IE7 To Ship With Windows Patches Tomorrow [Not]

An anonymous reader writes, "Microsoft plans to push out Internet Explorer 7 as a 'high priority update' when it ships security patches tomorrow, according to Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog. That means anyone who has Windows configured to download and install patches automagically from Redmond will be greeted with IE7 next time they boot up their machines. In related news, it appears IE's worldwide market share actually increased a couple of points since July, despite a number of high profile zero-day attacks this year." The article notes that the IE7 "containment wall" protected mode will not be available on XP, but only to those who purchase Vista.

Update: 10/09 21:26 GMT by kd : An anonymous reader points to this Microsoft blog posting where it is revealed that the article linked above is incorrect. IE7 will not be pushed tomorrow.

Comments

Thank God

[Mateo_LeFou]

I've been looking forward to that whole tabbed-browsing thing they invented

Re:Thank God

[beckerist]

I hate to be the first to do this, but Firefox has had tabbed browsing for as long as I've been using it (at the very least with a plugin). I'm certainly not trying to flame, merely the ignorant asking [the nieve?], but what is the appeal of IE? Why do people, the MAJORITY of people, keep using it?!?

Re:Thank God

[KDR_11k]

You obviously missed the sarcasm when he said MS "invented" tabbed browsing.

Re:Thank God

[Mateo_LeFou]

I think that the majority of people click on anything that says "Internet" when they want to use the internet. Since MS long ago renamed Explorer "The Internet" (via the start menu) that's what they'll use for the foreseeable future.

Re:Thank God

[nuzak]

> Why do people, the MAJORITY of people, keep using it?!?

Because it's good enough for them.

Re:Thank God

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla.org betas had tabbed browsing last century, before work started on pheonix (ff). Opera was the first browser with "tabs", IIRC they started out as minimised MDI windows(??).

Speaking as someone who went from NN to Opera to Moz, I'll answer your question if you answer me this. Why weren't you using Opera or the Mozilla betas back in 1999?

Re:Thank God

[xENoLocO]

Exactly. *Our* reasons to switch browsers aren't near enough reason for everyone to switch browsers.

Re:Thank God

[thebdj]

You aren't kidding. Little story: I was working in mail order at the time, and a gentleman called up in reference to a product the company sold. One of the requirements for the item being sold was that you needed a web browser. The device in question was a GPS system for a laptop, though I am not 100% sure why it needed a browser. Well, this gentleman obviously had a hard time understanding what a web browser was. I even said, "If you are surfing the internet, you have a web browser." The old fool still didn't understand. I mean, it is really sad how these concepts that truly are rather simple just seem to miss many PC users. Hence, why IE becomes the internet. Though, I have managed to switch my siblings off of AIM to gaim. No longer does instant messaging just mean that ad ridden AOL product.

Re:Thank God

[dwlovell]

A lot of very smart people keep using IE because it still loads faster and renders more websites the way the developer intended. (you can pontificate on all the crappy reasons why we are in this mess, but it is still reality)

A lot of developers still prefer IE because some dhtml features for Enterprise applications are disabled by default or broken in Firefox/Mozilla. (modal dialogs, correct rendering of dynamic scaled nested divs with scrollbars that interpret height:100% as height of container, not height of entire page)

I think Firefox does do better on CSS standards and div positioning for document layouts and I hope IE gets on the ball on CSS and PNG alpha, but Firefox and other of the "standards" browsers need to really get on the ball for using the browser as an applications platform. You still cannot beat IE for creating a "windows-like" application running in a browser without resorting to Flash or other applets. (and no, I am not condoning the use of ActiveX.)

-David

Re:Thank God

[Tim C]

To be fair, it's "Internet (Internet Explorer)", just like my default email client is "E-Mail (Mozilla Thunderbird)" (parenthised bits are on a separate line).

They've not renamed IE to "The Internet", they're making it obvious for the less technically savvy that that's the program you use to access the Internet. You're free to change it to whatever you want, in which case it'll say (eg) "Internet (Mozilla Firefox)".

Re:Thank God

[Anonymous Coward]

The program is still called Internet Explorer elsewhere. They only added a standard way to set your default web browser in the Add or Remove Programs or Start Menu properties panel, and if you install, say, Firefox or Opera, they replace IE in the Start Menu and keep the title "Internet". I think it actually benefits usability and gives other browsers a better chance to seamlessly replace IE.

Re:Thank God

[jazman_777]

Exactly. *Our* reasons to switch browsers aren't near enough reason for everyone to switch browsers.

"Anyone not exactly like me is insanely stupid" sounds like a symptom of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I see it all the time in the geek world. Hmm...I'm prone to it at times, too.

Re:Thank God

[Overly Critical Guy]

IE7 has the worst interface I've ever seen in a browser. Stop and refresh are over on the right side of the address bar, and a bunch of toolbar buttons are sitting below that on the right side of the tab bar, so you get less space for your tabs unless you run full screen, which I'm not going to do on a widescreen monitor (the proliferation of wide screen displays has made Windows' maximize feature obsolete and ridiculous).

Re:Thank God

[solas]

"Since MS long ago renamed Explorer "The Internet" (via the start menu) that's what they'll use for the foreseeable future."

Actually, my start menu 'Internet' entry points to Firefox, and I don't ever remember setting that up myself. Perhaps it points to your specified default browser.

Re:Thank God

[GigsVT]

It's not the program you use to access the Internet. It's the program you use to access the web.

With such a low UID, I would have expected better.

Re:Thank God

[Mateo_LeFou]

"It's not the program you use to access the Internet. It's the program you use to access the web."

Aye. In my "start menu" (which is actually a smelly footprint) There's a whole submenu called "Internet", with 20 applications in it, including a couple different browsers.

Re:Thank God

[Fred_A]

In a similar vein, trying to explain the difference between the Web and the Internet to a random user nowadays is an exercise in frustration... :-/

Re:Thank God

[TheoMurpse]

I've been looking forward to that whole tabbed-browsing thing they invented

Hey guys, so I'm writing this post from jail. Yesterday was my grandmother's birthday, and I was having a chat with my uncle. We were talking about web browsers, and he said that he preferred IE over FF because, and I quote, "It's just more powerful than Firefox." So I killed him, which brings me back to why I'm writing from jail :(

Re:Thank God

[Ned in California]

I first read this as: I've been looking forward to that whole tabbed booting thing they invented.

Re:Thank God

[Shawn is an Asshole]

To most people, the web is "the internet".

Re:Thank God

[Igasagu]

You're such a furry.

Re:Thank God

[Anonymous Coward]

...how much of an hero do you need to become before you realize that they did not invent tabs at all....they stole them

Re:Thank God

[Mondor]

The "Internet" in the start menu of Windows XP/2003 is the default web browser. If your default web browser is Firefox, then even the icon of "Internet" will be firefox icon.

Re:Thank God

[rtb61]

Except for example the quick launch toolbar, which is in fact internet explorer or windows explorer when it connects to the internet as internet explorer. You might be using firefox as your browser but unless you kerb internet explorer via an independent firewall it still sneaks out all the time.

Prefer IE6

[kilox]

With that horrible UI?

The article says this month

[alta]

The article has been updated because microsoft will not confirm "tomorrow" but will confirm this month.

Tomorrow seems a likely time to me...

Re:The article says this month

[seanmb15]

On the IE blog they mention having a webchat on the 12th for "one last chat session before we ship IE." This makes me think that it won't be coming out tomorrow.

WGA?

[Honest Olaf]

Formerly IE7 was only available to folks who passed WGA, but Windows Update is available to all. Does this mean that IE7 will be distributed to users with non-genuine XP?

Re:WGA?

[Kelson]

I would guess not. IIRC, only "critical" updates are available to systems that haven't passed WGA, and this is a "high priority" update. It looks like even the automatic update next month is only going to be semi-automatic (it'll offer the download, but require user confirmation).

Re:WGA?

[honor, not armor]

Doubt it.

If a user selects "Install": The installation process will commence and require Windows Genuine Advantage validation and a re-boot to complete.

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/updatemanagement/ windowsupdate/ie7announcement.mspx (mentioned in jorghis' post)

Re:WGA?

[stonecypher]

Now, why would someone with "honest" in their handle care about illegitimate copies of operating systems?

Praise Allah!

[drinkypoo]

Anything to get people away from IE6, with which we have to use stupid hacks that don't work reliably to get PNGs to display properly. Not to mention all the box model bullshit. Now maybe I'm just not using esoteric enough markup but every page I've designed for Firefox has worked right in IE7... so, BRING ON THE UPGRADE! IE6 is a sad joke from both the security and standards compliance points of view and Microsoft is doing the right thing.

Re:Praise Allah!

[nine-times]

I'm wondering if it's really an improvement. Can't find them, but a while back there were complaints on /. that IE7 fixed enough things that IE6 hacks won't work anymore, but didn't fix the things that people had used the hacks to fix. I haven't seen this myself (I'm not doing web development these days), but supposedly the result of these "fixes" was that pages that displayed properly in IE6 and Firefox (and maybe other browsers) would not display properly in IE7. Therefore, web developers would have to go back through their sites and figure out how to support standards-compliant browsers, IE6, and IE7.

Now, I don't want to assert that as fact because, as I've said, I'm not aware of the facts. But I wanted to ask, is this the case? If so, is it still a problem, or have these issues been addressed in more recent builds? Anyone?

Re:Praise Allah!

[bruce_the_moose]

Um, yeah, but I've been hearing from users (mostly sales guys who always have to have the latest) that my sites--which are IE6, Netscape, Firefox, Safari, and Opera happy--break with IE7. Quoth The Who, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Re:Praise Allah!

[drinkypoo]

Can't find them, but a while back there were complaints on /. that IE7 fixed enough things that IE6 hacks won't work anymore, but didn't fix the things that people had used the hacks to fix.

It's mostly not true. Your best weapon in the IE hack arsenal is the IF IE conditional "comments". Lots of people are currently using hacks that would best be replaced with IF IE. You can test for specific versions or that you're within a range of versions, so it's trivial to apply separate hacks to IE5.5 and IE6 but none to IE7. In fact the hack I borrowed for PNG transparency (first google hit when I looked) is a javascript loaded only from IF IE LT 7 (or was it a < symbol?) that, once it is loaded, checks to see if it's running on less than 5.5 and then doesn't do anything (no PNG support before 5.5) and then loads different code depending on if it's 5.5 or 6.0.

Now, I don't want to assert that as fact because, as I've said, I'm not aware of the facts. But I wanted to ask, is this the case? If so, is it still a problem, or have these issues been addressed in more recent builds? Anyone?

From all that I've read, and from what I've seen, it's really not much of an issue. Granted, I'm no CSS guru, I can just do enough with it to make it do most of the things I want it to do. (Most of the things I can't figure out, I've been able to confirm that CSS can't actually do it, and you have to use javascript, so I feel pretty good about my level of knowledge...) In general there are ways to tweak your hacks such that they will work.

Re:Praise Allah!

[thelost]

It sounds great, but let's be realistic. What this means for web devs is having support IE 5.5,6 & now 7 too. People won't automatically migrate to 7 because they can. Even worse than that I've read far too much stuff about IE7 having very little extra support for CSS standards.

Re:Praise Allah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's what I thought, but two years later I realize that we'll still have to deal with it. IE isn't even relevant anymore. The replacement, for security's sake, is any other browser. IE is a tool for installing Windows updates, and a stupid developer's framework which I wish would just go away (I hate have to switch default browsers to install some piece of software that has nothing to do with web browsing).

However, the truth is that if you do any web development, you're going to have to deal with /yet another/ semi-broken browser. There will be just enough installations to warrant giving it some attention in your code. So now, I will have to tune my page templates to IE 6, NS 7, Firefox 1.x/NS 8, and Safari... and now IE 7.

Re:Praise Allah!

[unapersson]

It's mostly not true. Your best weapon in the IE hack arsenal is the IF IE conditional "comments". Lots of people are currently using hacks that would best be replaced with IF IE.

They don't work in CSS files though do they? So require you to provide a separate stylesheet. We would rather not maintain a seperate stylesheet for each version of IE.

If you could do: /* [if(ie6)] body { background: red } */

then that would be great, but the last time I looked the best they could manage was conditional HTML comments which are a lot less useful.

Re:Praise Allah!

[drinkypoo]

People won't automatically migrate to 7 because they can.

No, people will automatically migrate to 7 because microsoft will push it as an update.

Even worse than that I've read far too much stuff about IE7 having very little extra support for CSS standards.

Frankly I'll be pretty happy, for a while, with proper box model and png transparency support.

Re:Praise Allah!

[drinkypoo]

They don't work in CSS files though do they? So require you to provide a separate stylesheet. We would rather not maintain a seperate stylesheet for each version of IE.

That's true. You don't have to maintain the whole style sheet, though, just the deltas. And, nothing is stopping you from writing a simple perl preprocessor that will let you write style sheets with conditional comments, and then moving those lines from your source style sheet into the conditional style sheets. It would not take you very long, it would not be very hard, and it would take care of your little problem.

Alternatively, you can store all your styles in a database, and generate style sheets based on browser detection. This database could be populated either from a file using a preprocessor as I discuss above, or through some specific-purpose tool.

I agree that this is a pain in the ass but the alternative is to drop a bunch of nukes on the various microsoft campuses.

Re:Praise Allah!

[Bogtha]

You're mostly right. Internet Explorer 6 is missing major parts of CSS 2 support, and only supports CSS 1 selectors (and possibly a couple of CSS 2 selectors). Internet Explorer 7 adds a little bit more support for CSS 2, and support for all the CSS 2 selectors.

The problem is that people were hiding the CSS 2 that Internet Explorer 6 doesn't support from it using the CSS 2 selectors it also doesn't support. Now Internet Explorer 7 understands those selectors, but still doesn't understand a lot of the rest of CSS 2. So the developers that provided ugly float hacks for Internet Explorer and more advanced CSS 2 for everything else are left with Internet Explorer 7 making a mess because it ignores the Internet Explorer 6 stuff and tries to use the stuff it doesn't understand.

The solution, from Microsoft's perspective, is to use another non-standard Microsoft hack called conditional comments and conditional compilation. It's a way of selectively hiding code from other browsers based on whether it's Internet Explorer or not and which version is in use.

Now, some people's hackles will be raised by my description of it as "non-standard". Here's the deal: a document with conditional comments in can be perfectly valid and make sense to standards-compliant user-agents. But — and this is a big but — this is only the case because they look like normal comments that should be ignored to every other user-agent. This means that anything hidden in a conditional comment is not going to be checked by validators, link checkers, security software, filters, or anything like that, unless they have special support built in for Microsoft's non-standard extensions to HTML and ECMAScript.

The conditional comment approach also has downsides purely from a technical point of view. For instance, with CSS selector hacks, you can include code for Internet Explorer and code for standard browsers in the same external stylesheet. With conditional comments, you are stuck with an additional external stylesheet, or embedded <style> elements, both of which are less efficient.

CSS selector hacks were fragile, everybody knew that, but I still think it was irresponsible of Microsoft to fix the selectors first. If they had fixed them after fixing the other issues, there would be no problem. An HTTP header or <meta> element approach would also have allowed complete backwards compatibility. But they ploughed ahead because the selector problem was easy and the other stuff was hard, and they were getting shit about CSS support so they did the little easy thing to get people off their backs but caused a load of new problems instead of the big hard thing that works right.

Re:Praise Allah!

[mrbester]

So, I need to install ActivePerl, learn Perl and then use server side processing to present a stylesheet that is only used on the client? Your alternative is just as bad, meaning you have to maintain a database (with associated CRUD functionality so it is just as "flexible" as a plaintext file) and *still* use serverside processing for browser detection. Given that it is more difficult just using the headers sent by a browser to detect what it actually is (spoof IE in Safari and you make your lovely application/xhtml+xml site you spent ages on utterly worthless for Mac users). Before this bollocks we could use the rubbishness of the browser against itself, which iwas the whole point of the hacks. It's far far easier and you don't need to be dicking about with multiple versions of anything. I've had stylesheets that worked with 6 different browsers, ordered by shoddyness DESC; to utilise cascading. Now we get told to use proprietary crap to snarf up the HTML. I'm take door number 3, Hal.

Re:Praise Allah!

[drinkypoo]

So, I need to install ActivePerl, learn Perl and then use server side processing to present a stylesheet that is only used on the client?

Actually, given that you're theoretically a web developer, you could write it in (insert web scripting language here) and do it that way; I only proposed perl because it makes text mangling easier than in any other language and that's what we're doing here, mangling text.

Given that it is more difficult just using the headers sent by a browser to detect what it actually is (spoof IE in Safari and you make your lovely application/xhtml+xml site you spent ages on utterly worthless for Mac users).

You don't have to care about supporting users who change their useragent string, because they are savvy and will figure out how to use your website, or they are in over their head and you can't effectively support them anyway because they are fucking with their computer without knowing what they are doing.

Before this bollocks we could use the rubbishness of the browser against itself, which iwas the whole point of the hacks. It's far far easier and you don't need to be dicking about with multiple versions of anything.

You're still dealing with multiple versions, just of individual rules, which are stored in the same sheet. You still have to remember all the stupid hacks to get it to work properly. Or you could just put the superseding rules in a style sheet, and use one sheet for all browsers, then keep the changes to that sheet in browser-specific sheets.

Is it really easier to deal with the hacks? Using hacks makes it harder to, at a glance, see how a sheet will be interpreted, than actually having multiple sheets, in my experience and opinion.

Re:Praise Allah!

[drinkypoo]

So the developers that provided ugly float hacks for Internet Explorer and more advanced CSS 2 for everything else are left with Internet Explorer 7 making a mess because it ignores the Internet Explorer 6 stuff and tries to use the stuff it doesn't understand.

and let me quote one more before I continue:

CSS selector hacks were fragile, everybody knew that, but I still think it was irresponsible of Microsoft to fix the selectors first.

Microsoft provided a nice document that told us all to use the IF IE conditional comments long before IE7 beta was released, but many people continued to use the same old lame browser hacks that we've been using all along. Exploiting bugs in software can provide great benefits, but is often a bad idea. Just as an example (not that the developers have to care) last I looked the only commodore 64 emulator worth a damn was C64S because it had superior bug emulation. See, the commodore engineers who designed the C64 made some errors, as engineers typically will, and some developers (In the major commercial arena, notably Epyx) utilized some of these flaws to make certain aspects of their programs faster. Problem is, if you code your emulator to the specifications, you don't have these bugs and software that uses them will fail.

Browser hacks are just coding to bugs. It's a bad, stupid idea. People did it because it worked, and I understand that, but given that Microsoft even told us what we should be doing instead, I just can't get upset at them for fixing bugs.

Actually Microsoft gets grilled for this often. Someone writes a program and does things the wrong way because they don't understand the right way; then it works on Win98 but not on any version of NT, and people blame Microsoft. "I thought this thing had reverse compatibility!" Well, it does, but only if the developers actually properly utilize the API. (Yes, some bugs are emulated as well; but clearly, not all of them.)

Re:Praise Allah!

[Bogtha]

Microsoft provided a nice document that told us all to use the IF IE conditional comments long before IE7 beta was released

What about the code written before this? And what about the downsides I already mentioned?

It's all very well Microsoft offering another option, but when that option is demonstrably worse, when there have been no changes to Internet Explorer for years, and when they've said that there won't be any more versions of Internet Explorer, conditional comments simply weren't the best approach.

Just as an example (not that the developers have to care) last I looked the only commodore 64 emulator worth a damn was C64S because it had superior bug emulation. See, the commodore engineers who designed the C64 made some errors, as engineers typically will, and some developers (In the major commercial arena, notably Epyx) utilized some of these flaws to make certain aspects of their programs faster. Problem is, if you code your emulator to the specifications, you don't have these bugs and software that uses them will fail.

That's an interesting example, but it's not the same thing. Typically the web developers using CSS hacks write valid code first, and only target buggy browsers with the hacks. Any web browser conforming to the CSS specification wouldn't have a problem with this. It's not the fact that Internet Explorer 7 is conformant that is the problem. It's that it's still broken, but in different ways.

given that Microsoft even told us what we should be doing instead

We are supposed to listen to Microsoft when they suggest non-standard hacks, even when they are a worse solution than the alternatives, just in case they change their minds and restart development on an EOLed application? Sorry, but the situation web developers would end up in if they all did that would be far worse than having to go back and find new workarounds for Internet Explorer bugs in all their websites.

Someone writes a program and does things the wrong way because they don't understand the right way

But conditional comments are not the right way! They are still a non-standard hack. Just because Microsoft did a 180 and ended up causing hassle for people using alternative methods of working around their bugs, it doesn't mean that the non-standard hack is suddenly a good idea.

Also, I'm not entirely certain whether you've grasped this point, because it doesn't frequently get mentioned. Using CSS hacks is not "the wrong way". You can still use hacks and end up with a valid stylesheet that will be interpreted in the same way by all conformant implementations. You aren't making it invalid or mean different things if you include hacks. For instance, the phantom root element hack ("* html") will never cause problems for conformant browsers because it can never match any elements.

yay!

[Klaidas]

Well, I've been waiting for this - I mean, let's face it, about 80% of computer user use IE as their default browser. And since tomorrow, they are getting tabs, new GUI, features, features, more features security updates, etc...
Even being a long-time Firefox user, I'm looking forward to test it (ya, I know, there were betas, there was a RC, but this is the stable one!)

Re:yay!

[sqlrob]

This is the stable one

And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you

Re:yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the bridge support tabbed browsing?

Means Nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, it appears IE's worldwide market share actually increased a couple of points since July, despite a number of high profile zero-day attacks this year."

As long as the average user doesn't take security into consideration on their computers - which a majority of them do not - then the number of zero day attacks mean nothing. I really don't think that would have any bearing on IE's market share increasing or decreasing.

Re:Means Nothing

[Kelson]

Hasn't IE's marketshare increased every summer for the last few years, wth Firefox and company catching up again in fall?

Re:Means Nothing

[Dan Ost]

That sounds suspiciously like it follows the school year...

Re:Means Nothing

[bunratty]

I can't see a pattern that regular in the historical record of browser usage. But IE posting a gain one reporting period only to lose share the next is common. The trend still seems to be IE usage decreasing and Firefox and Safari usage increasing. To verify that there's a new trend in browser usage share, we'll need to see more than just one data point from one stats source.

Actually, 'Yay!'

[Odin_Tiger]

Hopefully, it will be weird enough for users to call and ask about it, thus allowing me to weed out the few who are still using IE when they know they're supposed to be using Firefox.

Re:Actually, 'Yay!'

[Timesprout]

when they know they're supposed to be using Firefox.

Actually according to Secunia 'they' should be using Opera. Its funny how the best tool for the job theory goes out the window when it comes to Firefox.

Re:Actually, 'Yay!'

[chroot_james]

People aren't anti-ie because they're agnostic. It's all religion when it comes to browsers.

Re:Actually, 'Yay!'

[Rinzai]

Whomever modded this interesting needs to ask me first before doing it again.

Re:Actually, 'Yay!'

[Kelson]

Its funny how the best tool for the job theory goes out the window when it comes to Firefox.

That depends on "the job." For Firefox 1.x and Opera 7-8, if "the job" required WYSIWYG text editing or heavy AJAX functionality, then Firefox was the best tool. If "the job" involved highly advanced CSS, then it would have been Opera.

Don't assume everyone uses the web the same way you do. That's the same mentality behind the "Oprah sux b/c it don't have no extenshuns" attitude.

Good or bad news for the web developers?

[YA_Python_dev]

So this is a good or bad news for the web developers (not end users) that want to create useable standards-compliant websites?

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[xENoLocO]

It's a "bad news" if you want to test in IE6 *and* have a fully patched OS.

It's a good news in that they've taken leaps and bounds as far as standards support. Still not as good as it should be, but at this point I'll take anything.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[drinkypoo]

It's a "bad news" if you want to test in IE6 *and* have a fully patched OS.

Sure, unless perhaps you know what you are doing. Then you can have multiple IEs installed. I have IE5.5, IE6, and IE7 installed on my laptop alongside FF 1.5.whatever so I can do testing. To my right is a dual G5, running safari and ff/mac. IE/mac and Opera aren't even on the radar, the number of visitors using them is statistically insignificant for us. Really that's true of Safari as well but I like to support default web browsers.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[Tim C]

Just as releasing IE6 was bad if you wanted to test in IE5?

It'll be a pain for small-time web shops for a little while, but if IE7 really is going to be pushed out as a high priority, most people will end up getting it relatively quickly.

More serious shops should already have a range of different OS and browser combinations setup for testing; this will only add a couple more. Certainly it's no worse than testing under (eg) a couple of combinations of OS X and Safari, or various distros and various versions of Mozilla, FF, Konqi, Galleon, etc.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[xENoLocO]

Perhaps you misunderstood.

It's a pain to have multiple instances. Not impossible. I've been testing in IE7 for months, but thanks for your feeble attempt at being a smartass. Much love. :)

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[pe1chl]

This does not really work. You can install multiple versions but they will all send the same browser version to the website and the "conditional comment" evaluation is also done using one version.
That will break the methods you can use to have different versions of the browser looking at the same content in a way compatible to each of them.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[drinkypoo]

It's a pain? It's neither a pain nor even slightly difficult. you unpack the cabfiles into a directory and create a file called iexplore.exe.local in the directory. (You can delete some files, but it's not actually necessary to do so.) If that's hard for you, then I wonder how you manage with CSS? I personally use dreamweaver and it even allows me to specify multiple browsers that can be selected from the preview menu, so I don't even have to go hunting for icons. How much easier can it get?

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[drinkypoo]

This does not really work. You can install multiple versions but they will all send the same browser version to the website and the "conditional comment" evaluation is also done using one version.

Ah, that is good information, which I did not have before. Although there are ways to change the useragent, the conditional comment thing is pretty serious.

Guess it's time to make myself more Windows 98 VMs.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[Kjella]

Sure, unless perhaps you know what you are doing. Then you can have multiple IEs installed. I have IE5.5, IE6, and IE7 installed on my laptop alongside FF 1.5.whatever so I can do testing. To my right is a dual G5, running safari and ff/mac. IE/mac and Opera aren't even on the radar, the number of visitors using them is statistically insignificant for us. Really that's true of Safari as well but I like to support default web browsers.

Well, I missed one thing in your list and that's W3C compliance checks. Rather that testing everything in browsers that aren't on the radar, test against W3C. If it still breaks, well... then the browser is marginal and broken, who cares? I'd be more concerned about using IE bugs that the other browsers have chosen to mimic, but aren't really in the spec.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[xENoLocO]

The windows virtual machine method is a pain. I wasn't aware that method was reliable, since the last time I read about it they were still having issues getting it to work properly.

"... I wonder how you manage with CSS? I personally use dreamweaver ..."

Says he with 20 validation errors on his website. :)

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[Antiocheian]

If it still breaks, well... then the browser is marginal and broken, who cares?

None important, just the customer and the visitors.

Crawl back to CIWAH you moron!

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[mackyrae]

It's a good news in that they've taken leaps and bounds as far as standards support. Still not as good as it should be, but at this point I'll take anything.

Except now, the Holly Hack doesn't work, but not all of the positioning stuff was fixed. If they weren't going to fix it all, they could've at least left that container around <html></html> so the * html body p (the Holly Hack) would still work correctly.

Now, if you want your site to work correctly, you need 3 style sheets. One is for all web-standards-compliant browsers. One is for IE < 7, and one is for IE 7. Then, use conditional comments to tell it which to use:

<link href="css.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />

<!--[if lt IE 7]>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="iehacks.css" />

<![endif]-->

<!--[if IE 7]>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie7.css" />
<!--[endif]-->

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[BalanceOfJudgement]

The wonderful folks at PositionIsEverything have resolved those problems. It's a pain in the royal ass to fix but definitely possible.

Since browser compliance testing is something I do when I build websites I'll need these instructions when I (unwillingly but necessarily) install IE7 on my machine. I have not done so yet because I don't want to test IE7 until it is essentially complete. No point in coding for a bug that will disappear on final release.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[cartel]

I can confirm this. I tried doing this and the same thing happened to me - the web sites didn't show up like they did before. This was on Windows.

I'm running Linux (Ubuntu) now, and I installed IE4Linux, and that's seemed to work great. So once again Linux beat Microsoft at its own stuff.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously do not do web dev for a living.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[pe1chl]

Although I hold the same position, to my disappointment I read that there are not going to be any essential bugfixes before the release.
They will just be looking at the things important to MS (i.e. the eye-candy, the smoothness of the installer), not the CSS bugs.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[pe1chl]

This has always been the only reasonable way to do it...
Don't use hacks that rely on CSS parsing bugs. Use conditional comments.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[mackyrae]

Well, not all sites teach about conditional comments. I never heard of them until this whole mess happened. I also never hacked my code, though. For all the web people out there who were taught the * html hack though, they'll be in for a rude awakening tomorrow when their website renders incorrectly for everyone.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[Frizzle Fry]

That gives you a weird hybrid registration containing the dlls from whichever cab you unpacked along with the registry info for the version you actually have installed.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[Frizzle Fry]

Sorry, that was supposed to be "hybrid version".

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[suv4x4]

Rather that testing everything in browsers that aren't on the radar, test against W3C.

If you can run your sites against text specifications, more power to ya. The rest of the world uses good ol' fashioned browsers, and check against them to confirm they work.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[pkulak]

Hey, Safari is at like 4% or so for our webpages, and the internet in general, I thought.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[DaggertipX]

Exactly, lets have all of our new hacks spill out of the CSS files and into our HTML/XHTML markup. Yet again, Microsoft gives the finger to developers.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[drinkypoo]

while this is true, it DOES use the engine for the version you ran in order to render the page content. I've tested and verified. Actually, now that I come to think of it, I verified that the IF IE was working properly too, at least with 5.5 installed on a system with IE6.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[drinkypoo]

Yeah, fixing validation of my website is a pretty low priority. It goes like this: Make it look right in firefox, make it compliant, make it work in IE. I'm still between #1 and #2 someplace... I'm actually putting my efforts into a new website for work right now, I did the facelift (in dreamweaver) and am currently working on reimplementing the site in drupal (instead of flat files plus dreamweaver templates and a small handful of database crap.) So my website will have to wait, well, a long time :)

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[stonecypher]

Really that's true of Safari as well but I like to support default web browsers.

There are more cellular phones which default to Opera than Macs defaulting to Safari, fwiw. Nintendo DS too.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[syousef]

You've got to be kidding right? Just because you can do this nasty hack on your laptop, doesn't make it a good solution for testing. Someone else says you get a hybrid. Well it's also a hack. Can't imagine this even being allowed where I work, and for good reason. Not to mention the possible licensing violations.

The correct term for this kind of hacking is "Cowboy Coding". It has it's place but not in a pro environment.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[bruciemoose]

You could always do both. W3C specifications only go so far - and CSS is often manipulable to the point where you can make stuff work on all browsers (obviously using some conditional markup comments and NOT the holly hack).

If you don't conform to W3C standards, it's likely that come the next release of The Internet (nice post, I nearly cried), there will be no middle ground from which to start when fixing layout problems.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[jonadab]

> > If it still breaks, well... then the browser is marginal and broken, who cares?
> None important, just the customer and the visitors.

Actually, in context, he was talking about browsers that aren't on the radar, presumably because they don't have a significant showing in the access logs. Hence, the browser is marginal. And he says he tests for W3C compliance, hence if the browser can't display the page it's "broken" in some way (although it's more likely to just be out of date, I suspect).

It's good to test on a variety of browsers and platforms, but fundamentally it's impossible to test on _every_ browser in existence. (Do *you* test on NetPositive, Arachne, Oregano, and QNX Voyager? These are important niche browsers, each very significant for its respective platform.) That's why testing for standards compliance is important: if your site adheres to standards, then it should display reasonably in any browser that supports the standards. (I say "should" because no browser's standards support is entirely complete, but you do what you can and hope for the best.)

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[Antiocheian]

That's why testing for standards compliance is important: if your site adheres to standards, then it should display reasonably in any browser that supports the standards.

That's absolutely correct. Marvellously written. I agree.

The standards are Google, the Mozilla Foundation, Microsoft, Opera and a few others. So, if your site adheres to the standards, then it should display reasonably in any browser that supports the standards.

What role W3C plays in all that? Well, W3C can help with its online validator, here is how: Sit down, and write an SGML document type definition that covers all the elements that are supported uniformly supported by the standards I've mentioned then have it declared in every (X)HTML document you serve. The W3C will happily accept your DTD and validate your document against the REAL standards.

but you do what you can and hope for the best

You don't have to hope. All you need is, as you said, documents that validate against the standards.

Re:Good or bad news for the web developers?

[drinkypoo]

Whatever you want to call it, it works, I've compared it to the "real" thing (the real browser installed in a VM) and it has the same kind of output, flaws, etc. Don't like it? Don't use it.

And BANG!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like that IE6 was slain. Any more IE6 support requests can now be marked WONTFIX and users can either unpgrade to XP/IE7 or download firefox or Opera.

And there was much rejoicing.

What's going to break tomorrow?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can imagine hundreds of applications breaking as users start their computers up with the lastest 'patch' from Microsoft. Anyone who relies on ASP's or B2B websites had better turn automatic updates off.

no no no

[jaiyen]

The RFTA references a post on the Microsoft IE blog that says IE7 is coming 'real soon now' and that it "will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it's available for download". How the submitter took that to mean it's going to be automatically for everyone from tomorrow is a mystery.

Re:no no no

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here.

Re:no no no

[Chapter80]

From TFA:

Update, 1:14 p.m. ET: The above post was changed to say IE7 would be released this month. Microsoft declined to confirm whether it would release IE tomorrow as part of its patch process, only to say that it planned the release sometime this month.

I think it DID say tomorrow, and has since been updated.

Re:no no no

[Kelson]

On top of that, even after it does become available through automatic updates -- which will most likely be in the November patch cycle, given that it's "a few weeks after" the October release, you can block the update (at least for now).

Re:no no no

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF's a RFTA?

Re:no no no

[XenoPhage]

That would be a "Really Friendly and Thoughtful Article".. Leftovers from OMG PONIES!! era...

Containment Wall

[TubeSteak]

However, one of IE 7's most useful security features, a protected mode -- billed as a "containment wall" to prevent the browser from installing software or changing computer settings without the user's consent -- will not be available for XP users. That feature will be reserved for users who upgrade to Windows Vista, the next version of the operating system, due in January.

Is this "Containment Wall" something that can be hacked into working on XP?

Re:Containment Wall

[emarkp]

Yes, it's typically done by installing Firefox or Opera on XP. It's the proven solution that I use.

Re:Containment Wall

[Kjella]

Ha funny. You sir, are a mental midget.

To answer the GP, no, no it can not. If you want IE6 to be safe get a hardware firewall and configur eit correctly.

Funny hearing insult from someone who has absolutely no clue at all. What exactly would you do with a hardware firewall to make IE safer? Blocking outbound port 80 might help, but I doubt you'll be happy with the results...

Re:Containment Wall

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this "Containment Wall" something that can be hacked into working on XP?

Yes. You can download it here

Re:Containment Wall

[Anonymous Coward]

All joking aside, no you cannot. This "containment wall" uses new mandatory access features of the kernel. There are, of course, various restrictive features that XP supports, but the specific feature this uses requires an upgraded kernel.

Don't worry, though, Mozilla will also be using this "containment wall" idea when it ships for Vista.

dom

Re:Containment Wall

[Anonymous Coward]

That tends to break other things.

Speed, Ease of use, the company intranet.

As an occassional web developer

[arevos]

I was dreading the inevitable process of trying to get a new CSS design working in IE 6; but hopefully now I don't have to :)

Re:As an occassional web developer

[Per Wigren]

I was dreading the inevitable process of trying to get a new CSS design working in IE 6; but hopefully now I don't have to :)

Actually, IE7 is THE solution. Don't confuse it with Internet Explorer v7. IE7 is the best tool a modern web developer can have. It's a JavaScript library that automatically convert standards compliant modern CSS to IE 5+6 workarounds so you can code your pages using clean W3C-compliant CSS2+3 and XHTML and your pages will work fine in IE 6, IE 5.5 and even IE 5.0. It's magic!

Here is the list of all IE-bugs it fixes.

Re:As an occassional web developer

[Kelson]

I was dreading the inevitable process of trying to get a new CSS design working in IE 6; but hopefully now I don't have to :)

Ah, if only!

Even with Microsoft pushing it out via automatic updates next month, I expect it will take at least a year before IE6's marketshare declines to the point where we can ignore it.

Consider:

• People who don't update (and don't have automatic updates set up).
• People who are still on Windows XP Service pack 1
• People who are still on Windows 2000 (still common in business), or on Windows 98/Me (yes, they're still out there!)

We can get some of the people on outdated OSes to switch to Firefox or Opera, but the ones who don't update are also unlikely to install third-party software that (as far as they can see) just duplicates something their computer can already do.

For that crowd -- and for the offices running Win2k + Microsoft apps across the board -- we're going to need to wait for people to replace their computers entirely.

The good news is that, in a matter of days or weeks, Internet Explorer 6 will officially be the new Netscape 4: a relic with declining relevance. If only it would decline fast enough!

Re:As an occassional web developer

[hkgroove]

Thanks for that! I'm surprised I had not yet come across this.

Re:As an occassional web developer

[misleb]

Sadly, there are still quite a number of people still running Windows older than XP which will never run IE7. I don't have the figures handly, but I imagine it is somewhere around 30%. So unless you want to alienate a good chunk of users, you'll have to continue supporting IE6 (and maybe even IE5.5) for several years to come.

-matthew

Re:As an occassional web developer

[yesthatmcgurk]

Just revamped a website and managed to get 90% of everything straight with everybody. The rest went in conditional comments. Mmmmm... conditional comments. Too bad the comment system here strips them out.

Re:As an occassional web developer

[arevos]

Oho! That I have to try! Do you know if it allows for transparent PNGs referenced in the CSS background-image property?

Re:As an occassional web developer

[clawoo]

Actually, IE7 is THE solution. Don't confuse it with Internet Explorer v7. IE7 is the best tool a modern web developer can have. It's a JavaScript library that automatically convert standards compliant modern CSS to IE 5+6 workarounds so you can code your pages using clean W3C-compliant CSS2+3 and XHTML and your pages will work fine in IE 6, IE 5.5 and even IE 5.0. It's magic!

I don't know what you've been smoking, but I want that too.

Re:As an occassional web developer

[Per Wigren]

From the list:
background-image | PNG alpha transparency (IE5.5+)

Note that by default it only enables transparency on images ending with "-trans.png". You can change that by setting IE7_PNG_SUFFIX to something else before loading IE7, like IE7_PNG_SUFFIX = ".png"; to enable transparency for all .png images (can be slow if you have lots of them).

Re:As an occassional web developer

[Falesh]

If you rely on JavaScript then you miss the 10% of people who have JavaScript turned off. That is quite a percentage for a business.

Re:As an occassional web developer

[Per Wigren]

It only requires users of Internet Explorer 5-6 having JavaScript enabled. With Explorer v7 being pushed out, the amount of IE 5-6-users without JavaScript will drop significantly over the next year. I don't know what hacks are required to make IEv7 compliant but hopefully they are few enough to be worked around in a managable way, not the horror that is IEv6.

Besides, these days it's almost impossible to have a good experience on the web with JavaScript turned off. It all depends on your target users.

admission

[joerdie]

I thought IE has had tabs all this time. As a firefox user I havent been around IE that much lately but i could have swrorn they where already doing this.

Re:admission

[Timesprout]

No the IE team specifically made a design decision against using tabs back when they were building version 5 of IE.

The article says "could be"

[origamy]

Please RTFA before posting: "According to a post on the company's IE blog, that high-priority update could be IE7"

If you dont want to install it...

[jorghis]

If want to prevent the automatic install MS has a page for you here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/updatemanagement/ windowsupdate/ie7announcement.mspx

It looks like you have the option to just click "no thanks" when it asks you if you want to upgrade to IE7.

Re:If you dont want to install it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but someone already beat you to the punch and posted that information after you posted it. Get a life, douche bag. http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=199877&cid= 16369671

A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[rumith]

How nice. It's like I come and replace your old rusty garage door with a brand new one, with all the bells and whistles, some heavy armor and even an electronic keypad to open it. However, I will not allow you to change the password to open the door from the factory default "1234". Unless you pay me, that is.

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[EXMSFT]

Wow that's a weird metaphor.

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[kfg]

Wow that's a weird metaphor.

Wait for metaV.0

KFG

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[jorghis]

I dont follow that analogy. How is MS refusing to allow you to change your combination from 1234 unless you pay them?

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[rumith]

The article notes that the IE7 "containment wall" protected mode will not be available on XP, but only to those who purchase Vista.

I cannot be 100% sure, but something is telling me that without this "containment wall" IE7 security will be, well, a disaster.

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[jorghis]

Oh, I see what you are saying. A better analogy would have been that you went and installed all the security measures you could on the garage but didnt do one because the architecture of the house didnt support it. It isnt like they are deliberately trying to sabotage the security to force you to upgrade to vista which seems to be what you are implying.

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[rumith]

An even better analogy would sound like I intentionally design that 'feature' to be incompatible with your house/garage/whatever. So I can always get away with it saying "I couldn't do anything about it; that's how things work!". That's what Microsoft kept telling during the MS-Netscape war. Surprisingly enough, they did get away with it; why shouldn't they apply working tactics again?

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[jorghis]

Thats a bold accusation. While you are right about MS-netscape that is a seperate issue from a decade ago.

Do you understand how the contaiment wall works? XP wasnt designed to support this kind of thing at all. As near as I can tell they implemented everything that they could for the XP release. While the containment wall is a very nice thing and its unfortunate that it wont be in the XP version, your accusations that they are doing something sinister dont seem to be based on the facts. It looks to me like they are making a good faith effort to improve the security of IE for XP even though it probably will not be as good as the security in Vista.

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[jazman_777]

Wow that's a weird metaphor.

Just goes to show what happens when you stop using bad car analogies / metaphors. Things go right down the tubes.

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[rumith]

While you are right about MS-netscape that is a seperate issue from a decade ago

I don't see anything changed for a more ethical approach, although I'd love to.

your accusations that they are doing something sinister

Oh no, I'm not accusing them of anything sinister. I understand their desire to make as much money as possible - that's what they are supposed to do, after all. I'm only complaining about their lack of ethics.

XP wasnt designed to support this kind of thing at all

Of course it wasn't! And rest assured that Vista will also have a zillion drawbacks [or at least a dozen major ones], so when the time comes for the next upgrade, people will readily buy that next version to get the better OS. Please, try to understand: Microsoft's goal is not to produce the best operating system ever; its goal is to make money in short and long term. If they produced something amazing and satisfying everybody for a decade or two, they would lose shareholders to more profitable and faster growing businesses. And amont that all, I would like to point your attention to a rumour that MS is going to drop the 'develop-release-patch' cycle one day, and switch to a subscription-based revenue stream [software as service]. Many and a lot of Microsoft's sins will be forgiven shall they take this step and reform their whole development process.

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[jorghis]

Well of course Vista will lack features or contain drawbacks that the Microsoft's OS after it will improve on. It isnt like they are deliberately sabotaging their operating systems, whenever a bug is found they patch it.(yes, they have been slow about it before, but they have never charged for bug fixes) Do you really believe that companies should be expected to put out only one release of their software that is absolutely perfect and has every feature their users could ever want for the next 80 years?

Do you also have a negative view of Apple? They have released way more than one version of their operating system as well.

This is the first time I have ever heard someone try to make the claim that putting out a new version of their software every couple of years and trying to charge money for it constituted a lack of ethics.

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[rumith]

• Do you really believe that companies should be expected to put out only one release of their software that is absolutely perfect and has every feature their users could ever want for the next 80 years?

  No I don't. But I believe that software produced shouldn't contain flaws and drawbacks specifically designed to promote the sales of the next version. So it's either Microsoft cannot develop software properly, and it isn't worth buying, or they can develop properly but intentionally do not - and it isn't worth buying as well.
• The part about free of charge bugfixes was absolutely brilliant! You see, the moment a large software vendor declares that bugfixes will be available at cost, the top brass will be shot. That's why Microsoft has to invent moves like the one in question to disguise their wish to charge for bugfixes. Remember, a bug is a company's undoing - you have supposedly paid for the version without it, and surely you'll be disappointed if the software doesn't live up to your expectations. A bugfix is how software vendors return their debt to you, not an extra feature to pay for.
• *Ironic* Yes, and most of all I'm critisizing Linux for pumping out a new kernel revision every month or so. Actually, I do recommend unskilled users I have to support to use Mac OS X or Ubuntu powered machines whenever such possibility exists.
• You've misunderstood, again. The unethical approach is making user experience of those who didn't wish to buy this new version significantly more difficult, if not unbearable. The unethical approach is luring and forcing people to upgrade. After all, if this new software is so good that it's definitely worth upgrading, why should MS *force* anyone into buying it, when lots of reasonable people [and the absolute majority of the unreasonable ones] would upgrade anyway? The conclusion is that the upgrade is not worth it, and additional measures are needed to make sure Vista doesn't go down the drain right away.

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[VGPowerlord]

This is the first time I have ever heard someone try to make the claim that putting out a new version of their software every couple of years and trying to charge money for it constituted a lack of ethics.

Does the name "Symantec" or "Norton Anti-Virus" ring a bell?

Re:A proposal that cannot be rejected?

[Anonymous Coward]

1234? That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!

Tomorrow is not accurate

[DigitlDud]

The blog post the article is referring to says it will be pushed out via Automatic Updates a FEW WEEKS after it's available for download. And it's not available for download yet. Somehow I doubt they ment tomorrow.

Wow

[wumpus188]

Finally, IE with proper combobox implementation... Wow, just wow..

For a Firefox user:

[jbeaupre]

For a Firefox user such as myself, can someone give me a link or explanation of the pro's and con's of putting IE7 on my XP box? Browsing experience doesn't factor in, so are there other factors to consider?

Re:For a Firefox user:

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

explanation of the pro's and con's of putting IE7 on my XP box?

Sure:

- Pros: you get the latest Microsoft software that hopefully *fixes* the previous version
- Cons: you get the latest Microsoft software that *hopefully* fixes the previous version

Re:For a Firefox user:

[Anonymous Coward]

Con: You can't test your pages in IE6.

don't want it!

[krell]

Don't want it. They force tabbed browsing on you whether you want it or not (there's a big hole in the screen if you turn it off), and the locations of other things are moved to less-intuitive locations. Worst of all, installing it turns off "Visual Studio".

Re:don't want it!

[lindquist]

What do you mean it turns off Visual Studio? That would seem a pretty stupid thing to do...

Re:don't want it!

[oggiejnr]

I haven't experienced the problem you describe. Both VS.NET 2003 C++ and C# standard editions and C# 2005 still work fine with beta 3 of IE7.

Yay for CSS!

[Lord Ender]

I recently started using CSS for the first time. I went right from the spec. The HTML and CSS validated strict. It looked great in Firefox. Then I tested it with IE6, and started to cry. I spent more hours trying to hack my way around the bugs in IE6's rendering than I spent making the page design in the first place.

With this news, though, I can go back to writing real CSS! This will save me so much time! The only people who won't be able to see my page properly are people who don't maintain their machines AT ALL. And they can piss off, for all I care. Running an unpatched Windows machine is peeing in the public pool of the internet.

Re:Yay for CSS!

[pe1chl]

not too quick... the CSS support in IE7 still sucks badly when compared with competing browsers.
sure it is better than IE6, but don't assume your valid CSS will work OK in IE7, it probably will not.

Re:Yay for CSS!

[diegocgteleline.es]

With this news, though, I can go back to writing real CSS! This will save me so much time!

No, it won't. IE7 doesn't improve CSS support that much. Yes, they fixed it a bit, but it's mostly the same.

IE7 = tabs + new UI

What I don't understand is why it took them so much time to release this crap. I guess that because IE is tied into XP and so many things depend on it they spent most of the time trying to track down regressions from crappy 3rd progarms

Re:Yay for CSS!

[CheeseTroll]

IE7 won't run on Win2K, AFAIK, no matter how well it's patched. That's a lot of corporate machines being left out.

Re:Yay for CSS!

[plopez]

as a scarred veteren of the 90's browser wars, I feel for you. It took me several years to get the twitching under control.

Oh, and check your hacks again. Odds are you will have to roll out the IE6 hacks and replace them with IE7 hacks. A site that renders will in IE6 will probably not work under IE7 now.

Like I said, I feel for you.

Re:Yay for CSS!

[nomoreself]

IE7 CSS support is lacking in different - not fewer - ways from IE6, which means your enthusiasm should be quite the opposite. With the release of IE7, CSS authors are going to simply have one more portion of hacks to implement. Perhaps the days of being able to develop for the web using only standards is around the corner, but that corner is several miles away yet.

Re:Yay for CSS!

[mackyrae]

ah but your IE6 hacks will screw up IE7 which won't render your correct CSS correctly....that is what conditional comments and writing 3 different stylesheets are for

Re:Yay for CSS!

[Lord Ender]

Well, I plan on just ignoring IE6, and rewriting everyting to the section of the spec that works on IE7 and Firefox.

BTW: Girl+Linux+slashdot=hot. Will you marry me?

Re:Yay for CSS!

[_bug_]

The CSS/rendering engine they've been using since IE4 is still around. They keep patching it with every release to try and bring it up to spec. However the underlying reason for all the layout bugs still remain.

It's called hasLayout and it's created many problems over the years. It's still there in IE7 and there are new bugs relating to hasLayout in IE7 as demonstrated here.

Re:Yay for CSS!

[mackyrae]

You can't ignore IE6. Not everyone will take the update. Only XP and Vista can get it. Plenty of people are refusing it because poor coding (or coding just to IE) will cause breaks in a lot of pages.

I already have a boyfriend. He's here on /. too. His username is either nexgenshane or shanlot751. I can't figure out how to find a person on here though. Yes, his usernumber is lower than mine, but that doesn't mean he converted me to geekdom. I converted him to Linux, and he helps me out on hardware. We're pretty evenly matched on html, though he can handle php much better than I can. I make up for it by programming in Java and Python when he can't program at all.

Re:Yay for CSS!

[mackyrae]

Correction, he has never posted here (lurker) and so he never signed up. I do have a lower number than him :-P

Re:Yay for CSS!

[Lord Ender]

You seem to have thoroughly out-geeked your boyfriend. I hope he has some other quality to make up for it!

And perhaps I will just have to look at the logs to see if there are enough IE6 people still around to make it worth supporting them. My site seems to attract mostly technically-able people, so lets hope not.

Re:Yay for CSS!

[mackyrae]

He's a good artist...who really needs to add more stuff to his deviantart account.

My site always has interesting stats. I suppose it's because I'm a doller (cartoon dolls, those little web graphics), so the other people who visit it are also dollers. Since most dollers have their own doll sites, they learn HTML and CSS and all that if they don't know it already (or get someone else to do it for them). From doing that, they learn which browsers work and which suck. From the stats of my index.html page:

• 78.49% use Mozilla 1.8.0.7
• 21.22% use Safari 419.3
• 0.29% use MSIE 6

Then there's the resolutions...

• 78.49% 1280x768
• 21.22% 1440x900
• 0.3% 1024x768

Not even 0.01% use 800x600! They ALL have 32 bit color depth. Mac OS X has 21.22% (ok, this is a popular number, so I think all the Macs are running Safari at that mega-huge resolution) Windows NT 5.1 has the other 78.78% (that's XP SP2, right?)

Now, how many sites can say that less than 1/3 of 1% of visitors use IE? Very few, I'd imagine.

Re:Yay for CSS!

[Lord Ender]

Hm... perhaps I should give up on making money in IT and staying in shape, and instead learn to draw. And I had never heard of this "dollz" thing before now. It's a bunch of technically with-it girls? If I could possibly imagine myself being interested in the cartoon version of precious moments, I would look in to it further. But alas, no dice.

Re:Yay for CSS!

[jonadab]

> IE7 = tabs + new UI

From a webmaster's perspective, the big win with IE7 is the alpha channel.

However, that's a pretty big deal given that approximately eight out of every ten webmasters have been dying to get it for the last six years or so. Improved CSS support would be nice, but the alpha channel is much *more* important.

I imagine that about a day and a half after IE7 is officially released, rather a lot of websites will start telling IE6 users to upgrade. As a web developer, I'll be *VERY* pleased if it's pushed out as a critical update.

Improved CSS support? That'd be real nice, but I'll take what I can get.

The biggest inconvenience

[ezratrumpet]

...will be to those people who have no idea when they start their machines that they must endure a lengthy install and restart process before they can get to work.

Re:The biggest inconvenience

[snarkth]

My first thought as a "on-the-side" home PC tech was - oh gawd, here we go again. Fuck this, I'm not gonna listen to my voicemail until next week '=) -

  Whew, a brief reprieve... ;)

  *snark*

Re:The biggest inconvenience

[Software]

Um, no. From http://www.microsoft.com/technet/updatemanagement/ windowsupdate/ie7announcement.mspx

The automatic delivery process will notify users an update is available and allow users to choose whether to install Internet Explorer 7.

The key words are "allow users to choose". Please stop spreading FUD.

every time I try firefox, I go back.

[krell]

I keep going back to the "Bad" one after using Firefox. Reasons including pages that don't display right in Firefox and that nasty "do you want to remember this password?" or whatever pop-up that LACKS a basic "no, and never ever ask me again for ANY site!!!!" option right on the popup. Better yet, it shouldn't ask this in the first place.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[APLowman]

I'm going to assume you never looked under Tools->Options->Privacy->Passwords because there is this handy checkbox that turns off saving passwords. The reason it is on by default is because many users would think Firefox didn't have that feature, since most users don't look at the options screen. Firefox has always had the ability to turn this off completely, as well as the ability to turn it off by domain; offering much better control then IE. Really there is no reason to use IE as your primary browser, just get the IE tab plugin for Firefox so that when you hit a stie that dosn't work you can switch to IE to use it.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[ElleyKitten]

If you go to Tools->Options, then Privacy->Passwords, and uncheck Remember Passwords, it won't ask you again.

What sites do you go to that don't work right in Firefox? It's been a long time since I've seen one, though I know a few sites that don't work well in IE6, mostly because of the stupid PNG transparency issue. IE6 is so old and outdated, I don't know how people can stand it.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[krell]

"I'm going to assume you never looked under Tools->Options->Privacy->Passwords because there is this handy checkbox that turns off saving passwords"

You are right. I didn't dig deep in obscure menus to kill this annoyance that (1) should not be the in the first place and (2) should have a turn off option right on the pop-up. I know, it's an old glitch. Netscape has had it going WAYYY.... back.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't use a coporate intranet at work, or you'd know that in most workplaces IE is the standard and if CSS is broken or a site requires ActiveX and FireFox won't load it right nobody cares. I work for a government contractor that designs a web-based system for filing HIPPA complaints. I came on this project after it was "done" only to discover that many things on this site only function in IE due to poor CSS. I am now the only programmer on the project, and I have informed my project manager that the site (which is intended to be used by the public) needs to have serious reviosions or be redone from scratch. The system isn't that big so a complete rewrite would only take a month or so, however CMS, the agency that hired us only cares about IE compatablity. I attempeted to push for this by saying that IE 7 may break under the current code, although this route isn't getting me too far either. Go check it out

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[APLowman]

You are right. I didn't dig deep in obscure menus to kill this annoyance that (1) should not be the in the first place and (2) should have a turn off option right on the pop-up. I know, it's an old glitch. Netscape has had it going WAYYY.... back.

glitch
1 : a usually minor malfunction ;
2 : a minor problem that causes a temporary setback
3 : a false or spurious electronic signal

I'm not sure how putting options in the "Options" dialog is a "glitch". I'm pretty sure implementing a clean UI free of clutter, rather then including every option possible on every pop-up for lazy/ignorant users, is not a glitch. There is nothing wrong with this feature being on in the first place, since there is nothing to stop you from turning it off or clicking "No". Please keep in mind not everybody cares if their passwords to trivial things are stolen, this feature is great for passwords like that.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[fprintf]

My guess is that if you cannot spell "HIPAA" correctly, you won't be working for your current employer for very long. Remember, there are no hippos in HIPAA.

HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It is so commonly misspelled that the link you provided redirects to the appropriate link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIPAA

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, as you stated it is a common typo... considering it HIPAA is commonly prononunced "Hip-Ah". Although none of this has anything to do with what I posted about.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[Anonymous Coward]

However, putting Preferences in the Options dialog is a glitch.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[edmicman]

or whatever pop-up that LACKS a basic "no, and never ever ask me again for ANY site!!!!" option right on the popup. Better yet, it shouldn't ask this in the first place.

Which version are you using? Maybe it's a new feature of v2, but on mine the popup has an option for "remember password", "not this time", and "never for this site". And as others have said, the option to turn the whole thing off is in the preferences options, anyway.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I try it I go back... to Opera.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[edumacator]

I can see your point about putting that option on the actual dialogue box, but having to "dig down" two layers one time to turn off a feature is a trivial reason not to use a browser that has some pretty cool features that IE hasn't had.

Also, keep in mind, you aren't the only user out there. I can pretty much gaurantee that there are others out there that feel the exact opposite as you do. I'd try to avoid the arrogance of assuming your views is the only "right" one.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[krell]

"I'm pretty sure implementing a clean UI free of clutter"

Step 1: No annoying worthless popups. You have to admit, these do clutter, right? Right???

"There is nothing wrong with this feature being on in the first place"

Just like there is nothing wrong with web page popups at all, is there?

"since there is nothing to stop you from turning it off or clicking "No".

Yes, clicking NO over and over and over again....

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[krell]

"Maybe it's a new feature of v2, but on mine the popup has an option for "remember password", "not this time", and "never for this site"

None of which is as useful as "never for any site". Worthless annoying popups killed forever, with one click, no need to dig down into multiple menu layers to get rid of this problem.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[robertjw]

Tools->Options->Privacy->Passwords = handy I bet you write software for a living.

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, don't use firefox then. Feeling better?

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or better yet... if you ever have to use Firefox, go look in the Options menu and configure it whatever dammed perverse way you want to, just like everybody else does for every other piece of software they've ever used.

This was the most ridiculous reason I have ever heard for not using a program. "I didn't like it's default configuration and I didn't want to learn about the options available to me to configure it."

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[zaydana]

I am not an interface designer, but it seems to me that it would actually be a stupid item to put there by way of usability. As a designer, you don't want the majority of users (i.e. not you) to place a few milliseconds into avoiding a button they'll never click every time the press login. Its best to keep the most used buttons in the most obvious places, and place more obscure alternative configuration choices somewhere separate, which isn't often displayed while the user is browsing.

By the same argument you are putting forward, we may as well put the "Use a master password" option in the same pop-up dialog. And just for the hell of it, we'll add a link to the exceptions box, just in case people actually want to use the exceptions button. Oh, and don't forget the change master password button, we can't have people going into the settings box to change the settings... </sarcasm>

Re:every time I try firefox, I go back.

[RemovableBait]

Riiiight. So you switch back to IE because you're too lazy to go into the Preferences and set it up the way you want it? And on that basis, you're condemning the entire project because the default configuration (which seems to suit the many millions of users out there) doesn't suit you? WTF.

Since when did any piece of software come set up 'just the way you like it'? I can't think of a single program that I have installed and not changed something in the preferences, however trivial.

Come back in a few years time when you realise that software is not written just for you.

Am I The Only One Concerned?

[The Real Nem]

I'm sure IE7 is a positive step from IE6, but how big of a resource hog is that shinny new interface? When I updated to Windows Messenger Live (yes I'm aware of the alternatives, but 99% of my friends use it) I couldn't believe how much resources the thing ate up. Right now it's sitting at a ridiculous 48 MB of memory usage.

More to the point, how much of IE7 is integrated into the kernel and how much memory does it consume when I'm not even using it? How does it affect boot times? I'm unlikely to use it for anything I don't have to so I think I'll be avoiding it for as long as possible.

Re:Am I The Only One Concerned?

[Sylver Dragon]

On my system, Task Manager reports that the two executables for IE7 (iexplore.exe and iuser.exe) are taking up about 10MB of memory total. By contrast FireFox is taking about 20MB. Both are freash instances of the browser sitting at the main google page. Of course, I have a bunch of extensions installed for FF along with all of my bookmarks, so it is probably a bit high.
Of course, this is running on Vista RC1 so, YMMV.
In all, if the security of IE7 is even half as good as MS is claiming, I'll be happy. I'm tired of cleaning spyware off my user's systems.

Re:Am I The Only One Concerned?

[NineNine]

As long as it doesn't have terrible memory leaks like Firefox, I don't care how big the footprint is. Big is much better than infinitely big over time. I've never understood why the guys at Firefox can't (or won't?) fix something as simple and serious as memory leaks.

Re:Am I The Only One Concerned?

[Kelson]

I've never understood why the guys at Firefox can't (or won't?) fix something as simple and serious as memory leaks.

You are aware that they've fixed memory leaks in nearly every point release since 1.5, right? (Check the release notes.) And that they've fixed more memory leaks in 2.0?

It's not a matter of fixing a couple of big leaks. It's a matter of tracking down a bunch of little leaks and fixing each of them.

Re:Am I The Only One Concerned?

[Anonymous Coward]

The onyl explanation I ever read was that its not "memeory leaks" per say but rather just a very shitty memory allocation sheme where memory cannot be easily released or re-used. In other words it's simpyl bad design not bad coding, which means they can't fix it easily because it would require massive rewrites of the FF code.

Re:Am I The Only One Concerned?

[Bogtha]

how much of IE7 is integrated into the kernel

None of it. Internet Explorer has never been anywhere near the Windows kernel. Ever.

Its rendering engine has been available for any applications to embed since Windows 98. Many do. When you hear about Internet Explorer being "integrated" into Windows, what they mean is that an important library used by Internet Explorer is also used by other applications. Consider glibc on Linux, or Webkit on OS X. Neither are "integrated into the kernel", but many applications break if you take it away, and many applications are affected if there's a security vulnerability found in them. Internet Explorer's rendering engine is like that.

how much memory does it consume when I'm not even using it?

But you are using it all the time. You already mentioned that you use Windows Messenger - that uses Internet Explorer's rendering engine to display various things. Whenever you call up an application's help, you are using Internet Explorer's rendering engine. It's a system library that many applications use.

Re:Am I The Only One Concerned?

[Anonymous Coward]

shut up, Micro$oft Fanboy.

Re:Am I The Only One Concerned?

[mackyrae]

I was under the impression it had to do with the cache. In order to render pages more quickly, it stores an image of every page you've visited. Storing all those pages after a round of heavy-browsing requires more memory.

New exploits to ship on Wednesday

[Animats]

Following the push of IE7 on Patch Tuesday, new IE7 exploits will be deployed on Exploit Wednesday. Coming soon to a computer near you.

Firefox in Australia

[Brad_sk]

Just curious - How come Firefox is so famous in Australia...?

Re:Firefox in Australia

[Megaweapon]

Just curious - How come Firefox is so famous in Australia...?

A dingo ate my IE!

What I can look forward to

[shawn443]

75 users calling me up saying they think they have a virus because something is new. After explaining its not, 25 users saying they dont like it and want the old one. I have learned old people don't like new things.

Re:What I can look forward to

[Hymer]

"I have learned old people don't like new things." ...and that's also what Bill Gates is telling us everytime someone say that Linux is desktop ready.... I just don't understand why he is confusing his users with new and "improved" user interface on every new version of his software...
I just saw Vista btw... it allmost looks like KDE on SuSE...
--
When you get your MCSE you discover why you want to run UNIX* * incl. xBSD, OS X and Linux

yes, it turns off VS

[krell]

Yes, it turned off my Visual Studio. After I installed IE7 and tried to run Visual Studio (I admit, an older version), I got a DLL error. I googled the error, and confirmed the incompability. I simply uninstalled IE 7 (could not stand it due to the messed-up control area and menu anyway) and VS worked again. Luckily.

Re:yes, it turns off VS

[lindquist]

sounds like I'm not getting this update then. Thanx for the heads up!

Re:yes, it turns off VS

[krell]

I'm hoping they fix it. However, as per a typical "beta", there was no place to report problems other than the usual "drop comment into a black hole" Microsoft feedback area.

Do you like tabbed browsing, by the way?

Re:yes, it turns off VS

[Phu5ion]

Visual Studio (I admit, an older version)

Oh good, I was afraid you were using VS.NET. I don't know why someone would be using VS.NET, but it was the first think that came to mind.

Of course, MS could be using it as an excuse to get you to upgrade to .NET where they have fixed that incompatibility.

Or maybe I'm just being paranoid.

Re:yes, it turns off VS

[lindquist]

Indeed I do, and Firefox delivers :)

Re:yes, it turns off VS

[jazman_777]

Or maybe I'm just being paranoid.

It's not paranoia when they really are trying to get your money.

They just need to make our jobs a little harder...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a huge PITA for web developers. It's even worse than just IE6. Now somehow we need to do fixes for IE6 AND IE7, since the majority of people will be using either one of those. And you can't even test pages in IE6 and IE7 easily, since MS doesn't let you have both installed at the same time! I don't have IE7 installed because I need to test for the bugs in IE6. Now how am I supposed to do that?

What a difference a day makes

[GregVernon]

First off, I for one can't wait for the new Internet Explorer. The new transparent PNG and CSS support will finally make cross browser compatibility a, slim, possibility! The older versions of Internet Explorer where horrible at both and made any site much more difficult to code. Secondly, as I have read the comments for this story I have noticed a general change in mood from yesterday's article concerning toolbars. Yesterday the general assembly of "slashdotters" was remarkably pro-Microsoft, whereas now, it seems like it is the usual Microsoft screws up this, Microsoft screws up that, etc. etc. Even though the articles are completely different, it is kind of interesting to see how the reactions differ, especially in the span of 24 hours.

Re:What a difference a day makes

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares, the point is that fairly soon no-one will be using Internet Explorer 6 any more. You won't *need* to test in IE6, just as you don't have to mess around with IE5 today when testing pages.

Re:What a difference a day makes

[GregVernon]

Hmm, thats not entirely what I meant. I was trying to say that many people are ranting about how bad IE is, whereas yesterday they where accepting it as reasonable. Thats all.

Sys Admins Watch Out For Incompatability!

[Scott872004]

All the SA's need to keep a close eye to this one, my company supports users that use a MAJOR payroll company (ADP) and their software will not work with IE 7. Many applications will cease to work in the same fashion, especially if they are security laden type web-based applications. My WSUS server is not going to let this update pass, regardless of the tabbed browsing and the new glitz and glam, Microsoft has gone too far in their blatant disregard for the customer's best interest. This will cause problems for a bunch of people when they do it. Historically, lots of time and energy are wasted when they push updates like this. I'm no programmer, but is is ridiculous that you release a full version upgrade (IE 7) and it cannot perfom the vendor-specific functions of the previous version (IE 6). What kind of action is that? Microsoft is interested in one thing in this market and that is money. Again they prove thier point.

Re:Sys Admins Watch Out For Incompatability!

[Anonymous Coward]

Many applications will cease to work in the same fashion, especially if they are security laden type web-based applications.

This wouldn't be a problem if they'd properly implemented the application in Flash.

Re:Sys Admins Watch Out For Incompatability!

[VGPowerlord]

Now, I know that your company didn't develop this, but relying on proprietary vendor "standards" rather than the real standards is just asking to be bitten.

Re:Sys Admins Watch Out For Incompatability!

[Scott872004]

Precisely, asking to be bitten. But the thing is before the Sys Ads get to the punch, Microsoft has already partnered with bigger businesses that force thier products down the throats of the end-users, leaving the decision to implement a technology not in the hands of the IT department, but in the hands of the users and business owners that will be saving time and money with great new web based technologies.. again securing the future of Microsoft by weaving themselves into the fabric of the corporate buying power. Any good salesperson will tell you that selling stuff is all about finding the audience with the best buying power, shifting the buying power from asking the IT department before a purchase, to the user having the buying power with cost savings, a technology not being stable according to the IT guy doesn't fly, thats collateral damage to a business owner, they care about cost savings, and that is always the priority with Microsoft. Microsoft always aligns thier goals with thier customers goals... thier business customer has the persistant goal of making money, yes above the goal of surviving patches, upgrades and possible outages.

Is MS Waiting for XP SP1 to die before IE7 ??

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it peculiar that MS is seemingly waiting for XP SP1's support date to pass to distribute IE7. I guess that only makes sense as bundling IE7 with this months updates for XP SP1 customers would be a silly thing to do. Then again, "silly" and "Microsoft" often appear in the same sentence. Will IE7 even run on SP1? If so, I don't care. I'm a smug Mozilla/Firefox user.

A bit off topic, MS's IE7 site boldly displays these words: "we heard you...you wanted it easier and more secure". No, you heard the sound of IE's dominance deteriorating away like a landslide. MS rarely does anything for the customer anymore, it's all about you, Microsoft. Then again, I thought the IE7 site was talking about internet porn, but alas, it was only IE7. :)

Don't expect miracles

[suv4x4]

IE7 will come with the WGA checks, and we know more than half of those 8x% that have IE6 now don't have legit Windows. They will not get IE7, even if they want it (of course, a small minority of them wil crack it).

Unless they go on a crackfest, all of them, we can expect steady 50% or more of IE6 for the next few years. Pitty, but remember IE5.0 guys! IE6 is bearable in my humble opinion (I'm a web dev).

The couple of points where IE's adoption increased: we have over a million people (half a million only official downloads of RC1 if I remember, counting bittorrents etc., companies will spread it internally to multiple test machines) or more, trying out Vista. Vista comes with IE (7).

Also hundreds of thousands testing their sites in IE7 (not just web devs). So there we go with this. Notice the IE7 share is around 2-3 % before release. It's those guys.

Significantly Higher?

[webword]

When it comes to switching browsers, I really only care when I see value. In general, I stick with what works until (a) it breaks or (b) the positive value of switching is significant.

For each person, the significantly higher will be different. Extremely minor updates are enough for those folks that want the latest and greatest. For others, it takes a crazy value propostion to be enough for a switch. Obviously this kind of thinking can be mapped to an innovation adoption curve.

I'll wait. My browser isn't broken and the value isn't there. But now I ask, does IE7 arouse your interest? Are you sold on the business case?

Re:Significantly Higher?

[DoorFrame]

I switched to Firefox for adblock, which has made web surfing a considerably better experience for me.

Windows Media player mashup

[LiquidCoooled]

Does Windows Media Player still leave traces in Internet Explorers' History?

I say this because I discovered the default WMP plugin for Firefox (identified on installation) leaves traces in Internet Explorers history and cache.

Clearing firefoxes cache does not remove this...

I realise its not an IE problem specifically and its not a Firefox problem, but its something that surprised me...

see here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=4725 58

Block IE7

[ZOMFF]

It is possible to block IE7 from being installed via WindowsUpdate by adding a registry key:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\7.0
REGDWORD Keyname=DoNotAllowIE70 Value=1

Use DropMyRights

[bogie]

Article here http://msdn.microsoft.com/security/securecode/colu mns/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dncode/html/s ecure11152004.asp

So for example this is my shortcut to IE

C:\DropMyRights\DropMyRights.exe "c:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe" /c

If you try to install something like Shockwave you get an error. Now I don't use IE much at all but if your in a situation where you have to use it and have to login as Admin this is a decent solution.

Re:Use DropMyRights

[Ergonomicon]

According to that link, you need to put "DropMyRights.exe" in the "C:\warez" folder. Uh...

Re:Use DropMyRights

[bogie]

I know quite funny coming from an article hosted on MSDN. At least the guy was giving help for a real life scenario.

oh god

[matt328]

I don't know about you guys, but I've started eating advil already.

How to avoid a possible disaster - For Admins

[mgpeter]

This is for all the Network Admins for Windows Networks.

If you do not want Automatic Updates to Install IE7 when it is released then just set the following registry key on every workstation:

Registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\7.0
Key value name: DoNotAllowIE70

* When the key value name is not defined, distribution is not blocked.
* When the key value name is set to 0, distribution is not blocked.
* When the key value name is set to 1, distribution is blocked.

NOTE: This is highly recommended as everytime I dealt with any Major release from Microsoft things started getting trashed. Microsoft should NOT Automatically deploy this in this way.

For lazy/Proficient Admins here is a Kixtart Script to do this on a list of computers over the network: NoAutoIE7.txt

Re:How to avoid a possible disaster - For Admins

[Chris Brewer]

Microsoft provides a toolkit with which you can roll out the registry changes via Group Policy:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyID=4516A6F7-5D44-482B-9DBD-869B4A90159C&displa ylang=en&Hash=GJ3Y7L7

Re:How to avoid a possible disaster - For Admins

[the_flyswatter]

A better solution is to install WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) to manage Windows Updates. You get complete control over what updates get installed. And the machines will download the updates from your local server, instead of the internet.

It can be downloaded for free from here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updat eservices/default.mspx

Why so cagey?

[LordSnooty]

I've spent the day co-ordinating my department's response to the auto-install of IE7, since several of our apps are incompatible. We've had to block it with the reg key. But why are they so cagey about the actual release date? "This month" isn't good enough, I need a precise date if I'm to avoid a phalanx of users unable to use business-critical web sites. What can be so hard about it? Have they not set a date themselves? If not, why say "this month"? They bang on in their blog about how we ought to be ready, and here's a load of tools to help you, but we won't give you the exact date, that would ruin the game, right?

Re:Why so cagey?

[Kelson]

My guess: They don't want to see headlines saying "IE7 delayed again!" if they find some last-minute problem.

As for the deluge of incompatible users, keep in mind that the summary is incorrect, and it's not going to be an automatic update until next month (the exact wording is "a few weeks after it's available for download"). So that should limit the initial problems to early adopters.

Incidentally, IE7 RC1 has been out since August. I trust you've been working on updating your apps for the last six weeks, and just need time to finish?

Re:Why so cagey?

[LordSnooty]

I trust you've been working on updating your apps for the last six weeks, and just need time to finish?

Actually it's the vendor at fault, so what can you do? We only support it.

Re:Why so cagey?

[Kelson]

Actually it's the vendor at fault, so what can you do? We only support it.

Sorry to hear it. Good luck with the damage control (and, more importantly, convincing the vendor to fix their product!)

Re:They just need to make our jobs a little harder

[Scott872004]

I think Microsoft loves to make changes like this that secure a workforce of people like us to be dependent on them, they are not doing this without regard to the amount of work that will be necessary to bring IE7 into widespread use, alot of that PITA is under the radar to the users; and they see this as a way of causing an economy of IT people to be dependant on Microsoft. I think the subtle action of Microsoft when they make changes like this gives more leverage to anybody screaming monopoly, nobody cares about stuff like this, this is just what they do... but thier teeth get sank deeper and deeper into IT when they do things like this and that is the important factor for Microsoft.

You've got a few weeks to prepare

[Kelson]

MS won't be pushing it out to automatc updates until a few weeks after it's been released for download. I'm guessing November's round of patches.

Even then, it looks like even the "automatic" installation will still be interactive. So instead of just installing it, it'll bring up a screen saying "You can get an updated Internet Explorer! Do you want it?"

Not this IE6 user

[fprintf]

I highly doubt that this IE6 user will get any patches to IE anytime soon. As a user behind an entire team of corporate security experts our machines are locked down. So make any plans for not supporting IE6 cautiously, there are probably millions of us locked into IE6 for the next 12 months or more!

(home is a different story, I'll probably get IE7 as soon as I can just to see what all the fuss is about)

Firefox the memory hog

[DrDitto]

This morning I loaded Firefox 1.5.something on my Windows XP laptop, entered cnn.com for news. 10 minutes later Firefox was chewing up 65MB of memory and causing my laptop to drag.

I'm thrilled to get tabs on a browser that doesn't have a memory leak.

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[Hymer]

Could someone pls. direct me to that leak... I've searched for it for the last 2 years & I can't find anything that match your description...
I think your OS is incompatible with FireFox... and it is probably done on purpose.
...but then again, I do only use FireFox on W2K, SuSE and OS X.

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[DrDitto]

Just google "Firefox memory leak". Or keep the same instance of Firefox open for a long time.

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[bunratty]

65 MB of memory usage is normal for a browser. I tried Opera 9 when it first came out, and it was using over 100 MB on the first day. I wouldn't consider either browser a "memory hog".

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[Hymer]

I do know that a lot of people a writing about those problems... I'm just saying that I cant find the leak...
I keep my FireFox open for 48 hours every weekend... with no problems.

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[VGPowerlord]

I'm thrilled to get tabs on a browser that doesn't have a memory leak.

Here you go!

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[VGPowerlord]

I'm not going to ask what you were doing, but right now, with 4 tabs open, one of which has the Quicktime plugin loaded, Opera 9.02 is only using 61MB of RAM on my computer.

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[svallarian]

I think it has to do more with flash that Firefox. I don't recall having memory leaks when I didn't have the flash plug in installed.

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[m85476585]

To mostly fix the memory leak: Make sure you have the latest version installed (1.5.0.7) Go to about:config Create a new boolean called config.trim_on_minimize, set to true If you have Adblock, install Adblock plus (it should act as an update)

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[bunratty]

You can easily find instances of Opera using more memory than that: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[VGPowerlord]

1. Other than telling us Opera is "consuming 100000kB," the user doesn't give any details.

2. Beta versions have bugs. This is something testing is supposed to get rid of.

3. I tried this for 10 minutes, but memory usage hadn't gone past 67MB. I'm not going to wait the whole 3 hours to test it, though.

4. This is the only actual real world example. Yes, Opera performs poorly on this page, but so do Internet Explorer and Firefox. It's a very good example of a badly designed page.

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[bunratty]

Other than telling us Opera is "consuming 100000kB," the user doesn't give any details.

I don't understand the point of this comment. When Firefox users complain about memory usage, they don't give any details either. It seems like both Opera and Firefox users report the same typical memory usage of about 100 MB, and they both describe memory problems.

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[VGPowerlord]

Similarly, I can describe a memory problem I had with Firefox 1.5.0.7.

Extensions present:
Adblock Plus
Adblock Filterset.G
DownThemAll
FlashBlock

I had three tabs open.
1. Was browsing /.
2. Was open to the PHP manual
3. Was browsing Home of the Underdogs's Hall of Belated Fame and was about 20 pages in to it.

Firefox's memory usage was at 721MB. To repeat that so you don't think it was a typo: 721MB.

So yes, I'm going to conclude that it has a memory leak.

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[rifter]

Could someone pls. direct me to that leak... I've searched for it for the last 2 years & I can't find anything that match your description...
I think your OS is incompatible with FireFox... and it is probably done on purpose. ...but then again, I do only use FireFox on W2K, SuSE and OS X.

For me it wasn't the memory leaks so much as the CPU consumption (spiking and then staying at 100% CPU) that burned me. And really I only saw it on XP, though some people said that they saw it on Linux, I did not mainly because the version of Linux I was using (Ubuntu) locked in the version of FireFox. It hit me on one of the early versions of 1.5, I believe it may have been 1.5.0.1 . There was the option to roll back to 1.0.7, but given the fact that 1.5.0.1 was a security fix that was a bit laughable coming from a browser which, let's face it, has a little extra security as its main selling point. And the real dealbreaker was reading all the reports from users who were having this problem, and the Mozilla developers publically saying they had no intention of fixing it and could you please stop telling us about it because we really do not care what do you want for free you ingrate pusbags. After years of using and promoting, ( even mandating! ) Mozilla and then Firefox, I had to go look for another browser.

I used Opera for awhile, but it was really strange. There were a lot of skins to choose from, and the default one was pretty ugly. Adding on customizations to try and make the interface a little more manageble from a usability standpoint as well as from a standpoint of "my god I have to look at that interface all day can it please not hurt my eyes so." I thought I had used Opera many years back and it had a reasonable interface. But now it seems they wanted to differentiate themselves. It's usually not a good idea for UI to come up with strange new ways to taunt the user and exciting alien landscapes on which lay all control of your application.

Suffice it to say I got lucky. I don't know whether the guys who were decrying all user input changed their minds or whether someone else picked up the ball, open source and all that. I have more interesting things than mozdev mailing lists to read, on my browser, except when it's broken, in which case, well then I have to use another one to figure out how to fix it. All I know is I gave up on browsing with firefox on windows for a few months and only used linux or IE (sparingly) and then one day I decided to bite the bullet and try again. As I write this from work Firefox 1.5.0.7 is happily giving me 35 windows with 4-8 tabs per window with a negligable memory footprint and pretty much no CPU usage as God intended. And having confirmed that I put that version on all my machines. It does provide a bit of a cautionary tale. Whether you are using open source or closed source software you are still at the mercy of the "vendor" unless you are ready to rewrite it yourself. And the fact that there is no browser on earth as good as firefox in any way shape or form is a bit scary, because it constitutes a new wrinkle in vendor lock in precisely the same way that no one has been able to outdo Outlook in the areas people use it for works for Microsoft.

Open Source won out this time. But the cry of the developers does tend to remind one that you will only get bugfixes and features if the developers feel like coding them or are forced to by their boss.

Re:Firefox the memory hog

[rifter]

I spoke too soon. It looks like the 100%cpu thing is still happening occasionally. There isn't much to go on; today when it happened I only had 5 firefox windows up, mostly with only one tab. None of the pages were dynamic, either. I expect to see that sometimes if there are flash pages or some other dynamic code, stuff that self-refreshes, etc. But if the page has already been rendered and is not being refreshed, there is no applet or flash plugin being run because of the page... what could firefox possibly be doing with all those cycles?

IE7-Only sites start soon

[alohatiger]

Probably a few days after IE7 comes out we'll have "new and improved" websites that only work on IE7.

Well hells donkeys...

[Kenja]

Guess I'd better get started testing it for compatibility with my web application.

Re:Well hells donkeys...

[Anonymous Coward]

And with 9 months of public betas and 6 weeks of a release candidate you waited until now to test it why?

Is this Goodbye Non-MS Browsers?

[Toreo asesino]

Bearing in mind for the majority of users, when presented with a question - they'll just click "yes" to make it go away, I suspect this is a very under-hand tactic to render non-IE browsers as non-default.

Think about it - a message will pop-up saying "Want to upgrade to the new shiny IE? (y/n)"....one restart later, and the next question will be "Want to make it your default browser? (y/n)".....and just like that, poor Firefox/Opera is sat there collecting dust.

It's funny; I have a good friend working in Microsoft. Apparently, Microsoft aren't worried about Windows being pushed to the side, nor Office, nor any of the "paid" stuff....it's IE and WMP that's getting Microsoft hot under the collar right now. I believe it's starting to show.

Re:Is this Goodbye Non-MS Browsers?

[Mixel]

That's the first thing I thought of when reading the post. Surprised that more people at slashdot haven't picked up on it. Maybe most people are just glad to be rid of the classic hassles of IE6.

Re:Is this Goodbye Non-MS Browsers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about it - a message will pop-up saying "Want to upgrade to the new shiny IE? (y/n)"....one restart later, and the next question will be "Want to make it your default browser? (y/n)".....and just like that, poor Firefox/Opera is sat there collecting dust.

It might not even ask about the "default" change. That wording could be in the license agreement or otherwise buried and non-obvious.

This is probably the real reason for pushing this in an "update" and not available as a separate download.

You can kiss those stats of rising Firefox use goodbye.

Re:Is this Goodbye Non-MS Browsers?

[snarkth]

Does anyone know for sure whether they are going to respect the old default browser settings? Just knowing will be helpful to a lot of people.

  *snark*

Re:Is this Goodbye Non-MS Browsers?

[Falesh]

Other browsers will always have the market of those who compare the software they use and select the best one. IE is hardly going to beat Opera or Firefox in the best browser awards any time soon. Opera is the best browser for mobile devices, so they don't need a large share of the desktop market to continue. In fact if mobile browsing increases Opera might become the familiar browser to people giving it a knock on benefit to the desktop version. Firefox doesn't need to be popular to keep enough people coding for it. In short I can't see IE killing it's competition.

Not true

[yesthatmcgurk]

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/10/09/Last-E xpert-Zone-Chat-Before-We-Ship-IE.aspx

Too many sites are not ready for IE7

[Com2Kid]

I use IE at home, and I still encounter sites that alert me "You must have IE6 or Firefox to browse this site!" ....

Oh also I have a number of games that rely upon being able to do not so secure things on locally stored web pages that IE7 prohibits, and I cannot play those games at all now!

Re: Fabricated Recommendation?

[bunratty]

Actually according to Secunia 'they' should be using Opera.

I must have missed that Secunia is recommending users to switch to Opera. Can you point me to where they say that?

Acronyms gone wild

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>WTF's a RFTA?

Regional Fuel Tax Agreement, of course. What else could it be?

Website designers worst nightmare

[germanStefan]

I wonder how many websites out there have tested their designs and CSS with IE7? Many people use IE and if its getting pushed, then when they log in after the update, they'll be having some problems with many websites methinks. I haven't ever used ie7 so I don't know if all the IE css bugs (features) still are present or if they somehow improved the CSS engine.

It would have been nice to MS to announce 6 months in advance that IE7 will be pushed, so get the betas and test your website away with it. I'm assuming some devs did that anyway, but I'm on Linux so I don't care to much...anyone know if IE7 works under wine?

Re:They just need to make our jobs a little harder

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare, yo. VMWare.

Thanks for the warning

[Admiral Justin]

I had tried the RC about a month back.

I then was accepted into the windows live essentials beta, requiring IE6.

So, I follow MS's uninstallation instructions...

One unrecoverable reboot loop and reformat later: I do not like IE7.

What about IE6 updates?

[a16]

So if MS are pushing out IE to it's genuine customers, but won't let non-genuine advantage machines get the update, are they going to continue to put out security updates to IE6 - which in theory will only be used by non-genuine customers?

I fear not, especially with Vista and it's uber anti-piracy coming along in the not to distant future. They need something to get people to see the upgrade as worthwhile.

I personally think the days of being able to run a non-genuine key are over, it'll be near impossible soon to stay secure on one of these copies. That's why I made the switch completely to linux last month, after dual booting (for games) for what must be 4 years. And before I get yelled at for being a pirate, I have 3 completely genuine and unused XP licenses in my house, all tied to a specific vendor's hardware restore CD. So I've never felt particularly guilty using a "pirate" corp edition license key to run windows without much bother on a custom-built desktop.

Re:What about IE6 updates?

[Kelson]

are they going to continue to put out security updates to IE6

Short answer: yes. Long answer: depends on what version of Windows you're using.

Basically, as long as your version of Windows is supported, the version of IE that came with it will also be supported. Keep in mind that Microsoft considers service packs to be different "versions" for purposes of their lifecycle policy, and older SPs drop out of support before the newer ones do.

So IE6 will get security patches as long as Windows 2000 SP4 and Windows XP SP2 are still supported. Of course, the patches might not work on older versions like Win2k SP3 or WinXP SP1.

This may surprise you, BUT

[Anonymous Coward]

many people don't use browsers to surf for porn or wares. For them the browser security is relatively unimportant.

Mod Insightful? What the...

[Logiksan]

How exactly does a nitpick on a singluar typo that's completely out of the scope of the OP get modded "Insightful?" The link is still valid, there's no clarification neccessary.

We should have preliminary competence exams before you qualify for mod points. =P

Tomorrow is accurate...

[Hillgiant]

...for sufficiently large values of Today.

Only those who purchase Vista....

[GuyverDH]

The article notes that the IE7 "containment wall" protected mode will not be available on XP, but only to those who purchase Vista.
In other words, "No one will have the containment wall?"

Re:They just need to make our jobs a little harder

[Anonymous Coward]

It really depends on where you work, what your audience uses - and also what the policies of your IS department are. I work for a rather large corporation (which tends to be very conservative about upgrading systems, etc), and I -know- for a fact that we won't be rushing to support IE7, not, at least, until 6 months to a year after its release - after being thoroughly tested and observed for any potential security risks.

I think you meant "DO NOT WANT"

[Anonymous Coward]

here's lookin at you, fark.

Re:They just need to make our jobs a little harder

[LanMan04]

Check out this service (yes, it costs money):

http://www.browsercam.com/default.aspx

Lets you VNC (or whatever) into a huge bank of machines (virtual or not, I don't know) that allow you to test your pages in every platform/browser combo in the known universe. Pretty cool, I wish I had thought of it.

MicroCra... is serving virus

[thorkyl]

Update your scanner and go to Microsoft IE 7 website and sit back and giggle as you are served a virus

Interesting

[YetAnotherBob]

One measurement site shows IE up, another shows it down. This in the same 3 month time period. I wonder what they are really measuring?

I'm sure the Mozilla site shows high Firefox usage, while the Microsoft update site shows high IE usage. Neither really means anything.

Yeah, IE7's CSS is still broken

[CritterNYC]

IE7 fixes enough stuff in its CSS handling that the old IE6 hacks don't work anymore. But it still has enough broken CSS stuff that a valid CSS layout with floats and clears in a containing DIV will wind up borked in IE7 even though it will work right in every modern browser (Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror).

So, essentially, IE7 isn't really a modern browser, it's a slightly hacked IE6 rendering engine with a prettied up interface (though "prettied" is certainly in the eye of the beholder... I, personally, don't like it).

From a web dev point of view I hope all get it

[Falesh]

If people without a genuine Windows key don't get the update it will mean we need to support IE 6's aggravating CSS performance for a long time to come.

Re:From a web dev point of view I hope all get it

[cheshire_cqx]

Unless they install this update.

But it still has serious usability bugs

[SpryGuy]

I have not once been able to get IE7 to launch a windows media player file (audio MP3 or video WMV) successfully. It launches the Media Player as expected, which then hangs consuming tons of CPU forever, until you actively kill it with Task Manager.

The suggested work-around of disabling the anti-phishing filter doesn't work (and isn't acceptable anyway).

LOTS of people are experiencing this problem. I can't believe they're pushing it out with this serious of an issue. I've provided them logs and such, but they only got them last Thursday, so I doubt there's been any fix (hell, I doubt they've even looked at them yet).

It's completely irresponsible to be pushing it out. Looking at the list of outstanding "large" bugs, and knowing the problems I myself have had with it, it's not yet ready for primetime.

Re:But it still has serious usability bugs

[ArtStone]

Add me to the list, although a slightly different problem...

My web site does a 302 redirect to launch the appropriate media player via the web browser (WMP, .mp3, m3u, Quicktime, RealPlayer, etc...)

The problem with IE7 is that if the URI is an mms:// type (Micosoft Multimedia Streaming)

Example:
mms://64.92.199.74/KPAM-AM

(KPAM is a news/talk radio station in Portland, Oregon)

If you do a 302 redirect to that location:, you get a DNS "Server not found" error, which is extremely odd, since that URI does not contain a domain name, so no DNS lookup should be necessary.

In more detail, if you have a copy of IE7, click on this link:

http://streamingradioguide.com/listens.php?station id=1130
    (Again, this is KPAM)

This is the response you get:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 09:07:21 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.0
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 09:07:21 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
Location: mms://64.92.199.74/KPAM-AM
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

I don't see anything odd that I've done wrong - this works on IE6 and all other browsers. All 230 stations using mms:// URIs fail. Putting the mms:// link directly into the browser, they work.

If this flaw isn't fixed by the time IE7 ships, I'll have to redirect the visitors away from MMS streams to other stream types (mostly m3u/pls mp3 playlists). MMS has definite advantages like adaptive playback speeds, automatic protocol support detection that make it useful when it works. Since MMS is Microsoft's streaming server software, this is a big puzzle to me why they haven't caught this in testing. I could see the anti-phishing filter being the explanation, but stating a workaround doesn't get the bugs fixed.

Re:But it still has serious usability bugs

[SpryGuy]

Have you tried turning off the anti-phishing filter and seeing if that has an effect for you?

You can block auto-upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

To block auto-upgrade, check out http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=4516A6F7-5D44-482B-9DBD-869B4A90159C&displa ylang=en (IE7BlockerToolkit). For more details, you can read TechWeb: Microsoft Issues Tool To Block IE 7 Auto Updates

Is there a way to roll back

[baggins2001]

Since some of our road warriors are probably going to install the update and we will probably have a few users install it internally. Is there a way to roll back to IE6?
We already know that some of our internal web site is not compatible with IE7.

Re:Is there a way to roll back

[Anonymous Coward]

Just un-install IE7.

Re:They just need to make our jobs a little harder

[poulbailey]

I know VMWare Server and VPC are free, but won't you need another Windows XP license?

Really easy way

[Shawn is an Asshole]

IEs4Linux.

Run it's script and it will ask you what versions you want to install (5, 5.5, 6) and it will install it. It also can install Flash 9. This makes things really easy. I have access to three versions of IE on my Linux desktop, Opera, Firefox and Konqueror. For IE7 I have that in VMWare. To my left is my PowerBook with Safari, Firefox, and Opera (though I can test for all of these under Linux).

Re:Really easy way

[Spliffster]

How do you test safari under linux ? i have searched for source and build instructions to get a linux build of safari, without any luck (it's not the same as the khtml project anymore, the differ slightly, so ... konquerer is not enough to test for safari).

Re:Really easy way

[Shawn is an Asshole]

I test Safari with Konqueor. I'm aware that Webkit and khtml are slightly different, but I have yet to come across anything they render differently. It's good enough for developing, plus it's what I use as my guide (my editor of choice is Quanta).

When done I test everything on Linux, OS X (with Safari), Windows XP (VMware), Windows 2000 (VMWare), and Windows 98 (VMWare). The main difference I usually see are font issues (each seems to render then differently).

Why even mention no 'protected mode'...

[TheNetAvenger]

The article notes that the IE7 "containment wall" protected mode will not be available on XP, but only to those who purchase Vista.

Why even mention this. XP is NOT capable of running a browser with 'lower than user' level of privledges. Which is what protected mode means.

I think the person writing this post has no idea what this means, or they would not of made a point of it.

IE7 still has a massive security model upgrade from IE6, even if it can't run as less than a normal user as it can on Vista.

Oh, and anything to get the mass public off of IE6, even if it moving them to IE7, it is worth it and a good thing. The faster MS can get this out to users, the better. (Even for webiste developers that can just say,"This site only works with IE7 or a browser that supports better CSS specifications, if you are running XP download IE7 or Firefox, and if you are running an older version of Windows, just go download Firefox now..."

XUL

[Shawn is an Asshole]

Apparently someone's never heard of XUL...

MS Blogs slashdotted...got a mirror?

[PoconoPCDoctor]

Hmm...does this not speak volumes about the utter and absolute power of Slashdot? Of course, the MS blog site might not be hosted on a high capacity server, but dag!

rc1 hosed me

[BroadbandBradley]

I installed rc1 and got into a reboot loop. I got out of the loop but now I can't use windows update because IE won't launch. I don't even have the internet options control panel available from windows control panel. All I need IE for is to run windows update because outside of that firefox rules.

Hell the only reason MS exists on this machine is so the Kids can play at some games. after messing with that reboot loop hell I went into ubuntu and upgaraded the whole thing to 6.04 with only a few clicks and no errors or conflicts.

of course if you launch ie6setup.exe it only complains that a newer version is available and doesn't offer you the option of downgrading.

and people think Linux is hard... Windows is hell!!!

Re:rc1 hosed me

[mrbester]

http://windizupdate.com/ should sort you out. Use the fox, install the plugin and accept the data request. Alternatively, download Autopatcher and apply at your leisure.

Update

[kbox]

An anonymous reader points to this Microsoft blog posting where it is revealed that the article linked above is incorrect. IE7 will not be pushed tomorrow.

They decided to push Firefox instead.

Re:Update

[Ergasiophobia]

..And then we woke up. Unfortunately. Honestly though, that would probably be both a good and a bad thing for Firefox. Just like with IE, it would give some people more reason to test and examine the Firefox code for bugs and such that could be used for malicious means, of course then again with the rate that the Firefox Dev team puts out patches any found problems wouldn't cause too much damage.

IE7 CSS fixes only if you use a DTD!

[Tumbleweed]

If this is still the case from what they said earlier, you're only going to see CSS improvement with IE7 if you use a DTD (which, let's face it, most of you probably aren't). So, time to suck it up, you lazy bastards, and start using a DTD. While you're at it, learn which ones trigger quirks mode in IE6 and which ones don't. As far as I know, IE7 doesn't work with Windows 2000, right? There are still quite a lot of people on W2K...

Re:IE7 CSS fixes only if you use a DTD!

[pe1chl]

Even with a DTD, the CSS support still sucks.
I use a DTD for IE6 as well, to fix the boxmodel, and with this same DTD IE7 still shows positioning and stacking bugs.
(absolute and relative positioning do not work according to spec, and positioned elements still start a new stacking context making z-index inoperative)

Re:They just need to make our jobs a little harder

[RvLeshrac]

No, actually, you can simply run an unactivated installation of XP. There are issues with security, but one assumes you'll be installing XPSP2 and not using the machine for anything more than IE6 testing of a single site, so that point is moot.

Default Applications

[mattcoz]

The "Internet" and "E-Mail" shortcuts just point to the default application, so these people that would just click on "Internet" will use Firefox or Opera or whatever you set their default to.

More of the same

[Anonymous Coward]

More of the expected from Kdawson. Anybody mind throwing up a vote to see if it is just me or if everyone thinks that he posts the most worthless stories here?

No more telnet:// support

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks God for that, because that telnet:// thing (whatever it is) was causing all sorts of security problems, especially for the people using that Linux application (I read about it on some blog) </sarcasm>