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Windows Vista & IE7 Beta 1 Released
gdsotirov writes "Today on the IE blog the availability of two new beta tests - Windows Vista Beta 1 and Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 - was announced. These tests are mainly targeted to developers and IT professionals. Thus the betas are only available to MSDN subscribers. Tom's Hardware has details as well." From the article: "While the code also includes an early look at the new user-interface design, the majority of end-user features in Windows Vista will not be included until Beta 2. In addition to these fundamentals, Windows Vista Beta 1 also includes the Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 built into the platform. The technical Beta of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2 also is available today." Any early thoughts, MSDN subscribers?
Tabbed browsing is in IE7 standalone, and works nicely (is doing as we speak).
Also includes some kind of "phishing site checker", RSS support (picks them out from page and can display from a single button), pop-up blocking, easy history deletion.
Seems pretty stable and not too memory hungry... so far
Protected Mode. Available in the Windows Vista beta 2 release and beyond, Internet Explorer Protected Mode will provide new levels of security and data protection for Windows users. Designed to defend against "elevation of privilege" attacks, Internet Explorer Protected Mode provides the safety of a robust Internet browsing experience while helping prevent hackers from taking over the browser and executing code through the use of administrator rights. In this mode, Internet Explorer 7 is completely unable modify user or system files and settings. All communications occur via a broker process that mediates between the Internet Explorer browser and the operating system. The broker process is only initiated when the user clicks on the Internet Explorer menus and screens. The highly restrictive broker process prohibits workarounds from bypassing the Protected Mode. Any scripted actions or automatic processes will be prevented from downloading data or affecting the system. Specifically, Component Object Model objects will only be self-aware and have no reference information by which to identify and attack other applications or the operating system. Internet Explorer Protected Mode helps protect users from malicious downloads by restricting the ability to write to any local machine zone resources other than temporary Internet files. Attempting to write to the Windows Registry or other locations will require the broker process to provide the necessary elevated permissions.
Not that I actually looked, but maybe http://static.thepiratebay.org/downloadtorrent/336 2112.torrent/Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Codename.Long horn.Beta.1.32Bit.DVD.READ..3362112.TPB.torrent is what you are looking for.
Paul Thurrott has a fairly comprehensive (and probably quite rose-tinted) review of the Vista beta over at his SuperSite for Windows.
It goes through the vast majority of new features, although doesn't go into a great deal of depth at this early stage. Seems there are no great surprises here - Vista is still very much watered down from initial promises - but apparently things are at least moving along noticably now.
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www.markwheeler.net
www.markwheeler.net
If I feel brave enough (and our webmasters think they can survive a potential Slashdotting ;-) ) I'll put up some blog entries about my experiences over the next few days.
I'm writing this post in IE7.
To tell the truth, the only "improvement" I've noticed is the tabs, but tabs have been available as extensions for quite some time.
I was hoping for some CSS improvements. When I first installed it, I immediately went to a few of the more difficult CSS sites, to see if they'd render correctly. Nope - no such luck. See http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/ for example.
The toolbar has been moved around. In my copy of it, at least, the URL bar is just below the titlebar, then there are the tabs, then another bar with text buttons on the left, and some icons on the right for home, favourites, history, rss, and print.
A search bar has been integrated into the same bar as the URL entry box. I expected it to use MSN by default, but it's set to Google. Or maybe that's just on mine?
As a web developer, I was hoping for better CSS support and better debugging tools.
According to their documentation, they've addressed at least two CSS bugs. I haven't seen any improvements at all yet. I will be using Dean Edwards' script for some time yet, it seems...
On the JavaScript end, there does not seem to have been any work done on the debug tools there at all - still the old crappy "error on line X" (of what file? a bit more detail please?).
The RSS doesn't seem as good as Firefox's.
In Firefox, an icon appears on the bottom of the page you're on. You click the icon, then add the feed with another click. Immediately, you have Live Feeds, where you can open your bookmarks, scroll to the feed you want, and a list of the article headlines is immediately available.
In IE7, however, an icon highlights on the top of the page. You click the icon, which opens up the RSS and renders it (nyeh - whatever). Then you click add to favourites. Then you click to confirm that. Now, when you want to view the feeds, you open your favourites from the text toolbar, scroll down and click on the feed.
The main difference is that in IE7, you must click each feed that you want to view, whereas in Firefox, you get a preview of the new items.
Overall, I am not impressed in the slightest. Nothing innovative at all, and their CSS is still nowhere near as good as Firefox, Opera, KDE or Safari's (I know the latter two are basically the same engine...).
Vista Beta 1 has about 80 new features, but most of them revolve around the architecture (driver model, LUA, security, display, file system, remote management, system tracing/logging, new task schedulers, etc...). Believe me, they changes are not small at all! But while these things do end up stabilizing/securing the platform further, the features will only really be of particular interest to developers.
:}), we could start seeing some killer Vista only apps in the first year or two, driving more generalized consumer adoption. Finally, the OS takes some big security steps so it will be *the* platform for people that really want to stop dealing with spyware/virus problems (who don't want to switch to linux/OSX of course).
If they were to release the OS as-is, it would not create any particular buzz among consumers, since for the most part it still feels and drives like XP/win2k3. But it would be huge in the corporate market. Remote management capabilities have been expanded significantly (and they are pretty good already in xp/win2k3), but more importantly are the security revamp of the core OS. While you currently can have your employees on XP workstations run as non-admin, it is very difficult to give them freedoms to modify the system without giving them full admin access (aka - install a new printer). Now, there is a more robust priviledge system, where (1) even if you are full admin most applications start in lower priviledges, and (2) you can give more granular admin perms on a user-to-user basis. So, employees will have more freedom to customize/configure their system, while the admins can still protect the core OS image from rootkits or the machine in general from spyware.
Additionally, governments are interested in the platform as well. Apart from the security features above, there are content protection schemes on the platform, and features like secure boot (sounds ridiculous for a consumer, but appealing to, say, someone like the CIA).
Will Vista RTM be compelling enough that consumers will fly it off the shelves? I can't really say, to be honest my experience is with the core (which I am impressed with). But lets be honest, MS doesn't make its income through selling software boxes of XP. Vista will follow the same adoption of XP -- corporate/government contracts and OEM bundles will make the first surge of adoptions. But, with things like Avalon and Indigo (actually implemented, believe it or not
How often do we have to go through this?
Obviously a few more times.
IE is integral to the platform in the same way Konqueror/KHTML is to KDE. It is part of the standard libraries/components and applications can expect it to be available to view richly formatted data.
This is not true. Applications don't give a damn if Internet Explorer is installed. Applications depend on Trident. Trident is the rendering engine that transforms web pages into something you can see and interact with.
Internet Explorer is nothing but a (pretty poor) shell around Trident. Internet Explorer is simply not necessary for the correct operation of Windows or Windows applications. Trident is. Internet Explorer is an application bundled with Windows.
Well... that was a whole lot of fuss about nothing. I truly don't know what I expected from Microsoft.
..system wide RSS integration and a whole-bunch-of-features-stolen-from-OSX branded with a Microsoft logo to make sure we all know it's high grade proprietary worthless crap that was actually and surprisingly developed by intelligent human beings and not just cobbled together by monkeys who arranged the shredded strands of 500 billion pages of printed source-code by sneezing at them.
Improved CSS support? Yeah. Right.
This is IE6 with tabs and a "phishing filter". Nothing new here. The RSS reader is abysmal, not even comparing to that of Safari 2.0.. not to mention I couldn't find a visible button to access the feeds on a website and had to dig in the tools menu for it.
CSS support has some minor improvements, but nothing groundbreaking. IE7 fails the Acid2 test miserably, which is tough luck because we're probably not going to see IE8 for 5 years now.
Microsoft have the future of SVG and CSS3 in the palms of their hands and they are content to toss it aside so they can implement a couple of silly superficial features to keep the monkey-brained masses happy and try to pass us developers off with "immproved CSS support" and a PNG transparent support which is nice, but frankly I'm having none of it. Microsoft have officially torn the final straw from my clutches and chewed it into a pulp before my very eyes.
As for Windows Vista.. whoopety-fucking-doo
And to think... how long has IE7 been in the works before it took them to come out with this shitty beta? In 10 minutes they could have handed the Mozilla group seven figures to use Gecko in their commercial crap-pile which would have made everyone happy. But nooooo, they can't even do the sensible thing.
Money grubbing idiots.
Gadgetoid.com - Gadgets & Games Journalism
I threw together some quick tests for a few of my most hated IE issues to see if there has been anything fixed.
t ml
t ml
All are still just as broken as in IE6. It looks like VERY little effort has been put into the rendering engine so far. Absolutely pathetic.
http://www.lysergic.org.nz/testcss/divhover.html
http://www.lysergic.org.nz/testcss/selectheight.h
http://www.lysergic.org.nz/testcss/selectzindex.h