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Microsoft to Force IE7 Update on February 12th
Z80xxc! writes "InfoWorld is reporting that on February 12th, Microsoft will roll out Internet Explorer 7 through Windows Server Update Services to all systems - regardless of whether or not the update had been requested previously. The piece also mentions ways to prevent the update from occurring, for sysadmins who do not want to use IE7 on their systems. Microsoft claims that the decision was made due to 'security concerns'."
At least now there is only IE7 to support - IE6 should quickly fall from use.
Now we'll see which browser has the greatest growth rate in January!
Microsoft claims that the decision was made due to 'security concerns'."
So this means they're feeing insecure about their market share?
Go firefox!
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
IE6 is a huge pile of ******. These days, whenever I write a website, the procedure is always like this:
1. Test website in Firefox initially.
2. Verify that it works in Opera.
3. Verify that it works in Konqueror.
4. Verify that it works in Safari.
5. See it totally break down in IE6.
IE6 has too many rendering bugs. It's the sole cause of hours and hours of lost productivity. It's about time that it dies. IE7, although not as standards compliant as... uhm... pretty much every other browser on earth, is orders of magnitude better than IE6. People should be forced to use IE7 (or Firefox, or Opera, or whatever; just not IE6).
What's with web developers that have to test html code on IE6? It's really a shame for MS that you can't have IE6 and IE7 installed side by side (I know it IS somehow possible, but that's way too complicated and not the point here). To bad that you always need a second (virtual) machine, just to test html code. And now they are forcing the upgrade...Stupid.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
iptables -A INPUT -s update.microsoft.com -j DROP
at least for a month
I can't wait until Ron Paul gets elected, personally. At least then we won't have to deal with M$ and the government breathing down our necks.
You seem to have a pretty realistic view. Microsoft will release a standards compliant browser around the time that Ron Paul is actually elected president. You just forgot the cold fusion powered flying cars.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
Ah, except that in its current incarnation Firefox is a bit sucky too. It's better than IE on many levels, especially security, but it's no longer the snappy and lightweight browser it once was. Memory usage is terrible, I find the UI sluggish, render times are far from ideal and the whole thing just feels... not what it was.
Hopefully 3.0 will fix that, but for the meantime I'll stick with Safari.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Will this upgrade also include a (forced) installation of Silverlight?
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
I think this is great news. Quote: (...) and it has posted guidelines on how to ward off the automatic update if admins want to keep the older IE6 browser on their companies' machines. So you can keep IE6 if you want to, but all the non-tech savvy users get a safer, more standards compliant browser.
They must be pretty damn bad applications in the first place if moving from IE6 to IE7 'breaks' them!
1. Get spec: Must work on IE6
2. Design methodology: Hack it around until it looks right
3. Test methodology: Click around in IE6
If you have paid no heed to standards or alternative browsers, it's trivially simple to make a site that breaks on IE7.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
These pages are probably detecting that you are using IE, and enabling ugly IE6 hacks (or more likely the sites are "designed for IE6", and only enable the standards compliance hacks when they detect Mozilla/Firefox and perhaps Safari and Opera. Nothing is perfect, but IE7 is miles better than IE6 when it comes to standards compliance and rendering CSS properly.
This is somewhat off topic, but whatever.
Has anyone else noticed how terrible tabbed browsing is in IE7?
Let's just say, hypothetically, I'm at my favorite porn site, looking at thumbnails. The plan is to ctrl-click the thumbnails and open them in tabs.
Once you get enough tabs open, there comes a point where IE7 bogs down tremendously when asked to dispaly jpgs, each in her own tab. Symptoms include clicks on the first tab are no longer acknowledged, and tremendous slowness moving between tabs.
After that, there comes a point where your ctrl-click won't even spawn a new tab.
Tabbed browsing is a great "innovation" in the IE product line, but in terms of performance and not being a resource hog, IE7 is easily outpaced by Mozilla and many others.
...I wish there was another way of making it.
OK, note to self: week of Feb 12, expect many calls from windows-using clients...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
How long do you need? IE7 was released in August 2005 so Web developers could start testing and fixing their apps well ahead of the October 2006 release.
Wubi, which "is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click."
I am not a web browser tester but... lately Firefox seems to be performing much better than it used to. It's still using a bit of memory, but I'm not getting any crashes, or aberrant behaviors. The worst I've noticed in months is Foxmarks sucking the life out of my cpu when synchronizing, but that can be monitored/avoided.
Literally the only time I've been annoyed with FF in a year is having to load IE6/7 to open a website that refused to recognize FF using IETab. And in that case, it's not FF that annoys me. I'd put the coder of that site on the DHS watchlist if I could!@@#$%@$#%
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
IT still needs to approve the update via WSUS for IE 7 to get deployed. If its not an approved update you don't get it.
Of course this is Slashdot, you are allowed to spout all the innacurate crap you want, as long as its crap slung at Microsoft.
If people had bothered to read they would have noticed this in the "warning" from Microsoft: you have configured WSUS to "auto-approve" Update Rollup packages (this is not the default configuration), Windows Internet Explorer 7 will be automatically approved for installation after February 12, 2008 and consequently, you may want to take the actions below to manage how and when this update is installed
Thanks again Slashdot for proving the Linux camp really are full of a bunch of anti-Microsoft loonies who read only what they want to read.
Active X should be banned across the board in any company that even remotely considers security an issue. Intranet apps of the type you talk about need to be reprogrammed, because they probably won't be maintainable even in the short term.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
FF 2.x is worse than the other iterations. You can turn off spell check, that helps some. There's some tuning parameters you can set to release memory/pages in cache and limit it to those in the browser currently. Other than that, the core problem with all browsers is that the JS engine in them sucks rocks, and the single threaded nature of that beast is what kills performance when you have lots of plugins or heavy JS pages.
FF 3.0 reportedly is much lighter in memory and faster in performance, but I've not tried it yet. I downloaded it this weekend, and will try to find some time to install it shortly.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I don't like what they have done with IE7.. especially removed support for Active Desktop that was very good and being a standard for 12 years..
Does anyone have accurate statistics on IE version usage right now? Unfortunately my own stats really only break down between browser vendors and it's difficult to get per-version stats...
It's probably wise to start planning to stop supporting IE6 when it's usage drops below a certain percentage - the sooner we get rid of IE6 the better. Of course, a lot of users are stuck with it - but when things start breaking, they'll get the hint to either upgrade (if that's even possible) or just switch to a better browser.
Some stats here and a little blurb here
> ASP.Net apps work only with IE6 with ActiveX enabled.
Sorry but this is rubbish. ASP.NET is a *server-side* engine. It's rubbish to say that ASP.NET sites only work with IE6.
And ASP.NET does NOT require any ActiveX support in the browser. Properly written ASP.NET sites work properly in ALL browsers - even ones which don't have javascript support.
I think your website is broken for other reasons - not because of ASP.NET or it's supposed incompatibly with IE7.
Oookay, kiddo. Now let's start the thinking, shall we?
/. as representative indicators of linux' market penetration or calculating apple's market share from a survey in some Mac Owners Lounge.
1. The stats you quote are taken from w3schools.com
2. w3schools.com is a website containing some tutorials for web-related languages and technologies.
3. People interested in the topics covered by w3schools are a small subset of all web surfers.
4. People reading or using w3schools are another subset of this subset of surfers; according to their stats mostly Firefox users
Conclusion: Looking at those stats as an indicator of browser usage on the www and in various intranets is about as smart as using stats gathered on
The place I work uses activeX components to log into the citrix-based intranet client. They have big signs for the last couple years stating that they will not support Firefox. Over the last year they also had to add a sign that they will not cover IE7. Should be interesting to see what they do now. Maybe I'll drop them an email and ask. :-)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I have a Canadian Dollar here that says that this "update" is to shift the stats. As of right now, Firefox is p0wning IE6 OR IE7, but not IE6 AND IE7.
FedEx has declared IE 7 off limits until further notice, so there is one place it won't get implemented. And all employees that want to access the LAN infrastructure are further forbidden to go to IE 7. Makes my decision easy on what to do about this, as I need my machines to be able to access that net.
Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
So the handy dandy window listing the 100's of updates you are missing to keep your WinXP machine up-to-date just popped up over the weekend. No clue why. After seeing this slashdot story, I scrolled down and saw "Windows Internet Exploer 7.0 for Windows XP". I read the details and the last line says:
"This update includes Windows Genuine Advantage Validation."
I guess so few people are "choosing" to install their spyware that they now they are bundling it with other stuff? This is AFTER Microsloth said they weren't going to do such a thing:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/10/04/internet-explorer-7-update.aspx
Marc
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
Not only are most of Firefox's "unique" features copied from Opera, but Opera is also a remarkably fast and lightweight browser with most stuff built right in. It also happens to work in most variations of Linux including Sugar and it's used on the Nintendo Wii. Not to sound like a fanboy, but it's a far superior browser to anything else I've found. Other than the source, I'm not sure I see the big deal with Firefox. It's bloated and feature light to start with and as you add on more plugins the bloat just gets bigger. Is seeing the source really worth using an inferior product?
WSUS or Windows Server Update Systems is an addon for Microsoft Windows networks. It allows you to control which updates clients get and instead of every client going to MS's servers, clients go to the WSUS server which can save a crapload of bandwidth. Regular home users are not affected.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I work on an AJAX application, and Microsoft Visual Studio's debugger doesn't work with IE7. Most of our dev team still uses IE6 for this reason.
Seriously, the interface is the main reason I can't stand IE 7 (well, that and my copy of Win2k running in Parallels). If I could have the IE 7 rendering with the IE 6 "look and feel" then I would update it.
(Of course, I generally use Seamonkey on Linux and Firefox on Mac, so this is just for the times I find myself stuck on a Windows machine.)
Microsoft is finally pulling the 'security' card to force users to new versions of their products. It must be nice to be a MSFT programmer when you don't have to work on one rev old products no matter how large the install base.
Seriously, it blew me away in the mid 90s when the press+dog just let Microsoft refuse to provide USB support for the previous OS product and claimed that if you want USB support, you must purchase a new computer or fumble through an upgrade. IIRC, Windows 98 and NT v4 were such products though NT v4 was a larger update since they both moved the graphics subsystem into the kernel and added the win95 shell/desktop along with adding USB support.
I would love to be a fly on the wall for all those meetings they have on how to get customers to upgrade. There's got to be some very funny and some very scary recommendations being thrown around those meetings. It's got to be tough for Microsoft, wanting customers to be lame enough to not look outside of Microsoft for software solutions yet at the same time, be willing to keep upgrading Microsoft products every couple of months and like it.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
As I've said before, the problem is that we can never seem to recreate the problems users complain about. When we ask for a detailed set of steps to reproduce the problem, we almost always either get none or we cannot reproduce the problem. You can't fault developers for not fixing problems, when hardly anyone can seem to point out any. You need to report the bugs first, and then the developers will fix them.
I do not seem to experience these problems you refer to. Others I talk to in the MozillaZine forums do not, either. When people come into the forums complaining about problems, we point them to the Knowledge Base, and when they follow the instructions there, they seem to quickly fix their problems.
If you are unwilling or unable to report or fix problems in Firefox, you should probably switch to another browser. There's no sense putting up with problems, as there are many good browsers out there. And it's even more pointless to keep complaining about vague problems such as "shoddy coding and bloat in general" when you cannot point out even one specific problem, no matter how trivial.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Prepare for HUGE problems with some older HP printers. When I updated to IE7, my HP software (HP director) for my all-in-one 1350 HP printer stopped working, it is a known issue with IE7 that HP has known about but has refused to release a real fix(updated installer). As long as you do not uninstall the software you can find fixes online, but if you uninstall it (like I did), you are screwed unless you do a rollback before IE7.