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Microsoft Drops Hints on IE8

Posted by samzenpus on from the new-and-improved dept.

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."

3 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. Re:You know what I want? by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I want a little more attention paid to standards.

    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
  2. Re:Extensions by EvanED · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:I dont care... by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Everyone hates the browser, but nobody can replace it. Instead of denying it, it's time we (as a profession) accept that the browser actually *is* a good platform for applications, and start figuring out why, so that when we try to replace it we don't end up removing its best features.

    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?" `":" #");}