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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.
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....
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??
Simple solution:
Control Panel -> Automatic Updates -> Turn Off Automatic Updates ( or select "Notify Me but don't automatically download or install them")
By default, I have automatic updates turned off since I consider M$'s automatic updates to be a nuisance.
"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!*
IE 7 prompts the user and asks whether they want to install, whenever a new update is available. In other words, it's exactly like Firefox. With as many new browser exploits that are revealed constantly, frankly, this is a good thing.
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.
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/
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
I seriously doubt it will end up on 90% of the worlds' computers.
First off, Microsoft is releasing a tool that will allow businesses to block the upgrade, and you can be sure that after the problems with other forced rollouts, business is taking a wait-and-see approach.
Second, its to little, too late. Firefox already has more than 10% market share, and as people continue to use it, they get used to not using IE. Case in point - I asked a friend of mine to check out one of my sites using IE. After talking with him on the phone, and checking 3 or 4 times "You're sure you're using Internet Explorer, right?" - it turned out that he was so used to using Firefox that it had completely replaced IE in his mind for "connecting to the internet"
Third, WGA is going to be mandatory for downloading the final version of IE7. What's the piracy rate for Windows XP again?
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.
Every e-commerce site is going to be IE7 ready before it's released. There will be glitches, but with millions of customers at stake, they'll be solved pretty damn quick. (Of course, they may well break other browsers in the process, but that's another matter and MS will just try not to gloat about that too much.)
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.
"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."
Interesting. My computer has 4 gigs of RAM and uses only 200 megs or so at boot. Never had it use a gig, or close to it, even when IE was my primary browser. The pre-loaded DLLs don't store IE's cache.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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 :)
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.
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
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!
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
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
Firefox, Opera and Safari have generally working box-models. IE6's box-model is horribly broken. IE7's box model is generally working. All the hacks that people put in for IE6 are consequently going to get screwed when MS deploy IE7.
Dont get me wrong, I think it's good that MS are fixing all the problems with IE6, but this is not the way to go about it.
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
Define irony... as I was reading this post a popup appeared informing me that Firefox had just finished downloading updates and did I want to restart now or later...
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!
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
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!
"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.