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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.
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
Yeah... I actually thought they might do something like this... and in true M$ style they will mark it as a "critical update" because of all of the flaws in IE.
Okay... on a more serious note, I actually (don't flame me) like Windows XP. It is incredibly stable on my PC. But it is Microsoft style to push their products onto users my force. So my bets are on MS putting this out as a critical security updates.
I'll give 2 to 1 odds. Who's placing a bet??
"Also to have end users suddenly using a new browser right before the holiday shopping season could magnify the cost any bugs that might create a bad user experience on sites"
I for one welcome this. IE6 sucks. Badly.
IE7 has a few problems, but the faster IE6 dies, the better.
This and as a web developer, I hope the bugs associated with pushing this app out will create a bad user experience and force developers that rely on hacks and nonstandard practices to get screwed over. I've had several sites I use not work with IE7 and the simplest has been because their simple javascript that detects IE versions tells me I need to use IE5.5 or greater. I've had others not work with the activeX controls because of new security models (or so I imagine).
The sooner developers move towards standards the better. IE7 is a good push towards this goal, and having it pushed out buggy and forcing developers to address the idiotic IE Only Features is just another milestone on this route.
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.
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/
Oh dear, somebody who doesn't understand how the internets work. Here, this is a good start. http://www.w3.org/
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
More like someone who is realistic and knows that all browsers have their quirks I would say personally.
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
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.
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.
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.
Oh, it's the "major website admins" who block non-IE browsers, then? I could have sworn that was opnly something 12-year-olds, and deluded MS fanbois do.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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
Wait, so is New Hampshire bigger than Galactus?
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
More like someone who is realistic and knows that all browsers have their quirks I would say personally. Not all quirks are created equal. IE is so far behind the modern browsers in implementing standards like CSS that they're no longer even in the ballpark. With the newer browsers rev'ing so much faster than IE, I don't think they'll even be in the same league for long.
The argument here isn't idealistic or puritanical or religious - it's practical. CSS allows web developers to effectively separate content and presentation, which in turn allows for more efficient development. It's not about laziness either. We web developers have finite time. We either spend that time working on new features/content/layouts/whatever, or chasing down 4 year old bugs in IE.
Take as an example a group of mechanical engineers plotting designs for a car. Group A favors one brand of mechanical pencils. Group B favors another. An astute engineer might attempt to settle the matter as you do: "all mechanical pencils have their quirks." Unfortunately, group C is using crayons that are worn nearly to the nub. IE is a crayon that is worn quite to the nub.
To write off the pitiful state of IE's HTML, CSS and javascript support as "quirks" is to let MS off the hook. They leveraged their monopoly and "won" the browser wars. Having done so, it appears that they intend to use their dominant browser in order to defend their Big Two products by retarding the progress of web technologies indefinitely.
As a side note, why does "realist" now refer to people who give up on ethics (and other such long term concerns) for short-run gains?
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.