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."

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: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.

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.

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.