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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."
Patches are probably out already. I'm sure there are some hackers who have gotten code and already written spyware for it.
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I understand why they wish to compare it to Firefox, but there are other browsers out there. Now, I'm not saying that they should go and compare it to Links, Lynx, or Netscape, but how about another browser like Opera?
UI Customization is one of the main criticisms of IE? Darn, I guess I read /. too much. For some reason I was under the impression that the criticisms were:
1) Security (or lack thereof)
2) ActiveX
3) The fact that it came from Microsoft
4-50 other things
51) UI Customization or skinning or whatever useless thing that is
Seriously, if that is one of the main criticism, then no wonder IE is the dominant browser on the planet (which I say tongue-in-cheek as I type this in Firefox so I have spell checking).
Here's the link to the IE Blog posting:
t o-expect-from-ie-at-mix07.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/04/19/what-
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Surely at this stage it is just hype. With MS you can only consider something to be information when it has been shipping for a few versions. Most announcements from MS have a lot of hype about fancy features that don't make the cut.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Until Microsoft figures out a way for people to create extensions easily, without having to know C++ and COM/ActiveX, they're not going to get people like me back. I don't care about tabs. I don't care about skins. I don't care about aggregators or fancy micro-whatevers. I don't care about security (in the sense that I was secure enough with IE since my IQ is above that of a jellyfish). Without the extensions and the community that needs to build behind them, it's a no-go for me at least. Holy shit, it's 2007 and I still don't have an easy way to turn off Flash on demand. Really, WTF?
Firefox is a widely used browser and is the biggest competition to IE. No offense to opera, but its not as strong or as popular as firefox.
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
I want to see "it looks like you're typing an email" and animated puppies running off into the distance when I turn off animations
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
I want a little more attention paid to standards. What is the point of developing standards compliant, accessible websites if the most used browser in the market screws it up without crappy hacks? Oh, wait.. Notgetting sued is a pretty good reason, I guess. Still, the overhead IE creates for web developers (especially ones in areas with a low budget for design work) tends to make things cost much more than they should for the client.
We'll probably just see them get a little above 60% compliance on this round, though. Apathy is great, isn't it?
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
This is real and (IMHO) the computing experience for many users right-now.
So are MS trying to pull back users who have turned to an alternative browser, or they are desperately trying to plug the drip drip drip of users who still haven't moved?
Either way they will have to make a hyperspace leap to get ahead of the curve.
I began using FF at something like v0.83 and its now mature, secure and stable.
After occasionally dipping the big toe into linux over the past 5-6 years (Redhat 7.3; Fedora 3, 4, 5), just this week I installed ubuntu 7.04 and have fallen in love with it. Restored a ghost backup of XP to a partition and have booted into it just once.
IE's CSS hassles should have been fixed years ago - MS really needs to do more to stop the millions of users like me that are dabbling and finding that OSS is more than just a viable alternative.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Confirming upgraded support for CSS, eh? This is almost as exciting as waiting for WinFS!
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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"It will include improvements in RSS, CSS, and AJAX support, and will follow Firefox 3 in supporting microformats." So it will simply copy features already in most other browsers. These "improvements" are simply things which should already be in IE7. (Maybe with the exception of microformats.) Still, it's just MS trying to play catchup, but by the time IE8 is released, Firefox, Safari, and Opera will have moved on to bigger and better things.
Microsoft representative: "You know that really nifty stuff the Firefox team said they're working on? Um... Yeah, we're doing all that too. And better. And with a pony. ...Ok, we lied about the pony."
The ______ Agenda
If Microsoft had been broken into a variety of little companies like the judge wanted 10 years ago, we'd all have much better products now because of the resulting competition.
Now it's time for Firefox (or Apple) to truly think out of the box and blow us all away with the next big thing. What's the next KILLER APP? We all know Microsoft won't do it first.
boxlight
It will include improvements in RSS, CSS, and AJAX support, and will follow Firefox 3 in supporting microformats.
I generally think Microsoft provides solid products and I rarely stumble upon problems with aged products. Look at Office, Windows XP and other operating systems, that are doing just fine.
Internet Explorer is one of the few big mistakes Microsoft has had. IE4 knocked out Netscape and after that, we have seen little and rather futile competition, with Opera being the exception. But even with the release of Firefox, Microsoft has been utterly ignorant. They don't care about perfecting the CSS support and I have little hopes for IE8 after seeing IE7. Sure, it is far better but why is it so damn hard to follow standards?
In my opinion, Microsoft only needs to follow the standards to regain some trust from its lost users and it should have done so with IE7 as it had several years to do what Mozilla did.
Full Tilt
How about the ridiculously unintuitive location of history in IE 7? You wouldn't believe how many customers who have updated to IE7 or use Vista ask me where the history icon went...
Will people ever go back to IE once they've switched to Firefox? Maybe, but it might be a good thing.
... well, I'll let you fill in the rest so I don't start any flame wars. Then when testing happens, they have to include these extensions.
Firefox lit a firecracker under the butts of Microsoft (who actually disbanded the IE team after IE6 --can you believe it?), and made them scramble to build a web browser that was a first in the world of Microsoft: it was standards compliant. Okay, actually, it wasn't, but it was a heck of a lot more so than the old IE, and for the first time MS actually paid attention to Web standards compliance. Whatever happens after that, we can thank Firefox for this historic watershed; even if people switch back to IE, it won't be to IE 6, and web page authors will realize that Microsoft doesn't necessarily dictate the standards.
In the same way, though, Firefox can't afford to be complacent. Microsoft has a long history of coming from behind and overtaking. There are quite a few ways in which Firefox could be improved, and if MS makes this improved browser IE8, then I can very well envision people switching back.
I think the main thing Firefox needs to do is manage its extensions. There was an interview on Slashdot in which one of the developers said that there was no need for the Mozilla Foundation to vet and officially support extensions, which I think flies in the face of common sense. The MozFound needs to pick three or four extensions and make sure they work --which would not be hard to do since they work now-- but officially make it part of Firefox. These extensions are: Adblock [Plus], NoScript,
Firefox could do with a few other improvements, and I'm sure other posters will happily list them, but the point is: Microsoft is fully capable of overtaking Firefox again. This is a good thing only if it spurs Firefox to greater heights. I don't want IE to actually end up overtaking Firefox, because I want the dominant browser on the Web to be a cross-platform one.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
wait a fucking minute. did i just make IE more attractive?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
When will they learn to hack an x64 flash plugin into IE6, 7, or even 8 already? Ubudoobie x64 and firefox are cracking white hot baby. I got this puppy firing on all flash fours with that nspluginwarper doobamajigger. Honestly, I love IE7 and all, but everytime I make love to it, I feel like firefox's hands have been all over it first - from tabs to customizing UI to ... you name it. Hey, I'm no fanboi either way fellas, but I call 'em like I see 'em. Microsoft ain't no turtle nor hare in this race - probably some granny with a cane taking the scenic route. It really is impressive when you stop and think how a collective group of worldwide contributors can surpass this organization in swift response to user demand. Personally, I think Microsoft is in dire need of further decentralization of their many software departments, or more personnel, or ... something. It use to be I only booted into Windows for the browser, now I only boot into XP when I'm not using a browser. Strange turn of events...
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Let's revert back to HTML 1.0 and be done with it. :)
I'm generally rabidly anti-Luddite, but the web seems so broken sometimes.
Let's start over and make content matter. Please?
You better add IE support for AmigaOS you bastards!
You can't polish a turd.
:-)*
I don't know why not. Just lay a couple of coats of varnish and viola, polished turd, a pretty good description of Vista if I do say so myself.
*It was a joke, okay? I actually like Vista. Best Solitaire ever.
What?
By the time the first betas are out, MS will have announced that IE8 is Vista only, and given the amount of time they took to produce IE7 (a token effort at best), it'll probably require Vista SP1 to function fully. Another year of development means another 18 to 24 months, probably.
If they want to impress web developers (who are the catalyst for people moving away from IE), they have to stop paying lip service to web standards. Until then, developers will continue to do everything they can to save themselves wasted time and effort dealing with IE, by eroding IE's market share.
As a designer/developer, I don't really give a damn about RSS improvements. This is merely something they can use to bloat a bullet list of improved features. Fixes to CSS, DOM, events, floats, javascript, and making IE into a worthwhile developer's tool would be much more appreciated. And get rid of hasLayout while you're at it.
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!
Completely OT, but actually, I'd imagine you could. I'm not too sure about making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, though. I guess you'd need some kind of silk pig? Mythbusters need to step up here, both of these are long overdue.
Ahem. Back to the issue at hand, this particular turd has proven to be highly moldable, and polish is what it is lacking. Yes, incompabilities and poor standard coverage is a bitch, but the technology itself is adequate. If you had to make a web page/web app/whatever you had in mind when you wrote your comment, but with the guarantee that all visitors would use the same recent and 100% standards compliant browser, what would your main complaint be?
Core HTML is designed to represent a static document, yes, but the vast majority of the web is representable as such, animated interactive flash ads and embedded multimedia aside. What's new is mostly ever fancier styling, and loading some of that static content in a dynamic way.
I am not seeing the signs of age, but of immaturity. Browsers have aquired new capabilities that have made them a viable platform for more complex content, but early adopters face the hazzle of incompatible and incomplete implementations.
Going from your post, I don't think you really want a better successor to HTML and the browser. You sound like you want something completely unrelated, maybe a zero-install securely sandboxed app delivery system, but you are being forced to implement it as a web app? (Guessing wildly, sorry in advance.) Did you perchance have anything specific in mind as a successor to the common web page? Maybe one could do it in something portable, extensible and modern like XML... Oh, wait.
In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
"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
I agree to a point. Bottom line is if it still uses ActiveX, its still beyond repair (security wise).
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Requiring Windows to run IE? This is exactly what Silverlight does. It requires that developers run windows. While the plugin will be cross platform all the development require proprietary tools plus windows. I will resist it as a user as long as is reasonable, but I will never touch it as a developer. I'm all for next generation web technologies but they need to have open development standards.
There are a plethora of UI addons for ie7
:P
oh, you wanted voluntary ie addons! sorry, my mistake
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How about making the installer work first. I just spent an hour trying to install IE 7 on my dad's computer. It still isn't installed.
Hmmm...maybe his anti-virus program really does work that well...
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The world is the way it is now, browsers are being used as thin clients because they are ubiquitous. Java is not used because it's always had a shitty install process, version management and was historically slow.
So, we have browsers that can do an awful lot installed on pretty much every single computer out there, why not use that as a nifty way of being able to deliver applications?
And if you're so pissed off with the incompatibilities with javascript/DHTML, why not use a great dev platform like Openlaszlo where you code in one language and output to either flash or DHTML?
I'm currently building a flash based app using it as you get away from the hell of browser incompatibilities by way of the standard flash player.
Unless you're in a position to change the world, there's very little to be gained by spending your time bitching about how certain, quite insignificant, things are the way they are. (And why are you 'ashamed'? Did you cause this to happen? How can you be ashamed for something you had no part in... unless, of course, you did).
When Microsoft pushed this update, it plain and outright broke a lot of our customers ability to even surf on the web. It was random for sure. I just kind of boil it down to MS just not getting it. Like releasing what I would consider a alpha release. They could ping out and get info back, etc. Just a support nightmare for a while, and yep.. we pointed them to MS support to fix their crap software, while recommending Firefox.
I can imagine what a ie8 release will bring... more headaches.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
Although you can do filtering at the proxy level, with this approach you can't reclaim valuable screen real estate. You will have large gaps and websites will generally look ugly. Been there, tried to block ads with squid - AdBlock is just much easier and more effective.
ok first off no, there is no 64bit plugin for windows either. All it is a 32bit browser with 32bit plugin. Again I posted a link to the adobe knowledge base which clearly states there are no 64 bit versions of the plugin for any OS. Also firefox is only available from what I can tell only as a 32bit binary from the mozilla site. In linux you have two options, either run the plugin through ndiswrapper, or you run a 32bit binary of firefox and the plugin as normal. You can find out how to on any linux distros wiki, such as the ubuntu wiki.
Sadly as the Month of Active X Bugs blog is illustrating this is true across all MS'Active X applications
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
I'm using both browsers and although Opera starts up faster (even faster than both, my old Mozilla Firebird 0.7 or Mozilla 0.9.x I still have installed) and generally is less of a resource hog I still prefer to use Firefox. Even though I need to restart it due to the memory leak problem (which is mitigated by the built in session manager). Why? One word: customization. If I can not get plug-ins or a Greasemonkey script to do what I want I still can try to delve into the code and "fix" stuff myself.
As a normal browser for Joe Shmoe and his grandma though, I don't really see how Opera could not compete. It is very usable, at least as usable as the other browsers. It's got this new Speed Dial function (when opening a new tab instead of a black screen you'll get a cached thumbnail view of your favorite webpages to click on - real slick) and supports mouse gestures from the get go. It's definitely got the potential to become the main player. The only reason why it is not as popular is because Firefox has been propagated as the main alternative by most people anti-IE/MS, maybe in part because both those browsers stand for such different concepts/philosophies (greedy corporation vs. open source).
Also, Firefox didn't come out of nowhere. Actually quite the contrary: while Netscape (which evolved to Mozilla) was "doing their thing" (i.e. carving more and more market share from Mosaic and other browsers in the early days), whammo! - suddenly there was MS IE pre-installed as the default browser on Windows 95. Suddenly every MS box ran IE because there was no real need to run another browser (and it was faster too). The only edge that Mozilla had and what makes it the favorite alternative browser now is that it was and is open source.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
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.
I have to disagree with you slightly. I recently replaced all links to IE with Firefox on my parents' computer, and I chose Firefox for a reason: learning curve.
I'm going to divide all computer users into three categories:
* Power users who know how things work
* Adventurous users who might try changing their setups
* Normal users who go with default settings and never try to customise
The concept of software customisation is fairly new, and everyone from the third category is still adapting to it. Changing your computer's background is one thing, but changing the way your web-browser acts is another thing altogether. It ventures into the realm of programming, with which the third category is unfamiliar. They're simetimes even scared of technology, because they would have no way of recovering from their mistakes.
How does that relate to Opera? Opera has too much customization. The default installation has too many buttons. It has this strange toolbar that appears below the address bar with top 10 and bookmarks. The side panel has notes, transfers, and links. Even though to groups 1 and 2 this seems normal, to group 3 it's too much to learn, when there is a simpler alternative around the corner: Firefox. It's very similar to IE, its features are much more hidden, and it doesn't give off an aura of complexity.
In order to get Opera to the same state, someone needs to spend about 5 minutes customising it. But here's the paradox: group 3 users never bother with customisations, and it just doesn't happen. Opera developers don't care, because they realise that people are slowly migrating to groups 1 and 2. But group 3 is still better off with Firefox.
I think varnish has a lot to do with violas ;)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.