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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?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
"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
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
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.
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!
There are a plethora of UI addons for ie7
:P
oh, you wanted voluntary ie addons! sorry, my mistake
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
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.
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.