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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?
For the first time I agree with John C Dvorak.
pcmag
"Vista? As in "Hasta la Vista, baby?" That name might be appropriate as a symbolic goodbye since it might be the end of the line for Microsoft's dominance in the OS business."
"The new OS is getting zero buzz. Zero. now the name Vista, along with the new Microsoft Vista logo, has made it worse. Could anything be less exciting?"
"THE FUTURE OF DESKTOP COMPUTING: Apple. Vista will open the door to what I believe will be a radical change in the computing landscape. The trends are clear. Once the new Mac OS appears next year it will gravitate toward the existing x86 community much more rapidly than anticipated..."
"Right now, and as much as x86 users do not want to admit it, the Mac OS is already better than Windows in its modern look and feel as well as its functionality. I see too many smart people with Mac laptops nowadays."
"...it is always possible that Apple doesn't understand the power play position it's in and might actually believe that it's better off somehow keeping its OS in a small niche rather than the big market. If the world changed tomorrow to 85 percent Mac "OS x86" its laptop sales alone would triple overnight. Apple didn't put together what many consider the finest in-house industrial design teams in the world to fool around with piddly sales and more redesigns of the iPod."
"That said, how much more of Steve Jobs can we handle? Do we really want to hear him say "I told you so?" If it gets some excitement back into desktop computing, yes, we do. I think we can take it."
Has anyone tried to run IE 7 with WINE on Linux?
"...the majority of end-user features in Windows Vista will not be included until Beta 2"
So in other words, beta 1 is just XP with RSS? They already yanked everything else out of the system as is. The reason they call it Vista is because that's all that's left of the OS; a view.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
- Glass and new Window animation. The Windows Vista desktop experience will deliver a new visual identity -- translucent glass with more animation. Because it is visually intuitive, the glass helps users focus on the task at hand, whether reading a document, viewing a Web page or editing a photo.
Apparently the best way to develop a "visually intuitive" user interface is glass and more animation!
>>Windows Vista Beta 1 also includes the Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 built into the platform
Wouldn't this fly in the face of the US DOJ ruling that they had to separate it from the OS?
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Yes I'm an MSDN subscriber through work. No, I won't be downloading the betas. I personally don't have the time to fiddle around with such things any more. It's far easier to wait for others to find the gotchas. When the final version is released, it'll still be months until we deploy it at work.
Feel free to call me lazy. I just know I have interfaces to write and queries to improve. Those things can't wait.
So rather than implement a sandbox in the browser, they run the whole browser in a sandbox. This means that hostile scripts and ActiveX components can still be used to attack other systems, compromise the user's personal information on other web sites, steal passwords and credit card numbers, and take part in zombie networks.
On a lighter note, I'm not sure that having self-aware COM objects is a good idea. Apart from this being a dubious application of strong AI technology, won't this make shutting down your computer equivalent to murder?
Can anyone provide a SS of IE7 viewing the acid2 test?
6. Feeding generations of inept developers. check. [re: C#, anything .net, VB, ...] ... I wonder why anything .net feeds generations of inept developers and python or perl or java or any other language don't.
Oh let's return to the good old days where programmers had two big keys with 0 and 1 written on them and programmed opcodes like playing bongos..
From Paul's article: Because Microsoft built a search box into the Start menu, you can no longer use keyboard shortcuts to navigate around. To launch the Control Panel in XP, for example, you simply hit the Windows key and then the "C" key and, voila, the Control Panel opens. In Windows Vista, however, when you hit the "C" key, the system assumes you're searching for an application (Figure). Sigh.
For me, the user interface of Windows peaked with Windows 3.11 and NT 3.51. In these systems, virtually every control in every program could be easily navigated to using only the keyboard, with consistent shortcuts everywhere. This was a significantly better environment than Apple has managed to provide even now, and probably the best feature of the Windows UI. In 95/NT4 the Start Menu and Task Bar required new shortcuts. Then companies started shipping keyboards with extra keys (making the spacebar shorter and a harder target to hit, and not really solving the problem for people who have to work on multiple computers with a variety of keyboards). Newer versions of Office applications removed the ability to keyboard-navigate through toolbars (with or without he new keyboards). What's next?
... I'm glad I moved to mac. I liked Windows 2000, liked XP for a bit, and went back to 2k. I started looking at the mac platform when Mac OS X first came out, and switched when I bought my Mac Mini. I'm never going back, I see the future of both platforms, and I can't say I see much that I like in the Windows world. Everything looks cubersome, bloated, and ugly. Everyone I know that runs windows is always complaining about slowness, etc, and it's all from viruses/malware. I'm excited to see what this does to the Windows world, if anything. Everyone in the PC market is looking for a good deal at Walmart. I'd like to see Microsoft taken off the throne, and replaced with apple.
Sig: I stole this sig.
More Info
4 .aspxa milyId=718E9B3A-64FE-4A4C-9DDF-57AF0472EAD2&displa ylang=en
a boo.html and http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/guill otine.html. The final release of Internet Explorer 7 will focus on improving the developer experience by reducing the time needed for developing and testing on different browsers."
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/27/44400
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
"CSS improvements. CSS is a widely used standard for creating Web pages. Internet Explorer 7 is prioritizing compliance to CSS standards by first implementing the features that developers have said are most important to them. As a result, in Internet Explorer 7 beta 1 Microsoft has addressed some of the major inconsistencies that can cause Web developers problems producing rich, interactive Web pages. The work Microsoft has done includes fixing some positioning and layout issues related to the way Internet Explorer 6 handles tags. (More information about these bugs can be found online at http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/peek
- Power management menu in task bar (picture) - looks familiar.
- Search engine (picture) - Spotlight, anyone?
- User home directories can now be found in C:\Users\name - similar to how *nix does it
Then again, Apple borrowed Fast User Switching from Windows, so fair is fair..."Oh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-my-own-Grandpa." - Dr Hubert Farnsworth
Isn't this just a fancy way to say playlist? I fail to see the usefullness of adding yet another layer of confusion to getting to a users files. Not to mention, this ought to make user migration a joy for enterprise users.
--WooooHoooo--
1/ lots of developers and software add value to the M$ platform.
2/ good things like msdn attract devlopers to ms platform along with Vstudio++.net.whocares.
3/ they have lready paid for the priveldge of developing for MS product. licence fees for the OS and IDE [the ide at least adds value to their investment.]
ergo its a little cheeky for MS to charge money for the privelege of being part of their dev community. but oh wait they're the only game in town. so you shuld be grateful they are hepling you develop for their popular OS with all teh potential cutomers using it. despite their braindead platform bad buggy API.
also: alot of the collated info comes from MSDN subscribers. a not so open collaboration. big reports etc. tips and tricks, etc.
so yeah we are the lucky ones.
no no no. MS has it all backwards. the devs are gold:
"DEVLEOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"
familiar?
after all who uses MS PAINT or notepad or ms movie editor or wmplayer to play their dvds ot of the box? answer: no-one.
so they need apps. devleopers. a stcok fresh install xp box is worthless. doenst do anything.
oh wiat its got IE6.
wooohoo!
MS have subverted the entire concepts of IT.,
anything they say. do or wnat you to do. thuink of the opposite and it makes sense. emperor has no clothes and night is actually day. just take off the blindfold.
now apple who gets no love from me probably are worse as you prbably get less from them for the same sort of dev subscription.
I seem to recall hearing this story before, except that "a guy" was actually General Electric, and the "mechanic" was Charles Steinmetz, and it was a thousand dollars.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
This where we disagree. I don't think ANY program should be "a million lines of code".
If any single "build" is that large it means you're not developing software properly and have to learn to refactor code.
As for "100s of developers" that has nothing todo with any of the languages. You can use a CVS for Java just as easily for C# or C.
Writing in C isn't always about "getting the fastest program." In my case C is a very easy language. The syntax is easy to describe and the standard C functions are consistent [for the most part].
The fact that C programs build out of the box on things like embedded targets is a plus.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I did about 30 min of testing, going around all the quirks and compliance sites. The rendering engine has either not been worked on yet or maybe they are pushing that "feature" out to IE8.
Got some more details on my blog, case yer interested. (No ads, don't worry.)
I've installed Vista on a Tablet PC tc4200, for all those that were wondering, it seems no tablet functionaliy is in this build of Vista, but it runs fine on the tablet. I'm not sure if MS plans on keeping 2 versions of the OS- one for 'standard' PC's and another for tablets. You can see some screenshots and comments I have about Vista Beta 1 on my blog. I'll keep it updated as I explore. http://mtavel.blogspot.com/
Wow ... im almost impressed with it.
:/. Anywho ... it installs like a Service Pack (which pretty much what it is) and asks you to reboot.
... it seems safemode really doesn't want you to use it. You get a sound and that top bar flashes when you goto any site with it.
... It's IE 6 with tabs and a fucked up interface. I wonder what it will look like when it's done :)
My first impressions of it was not too good. I goto install it and it forces me to validate my XP install. For some stupid reason it passed
Once it's loaded the interface is fucked.
Screenshot
I don't like the point that you can not have your file menu on the very top of the screen. Oviously the graphics are not done because the little box beside those tabs makes a new tab. The interface is very very quick. Switching tabs is extreamly quick. I also like that it has the middle button thingy so when you press it, a window opens up in a new tab.
It also comes with a totally cut off version of it's self (similar to the safe mode in firefox). Im guessing this is for pooched IE's that won't start or people who wish to browse with IE without plugins.
Screenshot of Safemode
Well
All in all
solosoft
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