbed browsing makes my life much easier. As others have mentioned, Ctrl-Tab works great for navigating tabs.
Anyway, if you have a few bucks one to spare, one really nice way to navigate tabs is with a Griffin PowerMate. I set up so that twisting to the right sends Ctrl-Tab thus moving through successive tabs to the right and twisting left sends Ctrl-Shift-Tab moving through tabs to the left. Pushing the button closes the tab. (I also have push-twist set up to go forward/backward) This lets me do most browing without ever needing to touch the keyboard and makes navigating tabs very fast. Plus you can use it for other things in different applications. Haven't got it running on my linux box though I understand there are some third party drivers available.
And no I'm not affiliated in any way with Griffin Technologies. Just recommending a product I've found useful.
"will it confuse users more than it benefits them? Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don't have tabs?"
There are tabs all over the Windows interface. Maybe they are afraid that having tabs in IE will highlight the fact that the rest of Windows is an inconsistent mess of tabs, navigation panes and hyperlinks. Does implementing tabs in IE mean that those Workplace Shell guys back at IBM were right?
Of course, I have to ask one question. What is IE's market share in Asia on machines not running pirated copies of Windows? That's the end game scenario involving Microsoft winning market share by giving away copies of software, isn't it?
Like Malibu Stacey getting a new hat, Microsoft is adding a pretty accessory to their product without exploring the underlying problems with IE. What will continue to scare me away from IE is the plethora of security vulnerabilities, it's impossibly tight integration to the operating system and its proprietary, non-standards compliant "features".
I don't know what's more irritating, Apple thinking that one mouse button is enough, or Microsoft thinking that non-tabbed browsing is the way to go. Tabbed browsing (or for word processors) is so obviously a good thing, I'm amazed Microsoft hasn't realised it until now.
On a side note, I wonder if people will spend longer on the net because of this. Is there a correlation between tabs, and spending longer on the net?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
A shared library is not a program! A DLL that cannot be changed or written over by any program would not allow a virus or malware and still provide your code reuse.
Well if you had your computer set up right, that's how it would be. It's not the library's fault that you insist on logging on and running all sorts of random binaries as root.
funny munging
How silly is that. Make it a preference and default it to inactive. I think that's what Safari does. So the users who don't care about tabs or don't want them don't ever even have to know, and the users who have a clue do care will be able to browse with a bit of decency, even if they are using IE.
RP
Do you also never open more than one document at a time in a given instance of Word or Excel?
From very early on, Microsoft Office and other Microsoft software has had the ability to open multiple documents in the same application -- it's known as MDI, Multiple Document Interface. Tabbed browsing implements exactly the same model, except that it provides a more directly intuitive model for accessing multiple documents -- instead of using Ctrl-F6 (who came up with that?!) or the Window menu, you can use Ctrl-Tab or click on a visible, labelled tab.
Basically, tabbed browsing provides a more usable version of MDI, and shows up just how lacking in innovation Microsoft really is, not just in their browser but in one of their major cash-cow product lines, Office.
Me thinks you mean Windows Messenger. MSN Messenger uninstalls just fine. I have done so in the past. Windows Messenger is a PITA! Windows Messenger is like MSN messenger and it even works with it and looks the same as a older version, but it's there mainly for corporate use....one can set up their own messenger server. There is a hack that removes it for good and I have had to use it.
Gorkman
Does it mean it's not Red E?
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
I forgot that for once we are actually to some extent talking about Microsoft software and tabbed browsing simultaneously. Please disregard that last line in the parent post.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Ctrl-Shift-Tab goes in the other direction.
Like Opera had years ago, and Mozilla copied years later. Tabs were a welcome addition to Mozilla, but let's be honest: Opera invented them.
-Dan
Not sure if it will work on IE (never tried, but I don't see why not), but I found that the equally annoying MSN messenger had an awfully hard time popping itself up unexpectely once I'd deleted all of its files.
Windows update likes to reinstall it, for some reason or other.
he didnt want to de-install it forever, just long enough to remove or cripple the spyware.
I've tried using tabbed browsing in Firefox on several occasions. Personally, I hate it. I want all of my browser windows to show up as separate buttons on the taskbar. I couldn't care less if MS adds tabbed browsing to IE, because I only use it for sites that require it, or on my old computer where some banner ads (especially Flash) will crash Firefox. As long as I'm not forced to use tabs, then yes, put them in there, make the people who actually like it happy.
Probably the majority of apps that embed MSHTML uses it for a user interface and binds to local COM controls. "Add/Remove Program" and the like will not work with the Gecko renderer.
> tabs will be very "'basic' due to fears from Microsoft that tabbed browsing might scare off too many users.
Does Microsoft think users are stupid and can't learn new things? OK some users are total newbies, but damn i'm sure they are intelligent enough to find/Google a way to turn tabs off.
Or better yet leave them off by default? Nobody is preaching that tabs have to be on by default, just that there is a demand for them. You know...that'd actually be 'original'. Lookup 'originality'. Or better yet 'innovative' or 'thought'. Innovative is before original in the dictionary by the way so you better look that up first..just incase you can't work out you can flick backwards.
I guess someone will comment and say i'm being totally ignorant but Microsoft shouldn't be insulting their potential users with such feable excuses.
The 'system restore' feature of windows was detecting that MS Messenger was missing, and 'fixing it'. As only an incompetent fool would want to delete msn messenger.
I think if you turned off system restore you could delete that and the pinball game.
Just be glad you werent auto-reported to the department of homeland security for being subversive.
..if FF supported a domain proxy (MS ISA) out of the box. Right now i get things working using APS but this is a one-user-only solution, and not a pretty one even.
I had the exact same problem as the original poster with CoolWebSearch. I have no idea where it came from, I know for sure that I did not agree to install it (I am very anal about "click to instal" stuff, and never agree to it, and no, I don't use P2P, no Kazaa, no Gator, none of that shit). I ran every spyware tool that I could find (SpyBot, adAware etc), I ran two different "commercial AV" products (Norton, total piece of shit, and McAfee, equally shitty), I dug through the registry, I checked message boards, I talked to my network of geeks. I tried everything I could think of to get rid of this hijacker. It would be gone, all would be well, and on restart, bang, it would be back. I messed with this for the better part of a week.
.9?), I have NEVER found a single piece of ad/spy/malware. Not one. My surfing habits have not changed, just my browser. I used to scan my machine every couple of days, and I would always find something, usually quite a few somethings. Not one single thing since I switched. Not one. No popups, no drive by installs, no grief at all.
Finally, I could take no more, and I installed the Fox. Since I did that (pre 1.0, maybe
If the scumware developers start to hit FF, I will still stick with it. Why? Because in the last 6 years (about 5 with IE, and 1 with FF) I have had more positive browsing experiences with FF than I had with IE, despite IE having 500% more opportunity to impress me.
Good bye IE, please die a slow painful death. Developed by idiots, for idiots. Fuck that.
Bad news for Firefox, obviously, because it seems to be popular only because IE sucks so badly in comparison. My girlfriend and I tried out Firefox for a few months for average-style-but-heavy browsing, getting it decked out exactly as I wanted it, and then we switched back to Maxthon because the Firefox UI/tab-switching was so sluggish, Gecko hurt our eyes, it rendered some pages pretty strangely, the ad blocker was hard to access, and on her computer, it drew far more processor/memory resources than Maxthon does.
Whether these are good issues or not -- I'm not an expert on Firefox -- the point is that with IE getting tabs, one of the major reasons I push FF and Maxthon with people is gone. Now it's just mouse gestures and security (in that order, heh). And if IE gets mouse gestures, though I personally demand a browser with more functionality, I will no longer tell people they should check out Firefox for a better browsing experience.
Too bad. It was really gaining momentum.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Opera -- Opera scares a lot of people...
It's the arias. Arias in operas scare lots of people. Although personally, it's the overtures which frighten me.
I'm not sure (no documentation at hand and I'm no MS guru), but I think that separation of implementation is done. I'm _entirelly_ not sure if it's done well.
Segmentation fault. Ore dumped.
I'm predicting right now that IE7's new tabbed browsing feature will come complete with IE only HTML code for webpages to open links in new tabs. Which, of course, means that it is only a matter of time before we have pop-up tabs!!!
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Do you think the "Average Joe" cares whether the back-end http proto handlers are reused by every app or not? Heck, even if it is, the morons behind IE should have had the tiniest sense to ask themselves whether it should be that way...
Even if this is done do these applications need the entirity of a browser? As opposed some components.
And if you had any experience with some of these Browser Hijackers, you would know that spyware removal tools dont do shit. Both spybot and lavasoft did nada.
You need either "Hijack This" or to manually edit the registry.
Not only is it imbedded in the OS, but you need IE to use WindowsUpdate.com - it tells you to go download IE6.0 if you try to use FireFox.
This is gonna hurt.
Maybe hilding off on tabbed browsing was a good thing - as in a one button mouse was a good thing. I installed firefox on my girlfriends fathers computer (aged 50ish [the man, not the computer]). I told him about the perks of tabbed browsing, the amazing extensible architecture, and the technical superiority. He said to me, "So this will stop virus' then."
The majority of people aren't slashdotters. They don't want a sophisticated browser or operating system. They want a productive system. The caveat is that now enough people are in the habit of tabbed browsing that the rest will be easier to convert. However these things come slow. How many people know of others (not you yourself) who've had firefox installed and have never even installed an extension.
I support gecko browsers, and K-based browsers. I even support Opera (although I don't use it personally). The extremes stabilise the middle.
As a monopoly though, microsoft sets the agenda, and for all those computers which you and I fix each day, the lack of complexity and a contrived standard have been good.
For the idiot in accounting, having to switch between windows may have been enough of a disincentive that I wouldn't have to retrieve his spreadsheet after he overloaded and crached his computer.
I am currently using Safari and have firefox open in the background. I support these. However, IE is enough for some people (especially older users).
IE has its strong points, that's all I'm saying.
--Don't hurt me--
Aiiieeeeeeee!!!!
Tab-u-lay-sheee-ONNN leads to def-uh-cay-sheee-ONNN
Use AVG free edition to remove the virus. Works better than all the other subscription based anti-virus programs.
exactly
I just downloaded the IE6 TabTool pointed out in Dave's Blog. I have begun to think, my most used feature of Firefox is only available in IE.
Under this situation, and with IE7 coming up with tabs, why should one think of using Firefox?
Dont say security, I dont see the things are secure with 1.0.4 release only 2 weeks since 1.0.3 or SMS/automatic patches update from internet for apps.
Senthil
When I working in VS.net, I love to have all my code files on tabs because I have so many of them, and I am usually not working on more than one at a time (and if I am using two at once, I split the document pane)
With my web browser, I have never found the need to use tabs. In fact, tabs have often confused me because I wind up having two or three firefox windows each with a variety of tabs, and they aren't organized well. In VS.net, every window is a solution and the tabs are documents in that solution, but in a browser, there is no analogous divider, so I would like the ability to move tabs between windows.
Some poster above wanted tabs in all MS Office apps, this just proves that the concept of tabs could be universally applied to all applications... kind of like the taskbar! Think about it, tabs aren't any different than a taskbar, except they are nested one level deeper.
I propose a hierarchical, organizable taskbar. Rather than a hard and fast rule like "if the taskbar gets full, group like applications" I would like to be able to create groups and move windows into and out of groups. Applications should have API control over their own windows organization (user overridable of course), so VS.net could, for example, group applications by solution.
This solution eliminates the need to add tabs support to every single application and creates a common and more robust tab solution.
What does everyone think?
http://brandonbloom.name
I mean, I'm not trying to whine -- I'm not such a loser that I'd get jealous of other people for getting articles posted. I'm just honestly wondering if Slashdot claims to have any sort of process for determining if a story gets posted or not. If not, and an article's fate depends on the unpredictable mood fluctuations of the editor who sees it first, then fine, but I'd rather they not make it seem like a precise and intricate process. "Confusing or hysterical sounding writeup" or "Someone already submitted your story"? Ha!
(Apologies for offtopicness.)
Signature.
Are users in general scared of Excel too? After all it has tabs
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
See, it's not Microsoft's fault. It's just that they're not able to hire* as many programmers as they need, which puts a limit on the amount of innovation they're able to do. It's those darn American programmers -- all they want to do is sit around and eat triple-decker hamburgers and earn a "decent living". If you want better software, lift the H1-B visa cap!
(* read: don't want to pay for)
At least recent Mozilla/Firefox security updates were due to exploits in drag and drop tab interaction.
For example
Watch out MS - tabbed browsing ain't as simple as you might be thinking...
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
I have mentioned this b4 in other threads, and I will mention this again. Can the Mozilla team in charged of Thunderbird include tabs (for e-mail, contacts, etc) for this email reader? Something like Lotus Notes R5 and above. This will align with Firefox's use of tabs for multiple web pages.
I once "repaired" a windows PC of somebody I know by manually removing all references to internet explorer from the registry and wiping all internet explorer directories. Then installing it anew, ... worked quite well. (The computer was suffering from a botched install of a new internet explorer, so there were parts of two versions of it on there.)
Why could you uninstall IE 3 without serious harm?
Because it turns out that in the last ten years applications have come to depend on shared IE libraries, because they're always there.
The difference was in the openess of it all.
MS IE had an advantage over other browsers at that time.
The fact that everyone else does it is just because reusability, in general, is a good idea. Not the particular case of html rendering.
errera hunamum ets
Parent is unsubstantiated wide-eyed ranting.
Hey, look! This Z3 is a computer, just like Eniac!
One that hath name thou can not otter
Damn! And I was holding out for an Multi Window Interface (MWI) version of IE. Then it could suck like office by adding taskbar hacks for windows you can't see.
Hopefully you tried CWShredder? Best thing out there, because Merijn got a vendetta
http://liquidben.com - Aspiring to an 'under construction' gif
From the blog:
Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don't have tabs?
Um, What's been at the bottom of Excel for over a decade? Oh, excuse me, those are "worksheets", not "tabs". How could I be so insensitive?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Can't wait for that M$ javascript extension to create new IE tabs.
Hehehe...
Who gives a fuck, tabs in the browser or tabs on the task bar?
I don't!
When properly locked down in the Internet Zone IE is the most secure browser in existance.
IE 7.0 will for the most part will rely on properly locking these security settings down.
Finally all sites will code HTML without scripts of any kind if they wish to have viewers, as it should be.
KIO-HTTP is what makes an 'internet' (http) connection in KDE, not KHTML.
Also gtkhtml is a port of an old version of khtml to gtk. So it should be "(khtml, khtml, and khtml)".
It is when the default account is setup to be 'root'. You have to go out of your way to NOT be an administrator account in Windows.
At least it used to be the case that IIS would not work either without IE installed. Hmm, maybe, just maybe they should separate the shared backend rendering libraries from the browser as well.
I'll ambitiously candenza you.
With alt tab, as we all know, you can press it, and then release and press it again to go back to the last app, hence the quick cycle feature. If you hold it down you can go through all your apps.
But with ctrl-tab to get the same functionality, you have to press ctrl-shit-tab to go back.
I'd rather it behave just like alt tab. Can't think of a reason off hand why it shouldn't
I'd rather not have tab browsing on IE. Currently when IE blew up on my face ("Do you want to report this bug?"), it only blew up the independent browser, but with tab browsing it will blow up all my session.
run this to remove msn messenger:
RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove
Tabs implemented at the application level are just a temporary solution until someone figures out how to create a window manager that organises windows in a deep hierarchy. This will take some time because it is difficult to create a UI that finds the sweet spot between:
Nobody does.
/. back in '98 thought the answer was to knee cap microsoft instead of promoting competition.
Competition is good. It's the whole basis of free market capitalism.
And the fucking idiots at
Sheesh.
Anonymous is not stupid, anonymous remembers all comments and detects dupes. You lie! You never had a roommate that uninstalled IE4. You just spit out your fragmented memory of this comment:
= 11655462
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=139241&cid
Anonymous does NOT forgive! NEVER!
it seems everyone who has replied so far hasnt used opera and wonders what's so great about it. (And one person who says he prefers firefox because it has a feature... which opera also has)
Firefox's tabbed browsing is a set of buttons with a tabbed look which swap the active URL (*I know it's not as simple as just that, no use pointing that out). Opera on the other hand is a full MDI- something which OSS programs seem to all be against for some reason (usually saying "the window manager should handle that"). The MDI allows you to resize individual windows (call the websites which pop-up small windows for logins poorly-designed, but they still exist, and it's helpful to support them), view multiple pages simultaneously under a single window, view pages at multiple resolutions (good for editing), basically it's multiple browser windows contained within another browser window. It really is much better done than Firefox's method (whether or not you prefer one or the other, Opera's you can do more with and you can still use it the way firefox works if you want to).
And just to get this out there: I dont use Opera. I used to, but switched to firefox when Opera starting crashing every five seconds (this is not a problem I've heard anyone else complain of)
I think Opera looks better (well, looked better, they tend to revamp the entire UI every release, it probably looks like a small nobbed ball covered in pulsating yellow fibers by now), and has a much better focus on usability. That's to be expected: It's a product for sale, it's going to have a better UI.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I will be very surprised if IE implements full support of any version of CSS, ever. Politics dictate that they need to talk about improving CSS support, and they do need to improve support enough to back up that talk. But frankly it's obviously not in their best interests to be 100% compatible with other browsers, because they'd lose their lock-in.
I'm not sure why people don't seem to get that. Just read any recent article where corporate CIOs are talking about Firefox - they all play the same tune. The majority of the CIOs say "we've investigated Firefox, and we'd like to move to it - but we've got too many in-house apps written for Internet Explorer" (meaning ActiveX I assume).
As a sidenote, these CIOs are also basically saying that they've had to disable probably the most important security improvement of XP SP2, which is having ActiveX off by default.
#DeleteChrome
tabbed browsing
MS is going to send me a bill for browsing now?
Jeez, what else are they going to charge us for...
God I wish I had modpoints and hadn't posted tons of comments in this story already. I'd give you a "+1, Well placed STFU n00b" on the spot.
Integrate IE with the windows explorer properly already. As in: allow me the ability to open a bunch of windows within explorer... and have other pages within a site appear as "subfolders" (like the "history")... also the ability to save them as "mapped" favourites...
In other words: make the web one massive "hard drive" for me.
IE user: Erm... I'm using the internets and then this thingy came up.
Tech support guy: That's a tab
IE user: Whaaaa????
Tech support guy: You see that button where you put the phone down?
IE user: Yes...
Tech support guy: Press it
IE user: Ok
*disconnected*
Please don't force tabs on us. At least make it optional where the user can disable it. Thanks.
Not at all. Programmer time costs a lot more than CPU time.
I am trolling
Considering the Best Audio Player in the World
has Tabs.
Also the new gui component, foo_columns, is even more
awesomer!
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
Well since IE is so tightly integrated with the windows explorer. Wouldn't it be cool to see a tabbed explorer. I mean if Microsoft wanted to make changes to their browser then that would mean... *gasp* making changes to their shell interface!
Why the hell should you need an external program to repair your OS?
I am trolling
The problem Ive always had with browsers that have tabbed browsing is that they never give you a way to turn the damned tabbed browsing off.
I can deal with mulitple windows a lot easier than i can deal with multiple windows with multiple tabs in them.
Sure, you dont have to use tabbing, but that would be a lot easier to do if you could TURN IT OFF!
Anonymous is not stupid, anonymous remembers all comments and detects dupes. You lie! You never had a roommate that uninstalled IE4. You just spit out your fragmented memory of this comment:
5 53703
... minus herbivore> on Tuesday May 17, @09:00AM (#12553703)
= 11655462
Grand-parent:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149746&cid=12
Re:Allow users to uninstall and reinstall as neede (Score:5, Informative)
by darkonc (47285) <stephen_samuel@b
(http://bcgreen.com/~samuel | Last Journal: Friday April 30, @03:42PM)
Referenced post:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=139241&cid
Re:LMAO, AGAIN (Score:5, Interesting)
by Stephen Samuel (106962) Alter Relationship <samuel.bcgreen@com> on Saturday February 12, @08:47PM (#11655462)
(http://www.bcgreen.com/~samuel | Last Journal: Sunday May 23, @04:03PM)
The filesystem is the package manager
To be fair, when you uninstall or upgrade Firefox, the extensions still remain in the .mozilla directory (or in Docume~/Username/App-Data/Mozilla).
They are so late, and racing against the open source crowed. I hear the first alert now, "Tab vunerabiliy in IE7. An new vunerability was found..."
It's about time!! the browsers started implementing a tabbed system.. it's nothing new.
Now, if SecureCRT would just do the same thing my life would be complete!! Actually, maybe they have.. I haven't tried a new version since v3.0.
[I have no name!:/]# _
"I don't agree that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don't have, that feature is important," he said. "It is not. It is only important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don't have. We have plenty of features that our customers don't use.
t hreat+to+IE/2100-1032_3-5448719.html
"If there are features in our products that are subpar or need to be added, then I have great confidence that we are an organization that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that."
English reiterated that features such as tabbed browsing are not important to IE users. [emphasis mine]
"I don't believe it is a true statement that IE doesn't have the features that our customers want," he said. "We take user feedback very seriously. If you have that feedback, then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team."
quote from http://news.com.com/Microsoft+says+Firefox+not+a+
I always thought that the reason why none of IE's customers asked for Tabbed Browsing was because once they used it in Firefox, they never went back to IE.
Here's a guy who enjoys his job: The UPS Man
unattended, so that the user experience won't be degraded ...
It's a feature, not a bug.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Well, kind of.
Someone mentioned MaxThon in thier comments. I've been having issues, small and annoying, with FireFox and Moz.
Finally, I found an IE based tabbed browser that lets me use SharePoint and all those other fun things Moz doesn't.
Granted, I'm a geek and keep things fully patched and updated. About as safe as FireFox that way.
It's somewhat difficult to find the instructions for, but it can be done.
/u
; EN-US;318378
Removing IE6 on Windows 2000:
"c:\program files\Internet Explorer\IE Uninstall\w2kexcp.exe"
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=293907
For XP, see this:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
Unless DLLs on Windows aren't "shared libraries" in the same way *.so files are on *nix[1], I think we can safely assume that "every app could load up its own copy" could still imply code sharing. And even if code weren't being shared between instances, hardware is much cheaper than programmers.
[1] A quick Google reveals that they aren't quite the same, but my point stands.
:q!
Tight integration with the OS has its consequences. If you want IE7, you can't install it on anything less than XP - it's an OS upgrade. Firefox/Mozilla/Opera will work all the way down to WIN98.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Funny how quickly MS's stance changes. I have 6 more months to go with my prediction. Let's see if I make it in time! :)
Features such as tabbed browsing are not important to IE users 11/12/04
Microsofts strategy is not innovation. It never has been.
What it has been doing, is to incorporate things in so that for 70 - 80 % of the people, things work fairly ok.
A friend of mine has been using XP for some time, and when I tried to convert him over to 10.3, he was like - why should I? Luna (the XP theme) is good enough for me.
I think this is the critical statement. Good enough. As soon as IE has few enough security holes that Microsoft Anti-Spyware can catch everything that sneaks through, what need has Joe User for Firefox?
Seriously. Think about it. On my XP box, I use ZoneAlarm. There is now a one-way firewall with SP2. I use Ad-Aware and Spybot, along with HijackThis. There is a beta-version of MS anti-Spyware available.
I also use something called Anti-Vir. Mostly because NAV was such a piece of bloatware. Now with rumours that there will be a MS branded antivirus program, tell me, which Joe User is going to keep a multitude of programs, each of which need to be updated seperately, instead of some Microsoft Security Program, which keeps 80-90% of all the Bad Stuff(tm) off their computer?
In one way, this is probably a good thing. It frees up resources which were previously going to fix security holes to develop cool new features. However, I am, personally a little concerned about the dominance of one company over so many diverse parts of the user-experience.
Ah well. There is always my Mac.
Take care, R.
It is when the default account is setup to be 'root'. You have to go out of your way to NOT be an administrator account in Windows.
/add
net user user
Not that hard, now is it? And wouldn't it be a tad hard to, you know, do stuff with your computer if you don't have an administrator account?
funny munging
Seriously, why limited? just ask the user if they want tabs or not, if people can't handle that then they shouldn't be using a computer.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Tabbed browsing = silly gimmick
At least historically MS has juiced up its...hmm, 'borrowed ideas'...but not quite sure what they could do here.
No more 12 window pop behinds.
Now unlimited popups via tabs.
1. Download Ubuntu Linux
2. Burn to CD
3. Boot from CD
4. Install over Windows
For some reason this completely removed IE from my computer!
Note: This procedure may also change your desktop background. You have been warned!
> Never forget that a machine infested with spyware is compromised. If you're sufficiently paranoid, you can't trust *any* data or executable on it any more.
:)
Just look at the Google ads here. Do they know IE or what?
-----
Huntbar - Fast Remover
Free Scan, awarded Spyware, Malware and Adware killer - 5 Star Rated.
Hijacked by PerfectNav?
Remove this spyware in 3 minutes. Free scan. Detects 400+ program.
Remove ISearch toolbar
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Get with the program - If ANYONE else did it first, then it's BAD somehow. We are adding it as a pay-to-play option so you can use this BAD feature. You have to PAY for it FIRST. Only after everyone has PAYED for it do we supply it - cuze we got all the sucka's to PAY - dimwit's.
You gotta PAY for something you can get free elsewhere cuz that increases ms productivity. To MS productivity is how quick they can count da money!!!
CSS 2.1 is not a W3C recommendation yet
Actually you are dead wrong--it has been a recommendation for over a year now. Also, XHTML 1.1 and the proper mime types for XHTML have been final recommendations for even longer yet. It'd be really nice if my site that validates as clean XHTML 1.1 and proper CSS level 1 according to current, finalised standards was not treated like "tag soup" becasue IE barfs on "application/xhtml+xml" and only eats it if I serve it as "text/html". Since IE goes into "quirks mode" it also breaks all manner of CSS stuff too--even worse than if it was in "standards" mode. This means I must craft my compliant code to downgrade gracefully enough for IE, and that makes IE look primitive. The only other alternative is to deliberately break with standards and perpetuate the rot that is all to pervasive on the WWW. IE6 STILL doesn't dupport the DOM correctly either, which makes life difficult too.
Tabbed browsing is nice but it doesn't help developers who want to write future-proofed websites with some guarantee of compatibility with the present. I hope that the shortcomings I mentioned have been addressed in IE7 along with tabs. And in the case of tabs, I hope MS examines the use of tabs in ALL of its apps, and makes them consistent between Excel, IE, Visual Studio, tabbed dialogue boxes, etc...because the notion of tabs is NOT inconsistent with Windows UI. That is an excuse MS uses to explain their neglect of IE.
Anyways, I do not consider IE at present to be a "modern browser"--it is stuck in the leagues of "antique" browsers like Netscape Navigator 4.x. Simply adding tabs or any other UI goodies will mot make IE7 "modern" and will not stop competition from Mozilla (though it may slow it a bit). Only by addressing compliance issues with the DOM, XHTML up to 1.1 and CSS up to 2.1 will make it worhty of being included in the "modern" category. By doing so MS would be doing the web a tremendous service too.
'To Start Press Any Key'. Where's the ANY key? I see Esk, Catarl, and Pig-Up. There doesn't seem to be any ANY key. Woo! All this computer hacking is making me thirsty. I think I'll order a TAB.
they should fix CSS and the myriad of other bugs before adding new features.
JMHO.
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
... but no version of any full fledge Microsoft application ever used true MDI (at least from Windows 3.0 on). Word for Windows 2.0? Nope. Excel 3.0? Nope. Anything since then? Why bother? I don't know who came up with MDI, but it seems every team at Microsoft reinvented that wheel for their own application(s).
I wrote a shareware batch language interpreter way back then, and one of the features I tried to incorporate was control of MDI windows. It worked just fine -- except that none of Microsoft's own applications used MDI, so other, trickier methods of control had to be devised.
And why not reinvent the child window wheel? MDI was a means of forcing a specific set of functionality on child windows that was great as long as you only wanted to use child windows the official MDI way. None of the other teams at Microsoft bought it.
Reminds me of MFC. Whoops, don't get me started.
the tabs will be very "'basic' due to fears from Microsoft that tabbed browsing might scare off too many users. The feature is only being included because IE is slipping in the browser share market.
Scare them off - to what?
So what you're telling me is they're not adding tabs because they think they'll lose users if they did. But, instead, they're adding tabs - because they're afraid they'll lose users if they don't.
so... which is it?
It's also possible to prevent accidental usage of Internet Explorer through both IE and the Windows Explorer with the IE URL Lock Browser Helper Object that I recently released at http://ieurllock.sourceforge.net/
I'm about to deploy it where I work to replace the proxy.pac approach to locking down IE that we currently use so that WebDAV, FTP, and other folder views are not blocked.
Some people have asked why we didn't put tabs in IE sooner. Initially, we had some concerns around complexity and consistency... will it confuse users more than it benefits them? Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don't have tabs?
ahh you mean like KDE's konqueror?
It's easy to tack a tab feature onto IE. The tricky part is doing it well (I seriously doubt they will be able to).
When the user says "I want tabbed browsing" he/she means for everything. *All* new windows should be opened in a new tab. External apps opening a browser window, a right click search, a target="new window" link, all these should open in a new tab, *not* a new window. This is the way Firefox works (at least if you select the right settings).
Also, when you close a tab, it should switch to the tab to the right - because tabs are opened left to right, the tab on the right will normally then next one that you want to view. Other browsers get this detail wrong as well.
Hooray!!! Tabbed Browsing!!!
Boy I'm really looking forw....
Oh, wait... Nevermind, I already have that.
Hey Mr. Gates, innovate something new for me. Something unique! Something original! Something that hasn't been copied, stolen or bought.
If you can.
> Kinda defeats the whole purpose, doesn't it ?
Kinda' an idiot, aren't you?
Or you have no idea of what might be involved with test and development.
Either way, probably a future for you in management...
Why is it that us, the capable, intelligent masses, limited though we are in number, are kept from the options we so desire? It's not that everybody wants to use / would use a particular feature, but what is the ultimate restriction-mentality about "implement it only if everyone will use it, do not implement advanced functionality because it may confuse most users."
Why can there not be a button, a magic button that says "Turn on all advanced features" which enables things like tabbed browsing and perhaps neat things like mouse gesture navigation and session management options. The one thing that I *love* about Opera is its Session Management functionality, limited though it may be. In the event of a browser crash, a system failure (power failure, cpu fan failure, spill lots of liquid [something], etc), or some other such unfortunateness, the state of all the windows and their contained tabs can be restored. These sessions can be saved, I have a perl script that I use to copy my "autosave.win" (I believe it's called, it's been a couple years since I've touched the script, I just give it the nod every night at midnight when it runs as a scheduled task) to a filename descriptive of the date/time at an archive location.
I do a lot of reading about a lot of diverse topics. I have a lot of diverse interests and pursuits. Opera enables me to have 50 tabs or more open per window and stil be easily navigable. I like the ability to more or less completely saturate my brain with information by way of Opera's tabbed browsing features, and how their session management ties into it.
You know what's ultra-hot? The rough equivalent of tabbed desktops. It's called a VWM: Virtual Workspace Manager. If you tell Explorer to "suck your wang" (I've told it so many times. Oh Explorer, how I loathe thee!) you can actually use anything as your shell. I like Litestep, for now. Litestep's VWM allows me to have a grid four "virtual desktops" wide and two virtual desktops tall. I can click and drag windows between workspaces, from the VWM. I can switch workspaces from the VWM. I like to think of the litestep UI, as it is highly skinnable, as a "HUD" in a conventional game. If you think of any conventional game, the information is NEVER concentrated in one location. Certain relavent pieces of information should be in certain locations, and other pieces of information could/should be obscured. For example, I like having a huge clock in the lower right-hand corner of my screen, but there's no system tray down there. The system tray is a small bar at the top of the right hand side of my screen. There's also the interesting little shortcut buttons that Litestep offers me... These buttons can be set up to perform a different action depending upon the type of click it receives. I've currently got the first one set up so that a left-click launches Firefox, and a right-click launches Eudora. The next is text/graphics editor for left/right clicks respectively. There's a few more, but I believe you understand the functionality that pleases me about the ui in general: it's customizable, modular (the ui is driven by an underlying plug-in based architecture which enables the programmatic creation of arbitrary "HUD elements" as I'll call them), free (free is important), and empowers the user if they choose to be empowered. There are basic interfaces available, and there are skins that make use of modules that will rock your socks: System Monitoring, VWM, a built-in set of media player controls, advanced menuing functionality (ever wanted a system sub-menu buried inside some other menu to stay around for a while? Well, you can just grab a small bar at the top of just about any litestep menu and do so by dragging it away from the menu that it was opened from) and so forth.
As a total tangent, do you know what keeps me off Linux? Games. The games on Windows PCs are just hands-down better than the ones offered on Linux or any of the consoles, and have been for years. At least, the games I've been wanting to play. And my PC is able to emulate older game systems, allowing me the ability to enjoy console games that I have enjoyed in the past.
hope you enjoyed that.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Sharing pages of ready only memory between process spaces is trivial if your processor contains an MMU. x86 processors that support this, for example, are all modern processors (and has been true for over a decade).
So when every app loads up its own copy, the app gets a private data heap for the library and a public reference to the read-only code heap. This is as efficient as it can concievably be since no code is duplicated, only the data required to keep each instance of the library separate.
How an OS works -- it's good to know, so you don't make decisions based on invalid information.
It's funny how they can get away with everything, even a double-moral.
Scared of tabs. Oh the horror.
I always thought MS should have, during the first time a user logs on or when a software package is installed, the user classify themselves as to their computing ablility. If you click advanced all the little safeguards, questions, wizards and other PITA's never bother you. Ratchet up/down the help based on user experience.
Why should I have to hack the registry, change the options in every app, and flip countless control panel settings to get the PC to behave the way I want. Give me a global sliding scale.
But make it easy to change that scale afterwards for those that over estimated their experience or are now more technically savy.
OS X's Safari is not required for applications to do HTML rendering and Internet access. Those functions are built into the OS, but Safari is just another application that uses those functions.
"The main goal for tabs in our beta release is to make sure our implementation delivers on compatibility and security." This is just BS. IE and security : oh please... "Initially, we had some concerns around complexity and consistency" This is classic Microsoft. Just admit it, you didn't get it the 1st place. They can't even give the pint of credit on this neat feature from Mozilla/Firefox.
I actually kind of missed MDI, here it comes again!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I already turn off that damned icon combining feature of the taskbar - I go to the taskbar for a window I know I have open. I don't want to have to guess which tree it might be under.
I don't know why you don't find tabs useful, perhaps you never visit forums or blogs or use shopping sites? For instance right now I have the main page in Slashdot on the first tab, then this article with commets on a second, then finally I am typing in the third tab. WHen I hit reply I'll clsoe the tab and be right back where I was all without the window moving. I just find it far handier to group things like this.
Remember please the point of the taskbar is to get to windows quickly, not to organize them. Otherwise why can't I reorder where active icons are on the bar?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here:
Several of you asked about target="_tab" and the like. Tabbing is not exposed to script; there will be no such thing in IE7. Links that target a new top level browser window will automatically get turned into new tabs.
me too!
Now IE users can actually surf in a different tab while downloading firefox.
Come to think of it, that's probably what they meant with "third party add-ons"
I'd simply settle for having the delete key working 100% of the time. Occasionally the delete key stops functioning in IE (on numerous pcs, numerous versions of Windows). Damn annoying having to use backspace instead.
welcome to 1992 and shared libraries.
ummm. i suspect that MSHTML.dll is not the entire TCP/IP stack, just HTML rendering. a lot of MS apps do a sort of embedded browser thing, and i suspect that is the purpose of this library.
NT = No Text - so why are you looking here?
It'd be a lot easier if I didn't have to practically log out in order to do things as admin.
Maybe Windows has a SUDO command and I've never seen it.
This sounds like a familiar statment from Microsoft about internet technology. When the internet first became a "consumer level application" in about 1993-4 Microsoft avoided jumping on board hoping that "closed systems" loke AOL once was would catch on instead.
I've read many comments here to the effect that Microsoft did this because of a corperate culture that abhors the openness of the internet and their in ability to control it. I disagree. I believe that Microsoft has dedicated it's self to making software which everyone will use. This has ment they are constantly 3-4 years behind the technological curve when it comes to user experence.
The quote above seems to be a good example of Microsoft missing the boat and having to play catchup. It will not be the last. I predict that IE7 will take back significant market share over the next 2 years however because Microsoft has reduced the incentive to switch.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Windows XP has runas.exe. Of course, it's invoked from a command prompt. How many XP users use a command prompt?
I think you mean "welcome to the 1960's and Multics".
Windows XP has runas.exe. Of course, it's invoked from a command prompt. How many XP users use a command prompt?
You can also shift-right-click, "run as" any executable and lots of secondary files (like cpl files). And you only need to be an administrator to make system-wide changes. If your program doesn't work and claims it wants admin rights, then it's probably not really windows compatible, and/or the "developer" has no idea how to code for windows.
funny munging
I'm using the popup blocker with XP service pack 2 right now, and it is no good. I had to turn it off, since it blocks all kinds of things it shouldn't. Firefox works.
I'm sure tabbed browsing won't work as well under IE either. Being such a new feature for IE when its been standard for other browsers for a long time, I'm sure it will take IE a long time to catch up.
Microsoft should just ship Firefox with Windows, and get rid of Internet Explorer. It's open source anyway, so nothing would stop Microsoft from using it. Microsoft can use the money saved to catch up in other areas.
What is the value in tabbed browsing? Seriously? I tried it in FireFox for a few days and all it did was annoy the hell out of me. What am I missing?
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Whatever gave you that idea? It's never happened before, has it?
Cue litany of missed shipment dates and pruned feature lists (hello, Shorthorn?) from people taking me seriously
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There's not enough garlic in the world to make fox taste good in the best of circumstances. Making burnt fox taste good would require the help of some hallucinogenic drugs and the results would be whimsical at best.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And yes, I did middle-click in Konqueror and reply to this in a new tab.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Heck, even CMD.EXE uses tabs, just not the kind of tabs you're thinking of.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Tabs for Internet Explorer????!!!! Oh my GOD!!!! I'm havning a FUCKING HEART ATTACK!!!!! WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT!!!! Yup.
> My complaint is the different behavior of all of the office apps
Not just office apps.
Quick, who can enumerate all the different key combinations to bring up a "Find" dialog in various MS applications?
IE: Ctrl-F
OE: Ctrl-Shift-F
Outlook: F4
If you're speaking short term then you might have a point for consistency. Long term, I think it's necessary to justify that all of these other types of application switchers are better than tabs. To be honest, I don't have much confidence in Microsoft's ability to offer good UI advice -- the company has a history of ignoring even its own researchers unless it's convenient not to, and it also has a history of hideous UI's. Above all, Microsoft has a conflict of interests, where it's advantageous for it to promote the use of whatever UI methods and standards it already provides.
From the tab perspective, every so often, I've wondered what it might be like if tabs were the dominant form of application switching. It'd mean less annoying windows floating around my desktop, for one thing.
That means I can load more than one remote exploit in the same window!!!
There is one thing and one thing alone that keeps me coming back to IE: Support for Dragon Naturally speaking.
:) where as firefox has little to no support for dragon.
in IE I can browse hands free (no lame jokes.. I juggle alot is all
Anyone care to write an extention? i'd love to delete IE from my machine
'plex
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
I wonder how long before Microsoft patent the idea ...
blah, they can add all the new features they want, but the program's architecture is still flawed, and not worthy of my time or attention span, or lack thereof.
/me waves
bye IE!!
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
How so ?
MS IE had an advantage over other browsers at that time.
Indeed. Mostly because it was better.
The fact that everyone else does it is just because reusability, in general, is a good idea.
My point exactly - so why is it bad when Microsoft do it ?
It's easy to replace the *browser* in Windows, as well. There are many projects that do so.
[...] and its not dependant on a particular product, it only requires it to follow some standard.
You'd be wrong, as well. Or have you missed the recent kerfuffle the KDE folks have been having with Apple over their khtml fork ?
Probably Windows does that too, except that the standard is secret and cannot be used by anyone else except them (and now perhaps Sun?).
I remember finding a drop-in replacement for the IE HTML engine that uses Gecko in one of my idle web browsing sessions (linked from a comment in /., IIRC). So at least part of IE has been duplicated by a third party.
Replacing substantial chunks of code is a non-trivial affair in *any* OS. That IE is hard to replace in Windows makes it no different to its equivalents on other platforms.
Uh, my point was that "every app could load up its own copy" *excludes* the idea of code sharing (at least by my interpretation). That's what sparked my comment - if you've got shared libraries, doesn't every app having its own copy of the shared library kind of defeat the purpose of having them ?
Correct, but Safari != IE. Safari is the equivalent of Windows's iexplore.exe. IE is a lot more than that.
Those functions are built into the OS, but Safari is just another application that uses those functions.
Exactly. Just like IE is built into Windows and the browser is just another application that uses IE.
Not because it was better (though that is arguable) but because being closed only MS could take any advantage of that.
And there being a Browser already has an unfair advantadge (the browser, make notice I am talking about the browser, not about an html rendering engine) nobody else could use.
At the time everyone was confused because nobody understood what MS had done. embedding a browser is different from embeddin an html rendering engine.
It's not bad when MS does it.
What was bad is what MS did.
errera hunamum ets
How so ? What part of IE could "only MS" take advantage of that one would reasonably expect anyone else to be able to "take advantage of" ?
And there being a Browser already has an unfair advantadge (the browser, make notice I am talking about the browser, not about an html rendering engine) nobody else could use.
IE is primarily an embeddable web engine. The browser component is very small and (particularly in today's world) very light on features. There are a number of alternate browsers that have sprung up to fill the functionality gap the default IE browser leaves, all using the IE engine.
At the time everyone was confused because nobody understood what MS had done. embedding a browser is different from embeddin an html rendering engine.
No-one who bothered to actually read and comprehend what Microsoft had done was confused. That, of course, only includes a single-digit percentage of Slashdot readers.
Microsoft embedded a browser engine - just like GNOME, KDE and OS X went on to do. One might even say it was innovative.
What was bad is what MS did.
They did exactly the same thing KDE, GNOME and OS X developers went on to do aftrwards.
For god's sake, it's not. Nobody is forcing gnome users to use epiphany, or kde users to use their own web browser.
I am not wasting my time with this anymore.
errera hunamum ets
Yeah, I saw that the first time -- funny that nobody else has seen one of these mysterious "viral strains" of CWS. In other words -- if it was viral, it wasn't CWS.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Nobody forces Windows users to use IE as a browser, either.