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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?"
When Microsoft IE can pass the ACID 2.0 Test come back to me.
Sincerely,
Firefox Fan
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?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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.
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!
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.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Isn't IE still 90% of the market share? where did this subject line come from?
/. was completely non biased and objective
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
muahahahahahahaha
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.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
how about this one :
http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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 ...
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).
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.
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3