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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
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??
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!*
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.
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/
...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
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
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.
Which beta did you run? IE7 beta 2 had a serious problem with ram, that has definitely been mitigated in beta 3. In beta 2 I would end up using upwards of a gig of ram, but now beta 3 is only using about 100 megs, and I've had it running continuously for a few days. Before I restarted my machine it was only using about 400 megs, and that was after about 2 weeks.
-ed
So you see what had happened was....
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
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.
According to http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/07/26/678149 .aspx, the update will not change your default browser.
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.
"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)
I've used Firefox since it came out. I don't have any visual themes installed, but I do have my favorite extensions loaded. I've never had a problem with it before. In fact, I've found that IE does take up much more memory and does take longer to load. Plus the whole OS-integrated browser thing just makes matters worse what with ActiveX running everywhere.
Just for the heck of it, I'm running FF and IE right now (on Windows XP). I shut FF down and "shut" IE down (like that's even possible). I then loaded them up and browsed 2 pages on slashdot so far with IE and 6 pages with FF. The Windows Task Manager is telling me that IE is taking 28,108 Kb, and FF is using 27,744 Kb. While I realize that these numbers are not much different, don't forget that that's 3 times the amount of browsing (with cache enabled) in FF with slightly less memory used. IE is actually using more memory as it is constantly running and can never be shut down as it is integrated into the OS itself.
So I completely agree with you Foofoobar. FF is actually cleaner, more efficient, and generally less buggy IME. Even on my Windows box I don't use IE for anything except the occassional site that isn't written to play nicely with anything but IE. Don't you love wannabe web "developers"?
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).
You haven't taken into consideration that he is running the "Suck My Memory" extension. Get it and you too can have your "memory" sucked. :)
32303036 204D5620 41677573 74612042 72757461 6C652039 31307320 53696C76 65722F52 656400
Installed? Yes. Default? No.
I will say that, for me, IE tends to hang and stutter much much more. That in combination with "End Task" never seems to work properly (same with the stop button) with IE, and Firefox just seems to be a no brainer to me. I have NEVER had FF consume memory like IE does. I imagine if I loaded 3000 extensions, FF might consume a bit of memory, but really, wouldn't you expect it to?
32303036 204D5620 41677573 74612042 72757461 6C652039 31307320 53696C76 65722F52 656400
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
Whoa, hold on there, punchy. Before fully implementing CSS2 (which MS believes is horribly broken), there is a laundry list of things they still need to get right:
Pretty much every W3C Reccommendation since 1996.
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.
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.
They are perhaps trying to warn us.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
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.
Wait, so is New Hampshire bigger than Galactus?
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
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.
Ok, I see this repeated and mindlessly repeated...
Windows DOES NOT preload IE, PERIOD... Get it?
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.
It would be like saying that because Windows has Fonts, that if Firefox uses the same fonts as the shell, then Windows is pre-loading Firefox as well. It is called process isolation. 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?
This is NOT Windows98 days anymore, and even on Win98, IE could be set to be a separate process. In Win2k and WinXP, IE is as foreign to the boot as Firefox, Winword or Photoshop. Please catch up to the year 2000 at least before posting your own FUD.
The next time I hear some idiot repeat that Windows preloads ANY of IE I will go off the deep end. This is stuff you CAN look up, should probably already know, and if you do know better and are repeating this crap to make FireFox look better, you are failing.
Any half bright developer would know all of this, yet it is repeated on Slashdot almost Daily.
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.
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.
"Why did you buy 4 gig if you've never even used 1 gig?"
Never said I never even used 1 gig. The 'it' I was referring to was Internet Explorer.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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
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!
Hmmm, I sense more EU fines coming up soon. It smells like a violation of some EU laws.
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6 567
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.
What would be CONVINCING would be providing a SOURCE FOR YOUR CLAIMS that we can use to FIND OUT whether you know what you're talking about or not.
Ok, here are my sources... Learn how a process operates on Windows or goto www.microsoft.com and see how the IE process is isolated just LIKE any other application.
I give you the challenge to find the answers if you really don't know, it is up to you to find out who is the nutball, I am not here to spoon feed you programming or process and threads 101...
Copy on write. 'Nuff said.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
Do you use active desktop? I don't know about you, but I'm convinced leprechauns pre-render that for me while I sleep. The grandparent may not have been the most elegant speaker, but I think I understood what he meant, and I'm just some idiot.
Ok, Active Desktop is seldom used; however, EVEN if it is used, the HTML rendering DLLs are loaded in Explorer (the shell explorer not IE).
So when IE loads, it STILL has to load ALL the HTML rendering DLLs into the IE process. The 'only' advantage would be if the HTML DLLs would be in the system cache, but as for 'memory usage' or 'memory footprint' which is what this topic is about, IE loads ALL the DLLs in its process, it DOES NOT NOR CAN IT borrow them from the shell.
In Win98, IE could use the same process as Explorer, this has not been true now since WIn2k in 1999, yet people still believe that IE benefits from Windows having the HTML Dlls in the OS.
It would be like saying IE benefits from having the Truetype rendering DLLs in the OS as well, or the bitmap rendering DLLs in the OS. There are components the appliations on Windows can use, but differ from the HTML DLLs are they are NOT part of the core OS, as they are separate COM DLLs that each process has to open and LOAD.
Therefore, the IE memory footprint that taskmgr reports is INCLUDING all the HTML DLLs, just exactly like FireFox, and the load times should be equivalent as well, as both IE and FireFox have to load their HTML engines when launched. IE has NO advantages on Windows.
For an older example, see Mac OSX and the IE Version on OSX. It worked the same way, and still loaded fairly fast and used less memory when it was still being produced than several other browser on OSX. Yet you don't see people saying that IE had an advantage on OSX, yet it essentially worked the same way as it had to load its HTML rendering engine etc.
Go fact check this if you still don't understand. I am not here to say I have all the answers, but at the very least, if this interests you, go fact check it for yourself and don't believe me or the parent poster.
All I want to do is get the chance to get people to think and stop the Win98 thinking when they think of things like IE and Windows. It just cheapers the intellecutal input from the open source community when really bad information is spread as fact about Windows, and it gives Windows an advantage because it is underestimated because people believe these old facts.
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.
He want's to be the big guy in the block, nothing more
Short rebuttal:
Windows DOES NOT preload IE, PERIOD... Get it?
From what I heard, Windows pre-loads the HTML rendering engine. IE is just a wrapper.
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.
This makes no sense. Please go study computer science and come back later.
It would be like saying that because Windows has Fonts, that if Firefox uses the same fonts as the shell, then Windows is pre-loading Firefox as well. It is called process isolation. 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?
Wrong again. Memory is NOT duplicated for CODE and CONSTANT DATA. That would include fonts, too. What Taskmgr is reporting is the IE wrapper, plus internal page representation (DOM) of each open web page.
Any half bright developer would know all of this, yet it is repeated on Slashdot almost Daily.
No comment.
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.
funny you should mention photoshop... somehow IE ties itself to Adobe update and keeps it from working properly.. of course I don't know exactly why (I just uninstalled the damn thing so it would work) but there is some funky stuff going on between it and other apps it shouldnt have its grubby blue fingers on.
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
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?
Copy on write. 'Nuff said.
Well it would be nice to go 'aha you are right' but sadly, it does not work this way. Sure there are caching and optimizations, but these are NOT shared DLLs in the context you are trying to paint them.
Copy on write optimizations have little bering on a separate isolated COM DLL rendering engine in Windows.
To use your example, we would have to assert that Firefox's Memory Footprint is less because it is 'also' pre-loaded and a part of Windows because it 'uses' the GDI+ of Windows for displaying Fonts and Bitmaps from the core OS APIs.
And that is quite a stretch.
I'm sure there are some low level CPU and caching operation that might help IE, but that is ONLY if a previous process has loaded the HTML rendering Engine.
And again, I will stress we are talking about the 'load times' and Memory footprint. The Memory reported by IE in the taskmgr is an accurate reflection of ALL the memory IE is using, including ALL the core HTML rendering DLLs.
So in this respect the memory footprint of IE is not reported any different than Firefox, nor does it have anything truly pre-loaded beyond the 'file caching' system, that by the time a system with low RAM gets to someone opening IE, has probably already paged out, and that is 'if' a previous applicatino has called IE rendering DLLs.
Quit trying to find 'excuses' for the crazy statement that the Windows Footprint is part of the IE footprint or that IE is preloaded with Windows, it is not. And especially with your examples, because if we use the Copy on Write as a basis, then FireFox and EVERY Windows application that uses the Win32API is by definition 'pre-loaded' and has a smaller memory footprint, and that is totally out of context and crazy.
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...
Now, please go learn about the 1990s technique of "filesystem caching". This means that the DLLs can effectively bepreloaded even if they are loaded by another process in another memory space. All that's needed is a memory copy from the cache and a relocation, which is much cheaper than a load from disk.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
From what I heard, Windows pre-loads the HTML rendering engine. IE is just a wrapper.
If Explorer loads the HTML COM objects they could in theory be in the File Cache. That is the END of the advantage or pre-loading. See www.microsoft.com
IE specifically runs in an isolated process, again see www.microsoft.com. (In Win98 it did not and ran shared.) In Win2k, it used the process and DLL isloation and WInXP even further extended this will full COM DLL isolation, meaning it ONLY has access to its only process and vise versa.
What this means is that IE when clicking the E icon, loads the ENTIRE HTML COM DLLS and Rendering Engine 'separately' into the IE process. Just like FireFox loads it HTML Rendering core when it is launched. They are fundamentally EXACTLY the same in this regard.
Wrong again. Memory is NOT duplicated for CODE and CONSTANT DATA. That would include fonts, too. What Taskmgr is reporting is the IE wrapper, plus internal page representation (DOM) of each open web page.
Yes and No. In the context of FireFox 'reporting' more memory as the post I was responding to, the reported memory in use is the same for IE and FireFox. IE has no advantage over any other application running on the Win32 platform. Both IE and FireFox take advantage of the platform and stuff like Window's core abilities to render fonts, Bitmaps and draw to the screen.
So while you are partially correct that there could be 'system' level shared APIs in use or a shared font, FireFox would HAVE THE SAME EXACT advantage that IE does in this regard.
Why? The IE HTML Rendering Engine is not a CORE OS API, it is a separate COM DLL set of technologies that are 'included and used by Windows' but not a core API or WIN32 OS component.
Understand?
This makes no sense. Please go study computer science and come back later.
Nice... And yet I have to give 101 level lessons just to get my point across to people that apparently only read the rumors or base their Windows Knowledge on Win98 concepts.
I don't have to explain myself, go look this stuff up if you really want to know. I truly am not responsible for anyone here getting it, but I would like to hope that I make a few people think and find these answers on their own instead of accepting old ideas or new myths.
(Sad note, after all my explaining that IE has no memory footprint advantage, I pull open Taskmgr to see that IE is consuming 56mb and Firefox is consuming only 32mb. So please explain the myth once again how IE has a memory advantage over Firefox? - Sadly, everyone's argument here makes FireFox look like a bloated piece of software, it isn't.)
Now, please go learn about the 1990s technique of "filesystem caching". This means that the DLLs can effectively bepreloaded even if they are loaded by another process in another memory space. All that's needed is a memory copy from the cache and a relocation, which is much cheaper than a load from disk
Wow, while I'm learning this, maybe you can explain your awesome theory how this would in ANY way reduce the memory footprint of an application. Also go on to explain how because a file 'may or may not be cached' that the application would run faster and use less RAM.
Oh wait, that is another reality. Geesh...
PS, just so the other nerds won't tease you, it is NOT a 1990s concept, caching technology has been used for a LONG time before the 1990s.
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.
Actually this is untrue. I got a bug in IE on Win2000 which causes the IE crash when it displays a tooltip. Once this bug appears, i have to log out from the user (exiting IE6 doesn't fix it) to make it disappear. What does this mean: some rendering dll (which is responsible for the tooltip) remains in memory, and causes segfault in IE6.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
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.
If Windows doesn't automatically share libraries between applications then it's a worse operating system than I originally thought. *Every* other modern OS shares dynamically linked code between applications that use it, to do otherwise would be woefully inefficient (both in memory usage and startup time).
Let's look at how Linux handles shared libs (this is about the same as any other modern OS):
Since the executable code is read-only, there is no security problem with allowing both processes to access the data. (mmap() basically tells the kernel to treat the file a bit like swap space).
http://blog.nexusuk.org
What?? IANAD but here's my take:
Try this & I'm assuming your not daft enough to be using IE as your browser otherwise you get completely different results...go figure.
Open up a Windows Explorer window, run FileMon from Sysinternals. Begin capturing file access & type a URL into the address bar & press return, actually maybe you need to sit down first...
Notice how the window "magically" changes to an IE window. Check the contents of the FileMon capture, shock horror there's nearly nothing there!! Just a few precious dlls are opened, or is FileMon just lying??
Try the same thing but open up a "true" IE window, lots more activity I grant you, but what process is it all running under?? Hmm??
Ok, you can do this in KDE as well.
Here is the part you are missing...
Two thing can occur here. Use the KDE example, the HTML Rendering is loaded into the Shell, this can happen, and IE becomes a child process of Explorer.
However what should occur, is doing what you suggest spins off a new IE process. Which is the modern behavior.
The difference lies in the version of IE and Windows you are using. IE can spawn as a process of Explorer, therefore there is no Application memory allocation or launch process, just the spawning of the IE process. (The child process bit here would make it faster.)
However this example would be like me writing an application that is a text viewer (or whatever) and when the user types in a URL, I use the Mozilla code to drop an HTML Rendering component in my application. It is going to load faster than loading FireFox or Mozilla because it is a child process.
However the Shell flipping to IE and staying in the shell process is an outdated example. Current IE and Windows, it spins off a new process. (This is especially true of IE7 and Vista.) (It also depends on the version of IE and the version of Windows. Also note that you can force IE to be a child process or not just as you can force a folder view in Explorer to be a separate process or not.
But normally on WinXP in the current normal configuration, IE loads to a separate process, and does a full isolated load, just like Firefox being launched would do as well.
PS. Thanks for not just assuming I'm as daft as some of the other posts would like to believe.
Also the really, really strange thing here is that I am trying to demonstrate that IE doesn't have an advantage for memory footprint or load times. The part I haven't been able to voice, is that on average, FireFox does use less RAM than IE, and the load time for FireFox can sometimes be faster or slower than IE.
I don't see FireFox as some bloated piece of software, that is why I find it really strange that people are trying to 'excuse' the memory it uses by stating that IE has an advantage. Most of the time in Taskmgr, (or pick your favorite tool) IE is using as much Memory as FireFox if not more.
FireFox really isn't bloated, so there is no reason to push the myth that IE has an advantage.
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.
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
You know, this is the best troll I've heard in a while. And it's scored "+5 informative". Wow.
1) DLLs are shared across processes. If one process loads a DLL, it resides in physical memory, at a specific virtual address. If another process loads the same DLL, it reuses the same copy in physical memory, but in a different virtual address space. It may even be loaded at a different virtual address in the second process. The pages are read-only so any attempt by either process to modify them will result in an access violation.
2) Windows explorer is a process which exists as an application called explorer.exe. It is started when you log on to Windows, and explorer.exe links to mshtml.dll and shdocvw.dll. These are the IE core DLLs (the Microsoft HTML parser and the Shell Document View, respectively). It also happens to link to gdiplus.dll, gdi.dll, user.exe, ntdll.dll and a bunch of others.
3) Internet explorer is a very small application (a few hundred KB compiled) which links into shdocvw.dll and mshtml.dll. It also happens to link to a bunch of other DLLs like ntdll.dll.
4) Firefox is another application. It links to such Windows DLLs as ntdll.dll and user.exe. It also happens to link to gecko.dll, which no other Windows application will load. Therefore when Firefox starts up, it is going to be the first to load gecko.dll.
5) Going back to point 1; every time any application loads a specific DLL, the loader will check to see if it is already present in physical memory, and will create a new virtual mapping for it. The physical memory used is shared across each process. When Windows starts, it loads the IE core DLLs. Most of IE is in memory by the time you can view the desktop. Firefox however, has a much smaller percentage of the application in memory before you click on it.
Hence: Most of IE is loaded before you click on the IE icon. Most of Firefox is not loaded until you click on the IE icon.
*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?
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.
Kill your mshtml.dll, reboot. Notice how Windows doesn't complain. Start IE. Notice the "no mshtml.dll found" error. Open explorer. Type an internet address into the address bar. Notice the same error.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
See www.microsoft.com
Given how bad Microsoft's own site search is, can we have a more specific reference, please?
deus does not exist but if he does
Windows will end up preloading (to cache) important parts of IE in many cases. This decrease load time. COW page sharing could also decrease the amount of memory spent by IE, though I suspect relocation will make page sharing minimal (and I'm not even sure if Windows implement COW).
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
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
Therefore by the time you start IE, big chunks of it are already preloaded and memory resident. The actual iexplore.exe is just a shell around DLLs which are mostly comprised of things in your Windows\System folder.
Who knows what they will do with IE7 but it would not surprise me if a reboot is required to install it.
Having said all that, I don't think Firefox is particularly slow to load, but it does have more work to do than IE to start for all of the reasons above.
Most of Firefox is not loaded until you click on the IE icon.
:-)
Wow, is precaching of OTHER browsers' code a new feature in IE7? I knew MS were in trouble with the EU but I didn't think this was one of the concessions.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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?
If that's the case, your original post was terribly worded:
The first it is referring to "my computer" in the previous sentence, while the second it obviously refers to "a gig [of memory]."
LegendMUD
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.
this example would be like me writing an application that is a text viewer (or whatever) and when the user types in a URL, I use the Mozilla code to drop an HTML Rendering component in my application.
Sorry, emacs already exists.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Would you shut the fuck up already? You keep spouting the same WRONG bullshit about IE. You work on the IE team at MS or something? Holy christ! You sir are a complete fucking idiot.
Get yourself a true memory profiling app, NOT windows task manager, and take a good look for yourself. You are COMPLETELY and UTTERLY Full Of Shit and WRONG. Stop it already.
No Comment.
Ouch! You know, I never even thought of it that way!
You still use the end task button? That thing does about as much good for closing a failing program as a banana does for solving world peace. I always use end process. Always.
Cynical Idealist
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 may be too much to ask, but do you think that you could elevate the discussion a bit by presenting information to support your assertion that the GP is incorrect?
It's a series of tubes, right?!
I love how people contest that it "just isn't fair" that IE starts up quicker than Firefox, when Opera seems to start up faster than both of them. Face it: Firefox has bloat in the form of XPCOM. They could have used native UI controls throughout, but nooooo, they had to go make their own 'platform' in the process.
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
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!
If you recall, MS said IE could not be removed from Windows as it is an
"integral part of windows".
In short:
So, if all the above is true, how are parts of IE not being pre-loaded by Windows?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Oh it doesn't huh? So Windows Explorer relying upon IE doesn't count as preloading? Outlook relying on IE doesn't count? All the API's and DLL's that are preloaded on boot so that applications can use IE's underlying structure don't count?
Sorry to tell you friend but that what's known as preloading. And because it's bundled into ever MS app that there is, it HAS to preload so that everything else can work.
Remember, thoise who can, do. Those who can't, bundle.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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.
"It may be too much to ask, but do you think that you could elevate the discussion a bit by presenting information to support your assertion that the GP is incorrect?"
But why? This is so much more fun. Tit for tat.
The rendering engine is an integral part of Windows. It is used by multiple processes (Active Desktop, Outlook Express, etc...) The grand parent asserts that Active Desktop is seldom used. But how many average users turn it off? How many times have you had a user call because some web site has replaced the default desktop with a advertisement warning about spyware or pr0n? If you turn off Active Desktop, do those processes unload? For the most part, they don't. They sit there like a puppy at the dinner table, waiting, begging for you to drop some scrap to be rendered.
The original post claimed that IE was pre-loaded. TheNetAvenger asserts (LOUDLY), that it is not. What is IE? Is it just the wrapper for the rendering engine? What is the footprint of all those required processes?
The TheNetAvenger post asserts (LOUDLY) that IE cannot access DLL's currently in memory. Following that logic, IE must load it's own copy of the same rendering engine, yet looking at a memory map, unless something is broken and a process has been orphaned, there is only one instance. His assertions fly in the face of Microsoft's own claims of IE being integral to Windows. Shared objects like DLL's are written to be loaded once and used by multiple external processes. If the FireFox developers wanted to use the same rendering engine, the one that must not be part of IE because let's remember now, by those assertions, IE isn't pre-loaded, they could. And they would be subject to the same flaws and frailties as IE because the underlying structure is vulnerable. Instead they built their own rendering engine with their own flaws and frailties that, well, is still vulnerable because we're talking Windows, right?
Proof by repeated assertion works in politics, marketing and Slashdot.
Pull my finger for my public key.
(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
Frankly I don't care whether or not you go off "the deep end". You're evidence that Windows doesn't preload IE is that "the documentation doesn't say it does". Microsoft's documentation is far from complete.
Doing a quick goodle search what I found was the explorer preloads a significant portion of the code used by IE without explicitly preloading IE. What it doesn't preload is the rendering engine and some of the extensible "features" like activeX. In practice that means that half of the DLLs that IE needs are probably already in memory, and what remains to be loaded are the specific IE chrome libraries and the rendering engine.
So, like the answer to so many questions, it's not a case of black and white. Parts of the code needed by IE are preloaded by explorer, and they're preloaded because explorer uses them.
The "different process" stuff is wrong according to the developers who actually developed IE7, and if you disagree with me, then you can go google their discussion on MSN, because I don't feel like beeing any more helpful to a fanatic like you than you were to me. DLLs are shared between processes, that's why they're DLLs.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Brethren, brethren, can we not allow cooler heads to prevail and come to an agreement of sorts? Once I was in a similar debate with brother Jedidiah about his prized sheepshearing technique. After forcefully refuting his silly arguments about how shearing sheep using a machete was beneficial, he refused to listen so I reckoned him as a tax collector and a man of the nations. I hope my dear brother regains his sound mind and repents of his tomfoolerey.
Having said that, I find it of the utmost importance to state that TheNetAvenger's scathing words reveal some deep seated personal inadequacy, perhaps his mother did not show him his due affection as a child? He should stop writing now and tend to his own sheep, as it were.
--
Brother sloth, Amish tech support. I will fix your wagon wheel!
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!
"If that's the case, your original post was terribly worded:"
Yep. It was dumb of me to assume everybody would read the context of my post and work out what I was saying. I apologize.
"The first it is referring to "my computer" in the previous sentence, while the second it obviously refers to "a gig [of memory].""
Okie doke. Anyway, getting back on topic now that I've clarified, my point still stands. And just to cut off any further nitpicks to my post, I actually use all that RAM. Maya and Photoshop are both pigs. no need to worry that I'm an over-zealous UT fanboy with too much money in his pocket.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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'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.
Is your design work professional or for pleasure? If it's professional, then the issues about 'you buying the ram' don't exist, because either your work bought it, or it was a work expense.
If it's for pleasure, then how is that a more valid excuse for purchasing a large amount of ram than playing games?
If you're belittling using a computer as a game machine from a financial standpoint, I'd argue that gaming is hardly the most expensive form of entertainment that exists.
LegendMUD
"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?
If Windows doesn't automatically share libraries between applications then it's a worse operating system than I originally thought.
No, it shares libraries. My post was a bit too brief to explain it properly.
In Win2K and further expanind in WinXP Microsoft introduced a set of technologies to isolate DLLs.
In my reference IE, specifically loads the HTML engine COM DLLs into its own 'isolated' process. This is done for a couple of reasons, but the main one being security.
There are always shared DLLs in Windows with the core Win32 API, but the HTML rendering engine that IE is a wrapper for is not a core Windows API DLL, it is a set of COM DLLs that are included with Windows, but not something that loads into a shared area like something as the font rendering engine does. So each application that uses the IE rendering technology usually runs them in an isolated state, not sharing them with other applications that may also be using them.
Your list on how Linux handles libs is well done. Windows works like this 'in a way', but with the increased amount of 3rd party applications that use 'add-on' shared DLLs, problems occured in Pre Win2k, WinXP - as the versioning of these 3rd Party DLLs (even some from MS, but still considered 3rd party to the OS) caused problems because if Version 2.0 of DLL was loaded, and another application needed Version 3.0 the mapping of the DLL would cause problems.
Win2k and WinXP have mechanisms to isolate out shared DLLs that are external to the OS. (Even OS level DLLs can be isolated as well.) This is what brought a lot of stability to Windows because there was no longer what they call DLL hell, especially on WinXP as its changes were far more reaching than Win2k.
As for the process of how a Win32 application lauches and maps into the shared 'lib', there are some differences from Linux. The main one is that Win32 apps do this through the Win32 Kernel, and not normally through the NT kernel. (NT uses subsystem concepts, so Win32 is like an OS running on the NT OS, and Win32 has its own kernel, etc.)
I hope I didn't confuse this further and provided enough accurate information that if anyone is interested in this could go further with it by reading wiki or documentation at microsoft.com.
Since the executable code is read-only, there is no security problem with allowing both processes to access the data. (mmap() basically tells the kernel to treat the file a bit like swap space).
This is a bit more in depth than the topic, but you can find information on how Windows handles this as well, what is does right and what it does wrong. In theory this is also protected under Windows.
Thanks for the post.
"If it's for pleasure, then how is that a more valid excuse for purchasing a large amount of ram than playing games?"
Yeesh. Such a black and white world we live in.
That wasn't even in the same ZIP code with the point of my post, but I'll answer it anyway. Education. You know the old addage about finding a job you love and not working a day in your life? I'm a professional now, but before I was I was usually high-end in the RAM department. The 3D work I did for 'pleasure' landed me a career.
I love how I earned myself a RAM usage audit with this stupid thread. Heh.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
In my reference IE, specifically loads the HTML engine COM DLLs into its own 'isolated' process. This is done for a couple of reasons, but the main one being security.
I really can't see what security benefit there could possibly be - executable memory is read-only, so sharing it between processes is not a security risk. Isolating code like that is simply a needlessly inefficient use of resources.
as the versioning of these 3rd Party DLLs (even some from MS, but still considered 3rd party to the OS) caused problems because if Version 2.0 of DLL was loaded, and another application needed Version 3.0 the mapping of the DLL would cause problems.
Under Linux the versioning doesn't come into play at all at this point - both processes separately try to mmap() the file, but the kernel will realise it is the same *file* (it has the same inode number) and therefore will share the memory. The kernel has no concept of a global symbol table of sharable symbols - the only thing the kernel knows (or indeed, needs to know) is that there are 2 processes trying to map the same lump of read-only data into memory.
The idea of sharing code based on a vendor-specified version number seems very flawed, whereas if you just base the sharing off the inode number you really can't go wrong.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Does any browser really do support all of this perfectly?
Indeed; you felt you needed to legitimize the use of something that was high-end and expensive, most notably in hopes of distancing yourself from a stereotype you think you're better than.
I couldn't care any less how you used your resources; it's your computer. It is annoying when people casually demonstrate their ability to be elitist pricks, though.
LegendMUD
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.
I think what NetAvenger is saying is that the DLLs are loaded separately and do not run in the same virtual address space. What others are saying is that "sure enough but the CPU will map the same physical memory to different virtual addresses using the COPY-ON-WRITE" feature and thus there is effective preloading".
NetAvenger then goes on to say that, no, this is not the case. But what he then says to back it up seems to just be what he said in the first place. He then talks about different DLL versions which is an entirely different situation since the actual data will be different and the CPU will load them into different physical address spaces.
Now, possibly NetAvenger means that Microsoft ensures that more than one copy of the DLL will be loaded into different physical address spaces and he may even be right (but why would that be the case?) but I think we need to clarify the argument before it progresses.
I guess the question has to go to NetAvenger: Do you understand the difference between virtual and physical address spaces and are you asserting that Microsoft ensures that the DLLS in question are loaded into different *physical* address spaces and please can you provide a link that backs that up as there seems to be no earthly reason why anyone would do so.
Thanks
Rich
Oh, and my nomenclature may be slightly out. It's not really my field. Please forgive.
Also, even if the DLLS are "preloaded" (by whatever mechanism), they may still count against explorer's memory usage in task manager (I believe shared libraries do in top on Linux)
Heh. Pity that wasn't what I was doing. Again, wrong zip code.
Sure, you didn't care at all, that's why we're talking about this instead of the point I made.
MMm hmm. "Oops, he clarified what he said and destroyed my point. I better find something else to chew on!" Sorry man, it's really hard to take that comment seriously. You should find a stronger ground to stand on if you're going to continue to perpetuate this little battle.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I'll repeat: you felt you needed to legitimize the use of something that was high-end and expensive, most notably in hopes of distancing yourself from a stereotype you think you're better than. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192306&cid=157 91269
--...wait, what point?
Where was the clarification? Was it this?:
Just replace 'professional' with 'educational' and both 'work's with 'school'.
If you feel I'm not relating to anything you said, then why respond? It doesn't really bother me if I'm off topic (which I am), and I haven't argued against that.
LegendMUD
"I'll repeat: you felt you needed to legitimize the use of something that was high-end and expensive, most notably in hopes of distancing yourself from a stereotype you think you're better than. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192306&cid=157 91269"
Yep, that's the bit you're wrong about. It's funny how this comment has betrayed your motives. Heh.
"...wait, what point?"
So... you admit you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. That's cute. Thanks for the waste of time there, bud.
Feel free to come find me when you're interested in discussing instead of arguing. I don't have the time to explain things that you could easily work out for yourself if you weren't so intent on trying to 'win'.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Whatever, same thing. I was referring to the Task Manager, Processes, End Process button. I just didnt look it up before posting. Anyway, try it on IE when a java applet hangs and you will see what I mean.
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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.
"I guess the question has to go to NetAvenger..."
Oh, PFFFTTT... You're taking all the fun out of this by asking for clarification.
Pull my finger for my public key.
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.
It wasn't too god-awful, actually. I worked with the S60 port of GTK+/KHTML, because it's less painful than Webcore/Webkit, and basically just followed in Nokia's footprints. I had to port several underlying libraries, including Freetype and a massively hacked Nano-X (which I've been slowly replacing with something home-grown, built on top of a platform-specific fast graphics library.)
I've got mostly-correct rendering, correct ECMA/DHTML and good (not great) font rendering. International fonts are tremendously broken. PNG works better than it does on IE. It's pretty reasonably fast, and the browser footprint is about 950k, plus another 200k from support libraries and 300k from the fonts I built in. It's enough to use to roll certain other applications, as long as I'm careful about their RAM usage.
This is actually the reason I originally started the DS WiFi Bounty. The IRC clients and whatnot that are now being built are amusing, but I have bigger plans. (No, the web browser isn't the apex of what I'm doing.)
StoneCypher is Full of BS