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IE7 to be Pushed to Users Via Windows Update
dfrick writes "CNET is reporting that IE7 will be pushed to users via Windows Update. This has serious implications for e-commerce websites whose functionality might be affected by any bugs in the software. Also to have end users suddenly using a new browser right before the holiday shopping season could magnify the cost any bugs that might create a bad user experience on sites."
Well we just celebrated the Get Firefox day. Perhaps the day IE7 gets pushed via Windows update would be yet another Get Firefox day.
My favorite quote FTA: "It will be available from Microsoft's Download Center Web site, Schare said. "We're really trying to get the world ready for a major new browser release."
Sorry, I already got my "major new browser release" about the time Microsoft were claiming "nobody needs tabbed browsing." IE7 is too little, too late, even for the poor unfortunates I know who are still stuck running Windows.
Maybe it is possible that developers could start developing now for IE7 using the beta's so that when it does get pushed out to everyone there is a minimal amount of bugs in the programming on websites. Just some food for thought.
-Ed
So you see what had happened was....
Could they push a copy of Halo 2 and Crimson skies via Windows Update while they're at it?
I've fiddled around with beta 3 for a bit, it's just as stable as IE6 is (even moreso, if you can believe that). I think this summary was written by someone scared of "beta" software.
As for breaking webpages, big deal. IE6 has been breaking webpages for years. Now at least the web designers who built pages for the IE6 "standard" instead of the STANDARD standards will taste a bit of our pain.
Only IE7 bug I noticed is that IE7 REFUSES to remove borders on iframes (or maybe it's the body tag inside the iframe). Using CSS or deprecated HTML attributes have no effect. IE6 does not have this problem.
This would be a problem if users could not select which updates to install and which to ignore. DuranDuran, for instance, has been without the Microsoft Malicious Software tool since it was first released.
He has also been referring to himself in the third person since earlier this morning.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
Ok.. so Miscrosoft is forcing IE 7 on us.
:)
Obviously they fear that people wouldn't want to download it themselves.
Do they make it the default browser if we have say either Firefox or any other >IE browser installed?
Times like this make my sig really relevant
Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
Push, ... ...
Push,
Push it all out...
These are things that they've been waiting for
Come on
It's updating your PCs
Come on
[choirs]
In monopolistic times
You shouldn't have to ruin your PC
In blue and white
They really really ought to know
Those one track minds
That took you for a working end-user
Kiss them goodbye
You shouldn't have to jump for joy
You shouldn't have to
[choirs 2X]
They gave you Windows
And in return
you gave them them hell
As cold as ice
I hope we live to
tell the tale
I hope we live to
[choirs 2X]
[rift]
[choirs 2X]
And when you've taken down your guard
If they could change your mind
Hackers really love to BSOD your PC
Hackers really love to
[choirs 2X]
[rift]
[choirs 2X]
"Pushed?"
What is this thing, fucking heroin?
Why push halo 2 when you can push halo 5?
Yeah... I actually thought they might do something like this... and in true M$ style they will mark it as a "critical update" because of all of the flaws in IE.
Okay... on a more serious note, I actually (don't flame me) like Windows XP. It is incredibly stable on my PC. But it is Microsoft style to push their products onto users my force. So my bets are on MS putting this out as a critical security updates.
I'll give 2 to 1 odds. Who's placing a bet??
"Also to have end users suddenly using a new browser right before the holiday shopping season could magnify the cost any bugs that might create a bad user experience on sites"
I for one welcome this. IE6 sucks. Badly.
IE7 has a few problems, but the faster IE6 dies, the better.
This and as a web developer, I hope the bugs associated with pushing this app out will create a bad user experience and force developers that rely on hacks and nonstandard practices to get screwed over. I've had several sites I use not work with IE7 and the simplest has been because their simple javascript that detects IE versions tells me I need to use IE5.5 or greater. I've had others not work with the activeX controls because of new security models (or so I imagine).
The sooner developers move towards standards the better. IE7 is a good push towards this goal, and having it pushed out buggy and forcing developers to address the idiotic IE Only Features is just another milestone on this route.
This could backfire on MS if all the major website admins pushed to get the sites working flawlessly with Firefox then put notices up on where to download Firefox in case they have problems with IE 7.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
This has serious implications for e-commerce websites whose functionality might be affected by any bugs in the software.
<SARCASM>
Seriously? Microsoft software can be buggy?
</SARCASM>
Who will download a browser in the background that is larger than sp2 for xp.
(no, it probably won't be _that _ big)
(ie 6 _was_ 75 or so.. yay for bloat)
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Get your quick 'n easy version of IE7 straight from the main website: www.ie7.com
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure I understand the doom and gloom of the post? It is an update afterall. And a lot of what I've read online has been positive towards 7 over 6. On top of that, the article pushes that you don't have to install it if you don't want to.
As for the ecommerce sites being broken, it's not like they haven't had time to check to make sure their sites work in the new version. When the first beta came out, even I checked to see if there were any problems with my sites. I didn't fix them straight away, but I made sure to note down where the issues were for later repair.
I thought IE7 was supposed to be Vista only. What's next? Are they going to be porting Aero?
I used to think that Bill Gates wasn't really such a great engineer or such a great businessman. I just figured he was lucky, ruthless, and callous. But since he stepped down as CEO, Microsoft seems to have become collectively stupider every year. More and more often, they're choosing to do things that don't advance their own cause much, but that are sure to piss off legions of their own customers. Endless watering-down of Vista, endless Vista delays, the WGA debacle, and now no IE7. No wonder Apple and Linux are looking stronger than ever.
No, no, no, you don't get it. If Microsoft does it, it is bad, because it is Microsof. If Firefox does it, it is good, because it is Firefox. Can't you see the logic, man?
Besides, IE7 will block AdSense by default; be sure to sell your Google-stock before this gets public.
Ironic that I received that message as I was reading this story, and about to post that automatic update will only download IE7, but will give the users a choice of whether or not to install it. Kind of like the message I just received for Firefox.
Bandwidth is really the only issue with this release method, but not so much for a single user. Businesses who would be affected by the download can install the IE7 Update Blocker Toolkit to prevent even the download.
This really isn't that big of a deal.
I have installed IE7 on my machine at work, since i figured that most sites work best when veiwed with IE, and many of my work-related sites will only work with IE (and i'm trying to quit smoking....). I despise IE7 (beta). Many neccesarry active-x plug-ins aren't trusted so i have to refresh sites after clicking the stupid "Information bar" that was introduced in IE6 to allow it to run!!! .....
to summarize, i'm not denying that the UPDATE to firefox was pushed to me, but it was welcomed. I can't imagine how many MySpace yuppies will get pissed at the disfunctionality of IE7...
It makes sense. IE6 is obviously a critical security vulnerability, and apparently it can't be fixed without IE7 (I doubt IE7 will actually "fix" the problem, but it'd be pretty hard to make the situation any worse at this point).
The sooner *any* versions of MSIE go away (even if they're only replaced with new versions), the better, IMHO.
http://outcampaign.org/
For those of you who don't want to risk the install locally, you can try iecapture.
http://www.iecapture.com/
Produces a 1024x768 screenshot of most any URL you feed it.
...but does nobody else really REALLY hate the new Mickey-Mouse-ish interface? Where's the menu bar? (Yeah, I know, you can enable it if you go digging.) Where are the standard icons that have been with us in roughly the same form since who-knows-when? They wouldn't try to foist a DVR on us that didn't use the standard control scheme (square == stop; triangle == play; circle == record etc) -- why force (okay, okay, strongly suggest -- which is just delayed forcing) that everybody relearn how to use their browsers? Now I *really* like Firefox. And having tried the IE7 beta (as a last-ditch attempt to avoid an XP reinstall), it's amazing how many things suddenly have a new look (IE7 apparently uses a newer version of Cleartype or something -- and the fonts on a LOT of apps suddenly look a little different.) It really is that ubiquitous. Scary, given its history of security bugs.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Part of what got them into trouble in the first place was their (ab)use of their OS monopoly to wedge themselves into dominating the browser market.
I admin for a small site of about 100 seats. On each machine, I have reduced my workload by "removing" MSIE from machines and making Firefox the default browser. My workload has been reduced because my malware incidents have been reduced to near-zero. (My last couple of incidents came from those Sony-BMG CDs... anyone remember those?) But we all know that MSIE is still there right?
If I don't go to each machine to ensure that Windows Update is disabled, I forsee any machine that has it enabled will have MSIE 7 installed and set as the default browser. Just a guess... it's par for the Microsoft course.
This news makes me very unhappy.
Another nasty issue is that any program that has been built and tested with IE 6's web browser control may suddenly stop working if they changed any of the implementations under the MSHTML API, which they've managed to do with past IE upgrades - especially in the page load event mechanisms. Their automatic update to IE may break other programs. Might not, but.. I would categorize it as a high risk component upgrade.
It's also an issue for blind users. Oh, by the way, we automatically changed your browser interface. I hope you didn't have anything important to do this week because you're going to have to re-memorize a new interface now.
They'll click through all the hooplah windows so they can just get back to websurfing and suddenly IE will ask if they want to transfer all their settings from Firefox/Opera that their considerate kids set up for them. Of course, they'll just click through and go on with it because it was a "Critical Update". They'll have to go through all the "make IE your default browser" windows and any other alerts to make Windows centric programs as default...what a load of crap!
I like IE7 and have been using it for a bit but I still think this is just plain consumer abuse.
Do they still apologize the next day?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Dude,
either Barbarella is going to so kick your ass, or you're about to be mobbed by a bunch of 38 year old British chicks. I can't tell which.
Either way, thumbs up on the nick.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Has anyone tried it? I put it on my PC at home and at work... And Damned if I did not remove it within a day or two of TORMENT. Home PC is Dual Core 3.0 GHz with XP Home and it CRIPPLED it!!!!!!!!!! At work nothing else would run with the browser going.
ALso stay away from Media Player 11 until they fix that SON OF A BUCK!
MS actually mean MASS SUICIDE for end users and those who support them (IT techs)
I got this and said yes to the upgrade.
Basically it shutdown FireFox and did the upgrade.
Overall outage less then 2 minutes and back to reading Slashdot.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
What is the issue?
If sites are not using W3C standards for development then they should know that they can't expect compatibility with browser updates.
Blame the web developers.
An update to Internet Explorer is critical for security reasons and shouldn't be delayed because some developers are idiots.
The same issue occured with XP SP2. Idiot developers using non-standard APIs had issues in their software.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
And how will they deal with those of us who inadvertently deleted the temporary directory which allows one to uninstall their beta2 version?
-Kinsey
Hey Microsoft, call me when you guys spend billions of dollars on a web browser and actually implement CSS2. In the meanwhile, all your shitty, half-assed browsers do is push more web developers to use Flash, because developing for Flash is a hell of a lot easier than debugging XHTML/CSS to work in IE5/6/7.
The summary for the article is misleading. IE7 is not simply installed automatically like any other critical update. Instead, the user is prompted explicitly with a clear, colorful, simple prompt which explains what IE 7 is and gives the user an option to install the update. The article has a screenshot.
to get the new update, simply remove this:
msi http://microsoft.com/xp ie6 main
and replace it with this:
msi http://microsoft.com/xp ie7 main
in your c:/etc/apt/sources.list file. then do:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
I finally found out something I like about WGA! It'll protect everyone with pirated Windows from getting IE7 shoved down their throat!!
Excuse my French but I hope Microsoft fucking die for this one... This is just fucks up my xmas holidays completely.
... Enforcing IE7 on the whole Windows population at once - outright mean. Die Microsoft Deployment and Marketing division, die like my karma is about too.
I manage around twenty websites for businesses around my state for some spare pocket money each month and all of them are xhtml1.1/css2 compliant (w3c) with a large hacks section for each to get them to work in ie6 (and in the case of one ie5 through 6) and instead of a nice easy integration with Vista coming with ie7 out of the box and a steady stream to xp users I'm being told it will all come in one hit in less than six months? Fuck that. Maybe M$ (and the general web community) has forgotten why we, the web developers, pushed so hard for Firefox in the first place - it wasn't fancy tabs, it wasn't speed, it wasn't popup block...it was the fact that they gave a damn about web standards - and they expect us to learn all of the quirks for ie7 and hack up our sites for them while it's still in beta but that's just not going to happen for many of us.
Though that isn't what really scares me, what scares me is none of the company's I have done websites for and also maintain for will understand the implication of the sites needing recoded until customers start complaining. I can put that number, personally, to about thirty five businesses phoning up and complaining that their sites don't work which will a) not be their fault and b) be my fault for selling them a broken site which leads to two problems 1) they wont want to pay for the update and 2) I lose my god damn holiday or I lose my reputation if I tell them to stuff off. Worse still is that many of these are reasonably large sites so fixing and testing them all in that time frame is just going to hurt.
So I'm pissed. Vista, DRM, selling out free speech in china, what ever
I ate your fish.
I really don't see the problem in this. IE7 is better than IE6 in many ways, including security and features. You'd think people would want IE6 to just dissapear.
I suppose it's that bias against Microsoft in general that makes this a bad thing.
Also to have end users suddenly using a new browser right before the holiday shopping season could magnify the cost any bugs that might create a bad user experience on sites.
Since when has Microsoft given a rat's ass about whatever pain they might inflict on users of their software? As a matter of fact, I briefly wondered about a move like this when they announced that Vista would not be available for this holiday season. What better way to drum up enthusiasm for a mediocre upgrade than severe problems with XP over the holiday buying season?
Fuck 'em! Just fuck 'em!
Hello All,
a milyId=4516A6F7-5D44-482B-9DBD-869B4A90159C&displa ylang=en
Calm down. It is easy to succumb to media hype and not look deeper. But if you do, you'll find that administrators have options available to them and so do users.
1) IE7 Blocker Toolkit - non-expiring toolkit will assist admistrators through Group Policy or script to set registry to prevent automatic update to IE7:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
2) Admins who have Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) deployed already has control over what is pushed to the corporate desktop
3) Users individually have the ability to decline the install
I have also heard that users can uninstall IE7 from add/remove programs, this will revert the user back to IE6.
I was looking for a place to post this, but you've beaten me to it. Microsoft is giving users the option to choose not to install. The update will be pushed, but won't be automatiically installed.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Another whiney web dev. Do your damn job you lazy bastard! I get so tired of you lazy bums whining about having to maintain your sites for multiple browsers. IT'S WHAT YOU'RE GETTING PAID TO DO, IDIOT!
Hate to tell you this but you know that tiny little operating system called Windows that takes up a GIG? Guess what preloads, is built in and cannot be separated from it? If you guessed IE then you win a footprint the size of New Hampshire. Thats right, all those DLL's and API's that have to preload for 5 minutes more than double Firefoxs load. And Firefox can do the same (if you enjoy monlithic load times) so that it can poreload as well.
Aside from that, IE takes twice as long to load a page. We have an office in Manila that had to switch entirely to Firefox because our internal tools took FOREVER to load in IE.
So sorry pal. The old, 30MB footprint vs the GB footprint of a browser/os (yes until they can claim that they are separate, I count them as one) makes Firefox look like Kate Moss next to Jerry Garcia.
Those who can compete, do. Those who can't, bundle.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
First, I'd like to thank Microsoft for forcing this update. I'm not being sarcastic in the least. They acknowledge that IE6 is full of security holes and the best thing for the end-user is IE7. IE7 beta runs better than IE6 (at least for me).
The three biggest generalized statements I've read so far involve functionality, it's an abuse of a monopoly, and get firefox.
[Functionality]
IE7 runs better than IE6. The only sites that would be affected would be those sites that resort to explicitly stating that they only run in IE6 and those sites can fix that problem very, very easily. This leads directly into firefox.
["Get Firefox"]
How many sites have you used that don't work in firefox? Let's call those number of sites, X. It's a pretty logical assumption that internet explorer's replacement would have a higher probability of working with IE6 sites than firefox. It would be logical to say that ie's X value is less than firefox's X.
[Abuse of a monopoly]
Come on! Why is it that when Microsoft tries to fix a problem with an upgrade that they the monopoly arguement comes along? Someone else brought up the example of how tightly integrated Safari is in OSX. But if Microsoft wants to reduce the number of unsecured machines; it's a monopolistic move. Sometimes it seems that if MS ever released a free "Office lite" to compete with a product like iLife that we would have people screaming bloody murder. Wordpad is not acceptable. And for those saying that they went through a lot of trouble of uninstalling IE6 and being forced to upgrade to IE7. IE6 was uninstalled, how would it upgrade an uninstalled component? And then install itself, activate itself, and make it the default? All without any input.
The only thing I see wrong with this is the burden it would put on dial-up users. But this is microsoft so I would expect them to at least offer to purchase a cd containing the update. Or having the CD option with SP3 and making it mandatory then.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
This opinion has already been partially stated, but the way I see it, the sooner we can get IE6 out of the browserscape, the better. Hopefully, this will be able to rapidly accelerate the removal of screwy CSS-hacked sites, giving a bit higher marketshare to alternate browsers.
"Windows Update to update Windows component"
Way to go, Slashdot.
If you go through that article, you'll see that Microsoft is already putting out a tool to prevent the automatic update to IE7. I thought it would be a good idea to install this seeing as I have no desire to have Microsoft pump IE7 onto my computer when it is for the most part untested and most likely full of security holes that have yet to be found. So I was thinking Microsoft was actually being very nice to consumers to let us have the option of turning the download off ahead of time. Buuuuuuuuuuut.....
s px?FamilyId=4516A6F7-5D44-482B-9DBD-869B4A90159C&d isplaylang=en
As it turns out Microsoft isn't that benevolent. You run smack dab into a check to see whether or not you've installed Windows Genuine Advantage. I haven't. My copy of XP is perfectly legal and has never touched another computer. But I still am not comfortable with my computer calling Microsoft every day telling them what a happy customer I am, so I have no intention on installing it in the near future. Call me paranoid, but any software from Microsoft that will be doing any sort of hidden connection and any sort of transmission of data that I'm not allowed to monitor or check on crosses a boundary for me. Today it's that my copy of Windows is legal. Tomorrow it's what my favorite websites are. The day after that it's what DVDs I stick in my hard drive. But we've all heard this rant, so I'll just move on.
I hope somebody brings this up within the tech community or in the blogosphere. It doesn't seem kosher to have to install spyware in order to get my legal copy of Windows to behave like I'd like it to. Oh well, time to go buy a MacBook Pro.
Link:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.a
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
An upgrade to Windows is ready to be installed. Microsoft recommends installing Vista. This free upgrade for genuine windows customers offeres improvements such as: * (Bloated) New UI * Highly (in)secure re-designed kernel * Force Users to upgrade hardware. ok this is not an improvement. * WGA * Automatic update
I don't want a signature.
Obviously they fear that people wouldn't want to download it themselves.
The W3Schools stats suggest otherwise:
July IE 7 1.9% Opera 1.4% Browser Statistics
The only movement I see is from IE6 to IE7. The "alternative" browsers stand pretty much where they did last November.
I would still say that Nintendo has a monopoly. Their monopoly is in the GBA Game Pak and DS Game Card market. GBA games cannot run on a PSP (without emulators, that is).
Installed? Yes. Default? No.
First of all, since you admin a site of 100 seats, you can install the IE7 blocker to block Windows Update from downloading IE7.
Secondly, even if you don't install the blocker, and the user does elect to install IE7 (after downloading IE7, Windows Update presents the options "Install", "Don't Install", "Ask me later" (if you select "Don't Install", you're never asked again, even for future security updates)), IE7 will not be installed as the default browser, unless an older IE was already the default browser.
From the IE blog: "If you decide to install IE7, it will preserve your current toolbars, home page, search settings, and favorites and installing will not change your choice of default browser. You will also be able to roll back to IE6 at any point by using Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel."
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
A windows update is appearing on WindowsUpdate.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Completely out of the blue comes ie7, why didn't they release an alpha and maybe a few betas to make it possible for web devs time to prepare themselves, rather than push the release the night before christmas and expect people to make their sites compliant instead of celebrating christmas?
I don't think you've read his post. His clients will assume he built "broken websites" (because "Microsoft is never wrong and only open-source hippies complain about Microsoft") and he'll either be forced to code all new hacks for IE7 for free or lose his reputation with the clients (unless they understand exactly what's happening, which won't matter since even if he gets paid he'd need about 60 hours days to fix it all before the holidays buying season).
I made my points on why this is a problem and I'm more than sure that there are many more out there that will be in a far worse situation. The problem isn't that they are updating the browser, it's how they are planning to do it. As for maintaining sites that is all well and good and it's easy cheap money...Rewriting sites how ever is not, and even if there isn't a rewrite the fact that a stable site stops working/breaks in any regard is a bad reflection on us, to push it further Microsoft is playing with our reputations and putting us between a rock and a hard place when they don't have too. And that isn't even the hard part, if I was whiney about maintaining a site you'd have the right to put me down like the above (though grow some balls and don't be a coward or aren't you in high enough standing with the community that you can afford to stand up for your opinions with the karma to back you?), no the hard part is that we don't know the quirks that IE7 will throw up which will make the whole update so much harder - hacking for IE6 is long and painful and it's problems are well known about!
A slow roll out of IE7 is in every ones best interests, yes even Microsofts - see the rest of this thread for the reasons.
I ate your fish.
So I downloaded Firefox 1.5.0.5 on the home PC running Windows XP so that my kid can play neopets with the latest security fixes in place, and splat.... firefox 1.5.0.5 crashes (yes, firefox 1.5.0.4 worked fine for her to play neopets).
After explaining that yes, I know it works with IE but IE is bad and Firefox is good, I thought I would check with mozilla.org to see what's up. Clickly on the mozilla.com link, and hmmm.... I get redirected to mozilla.seeq.com.
So I cannot fix it tonight and instead explain its late and time for her to go to bed. As she says her prayers she adds: "and please let the fox fire up again."
And the next related news item would be "IE7 push gets scuttled by Microsoft's WGA technology".
Who knows, maybe the WGA guys or IE6 fans might be at it.
And what company was most responsible for this dark age? Couldn't have been Microsft after they crushed Netscape?
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
This is exactly why microsoft.com and all associated subdomains and IP ranges are blocked in my host file and my hardware firewall. If I really need to go get an update from them directly it's all too easy to unblock.
Wait, so is New Hampshire bigger than Galactus?
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
If they do so, aren't they using their position as OS providers to artificially push IE onto their customers? Aren't they leveraging their power to have an unfair advantage over their competitors in the browser market?
Your ad could be here!
Fantastic! Finally web-developers can start thinking ahead and start using PNGs and other features that were a living hell to implement on IE6!
Yes, they are probably just trying to win back some market share from Firefox, but I still feel this move is going to benefit the world.
I'm just hoping people will say YES to this update :)
But I think I'll go on using it the way most Americans do. After all, it gives etymologists something to do tracing the evolution of the widespread new definition.
I heard about the firefox browser jijack. That is scary. Download the new firefox browser here: Firefox Browser
IE 7 could be called both good and bad to be a 'required' update.
Good
Security is much higher than IE6
IE7 supports CSS and XHTML 100 times better than IE6 so sites can start using them
Too many people still use IE6, and IE7 is better than sticking with IE6
Bad
Sites that use some of the 'old' IE6 hacks to make stuff work, will break
--- Actually, that might be a good thing
Companies that have used 'old' IE standards instead of moving forward with
compliance like XHTMl and CSS will face problems if their work arounds
Assume that IE7 is just like IE6. So some web sites need to be testing for
IE7 Now.
I think the good does out weigh the bad, as it will push users that are still using IE6 to get a more standards compliant browser. And it might even educate some of them, so they understand their browser has changed and explore other browsers as well. It will probably help Firefox downloads even.
The other thing this article seems to miss is that IE7 'will be forced' on users in Vista as well, so this will be good for Web Sites to get ready for the Vista Launch, because Vista simply does not do IE6. (And IE7 in Vista is like the stupid cousin, as it runs in protected mode on Vista, several levels below the user's own security even.)
MS has made a lot of big press about IE7, has supplied what it does and doesn't do to developers and beta testers for a long time now, and any reasonable web site administrator or developer should already be ensuring that their sites doesn't assume IE7 is as stupida s IE6 and make things fail.
It would be different if the IE7 list of supported standards, and testing of the Browser itself was not widescale. It has been available almost a full year before its release date, and if that is not enough time for web sites to rip out the crap IE6 kludge code, then maybe this will be a wake up call for them to do so.
MS fek'd up bad with IE6 and I still don't like that IE7 still maintains some backward compatibility for the IE tags, (hence why it won't pass the ACID2 test), but IE7 is the first push from Microsoft to support standards that are not only MS standards, and if anything we should welcome Microsoft and keep encouraging to do the right thing. (It might actually work.)
So in the end, we can start using more advanced CSS and XHTML concepts in the next year without having separate coding to make it display properly in IE6. We can also just send the users to Firefox or the IE7 download site and finally write sites like we should have been doing for a while now but couldn't because of the widespread use of IE6.
What if someone squeezed XP onto an early P3 and then unknowingly (hopefully not) installs IE7 and now their browsing is slower? Did 7's system requirements change since 6? I agree that its time to move away from the albatross that is version 6, but pushing a version change automatically seems a bit much, IMO. This will just make the common folk more confused. I remember the first time I loaded the beta and was looking for the one toolbar. I had to fool around in the registry to get it back. I didn't care much if it was there since I use Firefox, but for the average user who has been using IE for years, it will be a big deal.
I'm quite suprised by IE 7, i tried one of the sites i maintain in it, it looked bloody awful, so i changed the conditional comments to LTE IE 6.5 rather than 7.5, and it looked quite close to how it should have.
thing is, soon i'm going to have to start maintaining 2 extra stylesheets included by conditional comments for every website
TFA makes no menton of breaking commerce sites, and fails to mention that this "pushed" update prompts the user if they want to upgrade first -- much like Service Pack 2 did.
The implication from the summary is that IE7 breaks online shopping, but gives absolutely NO evidence towards this.
And even if there were an issue with certain sites, they've got MONTHS to fix it before the big shopping season. Is that not enough notice? Maybe Microsoft should just hold the update until January, or would that affect Valentine's Day websites? They could it 'till March but what about all the April Fool's websites that might break?
This is a great example of the OSS world using FUD to slam Microsoft, while they complain about the FUD that Microsoft spreads.
-David
Lots of people are have resolution that exceed 1024x768, hence the introduction of elastic layout techniques done using CSS fixed attribute and position anchors ( auto on one side and a value on the other), have brought a very cool and accessible way of supporting multiple resolution keeping visual aspect consistent.
:(
Problem is that IE7 is killing the elastic layout !
First, fixed postioning is still buggy when using anchoring (ok, still bad)
Second, further more, the workaround technique that was working on IE5.5 and IE6 (do a dynamic computation of position using CSS evaluate) is now also killed because of inconsistency in the dimension computation with older version !
Third, the IE conditional comments like [if lt IE 7]> (stating the enclosed should be executed only if IE version is less that 7 = if IE7 or greater I don't want this !) is still executed under IE7 !!!!
IMHO, IE7 will kill most of the websites because MS is now in the middle of the river, they are moving to standard support, but as it is still uncomplete compared to other browser, be prepare to headaches nights and nights guys
Two words here... "anti" and "trust".
M$ obviously still thinks it can use it's dominance on the desktop to promote other software - which it certainly should NOT do by means of an automatic rollout even if it later asks after it has already been downloaded!
.. Crimson Skirts..
[hiding]
Hmmm, I sense more EU fines coming up soon. It smells like a violation of some EU laws.
Make a webpage, use some CSS, bit of JS, a few fancy bits, and any designer will tell you the next steps are the browser hacks to make the damn thing work properly.
If you've designed the site with IE6 in mind, try it in Firefox, if there are any mistakes in the rendering, try it in IE7.
I've found that IE7 will mangle IE6 pages in almost EXACTLY the same way Firefox does.
I dont know weather its a good or bad thing, Microsoft HAVE finally become standards compliant, but the result is the vast majority of sites designed for IE6, will have real problems.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/irony
2 a. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain).
That dogmatic definition previously posted is wrong. Also review situational irony:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony
Windows could have 'another' application that could call the IE DLLs, sure, but they are NO MORE PRELOADED than FIREFOX. As they would BE IN A DIFFERENT process that IE DOES NOT HAVE ACCESS TO.
.. but that's a whole different can of worms.
IE has to re-load all of its DLL even if another application has already loaded the Windows HTML rendering engine. So the memory reported in TaskMgr for IE is WHAT IE IS USING. Get it?
Um... what did the above just mean? If I remember my CS courses correctly, the reason DLL's exist is to REUSE the CODE by putting it ONCE in MEMORY and then allowing ACCESS from (gasp) DIFFERENT applications. Perhaps you are talking about DATA. There, you will have separate pages copied. That does no mean that CODE does not take space. If I am correct in assuming the HTML rendering engine code IS provided as a DLL, and the IE is just a wrapper around it, the rendering CODE could easily take 5-10MB of RAM, because rendering engines ARE COMPLEX.
Moreover, in Windows, fonts are bundled into the DLLs, making them shared as well. This means that IE can re-use fonts loaded into the HTML rendering engine, while Firefox probably cannot (It would make no point to write a browser that depends on another rendering engine, IMHO).
That's what I think the parent meant.
If you need substantiation for these claims, here you go (wikipedia):
The shared library term is slightly ambiguous, because it covers at least two different concepts. First, it is the sharing of code located on disk by unrelated programs. The second concept is the sharing of code in memory, when programs execute the same physical page of RAM, mapped into different address spaces. It would seem that the latter would be preferable, and indeed it has a number of advantages. For instance on the OpenStep system, applications were often only a few hundred kilobytes in size and loaded almost instantly; the vast majority of their code was located in libraries that had already been loaded for other purposes by the operating system.
In Windows, the concept was taken one step further, with even system resources such as fonts being bundled in the DLL file format. The same is true under OpenStep, where the universal "bundle" format is used for almost all system resources.
And, BTW, you're wrong about denied access. There is a function in the Windows API that allows any process run a thread in another process. Yep, any app can do that. From the Phrack magazine, issue 62:
The CreateRemoteThread function creates a thread that
runs in the address space of another process.
HANDLE CreateRemoteThread(
HANDLE hProcess,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpThreadAttributes,
DWORD dwStackSize,
LPTHREAD_START_ROUTINE lpStartAddress,
LPVOID lpParameter,
DWORD dwCreationFlags,
LPDWORD lpThreadId
);
Two more functions:
VirtualAllocEx()
WriteProcessMemory()
give us the power to inject our own arbitrary code to the
address space of another process - and once it is there, we can
create a thread remotely to execute it.
I wonder how those faces of emploees that don't really know much about computers will look when in the middle of the day it's like BANG - totally new look of their browser.
"Also to have end users suddenly using a new browser right before the holiday shopping season could magnify the cost any bugs that might create a bad user experience on sites."
Unless, of course, the browser is not really "new" but a hacked old one with tabs tacked on. This way, the company can brag about "unmatched backward compatibility" as the main selling point. Not that they need a selling point, anyway...
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
Well the good news is, they fixed most CSS2.1 bugs in IE7. They killed almost every bug mentioned at positioniseverything.net. They also added support for CSS2 selectors.
The bad news is they didn't add ":after" support..
If you used this to clear floats without structural markup, you need to find another way.
And worth mentioning:
Note that pages render fine now without this hack!
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
But I'd mod this up.
You must be new here. Here are a few reasons, some of them obvious:
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Have you not being paying attention?
The IE7 beta has been out for ages. Beta 1 was available at the end of July last year. The public beta started about 6 months ago.
Don't blame MS for them not knocking on your door and telling you.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Or if you're using Wintoo:
emerge -avu internet-explorer
Remember, using Windows is all about choices--not everyone uses the same package manager. ;)
Bored With ProgressQuest?
I don't know why parent was modded down because he's right. Firefox silently downloads updates, it only prompts you if you want to install them when they are downloaded. IMHO Firefox should only check if updates are available then display something like
An update is available, do you want to download and install it now ?
[ ] Don't check for updates in the future
[Yes] [No]
Whether it's firefox or not does not matter to me, I don't like new versions to be installed "on my back". I'm using Debian Sid so I don't have this kind of problem (ff updates are installed with apt IF I WANT TO), but my parents who are using Windows are pissed of those update prompts, and I understand them. The result is that they will *never* update their software.
Frankly, I've never understood the demonizing of ActiveX technology...
a) It's a security risk waiting to happen - ActiveX controls have no limits placed on what they can do to your machine. Even Internet Explorer has finally heaved a sigh and is now blocking them by default.
b) It's more Microsoft lock-in. An ActiveX site is a Windows(tm)-only site.
No sig today...
Didn't know Neocons often posted on slashdot... i'm off to digg (!)
ActiveX controls. Some people might, you know, want to use them.
ActiveX is one of the most insecure technologies out there. Enabling ActiveX is probably the quickest way to having your computer "owned" by somebody who will use it for sending spam, or worse.
Anybody currently "wanting" to use ActiveX controls needs to have the security aspects explained to them. Having understood them, they will stop wanting to use ActiveX.
I cannot understand why the parent was modded up to "5 insightful".
If you've designed the site with IE6 in mind, try it in Firefox, if there are any mistakes in the rendering, try it in IE7.
If you've designed a website "with IE6 in mind" and it doesn't work with Firefox, that probably is not a "mistake in the rendering" but a mistake in your website.
I've found that IE7 will mangle IE6 pages in almost EXACTLY the same way Firefox does.
Translation: your crap pages do not comply with W3C standards.
Again we see a kid working for spare cash, and businesses relying on him for their (no doubt) 'mission critical' web infrastructure instead of going to a proper business that supports the work they do. Such a business would cost more, but now is the time that you find out why that is.
If it takes 60 hours, then it takes 60 hours. This is what happens when you take on responsibility for something. If you agree to do it and got paid to do it, then you can't complain. Nobody forced you after all. Your inexperience with business shows that you didn't require them to pay for 'support' either on an as-needed basis, or with a regular payment to.
You get what you pay for. If the poster doesn't know how to manage his clients expectations properly, then he deserves to find out the hard way that working for someone requires more effort than just knocking up some website practically for fun.
Suggestion: contact clients, tell them IE7 is coming out and will be automatically updated. Suggest that some changes will be required to their websites to support the new browser and that these changes will be charged at £xx a hour, with estimated times for the sites. All the clients will be thankful you informed them before the changes occurred, all will pay for the changes. All will assume that upgrades are necessary because that's the way of the computer industry - we all upgrade to the latest version all the time, its ingrained as normal.
You then start work on upgrading the sites to support IE7 today, keep the changes stored away so that, in a few months time when the browser does come out, upgrading your client's sites is a simple matter of uploading the changes the day before. No stress, no weeny complaints about how 'fucking microsoft' ruined your life, no problems. This is how professionals do it. Learn.
I manage an e-commerce store on the net and it works and looks much better on the new IE7. It does a few things better than before. Same goes with wmp11. It's much easier and looks soo sexy. Update your grey matter cause one day it may matter.
is it possible to regress easily from ie7 to ie6 without having to re-install the entire OS?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
That's what you get when you just go and glance over Slashdot's headlines.
It seems someone needs a little lesson in the finer nuances of irony/sarcasm...
XHTML 1.1 isn't allowed to be served as text/html. Internet Explorer 6 can only understand text/html. I assume you are serving XHTML 1.1 as text/html against spec? It's kinda hard to take you seriously complaining about Internet Explorer's lack of compliance when you don't comply either.
No. They've been releasing betas, which you can use to check for compatibility, and there's no way everybody will upgrade all at once. But if you've done your job and checked for compatibility, why would it even matter if everybody upgraded all at once?
You appear to be really immature when you call Microsoft "M$".
You mean you've sold them a website without explaining to them what your policy is on future versions of browsers? Without putting something down in writing?
Imagine you weren't a web developer for a second. If you hire somebody to build you a website, it seems like a perfectly reasonable expectation to get something that will simply continue to work. If you didn't explain to them that this is not how websites work, then you didn't do your job when you initially took the work on, and it's simply taken until now for your corner-cutting to incur costs.
When you build websites, you need to explain these things to clients. What browsers are supported, your policies for older and newer browsers, when a bug is something you fix without payment and when they need to pay you to update the site. If you don't do that, you're a cowboy coder, not a professional that can be trusted.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
"has serious implications for e-commerce websites whose functionality might be affected by any bugs in the software"
Beta versions have been out for a while now. Even IF the application worked so differently then previous versions that it would affect your site your:
a) Making a website that hardly works on any browser (including old versions of IE)
b) Not taking your job seriously. If your job is to manage this sites that will be affected by a new browser version you should have all ready started your testing a year ago.
c) If you are not capable of a and b then I'm willing to bet your site has more serious problems to worry about then the 5 people a week that go to your site to begin with.
TruePunk | Games
Consequently, any browser statistics which are compiled using browser detection methods are likely to underestimate the market share of alternative browsers. When the reported market share for e.g. Opera is 1.4 percent, even a 1 percent error in the statistics is a large factor.
*Thank You* for getting to this aspect of the problem.
Now all the first line IT support guys get to field hundreds of "What is this??" calls. Because the end users won't know what exactly they downloaded, and will be horrified when "nothing is available" anymore.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So you're saying that the way Microsoft should have done it was to roll it out slowly, so that some of its paying customers can play guinea-pig for you and so that you don't have to do the tesing in the new browser yourself.
At the same time, you were going to not tell your customers about this, hoping that they wouldn't mind the "small umber" of users that cannot access the sites that they paid you for - until you could be bothered to find the time to do what you're being paid to do.
And all of this because Microsoft feels that a public beta along with tons of information about the upcoming changes a year in advance would suffice for people like you to do their job. How dare they!
No, how dare you collect maintenance fees for so many sites that you cannot even update them given a year's notice?
It seems to me that, as an independent web developer, at least some of (and I venture to suggest most of) the blame for your upcoming situation lays at your own door.
/. and few people here have a great deal of sympathy towards MS (myself included) it seems the bed here is almost entirely of your making, you are the one who now has to lie in it. If you didn't understand the implications of the business world when you entered into it as a web developer, you maybe should have consulted someone who did and they could have helped you avoid these pitfalls.
Of course, we'd all love to have every browser be fully standards compliant so that our lives would be a lot simpler (less time hacking IE's rendering engine, more time sipping martinis on the beach, etc.) but we don't live in that perfect world, unfortunately. I would love everyone to use FF (or, arguably even better, Opera), but again, that's not the world we live in.
As a web developer, something seems very wrong if you didn't anticipate for the release of a major new browser. It's not like it came out of the blue, we've known it was coming for some time, and yet you seem to be in a position where your clients expect free support for all future browser versions and you have built in no protection for yourself in such a situation.
A sensible move would have been to agree with all your clients beforehand exactly which browsers and which versions they wanted the site to support. If you'd clarified this from the outset, there could be no question of you being at fault for not supporting what they didn't ask you to support. No developer promises to fully support any and all future releases. Imagine if car dealers today had to make all vehicles they sold fully compatible with all possible future fuel types. Who would seriously enter into a contract that put them at such a disadvantage? Only a fool or a conman, I'd guess.
If you had agreed a list of supported browsers in advance, you would actually be in a very strong position to enter into a new contract to update the website so that it supports the new browser - in other words instead of having 35 clients complaining that you sold them a lemon, you'd have 35 potential new contracts beating a path to your door. You missed out on a very lucrative situation due to poor planning on your part.
Similarly, it seems you have an ongoing contract to maintain (some or all of) the websites. You should have accounted for issues such as major new browser launches when you established those contracts. You could have either excluded substantial rewrites for major browser launches from the support contract, or you personally should have allowed for the time and expense that such rewrites would take when you created the contract. Doing neither of these things and just hoping MS would never release another browser was incredibly short-sighted on your part.
Needless to say, as much as this is
Blaming MS at this point (after all, we've known IE7 was coming for a looooong time now) just makes you look childish. You claim that FF is the better browser because it has better standards support and we should all be championing web standards, yet in the same post you complain about MS releasing a new browser (after 6 years?) which, wait for it, has better standards support! You're relatively lucky this time, in that IE7 has come a long way in terms of CSS support and you'll likely not have to do much to get the sites working with it. It could have been a lot worse, and instead of ranting at MS you really should be counting your blessings and figuring out how you can avoid this kind of pitfall in the future.
sounds like a way to push WGA.
Quit your whining.
If you have any skill whatsoever you should, at the very least, be feeding your ie5/ie6 specific hacks via a seperate style sheet. Therefore, simply alter your xhtml code to use conditional statements (if you were clever this should be a two second job and involve simply altering one include file) and then spend an hour or two converting your hacks to valid css rules - job done, where's the problem?
> The IE7 beta has been out for ages. Beta 1 was available at the end of July last year.
Beta 1 barely contained any of the new CSS fixes, so no, it hasn't been out for ages.
The best part of the IE6 to IE7 transition is the test manager that signed off on all of the bugs and security exploits for IE6 is now a general manager in Microsoft's Security Business Unit. The Group PM for IE6 too!
Isn't that just a kick in the jimmy? Enjoy. Discuss.
If MS really wanted to provide a good service for it's users, it would push firefox to every windows user too.
I don't know about you all but for some web designers this is a good thing.
I've been reading the IE blogs and it seems that IE7 is going to be more standards compliant. so my css will work in IE7 without the thought of shoving a rusty spoon in my eye.
that and IE6 just plain sucks ie7 HAS to be better... right?
Not really. In this case, its Microsoft fixing a mistake (the mistake being IE6).
IE6 is holding the internet back. This -has- to be done. The faster the pool of IE user upgrade their browser, the faster we can push our web sites forward. IE7 isn't enough, mind you, but it is a start.
When i saw this headline, I was like "WOOHOO!", because I can expect my customers (which all use Windows XP or Linux), to -all- have IE7 or Firefox. So, I can ditch IE6 support in a matter of weeks. Thats a blessing.
Just as I was reading this article a window popped up telling me that Firefox 1.5.0.5 has finished downloading and I need to restart Firefox for it to install. My options are "Restart now" or "Restart later", but there's no option to avoid the update.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
Well, i take care of 100's of websites and i'm actually very happy MS are pusing it through as an auto update. However, alot of the css bug fixes are still not implemented, so for now on, im goin to put my ieonly div within the if[ie] command to display the following: IE Fix Your browser might not render the page as intended. Please upgrade to a css compliant browser like opera or firefox You may laugh, but i feel i should stop catering for Microshafts incompetence, and the only way to do this, it to show Microshaft what happens when they create inferior products. I'm serious about this BTW!
Massive, n00bish UI design failure there. The sane way to do it is to put three buttons up: "Yes", "No" and "No, and don't even dare thinking about asking again I will do my own upgrading as I see fit thankyouverymuch".
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Also to have end users suddenly using a new browser right before the holiday shopping season could magnify the cost any bugs that might create a bad user experience on sites
Can we tone the advocacy down a little?
This somehow suggests that this is a bad idea and that it is different from what Microsoft has done in the past. Well IE 5.5, IE 6, IE 6SP1 were all critical updates.
What is more, this is straight editorialising on the part of the submitter or the editor. This isn't a case of a sensationalised article that is being posted on slashdot, the sensationalisation is supplied by the submitter or the editor.
I'm hardly a Microsoft fanboy but this is ridiculous.
meh
Try explaining that to some managers. There are a LOT of people who expect things to work, and not care when something changes. He doesn't do the free upgrades, he looses work.
And his age doesn't mean a goddamned thing. There is a guy that graduated from my University that was 16 with a Honors in Computer Science.
Do you like to work for free? Cause if so, I'm sure there are lots of people that'd love to use your free time.
This sounds like an awful aggressive schedule for Microsoft. Do we really think that this product will really be ready before the 4Q2006 shopping season?
There are good Windows sysadmins and users but by far the majority of Windows' user base are Joe Average-types who wouldn't know a security update if it hit them on the head with a hammer - consequently, if those users won't take responsibility for the security of their PCs themselves, then good luck to MS pushing those updates on them. I've not used IE7 but if it's more secure & more standards compliant then I say it's a good thing.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
is it just me or is ie7 the best browser ive ever used?
the tab interface is slick, almost everything ALREADY works...
security is apparently better... not to mention that it now has a phishing filter.
its far faster in my experience than firefox...
and the reset button is AWESOME! settings get screwed up, your homepage gets hijacked...
just hit RESET and poof. back to factory defaults.
who WOULDNT want a better browser?
p.s. i cant read the word in the image... that is very poorly executed guys... and no im not a script.
In simple words - IExplore.exe is a process, it's isolated, that true. And that's apparently all you know. IExplore.exe depends upon numerous DLLs, which, wait for it..... are already loaded in memory by... wait for it... the OS.... applause.
Hopefully the lightbulb above your head got at least half a watt after reading that.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
It's a series of tubes, right?!
There's a big difference, firstly what was pushed to you was a minor update, not a full version upgrade as with IE6 > 7. When a new version of FF comes along, the browser doesn't push you to install (as far as I remember I wasn't even prompted that there was an upgrade to 1.5, I had to go find it myself).
Updates are often useful or even critical security fixes, upgrades can be much more disruptive if they change a lot of features or break compatibility with existing features, sites, etc. Going from IE6 to IE7 is likely to be one hell of a change for the average user.
Secondly, it was FF itself that fetched the update, not the OS. Meaning you had to be an active user of FF for this to happen. IE7 will be pushed whether the user is using it or not. I haven't used IE on my home system in 18 months - 2 years but it will still download and prompt me to install the newest version.
Software which updates itself with the latest patches can be useful (although a way to turn off the updates if you don't want them would also be nice). Software which does a full upgrade to the next version without you even having to use it, via the OS, could be seen as more insiduous.
By the way, despite what I've said above, I welcome the upgrade from 6 to 7. 6 was a pig of a browser and 7 should make my life as a developer a little easier, the quicker it spreads the better, it's just that comparing the FF update to the Windows-driven IE7 upgrade is a little skewed.
So Beta 2 did?
Which has been out for almost 6 months?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
ActiveX is demonized because it is both browser and OS specific. As an added bonus, many sites are coded to require it. Of all the other technologies you mentioned, they are either (1) available on multiple browsers and platforms, or (2) not required for a website to function. ActiveX is one of those technologies that by its very existance limits user choices. Under a very specific set of circumstances, it helps the people who have chosen MS and IE. That's great, until it starts penalizing those who have chosen something else.
You make an interesting point about Java applets. They run on any browser or OS, and are therefore viewed as less "evil". Problem is, applets tend to misbehave when they encounter versions of Java other than the ones they are written for. The potential for exploitation is surely there. Java would be almost as big a problem as ActiveX, but it is not so universal and consistent in its deployment so as to make an easy target for malware authors. Also realize that Java has a long history of making itself obvious when a program launches, while ActiveX is quite willing to conceal it's existance unless the user has their security settings cranked up.
Fortunately, ActiveX can be easily blocked by firewalls. This causes developers to think twice before relying on it. From a corporate perspective, we simply don't have the time to police the use the Internet and stop the users from self-infecting their machines with spyware delivered via Activex through mistyped URLs.
At least for webdesigners. The only fscking issue, is that STILL Microsoft refuse to adhere to standards. Look at how horridly IE7(b2) fails at the ACID2 test!
Microsoft prides themselves in having the industries brightest programmers and scientists, which they actually might have(google aside of course...), but MS must have the absolutely most moronic business executives and marketing executives.
As I said, if IE7 adhered to web standards, it would be such a fantastically orgasmic idea that over night all users would have IE7 instead of IE6. Bugs, yes... But at least we'd be able to create websites without having to spend 50% of the time creating a special "IE" version of all the CSS and Javascripts!
Firefox uses the same amount of memory whether trim_on_minimize is true or not. However, if you set that to true you will dramatically increase the number page ins/outs to disk and severely reduce system performance. That's why it's disabled by default. If you're low on memory you're much better off if you restart Firefox regularly. trim_on_minimize simply makes a bad situation much worse, especially when you're low on RAM.
You don't understand the memory statistic (Working Set) that Windows Task Manager is showing you. It doesn't mean what you think it does, but you can blame Microsoft for defaulting to misleading memory statistic (and mislabeling it as 'Memory Usage')
Use Process Explorer to get an accurate representation of the memory usage on your computer.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
You're absolutely right, and the only way to combat this perception is to start getting the word out now that
I think the best way to go is to remind everyone, once a week, about whats coming down. An email update every week with a brief discussion of Microsofts latest problems, and links to articles and blogs.
If we all get together and each write just ONE lousy article a week, and bundle them all up into our emails, it'll have some influence. After all, how can anyone argue if they get an email each week with 100 links to 100 different sites all saying the same thing?
Email me and we'll set it up. admin@groupehudson.com
Geeezuz, the tone of the post is the most FUD I've ever read. As far as browser operability goes, FF works like crap on a lot of websites - including THIS ONE! I know becuause I'm using it right now and the website looks like crap. Images running into words and vice versa. IE 7 works fine for chrisake. Could everyone just five the MS bashing a rest for a while? It's all a bunch of sour grapes.
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
This has serious implications for e-commerce websites whose functionality might be affected by any bugs in the software.
Bugs in the software? I think the risk is more about IE 7 adhering to standards better, and those websites not.
Also to have end users suddenly using a new browser right before the holiday shopping season could magnify the cost any bugs that might create a bad user experience on sites.
Yes, but on the other hand, is staying with IE 6 even an option for those? Is the risk of this greater than the risk of being infected by malware from IE 6 security holes? IE 7 isn't perfect, but it's improving in several security-related areas. For example its phishing support -- that could help users a lot in the holiday shopping season.
That article brings up the downsides, but it doesn't look into its upsides. IE 7 is a major improvement over IE 6 in most areas.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
i think this is a good idea. at some point people need to be prompted to download more secure products. the average user does not regularly patch their computer, and provided newer products shore up more security problems it will keep everyone safer.
So now about six months suddenly qualify as "ages"?
Agent Switcher for Firefox is an easy way around the agent check.
After having read a few posts about MSIE7's standards compliance, it seems the parent will have an easy job if:
- he used standards (the websites work fine on Opera, Safari, Firefox)
- he didn't use crap like ActiveX
- he used the usual MS-style conditionnal comments to add IE-only code
If that's the case, then a simple modification of the MS-style conditionnal comments will be all the work that's required. Depending on how well the whole things are coded, it could be as simple as 30 seconds of work per website.
If he didn't do the things above, well, though luck. That'll be a lesson about not using proprietary code on the Web.
It's certainly not 'last week'. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that someone could update their IE knowledge in six freakin' months.
Stop arguing semantics and try to argue a point.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Rather than cry about whats not going to work or what will work, if you meet the conditions of a.) Being a webmaster / designer and b.) Being at all responsible, then you should probably go download the beta on your testing platform (you have one of those riiiight???) and make sure your site isn't going to break. The whole argument is moot when you can negate the badness with 60 seconds of effort.
Oh, and to appease the "anti-trust" conspiracy theorists, some of which seem to be responsible for the submission of articles here of late, chances are 99% that this push WON'T affect anybody not currently using Internet Explorer 6. In which case, it counts as a program UPDATE and not some sort of forcible takeover of the users default browser.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
"We're really trying to get the world ready for a major new browser release"
Umm.. it's already happened. It's called Firefox. You know, that browser you copied ideas from? Yeah, that's the one.
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
Yes, probably. That lesson would include telling people that a lot of sarcasm requires tone of voice.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I doubt "e-commerce" sites will break any more or less than any other site online, so why put emphasis on them? Oh, and sites will more likely be affected by bug*fixes*, not new bugs. MS finally made an attempt to fix some of IE's bugs and in all honesty I doubt they could have done worse than the bug-ridden crash-prone sorry attempt at a browser IE6 is.
(command line) tool to block ie7 delivery via automatic updates and 'express' windowsupdate:
http://tinyurl.com/kwkgt (link target is microsoft)
on the local machine it looks like a simple registry edit:
Registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\7.0
Key value name: DoNotAllowIE70
Value = 0
ie7 is NOT blocked
Value = 1
ie7 is blocked from installing via above methods
Sure, we all know what firefox is. But can't the website at least say that firefox is a web browser? I advise anyone who asks me computer questions to get firefox, but many people have never heard of it and might assume they stumbled across something unrelated and avoid it.
science is a religion
So, as Microsoft attempts to eliminate the second, and make the first less of an issue, you're complaining?
Whatever you're drinking--stop.
I think you're missing the point. This is a consumer operating browser for the average user. Firefox should be smart enough to expire the memory cache either outright or to disk as it grows beyond a certain size. That size should also be set at a conservative (64MB maybe?) size to start with.
You, my friend, should be the one tweaking to get additional performance or make use of the 1-2GB of available RAM you probably have- not your average shmo with a Intel-Cellery processor and 192MB of RAM.
Am I the only one that believes that things should work right out of the box in 99% of the cases? Look at Linux's file cache system. buffers/cache will use most of the available memory, but when you start filling your memory, it reduces them instantly. Now of course FireFox doesn't have this power. It should be more sane to start with.
PS: As a side note, those of you in the OS world know that free() on Linux and Windows returns memory to the program, and not to the OS. So realisticly, Firefox should never use too much in the first place, as that won't go to the OS until the program exits.
So:
- small MEMORY cache to start with (64MB maybe?)
- configurable to make it bigger
- expiration policy to memory or disk
- minimal growth in application size due to reclaimation time on an application that pretty much doesn't close most of the time and hence won't release its memory
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
First of all, the update is OPTIONAL. The only thing that is "pushed" to the client via Windows Update is an installer shim. When it runs it prompts the user and asks them if they would like to install an update for IE. They can say Yes, No, or Ask Me Later.
Second, guess what I was greeted with this morning when I came in to work? It was a Firefox dialog saying that I was already updated to the new version and would I like to restart firefox so the changes could take effect. How is this really any different? Does anybody have knowledge that version 2.0 of Firefox won't be pushed this way, just like version 1.5.0.5 was today?
Could IE7 have bugs? It almost certainly does... but the fact of the matter is that it has some very important security related design changes and fixes that will make Windows users safer. If large e-commerce sites are worried about how their pages will display in IE7, why don't they download a copy of the freely available beta and test it?
Microsoft's decision to push IE7 out via Windows Update is a good one not just because of the security reasons, but because it will move a huge percentage of the people on the web to a browser with far better standards support. The lag time between standards adoption will be dramatically reduced. Let's face it, a big reason that many sites aren't standards compliant today is because of IE. If Microsoft simply offered it as a download on their web site it would take years for adoption to reach high enough levels to stop coding for IE6.
You see? This is exactly why Firefox will never really take off versus IE. All the slashdotters have to huddle 'round their Linux monitors and debate about which command-line voodoo is necessary to get it to really work; and they back all their points up with mythical snopes-ish conspiracies about what resources IE7 or Windows really uses. 90% of people are still using IE simply because it works and you never have to deal with it. Firefox and Linux is like becoming a Jehovah's Witness--you have to study it for years before you dabble in it for years before you actually become a user. That being said, I have two examples of companies that don't work on IE7 yet, and I wish they did. First, Google Desktop's RSS reader which brought me this article is opening everything in a new browser instance instead of a new tab. That's just annoying. But second, last.fm. Their new redesign won't load correctly under IE7, and there's no way to inform them of it because their fora don't work on IE7.
--Colin Jensen
colinandbethany.com
God damn, The Pusher
God damn, I say The Pusher
I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man!
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
w3schools belives the stats overstate the adoption of Firefox among the general population. But I don't you can simply ignore the trend lines which suggest that none of the alternative browsers have gained market share in 2006.
I just opened FF and a patch was installed automatically and it asked me to restart.
I'm as anti-microshaft as anyone, but I fail to see the big stir here. To this day, even though Windows XP SP1 will be unsupported as of October 10th, they *still* don't force you to update. I'm sure anyone with Automatic Updates enabled will receive it automatically, but for those users who prefer to live in an unsupported world, Microsoft seems to allow it. Having used the beta, I have no plans to "upgrade" as the biggest advantage (besides running activeX for those occasional sites that need it) over FireFox is its integration with Windows Explorer when it comes to FTP. Not being able to download entire directories drives me nuts, and for the first time since IE4, it's back to a simple web-page type interface with only single file downloads. No thanks. No plans to buy CuteFTP here... I'll just stick with what works, is free, and legal. FireFox will continue to be my primary browser, with IE6 being there when I'm absolutely forced to use it.
This sounds silly, but in the food industry it's pretty much exactly what most manufacturers are doing with allergy labeling. Instead of improving their factories to reduce the chance of, say, bits of peanuts from Snickers ending up in a Milky Way bar by accident, they put a warning on the Milky Way package to say, "Warning: manufactured in a facility that also uses peanuts, tree nuts, and might possibly have come into contact with air." (OK, I made up that last part.)
So instead of dealing with the problem (cross-contamination of allergens), they throw on a useless warning. It's useless because it doesn't provide information on which you can act beyond "don't buy prepared food, ever." By contrast, a useful warning would be one telling you that they've added peanuts to Almond Snickers.
Also to have end users suddenly using a new browser right before the holiday shopping season could magnify the cost any bugs that might create a bad user experience on sites."
this is 2006... who still thinks msft is interested in eliminating bad user experiences?
they are interested in E3 (embrace, extend, extinguish), and E3 often yields bad user experiences.
as a firefox user, i don't really care. i went to a travel site that didn't support ff and i sent them a note that i would shop elsewhere.
i *hope* msft breaks up lots of sites with this move - some lemmings might finally get the message and move to firefox or some other decent browser.
"Security is much higher than IE6"?
They've dropped ActiveX and desktop/browser integration finally?
No?
Then how exactly is "security much higher"? That's the biggest security problem in Windows for the past 9 years, and until it goes away I can't see how anything they could do could make a significant difference. Certainly nothing they've done over the past decade has.
I think people "demonize" active x because it makes it's so damn easy to install serious malware on a Windows box. Not everyone is an elite ubergeek like on slashdot and when a dialog box comes up saying hit OK to continue viewing the web site they click it without even knowing what they are clicking on. Of course in a perfect world everyone would know what they are clicking but the actual facts are that many non computer experts need to use a computer in their day to day life. That being the case the computer needs to be set up so ORDINARY users can use the damn thing without snagging malware. And yes it's very possible my Firefox and Mac setups never get malware even the iMac used by my mom who is a total non techie.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Go to LitePC.com, remove IE and all its dlls, and then tell us that Windows does not preload IE and its components. You will see how clear it is once you have compared the performace of a PC with and without IE installed. I have done this on numerous occasions in order to breathe life back into older PCs. When I remove IE completely, my clients thank me for the performance improvement on their otherwise obsolete PCs.
How did you get something that uses khtml to run on your ds?
OK, you are mostly correct (and way more informed than 99% of the other posters here), but you are wrong on a very key point: explorer.exe does NOT load MSHTML.DLL at startup. This can easily be verified with a debugger, or with processes explorer from sysinternals.
Does any browser really do support all of this perfectly?
I agree, sane defaults are good, and firefox lack them on occasion, but it's still better than IE. And if you're running WinXP on 192MB of memory, it doesn't matter what firefox does, your OS is going to enjoy chugging every now and then. I've used it on 256MB of memory and I ran into problems at times, and I've seen it crawl on a computer with 128MB of memory, so logically, 192MB has to be somewhat worse than 256MB. Also, not every power user goes and gets 2 gigs of RAM. Nowadays, I think there are even some people who think that because they obtained 2GB of RAM, they are now a power user. I, however, have been on a rather hefty laptop with 512MB of RAM for the past two years. And I'll be using it for another year at least, though probably with some kind of memory upgrade.
Afterall its one of the main reasons they even bothered to update IE (that and threat of Google and Firefox). I can't see them letting XP users get ahold of this before the Vista users, but I expect it to come out for XP like a week or two after Vista gets released.
You are correct it will be a reasonably easy task assuming I have the time to go through and test all of the betas for their quirks and learn how to fix them. I use the if ie version 'hack' to deal with css specific things and other problems that need fixing so I'll only have to fix one part of the site in most cases. All of my sites work in Firefox, Opera, Safari and Links2 and I dislike ActiveX as much as the next guy.
I ate your fish.
A PHP script pulls back the doctype to one supported by IE when it is detected though all of the code is XHTML1.1 compliant. Or didn't you know that could be done? Are you inexperienced or some thing?
...Okay on this point I am rather supportive of Microsoft because that was very nice of them though unfortunately I cannot run IE7 yet as I only have Linux and Mac computers. And before you scream fanboy IE6 runs nicely under wine so I've been able to test everything over the last few years since I moved away from Windows. Still that doesn't address the concerns I pointed out, reread the post.
.6, still correctly work in all the browsers they were written for so if Opera and Firefox can pull this off without any glitches in several years it is sad that Microsoft can't (and yes I know why they can't...we have several proprietary apps at work that are broken by IE7s basic updates).
Microsoft is releasing betas! Save the bell! The problem is solved!
I abbreviated as I had to type the post rather quickly, lunch hour was nearly up at work, and it's just a sarcastic noun so get over it.
I sold websites with the express details of all updates and content patches with what they'd cost and etc. Though for some unknown reason you assume small business would understand that this is a _required_ update that they are _required_ to pay if they want it to continue to work...So if I go to them with this they will assume I'm screwing them over and if I wait till they come to me I'll be swamped and they will assume I have screwed them over. I know not all of them will react this way though I know a majority will because they simply do not know the web at all - they paid me so they didn't have to. And yes I was a high school student when I did the majority of these, I am not professional in that it is my primary employment though at the time I was working for an interstate company doing enterprise websites, though in my defence the alternatives in this state are pitiful unless you are a huge fan of Frontpage templates for over four thousand dollars and I am not exaggerating.
As for keeping compliance I wrote the sites to be compliant and at that stage Microsoft said outright that IE was 'feature complete' and wouldn't be updated again, I didn't believe them and at most expected another service pack - this was a mistake but still. Though all of the sites I've done, one of which was tested against Firefox
I ate your fish.
The real reason is pretty simple. Vista is coming out next year and it will come with IE7, not IE6, I doubt there will be a way to install IE6 on Vista. So here a lot of people are going to buy Vista with IE7 only to find out that there pet site doesn't work because it is for IE5.5 and better. For most people the internet has become what the computer is. If the internet experience is bad they will smite Vista as a bad operating system. The only way for Microsoft to fix that is to get IE7 in as many hands as possible *now* in the hopes that most sites will be fixed before Vista is released. I don't use Windows so for me this just means is that with the combined usage of IE7 and Firefox in a few short months I will be able to finally be able to use transparent png's without feeling guilty. The increase of standards is good.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Maybe it's just all of my insane relatives, but none of them run windows update. Ever. Maybe that has to do with it taking hours to download on their dial-up connections.
Additionally, I don't see this as a big issue. If people would code their sites to comform to browser standards, instead of making them IE friendly, they would have nothing to worry about
You should be coding to published standards, not to individual browsers.
If their browser is broken - that is their problem not the problem of websites that don't display in broken browsers. End of Story.
Not quite. Some of us are trying to do business, not politics.