Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft IE 7 Goes (More) Beta
Hans W. Smith writes "Microsoft has unveiled Internet Explorer 7, releasing the new "preview" version of its Web browser to the general public for testing. The latest version works only with Windows XP Service Pack 2 and includes many of the features Microsoft has been touting for months such as: privacy protection,tabbed browsing and a search box similar to Firefox. They tried to outdo Firefox tab browsing with a feature call Quick tab which shows thumbnail view of all open tabs in a single window."
Yup, you saw it yesterday. Posting before coffee never works.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The "new" quicktab feature is nothing more than a copy of the Firefox Viewmatic Foxposé...
http://viamatic.com/index.php/firefox
And M$ says to dev, please install IE7 Beta and test your pages... except that if I do that, it kills IE6, and I can't check my pages as they'll be seen by 90% of visitors...
Is it just me or does Micorosft appear bored by IE7. Its not like its a finished product, they're are tens of standards that they don't conform too, its leaky and yet they're taking years between major revisions.
I know in the 90s it looked like who ever won the browser wars would take over the world, but 10 years on that seems to be the business logic of the underpant gnomes. Why don't they just give up, and distribute Firefox, SeaMonkey or some Gecko based wonder, instead of IE?
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
For what reason? I have installed SP2 on numerous XP machines with absolutely NO issues and it runs great.
The new browser also includes tabbed browsing and a search box on a more streamlined toolbar, concepts that should be familiar to users of Firefox, a rival browser distributed by the Mozilla Foundation.
Maybe at their next huge product release, Microsoft could give some credit to Mozilla and Firefox for helping them make a better browser? Just a thought.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
a feature call Quick tab which shows thumbnail view of all open tabs in a single window.
Sorry IE7. Omniweb beat you to that one.
Did they fix the 3 pixel shift bug?
Did they fix position:fixed?
Did they fix float messing up other blocks?
(I can't try it, as I use Windows 2000 Server.)
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
So much for IE having features that FireFox does not.
How many regular browser users ever change a setting for that browser? How many firefox users install extensions?
Microsoft realises the mose people use software out of the box, and never touch settings. They don't expect the mainstream of people wil tweak into oblivion and so they choose to make a browser which has everything as it should as default.
(This is about the same way opera does their browser. Did you ever check how many extensions there are for firefox? Are they all the same quality/stability? Do you check all those extensions once a month to see for any new ones?)
Look, I'm not trying to be a flamebait here, but simplicity is key for the most Microsoft software users. It's just that simple...
Dependency hell? =>
Of course digg posts articles faster, but at least at slashdot, most of the users aren't fifteen year old kids with nothing better to do than post comments like "Mac is kOOL!"
About the article..as for me, I'm really looking forward to IE7. For all the great aspects of firefox, it still has many shortcoming, like being extremely slow and opening the occasional webpage incorrectly.
If IE7 can offer tab browsing and do a reasonable job, I might just switch back over. If it sucks, then I'll just stick with my current browser, Opera.
From the FA: IE 7 also includes a number of new features for Web developers, including support for up-and-coming Web-programming technologies known collectively as AJAX. How would they go about supporting this? Would it have a javascript extension for it or something? Really the only thing a browser needs to do for ajax is support the xml http request object, which IE does since 5.0 (I believe). The rest is up to the server side code. or not?
Didn't Microsoft tell me about 2 years ago that their customers don't want tabbed browsing?
In 5 years they tell everyone they invented tabbed browsing years befor Opera and Firefox...
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
They seem to be just copying firefox, but it's still gonna be lacking in two major areas. Extensions and Security, in my opinion, are what makes firefox stand out.
But if looking at the progress between Beta1 and Beta2 I'm thoroughly impressed. The UI concerns I had with Beta1 have all been addressed. I really like where they seem to be going.
If it can't render basic shit like min-width and respect viewport positioning, I don't care. Are they CSS 1 compliant yet? As in... fully?
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
It looks like it takes ages to implement few useful features in IE. The same features that are many times already available for the same or competing browsers as third-party plugging or extension that are developed by one or very few geeks.
Is it that Microsoft is short of geeks? Is it so complex software that third-party developers are more effective and progressive then in-house developers?!
Anyway, why are the browsers evolving so slowly? Look where is the 3D gaming industry! Look what progress they did. And now look what progress we (browser vendors) did on the WWW! I don't think that there is less money on the web then in the gaming industry...
So why is it?
(Is the main reason the insufficient cooperation ? Don't they see that competition in this area instead of cooperation hurts everybody? Look where IE ended up with thier individual and aggresive stance.)
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
It was a nightmare when I tried Beta 1. Things didn't work and I could not go back to the previous version. Microsoft Support tried to help(sent a link to google groups :-) but it only made things worse. I had the look and feel of IE7 and the version reported IE6. It was a total mess.
A subsequent disk failure made me reinstall and rid IE7. My colleagues are now sending me all beta announcement links :-) I got this announcement 3 times in 5 minutes...
http://www.ie7.com/
The thumbnail of each page is something that AOL explorer does. It's kinda cool. Maybe someone will make a firefox extension that does the same thing.
Time makes more converts than reason
Where's the adblock extension for IE? Thats a good chunk of the reason I use FF over IE, just so I can turn off all the crap that I can't in IE....I might be tempted to try out IE7 at work, though....heh, I feel "guilty" using FF for looking up things and whatnot :-P
I am not fond of its' interface at all, it tries to look 'sleek and future' but fails. I mean, for crying out loud I can't even find the file menu!
...when Microsoft was innovative? I think the last time MS was pushing computing forward was the introduction of Windows 95 from 3.1, or when IE first came on the scene evolving from the dreadful Microsoft web browser, around version 4.0 if I remember. Maybe it is true that all the great engineers that were pushing home/office desktop computing have left due to the corporate environment that has taken over the mentality of the middle-managers that who's only concern is to help the stock price?
Like the above poster said, not being able to undo all the changes is a big red flag. I did try it out, but fighting with the firewall and other miscellaneous "enhancements" ended up being ridiculous, with not even a perceptible advantage to upgrading. I eventually moved all my data to one hard drive and formatted before throwing a nice, lean, torrented copy of regular xp onto it. On a positive note, the computer enema ended up improving performance across the board, for a mere day's work.
Just to save some people the bother of downloading....
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk
I know. But isn't now the proper time to do what Mozilla did? They split the Mozilla Suit into parts because the similar problem... I think that every Web developer is suffering from Windows this way (not only Win developers, but really EVERY deveoper!).
I don't really care if the IE is a component or not. I don't see any reason why should I break my web site compatibility with standards to be compatible with browser that tries to be compatible with Windows because it is A WIN COMPONENT.
As a web developer I know that IE is having difficulties to catch up on other browsers. It hurts me, it hurts you, it hurts everybody and at the end it hurts Microsoft as well.
I don't care about any Microsoft's internal reasons. I judge the final product. I know, it could be better. Microsoft can make it better BROWSER!
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
As I was reading this article I kept thinking how MS copied these features that already existed in firefox and being annoyed how MS would get the glory for them all.
I realized at that point, I had become one of the many Opera fans who have made similar posts about firefox and how Opera had x,y, & z first.
Check out Slashdot itself. On Opera, Firefox, IE 5 and 6, it seems to render nicely. Check out Slashdot with IE7. A good chunk of the bottom overlaps all sorts of stuff. I can't read the last few lines of someone's reply if they're the last comment. Also, my website www.binaryidiot.com renders perfectly with IE 5, 6, Opera, Firefox, Safari, Konquerer. In IE7, it places the add that should be on the right, between the navigation and the content. There is a HUGE space there. For some reason I am also seeing a lot of horizontal scroll bars for many pages. Looks like I'm going to need to make even MORE server side code to make sure IE7 works correctly. This is very frustrating. I wish the rumour that Microsoft purchased Opera was real. At least then we'd have a decent browser to work with. Another thing bothering me about IE7 is all the inconsistancy. Some back and forth icons, as well as the Favorites Center icon all have jaggies on them (these are seem even more with theming off) yet the icons on the right of the address bar look flawless. Also, I'd say almost 100% of windows applications have a menu at the top. Does IE7? NO! You have the option for the class menu but then it places it between the address bar and the tabs. If you unlock the bars, you can't move it up or down. There is no setting to put it where it belongs and if you have theming on, it has some odd lines on it that don't do anything. I fear for the web
MS does seem to think the answer to any and all security problems is enabling that danged firewall. Since when will a firewall protect you from an E-Mail virus? (Not that viruses have anything "directly" to do with security all the time...) But the thing is, dealing with the windows firewall is a hassle. If I want a firewall, i'll get a router and use IT as a firewall. (which i have by the way). Hardware firewalls don't completely get in the way like software ones do.
:-D I do feel secure in using windows for the most part, but due to past hiccups it's just that nagging feeling... It's just an awfuly big target and THAT makes all the difference.
Microsofts stance on security would be best placed in tha area of finding and plugging holes. Part of me wonders: Does MS have any team of people that look for security holes in windows? Or do they just wait until some 3rd party comes out with a release about a newly discovered hole and THEN decide to fix it.
This isn't intended to bash MS, because i use and pretty much depend on their products, but it is meant to maybe gander at their priorities. As a USER of their software I probably care about MS security a lot more than the people who DON'T use it and just bash it on here.
If you open up a QuickTab page, PNGs do not show themselves correctly.
To check, look at my site in QuickTabs (www.binaryidiot.com)
Tabbing has been in competing browsers for ages. It has been a killer feature of these browsers; tabbing makes browsing a lot more tidy and convenient.
Yet Microsoft has managed to do the impossible; the screen real-estate reserved for the tabs is SO f**kin small, that anything more than a few tabs will already crowd the interface.
Anyway, what I want to know is; has Microsoft fixed the major bug with JavaScript closures causing memory leaks?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
1. They are requesting that developers install it and test thier sites and report back. However, it installes OVER IE6, so you can't have them both on the same machine. This is a major showstopper for a developer, since we NEED to have IE6 installed for current functionality and compatibility.
... this is just dumb. All the navigation buttons should be grouped.
... I don't understand why even some of the most basic CSS functionality is beyond thier ability to grasp. I can understand some of the more 'advanced' CSS features being a little tricky to interpret and implement, but basic positioning, sizing, padding and margin issues should be pretty easy to understand.
.PNG alpha channel transparency, and that's true ... to a point, but it doesn't work when the .png with transparency is used in a layer in some cases.
... but I beleive that they've got a long way to go in order to have a final release of IE7 that can truly compete against the other players in today's browser market.
2. Fails the Acid2 test miserably
3. They've moved the Refresh button to the right of the address bar, while the Forward and Back buttons remain in the same position
4. The "Stop Navigation" button has also been moved over to the right. They've also changed the look of the button to a red "X", so that it now looks like a "close something" button instead of a "stop this action" button.
5. They've "fixed" the functionality that allows you to utilize many CSS hacks to compensate for IE's rendering flaws, however they haven't fixed the underlying bugs that the "hacks" were intended to fix. As a result, a lot of sites I checked out that rendered just fine in all current browsers (including IE6) are now broken in IE7, because the "hacks" no longer work in IE7, but thier standards complience is still shoddy, and thier box-model still sucks.
6. The graphics for the tabs looks "clunky" as compared to other tabbed browsers.
7. They've hidden the main menu, so now you have to go through a few clicks to find the options that used to be only 1 or 2 clicks away.
Overall, I hope they don't think that this release is close to production readiness. They've changed a number of things just so that they look different, while in the process breaking a number of UI conventions that have long been established an work.
They've still got a lot of work to do in thier CSS support
They claim to have fixed
One thing I can applaud them on is that they've added the ability to use XMLHttpRequest without using thier proprietary ActiveX control, which will simplify those of us writing AJAX code into our web apps. They claim the old ActiveX method will still work for legacy support though.
So, that's my take. They've come a long way from IE6
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.
Look at IE who haven't tried anything new for years and now they're playing catch up. In this way they'll always be behind the likes of Firefox which is community driven.
They put stuff as default to make it easy for everyone. Users, website creaters, people with bad intentions.
The first rule of Microsoft is: Let's make it as easy so blind monkeys can use it. All else comes as an afterthought.
Did I ever state Microsoft should be applauded? No! But they make a coherent package, with lots of default stuff (and crap). That's my whole point.
(I actually hate Microsoft for all the right reasons and type this sentence right now in opera on my Mandriva box. Don't think I'm a Microsoft fanboy...)
Dependency hell? =>
Can anyone that's installed this tell me if IE7 will live with IE6 still on the machine? My main browser is Firefox, but I'm interested in trying this out. The only thing is, I hear that IE7 doesn't necesarily show IE6-based sites right, so I think I'll only try this if IE6 stays on my machine
I know that, so that's why I said 'Do you check all those extensions once a month to see for any new ones?', so I mean to actually check for _new ones_, not if they're being updated.
Dependency hell? =>
need more than one machine to test on.. tell yer boss I said so.
one of the machines has to have no more than a 15" vga 800X600 res monitor connected to the internet at 56k
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Will the HTML source code be easily readable with contextual highlighting like all the other browsers or will they still use notepad?
I know a few web developers that have been IE diehards and use FF for the source code highlighting. They don't use tabs, don't know what tabs are, and don't want to know how to use tabs. It really bugs be because they'll have 5 FF windows open at one time.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Is there one for Mozilla v1.7.12? I will upgrade to SeaMonkey later on.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Really?? It failed miserably when I tried it. The pieces were spread all over the screen, some with scroll bars, and all layered in front of a big red background.
Heh ... even if you graded them on a curve, they'd still get a D, since Firefox almost gets the acid2 test right.
It quick renders Digg.com (sometimes it takes ages on IE6), but I can barely click on the One Pixel Banner.It renders Digg's HOME page fine, but click around the site, and you'll start noticing some positioning errors. Go to the "Digg For Stories" section, and you'll see some DIVs climbing over each other on the left nav.
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.
actually, no, it does not pass acid 2.
Mod parent up. I consider myself a bit of a software gear-head (love to try everything and the kitchen sink, tweak until the cows come home, etc) and I've stopped experimenting with the plug-ins. Most work -- by themselves! But once you get 20 or 30 plugins running, the often conflict in terms of user experience, and ultimately lead to browser instability.
Don't get me wrong...I won't be going back to IE. But I think a 'vanilla' version of Firefox or Opera is what most people will be considering, when moving away from IE. a better approach would be to 'adopt' plugins into the base code with each major release...gradually increase the featureset, that can be enabled/disabled via the default install.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
IE7 will be in WinXP SP3, which'll come out in Vista + 6-8 months.
If you like m$ so be it but don't hide behind a cloak with this illogical crap about how they are doing things right in the browser market.
Right for whom? Companies act in the way that they think is right for them. Some of them think it's worth trying to keep the techno-utopian nerds happy, some think it's too expensive. The fact that you call them "m$" is a good indication that it'd take a large investment for them to get you to like them. You're just making their decision easier.
Seamonkey has the functionality built in - no need to piss about with endless extensions.
I'm curious. Microsoft has been showing this feature for months now. As far as I can tell, Foxpose was only released earlier last month (Jauary 3). Did Microsoft copy Foxpose, or did Foxpose copy an early beta of IE? (Both of which copied MacOS, though I don't think Safari has that feature)
This kind of thing doesn't happen overnight. It takes time to develop, the question is, which got the idea from whom?
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
The iexplore.exe.local trick seems to work for IE7.
Simply download the installer, use WinRAR or similar to unpack the installer into a folder, add an empty file called "iexplore.exe.local" then run iexplore.exe.
No having to uninstall IE6, or even install IE7 at all. The interface gets a bit messed up but it's definitely running a new engine (still some CSS bugs I can see tho, tut tut....)
This kind of thing doesn't happen overnight. It takes time to develop, the question is, which got the idea from whom?
Perhaps they both copied it from Apple's Expose feature which does the same thing, but for all windows in the GUI. I'd guess Foxpose at least was copied from there, given the name.
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1594 60 has a video of some of the IE development crew talking. The interesting thing was there was a googl hat on the desk of the office he guy was in.
The Explorer "Quick Tabs" seems to be inspired by the "Tab Exposé" feature that's been a part of the the Shiira web browser on the Mac since last April (it was introduced in one of the 0.9.* releases).
Shiira is an open source browser that's based, like Safari, on Apple's KHTML port (the Webkit framework on OS X 10.3 and later)... which is also open source.
Tab Exposé screenshot
Tab Exposé movie
Shiira English home page
Is this a stealth advertisement?
This page explains how you can run both on the same PC without needing a virtual machine. It works well for me.
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2005/12/
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
I did mention that in my post.
However, Safari doesn't do this, so you can't see the individual tabs in a safari window through expose.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
"Open in new tab" in the context menu?
Installed it yesterday. It didn't crash, but my "connection manager" would pop up continuously while web pages were loading, and I didn't like the fact I couldn't put the menu bar ABOVE the address bar. So, I uninstalled and went back to Opera. Hope the "final product" is better than the beta.
"A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
However, Safari doesn't do this, so you can't see the individual tabs in a safari window through expose.
And it is completely inconceivable to you that multiple UI designers, when looking for a way to make a whole series of grouped windows easy to sort through, would not look at one of the more prominent new ways of doing just that, and copy it for within their application? Any GUI designer that has not looked at expose and tabs and considered them as a model for their application, should probably be fired now.
Along with the currently existing Foxpose mentioned above there is also the currently existing Reveal
p ?application=firefox&id=1942
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph
Personaly I'm not terribly excited over the tab preview function. I tend to just move my mouse up to the tab area and scroll my mousewheel to preview what pages I have open and stop on the relevent one.
The interface looks like it's trying to be slick, and reserve as much screen space as possible to display the webpage. Kudos to them, except that without mouse gestures etc. they still need all the buttons etc. making it look cluttered.
I think I'll stick with Firefox and my two line interface (File menu and URL bar on top line, tabs on row below) with mouse gestures for the time being.
I installed IE7 (since it's a beta, shouldn't it install beside my IE6, instead of replacing it? But I digress). I tried to fill in my company timesheet with it - it's a Microsoft Great Plains java application, and the application malfunctioned, refusing to recognize my entries in the timesheet.
Then I noticed some garbage characters beside my name at the top of the screen, and on a hunch decided to changed the default character encoding from Western European to Auto-detect. Voilà, it worked!
BTW, it seems Microsoft is trying to be innovative by departing from its normal CUA-compliant menu structure. IE7 starts up with no menu at all! So there's no obvious way to change settings of the browser. I had to hunt around for a while, and eventually found that a small Tools icon in the upper right has a Toolbars menu that in turn has a Classic Menu command you can check off - at which point a normal menu appears. But since when is a menu considered a toolbar? Don't toolbars normally consist of icons, with out without accompanying text, that carry out some specific function? A menu doesn't carry out a single specific function, it's more like the OS for your app. Not intuitive, MS!
- midtoad
Umwelt schützen, Fahrrad benützen
I put up a torrent that will let you run this standalone without installing, as well as run on x64 versions of windows and as far as I know vista. Instructions are included to do it yourself if you don't trust my distro. (=
Torrentspy
Mirror of Torrent
Is it available ??
Spam: Any activity on internet to gain popularity without paying to advertising companies like Google.
I agree that default settings are the key to ease of use for 95% of users. Even the other 5% like to have things working out of the box. But the 5% are generally safer from mass worms because their addons aren't known to every script kiddie and their dog.
IE's default settings have for years been a pain in the side of computer maintainers everywhere.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Do you check all those extensions once a month to see for any new ones?)
They update by themselves. It's like magic.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Does it fuck :p
orangeacid
Can anyone confirm that it's still impossible to resize the size of the font defined in pixel in CSS?
Check this: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175857&thresho ld=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=14615426#14615 511
Dependency hell? =>
Surely support for STANDARDS is much more important than blinking tabs! I like tabs, but IE is broken where it really counts - supporting W3C standards.
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!
Well by using it you are screwed, does that count?
I'm Linux Boy!! And proud of it.
Meh.
Thank you. ^__^
- Agilo
... until they officially discontinue support for them? With the exception being XBox games and keyboard/mice hardware.
Does ir run (more) on Linux? Does it play (more) Ogg?
This is a huge issue I have with Firefox. A lot of the extensions only work with certain versions of Firefox, some with .8, some with .9, some only with 1.01 - 1.04, and then some only with 1.5. I recently download 1.5 and tried installing the Web developer extension, but that was no go since it only worked with 1.01 to 1.04. Fun.
Microsoft have said that Acid2 is not a priority for them, and I doubt the final version of IE7 will work either.
Konqueror doesn't run well on Windows. That's perhaps one of the reasons why it isn't as widely used as Firefox, considering that many Firefox users do run Windows.
Another reason may be that it doesn't have the media hype that Firefox has had. That leads to many people, even long-time Linux users, being ignorant of Konqueror.
Going along with the ignorance issue, it must also be considered that many of the popular Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora) and Solaris include GNOME, rather than KDE, by default. Thus people may get Galeon or Firefox installed as their default browser, rather than Konqueror. Then it becomes an issue similar to that between Firefox and IE on Windows; it can be difficult to convince an IE user to switch to Firefox, especially if they're unaware of the technical benefits of Firefox over IE.
As for the innovations of Konqueror, Opera, Amaya, OmniWeb and other browsers being mistakenly attributed to Firefox, that is likely also due to ignorance. People see tabs in Firefox for the first time, and wrongly assume that it was the first browser to include them. Meanwhile, other browsers have offered such features for years.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Never forget tab function was a extension at mozilla days, after some discussion, it become a basic function of mozilla and then firefox. So this will happen again.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Even though the average Slashdotter isn't the type who would install AOL Explorer, that browser does the best job of QuickTab like functionality. (AE calls the feature Tab Explorer)
Not only is the layout of the thumbnails a lot cooler, it also incorporates a history timeline that makes the feature much more functional than Foxpose' or QuickTabs. Using the history timeline, you can quickly jump to any page in your history in a few seconds.
Poo Poo it if you want because it's from AOL, but it's a pretty sweet implementation of this functionality.10 bucks says Microsoft copies the history timeline feature for the IE 7 final release.
I'm curious... Which browser was truly the first to implement Tabbed Browsing? I only know that the first I personally ever heard of it was when it was included in Safari, but I have no idea if that was really the first browser to have it.
Would you like to elaborate on what IE does that Firefox doesn't, "out of the box"?
Peter