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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'."
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).
Except I can guarantee that at least one of my clients will cling doggedly to IE6, just to piss me off...
iptables -A INPUT -s update.microsoft.com -j DROP
at least for a month
Will this upgrade also include a (forced) installation of Silverlight?
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
Seriously, that's fine. You keep using IE 6 all you like. Just bear in mind that once your preferred broken browser is in the minority, us web developers will stop spending hours or days at a time going out of way to make our sites not look and work like complete and total ass in it.
The standards were created so that we didn't have to do that for every site that gets built, and by and large they apply--except for IE 6 and IE 7 (IE 7's so much better than IE 6, though; it's a breeze in comparison).
So yeah... you use IE 6. Then you'll discover how its rendering engine really copes with standards-compliant mark-up (hint: it's not pretty).
Probably because they are in the same boat we are, we implemented a large financial system last year and went to the newest available version and yet it still isn't certified with IE7, between that system and our document management system it will probably be years before we can run IE7. The financial system is going through its first year end right now so we are still tweaking and optimizing it, I can't imagine doing an upgrade just so we can support IE7!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
That's why you don't implement for IE at all. You build for Firefox, Opera, Safari, or something else that supports standards, and then make little tweaks to fix IE displays. Doing anything else puts you in a world of hurt.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
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.