Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Offers Phone Support For IE 7
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is running a short piece detailing Microsoft's newest step in testing Internet Explorer 7, which just went into Beta 2 yesterday. They're now offering free phone support to U.S., German, and Japanese users who try out the trial software." From the article: "'We believe that IE 7, even at this beta stage, is a significant improvement and we want as many people as possible to try it and use it,' said the browser development team in a post on its blog. 'IE 7 is feature complete and has been through significant compatibility and reliability testing. People (especially technology enthusiasts) will have a good experience with it,' continued the post. Microsoft said the new version addresses some problems affecting banking and news sites. It is also designed to be more secure than the current version, with built-in protection against malicious software and online phishing scams."
built-in protection against malicious software and online phishing scams.
So are they doing away with ActiveX?
I was absolutely sure they mean it will contain a skype-like application, voice chat, internet telephony.
Nope. Support by phone will be available. MSIE won't support a phone.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
What's the criterion for inclusion in this scheme? Your mother country has to have invaded another sovereign state? ;-)
I'm really looking forward to a good experience when running Windows Update experience, since that's all I ever use IE for.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
...that Microsoft is playing catch up these days. It's well aware of the fact that it's lost the confidence of the true "tech-oriented" people and now it hopes to win them back.
What they don't understand is that their business model needs changing. No longer is software that's outdated the moment you release it that has security holes in it left and right that don't have patches going to be tolerated.
We have an open source browser with wide spread web support. I don't care if you have the tabs or not, I'm not going back to find out that you had invested not enough time yet again into security and watching as my box fills with adware.
Let's not forget who is really to blame in this adware thing, and it's MS... Ceasing use of IE has kept my PC free of adware for going on two years now. Don't think I'm going back cuz you made it prettier or add features we already had elsewhere.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
It is good to see that an x64 build is now available with IE7B2.
a ult.mspx (where you can choose your desired poison) as opposed to the one in the stub (which links to the technology overview document).
Shame that as usual the phone support feature is not available in the UK...(not that I really care, FF is fine).
Note that the download link is http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/def
, , , , , karma elon
that we don't start bashing MS for this. Give them credit for beta testing and making sure that the product works and also for providing support to the end-users that try it. This seems like a interesting move on their part and a good effort to make sure that the code they will eventually release is stable. I use many beta products every day and they do not provide me phone support. If gmail craps the bed then I am SOL.
/. trashing this for one reason or another. Just don't bash them later for not testing their code.
I can image that we will see a lot of people here at
- Andrew
I meta-moderate because I care.
That's what the website says -- released 4/24. Yet I've been using IE7 for a while now, I'm thinking about 6 weeks, and I could have sworn it was Beta 2. In fact, my Help/About box claims that its Beta 2 as well. So is this a rerelease or really version 2.1?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Love him or hate him, I found a few interesting things to think about in one of his recent commentaries http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1952995,00.as p
Summary: MS's biggest problem is IE and they should just dump it.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Yes, that's right. You get this lovely tripod with gripping arm, absolutely free with your trial of IE7 Beta. Now, when you are stuck on interminable hold with Microsoft Tech support, you won't have to hold the phone up to your ear -- the Phone Support will do all the work! It frees up your hands so you can send hate mail to Bill Gates while still waiting for the next available tech support specialist.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Asside from obvious criticisms, I think this is an interesting move on Microsoft's part. I remember when the browser wars started. I chose the wrong side. I was excited by Windows95. I was excited that it included TCP/IP and a web browser. I didn't know or really even care about compatibility or specs or any of that stuff. I was a relatively new and unwashed user and I loved Microsoft for all the things in Win95.
With IE7, they seem to be attempting to bring some of that newness back, or maybe it's just my own perspective. In any case, I'm not a new or unwashed user any longer and I have real concerns over vulnerabilities and other annoyances. Will ActiveX remain as the most exploitable part of MSIE and any OS that uses it? Will CSS remain 'broken?' (I shouldn't say broken since that word implies accident and gives the impression that it's unintentional. CSS is incompatible and is intentional sabotage on Microsoft's part against the world of compatibility. In spite of all standards agreed upon, Microsoft in all its power and glory is unwilling to be compatible with the rest of the world.)
Until recently, when installing Firefox on a Windows computer, you had to do the uninstall old version / install new version thing to avoid duplicate - and "dead" - entries in the list of installed software.
Depends what you mean by recently.
this blog says the issue you're complaining about was fixed over a year ago
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
"Hello, welcome to Microsoft Internet Explorer Seven phone support..."
"Press 1 to be told to reboot, press 2 to be told to reinstall IE7, press 3 to be told to reinstall the OS, press 4 to be told to apply next month's patches to the OS, press 5 to be told to contact the website's administrator for writing non-IE7 compliant HTML, press 8 to purchase Microsoft malware protection services..."
Remain calm! All is well!
I'm not a web professional, but I've been given the job of designing a small website for my employers, and IE's crappy CSS support has caused me a world of hurt.I was going to ask whether anything has been done about fixing it, but an earlier post regarding the Acid 2 test has pretty much answered that. (It's a wish list? Well, yeah, but if Konqueror and Safari can grant those wishes, why not IE?)
I suppose the most we can hope for with IE7 is that it stays broken in the same ways as previous versions, so we don't have to learn a whole new raft of ugly hacks just to a get a page to look presentable.
No it does NOT prevent phishing scams, but actually IE actually makes various online hosting providers' anti-phishing filters useless. If someone hosts a text (yeah, .txt) file with HTML, *only* IE renders it as an HTML page.
One of my friends who was drowsy late night after cramming for exams, got phished!!! All fault of IE and partially his (being too drowsy!)... by this site : http://newphotosfamyli.bravehost.com/link2.txt
(Yeah, the site is still up after being reported to concerned people! If someone knows this fellow please punch him in the gut for me, thanks!).
More details and comparison of how Opera, Firefox and IE handle this phishing site are in my blog : http://blog.mritunjai.com/2006/04/23/gone-phishing /
- mritunjai
"Hello, this is Dogbert's Internet Explorer 7 Helpdesk. How may I destroy you?"
"Please hold while I disconnect, erm, redirect you to the appropriate expert. Sucker!"
That it's a significant improvement to IE 6. What I don't quite get is why it should be a significant improvement to the competition; specifically Opera & Firefox.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Microsoft has decided to offer free phone support for Calculator and Solitair.
hilarious
Stuff like page transitions, HTML TIME, their own proprietary tags for fancy text shadows, blur and gradiants. I realize a few rare people might use those but I think they could just use open standards instead. So many other programs out their depreciate things over time, why cant they? Thats how Firefox (phoenix) became the lightweight champ it is, it dropped a lot of the bloat Mozilla had.
Hmm, I just did the acid2 test in both MSIE 7 and Firefox. NEITHER passed it. MS's background is red with a vague happy face shape over on the left side, and although firefox doesn't have the background the image is still all discombobulated.
I've been running beta2 for months now and it actually seems to work better than the previous versions by a long shot. Not nearly as many problems with loading content that has traditionally given IE problems.
The tabbed browsing has a few advantages over firefox's and a few features are yet missing that firefox's tabbed browsing had from it's earliest incarnation. Of course beta 1 of firefox was based off of a heavily tested and proven codebase, and much of IE7 has been a complete rewrite.
It would be nice to right click and "open in new tab" now and then, a feature that is glaringly absent. However I do like the new layout, it took me a while to get used to the fact that the standard button layout was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it, but once I got used to it, it worked well, probably more efficient than my previous surfing experiences. However, there should be an option to use the standard web controls that people have used since the stone age of the world wide web, as my wife, being a neophyte, hates it, and refuses to get used to it. And she cant use firefox on her web applications her work provides because firefox doesn't like cold fusion, so she sort of has to. It would be nice if she could use the familiar interface.
It also seems to load pages much faster than previous versions of IE, and dare I say it *gasp* firefox. One of the first things I tested, out of curiosity. Of course these tests were not scientifically conducted, and results can changed based on connection, and host bandwidth, client bandwidth, etc. etc. but it's competetive in that area.
Prior to downloading the beta, I was getting sick of firefox, and hadn't been having a very good experience with it for a while. Probably because of an extension I loaded or something else completely unrelated to the sacred browser itself, but it seemed to be a resource hog. I have heard there were fixes, and I applied them, but my browsing experience continued to suck. And I was considering buying opera. I figured I'd try ie7 before I went that route since I was considering a change anyway, and so far, nothing has been bad enough to chase me off. I'll continue testing it. However I'll probably still buy opera if they don't add a few features and refine a few they don't already have.
And to the guys at MS, why not make it acid2 compliant? While your at the drawing board, might as well just make the necessary adjustments. One less thing to be critisized over at least, and I doubt it would require huge amounts of sweeping changes.
... what did you expect, something profound?
It seems that they're really pulling off the "still no CSS" stunt. Too bad. Also, IE7 still tries to download properly served XHTML. What a failure.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
And she cant use firefox on her web applications her work provides because firefox doesn't like cold fusion, so she sort of has to.
ColdFusion is a web programming language just like ASP, JSP, PHP, etc. It produces HTML just like any other language. There is no such a thing as a web browser that "doesn't like" an application programming language - the browser never sees the language, it sees the resultant HTML.
I am the Web Services Manager for Lightyear - http://www.lightyear.net/ - all code ColdFusion, all code written in Firefox first then bugfixed for IE.