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Microsoft Drops Hints on IE8
benuski writes "Lost in the hype about Microsoft's new Siverlight platform, there has been some information surfacing about IE8. It will include improvements in RSS, CSS, and AJAX support, and will follow Firefox 3 in supporting microformats. Also, the developers are going to try and improve UI customization, which is one of the main criticisms of IE7."
Amen. I want to see DOM 2 support (not just their crappy 1.0 support from 1998), CSS that works, caching that actually works, Canvas (ok, so it's not a W3C standard; but IE is the only one missing it), SVG, a Javascript debugger that doesn't suck, so on and so forth.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Microsoft announced a few major partners who were going to adopt Silverlight. I wonder, however, whether any of those were "wins" of content providers who were previously using Flash video ... or if they were merely content providers who were already using Windows Media and are merely going to take advantage of an easier way to distribute it.
Anyone know?
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By default, I let ads through. However, the instant $AD_NETWORK serves up an abusive ad, such as a fake dialog box, or circumventing Firefox's popup blocker, or playing audio by default, or anything else obnoxious (see also: Intellitxt, Rovion), said network goes into my blocklist. Needless to say, blocking the bad guys makes the browsing experience a whole lot nicer.
Google ads don't really bother me - they're text ads, rasy enough to ignore.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
"You can't polish a turd."
.NET out of its cloning labs, but it turned out to be a cheesy mix of Visual Basic API and Java, and nobody wants to catch the clap from sleeping with Microsoft. We have RDP, but seriously, can we get serious? Whatever this Silverlight thing Microsoft is shilling is poison from inception; I dismiss it knowing it only from this article.
You can if you freeze it first.
-- attribution unknown
On a serious note, I'm ashamed, ASHAMED, that browsers have become thin clients. They suck at it, AJAX is a horrible kludge, they are all incompatible, that's not what they are for, etc. I thought Java would be the thin client foundation for the future, all that was needed was a small caching/comms/app management environment. No...that was too obvious, and nobody wanted to put Sun in a position to call any shots. Microsoft pulls
This is something that some people have problems with and others don't it seems. I'm not sure what makes the difference, but I certainly can back up his claims.
I would guess it's probably an extension that's causing this, but I'm not sure; I only have a few installed and enabled now.
(I just restarted FF a couple times so now it's only at 55 MB with 2 tabs, but when I posted that comment above I was over 400 MB of mem usage (with a VM size over 900 MB) with 10 tabs.
So he's probably not making that up.
Here's a list of things browsers do better than any other client application platform out there:
- Superlative, lightning fast text layout and reflow, including support for all languages
- Sandboxed code from untrusted sources that you can actually trust enough to run routinely without security prompts
- Extremely robust and effective yet easy to use transparent caching mechanism makes "installation" irrelevant
- Stateless nature forces architecture choices on developers that turn out to be a good idea anyway (despite the kicking and screaming)
- Emphasis on declarative content and text instead of procedural code and opaque binary blobs enables automated processing, unintended features: search engines, back button, bookmarking, form autocomplete and spell check, password managers, download managers, tabbed browsing, GreaseMonkey
- Easy centralized control using proxies
- almost completely platform-agnostic
- Free development tools
- Practically instant start-up
- Tiny runtime size (Firefox is a 5.7 MB install; Java and
.NET are how much again?)
- "Everything is a hyperlink" user interface simplifies and standardizes user experience
I'm not even counting the installed base as an advantage here, so don't complain that alternatives fail because of user apathy toward installation of alternatives; these are genuine advantages that the browser has over alternatives, ignoring its ubiquity. Now, the implementation of all of these features in browsers have flaws that I'm sure you can name, and browsers have plenty of other faults too. But no other alternative provides all of these features in one package. These are *all* really important features with huge advantages in the real world that any replacement for the browser as an application platform will need to address.main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
...XP incompatibility.
Worst. Signature. Ever.