Windows Longhorn and Internet Explorer 7

An anonymous reader writes "At Gnomedex this year, Microsoft is excited about the new RSS integration into Windows Longhorn and Internet Explorer 7. Screenshots of Internet Explorer 7 reveal how Microsoft has added a search tool to the top right of the browsing window similar to the one found in Safari/Firefox. Also, Microsoft revealed that RSS will be integrated into the heart of Longhorn."

Comments

Say no to Windows

[bigwavejas]

I think I'll stick with Firefox and run http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs for my RSS feeds.

Stop the machine.

Re:Say no to Windows

[TGTilde]

at least when you get to a site that is only IE compatible you won't lose all your standard features...oh wait, we have to wait for Longhorn first. See: DN Forever

Re:Say no to Windows

[RoadkillBunny]

Why though? IE7 looks exactly like Firefox.

Looks like FireFox

[ryg0r]

Maybe its just me. But it looks like FireFox with some Longhorn UI added. :P

Re:Looks like FireFox

[pdbaby]

Yay Microsoft! King of innovation. They have the menu bar below the tablist. Truely innovation I'm sure people will pay for (in more ways than one).

Any word on how many bugs they'll have introduced, their png and css standards compliance support?

Good to see that RSS is integrated into the OS. That's something every kernel lacks these days ;-)

Re:Looks like FireFox

[XNormal]

They have the menu bar below the tablist.

It's not just below - it means that the menu bar is part of the tab and can change when you switch tabs. It's actually a pretty clever design. I think they will use it for plugins and web pages that add items to the menus (PDF, Office, etc.)

Re:Looks like FireFox

[remahl]

Menus that change isn't good design.

Re:Looks like FireFox

[suttree.com]

Clever in that you run one instance of every toolbar per tab?

Now that's innovation!

When Apple said 'Redmond, start your photocopiers' I thought they were joking....

Playaholics: Play Wolf N Swine

Re:Looks like FireFox

[hunterx11]

If the menu changes, maybe with the extra space there will be enough room to fit the entire "Shut Do..." item.

What about WEB DEVELOPERS?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a good move by MSFT, but their lack of respect for web developers is ridiculous.

Markus Mielke, quite possibly the most braindead member of humanity ever to use a computer, seems to think that separating content from presentation is wrong. See here for details. Even worse, the article he links says the reason is that CSS3 is not ready. This is despite the fact that the IE team won't even support CSS 2.1 fully in IE7! Yes, they might have fixed Peekaboo and Guillotine, but how about :hover for all elements? Or any semblance of support for floating elements? And they simply seem incapable of giving a straight answer!

Dave Massy, senior program manager and all round idiot, in comments to this article, says that support for MathML and SVG should be left to 'experts', never answering the very pertinent query about why Microsoft isn't an expert in web technologies.

Why not go over to the IEBlog and let them have a piece of your mind?

Re:What about WEB DEVELOPERS?

[MrDomino]

You're assuming, in calling these people idiots, that what they're doing is unintentional.

If web coding were easily doable by hand with a text editor, would they get much in the way of sales for FrontPage? If web applications were ubiquitous thanks to a fully functional browser, do you think people would continue to fork over such obscene amounts of cash for MS Office?

Is this crazy? Over-the-top? Probably. But for a company that has so many brilliant researchers among its ranks, isn't it odd that their web browser is so shoddy, yet they still continue to pour money and development time into it rather than let someone else take over?

Re:What about WEB DEVELOPERS?

[NutscrapeSucks]

Except that 5 years ago, Internet Explorer was a light-year ahead of the competition in client-side functionality. Despite Andreessen's hype, Microsoft did far more to legitimize web-based applications than Nutscrape ever did.

Don't forget that Microsoft is (at heart) a development tool vendor, and I'm sure they're fully aware that web application development is where the coding market is. And they've finally seemed to re-understand that browser features are critical to that market. Things like XHTML and CSS2 allow Microsoft to sell much effective web development tools (Visual Studio/ASP.NET), and that's a real revenue stream for them.

People romanticize the "Browser Wars", but it's really a big battle over nothing -- a bunch of almost zero-revenue eyeballs using a free product. The strategic value is what people build on top of the browser technologies.

As great of a browser as Firefox is, I don't believe that Mozilla.org still got the lessons of the last war. They spent a lot of time and money to build an enormous amount of developer technology, but have never seriously packaged and marketed it. You have to assume that Microsoft is not just trying to build a browser, but looking at this "holistically" (client/tools/server); while Mozilla isn't.

What's better than screen shots?

[HyperChicken]

Video: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=8053 3

Re:What's better than screen shots?

[kneeless]

Funny, there are actually IE-fanboys there at that thread. Didn't know those existed.

What really amazes me is the fact that they're saying that "RSS is going to be so much broader because MS is putting the work they are doing into the platform." RSS has been around for years, and now RSS is amazing because IE integrates it? IE is so far behind that technologies aren't realized until years later. Ridiculous.

its sad

[ericdano]

It's sad how Microsoft is so far behind the curve, yet they get excited cause THEY have figured something out. They are their own Hype machine.

It's sad.

I'm Shocked... Get Me The Booze...

[__aaclcg7560]

Microsoft is adding technology into Longhorn? For a moment, I thought it was another announcement of yet another technology being pulled from the house of cards called Longhorn. The next thing that they will be announcing is a Mactel version.

Re:I'm Shocked... Get Me The Booze...

[JudgeFurious]

The only reason they're adding this to Longhorn is that the PURE EVIL that's also fully integrated into the OS turned out to be smaller than expected. It seems obvious now but at the time nobody at Microsoft knew that pure evil is concentrated and takes up less space than the "mostly evil" they'd been using. The end result being that there was room for this.

Otherwise they'd have left it out.

Golly Gee...

[Rekrapt]

Can't we just all get along? ---

integrated into the heart

[Frank Grimes]

"RSS will be integrated into the heart of Longhorn." Oh my god! Someone get on the phone to Linus Torvalds and tell him to integrate RSS into the Linux kernel as fast as possible!

Say "NO" to Bloatware

[reporter]

I am sitting here, pondering the future of Windows, as I watch the operating system slowly boot up and struggle along. I suspect that operating systems and web clients have now reached the point where they offer much more features than I need and actually use.

Has anyone suggested that Microsoft create 2 parallel operating systems: slimware version and bloatware version? I want a slimmed down version of Windows that includes just a little more than a true pre-emptively multi-tasked kernel I also want a slimmed down web client that lacks support for ActiveX and anything else that is not strictly necessary for accessing the secure website run by my bank.

I need little more. I suspect that this barebones configuration meets the need of most Americans, who are not tech savy.

Re:Say "NO" to Bloatware

[pdbaby]

But that's not in microsoft's best interests. They're a company, after all. They're in a perfect position: they can make their operating system require a faster processor and more memory. Do you think Intel, AMD and the various memory makers aren't "very grateful" of the extra business they get from the dizzyingly high requirements of Windows nowadays?

Re:Say "NO" to Bloatware

[Anti_Climax]

Well, they'll probably never give it to you, but you can definitely have it.

http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html allows you to pull unwanted components from your windows install cd's, including media player, messenger and internet explorer. If you're so inclined I highly recommend making your own personalized install.

It also comes in particularly handy when you want to keep people from using IE after their machine gets hosed by malware.

As an aside, I find it much easier to just write the new install files into my CD image rather than burn a new one from folders on the disk and as a bonus the CD is typically smaller that way as well.

Re:Say "NO" to Bloatware

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"Do you think Intel, AMD and the various memory makers aren't "very grateful" of the extra business they get from the dizzyingly high requirements of Windows nowadays?"

Because, as we all know, GNOME runs *great* with 128MB of memory. And of course, Mac OS X is absolutely smooth on 128MB as well.

With 256M of memory, Windows is as nippy as any other fully-featured desktop environment.

Re:Say "NO" to Bloatware

[quarkscat]

"Has anyone suggested that Microsoft create 2 parallel operating systems: slimware version and bloatware version?"

Well, yes actually. Microsoft now offers the following "flavors" of Windows:

(1) Windows XP Home
(2) Windows XP Pro
(3) Windows XP Embedded
(4) Windows XP "Lite"
(5) Windows XP "Thin"
(6) Windows XP Home Theatre Edition
(7) Windows XP 64-bit Edition
(8) Windows XP N
(9) Windows CE

Pray tell, just which other version of Windows were you actually looking for, that MSFT doesn't already offer (except "Windows XP Secure")?
There are already more versions than you can shake a proverbial stick at, and all with varying levels of bloatware and also vulnerabilities. Pick your poison, and prepare to be "owned".

Re:Say "NO" to Bloatware

[fwarren]

Have you ever read the "leaked" Whitepaper Microsoft did on the conversion of HotMail from FreeBDS/Apache to Win2000/IIS?

One of the things they specifically mention is the fact you can build a VERY SMALL minimal *nix system because you can cut all of the cruft. It is humanly possible to figure out the mininum dependancies, libraries, etc.

Whereas with Microsoft, who was doing this as a matter of pride, would not create a striped down version of Windows for themselves. And even stated that you could not strip down a build of windows because there are to many unknown interactions.

It would take a lot of work to figure out what you can remove. More work than Microsoft was even willing to do as a matter of pride on a project they were throwing millions of dollars at and took several years to complete.

I don't think we will see a striped down "core" version of Windows anytime soon.

What's sad about this is....

[WMD_88]

When IE 7 comes out and all the Joe Average people start using it (via auto updating, or the new computer they bought, or whatever), they're gonna see the finally-added features and think, "Wow, look at these new things Microsoft created! They're amazing!" because they've never used anything but IE. Microsoft thus gains mindshare for nothing.

Can it get any bigger or uglier?

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Microsoft really needs to hire some real UI artists one of these days.

Personally, i dont need the windows title bar, address bar, etc taking of a chunk of the screen like that. It must be a low res shot but still...

MS likes to make these big screen eating UI's with things that most people never use.

Re:TARGET=_TAB

[rebug]

I'd much rather stick with not specifying a target and letting the user handle where to open the link

Staring at the embers

[LS]

Seeing this news item really awakened me to the lack of innovation with Internet software these days. Embedding RSS into IE is mundane to the extreme. This pales in comparison to the rate at which ideas were pouring out 5-7 years ago. I suppose the browser is a mature market, but is it really? Perhaps we need to go back and look at some of the older ideas that were ahead of their time now that the Internet infrastructure is more mature. It just feels like we are still staring at the embers of a long-dead bonfire.

LS

Looks pretty good

[melted]

Gotta admit, they have some smart people there. Yes, firefox is a superior browser, technologically. Yes, it's open source. Yes, it supports CSS2 a little better and yes, it supports alpha channel in PNGs. Does any of this matter as far as Joe Sixpack is concerned? Not a bit!

What does matter then? The stuff they're emphasizing - tabbed browsing, design, and integration. You can spend hours explaining what's better to a layman, and in the end they'll use the browser that looks better and is more comfortable. Plus, if they approach security of IE7 with the same rigor we've seen in IIS6 (which I doubt highly, considering such a short product cycle), security will not be a problem.

It is time for Firefox/Mozilla devs to pile on the goodies. Get us some SVG and CSS3, get web devs (at least some of them) to use these cool technologies, and make Microsoft play catch-up again.

Ain't competition grand?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Microsoft's motto should be...

[Stormwatch]

..."The technologies of today --- TOMORROW!"

How far have they fallen

[codemachine]

Longhorn loses its next generation shell and filesystems, both of which are pretty core OS functionality.

Now they make up for it by adding RSS to their browser? At this rate Longhorn isn't going to be much more than Windows XP plus IE 7 (and yet still delivered late?). And IE hardly counts as OS functionality.

Maybe if they spent their time building an operating system, and let application developers build the applications for it, they'd be able to build an OS that has some really innovative technologies in it. Instead they spend all this time trying to "own the web", as well as compete with 3rd party software vendors like Adobe.

From a technology perspective, I think this strategy sucks. Time will tell whether this is a good business strategy or not.

Re:Is it too much to ask...

[omry_y]

why, its very useful to have RSS in the heart of the system.
imagine the possiblities:

* RSS system log:
whenever a line is added to the log, you will be able to see it in your IE 7 Browser!

* RSS memory monitor:
you will have an RSS feed of your memory status in the last 24 hours! you will be able to tell how much memory your computer used, all from your IE 7 Browser!

* RSS file system:
Saving files is too boring?
now you can save them as RSS entries, and watch them from your IE 7 Browser!

* RSS buttons, checkboxes and tabs:
instead of the silly outdated over-rated gui widgets we have today, we will have RSS widgets, which will allow you to know which buttons of an application was pressed, when, and why - all from your IE 7 Browser!

now, tell me you are not excited!
Microsoft, inovates the future

Great news for Firefox!

[salesgeek]

Microsoft didn't get it: the reason Firefox is so damn good is that it's a better browser than IE. I think MS marketing looked at the eyecandy (search box, tabs, Live Bookmarks) and thought that this FireFox was more like some of the customized versions of IE that are out there. They totally missed out the power that Gecko, XUL and the amazingly simple extension system bring.

Firefox renders correctly, it's simple to use and extensions are just plain fun and useful. The user has more control and is literally safer than with IE. Sure there are exploits found, but they are generally fixed quickly and users are alerted to upgrade.

Then there's that whole extensible user interface...