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?
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
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...
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.
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.
Tabs are turn offable in Firefox. Sheeesh. In fact, it took me fiddling with the settings to make it so new windows don't pop up.
Hey, look! This funny browser has tabs, just like in Internet Explorer!
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.
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.
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?
Corporate branding is one reason marketshare is desirable for Microsoft. When using MSIE, "Microsoft Internet Explorer" is displayed on the top of the bar, along with a Microsoft logo in the top right corner. People can then associate "using" the Internet, with "using" a Microsoft product.
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.
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?
From a consumer/end-user perspective, you're probably right. From a content-creator/geek perspective, the "market" is dominated by a browser that doesn't play nice with other browsers, leaving the web-content people with a choice: (1) support IE and ignore everything else, (2) ignore IE and code to standards, or (3) code to standards, then hack until it works on IE. I "choose" option 3, but I live for the day standards-compliant browsers like Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and Safari dominate the market.
So... long story short: it's only folk like me who consider there to be a web browser market... probably!
This is where the serious fun begins.
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.
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.
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.
Mind Booster Noori
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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