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IE7 Released and Available for Download
Luis Escalante writes "After over a year and a half, IE7 has been released to the public as of Monday afternoon. Download it directly here. Word hit the streets after several mangers of the IE division posted on the IE blog."
(Yes, strictly speaking 5 years is "over a year and a half", but the point remains.)
Once again, competition wins. Microsoft, after leveraging their monopoly power to win the browser wars, had summarily decided that there was no longer anything else in IE that needed work. IE was effectively frozen for years, bugs and all - cracked open, by stern policy, only for security fixes.
It took a free software effort with no hope of profit to do so, but MS has at long, long last bestirred themselves to code again. This has once again demonstrated the baseline of what MS' monopoly will do. Since it is not economically feasible to confront MS's monopoly powers, the commercial market for product X (browsers, office apps, OSs, etc) is effectively destroyed (sorry Opera), but at a minimum, MS is forced to compete against what the community can develop for free.
Never forget - human beings are lazy by design, and so are our organizations. No business, no politician, no religious leader, will exhibit much virtue except under threat. This is why competition and democracy have been largely effective as policy.
Whether MS wins or loses the browser war (or these days, the browser cold war), or the OS war, we have already won, because we have pushed them to innovate, to make their products more stable, more credible, and more powerful.
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Actually, there will be quite a few people downloading it. I upgraded to IE7 beta to test out my pages on that. Now I'll upgrade to the final. Sadly, you still can't ignore IE.
How come this is on Slashdot before news about Flash Player 9 for Linux?
Let's see now.. It's the world's most widely used internet browser. It's probably the most commonly used application in the world. It marks the date when Microsoft finally started to worry about Firefox. It is a huge improvement over IE6. Yeah, I guess that makes this news more important, despite the fact that Slashdot is more Linux oriented.
Last but not least, your complaint is ignorant because not only is there no such thing as a race for news, but a lot of people might find the IE vs FF wars more interesting, too. You know, almost 90 percent of the world's users browse with IE, so there's a pretty good chance that at least a few Slashdot users will enjoy this story.
Full Tilt
I completely agree that not having *all* of the CSS support is a bummer. However, it is a minor piece of the puzzle in the grand scheme of things. You can't count on all of your users having an updated browser. You (in general) have to code to the lowest common denominator. Sites are just now starting to drop support NN4, but IE5 is still a big player. So...this is actually a headline for about 3-4 years in the future when people are considering having to accomodate IE7 and its shortcomings, and consequentially considering dropping support. Today, I still sit in backwards compatibility hell...tomorrow doesn't look good either.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
There are many web developers here. IE7 will affect them much more than Flash for Linux.
Hmm... Number of people worldwide who use Internet Explorer vs. number of people worldwide who (a) use Linux, (b) want to have Flash animations in their browser, and (c) are OK with installing the proprietary Flash player.
I'd say based on numbers alone, the new IE release qualifies as "stuff that matters."
(P.S. Thanks for the link -- that's great news!)
It's completely telling that the first comment on that page, is a comment by a guy who's worried IE7 is going to trash his computer.
If that's the first reaction people have, firefox has a pretty good chance.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Hmmm... a cleaner interface is a bad thing because it was Microsoft that innovated?
IE7 leaves much more space open on your screen for actual web browsing compared to IE6 (or Firefox, or most any browser minus lynx). Everything's accessible from a toolbar that uses the same icons Windows and IE have used since the dawn of time. And your precious menus that'll make it look like a "real Windows app" are hidden by your "alt" key.
Office 2007 uses a "ribbon" - a tabbed toolbar. It's pretty damn slick - you don't need your drawing tools open unless you're editing a picture, so you go to your drawing tab. (Or, you can use the toolbar that hovers by your mouse when you start editing a picture, or the formatting toolbar that appears by your mouse when you select text, etc.) It's so much cleaner, and intuitive.
But Microsoft changed things. They're not ugly and just-barely functional anymore. That's why I'm getting a Mac.
DATABASE WOW WOW
What's that sound?
Oh yeah, it's thousands of webmasters scrambling to test their sites on the latest mutilation of web standards.
Dude, Flash is one of the few things that sucks worse than IE. On any OS it's buggy, poorly designed, and frequently misused. When Flash is cleaned up and opened up enough to be fully intergrated into IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari in the least then it might be worth caring about. The general concept of plug-ins has proven to lead to a sucky web browsing experience even if the average user isn't aware that it's these crappy plug-ins making their browser crash, run slow, give confussing plug-in required messages, and sites that are poorly indexed by search engines, have strange hard to use interfaces, and difficult to use for people with accessibility needs.
Just say no to plug-ins for things like Flash. They can be useful at times but in the vast majority of uses they are only used because programmers are to lazy, stupid, or harried by lazy stupid bosses to use more compatible solutions that do the exact same things.
IE7 isn't that big of news to us geeks but it is a huge relief to us as it goes mainstream - it isn't as good as Firefox, Safari, or Opera but it is worlds better than IE6 and will make it much easier to develop nice websites without having to disable everything cool because it doesn't work in IE. Of course it'll be a few years before the majority of users have updated but at least the process has begun.
If only Microsoft wasn't so lame as to make it difficult for developers to run IE6 and IE7 side by side.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Dude, Flash is one of the few things that sucks worse than IE. On any OS it's buggy, poorly designed, and frequently misused.
I don't think I agree with that analysis. With the arrival of things like YouTube and Google Video, it's starting to be used properly and implemented well. These companies get large numbers of people using their services mainly because they can pretty much assume Flash 7 is installed on the vast majority of browsers and they know they have it available. Would streaming video over the net be anywhere near as popular if they required an MPG-compatible embedded media player? I rather doubt it; we had those before, and they never got as popular.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.