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

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."

RTF...

[zerocommazero]

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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

um, Firefox doesn't pass ACID2 either

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.

Re:Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

[the quick brown fox]

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

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: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.

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.

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: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: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: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

[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.