Internet Explorer Not Dead Yet

turnitover writes "The future's not all Firefox, Deer Park and Camino, insists Microsoft. At its Mix '06 conference in Las Vegas, reports Microsoft Watch, company execs insisted that there's a bright future for IE. They not only distributed a 'layout-complete' build of IE 7.0, but offered hints about what the new version of the browser geeks love to disdain (yes, it will include ActiveX) will include. Also shown: tools to test IE compatibility. But with what? Standards or IE 6?"

Comments

Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[ackthpt]

Also shown: tools to test IE compatibility. But with what? Standards or IE 6?

Right.

"See? It it renders these pages, full of our own standards, the W3c be damned. What's not to like?"

Wait, wait.. OK, never mind. I thought I was going to be whelmed by word of IE 7.0, not overwhelmed mind you, but only whelmed. But the feeling passed, I'm OK now. Really.

Honestly, I use Firefox for almost everything simply because I prefer the way it behaves, meaning, it behaves.

Mar. 17, 2006, 50th anniversary of Fred Allen's passing. "As the chinese teapot said to the auctioneer's hammer, I'm going-going-gone!"

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[slashbob22]

I can't explain where standards are, but Bueller took the day off.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[uomolinux]

Not dead yet but not verry popular in my business. We only use it for some MS update, we are curently replacing Office for OpenOffice.org, but wait... Google is preparing something too ;-)

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[TERdON]

Also shown: tools to test IE compatibility. But with what? Standards or IE 6?

Most probably neither, if we're to judge by history...

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[solarbob]

Firefox IMHO is a much better user expierence with tabs (once you get use to the idea) and having a little search box. Ignroing the power features that users like (greasemoney,scripts etc) it just works. However for most Windows customers when they switch on the PC for the first time there is thebig blue E and off they go surfing. It also "just works" so why should they look for something extra? Most people don't know/realise the holes in IE and just click randomly. Until there is a fundemental change is user education its going to be a very slow battle to get domiance (and the "standards" it implies) from IE

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[lowrydr310]

Unfortunately my workplace requires IE - several company sites that I need to regularly access don't work in anything but IE. I installed Firefox and in addition to not being able to view those few sites, the IT department hunted me down and made me get rid of it because it's "unauthorized software" (it's funny when the unauthorized browser is more secure than the authorized browser, eh?).

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[cyber-vandal]

Not really. Firefox has gained quite a decent market share considering that it doesn't come with Windows. My old man and little sister both use it, my dad with no prompting from me whatsoever (and he's no more a geek than I am a quantum physicist) and my little sister from being given mild scare stories about trojans stealing her bank details (although she still uses IE for her MSN home page).
Firefox gets regular positive mentions in the PC mags over here in the UK (and is included on the cover CDs/DVDs), and given the advantages to using it and the only superficial differences between the way it works and the way IE works a lot of people are switching.
There won't be any dominance by any one browser any more as there has been over the last decade unless MS do something very evilly clever (which to be fair is always a possibility).
FF has too much momentum now to be derailed unless IE 7 offers something that is incredibly useful and can not be easily emulated by the competition.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[CastrTroy]

I've been using firefox for quite a while. I still don't use the search box. I just go to the address bar and type in google.ca, then search that way. I know the other way is much faster, but I'm just so used to the old way, that I haven't bothered to switch. Not to mention that most times when I search, I'm opening a new tab anyway. I love the tab feature because it offers such an advantage over the old system. Every time I watch a co-worker try to figure out which of the IE windows on their taskbar is the one they're looking for (especially bad if they are grouped) I thank the almighty dinosaur for Tabs.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[bmalia]

Firefox IMHO is a much better user expierence with tabs (once you get use to the idea) and having a little search box.

I just wanted to comment on tabs and the little search box. I was helping a not-so-computer-literate friend out the other day. When I suggested he google something, he clicked on the icon to open up a new browser. I then suggested he close that new window and open a new tab. Which I had to teach him how. Then he started to goto google.com, and I stopped him suggesting he type it in the search box. Which he did, but instead of pressing enter to submit it, he pressed the go button just to the left of it. That go button only works for the URL, not for the search. So i had him put the cursor back in the search box and press enter.

A simple task turned into a crash course on web surfing. Is he the only idiot out there or are there thousands of other firefox users out there not using firefox's ease of browsing features simply because they don't know how?

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Pantero Blanco]

There are people who don't use them, and they usually aren't "idiots". They're generally part-time or former IE users who switched for security reasons, not ease-of-use, and treat the interface the same way they treated IE's.

A friend of mine who is fairly computer literate and uses (the official) Netscape didn't know it had tabs until I showed him a few days ago.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[_Swank]

fyi, when you search in firefox's search bar, pressing alt-enter will open the result in a new tab.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[misleb]

And dont' forget about Safari. Apple is also nibbling away at IE's dominance. And this is one trend that simply won't be solved by IE 7.0 no matter how good it is. I think it will only take a certain critical mass of alternative browser to really enforce web standards so that the browser you use will be totally irrelevant... making it easier for more people leave IE.

-matthew

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[jacksonj04]

Installing the Google Toolbar for Firefox is actually quite a good extension, since every object on it is just as customisable as the normal Firefox UI. I've replaced the default search with the Google one (And the button for quick links to images, news etc), and added pagerank without losing any browsing space.

I'd recommend giving it a whirl, but as always ymmv.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Mike Savior]

FYI, if you don't delete the "Quick search" section of your bookmarks, you can search right from the url bar by typing "google (search string)". It also does "define (word)", and "wiki (term)".

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[the quick brown fox]

FYI, IE7 also has tabs and a little search box.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[porl]

you can also add your own custom keywords by adding bookmarks into the quick search folder (just check the properties of those there to see how, it's not hard)

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[zantsuken]

Wow, thanks for the tip. Very nice!

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know in the IE7 beta preview there are tabs and a search box right next to the adress bar, ala Firefox?

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[mdecarle]

You have obviously never heard of QuickSearch?

It was a little addition to IE 5.0, that let you search from the addressbar by typing a short code for the engine you wanted to use, and then enter your keywords.

Example: "y Bueller" would give you the YaHoo! results for that keyword. It didn't have Google (because it was still very small and unknown back then), but you could always add extra engines. I still use that today with IE6!

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[TheGavster]

This is assuming you can actually get things to stay in tabs. No matter how you tweak it or add extensions, FF is still more than willing to open new windows for pretty much any reason. If you want real, functional tabs, you need to use Opera (everything is a tab, unless the *user* says please open this in a new window. Script says new window? Enjoy your new tab.)

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never used the search field, and I've been a Firefox user since it was called Phoenix. Reasons?

I liked it when Ctrl-K worked as it should, deleting the text to the right of the cursor. Stealing that shortcut for the search field made me dislike it from the beginning.

It's annoying that I have to erase the contents of the field manually.

It shortens the address field.

Also, it's generally unnecessary as I can just go type "google keywords" into the address bar to do the same thing.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[BigCheese]

"FYI, IE7 also has tabs and a little search box."

Isn't that just lipstick on a pig?

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Dunrobin]

Everyone where I work uses IE, because (a) they haven't a clue about other browsers, and would probably be lost if you made them use a different browser, and (b) we use several IE-only web apps. I manage to confuse everyone by using Firefox, since the IE Tab extension lets me access those "IE only" web apps without any problems. Hell, I can even use it for the Microsoft Updates site! ;D

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[ackthpt]

Also shown: tools to test IE compatibility. But with what? Standards or IE 6?

Most probably neither, if we're to judge by history...

You mean, they test for the expected, not the unexpected. I so love going to demos and watching the stuff crash and hearing someone say, "I don't know what happened there."

it's a selling point!

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Khuffie]

Firefox IMHO is a much better user expierence with tabs (once you get use to the idea) and having a little search box.

*coughoperacough*. Us Opera fanboys get no love I tells ya! No love!

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[sconeu]

I heard he was dying!

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Bohiti]

I wish my mod points hadn't gone away in the past few hours-- that was a very informative post.

I didn't know I needed that key-sequence until you mentioned it. Thanks.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[frodo from middle ea]

If I am just a user, why should I really care about standards ? No seriously why should I ?

If you say to me, web developers have a hard time implementing support for various browsers, then I will say that, it is the web developer's problem not mine.

I exclusively use Firefox, but not because it is standard compliant, but because, it is much more secure and customizable for my needs.

Ordinary users don't give a damn, about standards or about the web developers.

If future versions of IE, however so non standard compliant they be, can tackle the biggest issue hounding IE, viz.. "Security", then there is no reason why IE won't regain all the lost market share to firefox.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[twistedsymphony]

he better not die, he said he was going to get me out of summer school!

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Laur]

If you want real, functional tabs, you need to use Opera

Or you could just install one of the tab browser extensions to Firefox. Really, isn't one of the strengths of Firefox supposed to be the numerous extensions available?

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[TERdON]

No seriously why should I ?

You miss a little, tiny bit of fact. You're on Slashdot. If you haven't ever done any kind of web development, WTF are you doing here? And if you have done any kind of web development, how can you not appreciate consistent behavior between different kinds of web browsers?

So yeah, the end users probably won't care. But that doesn't mean we should jump to the conclusion that slashdotters won't care - because at least many of them will.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[zaphod_es]

I know two people who have no favorites and never use the address line. If they want to go to example.com they click the icon for their home page to arrive at MSN and then search for "example.com" and then click on the result. They even bring up Google this way.

I have told them how to do it better, shown them, nagged them and every time I do a little shoulder surfing I see them up to their old habits. They are not stupid but sometimes they dont think very much :)

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[killjoe]

run firefox off your USB drive.

Better yet look for another job, clearly a company that is this rigid in it's thinking will not be able to survive in a fast changing world. Embrace change or die is the new business mantra.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

add the extention to allow rendering in IE. I use itwhen I HAVE to look at an IE site. Usually I just leave and look elsewhere. I don't have time to deal with places that are so sloppy to only code for one browser.

(and yes I do have enough time to post to ./, maybe IU should have said I don't have enough patience)

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[clydemaxwell]

Not all slashdotters are web developers. Some of us are involved in other levels of geek.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[TERdON]

I do know that I was generalizing, perhaps even a bit too much - it was on purpose I did that. I'm a robotics geek myself - but I still did some web development. Anyway, even if you really haven't done any web development - if you're a geek I'm pretty sure you would be able to appreciate the advantage anyway.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Petrushka]

I would think -- based on my own experience and observations -- that number two on the list of things that is pushing people towards Firefox, after security, isn't tabbed browsing, but Adblock. FWIW, Opera 9, currently at "technical preview 2", also has a "content blocker" -- see here -- and though it's reportedly less powerful than Adblock, I for one am likely to find that Opera 9 will suit me better than Firefox does. (Yes yes I know that it's been possible to block content in Opera for ages, but it's never been very convenient.) The fact that it isn't Free gives me qualms, but only mild qualms.

Anyway, IE 7 may (may) turn out to be more secure than IE 6 (not difficult), but that's only one of the things that has been pushing people away from IE.

That and the fact that once you've had one security nightmare with IE, or one spate of never-ending-popups installing malware/adware, you never ever trust it again. IE 7 might possibly close the stable door (yeah, right), but the horse has already bolted ...

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Doctor Faustus]

There are people who don't use them, and they usually aren't "idiots". They're generally part-time or former IE users who switched for security reasons, not ease-of-use, and treat the interface the same way they treated IE's.

Also, some of us just plain don't like the tabs. MDI interfaces had been on the decline for years, until they suddenly became the hot new thing in web browsers.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[catprog]

You can remove the search bar by customize and drag the search bar into the icons.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[jrmcferren]

This happens to work in google toolbar and quite possibly any toolbar for FF.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Tony Hoyle]

Tabs aren't MDI - MDI sucked, which is why you don't see it much any more (MDI allowed you to open windows within other windows - the last app I saw that did that was VC6 IIRC before all the MS stuff moved to tabbed windows instead).

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[ZERO1ZERO]

nice, since i'm lazt though I set up a New Tab button (right click -> customize toolbar) between go and search box then as I move the mouse over it I click on the new tab button and then into the search bar. Also handy to click Newtab, then paste an address in and click go.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Ms_Phitt]

Not true.

FF1.5 Edit -> Preferences -> Tabs. Change "Open links in other apps" to "A new tab." Check "Force links that open in new windows" and select "to open in a new tab." Click "Close." Problem solved.

Don't slam something if you don't know how to use it.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Xymor]

Right on. MS might be able to improve IE7 Security to match FF but, they can't ship a list to block ad-providers with their browser. One a second thought, can MS even ship IE7 budled with Vista? How are they doing in Europe and Korea again?

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's two other shortcuts someone might like:

- Middle click/shift-click on menu items that load an URL will work same as on hyperlinks
- Most of the toolbar buttons support drag&drop, useful when you want to open a plaintext URL quickly.

I just wish shift-alt-F or whatever it was still worked. :(

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Bing Tsher E]

You miss a little, tiny bit of fact. You're on Slashdot. If you haven't ever done any kind of web development, WTF are you doing here?

Now, I admit I have composed plenty of web content, but what the hell??

I didn't know this nerd place had been taken over by IT types.

Here's a clue: 'IT geeks' are marginally nerd-like, in some instances. There are people here who actually know quite a bit about a lot of diverse topics. Being some IT dude is NOT the default at slashdot.org. Some of us (to paraphrase Steve Ciarcia) even write our best code in solder. (my favorite 'language' is still TTL)

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[MikeFM]

Sadly this is a fair example of how users really use any program. To us geeks this stuff is obvious but you have to remember that most users never really pay attention to what they're doing. They don't notice a useful text box that can do powerful things like search unless there is actually a button next to it marked search. To many options and they'll not understand them but if you nest options more than a couple deep they'll get confused and not know what they're doing. It's amazing how stupid people can really be.

In my programs and websites I try to keep things clearly labeled and as simple as possible to use because otherwise people just won't use them very much. I'd suggest it being useful for Firefox to add an optional search button similar to the go button next to the search box and turn tabs on by default even if only one is loaded. Adding an optional new tab button to the tab bar would be smart too.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Visual basic and probably a number of other VS components had long been able to operate in an SDI mode though, it was an option in one of the preference dialogues.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Bing Tsher E]

didn't know it had tabs until I showed him a few days ago.

One of the weakest, most brain-dead things about Mozilla (or Firefox) is that the 'open a new tab' button disappears so easily disappear and requires extra work to get back. In my opinion, it should instead be an extra effort to disable the 'open a new tab' button. Clicking the 'x' on the right side of the tab bar when there is only one tab open should definitely NOT do away with the button.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Bing Tsher E]

I really liked Opera, back when one of the points they touted it with was that the installation binary for Windows would fit on a single floppy diskette.

It's still okay, but it's just another of the bloated pigs now.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[mikek3332002]

or sue/regulate the competition

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[poopdeville]

Apple-Enter works in Safari as well.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[kimvette]

Sorry for the me-too post but here goes:

Thank you for the tip!

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You mean like Cavalier Telephone?

Then again, the people in charge do still run it as if they were a telephone company, instead of an internet one...

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Either lost, or they'd gain productivity, from not having a million fucking IE windows open all over the place.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

He's not the worst. Most open their yahoo.com bookmark, and type in website.com there, hit enter, then click on the link yahoo brings up. I'm not kidding.

That they can type it in directly to the url field is a mystery to them.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[bunratty]

If I am just a user, why should I really care about standards ? No seriously why should I ?

So stuff works without you having to think about it. If web developers write a site that works in IE only, and you want to go to that site with any other browser, it won't work. If you happen to be on a Mac or Linux computer, you don't even have the luxury of using IE. It just won't work. If everyone follows standards, things just work.

It's exactly the same principle as other standards, such as the standard rail gauge that allows standard trains to ride on all standard tracks. Do you want websites to just work? If so, you should care about standards.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[michelcultivo]

I saw her dying!

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[MMMDI]

Now click Edit -> Extensions and select an extension. Right click and "Visit Home Page". Assuming you don't have an extension to prevent this, you just opened a new window. The same occurs with the themes listing and the "Get more extensions/themes" links.

FF = good, IE = bad, but this is indeed a valid point.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Ms_Phitt]

Now click Edit -> Extensions and select an extension. Right click and "Visit Home Page". Assuming you don't have an extension to prevent this, you just opened a new window. The same occurs with the themes listing and the "Get more extensions/themes" links.

Touché. And to be honest, I didn't really notice that. But I have to add that I think the reason it wasn't that noticeable to me is that it's pretty minor in the scheme of things. I click dozens of links that are forced to open in FF tabs every day, but I might go looking for a new extension or theme once every couple of months. So I'll concede your point but it seems like a minor thing, and while ideally it should be built in, it is easily extensible to have the desired behavior. Fair? :)

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[dal20402]

I've never understood the big deal with tabs. What's the difference between having tons of tabs open and tons of windows open? Either you have a cluttered overfull taskbar (on Windows) or a cluttered overfull tab bar.

I suppose the tab bar may be a little easier to read because of Windows's brain-dead taskbar implementation.

But the systems I use all day are OS X systems. With those systems, windows are actually easier to deal with than tabs. There is no way to see the content of all the tabs at once (unless I use Shiira, which despite being very promising isn't quite ready for prime time yet). If I have pages open in separate windows, I can Exposé to see them all at once.

The other thing I don't get is what people who have 30-40 tabs open at once are actually doing with all those pages. I can't remember a project where I needed more than 6-8 web pages open at once. I have a sneaking suspicion it's some combination of disorganization and the compulsive need to feel busy that seems to have overtaken modern life.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[TERdON]

Please read my reply to the other answer. I did exaggarate, and quite a lot, but that was on purpose. Basically, even non-web-slashdotter IMHO shouldn't be so shortsighted that they only look at what the users think about the technology. Basically, as a geek (any type) you should also be able to appreciate the benefit of standards in this situation. Compare the current state of web standards with connecting all of your nice TTL logic, only you have to add 5 ECL chips as well...

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Sepodati]

Isn't that just lipstick on a pig?

Depends. What color lipstick? Just so I can, uh... get a visual, you know?

---John Holmes...

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[man_of_mr_e]

Tabs are MDI. MDI stands for Multiple Document Interface. If you are using a single application that allows multiple documents to be open simultaneously and switched between, it's MDI, whether it uses tabs or any other mechanism.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[jp10558]

You really only care if you want to have any choice in the application you use for accessing the web. If you never want anything different than the market leader, then you don't care. Some portion of the population, however small, like to choose between applications for a job so they can pick the one that fits their method of doing stuff. These people like standards so they can still do the "stuff", but in their own way.

It's like phones, all the different phones only work cause there is a standard for them to plug into. Remember how much fun it was renting the one and only phone from ma bell? Some people don't want to do that with computers either.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[hkmwbz]

It's not really bloated. When it could fit on a floppy it didn't support even a tiny fraction of the web standards it does today. And Unicode alone added slightly less than 1 MB to the size, IIRC.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Valdoran]

You should use IETab. It uses the IE engine inside a Firefox tab. Technically, it's still IE, but at least you don't have to use IE itself anymore to use the WindowsUpdate site.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Ginger Unicorn]

The single coolest search thing in firefox is that if you type a phrase into the address bar, it looks it up on google and navigates to the top search result.

It's like having a browser that navigates via phrases instead of URLs. e.g. just type "slashdot" and it goes straight here. It's most handy for going to sites you cant remember or dont know the URL of. Like finding the website of your device manufacturer. If you type "gigabyte" you go straight to www.giga-byte.com, but if you'd guessed and put www.gigabyte.com you would have gone to some web design company who are probably just squatting on a valuable domain name.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[BigCheese]

Like this

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Hal_Porter]

Except that hardware engineers don't get emotional about technology in my experience. And most hardware standards, like TTL are defacto ones, set by some big company and usually patented by them. If they are popular, other companies license the patents or figure out alternative solutions to the problems and patent those.

So it's a completley different world from some goateed dude complaining he has to type a few more lines of text because "OMFG IE is not compliant with teh standards!!1". Like it or not, IE is the standard for 80-90% of the world, if your code doesn't work on that then it's going to be regarded as wrong by the majority of the people that see it.

Plus most hardware designers I know have websites written in vi or notepad ten years ago that look a bit primitive but work on all browsers, from lynx up to current IE and firefox. I can't imagine them relying on some feature which any popular browser doesn't support and then blaming the browser for rather than their own poor research/design.

Just imagine if you hired some guy to design a chip. At the interview he makes a few strange comments about the market leading HDL from one company being bad, and an alternative multi source one is much better. He claims, however to have only worked with the market leader at work, the alternative is only used at home. You point out that the project he will work in will use the market leader, but that you'll consider about alternative for future projects. He grudgingly accepts this and you hire him. Then he starts working, but none of the chips he designs work when they come back from the chip fab. When you confront him, he makes the excuse that the HDL you work in isn't standards compliant.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[TERdON]

I never proposed making non-IE-compatible websites - IE is so big you better make it work at least decently in IE. What I'm complaining about is that the fact that IE isn't very compliant makes you do a bunch of extra work (as all people I'm lazy).

Also your example isn't the equivalent at all. A better one would be to have to write the chip design so it is compatible with both the slightly different HDLs, as you want the design to be manufacturable at two different plants. This would indeed add a lot of not really needed overhead, wouldn't it? It's exactly the situation the web designers have to live with...

Finally, no one in their right mind releases any kind of project without at least some kind of proper testing - be it websites or chips. Especially very expensive custom chips. And please don't forget the classic Verilog-vs-VHDL-flamewar here as well! :)

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[Winckle]

Thank you very much swank, very useful!

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[jp10558]

Well, I find MDI to be really powerful, in, say, Opera, mIRC and Lotus Word Pro to name a few. Oh, and Adobe Photoshop.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[mixmasta]

People seem to love the search box, but it is the first thing I get rid of.  Bookmark keywords are much better.

Just type in the location bar (for example):
g subject (google)
w subject (wikipedia)
d word    (dictionary.com)

etc.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[mixmasta]

yeah but the bad part of MDI, losing your windows, doesn't exist with tabs.

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[mixmasta]

lol

Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing.

[julesh]

Tabs aren't MDI - MDI sucked, which is why you don't see it much any more

No, the reason you don't see MDI any more is that microsoft declared that it confused users (because they couldn't find their documents) and migrated all their apps away from it, prefering instead the I.E.-like model of using a window per document. When users complained that the number of windows was hard to manage on the desktop, they added task bar button grouping to Windows. Other developers, seeing what MS had done, decided to follow suit.

In the meantime, a number of application developers had discovered the way of solving this problem without throwing out the baby (i.e., single window/multiple documents) with the bathwater: present a list of available documents in some obvious way to the user. The earliest app I know of that did this was a text editor called EditPlus, which had a Windows-taskbar style arrangement along the bottom of its window to show what was available. I believe Opera was also an early adopter. Then Mozilla borrowed Opera's concept, and the era of the tabbed user interface was upon us. They started showing up everywhere. But, basically, they _are_ MDI -- a way of showing multiple documents in a single window. Many of them even work with the same MDI implementation that has always existed in Windows. I believe, for instance, this is how Visual Studio works these days: MDI + tabs. I'm not certain, though, I only have version 6 here. Certainly the .NET dev tools I have here (SharpCode, Microsoft WebMatrix) both use this model.

Unfortunately, OpenOffice hasn't switched to it. I really wish they would.

ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

When Microsoft IE can pass the ACID 2.0 Test come back to me.

Sincerely,

Firefox Fan

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you know this, but just in case, and for the benifit of passerbys, Firefox does NOT pass the acid 2 test.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[ELProphet]

Neglecting Firefox's inability to pass Acid 2.0. this might be better for you.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

um, Firefox doesn't pass ACID2 either

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[dreemernj]

When Firefox can pass the Acid 2.0 Test, come back to me.

Sincerely,

Opera 9tp Fan

(disclaimer, not bashing FF, just found the previous comment to be an offer too tempting to turn down)

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Spy der Mann]

The GP poster never claimed Firefox passes the ACID2 test. But at least they're working on it, and the current rendering is 100 times better than IE7's blood-stained test.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

When Opera can handle more than a quarter of the pages on the internet correctly come back to me.

Sincerely,

Another Firefox Fan

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Ravatar]

However, he implied through his signature that contrary to FF, IE can't pass Acid2.0

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[kimvette]

While I am also a Firefox fan and use it despite Konqueror's being very nice and passing the Acid2 test, it should be pointed out that Firefox does NOT pass the Acid2 test. At least, Firefox/1.5.0.1 does not. The dev tree might, but who counts that? One may as well claim that Looking Glass is the best operating environment ever - but since it's vaporware/unreleased it would be a false statement.

Sure, Firefox breaks less than IE does when loading the Acid2 test, however by a strict measurement, only one (two) browsers to date pass Acid2:

KHTML (Safari/Konqueror)

If you want to count dev trees/beta releases, then you've got:

Opera
Firefox

Also, I think it's great that the Opera folks are almost mocking Microsoft, and challenging them to pass Acid2. Aside from KHTML which is there, and MSIE which TOTALLY pukes on it, Every other browser is almost rendering Acid2 to be recognizable as a smiley face. At least everyone else is attempting to handle proper CSS and bad CSS correctly, e.g, render compliant CSS, and downgrade gracefully on broken CSS.

What MSIE renders could just as well be accomplished by splashing paint on a sheet of canvas. With the way Microsoft is handling things, I wonder why they don't just ignore CSS altogether and turn their browser into a random pixel renderer?

Get with the program, Microsoft. You have the greatest market share so it is in your best interest for maintaining your share to act responsibly. I hope the mass reaction to MSIE 7.0 is for major sites to either block the browser, or to use CSS which causes MSIE to totally break, and for those sites to recommend all browsers which are not MSIE as alternatives.

Microsoft has held the web back long enough with their refusal to implement proper PNG rendering - their holding back the web has to stop now.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[CastrTroy]

I think I heard that safari passed the ACID 2.0 test, and then I hear tons of people complaining that Safari doesn't render things properly. The ACID 2.0 test is not some wonderful test that verifies your browser will render all HTML/CSS content perfectly. You could program your browser specifically to pass the test, and it still may not render everything properly. Reminds me of video card manufacturers tweaking their drivers to get higher frame rates on Quake 3.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Derek Pomery]

That's true, but it *does* incorporate a sufficiently large number of parameters, that if a browser passes it by "cheating" the cheating will be quickly discovered on pages that try to use the various technology.
That'd be a PR nightmare.
ACID2 is a quick and effective way to check how a browser supports a broad swathe of web technology.
There's a reason Firefox isn't quite there yet (yes, even on the nightly builds). Getting it all to work requires a sufficiently sophisticated model that other web stuff also will work better.
We all benefit from that.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

When Mozilla Firefox can pass the ACID 2.0 Test come back to me.

Sincerely,

Safari Fan

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[AnyoneEB]

I use both Opera and FireFox (mainly FireFox), and I remember back around Opera 6 or so, the rendering was horrible, but I have not encountered any problems with the more recent versions.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[ergo98]

When Opera can handle more than a quarter of the pages on the internet correctly come back to me.

I love Firefox, but I'm not blinded by it. I use both browsers (Opera and Firefox) regularly, in fact they're both open as I write this, and I can say that Opera has just as much success as Firefox does. When I do have problems, it tends to be a problem in both (e.g. a page written purely for IE).

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[nmg196]

Who cares about the stupid ACID 2 test? I'm fed up of hearing about it. In the same way that IQ tests are only a way to measure your IQ - not your intelligence or knowledge, the ACID 2 test is only a measure of the ability of a browser to pass the ACID 2 test. Safari for example passes the ACID 2 test, yet has several rendering bugs which make many websites render incorrectly which are fine in Firefox, Opera AND IE7.

As stated on the ACID 2 test webpage:
"Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification"

What's important is that IE 7 is WAY more standards compliant than the previous version, and shows that Microsoft is clearly making a commitment towards standards compliance in their browser. Perhaps IE7 won't be perfect by launch, but no other browsers are yet either (including Safari).

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[j79]

This feels more "Flaimbait" than "Insightful", but oh well...no mod points. :)

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[ch424]

I think the parent was joking. Why else sign as Firefox Fan?

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[bigbigbison]

Name a non-Microsoft-owned site that Firefox can handle that Opera can't? Hell, there are times when I open Opera because something on a site doesn't work with Firefox. I mainly use Firefox, but there isn't any reason to go badmouthing Opera.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

. I hope the mass reaction to MSIE 7.0 is for major sites to either block the browser, or to use CSS which causes MSIE to totally break, and for those sites to recommend all browsers which are not MSIE as alternatives.

I'd really love to have some of whatever you were smoking. If this is the kind of arrogance Firefox fans show with 10% of the market, you don't deserve anything better.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[JulesLt]

Do you mean complaints that existing websites don't render correctly, or issues with how it's rendering valid CSS and HTML?

I've no doubt that both Apple and Opera have deliberately focused their CSS implementation on passing ACID, but they're still way ahead of IE7, and at least have a commitment to implementing CSS standards, rather than 'implementing the bits we can be bothered to, and thus force web developers everywhere only to use what works on IE'.

What is interesting is what Adobe are doing - a new client that allows mixed PDF, Flash and HTML content with the guarantee of cross-browser rendering - i.e. it will render the HTML as well as the PDF and Flash. Granted, Adobe Acrobat is every /.'ers worst nightmare, and there's no statement on how much of CSS it will handle, but it's an interesting idea in itself. Of course it's a client rather than a plug-in, but there's an idea - 'fix' IE with a plug-in page rendering engine. Call it something non-scary so that users feel comfortable installing it, like they do with Flash.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[AeroIllini]

When Opera opens its source, come back to me.

Sincerely,

Firefox Fan

(disclaimer, not bashing Opera, just found the previous comment to lack perspective.)

------

In all seriousness, Opera is a fantastic browser. I used it for a while and enjoyed the experience immensely. However, I prefer to use Open Source apps whenever possible, and since Firefox is as good as Opera and open source to boot, I prefer it. Personally, I don't care whether people use Firefox or Opera or Professor Whantunkel's Fantastical Whizz-Bang Browser, as long as the browser they use strives to be standards-compliant. IE purposefully breaks compliance.

The Acid 2.0 Test is not the end-all of compatibility. It is merely a goal to strive for. And, for the record, Safari beat us both.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[LocoMan]

My bank's website ( http://www.banesco.com/ ). The page works perfectly, but for some reason when I try to log in it tells me invalid password with opera, works with firefox. I'm an opera user but I keep firefox around mostly for that page alone (it's actually its start page because usually anytime I open FF is for that one). On the other hand, this page: http://www.pcactual.net/ used to work perfectly on IE, and on opera, while it had glitches, the side navigation could still be used, but it was completely broken in firefox. That was sometime ago, though, and they changed it since then, and I'm at work and only have opera and safari on this computer, so can't test if it now works.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[TheoMurpse]

I hope the mass reaction to MSIE 7.0 is for major sites to either block the browser, or to use CSS which causes MSIE to totally break, and for those sites to recommend all browsers which are not MSIE as alternatives.

As a web developer, I'd love it if IE would support fully CSS, but as web developers, our loyalties are to the end user; writing code that will break on 30% of their browsers is a failure to perform our job adequately. That's like a doctor saying, you know, I'm just not going to help fat people with exercise because it's their fault for not eating healthily. Until they fix their nutrition, I will not help them with an exercise regimen. That's ridiculous, and as painful as it may be, it is our responsibility to enhance the end user experience, not exercise our compupolitical beliefs.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Karzz1]

"What's important is that IE 7 is WAY more standards compliant than the previous version..."

Dude, they couldn't be any less standards compliant than previous versions. They had nowhere to go but up.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Bert64]

No...
He implied that IE's rendering is inferior to firefox, and that if it supported ACID2 it would be superior to firefox and he might consider looking at it.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[TekGoNos]

Name a non-Microsoft-owned site that Firefox can handle that Opera can't?

Sun Java(tm) System Messenger Express 6.1

An AJAX (? dont know about the X though) email system that my university uses.
Works (sometimes buggy, but works) in IE, Firefox & Mozilla,
but is buggy as Hell (= inoperable) in Opera.

Generally though, I agree. It's the only site I know of that Opera has problems with. And I think it's more a problem on Sun's side than with Opera.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[porneL]

"Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification"

But conformance with W3C specifications guarantees passing Acid2 test.

Acid2 is not the ultimate goal, but it's a pretty and easy to understand by non-techies indicator of progress in HTML/CSS support.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

On why Acid2 is important:

    http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/guide/

Simply:

Acid2 is a test page for web browsers published by The Web Standards Project (WaSP). It has been written to help browser vendors make sure their products correctly support features that web designers would like to use. These features are part of existing standards but haven't been interoperably supported by major browsers. Acid2 tries to change this by challenging browsers to render Acid2 correctly before shipping.

Okay, IE is greatly improved. That doesn't mean:

• it's good
• MS cares about standards per se

But I can see how you might think that. No, MS adheres to standards only as much as they must. Your using Firefox forces MS towards compliance.

Funny, never thought of it that way before. If you care about improving IE, you should use Firefox.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla on the trunk still doesn't pass Acid 2 and I don't think it will by v2.0 either. It's very close but there are apparently some sticky issues that they have to fixup first.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Trogre]

Microsoft has held the web back long enough with their refusal to implement proper PNG rendering - their holding back the web has to stop now.

Most of us web devs treat MS browsers as damage and route around them anyway.

Unfortunately not all web devs can do that through fear of driving away customers.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

When you actually download the firefox source, edit it, and recompile, get back to me.

Sincerely,

U. Jizzmop.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[zootm]

But conformance with W3C specifications guarantees passing Acid2 test.

I'm fairly sure that that's not true — I think that Acid2 checks standards that are non-W3C.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

Why folks think Safari is so great is beyond me. So it pases acid test 2.o. it has more bugs in its capability to handle layers etc compared to Firefox or IE. Safari is not that great a browser.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[mdwh2]

Why is it that everyone always goes on about it being better to use open source when the issue is Opera or Firefox, yet MacOS X is worshipped here on Slashdot, and no one would ever dare criticise it on that point.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[MikeFM]

I often fine little odd behaviors in how Opera handles CSS. They may technically be correct but so is Firefox. The issue being that the spec is very confusing and generic so that it's hard to know where the bug is. Still, Firefox does what I think is most often the desired effect in these cases whereas Opera and Safari seem to take the approach of the easiest solution to implement. Both Opera and Safari handle form widgets incorrectly, IMHO, as they try to use platform-centric widgets rather than widgets that are properly styled using CSS. Try drawing a background image on form dropdowns in Safari or Opera and all you'll get is a flat white background. Little issues like that are a hassle but it's great that Firefox, Safari, and Opera are all doing so well that it even becomes an issue to handle those little nagging things.

Some examples -
Centering problem in Safari and Opera: http://www.tubmonkey.com/
Dropdown backgrounds problem in Safari and Opera (color selector): http://www.tubmonkey.com/viewProduct.html/productI d/388

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of people criticise that, in every single OS X-related story. Do you not bother reading anything that's below +3?

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[MikeFM]

It's great that IE7 is more compliant with standards but I'd be a lot happier if they'd get at least close to the same level as Firefox, Opera, or Safari. That would be fantastic. Better yet, I'd love to see them be so compliant that they leave Firefox, Safari, and Opera looking like wannabes. I don't care who I'm supporting so long as they make my life easier.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[mpcooke3]

Have things really improved?

Last thing i read on slashdot they'd fixed the CSS bugs that many people were using to work around the broken box model in IE6 but hadn't fixed the broken box model itself. Clearly that is not good.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Ravatar]

There is no superior, or inferior result in the ACID2 test. You either pass or you don't.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[tekcsound]

Oh I dunno, how about that little site called Yahoo?

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[jibjibjib]

When more than a quarter of the pages on the internet can handle Opera correctly come back to me.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[ClamIAm]

Firefox does NOT pass the Acid2 test. ... The dev tree might, but who counts that?

As a corollary, who touts passing Acid2 as the cornerstone of their browser? I believe the only answer right now would be Apple/KDE zealots, but that's just virtual wanking. What people don't seem to think about is it doesn't mean anything if your browser can pass some specific test like Acid2, especially if the rest of the CSS support mangles pages worse than IE. A little perspective is important, folks.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[VGPowerlord]

"What's important is that IE 7 is WAY more standards compliant than the previous version..."

Dude, they couldn't be any less standards compliant than previous versions. They had nowhere to go but up.

I take it that you've never used Netscape 4...

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

Konqueror doesnt even pass it fully, it doesn't hide the scroll bar like it should.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[VGPowerlord]

ACID2 will be a useless test as long as it uses data urls. Although the HTML 4.01 standard mentioned data urls, web browsers are not required to implement them, just like they're not required to implement a python parser for the objects as examples earlier in the same section.

I personally dislike the idea of data urls, for the following reasons.

1. Embedded files can not be reused.
2. Embedded binary files are approximately 33% larger than their non-embedded versions, because they must be encoded first.
3. Section 6 of RFC2397.

Back to Acid2 guided tour. Here are the problems I see right off the bat.

1. The "version without data URLs" link brings you to a page that uses a data url in one of the tests. Oops.
2. The ACID2 page does not include the URI in the DTD line. This is in violation of HTML 4.01 Section 7.2, which states "HTML 4.01 specifies three DTDs, so authors must include one of the following document type declarations in their documents." (Emphasis mine) All 3 DTDs listed include URLs.
3. Acid2 claims "Acid2 assumes basic support for... CSS1..." but actually tests against CSS2.
4. The Acid2 test intentionally has an object of type application/x-unknown. This has a nasty tendancy to launch plugin finders in most browsers. application/octet-stream is the "official" unknown type.

I'm sure I'll find more later, but it's getting late here.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[AnotherDaveB]

I think I heard that safari passed the ACID 2.0 test, and then I hear tons of people complaining that Safari doesn't render things properly.

While the latest version of Safari may pass Acid2, Safari is not available as a standalone download. Apple control distribution of it which they have tied to the OS.

Many/most users of Safari, who are possibly complaining about pages not rendering properly, are using an earlier version.

I use Safari 1.3.2 on Mac OS 10.3.9 and it doesn't pass the Acid 2 test. Of the other browsers on my machine, FF 1.5.0.1 is closest to passing, IE 5.2.3 shows a blank page.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[man_of_mr_e]

I've no doubt that both Apple and Opera have deliberately focused their CSS implementation on passing ACID, but they're still way ahead of IE7, and at least have a commitment to implementing CSS standards, rather than 'implementing the bits we can be bothered to, and thus force web developers everywhere only to use what works on IE'.

The IE team has said they're committed to standards support, and they're working pretty heavily with the WaSP project to get there. Rome wasn't built in a day, though, and IE7 is just the first step to standards compliance.

rant on:

I get pretty sick of hearing people say stuff like "Why can't they just make it standards compliant"? This ignores the fact that making something standards compliant isn't an easy task. In fact, NO browser is fully standards compliant yet, and that should be testament enough to how difficult it is.

Would you rather they wait another 5 years to release a fully compliant IE than release one in a decent timeframe that addresses the largest number of common issues? Yes, yes, you can complain all you like about how they sat on their ass for 5 years, but that doesn't change the fact that they're working their asses off now, and all they get is crap like this.

Ok, rant over.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[man_of_mr_e]

You heard wrong.

IE7's box model is fully compliant in strict mode. In fact, IE6's box model is fully compliant when in strict mode as well. Of course many people assume otherwise because they don't know they're running in quirks mode.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[mpcooke3]

Hmm, interesting I'm using strict mode and getting different box height calculations in IE - it must be being caused by something different then.

Still, at the moment that's not much to worry about compared to the fact that IE6 is making the txt in some random DIVs dissapear when I use "float"...

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Bert64]

Neither IE nor firefox pass, he was saying that if IE passed he would consider using it as a browser, until then firefox's effort is still a lot better even if it doesn't pass everything in ACID2.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[JulesLt]

I'm happy to believe that the development team are working their asses off - but like in any company they are doing so to the companies priorities, and, I would wager, with limited resources.

I'm well aware that you don't solve problems by throwing more people at them - but you do have to ask why an organisation the size of Microsoft is now lagging behind far smaller companies in this particular area. In terms of the user interface side, which is what the consumer will see, they've definitely put the effort in. As a company they've also managed to put time into creating a wholly new equivalent to SVG and Flash. That, for me, says where their priorities lie.

Hell, it's a big enough company that they should have been able carry on with support on IE6 while having a whole different team working on IE7 from the ground up. It's just that there is about 0% business benefit in doing so, if the world is willing to work around your bugs.

I think part of the issue relates to who is the consumer of the browser - web designers have been complaining about the difficulty of PNG transparency support in IE since the 90s. Now given that it's achievable through well-known JavaScript hacks, do IE users see a difference? No.

(That may be part of the issue - who is the consumer? For Flash, web designers are the real consumer. If HTML/CSS was a similar closed ecosystem - i.e. linked to Microsoft development tool - then I'd expect you'd have seen progress at the rate we have seen with MS other development tools).

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[Jesus_666]

1.) Make a site with spiffy CSS2+ effects
2.) Write a stylesheet that displays the site in a usable state, even if it doesn't look that good
3.) <!--[if IE]> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="iestyle.css"> <![endif]-->
4.) <!--[if IE]> Because of technical limitations of Microsoft(R) Internet Explorer(TM) this site is displayed using a fallback stylesheet. If you really want to see the regular version of the site we're afraid to tell you that you'd have to use a different browser, as the Internt Explorer(TM) doesn't yet support the corresponding W3C standards. <![endif]-->

You can also leave out step 4, especially if you can emulate the regular CSS' behavior by using broken CSS in iestyle.css. If you can't you can at least have the page degrade gracefully when IE is present.
Seriously, conditional comments are the IE's greatest feature.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[man_of_mr_e]

My guess is that you're NOT actually using strict mode. Simply using a strict doctype is not enough, there's lots of things that will put IE6 into quirksmode, like using an XML declaration, or having *ANYTHING* (including a blank line) before the doctype.

Your other problem is called the "peek-a-boo" bug, and is well known (google for it). This is fixed in IE7, by the way.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[man_of_mr_e]

It's certainly true that Microsoft sat on their ass for 4 years, but nothing can change that now.

I think the LAST thing we want Microsoft to do is simply throw bodies at the problem. You want people with experience, and passion for developing web browsers, not some guy who's spent his last 2 years working on Office thrown in to help.

The fact of the matter is, even for Microsoft, they don't have unlimited resources. They are bound by the same kinds of talent shortages you find everywhere. I'm not saying they couldn't find a few more bodies if they wanted to, but sometimes a gelled team is much better than constantly adding more people.

You also seem to make the same mistake lots of other people do. They complain that MS is busy creating shiny graphics, but this ignores the fact that the graphic designers are not programmers, and you couldn't put them on tasks like implementing CSS features. The people working on their SVG and Flash alternatives are not web browser programmers, most likely, but graphics programmers. It's a different skill set. Also, those projects are used in more than just the browser, so they have exposure in Office, the OS, Development Toools, etc...

Oh, and Visual Studio 2005 is XHTML and CSS oriented, so that should give you some kind of idea of the committment Microsoft has to these technologies.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[fader]

Why is it that everyone always goes on about it being better to use open source when the issue is Opera or Firefox, yet MacOS X is worshipped here on Slashdot, and no one would ever dare criticise it on that point.

Maybe because there are oodles of different peope here, and the ones that use only open source apps aren't the same ones that praise OSX as the Second Coming?

Tough to imagine, I know... different people with different opinions. Crazy!

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[mpcooke3]

Thanks, I think it is rendering in strict mode or things would be a lot worse (www.eatmyhamster.com) We set a few more paddings and margins to 0 and it seems a bit better now.

I'm glad that Microsoft is fixing these things even if it is mainly because of Firefox. Fingers crossed the min-width/max-width/auto stuff will also make it into IE7. I wonder if there is any chances they will roll out these CSS fixes in an IE6 update.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[JulesLt]

I'd definitely agree on the first point - throwing inappropriate people at a project doesn't work. That's very separate from how you direct the priorities of a team - especially when you've got limited resource.

I don't believe that I made any comment about graphic designers; I'd imagine that even within the IE team you're going to have a pretty clear split between the people implementing the UI and the renderer, and I'm under no illusion those skills are switchable. The reason I mentioned SVG and Flash is that I reckon that is probably the one area where you might get some overlap (they both concern developing high speed rendering from structured formats). I think it would also be naive to think that integrating with Metro won't have impacted on the IE team - which comes back to my point about setting priorities.

If Bill's No.1 priority had been 'the world's most standards compliant browser' do you have any doubt that is what you'd be seeing?
Equally, why did Apple focus so much effort on getting Safari through ACID 2? It's not as if anyone anywhere designs web pages that only render well in Safari.

Anyway, I'm happy to read that they are committed - and look forward to them delivering on it.

Re:ACID 2.0 Test

[man_of_mr_e]

This sounds like you're confusing the difference between default style sheets and the box model.

CSS doesn't define what the default paddings and margins are, thus each browser is left to their own devices to define what those are for their own application. If you don't set your own defaults, then you're at the mercy of whatever the browser vendor defines, all without violating any standard.

Standards?

[Quasar1999]

I remember when the standards were defined by Netscape and IE, basically any new feature one implemented, the other copied, and voila, a standard... Whatever happend to that type of development? It benefited everyone. Now we have a bunch of lame ass intellects defining standards but not actually implementing them, resulting in any app that does follow these new standard features to have massive memory leaks, and hacked code to get it to work...

I want the old 'standards' war back.

Re:Standards?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"I remember when the standards were defined by Netscape and IE, basically any new feature one implemented, the other copied, and voila, a standard... Whatever happend to that type of development? It benefited everyone."

I take it you're a bit too young to remember when IE invented the "strong" tag to break the "b" tag. (If you ever tried to create "cross-browser" Javascript, especially around 2000, you'd also feel differently.)

Re:Standards?

[Pantero Blanco]

I don't think the parent post is flamebait, though I think he's missing something.

What you're talking about is what takes place between F/OSS projects working on the same thing; each takes ideas from the others while coming up with its own ideas, which may be copied.

Sometimes it happens in battles between commercial products, but often each starts implementing things differently for the sole purpose of breaking compatibility with the other. The result is documents, pages, et cetera that will only work with one company's product. There's no progress there.

translation

[gEvil (beta)]

Translation: We're working on ways of tying this thing even further into our operating system than before.

Re:translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone also heard the words "we will cut off their air supply."

Oh boy!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't WAIT to watch the objective analysis that this thread will surely contain.

Re:Oh boy!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I can't WAIT to watch the objective analysis that this thread will surely contain.

Analysis? What is there to analyze? MS issued bunch of PR about Internet Explorer that fails to address the most egregious failings of the product. It has control of the market with this pile of crap simply because they bundled it with their monopoly OS. The consumers are suffering, but that is old news and this does nothing to make most of us believe it will change.

Re:Oh boy!

[TheAncientHacker]

Let's see - an objective Slashdot analysis of an objective article by Mary Jo Foley as interpreted by some poster? Serious disappointment's in store for you.

Just as a start, notice that the headline talks about what Microsoft announce

• d

at the Mix06 conference. Um. Hate to break it to whoever wrote that headline but Mix06 doesn't start until Next Monday as the could have easily learned by

1. Reading the actual article they linked to
2. Going to Microsoft's Mix06 website and actually reading the dates.

Re:Oh boy!

[DanTheLewis]

Yeah, and I can't wait to see the sarcasm trolls. God knows, we supercilious trolls have been going hungry lately.

Re:Oh boy!

[martingunnarsson]

I think you're wrong. For 99% of the users IE does exactly what it's supposed to do, and no, the users aren't suffering. The web designers are the suffering ones, and there aren't just an awful lot of them compared to the number of users.
Techlically IE is a lot worse than Firefox in many ways, but from a user perspective it's not.

Re:Oh boy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Objective analysis? Who needs one, don't you think the opinions of MS execs are objective enough as it is?

Re:Oh boy!

[GaryPatterson]

The users have suffered in the past, through security holes in IE. There's a reason the Firefox takeup has been so good, and why it's not confined to tech people.

Re:Oh boy!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I think you're wrong. For 99% of the users IE does exactly what it's supposed to do, and no, the users aren't suffering.

Users suffer from lack of innovation. Security holes allow their computers to be infested and broken. Useful ad blocking is still rudimentary. Users have no option to use tabbed browsing (and are unaware of its existence) for more than five years. I'd say all of that directly affects end users and none of this is from the perspective of a developer.

Ash

[thatguywhoiam]

"Its a trick. Get an axe."

Re:Ash

[Mayhem178]

Us: Gimme some sugar, baby.
M$: Okay! *hands over IE 7.0*
Us: Ugh!
M$: You found me beautiful once...
Us: Honey, you got real ugly!

Re:Ash

[irablum]

Its a trap - Admiral Ackbar

Re:Ash

[Mantrid]

It's a trap - moviegoers fooled into seeing Ep II & III :)

Re:Ash

[Anonymous Coward]

funniest post *ever*

Re:Ash

[fredrik70]

They put us up the bomb?

Re:Ash

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing about this is that the new IE7 interface is horribly ugly. The tabs are ugly, the menu changes are ugly, the toolbar i sugly. It's just flat out ugly. I would actually consider using IE if it had the old 6.0 style UI and fixed the security and rendering problems.

Re:Ash

[maxume]

Fooled into seeing I and II. III was what everybody wanted, the origin of Vader...

Re:Ash

[Jesus_666]

That's not a browser... It's an operating system! - Obi Wan Stallman

IE may not be dead yet

[RLiegh]

But it's certainly beginning to smell like it is!

Re:IE may not be dead yet

[AltGrendel]

Or...

With proper technology, even Frankenstein's monster could be resurrected.
Doesn't mean it's a good idea though.

Re:IE may not be dead yet

[nwbvt]

Microsoft products always have a bad stench around them. That doesn't mean anything, it still isn't even close to being dead. What percentage of the market share does it have? 80-90%? And the closest competitor, Firefox, has undergone some serious problems lately. More security bugs, memory leaks, a tendency to crash, etc. The movement to embrace Firefox has stalled, and IE is gaining their market share again. And most people out there probably don't know what Opera or Safari are either (hell they probably don't really know what IE is, they think the program they are opening is called "The Internet").

Antigravity drive the Microsoft way...

[gd23ka]

"company execs insisted that there's a bright future for IE." just insist that gravity does not exist.

Re:Antigravity drive the Microsoft way...

[dusik]

General relativity explains that gravity is an illusion of sorts... and maybe so is the bright future of IE. Let's wait and see.

(Although, it's a fact that IE is technically behind Firefox and Opera, it will likely continue to be popular because it's Microsoft, which is an entirely non-technical reason.)

Re:Antigravity drive the Microsoft way...

[gd23ka]

Actually I think it is the other way around and most people when it comes to browsers and thus to privacy on the net, most are very apprehensive of anything that comes from Microsoft. Even though Firefox and Opera for example are technologically (vastly) superior, I think the real reason why they are successful is mainly because people trust browsers like Firefox or Opera while the only thing Microsoft has "going for it" is a a solid track record of consequently disappointing trust placed into their vague promises of privacy.

MS says IE isn't dead?

[Jesselnz]

I'm sure FreeBSD is saying the same thing...

Re:MS says IE isn't dead?

[bgalbrecht]

I find it hard to believe that FreeBSD is saying that IE is not dead.

Re:MS says IE isn't dead?

[vishbar]

Maybe. But FreeBSD doesn't have 80-90% marketshare.

Re:MS says IE isn't dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would FreeBSD say IE isn't dead?

Re:MS says IE isn't dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure FreeBSD is saying the same thing...

Netcraft confirms it.

In other news..

[Rob T Firefly]

Honda claims next year's Hondas will be the best cars ever, Magnavox claims to produce the greatest ever stereo system, and Goya state that their upcoming batch of red kidney beans are going to be the absolute mind-blowingly best batch of red kidney beans ever set upon by human sensory organs.

Why is it news when a company advertises its own products?

Re:In other news..

[ThinkWeak]

It's not news when a company advertises its own products. It is also nothing new when slashdot throws MS a free advertisement for one of their products.

Re:In other news..

[dusik]

>> "Why is it news when a company advertises its own products?"

Good point.

Could it be because so many people (sheep) take Microsoft's word as coming from a reputable source, and therefore we would like to take the time to criticise it as such, rather than a joke, in an attempt to counterbalance the discrepancy?

Re:In other news..

[Firehed]

Especially when their products have upwards of 80% market share... Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox, but it hasn't come anywhere near killing off IE. Honestly I still can't see why MS cares - if nobody uses their browser, less coding for them and less potential tech support. MSN Search, maybe; but the browswer itself, being freely available and all, is hardly a money-spinner.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm terribly excited about this red kidney bean news, where do i learn more? And come to think of it my stereo doesn't say best ever on it and the Magnavox you speak of sounds right up my alley. well no time to chat now, I'm on my way to the Honda dealership.

Re:In other news..

[baKanale]

and Goya state that their upcoming batch of red kidney beans are going to be the absolute mind-blowingly best batch of red kidney beans ever set upon by human sensory organs.

Well, if this was "Beandot: News for Beanographers. Beans that matter.", then yes. It would be news.

Re:In other news..

[mrcolj]

IE will always be alive and kicking so long as it has hundreds of billions of dollars... ;) Firefox will always be nothing more than an academic project so long as it has zero dollars. There are no exceptions in history.

Re:In other news..

[TexasDex]

They give away the browser for free for a reason, and that isn't because they're nicer than Netscape. Microsoft stands to benifit enormously from being the only browser on the market. All the IE-only web pages that just plain won't work right under Linux or OSX help keep Microsoft's OS monopoly firmly entrenched. If HTML/Javascript/XML/etc were truly standardized then people would realize that they could use whatever operating system they wanted, and Microsoft would lose out.

Re:In other news..

[panaceaa]

Having diversity in web browsers makes it more time consuming (read: espensive) to develop web applications. However, the cost of developing Windows applications has remained the same, or even decreased with .NET's continuing adoption, making developing applications on Windows a more attractive option. And I probably don't have to state that by having more applications on Windows-only continues the Microsoft lock-in.

Re:In other news..

[NutscrapeSucks]

If HTML/Javascript/XML/etc were truly standardized then people would realize that they could use whatever operating system they wanted, and Microsoft would lose out.

Even if these technologies were 100% standardized (which they never will be), the web browser is a critical part of the development tool "stack", which includes everything from IDEs to Databases to Application Servers. So Microsoft pretty much has to be in the browser market as long as they are advertising a complete solution.

Re:In other news..

[bunratty]

Microsoft doesn't make a Flash plugin that you need for Flash sites, or a PDF reader that you need to view PDFs. Why do they need to make the browser that you need to view web pages?

Re:In other news..

[bunratty]

I don't think that increased diversity has made it more time consuming to develop web applications. Back when Netscape 4 and IE 4 were the big two browsers, it was awful to write sites that worked well in both browsers. Now that we have IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera, even though there are more browsers to potentially test with and have issues with, it's much easier to write sites that work in all browsers because they support the standards so much better than the older browsers. Usually all I need to do these days is make a site work in Firefox and validate the HTML and CSS, then tweak it for IE a bit, and it tends to work well in all browsers.

Re:In other news..

[Firehed]

Ah, if only I had mod points. That'd get +1, Insightful any day of the week. However, MS does still have a strong dominance on software, most notably games. Unlike the geeks, most normal people don't hate Microsoft, and other OS producers would need to give a reason to switch beyond "it'll work just as well" - you're going to need more than just websites to be standardized before the masses consider moving. However, I for one refuse to do any sort of business on IE-only sites, and I know I'm not alone. As they say, standards are so good that we should each have our own! It's not the languages that are the problem, it's that having the site display as desired in IE often means that you'll have to use incorrect code. I personally don't even check my websites in IE anymore, unless I've added one of those blocks that only show up in IE that say "switch to a standars-compliant browswer".

The good news is that, if nothing else, most websites work at least well enough in standars-compliant browsers to be able to navigate them, even if they're not shown as intended because the coder only cared about IE. We've moved beyond the point in web design where frames were the latest rage (right up there with animated gifs) so code is more complicated, but the browswers are also a lot better about doing things. Even if 80% (or whatever) of the market may not necessarily be displaying pages as they should be rendered.

I guess what I'm saying is that it could backfire. The open source movement is stronger than ever, and with security as a forerunner, Microsoft has a lot more to do than just add in tabbed browsing. More and more sites are displaying a "Get Firefox" logo (or some other OSS browser), just as more sites are coding to be standards-compliant. As more "Page not rendering correctly? Try [not IE]." is showing up in more and more places. Unlike most of my geeky habits, I actually know other people that use Firefox (even ones that see sunlight on a regular basis). As S-C browsers become more dominant, web designers and going to have to change their code accordingly. As it is, AJAX is really the only thing you can (should be able to?) count on to use in any OS with a web browswer. Just consider what would happen if Gmail suddenly stopped working in IE, or something else just as common? The decision is a) switch email address or b) change to a standards-compliant browser which is probably more secure than what I'm using. While change can be difficult, it's much more of a PITA to change your email addy than your browser. It took me a while to transition to FF, just because I always used to use IE through My Computer since it launched so quickly (then I realized I had a "home" hotkey next to the MC one which launced the default browser), but changing email addresses, particularly at a moments notice, is much harder to deal with. I guess I just figure that MS can only keep their almost-monopoly for so long before people get fed up with them.

Good thing too!

[clevershark]

The decision was cheered as "guaranteed work for the next decade" by computer security experts worldwide.

Re:Good thing too!

[xiando]

"guaranteed work for the next decade" by computer security experts worldwide.

Totally! And make no mistake: That's by design, not by error: NSA access was built into Windows: http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/5/5263/1.html

Additionally, it may be of great interest and surely value for everyone to know and realize that the NSA is except from all laws that do not specifically mention NSA in the text of that law. Check it our for yourselves. THAT MEANS THAT ONLY LAWS WHERE NSA IS SPECIFICALLY MENTIONION NSA APPLY TO NSA. They are the premiere intelligence agency in the world, they answer to no-one and only a handful of laws actually apply to them... Scared yet? That's just the tip of the iceberg of trouble we're in.

Microsoft hosting lab about this

[Anonymous Coward]

I have not heard it reported anywhere, but note that Microsoft will be hosting an "IE7 Compat Lab" at Mix '06, where developers can test their applications for compatibility with the latest IE test builds. As Microsoft itself has acknowledged, there could be app-compatibility hiccups with IE 7.0.

I have read that Microsoft acknowleding on the Mix '06 Web site, "reduced need to hack around quirks in older browsers, however, means that existing pages written specifically for older browsers may render differently in IE7. In addition, IE7 includes a number of new security features which may have impact on binary extensions such as toolbars, browser helper objects, and ActiveX controls."

Re:Microsoft hosting lab about this

[Bogtha]

The sad thing is that there are two rendering modes for Internet Explorer, "quirks", where it intentionally gets things wrong regarding the W3C specifications, and "strict", where it unintentionally gets things wrong regarding the W3C specifications.

Decent web developers make sure they trigger strict mode, because, although it's still atrociously bad, it's still a bit more compliant than quirks mode.

However Internet Explorer 7's updates that break compatibility do so only for one of the modes. Guess which one? Yep, Microsoft are breaking compatibility for the web developers who try and follow the W3C specifications as closely as possible, but are retaining compatibility for all the developers who ignore the specs and follow quirks mode.

Doctype switching is an awful hack that they could have avoided (want quirks? Send an X-Microsoft-Quirks header), but they chose not to, and as a result have made life difficult for web developers who are doing their best to hack around Internet Explorer's deficiencies.

Re:Microsoft hosting lab about this

[NutscrapeSucks]

Keep in mind that MS implemented their Quirks/Strict mode thing in 2001, when approximately 8 pages on the entire Internet were written towards strict HTML4/CSS2 compliance. (Yeah, they should have fixed it a long time ago, better late than never.)

Also I wouldn't say they are "breaking compatibility" as much a fixing bugs -- if you worked around IE6 Strict Mode, you should be fine, and if IE6 has broken your page, it should be fixed.

> want quirks? Send an X-Microsoft-Quirks header

This is exactly what DOCTYPE is for, and exactly how it's used in Firefox.

Re:Microsoft hosting lab about this

[nixkuroi]

People. They are in PRE BETA stage. This compatability lab is there so that they can get developers to show them where they screwed up before they get into a real beta.

IE7 hasn't even been completed and people are acting like it's already broken. I love Firefox as much as everyone else, but to proclaim IE7 dead before arrival is a huge mistake.

Besides, isn't anyone the least bit happy that they've fixed stuff that forced the box hack and other BS css stopgap measures? Isn't anyone happy that they're implementing the httprequest object? You're ignoring the fact that really, for the first time, Microsoft is actually paying attention to the fact that we DON'T want to have to code two different interfaces to get AJAX data. Sure, for the next couple years you're going to have to deal with the ActiveX MSXML dom, but the idea is that 3-4 years when you have a 60-70% market shift to ie7 from 6 and 5, pages you create won't have to be as broken. There'll be a smaller number of hacks or sacrifices to the lowest common denominator.

Think ahead people. This will echo into the next releases when we can all not have to ask questions like "if (window.ActiveXObject)" if all we want to do is go out and get a little data :)

Re:Microsoft hosting lab about this

[Bogtha]

Also I wouldn't say they are "breaking compatibility" as much a fixing bugs -- if you worked around IE6 Strict Mode, you should be fine

This is not true. There's all kinds of changes to strict mode that can break backwards compatibility. I quote from the ieblog:

It is has been our policy since IE6 that under quirks doctype we will not make any behavioral changes so that existing pages will continue to render unmodified, but under the strict doctype we want to change behavior to be as compliant as possible with the web standards. For IE7, we introduced new CSS functionality (see Chris' blog post for the full list) and cleaned up our parser bugs. This leads now to several CSS hacks failing. If you are using IE7 (you are MSDN subscriber or received a copy at the PDC) you may notice major sites breaking due to the use of CSS hacks and the strict doctype.

Bottom line: if you used quirks, you'll be fine, if you used strict, you might have a lot of work on your hands.

This is exactly what DOCTYPE is for, and exactly how it's used in Firefox.

Absolutely 100% totally incorrect. Just because Firefox does it, that doesn't mean it's right. This isn't "exactly what DOCTYPE is for". That's completely wrong. The doctype line is for referencing an external DTD subset, which defines the markup language's grammar. The use of it for picking rendering modes is a Microsoft-invented hack, and nothing at all to do with what it is designed for.

Have you actually

[fatboysmith]

tried IE7 Beta? It doesn't suck from an interface standpoint. Security issues aside, there are a few features I'd like to see in Firefox that are in IE7. The RSS intergration is well done. Customization still needs tweaking though.

Well, Not too "Bright", but...

[Pantero Blanco]

I don't know about a bright future, but it's not going away any time soon. I'm not sure how massive a screw-up it would take for IE to lose its largest customer base - the people who can't be bothered to look for anything else or don't know anything else exists.

As long as the Gecko crowd and Opera manage to hold on to enough marketshare to force web developers to use REAL standards instead of Microsoft's so that my browser of choice works, I'll be content.

Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Moral absolutism" seeks to eliminate all meaningful definitions of "freedom".

It's just restin'..

[otis wildflower]

.. Or is it pinin' for the fjords? /obvious

Just say no to IE

[davro]

"company execs insisted that there's a bright future for IE."

Like there going to say IE has no future! holds head in hands.

Re:Just say no to IE

[BigCheese]

Well, I saw a webpage in IE the other day and I thought the flashy ads and popups were going to blind me.
Yes, IE's future is bright in a staring-into-the-sun-with-no-eye-protection sort of way.

I forget how nice it is with FF and AdBlock+.

Yes, but...

[GillBates0]

...has Netcraft confirmed this?

What's bright....

[fm6]

If "bright future" means technical excellence, then of course this is obvious bullshit. But if it means 90% of the user base, then I'm afraid it's a foregone conclusion.

The thing is when you're a company like Microsoft and you've got this huge, unstoppable cash flow: you never really have to pay for your mistakes. Which makes it hard for you to stop making them. I hate to be the one to point this out, but Google has the same problem!

Re:What's bright....

[TexasDex]

Google's cash flow is as fickle as the massive number of people who use it.

So far only Google has technically mastered search results and presented a simple enough interface that people want to use it. If somebody else finds a way to deliver better search results, and the slashdot crowd gets wind of it, or if Google turns (truly) evil, then it can say goodbye to it's user base and it's profit. The massive fascination with Google is a fad, not a bad fad but a fad nonetheless. Other online companies have massive userbase momentum (eBay, AIM, etc), not just mindshare.

Unlike Microsoft's WIN32 API and massive program base they don't have any real kind of lock-in. A competitor to Google is possible and likely, simply because it doesn't take as much capital to start up a competing search company and get people to use it if you do it right.

Re:What's bright....

[fm6]

You're right, Google doesn't have the lockin with their search engine that Microsoft has with all the software that people can't move away from. I'm dubious that anyone will be able to reproduce Google's success with search engine technology, but it's always possible.

But that's all beside the point. I wasn't claiming that Google would always dominate searching the way Microsoft seems destined to always dominate PC software. I was simply pointing out that Google, like Microsoft, doesn't have to pay for their mistakes — they have enough cash coming in so they're not in trouble when they screw up. And they have screwed up.

Not in the same way Microsoft has, of course. Microsoft screws up with bad QA, mind-boggling feature bloat, and the odd product nobody could possibly want. The computer geniuses at Google have more professional pride than that. Their products are well tested, unbloated, and extremely useful — they just never seem to finish them.

RTF...

[zerocommazero]

Der article stated that a stand-alone will be available for Windows XP SP2 also.

Re:RTF...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's der Artikle, respektive das Artiklechen to you, bitch.

Re:RTF...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really 'Artikel', du verfickte Schlampe!

Extensions

[quokkapox]

IE is kind of boring nowadays because it isn't extensible. At least, not voluntarily.

I just can't imagine installing IE7 on my machine except if I REALLY have to to verify that my websites load and operate with it. And that would be really sad.

Re:Extensions

[Osty]

IE is kind of boring nowadays because it isn't extensible. At least, not voluntarily.

BS. It's not extensible through HTML/CSS/Javascript like Firefox, but it is extensible, and in many ways even moreso than Gecko-and-XUL-based browsers. You can add new functionality to IE via Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), or embed/extend the browser by referencing the browser COM object.

BHOs are actually a very powerful way of extending IE. For example, when popup blockers started showing up in other browsers way back in the day (~2001?), I wrote a BHO to add popup blocking support in IE. Toolbars provided by developers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are also BHOs, though you don't have to have a toolbar if you don't want to (BHOs require no UI interaction). At one point, I even wrote a Greasemonkey work-alike for IE, though I ended up abandoning the project due to time constraints (but the goal of building a proof of concept was successful). The MSN toolbar added tabbed browsing to IE6, and while it was a little flakey it still worked very well. So, what can't you do with BHOs?

That amount of power is also a problem, though. Like ActiveX, BHOs can be used by bad people. Also like ActiveX, IE has built incremental improvements to security to protect you from bad BHOs. It never should've been possible to have a drive-by badware-BHO installation in the first place, but Microsoft has learned the lesson. Good and bad, with great power comes great responsibility, whatever. You may not like the extensibility options in IE, but that doesn't mean that they're not there, nor that they're not as powerful, if not more powerful, as Firefox extensions.

Re:Extensions

[xiando]

I just can't imagine installing IE7 on my machine except if I REALLY have to to verify that my websites load and operate with it. And that would be really sad.

Check out http://www.browsercam.com/ if you need to know what your website(s) look like in other browsers. It's generally enough to make sure your (x)html folows W3 http://www.w3.org/ standards, but some browsers don't so Browsercam and other tools like it can be of value if you really want to know what your site will look like in other browsers. It's great for Windows users also since it can show Linux-browsers like Konqueror etc also.

Re:Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

Any chance at you releasing the unfinished grease monkey control to the community for further development?

Re:Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

The wonderful thing is, you don't have to actually install IE! It is included with every version of Windows! How great is that?

Re:Extensions

[Osty]

Any chance at you releasing the unfinished grease monkey control to the community for further development?

No need. Somebody else already did that, though development seems to have stalled for some time now. But their source is available, and it's written in C++ rather than the C# I used (mine was a proof of concept, so I didn't care about performance or extra requirements like having the .NET framework installed). I'm not a big fan of the direction they went with Turnabout (split basic/advanced installations with no ability to change basic to advanced without reinstalling, requiring a toolbar), but that's fixable by anyone who wants to take the time. The core functionality works well enough, though it has problems with framed pages (who uses framed pages anymore, anyway?), and the source is under a BSD-ish license so you could do a closed-source binary release if you really wanted to.

I stopped using Turnabout for two reasons

1. The toolbar interaction of Turnabout exposed an unfortunate design flaw in IE where you can no longer save pages as archives (it's not a bug because apparently it's working as designed). Worse, that same flaw causes javascript errors to disregard the "do not show error dialog" option, resulting in a bunch of annoying javascript error dialogs on every single page. You'd be surprised at the number of popular pages with broken javascript (usually ad-related scripts).
2. IE's tendency to leak memory resulted in the iexplore.exe process eating up 200-300MB of RAM after only an hour or two of usage. You could solve that with carefully-written scripts, but when you're trying to reuse scripts from the Greasemonkey community that were targetted to Firefox (which is less leaky) you don't reeally get that level of control.

If Turnabout were to ever resume development (or someone were to fork the code), and IE7 were to solve most of IE's leakiness, I'd very likely revisit using a Greasemonkey-like extension.

Re:Extensions

[julesh]

It's great for Windows users also since it can show Linux-browsers like Konqueror etc also.

You can run Konq on Windows using the cygwin port of KDE. Works just fine for me.

... Not Dead Yet

[Duke]

Damn! Where is a silver bullet whien you really need one?

Re:... Not Dead Yet

[KarmaMB84]

Don't bother, it'll just pull a Sigma again.

Firefox has some work to do too...

[bogaboga]

The Firefox browser has got some work to be done on it too.

In my view, the guys at Mozilla should grade the extensions in relation to how stable or otherwise they leave the base Firefox installation. The FoxyTunes extension for example, while being touted as completely compatible with Firefox 1.5.0.x, still makes the tab browsing interface completely inconsistent.

I also feel that at this point in time, the Firefox interface looks ancient. It's time for a revamp. How about that guys?

Re:Firefox has some work to do too...

[GFPerez]

Try Azerty's Themes, they are very nice.

Re:Firefox has some work to do too...

[Al Dimond]

Firefox interface looking ancient? What would you replace it with, FisherPrice-looking crap? Ugly blue gradients like Office and now OO.o? Apple-style glass effects? Why is it that every time Microsoft or Apple comes out with an ugly new look people think sensible designs are outdated? Count me out! I'd rather have FF look like Motif than Office or the current Netscape version!

NOT DEAD YET?

[peterpressure]

Isn't IE still 90% of the market share? where did this subject line come from?

Sure I wish it was dead just like everyone else, but last I checked my grandmother wasn't going to download firefox so she can receive RSS feeds and use tabbed browsing...

what a bias misleading subject...

i thought /. was completely non biased and objective

muahahahahahahaha

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[Ravatar]

i thought /. was completely non biased and objective

You must be new here, welcome.

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[Keith Russell]

where did this subject line come from?

From the fact that the only new feature in the past few years was the popup blocker. Microsoft hadn't been arsed to do anything about new features or standards compliance until Firefox came along. The IE "team" was just there to spackle over the latest high-profile security crack.

IE is still the 500 lb. gorilla in user share terms, but it's a lazy, out-of-shape 500 lb. gorilla.

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[peterpressure]

hey I agree man,
IE isn't innovative in the least bit...

but it doesnt need to be, it just needs to work, however poorly and whatever noob user will use it since its bundled with Windows...
My point was my grandma, dad, mom, non techie friends, will always use IE since they are just users unable to install apps...

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[jb.hl.com]

Maybe that's what people want. They don't want all the fancy tabbed browsing stuff and the RSS doohickeys and extensions. Maybe IE works for them because it's simple?

Not saying I like IE (I don't) but just a thought.

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[xiando]

"Isn't IE still 90% of the market share? where did this subject line come from?"

According to my Webalizer output (with a very long and careful configuration), between 74% and 84% of users of mainstream sites are using Internet Explorer. 6% to 16% from having 90% market share. It's not got 90% according to my numbers, but it's not very far from it.

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[robertjw]

My stats show about 79% consistently for the last few months. 79 may not be far from 90, but it's the difference between a C and an A.

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[nasch]

It's funny, but I've accidentally converted two people to Firefox. One was a nearly computer-illiterate friend who needed to use a page on our church web site that didn't work in IE. I tried Firefox, and bingo, no problem. Now maybe she still uses IE for everything else, but still. The other is my wife, who was an IE user until I had to reinstall Windows and her Microsoft Outlook webmail stopped working with IE. How ironic is that? So again, fired it up with Firefox and it worked perfectly. So IE6 really is driving people to Firefox, even people who don't hate MS, don't care about OSS, and don't know the difference. Multiply my experince by 20 million and maybe we'll start to see something. :-)

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[Just Some Guy]

You must be new here, welcome.

Pot, meet kettle...

Queue the response from that guy with a UID of 9 or something like that.

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[ilctoh]

i thought /. was completely non biased and objective

You seem to be confused - we're not affiliated with the FOX News Channel...

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you take into account the bots?
If you do, then IE is close to 90%.

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[Zantetsuken]

which is why next time you visit them, you install Firefox and possibly Spybot on their machines :)

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[Zantetsuken]

Firefox/Netscape, Safari, and any other browser superior to IE can be used in just as an "uncomplicated" way - do I personally use RSS directly? no (except through my Google portal, but aside from that). Do people have to use tabbed browsing? no, but I would think once they find the convenience of it, they definitely wont go back to pre-tabbed browsing. Do people have to go through the extensions list and pick a bunch out? no, but it sure makes it easier to manage extensions than IE with BHOs, and can sure tweak the browser to more you liking functionwise.

much more likely is what the rest of us have already accepted, that the common person is just too stupid to know about or even *want* to know about anything else as long as what they are using works - and usually even if their machine is riddled with spyware, they'd rather go to Best Buy and get their wallet raped strait outta their ass for *tech support* to run a scan or reformat the drive, AND leave them stuck with IE afterwards

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[A beautiful mind]

I don't know about the US, but according to European statistics, Firefox usage is above 20% in average in Europe, and increasing consistently.

Re:NOT DEAD YET?

[Ilgaz]

I keep a site, a very very generic user profile site. It has analysis too. I sometimes print it to pdf (OS X here) to send my geek friends living in a dreamland :)

85-90% IE. Lots of Windows 98. Lots of XP SP1.

4-5% Gecko

(btw, the "OP" (story submitter) is trolling)

Re:dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like Jim Morrison and BSD; supposedly they're not dead either!

Dead

[certel]

I still find that IE is faster than FireFox and hope that they can continue to work out the bugs... Wow, am I really saying that? I've tried FireFox and although I am a fan of the browser, I still find that I use IE more.

Bright?

[AWhiteFlame]

As long as its shipped with Windows, and Windows is the dominant force, yeah, Internet Explorer is not going to die. "Bright Future" may be extensive, but its definitely still going to be the powerhouse. The only way Internet Explorer can be dealt with is if more computers are shipped by default with a different browser. I know plenty of people who don't want to switch from IE because its just "what they've used" and it just "works" for them.

There's a really bright future for IE, alright...

[Jim in Buffalo]

There's a bright future for IE if you're a botnet farmer, that's for sure.

IE7 Dynamic Security Protection

[digitaldc]

IE7 shows warning messages for 'Reported Phishing Websites.'

Maybe this will finally catch the 'big one that got away.'

Re:IE7 Dynamic Security Protection

[xiando]

IE7 shows warning messages for 'Reported Phishing Websites.'

BEWARE of warning messages and censure like that. The Norwegian Police branch "kripos" provide Norwegian Internet providers with a list of "child porn" websites which they filter out. And what do you know, websites with factual objective information about 911 and other information that goes against everything our tyrannical covertly torturing government would have people believe is censured as "child porn".

So be very aware of "warning messages for 'Reported Phishing Websites.'" and other "warning messages" and "filters" who have the potential to be abused by criminal tyrannical governments.

Terrible title

[snitmo]

"Internet Explorer Not Dead Yet" ... Thanks for letting me know. Of course it's not dead. IE ships with all Windows, so it will be installed on 90% (or whatever percentage Windows has) of the desktops. There are some web pages that don't work well with other browsers (e.g. the ones at microsoft.com :) ), so a regular user wouldn't uninstall IE even if he or she uses FireFox for most purposes. Whether you like it or not (and I don't), IE is here to stay.

But Firefox could have a great 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that PS3 and the $100 laptop, both of which run Linux, will each ship in quantity millions in 2007 will not help IE one bit.

Still trying to figure out the statement

[NorbrookC]

FTA "reduced need to hack around quirks in older browsers, however, means that existing pages written specifically for older browsers may render differently in IE7. In addition, IE7 includes a number of new security features which may have impact on binary extensions such as toolbars, browser helper objects, and ActiveX controls."

I'm still scratching my head over this. From what I think this says, it means that the pages that relied on the MS specific stuff for IE5x and 6 won't look the same when viewed with IE7. Which doesn't say anything about following standards, or comparing it to how the page looks using FireFox and Opera. And, the new "security measures" will screw up all the toolbars, objects, and ActiveX that they've encouraged web developers to use. Gee, wasn't this why I switched to FireFox in the first place?

As long as they have an iron grip on the desktop OS, and insist on intertwining it into their OS, of course it has a "bright future." It doesn't mean that it's going to be any more secure (although hope reigns eternal), or be compliant with standards. I'm still trying to work out what the hell they meant.

Re:Still trying to figure out the statement

[Random Destruction]

Did you mean Hope Springs Eternal or does what you said have a different meaning?

Re:Still trying to figure out the statement

[Sheridan]

As far as I can tell from reading around the voluminous literature about IE's (and other browsers, but mainly IE's) brokenness, it would appear that they are likely to fix some of the bugs people have used to work around their brokenness, without fixing the underlying brokenness (e.g. the bug required to use the "holly hack" or the "* HTML" hack.

The following (which you are probably aware of, but others may not be) are good references on CSS/HTML/XHTML etc. which I came across whilst trying to work out why my standards compliant pages were so badly broken in IE6 -- it absolutely amazed me how much of the websites about CSS etc. are devoted to IE bugs and workarounds.

• PIE
• ALA
• (support pages for) the CSS Zen Garden

Cheers,
Mark

Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Sure IE isn't dead yet but by not working with standards, by being overly invasive, by being integrated into the OS and several other mistakes that they REFUSE to correct, they are doing their best to kill it. It's like they are doing there best to ignore the public outcry while cramming something else down there throats.

Sure Joe Average user doesn't care about these things (at least not directly) but he does care about the indirect problems that these things incur. All he knows is that with Firefox, he doesn't get POPUPS, it lets him modify it to what he wants it to look and act like and it's simple easy and fun to use. Most users completely forget about IE until another applications forces them to open it and asks if they want it to be their default browser.

Now even universities, schools and businesses are installing Firefox and doing their best to remove all pointers to IE due to security risks. And once the end user becomes familiar with the brwser at work or school, they will be more likely to download it and install it at home.

There is a reason why some sites show Firefox usage as high as 30%; hell even internally at Microsoft, 8-11% of people use a Mozilla based browser (based on stats from exclusive third party vendors to Microsoft).

In this case, Microsoft is their own worst enemy and needs to modify their business strategy or else continue to lose market share in the browser.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Reality Master 101]

All he knows is that with Firefox, he doesn't get POPUPS, it lets him modify it to what he wants it to look and act like and it's simple easy and fun to use. Most users completely forget about IE until another applications forces them to open it and asks if they want it to be their default browser.

Um, IE has had a popup blocker for years now, and the average user doesn't even know you can plug things in.

There is only one reason Firefox has gained marketshare: IE's vulnerability to spyware. If they fix that, then no one will have any incentive to move to Firefox. Hell, I use Firefox for this reason, and if IE finally becomes fixed (and has tabbed, which I've grown to like), I probably won't bother with Firefox anymore. Why should I if IE works well enough?

People need a really good reason to use something other than what works well enough. Firefox managed to gain a foothold when IE wasn't working well enough, but I think that probably won't last.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[briancnorton]

There is a reason why some sites show Firefox usage as high as 30%

Yep, it's called wishful thinking, or more accurately, Lies.

All he knows is that with Firefox, he doesn't get POPUPS, it lets him modify it to what he wants it to look and act like and it's simple easy and fun to use.

You're right, Joe average doesn't care, but IE has a popup blocker, and lets him modify just as easily as firefox. (drag and drop) It's no simpler or easier to use, and the supposed security advantage over IE looks like more hype than reality.

The most interesting part though is when you call it "fun." How is it "fun?" Why should a browser be "fun." A browser is about accessing content, not entertaining me.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

There is only one reason Firefox has gained marketshare...

People need a really good reason to use something other than what works well enough

People need several reasons. One isn't generally enough to cause people to change from something they are comfortable with and used to. You may think it is only one reason but it is a combinations of issues that have plagued their browser. Lack of CSS support, lack of W3C compliance, activeX vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities to the OS, spyware, viruses, browser hijacking, popups, lack of customization capabilities... the list goes on and on.

This is a combined effect of all their bad decisions they have made over the years and the emergence of a tool that just does it all better. And regardless of whether they actually fix all those mistakes, those users will not come back for a good long time as IE has earned itself a bad reputation.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Yep, it's called wishful thinking, or more accurately, Lies.

And decrying it without proof is called denial. Of course you can always deny that too. :)

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Reality Master 101]

Lack of CSS support, lack of W3C compliance, activeX vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities to the OS, spyware, viruses, browser hijacking, popups, lack of customization capabilities... the list goes on and on.

Regular users don't care about any of that (and again, sheesh, IE has had popup blocking for YEARS). All they know is that their computer "got really slow" and their brother-in-law installed Firefox for them. IE renders all web sites perfectly, as far as regular users are concerned.

IE may have earned itself a bad repution, but keep in mind they still have around 90% marketshare. When people buy new computers with Vista, most people are not going to bother downloading Firefox. Heck, most people won't even *remember* they were using Firefox before.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Regular users don't care about any of that (and again, sheesh, IE has had popup blocking for YEARS).

And as I stated in the original post, users don't care about it DIRECTLY but care about the indirect affects that these things produce.

And yes, IE has had POPUP blocking you can purchase and popup blocking that they added in recently... both are highly ineffectual.

IE may have earned itself a bad repution, but keep in mind they still have around 90% marketshare...

IE doesn't even have a 90% marketshare on the Microsoft campus so I don't know how you can possibly say that; I actually worked as a web developer with Microsoft (as an external vendor) and internally, 8-11% of users run a Mozilla based browser. THIS IS IN MICROSOFT ITSELF! When I left over a year ago, it was around 11%.

So where you get that stat must be from someplace that has EXTREMELY slanted results with a very limited polling set. Either that or its just simply made up.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[ghislain_leblanc]

Sure IE isn't dead yet but by not working with standards, by being overly invasive, by being integrated into the OS and several other mistakes that they REFUSE to correct, they are doing their best to kill it. It's like they are doing there best to ignore the public outcry while cramming something else down there throats.

What public outcry? Half a million slashdot users complaining ON SLASHDOT is really not that many people compared to what I would guess BILLIONS internet explorer installs troughout the world. I know it's not really good nor ethical but software ethics and quality are not something people who matter care about.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Why should I if IE works well enough?

Besides IE's other drawbacks is the fact that it's only available on a single platform: Windows. When I use a Mac or Linux box I like the fact that the same browser is available.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

What public outcry?

You know denial isn't just a river in Egypt. It's fun for all Microsofties.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Yeah, this is a big one for me as well. I like being able to have the exact same setup on my Linux and Mac boxes as I do on my Windows box. Makes the surfing experience similar no matter what OS I am using.

Microsoft will realize this too late that people will adopt Firefox due to using it on other OS's as well so when forced onto a new OS, they will instantly grab Firefox.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[robertjw]

the average user doesn't even know you can plug things in.

The average user may not, but many, many do. I'm more of an Opera guy than firefox, but one thing I REALLY like in firefox is the plugin interface. Two clicks and I'm on a site that lists plugins. Two more clicks and I've installed some cool new widget. The plugin interface can't be beat. IE could definitely benefit from features like that.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[GIL_Dude]

Maybe you haven't tried IE in over a year? IE doesn't get popups either.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[killjoe]

IE does not have popup blocking, XP does. IE on W2K doesn't block shite.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Too little, too late. That bus has left the station

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[telbij]

IE doesn't even have a 90% marketshare on the Microsoft campus so I don't know how you can possibly say that; I actually worked as a web developer with Microsoft (as an external vendor) and internally, 8-11% of users run a Mozilla based browser. THIS IS IN MICROSOFT ITSELF! When I left over a year ago, it was around 11%.

Microsoft employees are geeks. They should have a significantly higher usage of Firefox than the general public.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Only about 10% of people on the Microsoft campus in Redmond Washington are developers/IT Personnel. Everyone else is marketing, support, etc. 35% of computers on their campus still use an 800x600 screen resolution. There are an amazing number of users who are nt computer savvy.

So even if you said that ALL their developers don't even use their product, that's a powerful statement no matter how you cut it.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[sxtxixtxcxh]

last i checked (just now) firefox has a 58.8% piece of the pie on http://lib.rario.us/ with i.e. at 24% and safari at 10% and opera at 4% ...

of course, most of my traffic is coming from del.icio.us and various other "web2.0"-ish sites and blogs... so it's probably bit skewed anyway.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[briancnorton]

ok, here's the first one I found http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/March/browser .php

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

and here's mine

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even bother to read your own link? w3schools.com's statistics are not at all representative of the internet at large.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Oh ... you are going to fault them for honesty?? I suppose you think your link IS a representation of the entire web??

Poor deluded Microsoftie...

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[briancnorton]

Did you even read the big disclaimer?

"W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers."

Thecounter.com has far larger sample sizes than that one website, about a quarter of a billion *USERS* every month for the hundreds of thousands of websites that use it's services.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Actually if you read on through the site, you will also read that the stats are a cross sampling of sites... similar to the counter. But iunderstand your want to selectively read to prove your point and ignore all other data. That's the way you Microsofties are.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you read on through the site, you will read that the statistics come only from w3schools logs, but they also monitor other sites. I, however, understand that you want to selectively have the reading level of an idiot to prove your point. That's the way you zealots are.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Actually they state that the stats are a combination of their own stats and the stats of sites that tyhey monitor. You'd know this if you followed w3schools for the last 3 years and had a reading comprehension higher than the third grade. But I can understand if your point and click mentallity is taxed by all those two syllable words.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Anonymous Coward]

"The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures."

Learn to read, dumbass.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[julesh]

IE does not have popup blocking, XP does. IE on W2K doesn't block shite.

It is actually IE that does the blocking. It's just that there's a version of IE that'll only run on XP SP2 (and is only distributed with that service pack/OS).

If you don't believe me, tell me what version of IE you have on W2K. I have version "6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519". Bet your version is a different one.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Yep... quality of those figures. Now how do you suppose you take other numbers from other sites and come up with some sort of average... I understand this may take you a day or two to figure out so don't hurry. I wouldn't want one of the two brain cells you are rubbing together to blow a fuse.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Anonymous Coward]

What does taking an average have to do with our argument, retard? The site clearly says that their statistics are from their own web logs. They look at the statistics from other sites only to see if their numbers make sense and to come up with conclusions like, "These facts indicate that the browser figures below are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at least 80% of the users."

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

What does taking an average have to do with our argument, retard?

Yeah I didn't think you'd be able to figure it out on your own. Keep working on it. If you have a friend, call them and maybe they can help. Imaginary friends don't count.

Oh and I like the way the number changed from 90% to 80%. In the time of this posting, your stats lost 10%. Your accuracy is astounding.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Anonymous Coward]

What number changed from 90% to 80%? I never said 90%. Maybe your imaginary retarded friend has been repeating 90% in your head.

Also, you clearly didn't understand the jest I made about averages. I asked about taking averages to make fun of you . . . because the site doesn't take any averages. You just brought averages into the argument because you couldn't understand that w3schools just looks at its own web logs and doesn't aggregate information from elsewhere.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Gee it takes stats from other sites to make sure their numbers aren't an exaggeration. Now how they hell do you suppose they do that? Man, you're getting more stupid by the minute.

And even though you are now an anonymous coward, I'll place good money on you being the same person who originally stated 90%. Hell they haven't even been 90% even on the Microsoft campus for about 2 years.

The propoganda machine is slowing, Microsoftie.

Doesn't matter anyway because nobody reads this far into a threead except trolls like yourself who have nothing better to do that masterbate to the family dog.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Anonymous Coward]

They make sure their numbers make sense by comparison. Look it up after you learn how to use a dictionary.

I don't even know what 90% post you're referring to, you paranoid kook. Do you consider yourself to be a one man anti-Microsoft army? I'll let you in on something: I don't work for Microsoft, and I don't even like the company. I just like to point out stupid posts when I see them.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Uh huh. Comparison. And so they just look at those other number and go 'Hmm... our stats are off... lets raise them by... oh say, 5%". Wow. You must be right because you say so.

You Microsofties crack me up. No wonder your stuff sucks ass when you don't even realize what you yourselves are saying. Here's a hint, open the garage door a little earlier next time so you don't sit their huffing fumes all morning.

Inbreeding is calling for you. They want their poster child back.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you even follow the argument so far? It's been only around five posts. You're the only one who thinks they adjust their stats by looking at stats from other sites, you moron. I've been saying that they compare stats from other sites only to deduce that their own statistics are off. Learn to read.

I don't work at Microsoft, but you look like somebody who is jealous of people who do. Maybe you're one of those people who got hired as a temp and was laughed at by their real employees.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

Uh Huh... whatever helps you get to sleep at night.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like I hit a little close to home.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody has said 90%. You're stupid.

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Anonymous Coward]

You're stupid. It's "there," not "their."

Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged

[Foofoobar]

LOL. If you say so then it must be true. :)

Its future IS bright

[Spy der Mann]

Flames are bright, aren't they? :P

Re:vista only?

[ackthpt]

It's certainly dead if it's a Vista-exclusive

There's two ways to get Vista into the hands of schucks:

• Have sommat supported by some tool (like IE7) which is so necessary, the user has no choice but the upgrade*.
• Cut a deal with PC makers so ONLY Vista on installed on new PCs, further fragmenting and forking** the market.

Vista will be out there, but keep in mind, there's a lot of users still dorking along on Win 95, Win 98, ME, NT, 2000, etc. and they're in no hurry to switch. Why pay an a Technology Tax every few years?

* The term Upgrade is used figuratively.
** Also f__king the market.

IE, monty python style

[Kn1nJa]

IE: I'm not dead yet Firefox: Well you will be soon enough IE: I feel happy, I feel.... *WHACK* Firefox: Thank you very much, see you thursday

Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I don't know about a bright future, but it's not going away any time soon. I'm not sure how massive a screw-up it would take for IE to lose its largest customer base - the people who can't be bothered to look for anything else or don't know anything else exists."

Or the people who have a large investment in ActiveX, and other IE technologies. You guys always assume that people are either lazy, or uneducated just because they don't use what you think they should use.* How about providing equalvilents instead of acting smug?

*How very 1984'ish.

Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me.

[Bert64]

Well, people are lazy or uneducated to have used activex in the first place... There are alternatives, such as flash and java, which are cross platform and far more secure.

Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me.

[pilkul]

Or the people who have a large investment in ActiveX, and other IE technologies.

Er, certainly a few companies have inhouse ActiveX applications, and that's fine. I imagine your company is among them, or you wouldn't be making this post. But get a little perspective: those people represent a tiny fraction of the market.

*How very 1984'ish.

Uh huh, right. The grandparent "Pantero Blanco" controls a vast world-controlling network of agents, and he will soon deploy black helicopters to your house for daring to dispute his assessment of the best web browser.

Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me.

[Pantero Blanco]

The "people who have a large investment in ActiveX" don't take up 75% of IE's userbase. The people who don't have an inclination to look for or don't know about anything else do. I never called them "lazy" or "uneducated".

Saying I "want everyone to be like me" doesn't even make sense given the original post. Did you get to the second paragraph before you knee-jerked?

Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me.

[hunterx11]

http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/?q=xul

Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me.

[ergo98]

Or the people who have a large investment in ActiveX, and other IE technologies.

I developed a solution in the late 90s that used ActiveX, and it was very good for the time. I'd use a different technology if I were to do it again.

In any case, the number of firms with solutions like that is absolutely miniscule. On the public internet ActiveX is close to non-existant, and in corporations it is certainly a rarity. That accounts for a tiny fraction of the users who use IE.

The sad truth is that most users stick with IE simply because it's there and it's easy (which normally qualifies as laziness), and even if it were a decade behind it would still see prevalent use. What we really need is a jazzy, cool looking Firefox (or Opera) by default, and installation by computer vendors. Corporation IT departments need to get off their asses and figure out how to do their jobs, and at least seriously consider alternatives to IE.

Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me.

[jerw134]

On the public internet ActiveX is close to non-existant

This proves that you don't understand what ActiveX really is. Flash in IE? ActiveX. Java in IE? ActiveX. ActiveX is nothing more than IE's plug-in system, so to say that it's "close to non-existent" on the public Internet is completely fallacious.

Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me.

[Eivind]

*how* IE choose to load its plugins is irrelevant. When he talked about ActiveX on the internet he meant content on the actual internet that is ActiveX, that is -- that requires an ActiveX-understanding broweser to view.

Such content is indeed very rare, and does NOT include either flash or java.

If Firefox starts loading plugins by the use of Python tomorrow, this doesn't mean that Flash is now python-only content. And the fact that IE uses ActiveX to load the flash-plugin does not mean that a flash-movie on the internet is ActiveX-content.

Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me.

[ergo98]

This proves that you don't understand what ActiveX really is. Flash in IE? ActiveX. Java in IE? ActiveX. ActiveX is nothing more than IE's plug-in system, so to say that it's "close to non-existent" on the public Internet is completely fallacious.

ActiveX isn't "IE's plug-in system", it's used as IE's plug-in system. There's a huge difference.

Whether IE uses ActiveX, .NET, or VBScript to implement platform specific object handlers is irrelevant -- it is a platform implementation detail, and the same instantiation code works across platforms.

What I was obviously talking about is ActiveX specific or only functionality, which is non-existant. To use your own examples - Flash, Java, and so on all happily instantiate on Firefox on Linux as well.

Gomer Pyle Alert!

[ackthpt]

Most people don't know/realise the holes in IE and just click randomly. Until there is a fundemental change is user education its going to be a very slow battle to get domiance (and the "standards" it implies) from IE

To employ an old quote: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

And there are people out there who never fix the the bugs, never patch, never anything, and they get pwn3d and join the hordes of bots.

As Gomer would say, "Fer shame, fer shame, fer shame!"

Re:Gomer Pyle Alert!

[rcamera]

come on, if you're going to give a quote, at least do it accurately.

There's an old saying in Tennessee--I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee--that says, fool me once, shame on--shame on you. Fool me--you can't get fooled again."

-- President G.W Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

Re:Dead

[pl1ght]

I have to agree on this as well. I have been using IE7 beta and am finding it is quite well done so far. Also doesnt suffer from the memory leak problems that "dont" exist in firefox.

Thats nice, but

[Kelz]

Does it run on Linux?

*ducks*

Re:Thats nice, but

[HermanAB]

Yes, it does actually - Codeweavers sees to it.

It's just resting!

[Tackhead]

> But it's certainly beginning to smell like it is!

Dont' worry, it'll be stone dead in a minute.
$ rm -rf /source/vista/ie7/*

But seriously...

User: I wish to make a complaint!
Ballmer: (hurriedly) Sorry, we're about to ship Vista.
User: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this web browser, what came bundled not five years ago from this very operating system.
Ballmer: Oh yes, IE, ah, version 6. What's, ah... W-what's wrong with it?
User: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it.
Ballmer: No, no, It's ah... it's undergoing a security upgrade.
User: Look, matey, I know a dead browser when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Ballmer: No no, i-it's not dead, it's... getting its user interface upgraded!
User: User interface?
Ballmer: Y-yeah, the UI. Upgradin'. Remarkable browser, IE, isn't it, eh? Beautiful layouts!
User: The layout-complete build don't enter into it. It's stone dead!
Ballmer: Nononono, no, no! 'E's bein' upgraded!
User: All right then, if he's bein' upgraded, I'll run 'im!
(starts typing)
IEXPLORE.EXE! C:\MYDOCU~1\HELLO.JPG
Looky looky looky! Happily rendering the Goatse Guy! Hey, IE, I've got lots of lovely RAM for you if you're running, Mr. Internet Explorer!)
(pounds keyboard)
Ballmer: There, the page refreshed!
User: No, he didn't, that was you clicking reload!
Ballmer: I never!!
User: Yes, you did!
Ballmer: I never, never....
(pounding Ctrl-Alt-Del on the keyboard again)
User: HELLO, WORLD! HELLO TASK MANAGER! PLEASE WAKE UP!
Now that's what I call a dead browser.
Ballmer: No, no.... No, it's just running a signed ActiveX Control in the background.
User: A ACTIVEX CONTROL!?!?
Ballmer: Yeah! You invoked an ActiveX control, just as it was wakin' up! Believe me, IE runs those easily, major!
User: Look my lad, I've had just about enough of this. That browser is definitely deceased, and when I booted its PC up after buyin' it not half an hour ago, you assured me that the PC's total lack of computational power was due to it being tired and shagged out after a prolonged virus scan.
Ballmer: Well, he's... it's, ah... probably needin' activation and authorization with Windows Genuine Advantage.
User: WINDOWS Genuine ADVANTAGE?!? What kind of talk is that? Look, why did the OS crash flat on its back the moment I plugged it into the router?
Ballmer: The Norwegian Bluescreen prefers kippin' on its back! Remarkable UI, though, isn't it, guv, eh? Lovely layout-complete screenshots!
User: (coldly) Look, I took the liberty of examining that browser cache when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that the PC had anything to run on its hard drive in the first place was that it had been bundled in there along with the spyware and the DRM.
Ballmer: Well, of course it has DRM there! If I hadn't bundled that browser and nailed everything down with DRM, all the content would have nuzzled up to those wires at the back, bent 'em apart with its little bits, and VOOM!
User: "VOOM?" Look matey, this browser wouldn't "voom" if you put four thousand kilobytes of W3C standards through it! It's bleedin' demised!
Ballmer: It's not! I-It's just authenticating!
User: It's not authenticatin,' it's passed on! This browser is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late software release! It's a stiff! Bereft of RAM, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the system with DRM and your monopoly it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its spawned processes are of interest only to historians! It's hopped the twig! It's shuffled off this mortal coil! It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This.... is an INACTIVE X!
Ballmer: Well, I'd better upgrade it, then.

(I'll stop it now. It's silly.)

Re:It's just resting!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hereby nominate "This... is an INACTIVE X!" as the computer quote of the century.

Re:It's just resting!

[kainewynd2]

All I have to say is... wow... PROFIT!

Re:It's just resting!

[Blazeix]

Wow. This is really good. You may end up seeing this copy-pasted onto other websites!

Re:It's just resting!

[HUADPE]

Ballmer: It's not Firefox! It's a...whats it...a palindrome!

User: The palindrome of IE is EI!

*Hearing this karate yell, Chuck Norris entered and roundhouse kicked Ballmer in the head.*

Re:It's just resting!

[mattpointblank]

What? No "*Ballmer throws a chair*" comment? For shame, /.

Re:It's just resting!

[DanTheLewis]

+5 Funny. Clearly inhabited by genius today.

My mod points would wish they knew how to quit you.

Re:It's just resting!

[shadowkin]

You forgot

User : I swear if you want anything done in this OS you've got to kill processes until you're blue in the screen.

Re:It's just resting!

[WhiskerTheMad]

Holy shit I so wish I had mod points right now

/me picks himself up from the floor

Re:It's just resting!

[Roadstar]

User: The palindrome of IE is EI!

That sounds perfectly reasonable with me being a Finn. For after all, 'EI' is Finnish for 'NO', and that's what I say to this "browser" all the time.

Re:It's just resting!

[Goalie_Ca]

For some reason as I was reading i imagined User had an australian accent.

Re:It's just resting!

[Anonymous Coward]

IE and EI are not pallindromes.

A pallindrome is a word or phrase that is spelled the same way forwards and backwards, such as "Bob" or "race car".

Re:It's just resting!

[mqduck]

For some reason as I was reading i imagined User had an australian accent.

Huh? Is there a difference between that and a British accent?

Signed,
Jeffrey Piercy - PATRIOTIC AMERICAN

Re:It's just resting!

[ASUSanator]

Umm i hate to inform you, that isn't an Australian accent.

Re:It's just resting!

[Anonymous Coward]

> +5 Funny. Clearly inhabited by genius today.
>
>My mod points would wish they knew how to quit you.

Ya shoulda heard his 2002 parody of Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant. Hey, there it is on the guitar again...

(And leave his ewe alone. This is Slashdot, where the men are men, the women are figments of the imagination, and the sheep are... umm... very, very scared. Save your mod points, geeks, he's on a roll this month :)

Re:It's just resting!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Wow. This is really good. You may end up seeing this copy-pasted onto other websites!

*takes a bow* - and offers a copy 2002 parody of Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant to go with it. Hey, there it is on the guitar again...

Reproduce freely.

Re:It's just resting!

[ozbird]

If 'e were Australian, his name would be "Bruce", not "User."

Re:It's just resting!

[Polly_Morf]

Ballmer: *Throws a chair*

For some of us, IE has been dead since 1997...

[Anonymous Coward]

... with the release of IE 4.00 (read: NOT 4.01.) It was the absolute worst excuse for a browser ever conceived. Once installed, it rendered any other browser unusable on both Windows 95 and NT. You could double-click Netscape (the most popular browser at the time) all day and night, but it would no longer function.

And you didn't dare attempt to uninstall IE 4.0. Doing so would render EVERYTHING on the PC unusable. You might as well reformat.

I vowed to this date to never, ever install IE 4 and up on any machine that I remotely care about. I have gotten along just fine without it and never looked back. As long as I live, there will always be at least one person NOT using IE. Period.

If it weren't nailed to its perch....

[Anonymous Coward]

Voom! Fwweeeeee!

I'm not dead yet ..

[arougthopher]

in fact, I think I'll go for a walk ....

I feel happy! I feel happy!

(thud)

Right, see you next thursday.

I don't want to go on the cart!

[Dracos]

IE may not be dead now, but if MS don't stop implementing open standards how and if they feel like, IE will be loaded on the cart and clubbed in the head by Eric Idle.

Sure they've fixed a lot of stuff, but one of the most critical is the lack of support for the application/html+xml mime type.

Re:I don't want to go on the cart!

[Ciaran_H]

Firefox doesn't have proper support for it either, assuming you meant "application/xhtml+xml". I know, I've tried it.

If you don't believe me, try it for yourself: http://matrix.theblob.org/xhtml.html . That's a valid XHTML page served up with a MIME type of application/xhtml+xml.

* IE prompts you to download it.
* Firefox presents you with a XML tree.
* Safari renders it correctly.

I hate IE as much as you do, but Firefox has some way to go too.

Re:I don't want to go on the cart!

[Ciaran_H]

I wish to eat my own words here. Well, I don't wish to, but I need to, because I'm wrong.

Turns out I forgot two important things - an XML declaration, and an xmlns attribute on the HTML tag, without which all the tags in the file are meaningless. Why didn't the validator detect these? Because it already knew that this was an XHTML file from the doctype, and because without the xmlns attribute it didn't know what to validate the existing tags against.

Adding those two things gives us http://matrix.theblob.org/xhtml-3.html , which displays properly in Firefox. It also happens to display properly in IE, but it isn't following the specs - that can be proven by http://matrix.theblob.org/xhtml-4.html . That's a malformed file, and Firefox will quite correctly choke on it, whereas IE will display it - meaning that it's not using a proper XML parser.

Interestingly, this means that Opera also isn't following the specs, since it displayed the link in the parent as if it had the xmlns attribute already in it, when it didn't. That's not good.

In short, every browser sucks.

ActiveX ain't dead: Blackberry to require IE

[weisen]

According to RIM's webmaster, the reason that a web download of Google Talk for Blackberry (http://www.blackberry.com/GoogleTalk) requires IE is that this and future Blackberry applications will be installed directly via an ActiveX control. Since Blackberry Desktop is no longer "a required part of the BlackBerry solution," Internet Explorer is and they're not packaging software to be installed with BB Desktop.

I'm going to keep an old, virus infested Windows PC lying around.

ActiveX has to stay

[ichin4]

The summary implies that the "right" engineering decision would be to eliminate ActiveX. This is complete bullshit.

ActiveX is a mechanism that allows compiled code delivered via the web to run on the client. This feature is an absolute must-have for many corporate environments.

Was Microsoft's ActiveX security framework insufficient? Absolutely. Were their implementation buggy? Yes. Were their security defaults too lax? Certainly. But with a feature as important to your customer base as this, the right solution isn't to cut the feature. It's to fix the problems.

Re:ActiveX has to stay

[throx]

I agree 100%. IE has ActiveX. Mozilla has plugins. Both are extensibility interfaces that are essential for web browsing. Properly implemented and secured they are a great asset for the end user. Improperly implemented they just become a security or usability nightmare.

I'm not convinced either browser does it well yet but Firefox does seem better than IE.

Re:ActiveX has to stay

[petermgreen]

well to "fix" activex would require major changes at the OS level to allow safely running untrusted native code.

personally i think the best option for activex is to leave it completely disabled by default with a hidden setting somewhere for those corps that bought into it (maybe because they didn't have a proper app deployment setup or whatever) to enable it for a few spefic sites. Its most certainly totally inappropriate for the open web.

Re:ActiveX has to stay

[TBone]

ActiveX is a mechanism that allows compiled code delivered via the web to run on the client. This feature is an absolute must-have for many corporate environments.

Must-have? For what?

What do corporate environments do that require code to be downloaded willy-nilly and run on the client, that an actual installer, that you intentionally go and run, can't be used for instead?

Especially in a corporate environment, there should be no random installation of code on computers. Anything a user needs to run should be made available in prechecked, verified installer packages that can be installed in whatever maintenance cycle said corporation runs with - automated overnight installs, periodic patches, etc.

The only place I can see ActiveX being "necessary" would be for home users. And with as insufficient as the framework is, as buggy as the implementation is, as lax as the security is, the entire thing should just be nuked from orbit. Take it out of IE7, publish an aftermarket patch through the KB that will allow users to re-enable ActiveX functionality, and make it so that only people who specifically want ActiveX have it.

There's no reason for your browser to have the ability to physically install code that outlives the life of your user session. If there is, said code should be a thin application, not a browser-based "program".

Re:ActiveX has to stay

[ichin4]

Must-have? For what?

There are all sort of internal corporate tools for accounting, logistics, mapping, human resources and more that run via ActiveX. With better Javascript, web development frameworks, AJAX, etc. the architects of these applications would probably make different choices if they were to start over today. But 5 years ago ActiveX was the fastest, easiest way to deliver rich functionality via the web, and a lot of people used it. In these intranet scenarios, malicious code was less of a concern, which is probably why the original ActiveX design didn't give that scenario enough thought.

While from an engineering perspective it is often more interesting to start over from scratch, from a business perspective that's often not an option. Any browser manufacturer that cut features that big corporate customers had built against, even Microsoft, risks loosing a significant number of those customers.

Re:ActiveX has to stay

[Cyno]

Yeah, but its not cross platform.

I care about standards.

Re:ActiveX has to stay

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a critical defect in ActiveX which makes it indefensible and means that yes, Microsoft should abandon it in Internet Explorer.

ActiveX relies on an existing infrastructure for natively executable modules in Windows. This infrastructure is intended to let you buy or download and install components and integrate them into software you already use. Microsoft's developers looked at this, and at their need for a plug-in architecture for Internet Explorer and thought they'd had a Eureka moment. Add scripting, connect the bits together and you've got a ready-made supply of plug-ins, a pool of developers who already know how to write more, and it's all Windows-only so it drives sales of the core product. This is the first mistake.

Now, it didn't take long for someone to pipe up with an annoying concern. Software written for one purpose, and in one security environment might not be suitable for a quite different purpose and environment, e.g. web pages. After some attempts to make this "go away" by claiming that page authors (ie black hats) would choose only safe ActiveX controls, Microsoft made their second mistake, they decided to allow controls to be blacklisted as unsuitable for Internet use.

At that moment Microsoft could have made ActiveX safe. They could have said, let's require ActiveX controls to provide a separate "suitable for the Web" interface and whitelist only those controls that do so. The vast majority of ActiveX exploits would never have happened and this thread wouldn't exist.

But they chose convenient and market penetration over security. And they'll do it again.

Re:ActiveX has to stay

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista has exactly this feature - it's called "low rights IE". Its implementation does require some mods to the OS core but basically it's just running IE in a low privs account - lower than a regular user, not just lower rights than an admin. It's also possible they could have done this for earlier versions of Windows but it's easier/more thorough on Vista.

Re:ActiveX has to stay

[ichin4]

Yeah, but its not cross platform.

That was supposed to be funny, right? In case not, I'll be pedantic: why have a cross-platfrom method for running native binaries, when the native binaries you want to run aren't corss-platfrom? Or do you refuse to run Linux binaries under Linux because they won't run under Windows?

I suppose you could say that people just shouldn't be able to run native binaries via the web, even if they want to, because that wouldn't be cross-platform. But in doing so, you would be illustrating perfectly why a business would prefer dealing with Microsoft to dealing with OSS zealots.

Business: The web is great, but we want our web app to support drag-n-drop, and there isn't a Javascript standard for that yet. We have a lot of programmers who know how to code against your native GUI APIs, so why don't you give us a mechanism to call into those APIs via our web app?

Microsoft: Okay.

OSS Zealot: No! That's not standards-based! That's not cross-platform!

Re:ActiveX has to stay

[Cyno]

OSS Zealot: No! That's not standards-based! That's not cross-platform!

It's not secure.
It's not efficient.
It's not stable.

But I know, no amount of cross-platform, standards compliant, secure, stable and efficient OSS software is going to stand in your way. And I love you for that. Keep spreadin the MS.

Re:ActiveX has to stay

[ichin4]

It's not secure. It's not efficient. It's not stable.

I find it amusing that, once you found your "standards ueber alles" argument demolished, you proceeded to repeat precisely what I wrote in my orginal post, namely that MSFT, instead of turning off ActiveX, needs to work on making it more secure and less buggy (oh, and you added "efficient" -- fine by me). And yet you still seem to believe that you disagree with me, I guess because I didn't do the requisite "MSFT is evil" genuflections before making my point.

Re:ActiveX has to stay

[Cyno]

Demolished? Hardly.

You believe they can make this technology secure. You have faith in Microsoft. There's nothing I can say that could make you change your mind. So I won't.

I won't use it because its not cross-platform or secure. I don't need drag-and-drop web pages. For that I'll go to google.com or write some Ajax. Its simple, for me. I don't have the same needs as these businesses you write about nor do I have the security problems that plague them today. Coincidence? I think not.

mhm..

[niXcamiC]

The future's not all Firefox, Deer Park and Camino

Right, its Opera.

ducks

Re:mhm..

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to duck. Opera is a very nice browser. Just because I prefer Firefox does not mean I am against Opera. I have both installed. Opera is much better than IE due to many reasons. Standards compatibility is one major one. However, Firefox just suits me better.

When I help someone with a new computer or after cleaning up a computer, I help them find and install Firefox and Opera, and tell them to try both and see which they like more.

The more non IE standards compliant browsers out there, the more IE will need to become standards compliant, (at least I would hope), then the better we all will be off.

This is absolutely true!!!

[JK23]

I agree 100% with this article "that there's a bright future for IE." ..... That there's a bright future for IE until the next version of Firefox comes out to smash in the ground where it belongs.

Re:Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to claim a browser "faster" when it's preloaded with the OS.

IE is dead...

[__aaclcg7560]

...on the Mac. Not that I'm complaining about it. Camino works just fine for me.

Re:IE is dead...

[Ilgaz]

IE for Mac had nothing to do with Windows versions.

It was always coded elitely with respect to standards. In fact it was (one time) the best standards covering browser out there, on ALL platforms. Forget "versiontracker" etc comment guys, the people who cared about standards that time saw it as a "hope" for future MS browsers.

I still keep it in my Applications folder, does not harm by sitting there. If Windows IE was like it, e.g. a application sitting in own directory without any "virus like" DLLs and "World domination agenda" all over OS , MS could even sell it like Opera ASA did with their product.

Download IE here.

[Tei]

Because IE IS BROKEN, the webmaster need to test his design against the IE bugs. So If you are a Linux webmaster, you will need something like ie4linux to use IE5+IE5.5+IE6 under linux.

In other news..The "Unsinkable" RMS Slashtanic.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Could it be because so many people (sheep) take Microsoft's word as coming from a reputable source, and therefore we would like to take the time to criticise it as such, rather than a joke, in an attempt to counterbalance the discrepancy?"

You'd have a point if someone other than geeks read this site. Hell, we can't even hold onto the geeks, let alone everyone else. Just look at how many long time monikers you no longer see.

Re:In other news..The "Unsinkable" RMS Slashtanic.

[dusik]

>> "Just look at how many long time monikers you no longer see."

Well, one things is for sure: we'll never be rid of Anonymous Coward! :)

It could've been...

[TCQuad]

Isn't IE still 90% of the market share? where did this subject line come from?

A Mac user?

Re:It could've been...

[peterpressure]

If my grandma pwned a mac, she would surely use safari...

Re:vista only?

[lowrydr310]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. There's no reason to upgrade beyond Windows 2000. Once it's required (as in certain things won't run unless I have Vista or my hardware dies and the only new hardware needs Vista) then it'll be a full transition to Linux.

My wife is already sold on a MacBook (she's waiting for the design to mature a little, we've been burned before buying the first generation of a product). I'm happily running Windows 2000 and Ubuntu and they suit my needs just fine. In fact Windows 2000 suits all my needs right now, however I am trying to get used to Ubuntu just for fun.

Re:Dead

[British]

The one time I have to use IE instead of Firefox is for one trivial feature at my bank's website.
Is it an IE-only function of the bank's software? No.

It's the "print just this frame" function. My bank's website has a frame layout, and on the lower frame, it shows all my transactions. It's over a secure connection. In IE I can right click and choose to print just this frame(I think that's how it goes), and boom, it prints out my bank statement and I balance the checkbook.

If I try this in firefox, it insists on reloading the individual frame, and appears to do a reload of the frame. The bank's webapp doesn't like that, and gives me an error message.

But at least I can use most of the functionality of my bank's website in Firefox. I can't use the "today" button to type in today's date while paying bills.

What's the point of comparing features?

[popo]

...When Firefox is infinitely and openly extensible?

A quick visit to the Firefox extensions archive, and anyone can see
IE is primitive by comparison. I've got at least 15 extensions running
in Firefox, which add functionality to Gmail, Amazon, Ebay and yes, Hotmail.

I've also got FireFTP, for in-browser FTP'ing, G-Space for file storage
on Gmail, weather reporting, in-page/on the fly foreign-currency to dollar conversion,
a sophisticated download manager, right-click access to Wikipedia, Dictionary.com,
and TinyURL and a host of other features that aren't available for IE.

Its not like we're comparing similar feature sets and picking either/or. We're
comparing the infinite extensibility of an open-environment with a limited,
closed, non-standard and security flawed product line.

The only reason its not "Game Over", is that Firefox doesn't advertise or bundle.

But if anyone needs proof that the better service rises to the top despite bundling
and advertising, look no further than Google.

IE will continue to dominate

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem that many people dont consider is that the major windows user base just wants something that works. You may care about standards, average users dont. As long as IE7 doesent have all the frustrating problems as IE6 did nobody cares to switch from their default vista install. Firefox may stay a step ahead for a while, but if you think the IE team will stand still your very mistaken. For many people it will not matter to download new browsers as long as IE works. I certainly know I will.

"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[tepples]

Neglecting Firefox's inability to pass Acid 2.0.

Where I went to school, 70 percent was a D- but still "passing". Therefore, I consider a 70% intact face on Acid2 to constitute "passing". Opera is the first web browser to get 100% and run on Microsoft Windows, but Firefox is still "passing" by the school standard. IE 7, on the other hand, is still nowhere near 70%.

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[CastrTroy]

Where I went to school 70% was a B. A was 80% and above, 60-69 was a C and 50-60 was a D. E was usually below 50%, maybe above 40%, I think they got rid of F because it made people feel bad. I'm not sure where all the +'s and -'s fit in.

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[KingMotley]

You should have gone to a better school. 100-93 Was an A 92-86 Was a B 85-80 Was a C 79-75 Was a D 74-below was an F

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[cheezit]

wha??? 70% was a B? 89% was a B for me!! wow.

And to think that less than half would give you a non-failing grade...what's the point? Just give everyone a happy face for effort.

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[greyrose111]

Geez, havn't you been reloading slashdot every 5 seconds every day for the past week, the latest build of Opera 9 passed the ACID 2 test with full marks, becoming the second browser to do so.

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[CastrTroy]

The E was the failure, and they got rid of the F because it hurt your feelings.

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[tepples]

the latest build of Opera 9 passed the ACID 2 test with full marks, becoming the second browser to do so.

Opera is the second web browser to get 100% on Acid2, but it is the first to do so on Microsoft Windows. Konqueror is for Linux and BSD, and Safari is for Mac OS X.

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[Tony Hoyle]

OTOH Opera won't render some perfectly valid (pass validation) pages due to missing CSS elements (my wife tells me it's something to do with layer support that it doesn't implement, but I'm no HTML expert and was lost on the explanation).

I'd go with the browser that worked rather than the one that passed an artificial test any day.

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[The Warlock]

You can run Konqueror on Windows. Haven't you ever heard of cygwin?

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[tepples]

You can run Konqueror on Windows. Haven't you ever heard of cygwin?

Does Konqueror in Cygwin work reliably? Is there a self-contained installer that I can put on a CD with my magazine? Can it be recommended to inexperienced PC owners in the way that getfirefox.com and opera.com can? And even if so, you can run Microsoft Internet Explorer in Wine, but that doesn't make IE a "Linux app" now, does it?

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[Aewyn]

Got a URL?

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[jlarocco]

Where I went to school, 70 percent was a D- but still "passing"...

Welcome to the real world! "70% done" means "30% to go", or more to the point "Not finished." It's a pass/fail test.

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[Anonymous Coward]

Some schools do this because the courses are taught at a very accelerated pace. I took several math classes where we would cover everything a 'regular' class would cover in a semester in the first week. There's little point in failing someone when a 40% score shows they know much, much more than would be expected by a grad school. Indeed, while the pace is accelerated, there is little pressure, which makes these accelerated courses very fulfilling. It certainly helps that no one tries to "play the system" -- everyone in these classes sincerely wants to be there.

On a similar note, I've talked to graduate schools about my alma mater, and they all say that our graduates are consistently 18-24 months ahead of everyone else, as far as the general programs go, and further along than that once they start specializing. Heck, one professor remarked that I could easily retool my undergraduate thesis and turn it into a dissertation, as I used original methods to prove a classical theorem, and foresaw other applications of the method.

No shit.

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[baadger]

Actually I believe there is another Windows browser that passes Acid 2. SomethingOrOtherCab. I can't be bothered to look it up right now.

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[hkmwbz]

iCab is a Mac browser. And it doesn't pass. It still shows scrollbars.

Re:"Passing"? 70 percent is a D-

[nwbvt]

Strange... Where I went to school 70% was a D+ and was considered failing (C was the lowest passing grade)...

And in the real world, I doubt my boss would be happy if, come the deadline, I said my work was 70% complete.

I like the IE7 beta...

[InfinityWpi]

I find myself usng IE7Beta more than I use Firefox... there's only three things about it I don't like.

1) It steal focus whenever a page loads.
2) Doesn't work with Turbotax.com. Won't be a factor again...
3) Somehow, screwed up the 'search' function in Visual C# Express' Help program. Might be a wee bit ingrained into the OS still.

Re:I like the IE7 beta...

[danpsmith]

People miss the point. This is not a feature by feature analysis issue. I don't care if you like the latest features of IE, or if IE does something a little bit better than firefox. This is a true test. Mozilla is an open source browser. This type of software is fundamentally more sound. It's not about whether you like IE7's current working model, because in 6 months when all the features are outdated and security problems emerge, you have to have an alternative. Microsoft doesn't care about keeping its products current, it's more concerned on keeping market share. If you switch from an open source solution to a closed one then you now again have no say in when and how new features are added. An open source browser with support is important for everyone.

What is "passing"?

[tepples]

Sure, Firefox breaks less than IE does when loading the Acid2 test, however by a strict measurement, only one (two) browsers to date pass Acid2:

How do you define "passing", and what justification do you give for your definition? Is getting an 80% on an exam considered "failing"? Though Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.1 isn't 100% yet, it is still a h*ck of a lot closer than IE 7 preview builds, and it is likely the best among released web browsers that do not require switching from Microsoft Windows. By my definition, IE 7 fails the test, Firefox passes it, and the Opera pre-release aces it.

Re:What is "passing"?

[Anonymous Coward]

...it is still a h*ck of a lot closer than IE 7 preview builds...

The asterisk confuses me... what the fuck is h*ck supposed to mean?

Re:What is "passing"?

[Trogre]

Uh, for a computer program to pass any QA test it needs to produce output *exactly* as expected. This isn't some University exam, it's a collection of 1's and 0's. Either it renders the page as it's supposed to (in this case handling invalid input correctly) or it doesn't.

Or, put another way by means of a Simpson's quote:
"Come on, do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry"?

Re:What is "passing"?

[Trogre]

The asterisk confuses me... what the #%@! is h*ck supposed to mean?

hack, heck, hick, hock, huck, or my favourite hyck of course.

duh

Re:What is "passing"?

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

"I don't understand what all the fuss is about. The office building we constructed meets over 80% of the national building code! Is getting an 80% on an exam considered 'failing'? I think not."

Re:What is "passing"?

[tepples]

The office building we constructed meets over 80% of the national building code! Is getting an 80% on an exam considered 'failing'?

So to continue the analogy, if no builder that constructs buildings in a given geographic area can meet all requirements ("MUST" in RFCese) and all best practices ("SHOULD") of the building code, then does that mean no buildings should be constructed in that area? Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.1 does not ace Acid2, but does that make Firefox not worth installing? Or do you seriously expect to get millions of people to install Cygwin to run Konqueror?

Come again?

[john82]

Let me see if I've got this right:

• IE has a bright future ahead of it
• MIT's $100 OLPC is a bad idea

And people think that Steve Jobs operates a reality distortion field!

IT narcs

[fritzk3]

That sucks, dude. I totally feel your pain. Even though most all of the apps that are developed for internal use at my company rely on IE, I still use Firefox for everything else. It's just too bad that your IT guys don't realize that you're actually helping them by reducing the chance of malware entering your corporate network. You'd think that the IT guys at a company would "see the light" so to speak, instead of mindlessly carrying out some antiquated marching orders.

Re:IT narcs

[LunaticTippy]

I'm responsible for several installs of firefox around here after I accidently demo'd my app with firefox and they wondered why it looked different in IE. I'm also the IT guy, so no problem there.

Re:IT narcs

[glassjaw rocks]

Try using W3C Standards. Here's a link.

Re:IT narcs

[DrSkwid]

how about this one :

http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html

Re:IT narcs

[LunaticTippy]

The features they noticed were tabs and ctrl-+/-. Asked me how to do it in IE. I told them to try firefox. Thanks for the link, though.

Standards. I wish.

My app has to play nice with the other sites ASP.NET apps, so my hands are tied. Life is too short to use the right tool when the wrong one is so much less work.

ie/flock

[naught]

what will ever keep IE alive? all of the corporate customers that demand that not only their employees use it exclusively, but that all of their apps be developed to only support it. almost every company i've worked for over the past five years has coded their pages to the IE standard, and the rest be damned.

lately i've been using Flock. (http://flock.com/). based on firefox (as such, has the same memory leaks that firefox does) but provides a lot of gee-whiz features that i find myself missing when i go elsewhere. ties in with blog posting, remote bookmarks, flickr, and does it all pretty seamlessly. it's a browser i'd feel comfortable turning my mom loose on.

and my mom's a hairdresser. just sayin.

Well duh...

[Chowderbags]

Of course it'll be a bright future if they crash and burn.

Bah

[DaveJay]

I just finished building a pile of templates, pure css in structure, and one of the target browsers is IE7 (beta 2).

One of the things I needed to implement was a horizontal row of navigaion items, with bullets. Simple, right? Drop an unordered list with li set to display: inline, set a padding-left on the li (or on the contained within, because they're links) and a white-space: nowrap on the container.

Except IE7. In IE7, whenever the screen size is narrower than the links, the padding on the first bullet collapses. I tried every variation I could think of over the course of an hour to no avail.

I finally had to set up a class with display:hidden, font-size:0, and a few other things, then apply that style to an otherwise useless "first" link in the list, like so:

[ul]
      [li class="stupidie7bugfix"][/li]
      [li][a href="..."]actual first link[/a][/li]
.
.
.
[/ul]
In my opinion, IE7 is still garbage.

Re:Bah

[rjstanford]

In my opinion, IE7 is still garbage

That's funny - in my opinion, you found a bug in a limited-release beta product with a lot of rework in its rendering engine. I hope you reported it somewhere other than slashdot...

Re:Bah

[chrysalis]

How many rendering bugs were reported to Microsoft for IE 6?
How long did they wait until painfully trying to fix some of them?
How many would have been fixed without the pressure of Firefox?

FUD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet Explorer Not Dead Yet

NOT????

I feel fear, uncearnity and danger coming my way...

M$ being competitive with Camino...

[cultrhetor]

is like claiming that it was "a winner" at the Special Olympics. Camino is terrible and unstable - Internet Exploder needs that little confidence booster, I guess. M$IE is useless, Camino is less than that (but it has a cool icon), and I'm glad I don't run either of them...

Re:M$ being competitive with Camino...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing you haven't run Camino 1.0 or 0.8.x. They are extremely stable.

Internet Explorer isn't dead yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

... it just has about 70% of the browser market.

I'm a proud Firefox user, but try to think of a better post title next time.

Re:when a company advertises its own products

[xiando]

The difference is that this company has a virtual monopoly that's growing stronger (no thanks) to Intel planning on building DRM technology into their new chips so Linux and other free variants of the The GNU Operating System http://www.gnu.org/ may not even work in the future.

The important the difference between MS and other corporations is that if you read between the lines they don't even try to sell their product anymore, like NATO with their new ground-(HAARP etc)-to-DeathRay(tm)-satellites-to-ground, MS now only repeats one message: Resistance is futile. We will force our evil (software) upon you regardless of you wanting it or not.

ActiveX

[93 Escort Wagon]

"... (yes, it will include ActiveX) ..."

Well, duh. Too many corporations have intranet apps that are based on ActiveX. If you've read a trade mag anytime in the past two years, that's always the reasons IT heads give for not moving company-wide over to Firefox.

Of course they are ignoring the huge hole that enabling ActiveX leaves in their users' browsers. Yeah, yeah, I know you can set different levels of security for your "trusted" internal site, but I doubt Average Joe Worker thinks any more about this than "Oh, we use ActiveX onsite - so it must be fine to enable it for these external sites as well".

Re:ActiveX

[16K Ram Pack]

Mostly, ActiveX on the corporate desktop is just because someone's taking a short cut.

There are very few good reasons for using ActiveX on pages. You've got Java, Flash and AJAX for interactivity, all of which are safer and more cross-platform.

Re:ActiveX

[jerw134]

There are very few good reasons for using ActiveX on pages. You've got Java, Flash and AJAX for interactivity

Guess what? In IE, Java and Flash are ActiveX controls, and in IE6 so is the XmlHttpRequest that is the foundation for AJAX! You don't understand what ActiveX is.

Re:ActiveX

[16K Ram Pack]

Well you are wrong because I do. What I was referring to was people building their own ActiveX controls, or using applications with ActiveX controls as part of deployment.

Well

[Flunitrazepam]

Well, what's it gonna to do, bleed on us?

Not dead yet?

[zubinjdalal]

Oh okay... let me know when.

Bundling

[Anonymous Coward]

The final IE 7.0 - which will be available both as an integrated part of Windows Vista and as a standalone browser for Windows XP Service Pack 2 - is expected to ship before year end. Windows Vista is expected to launch in November.



Maybe Iam just misremembering, but wasn't MS supposed to stop doing this as part of their agreement with the DOJ, or was this wishful thinking on my part?

Re:vista only?

[Ender_Stonebender]

Why do I have no mod points when I finally come across a comment worth modding up?

MOD PARENT UP!

Windows 2000 was the last upgrade to Windows where there was a compelling reason to upgrade, at least for me. And that was only to be able to run as an account without adminstrative priviledges and still have decent DirectX support for playing games.

Re:when a company advertises its own products

[YU Nicks NE Way]

The GNU operating System? Hey, snookums? 2003...err, 2000...err, 1995...umm, and, 2...all called. They want their catch phrase back, particularly seeing as its all each of them ever got out of GNU as far as operating systems go.

Wrong joke

[gnarlin]

Hey, the BSD's called and they want they're joke back!

Of course it's faster...

[danpsmith]

It's got a head start, it's always running for christ sakes. You can't get rid of the thing any way on windows. If you type a web address into the path bar after uninstalling, IE still pops up its ugly head.

People believe Jobs

[acomj]

Even competent tech people believe Jobs hype sometimes. MS has become a really clear follower of trends, not a leader by any stretch and as such no one believes then.

Security!!! Security!!!

[Heembo]

So, will the massive amount of spyware and other malware that IE is *highly* vulnerable to still be considered a free service, or will microsoft start charging us for these infections?

Bug 330869

[tepples]

Bug 330869 in bugzilla.mozilla.org has been filed as a Tech Evangelism issue to convince RIM to use something other than ActiveX to install Google Talk on a BlackBerry device.

"Deer Park"?

[wootest]

"Deer Park" was the covert name under which the Firefox 1.5 alpha was distributed. So yes, the future's not "Deer Park", indeed.

Not dead yet?

[buddha42]

Only on slashdot could something with 90+% market share be declared "not dead yet".

Don't Install 7 If You're a Web Developer

[bigtrike]

IE 7 is far more standards compliant than IE 6. You will create pages which render great in IE7 and Firefox, but look horrible in IE6. You can't have both installed at the same time.

Re:Don't Install 7 If You're a Web Developer

[pe1chl]

You can't have both installed at the same time.

That is a big problem with every MSIE release, but even bigger because it is a beta...
Who wants to install a beta version that overrides the stable version? Did Microsoft never hear of separate test and production environments?

The browser should be installable as a separate application, with as many different versions installable as you like, and at worst selectable via some version number menu. Better would be to be able to run different versions in parallel.

Re:vista only?

[Anonymous Coward]

yah, cuz nobody wants to play games on windows anymore anyway. Especially that game where you kill aliens trying to destroy earth. Think it was called halo 2 or something like that.

It's Damn Dead, and MS doesn't know it

[Spinlock_1977]

IE has grown gangrene, and MS doesn't know it. This is where I voice personal opinion, right? Global standards continue to attract followers, except MS. (Their occassional self-serving nod in the standards direction notwithstanding). They continue to play the lock-in card, which the rest of the industry had to get over when "disruptive" MS showed up on the scene in the first place. I also want to say that MS has played an important role in shaking up the big vendors over the last 15 years, but now they're a big vendor too, and their prices (high) and products (paralyzed) reflect that.

Announcing a browser that is pretty well furthest from acid-2 compliance is one of their stupider moves (from a notable pallate of other lock-in tactics). And coming from a company that continually protests their "right to innovate" must be protected (at the expense, of course, of other companies' right to innovate), this lack of standards adherance must clearly be spun as "innovation". Congratulations MS, you're innovating your way right off the web. You've earned it through greed.

Control-K

[webfiend]

I didn't use the search box either until I learned the keyboard shortcut for it (Ctrl-K). Since then, I use it constantly.

Same in IE

[rjstanford]

IE7 does the same thing, with the same key combination. Just FYI.

It may not be FireFox, but IE7 is actually a very nice, usable browser. Between it and AdMuncher, I really don't have a reason to use FireFox. Of course, the same is true the other way around as well. But the compelling argument just isn't there anymore.

Re:Same in IE

[vaderhelmet]

Standards compliance, native SVG, and secure extensibility don't do it for you, eh?

Re:Same in IE

[Bing Tsher E]

I really don't have a reason to use FireFox.

Now, if I could find the IE source tarball, I would give it a try on this NetBSD system. Unfortunately (well, in a rhetorical sense) I haven't located said source tarball. There is probably some hideous method that could be used with Wine that would work to run the binary. Naw...

Re:Same in IE

[edflyerssn007]

slashdot tends to load quite fine in IE7. I've read about all this standards compliance and stuff, but IE7 "Just Works." I have a block list from spybot search and destroy and I have norton antivirus corporate adition, and I have yet to have a virus come through on my computer since last install, about 4 months ago when I upgraded to windows xp pro. I am pretty sure, the problem is less and less with windows and IE being vulnerable than it is that users are dumb and don't run a basic virus and spyware scan. I also run mac os x and linux on my gateway laptop. So the people who are gonna reply with, "but if you were using linux..." or "I can't run ie on my linux box" or "mac os x is more secure than windows" don't really need to reply. As long as it Just Works(tm) there's no real problems with an operating system, and right now, Windows, at least for me, seems to be the easiest system to work with many different types of hardware. I use camino on the mac, and firefox in linux so I am familiar with both. And all three just work when I need them to. That's what I want when I use my computer, no matter the operating system.

Re:Same in IE

[rjstanford]

Standards compliance, native SVG, and secure extensibility don't do it for you, eh?


Hmm. Nope, not really. I develop webapps using pure CSS driven layouts, and haven't run into very much at all that needs hacks for IE7. Sure, there's some, very little -- especially compared to IE6. Native SVG? Eh, I securely extended the browser through a plugin that renders SVGs just fine. Secure extensibility? Well, beyond a couple of plugins (flash, svg, pdf, etc) I really haven't found anything else I was missing. After all, isn't one of the points people make about browsers that they're supposed to be simple?

And yes, I have Firefox, Opera, et cetera installed and I use them frequently for testing. Don't assume that a product is more functional just because its "neat" or "cool." IE7 browses the web safely and quickly -- and that's all I use it for.

Re:Firefox is sooooo slow

[Penn]

OWA works fine on firefox for me, never had a problem. Granted OWA doesn't look as "pretty" as it does on IE but that's all relative. I hate the look of the new outlook and OWA mimics that. Firefox works well if you take advantage of the tabbed browsing, as soon as you start launching firefox.exe after firefox.exe you start to get memory heavy like you do when you use internet explorer.

Firefox has saved me quite a few times from spyware and malware that would have been sucked right up into IE. Some things i do at my office for my job i cannot avoid it, i know its on the sites that i need to visit and i just have to tread carefully. I feel better knowing though that the malware's going to have a MUCH harder time messing with firefox than IE.

Looking Glass Not Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree about the Acid2 stuff, but Project Looking Glass is far from vaporware. It hasn't had a final release yet and hasn't gotten much press of late, but considering that if you go here: https://lg3d-core.dev.java.net/, you can get nightly builds with instructions for Linux, Solaris and Windows installations, and that I was running these builds over a year ago, it's definitely an actual product. v0.7.1 is the latest stable build.

Still going and going and going

[lcsjk]

The internet Explorer, launched in the late '80s has reached and surpassed the far edges of the internet system and continues to feedback data long after the original design team had projected its demise.

Although recent technology has rendered it not so effective as scientists thought at launch time, and even though the technology should have been abandoned years ago, it continues to hang in there and send data (although often corrupted)across the internet universe. The inventors had insisted on shelving the old technology and building a completly new system, but top management insisted that anything that could still be operational after surviving so many software upgades could not be all bad.

The management consensus is that by adding a few enhancements to avoid backward compatibility, and a new GUI to make it look different from the old familiar, the next system can be marketed as new technology and launched to the OEMs as a new system that can go well beyond the fabled internet Pluto.

Re:Dead

[CastrTroy]

Where doesn't this memory leak stuff come from. I've been using Firefox all day, with > 5 tabs open at all times, and my memory usage is below 50 Megs.

Trusted Network Connect

[tepples]

Once it's required (as in certain things won't run unless I have Vista or my hardware dies and the only new hardware needs Vista) then it'll be a full transition to Linux.

What happens in 2015, once neither high-speed ISP in your geographic area works with anything older than Vista or any Linux kernel that isn't the official unmodified kernel of a major commercial Linux distribution? Would you move house to escape Trusted Network Connect?

Re:Trusted Network Connect

[Fanboy Troy]

What happens in 2015, once neither high-speed ISP in your geographic area works with anything older than Vista or any Linux kernel that isn't the official unmodified kernel of a major commercial Linux distribution? Would you move house to escape Trusted Network Connect?

What better way for him to defy the TNC movement than to jump ship now?
How will the big corporations avoid anti-competetive laws when they are locking out everybody else?
Why should any corporation benefit from TC and not my own goverment (read country)?

What you are arguing is that TC will oneday prevail and then it's adios-linux-as-we-now-it. But I'm betting that TC, as you fear it, also equals to adios-independant-developers, and this includes the big number of windows developers. So there is to much at steak for TC to pass without a fight. IMHO, in time it will just be rendered a useless overhead and if anything, another technology that will plague windows with stifness...

So, to GP: Don't let Billy-Gates scare you away. The linux way is the future. Microsoft is fighting a losing battle...

almost right

[AlgorithMan]

you're right... IE is dead - but MS knows it and spreads some FUD now to make people beleive it wasn't... uh uh uh! IE7 will habe Active X again! wow! great! has anyone ever seen a site actually using Active X for other purposes than installing spyware, virii, trojans, dialers and worms?

Re:almost right

[angrykeyboarder]

How can a browser with an overwhelming majority of market share be dead?

Inferior? Yes

Crap? Yes.

Dead? Not even close.

As long as the majority of computer users are clueless and/or don't care, that won't change.

Re:almost right

[AlgorithMan]

well its not dead YET... like a sky diver with a broken parachute is not dead when he's 5m over the ground...

look at how fast it is loosing market share... its a matter of time...
and the parachutist currently smiles at cameras declaring everything was fine... FUD!

Re:almost right

[angrykeyboarder]

Define a "matter of time"? Let's assume Microsoft was still where it was a year ago, with no plans for future releases of IE, except for Vista.

I figure it would still be several years before there was any kind of real impact (like say a drop to 50% market share). Again, most people just don't care and/or don't want to be bothered with downloading and installing (and learning) an alternative.

But now that IE 7 is coming out (and it does have significant improvements) that market share drop is going to slow even more.

I wish this weren't the case, but I can't imagine it being any other way.

Why do they care?

[robertjw]

My big question is why does Microsoft even care if there's a bright future for IE? Have they ever actually got a significant ROI from the browser wars? Has IE generated enough additional sales to justify all of the bad press and lawsuits that have stemmed from it's poor security and integration into the OS?

IE 7 = More work for web coders

[Infonaut]

From TFA:

As Microsoft acknowledges on the Mix '06 Web site, "reduced need to hack around quirks in older browsers, however, means that existing pages written specifically for older browsers may render differently in IE7. In addition, IE7 includes a number of new security features which may have impact on binary extensions such as toolbars, browser helper objects, and ActiveX controls."

Meaning, those of you who were shortsighted enough to code to IE 6 will now have to retrofit your sites to make them IE 7 compliant. When IE 8 comes out, you'll then have to retrofit your site again... .

Can you see why Web standards might be meaningful? Sure, it doesn't really matter to the web coder who gets the extra dough for doing such cleanup work, but I can imagine after a while big companies that spend a lot of money on web development might sit up, take notice, and push for standards-compliant browsers. Then again, they've been letting MS slide for years, so I'm not holding my breath.

Re:IE 7 = More work for web coders

[Anonymous Coward]

You touched on what has been a major annoyance for me on corporate websites.

Especially financially oriented web sites upon which sensitive data is to be exchanged.

In this day of identity theft, seeing how scripting languages, plugins, and any nonstandard protocols can be used to redirect (phish) or monitor communications makes me insist my banker NOT use all this monkey business code often used by porn sites and scammers.

I have seen where even seeing a picture on a Microsoft system (WMF exploit) or even playing a supposedly MUSIC CD (Sony rootkit) can compromise system security.

My fear is that Microsoft cozies up to corporate executive types to install proprietary technologies, then - once the executive's corporation is "locked in" to the vendor, the vendor is free to coerce the business into using only web development tools which will require the browser to honor those proprietary technologies. This has already happened to me, forcing me to transfer all of my accounts from that institution.

I can see where the executives of the large-cap corporate entity ignore me... as they are very well-paid and have grown far beyond the needs of giving their customers ( like me ) peace of mind. From their lofty corporate positions, they "think outside the box" by forcing lowly customers like me to agree to EULAs where I must agree to hold them harmless from problems I have.

I would not go into a bank wearing a ski-mask, as I know it would upset everybody if my intentions were not open, observable to anybody. Carrying a gun into a bank is to me a definite no-no! Whether its loaded or not!

Yet, I am supposed to accept scripts, Active-X, and whatever else which can mask my URL bars, mess up my toolbars, redirect me, pop up windows that may not have come from my addressee, or worse, send transcripts of my online session to strangers?

How does a lowly customer like me, aware of the spoofing that can be done with scripting languages, plugins, and other techniques that "mix code and data" - tell a highly paid corporate minion that I feel just as insecure having to enable this crap on my machine as he would feel if I brought a gun into his bank?

I feel very uncomfortable even having JavaScript on during a banking session.

I don't know just what that code may do on my machine - or worse - I don't know if I may have some delayed JavaScript code lingering in my machine just waiting for me to log onto the bank.

In short, I don't want my machine to have any "intelligence" when connected in terminal mode to the bank. Any intelligence implies it has some agenda to work out - and it may not be MY agenda. I only want my machine to be able to display what my financial institution sends me, and be able to send only whats in my HTML text box.

I completely fail to see why something as simple as checking account balances, paying bills, or whatever even comes close to needing JavaScript, ActiveX or anything else.

Whats the problem with plain HTML 4.0 standard over the standard Secure Sockets Layer?

The other major browser

[CarpetShark]

Yes, and don't forget Konqueror (which is on one of the two major Linux desktops, and also on Macs as Safari).

If it's not dead yet...

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Then let's get the mob together, light some torches, march up to the castle, and pound a stake through its fucking heart. That should do it.

Not a decade behind?

[twitter]

even if it were a decade behind it would still see prevalent use.

You mean IE has changed over the last ten years and does not look like IE or Netscape did in 1996? The tabless wonder could have fooled me.

Is MS afraid?

[marcosdumay]

Last time I saw, IE was de dominant brownser out there, with 80% or more of the overall hits. And nobody was talking about IE dying, just becomming less dominant.

The only one talking about IE dying here is Microsoft. Well, maybe they have a point, they know it better than anybody else.

Is this a variation of Monty Pyton skit

[slagell]

This reminds me a lot of the dead parrot an the petshop skit.

Re:Is this a variation of Monty Pyton skit

[Ctrl-Z]

You, sir, are absolutely brilliant.

Yes, it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the intention.

[..]tools to test IE compatibility. But with what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm.. These tools are obviously for checking if your website is IE-compatible...

Re:Firefox is sooooo slow

[Anonymous Coward]

Try:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ffpreloader/

apt-get install ie7 worked for me!

[twitter]

I just can't imagine installing IE7 on my machine except if I REALLY have to to verify that my websites load and operate with it. And that would be really sad.

gift:/home/user# apt-get install ie7
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package ie7
gift:/home/user#

I was unable to imagine typing that, so I did. Is there anyone, outside of webdesign and terminally dumb companies, that actually "upgrades" IE? Given a system with a different default or equal ease of install IE, dillo, epiphany, firefox, galeon, konqueror, mozilla and others, would anyone even use IE? It's doubtful, and that's why M$ had to put the screws to their vendors back in the Netscape days and continues the monkey business with Windoze Updater. It would be funny to see it work though. Imagine:

gift:/home/user# apt-get install ie7
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done

The following extra packages will be installed:
dos8.0 drm0.995 ugly_fonts1993 ie_license_submission
The following NEW packages will be installed
ie7
Recommended packages:
head_exam1.4
Suggested packages:
WMP notepad anti-virus spyware_detection fat_fat_wallet BSA_lawyer hammer
0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Need to get 800MB/800MB of archives. After unpacking 2024MB of additional disk space will be used and your computer will be very slow.
Do you really want to continue [Y/n]?

Re:apt-get install ie7 worked for me!

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't get this. Is it supposed to be funny? "ugly_fonts"?

Re:apt-get install ie7 worked for me!

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't get this.

That's because you are stupid.

Re:apt-get install ie7 worked for me!

[Anonymous Coward]

ah, willy. hilarious as always. evangelizing isn't just for retards anymore, eh?

Re:apt-get install ie7 worked for me!

[Anonymous Coward]

His name is 'Willy'? Are you sure? How do you know?

Re:apt-get install ie7 worked for me!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, William Hill, aka 'twitter', aka Erris aka Richard Stallman's long lost mongoloid child. Originally hailing from Baton Rouge, LA. Hangs out at the BRLUG (surprise), where you can read more of his laughable "evangelization" efforts. Truly one of the shining stars of the free software movement.

Re:apt-get install ie7 worked for me!

[Anonymous Coward]

ROTFL!!!

Thanks bunches =)

That's fun too.

[twitter]

Codeweavers sees to it [that IE runs under Linux]

It's even virus and spyware compatible. Just try pointing it at a gambling site. The popups come fast and furious. For extra fun, and to lessen the time you waste, install everyting they offer. Babba-bing-babba-BOOM, your virtual registry and Windoze is hosed! You did tar it up before you started, didn't you?

Why does the new version of firefox crash so much?

[ycompanys]

I must admit that I love the Mozilla Foundation and especially their products Firefox and Mozilla. I was not disappointed when I switched from IE to Firefox. Recently, I upgraded my firefox browser, and since then, I have had continuous crashes of my browser. I thought it was only me, but then I heard that several other Stanford students have been experiencing the same difficulties. It seems that this is not a localized problem. The Economist article (pls see the main slashdot article for today) points to the difficulties of building open source products when there is no hierarchy. I disagree in that there are many examples of optimal outcomes resulting from large-scale decentralized collective action (e.g., markets). There are problems both with hierarchy and markets. Depending on the specific conditions, one system will work better than the other. I make reference to this dichotomy because it seems to be the dichotomy of Microsoft IE and Firefox. Firefox can achieve more continuous upgrades by harnessing and empowering people, but it seems to be having problems at sustaining the same level of reliability. Many of my friends have already switched from Firefox. I have not. I am hoping that these problems can be addressed so that Firefox can continue to maintain the browser market competitive, thereby driving innovation.

Early beta tests...

[kiddygrinder]

Report that a score will be issued to each webpage as the user visits it, showing it's overall compatibility with IE in an easy to read "Microsoft Lock-in Score"

Wow, THERE'S news for ya. . .

[NetRAVEN5000]

"The future's not all Firefox, Deer Park and Camino, insists Microsoft. At its Mix '06 conference in Las Vegas, reports Microsoft Watch, company execs insisted that there's a bright future for IE."

Wow, THERE's news for ya - MS promoting its own products? No kidding!

It's dead on the Mac.

[artifex2004]

Or have you forgotten? Microsoft is no longer releasing IE for OSX.

Past Tense

[fredclown]

Uh ... the article headline talks about the Mix conference in the past tense. It hasn't happened yet.

Theory != practice

[tepples]

Uh, for a computer program to pass any QA test it needs to produce output *exactly* as expected.

But still, in practice, wouldn't "passes most of the test modules" (i.e. Firefox) be better than "requires users to replace their PC or peripherals or both" (i.e. Konqueror/Safari, which has no native Win32 port)?

Re:Theory != practice

[Trogre]

But still, in practice, wouldn't "passes most of the test modules" (i.e. Firefox) be better than "requires users to replace their PC or peripherals or both" (i.e. Konqueror/Safari, which has no native Win32 port)?

In many cases it would probably be better, yes. But the program still fails that test. All you've done is dismissed that test as not critical.

Re:Theory != practice

[tepples]

All you've done is dismissed that test as not critical.

Exactly my point. A 100% score on Acid2 is not critical for the purposes of advancing web standards from the point where they were in December 2001 when Microsoft first published IE 6. Advancing web standards is best done with a product that can directly replace IE on the same platform so that customers don't have to make a substantial reinvestment in hardware and training. Until this new version of Opera that aces Acid2 is both out and affordably distributable on magazine CDs, or until Cygwin redistribution on CD is clarified so that Windows users can easily install Konqueror, Firefox is the best thing we have.

Re:Theory != practice

[Trogre]

Agreed 100%.

What I disagree with is any claim that Firefox passes the Acid2 test. It doesn't. Firefox fails the Acid2 test. End of story.

It's not a problem though, as you say, since the Acid2 test isn't a show-stopper for being a viable web browser. So I guess we're really just debating semantics.

What's with the past tense?

[smallbites]

> At its Mix '06 conference in Las Vegas, reports Microsoft Watch, company execs insisted that there's a bright future for IE. They not only distributed a 'layout-complete' build of IE 7.0, but offered hints about what the new version of the browser geeks love to disdain (yes, it will include ActiveX) will include. Also shown: tools to test IE compatibility...

um... is it worth pointing out that this conference that Microsoft Watch and Slashdot are reporting about in the past tense hasn't actually happened yet? Mix '06 doesn't start until Monday.

http://www.mix06.com/

My verdict.

[DeathByDuke]

It's dead Jim.

Internet Explorer 7, new features;

[Kittie Rose]

- A shiny new "7" where the 6 used to be. - Built in DRM so you can't play any media at all that Bill Gates hasn't stamped with his penis-device. - Shuts down your P.C. at random intervals, just to catch those sneaky hackers out. - Revolutionary new browsing experience through the use of "MS Tabs", a wholely revolutionary system of revolution. - Comes with Firefox uninstaller.

Re:Dead

[jerw134]

The browser is not preloaded with the OS. There is no IEXPLORE.EXE running when IE is not. Get over this myth.

That's nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly I still can't see why MS cares - if nobody uses their browser, less coding for them and less potential tech support.

Indeed. I'm using Linux as a personal favor to the MS tech support department. Those guys must be way overworked.

Python reference.

[VoltageX]

Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! ...I'm not dead yet!

Re:vista only?

[Aramgutang]

You don't have to wait for software to require Vista. There's already major stuff out there that requres Windows XP and won't run under Windows 2000, for instance the latest versions of Adobe Premiere, AfterEffects and Audition.

Let's hope Photoshop won't be the next to require XP, even though, like Windows, Photoshop hasn't seen a single major improvement since they added edit history in Photoshop 5 (except maybe RAW camera image support in the more recent versions).

Its not dead...

[Elitist_Phoenix]

Its just pining for the fjords

Looking Glass is real

[r_cerq]

Slow, unusable in real work environments, but real. Check https://lg3d.dev.java.net/, "there be download links there".

Last time I tried it (about 6 months ago) I was actually able to use it for a couple of hours without hanging :)

throw away the statistic from 1999

[AlgorithMan]

you should really get yourself informed before talking so big... IE hasn't had 95% market share since 1999... my latest news (which are also not the newest by the way) say IE has 80% and is dropping fast

whose customers?

[AlgorithMan]

the customers need active X? whose customers? spyware customers? trojan and virii customers?

so what you're saying

[AlgorithMan]

so what you're saying is that we should use an extremely insecure feature as active X just to be able to have ajax, java and flash in IE? thats like saying we should use no firewall because some ports might be needed by "good" software...

- either the extreme insecurity (one "space"-hit mislead to an active X dialog box which showed up just milliseconds before you touched the keyboard and you've got yourself a trojan) gets fixed
- or you SHOULD use firefox, because there you have java, flash and ajax without this active X crap...

Not Dead Yet, hunh????

[Stephen Samuel]

Just a minute... Let me go get my other gun.

Re:Dead

[bunratty]

Also doesnt suffer from the memory leak problems that "dont" exist in firefox.

Where do you trolls come up with this stuff? Of course every version of Firefox has memory leak bugs in it. So does every browser. And every browser crashes, and has security problems, and hangs and has other CPU problems. Get over it.

Free

[skiddie]

What's not free about Opera? It's bee free for almost a year (or something like that).

Or do you mean OS?

Re:Free

[kv9]

Opera is free as in beer

Re:Free

[Hal_Porter]

How do you write the difference between free and Free when it's the first word of a sentence?

E.g, how would I write this -

free software is free as in beer, Free software is free as in speech.

or

free beer is when someone gives you a pint of Guiness, Free beer means that someone gives you a recipe for homebrew real ale.

Re:Free

[bobbyjack]

Well, in both cases, you'd quote the word, making the case violation less of a problem, IMO, e.g. "'free' software is free as in beer, 'Free' software is free as in speech." But, of course, that doesn't solve the 'problem' in sentences such as "Free software is always my preferred option"; the only foolproof rendering would result from a rearrangement, e.g. "My preferred option is Free/free software". You can't 'legally' express certain strings in a grammar: that's the point, even if it makes things tricky sometimes.

Of course, the geek's solution would be to fix the broken rules of the language; the 'initial capital' rule is really a redundancy. We may well be following a trend in that direction, since languages evolve, albeit at a relatively slow rate.

I just considered rewriting this entire post with no initial capitals. But that would have been far too pretentious ;) Oh, please moderate this 'off-topic'.

Re:Free

[Hal_Porter]

The other problem is that it breaks the case insensitivity of English. As you point out, you could write your post all in lower case, the capitalistion of the first letter of a sentence or proper nouns is redundant. You can write English on a device which only supports upper case, and it's still ok too. This free vs Free distinction stops you doing that. Shouldn't in be free for the normal dictionary definition of free and some new phrase for the new definition. What about "open source" for example?

Seems to me that whoever thought up this free vs Free thing needs to spend time reading Raymond Chen on adding new features without breaking back compatibility.

Windows programmer types needed

[Ilgaz]

Is there a way we can harvest all exe files in disk to figure how many programs running on average user machine links/embeds mshtml.dll?

I don't know COM etc stuff but you get the idea.

If Microsoft's "competitors" rely on mshtml.dll , Microsoft HTML rendering, MS really doesn't care who uses what browser.

Of course I know the submitter is trolling.

There's a joke here about Zombies...

[waferhead]

There's a joke here about Zombies...

I guess I should just leave it be ;-)

IE Bright Future!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no doubts IE will have a very bright future!

Re:Ehehe

[nnn0]

funny i get bad karma dissin M$ at this geeks place ;)

FF way is PITA

[Anonymous Coward]

--that separate search box is nuts. It was never needed and yet another example of FF trying to fix something that wasn't broken. It is WAY too small,and it doesn't automatically clear itself either between searches and it IS stupid with that dumb "go" button there next to it.. I much prefer the way moz suite/seamonkey does it the old way, just one box that can search or just "go".

But, either way, it is just more convenient to just keep a separate tab open with search of choice, google, yahoo, etc.

Re: Internet Explorer Not Dead Yet

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

MS Internet Explorer may not be dead yet, but it's dying at a "rate of speed" almost exceeding that of BSD! I advise that people remain cautious.

Re:vista only?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you and I'm at the same situation as you are. Actually I've been using Ubuntu for a week and games and everything works there, even better and faster they work on Windows, which was a bit of a surprice for me (both native games and games over wine).

Currently I'm once again in Windows, but this time I'm here only to make some final adjustments for my own program to be able to run and use it on Linux. After that is done, I should have no reasons to go back to Windows and eventually the Windows partition will vanish from my hard drive.

Re:Why does the new version of firefox crash so mu

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be your localised problem as I've never had problems with Firefox on a number of machines including in a lab environment.

no, of course IE isn't dead...

[Hosiah]

That would take several rounds each of silver bullets, wooden stakes, holy water vials, and several pounds of garlic. Not to mention black candles, a goat sacrifice, and a prayer to Cthulhu not to send IE back from the void after we dispatched it.

Only on Slashdot...

[devnull17]

Only on Slashdot will you hear it implied that a product with 65% marketshare might be "dead."

Re:Firefox is sooooo slow

[CrossChris]

>>I tried firefox for a day and hated it. It loads so slow. Your computer is probably virussed up the wazoo, so most things will be slow. Firefox here is the second fastest browser (opera is faster, but less complete). Internet Explorer is an unusable disaster. >>Tabbed browsing was nice, but I'll be sticking with IE. You obviously enjoy removing viruses and other malware from your machine, then. >>Why does everyone on slash dot complain abot popups and virus, you people are supposed to be geeks, can't you figure out how to protect your systems. You shouldn't have to "protect" your system - the operating system and browser software should do that automatically for you. Windows can't protect anything because of its fundamentally insecure nature. When you compound the problem by running IE, disaster follows swiftly! >>All thats needed is virus protection software and common sense; don't click the add that promises a larger penis ect. There is NO "anti-virus" software that actually works. Your operating system shouldn't be prone to viruses. >>I have never had a virus using IE, popups went away when xp sp2 included one, guess what, no more pop ups. You must have one of Bill Gates' special Windows builds - the ones unavailable to the general public. He must just give them out to his friends. >> Windows computers havn't crashed since windows ME. You DO have a special Windows build, then! Mean time to crash on the Windows versions supplied to the general public is 2 hours!

Re:Dead

[chrysalis]

The rendering engine is not in IEXPLORE.EXE but in DLLs that *are* loaded as soon as you open a session.

Re:Dead

[theCAS]

The libraries are preloaded, IEXPLORE.EXE doesn't do much.
Try opening the standard file explorer and type www.google.com. I'm sorry but this is harsh reality.

30% not finished? Ship it.

[tepples]

Welcome to the real world! "70% done" means "30% to go"

Welcome to the real real world! "30% to go" means "ship it".

Re:when a company advertises its own products

[arodland]

Dr. Gene Ray, is that you?

Firefox in Baghdad

[vivin]

I'm responsible for several installs of Firefox in our MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) center internet trailers. One of my buddies, who isn't extremely computer-literate, but passably so noticed the firefox icons in many of the computers. He says he likes it a whole lot better than IE. At the very least I figure the soldiers will get curious about it and try it out, which is what some of them have done. The part that gets them really quick is the "tabs" - when I show it to them, they go "Wow! this makes it so much easier!". It's not that many people won't use firefox, it's that many don't know.

IE is nowhere near dead yet. On my personal website, I still show only 27% for firefox, 70% for MSIE, and 3% for Opera/Konqueror/etc.