Internet Explorer 8 Beta Features Revealed

Admodieus writes "It seems as though the veil has been lifted on the Internet Explorer 8 beta. Microsoft has revealed a list of the new features in IE8, including two interesting new additions called Activities and WebSlices. From the site: 'Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do ... WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.' Also aboard the upgrade train is automatic crash recovery, a favorites toolbar, and improved phishing filter protection. Microsoft has also posted links to download the beta, but none of them are working right now."

Comments

SVG

[ccguy]

I'm sorry to see that there's no SVG support.

As for what _is_ there, well, most of the pages are broken, unavailable ("This project is not yet published"), so if the public documentation is any indication of the development status I'd say IE8 it pretty closed to the usual MS standard :-)

Re:SVG

[pilgrim23]

This from a "user" not a developer:
I just this last week tried IE 7 for the very first time. As a user of IE 6, Opera, Firefox, Safari, and having used Every browser from lynx Cello and Mosaic up through the offerings of today, I am not unfamiliar with various browser styles, feel, ways of doing things. From my early experience with it, I can say that 7... to use a standard automobile analogy: The engineer is 5' 2". He designed the seat fixed in one position and not adjustable. The rearview mirror fixed in positon as well; Seat belt? forget it! He likes the parking brake in the back seat so that's how it is going to be.
Microsoft seems to have an irrepressible arrogance when it comes to design. They also seem to have a less then stellar competence in other areas. The former seems to be a fall back for lack ehibited in the later. IE 8 is from the same designers? No thank you

Re:SVG

[MikeFM]

SVG would be awesome but working CSS and Javascript would be enough to make me happy. Being on par with Firefox, Safari, and Opera is all IE needs to get off my hate list. I'm so tired of having to bust my ass to make sure everything I want to do works in IE.

Of course we still have to support IE6 and IE7 for probably another ten years. IE6 still makes up 25% of the traffic my websites get and IE7 makes up another 50%.

Re:SVG

[Metaphorically]

I have to say I'm not surprised but it's still a real bummer. They mention SVG (along with MathML & others) in the section on recognizing namespaces but they don't imply that they'll support it. It does sound like it could be possible to have a helper (Behaviour I think they called it) that could render inline SVG with the appropriate namespace in an XHTML document. I'm too far out of that loop to know for sure if that's a realistic possibility though.

I get the feeling that they're going down the path they have so many times before where there's one level of support for their version of something (in this case Silverlight) and a second-class level of support for "everybody else" (in this case SVG). So that if we do get some third-party to support SVG in IE via an approved MS mechanism, it'll be as an alternative to Silverlight.

Re:SVG

[RiotingPacifist]

The screenshots in TFA show the tabs are now reduced to maybe a 3rd of your screen while even they arnt using the favorites bar!

Re:SVG

[jeff_schiller]

The scenario they seem to be enabling for SVG is inline SVG with HTML content (not XHTML). This means that you can install the Adobe SVG Viewer and have it render the inline SVG within the HTML page. Unfortunately it seems like there may be some implementation issues with it (possibly preventing the xlink namespace within the SVG). See the now-available whitepaper and the discussion here

Re:SVG

[Z34107]

I wonder why there are any broken links, but the links for the XP and Server 2003 x86 versions are working. I, with x64 Vista, will have to wait for Windows 7 in 2009 for anything resembling OS support >.<

Re:SVG

[Metaphorically]

I think there has to be some other ISV (note the MS name for software vendors other than themselves) to come up with a new SVG binary behaviour to actually enable that kind of rendering. Adobe SVG viewer is pretty much abandoned last I heard. I don't know what motivation anyone would have to develop another plugin for IE that they basically would have no way of making any return off of. Then there's just the fact that people need a plugin that would further hold back any penetration compared to Silverlight.

So the situation as I see it is still pretty grim. There's a tiny window open but it's not enough to get anything through as far as I see it.

Re:SVG

[jeff_schiller]

I also note that this namespace behavior change also allows inline XAML within HTML. How convenient for Microsoft. Renesis is an effort to develop a browser plugin for SVG. It's still not on par with ASV (only Opera and Batik really beat ASV's SVG support). Anyway, as with most plugins, the concept is to give away the plugin and sell the content-generation tools (SVG editor, etc). I'm still waiting to hear more from examotion on Renesis... sometime in 1Q08 supposedly.

Re:SVG

[freaknl]

This seems to be the sad truth. A lot of large companies and institutions appear reluctant to finally bury Internet Explorer 6. I wish they would, it will save developers of (X)HTML projects so much time.

I understand that there are cases when dependencies of in-house software on the specific ways of Internet Explorer 6 hold back the inevitable upgrade, but sometimes I don't see why. For example, why would my university (Leiden University) still cling to this over five year old browser? Microsoft already pushed the updates, so why is IT keeping them back?

Re:SVG

[smooth wombat]

A lot of large companies and institutions appear reluctant to finally bury Internet Explorer 6.

It's not always that they don't want to get rid of IE6 but rather, they can't because of their own web pages which have been hacked to work in IE6 or, as in my case, have applications that use a web interface and won't work with IE7 (or anything else).

I wish the folks who I work for would allow more people to install FF but we're a Microsoft-only place and so installing FF, or any other unapproved software, is verboten. Except in the case of where I work which fortunately is somewhat lenient in this regard. So long as we keep it updated, no problems.

The last place I worked for (and left) has a zero-tolerance policy towards anything not Microsoft. Not too long after I left orders came down that anyone who had FF was to remove it. Immediately. Or else.

Re:SVG

[masdog]

I think you answered your own question before you even asked it. There is software out there that was designed to work with IE5.5 and IE6 that hasn't been updated to work with IE7 yet. I can see in-house projects as being one of those areas, but there are also large commercial systems that have been customized to meet the customer's needs that may not be able to apply IE7 compatibility patches without some sort of patch customization.

Just because Microsoft pushes an update doesn't mean that the update has been tested with end-user systems. That is IT's job, and if IT finds that the update breaks critical systems that the business depends on, they won't push the update out until it is fixed.

Re:SVG

[T-Bone-T]

What is wrong with designing a fixed interface that will be immediately recognized and useful? When Office 2007 came out, people claimed it would kill productivity because things got moved around. If you use IE7 all the time and aren't good with computers, it makes getting a new computer smoother because you don't have to be confronted with an unfamiliar interface.

Re:SVG

[man_of_mr_e]

I assume you're referring to the lack of customizability of the top part of the UI. This wasn't an arbitrary decision, it was designed this way to reduce the risk of phishing attacks which typically create windows that look like a valid interface. The old customizable interface made it WAY too easy for fishers to grab data from unsuspecting users.

Re:SVG

[DarrenBaker]

I have found that what most people mistake for arrogance and fascism on Microsoft's part is really just what makes Microsoft's products so ubiquitous - ease of use, and minimal guesswork. Not everyone wants a customisable interface with thousands of widgets and doohickeys. It's the whole Ray Kroc philosophy in software form - different computer, same simple interface.

Which, tangentially speaking, is why I think Linux is having difficulty establishing itself in the desktop world - non-computer literates just don't want choice. If you have anything less than a plug-it-into-the-wall-and-go system (not that Windows follows this every time, but most times) then the user just gets frustrated, because it's like being asked to untangle a rat's nest of wires using only tweezers. In the dark. While wearing oven mitts.

Re:SVG

[ianare]

Uh, wouldn't having an unchanging interface make a window easier to forge? You can just grab a screenshot of IE7, having full confidence it will look exactly the same for everyone.
Maybe you are referring to the little dropdown that shows up in pop up dialogs?

Re:SVG

[CrazedWalrus]

I just wish they'd have pushed out a patch for working PNG transparency support. Just the other day I went to my personal/quasi-business web site from work (IE6, meh) and realized that my site logo was nothing but a big white block in the middle of the top banner. Converting it to .gif made it look like crap, so I had to take it down until I can come up with something that looks okay with transparent .gif.

How do you guys deal with the requirement for transparency coupled with the requirement for more than an indexed color pallet? I'm thinking about replacing the logo for IE6 visitors with a logo that says "Get Firefox Already, or buy a new damn computer if that's too difficult for you."

On second though, that might be a bit too wordy.

Re:SVG

[Strange Ranger]

The last place I worked for (and left) has a zero-tolerance policy towards anything not Microsoft. Not too long after I left orders came down that anyone who had FF was to remove it. Immediately. Or else.

Ironic, funny, sad, etc... IE has historically been a nightmare for corporate IT for all the reasons that have been beaten to death here on slashdot. In order to remedy this most companies' IT departments have long since used windows group policies, or policies for domains, or whatever they're calling it these days (yes it's been awhile, go ahead and slam me), in order to lock down IE. The way I remember it you would log into the network and your windows registry would be immediately "owned" by the policies. Where I worked you couldn't even add a site to the trusted list. Heck even the IE logo got replaced with a corporate one, just to remind you where you worked.

This all makes decent sense if you have to use IE, especially the older versions. Now along comes Firefox, which would obviate much of the need for locking the browser down to thin-client levels. But who's going to give up all that control? Certainly not the MCPs or PHBs.

Sure there are exceptions and complexities to this oversimplification, but much of it is just a case of the bigger monkeys in the cage trying to protect their positions of power.

Re:SVG

[Anonymous Coward]

What is wrong with designing a fixed interface that will be immediately recognized and useful? [...] If you use IE7 all the time and aren't good with computers, it makes getting a new computer smoother because you don't have to be confronted with an unfamiliar interface.

Oh, please. Of course there's nothing wrong with designing a fixed interface that will be immediately recognised and useful. Microsoft did a good job on that with IE6. Then Microsoft made a whole load of bizarre and completely arbitrary changes to the interface with IE7, so suddenly nobody who is used to previous versions of IE can figure out how to use it.

(When people ask me why their internet has gone all weird since they got a new computer with Vista on it, I generally show them Firefox. They still grumble a little because it's not exactly the same as it used to be, but at least they can figure out how to use it.)

Re:SVG

[Gwwfps]

Having an ability to customize != different interface on every computer Inexperienced users will just leave everything as the default, and I don't see how that would make things difficult when they get a new computer.

Re:SVG

[cheater512]

It *did* kill productivity. Mine at least.

I only tried it last week for the first time. I needed to view a powerpoint.
Took me ages to find the bloody slide show button.
In every other Powerpoint it was a nice simple button in the corner of the window.

The same could be said about Linux.
Different yes but once you get used to it, you'll notice the benefits.

The difference between your statement and mine? Yours is marketing crap. :)
With Microsoft its *not* the case. They'll change it for the next version as well.

Re:SVG

[zbend]

I like how MS gets bashed for totally ripping off design from Firefox and others, while at the same time for having 'irrepressible arrogance when it comes to design'.

Re:SVG

[Plunky]

Not everyone wants a customisable interface with thousands of widgets and doohickeys.

No, but millions of people want to turn off the one thing that annoys them, and for each of those people its a different thing..

Re:SVG

[jrumney]

I'm pretty sure the Internet Explorer and Office teams have a competition going on how far they can get away with breaking the Windows UI guidelines and still manage to ship it past QA and management. The Office team used to be well ahead, but with IE 7 the IE team are starting to get closer.

Re:SVG

[bdeclerc]

On a site I manage, Mira Public Observatory (Belgian Dutch site), I've used IE6-only conditional commenting of some javascript and a class attribute to replace the transparant PNG's with less attractive GIF's on IE6 browsers. On all other browsers, the script isn't run, so the images aren't replaced.

This doesn't actually slow down the site in any really noticeable manner for IE6-users, and not at all for anyone else (admittedly, I simply ignore IE5.5 and older, but by now that's less than 0.2% of my visiting audience). I've found this a good compromise, the IE6 users get a slightly slower and less pretty site, but the difference isn't huge and I expect them to die out in a few years anyway...

Re:SVG

[pilgrim23]

Yep Standards. they are why parachute releases all look the same... Standards that have meaning, makes sense, can be relied on can be trusted. Standards...
like the fixed interface of the right click on the task bar for just one example? Fixed. unchanging. complies with Microsoft standards. any applcation, right click the icon and the bottom option on the menu is "Close" ANY application. . Standards. everyone abides.
  Everyone except...Microsoft that is..
  Right click the icon for say Active Directory or Computer Managment. or other MS apps
  What is the bottom selection here?
  "Help topics".
  If Microsoft designs a UI in a standard way why do they not obey their own standard? one word: Arrogance. Your argument would apply if it were true, but it is not true. IE 7 is designed the away it is due to arrogance. and maybe a touch of lazy.

Re:SVG

[CrazedWalrus]

I see what you mean. The observatory icon in the top left is missing the anti-aliasing in the IE6 version, which is exactly the problem I had. It looks a lot smoother in FF3. Thanks for the advice!

Coincidentally, it seems you're using Drupal, which is the same CMS I'm using. I assume you had to code that javascript directly into the garland theme? I've been messing with Drupal quite a bit recently, but I'm still learning the ins and outs.

Thanks again.

Re:SVG

[Kalriath]

But who's going to give up all that control? Certainly not the MCPs or PHBs. Contrary to popular belief, MCPs aren't brainwashed into being Microsoft-loving hippies who demand absolute Microsoftyness in their networks. As a holder of an MCP, I'll still happily write an application in PHP, Perl, C++, or Pascal if that's what would better fit the requirements - even if I do like developing in .NET more (actually, I prefer Pascal, but all that proves is that I'm crazy).

Re:SVG

[RiotingPacifist]

It can safely be said that no 2 geeks have the same Firefox, but most 'norms' probably stick with the default firefox. So while your argument makes sens for fishing attacks it makes no difference if a browser can be customized or not (said 2 geeks will also check the address bar before entering any personal details).

Re:SVG

[hairyfeet]

Um-Here is the fix.I use this theme when I'm converting those that hate change. I have found just give them Firefox with this theme and they are happy little campers. I then I get nice referral business as the machines I fix doesn't get pwned in less than a week like those who run IE do. But YMMV

Re:SVG

[nachoboy]

like the fixed interface of the right click on the task bar for just one example? Fixed. unchanging. complies with Microsoft standards. any applcation, right click the icon and the bottom option on the menu is "Close" ANY application. . Standards. everyone abides.
    Everyone except...Microsoft that is..
    Right click the icon for say Active Directory or Computer Managment. or other MS apps
    What is the bottom selection here?
    "Help topics".

You seem to be confusing the word "standard" with "default". There is no standard that says the bottom option of the window menu must be Close. It just so happens that the default window menu for resizable windows contains the Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, and Close items. In fact, since Microsoft has not committed to this particular set of defaults via documentation, it's just an implementation detail and may be changed at will for any past, current, or future version of Windows.

It's true that most applications have no need to modify this default set of options (suggesting it is a good default), but the documentation explicitly allows ANY application (written by Microsoft or not) to modify the set of items in the Window menu:

"The GetSystemMenu function allows the application to access the window menu (also known as the system menu or the control menu) for copying and modifying."

That API and functionality go back over a decade to Windows 95. If you want to argue about standards support, at least pick an example demonstrative of your point.

Re:SVG

[gad_zuki!]

>Took me ages to find the bloody slide show button.
In every other Powerpoint it was a nice simple button in the corner of the window.

I support quite a few users and made the mistake of using a laptop with office 2007 for one of our large presentations with multiple presenters. This became a social experiment to see how my low-tech users would react. Hell, I almost fainted when two or three of them just found the play button in under 5 seconds and only one of them asked. So if these people can find it while doing a presentation in front of 150 people and you cant, well, you have no business posting on slashdot.

Re:SVG

[DarrenBaker]

This is true, but even more people aren't annoyed by anything, because they don't know any better and just know what they know. People on the whole are just too busy with other things to worry about how those things are delivered to them.

Re:SVG

[Anonymous Coward]

> What is wrong with designing a fixed interface that will be immediately recognized and useful?
Nothing. Except that IE7 GUI is different from all the other browsers, and most people have already used a browser before IE7. So they failed usability 101, and they perfectly know that. They just raised an artificial barrier to make it more difficult to switch.

Re:SVG

[pilgrim23]

You seem to be confusing the word "standard" with "defaul..."
As I said above: parachutes all have the same release. Explain your semantics to that user between 8 and 6 thousand feet.
I am a user, not a programmer. Granted a somewhat well versed user. You can point out your profession's particulars if you like it does nothing to ease the frustrations of the users of your products, I am sure it feels good though to have words and "well documented APIs) that say in a long winded manner "It just don't work"

Re:SVG

[GuyRCook]

This is what we've now started calling "Another One of Those" it seems. Too bad, the demand for a compliant browser hasn't over come the supply of one that isn't .... yet.

Re:SVG

[Jeruvy]

...and it DID. How many managers had to pay additional fees to get their staff up to speed with 2007? Anyone who didn't lost 20% productivity and probably haven't recovered it.

I'm not against changing things, but the biggest load of crap we hear from ballmers gang is that TCO is the reason to buy MS, and this very example shows how out to lunch the ballmer gang really is. They'd rather skew the reality from their perspective. Just watching someone create a mail profile in Outlook can take an hour out of a workday, and that's a LOT of lost productivity, then they have to deal with the content filters, and learn how to print the emails. If something that used to take a minute now takes three minutes that's a 300% increase in labor-costs, exasperating that over a full work day, which may result in a improvement in performance would still double the time required. That's already 10x's too much to simply read your email.

Re:SVG

[bdeclerc]

I copied the Garland theme into a custom "Mira" theme and modified it there, I did code the javascript directly into the custom theme, this seemed the most convenient way of doing it, since I've also customized other aspects of the Garland theme (not many, but enough to make it worthwile to separate the theme out from Garland.)

Re:SVG

[MikeFM]

You can tweak your stylesheets to take care of the issue. I mostly insert logos and theme related graphics from stylesheets anyway and those have a default stylesheet that uses PNGs and a IE6 stylesheet that uses GIF versions of the same graphics. For other images on the site I use the IE specific filter progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader ( src = 'src', sizingMethod = 'scale' ) to make things work a bit nicer.

Broken links in the summary

[BadAnalogyGuy]

You can download the latest browser from here: www.microsoft.com/IE8/download

Re:Broken links in the summary

[OrochimaruVoldemort]

you are funny, but seriously, did anyone think that microsoft was going to release a beta version of ie8 to anyone other than certified testers (common people)?

Re:Broken links in the summary

[kellyb9]

but seriously, did anyone think that microsoft was going to release a beta version of ie8 to anyone other than certified testers (common people)? Yes

Re:Broken links in the summary

[OrochimaruVoldemort]

*inhales crack* they did

Re:Broken links in the summary

[jrothwell97]

you are funny, but seriously, did anyone think that microsoft was going to release a beta version of ie8 to anyone other than certified testers (common people)? You must be new here.

Re:Broken links in the summary

[Z34107]

you are funny, but seriously, did anyone think that microsoft was going to release a beta version of ie8 to anyone other than certified testers (common people)?

They did, and they do. The x86 download links for Windows XP and Windows Sever 2003 are working as of the time of this post. IE7 Beta1 was closed (I got my copy from a developers conference), IE7 Beta2 was public registration IIRC, and IE7 Beta3 was public.

Looks like they're doing the same thing - the alpha versions are given to their closed-circle testers who can do meaningful debugging, later Beta versions are given to people at large.

Interestingly enough, back when they did the public betas of Vista, they only let people who filed bug reports using the included tool get a copy of the next beta/RTM. I wonder if they'll do the same thing for IE8, or if the next release will be the full-blown "critical update" release.

Re:Broken links in the summary

[uchris]

Why not? I have been beta testing MS products for years...Let's see DOS, Windows 3.0, Windows 95, etc, etc. And, I have paid for the privledge!

Re:Broken links in the summary

[sponga]

Actually you can download Beta 1 and here is an actual link

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

Hmmm ...

[Der Einzige]

Those features sound suspiciously like Mac OS X's Services menu and Web Clip widget. Not that there's anything wrong with that ...

Re:Hmmm ...

[jrothwell97]

Yep.

IE7 was a crap attempt to copy Firefox. Methinks this will be a crap attempt to copy Safari.

Re:Hmmm ...

[kyofunikushimi]

"WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes" So it's got a built in RSS/ATOM parser? Like every other browser? Including IE7? As far as I can tell, they just beefed it up a bit and set it to constantly poll for updates. *shrug*

Re:Hmmm ...

[0100010001010011]

And the context sensitive stuff I know Mail.app does right now.

Say I got an e-mail: "Hey, We're going to go to Tom's house tomorrow at 1 pm. The address is 123 Main Street, Anywhere USA". If I hover over "tomorrow at 1 pm" I get a popup "add to calendar" and if I hover over the address I get a "Map this address."

Crash recovery from firefox.

Who the hell has an excel document that is their 'favorite' and they'd want to launch from their "favorites bar"? I guess firefox does this already with file://.

Webslices look like the tool for Leopard where you can make a widget out of 'anything'.

Re:Hmmm ...

[Glonk]

I wouldn't say IE8 took the context-menus from Mail.app, if anything Mail.app stole smart tags from Office... Either way, if it's a handy feature, why not include it -- who cares who had it first.

Crash recovery, eh?

[religious freak]

Also aboard the upgrade train is automatic crash recovery Kind of funny, you'd think they'd work on not making it crash. Or at least spin it a little better.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[J0nne]

Also aboard the upgrade train is automatic crash recovery Kind of funny, you'd think they'd work on not making it crash. Or at least spin it a little better. Firefox has the same feature too. Browsers have to accept tons of different types of input (html, js, css, different image formats, ...) and try to make sense of it all. Third-party extensions and plugins can cause the browser to crash.

I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but that was low, even for Slashdot.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[purpledinoz]

Or not allowing any website or program to install all these components and toolbars onto your browser... The main reason for me switching to Firefox was that it wouldn't get cluttered with all these bullshit toolbars (and tabbed browsing of course). I'm not even sure how they get there, but they always do, and it pisses me off. Firefox only has components that I install myself. I'm never greeted with a new toolbar.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of funny, you'd think they'd work on not making it crash. Unlike Firefox, I haven't had IE crash at all in the past 4 years.

Oh yeah, that's because I haven't used IE in the past 4 years. :-)

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[mingot]

Strange. I never had toolbar that I didn't install just 'show up'. My 11 year old daughter does constantly, though. It's usually down to her having installed the latest MEGA INSTANT MESSANGER PONYS AND UNICORNS EMOTICON PACK or something similar and *gasp* not reading the part where it explains that it's going to install 14 toolbars and a bunch of other spyware. This is why she works in a VM. Maybe ask one of your parents to set one up for you?

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[Z34107]

I'm never greeted with a new toolbar.

How do people do this to their computers? You're reading/posting to slashdot, so I assume you're technically competent.

Even when I was using Internet Explorer 6, I never had this problem. I've had one virus the entire time I've used Windows (since 3.11) - and that was some file infecting virus I got on Windows 98 from who-knows-where. (Although I suspect my younger brother-knows-where, but I digress.)

Never had toolbars, and pop-ups stopped when I got IE7 (beta 1.) But, somehow, people manage to trash their Windows boxes, and trash them regularly.

How did you manage this? What sites did/do you browse? What horrible Bonzi-buddy software do you use on your computer? I'd like to know what the rest of my extended family (the ones who think I'm free 24-hour technical support) is doing.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[Dude McDude]

Firefox has the same feature too. To the best of my knowledge, Firefox doesn't have a tab recovery feature like IE8. From what I can gather from reading the ACR whitepaper, if a webpage crashes IE8 can potentially handle it by automatically closing/opening the offending tab.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=ie8whitepapers&ReleaseId=582

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[Nicolay77]

That sounds like a nifty feature.

Another feature I would like to have is a graph showing CPU usage by tab, so I can close the more demanding tabs instead of closing the browser, for gaming and related activities.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

One simple word, four letter word will clarify everything: Porn.

And that includes your mom's box.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[unapersson]

"To the best of my knowledge, Firefox doesn't have a tab recovery feature like IE8. From what I can gather from reading the ACR whitepaper, if a webpage crashes IE8 can potentially handle it by automatically closing/opening the offending tab."

Epiphany, the default browser in GNOME has this feature. It uses the firefox rendering engine (Gecko). It doesn't automatically close the tab but displays a message in the tab instead of the content, giving you the option to try and reload the problem page.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[purpledinoz]

It was a long time ago since I've used IE as my main browser. I think Yahoo messenger installs a toolbar or two. I wouldn't be surprised if Real Player installed a toolbar. Maybe the DivX codec. It's usually these small tools and programs I install that put all this crap on. I don't think it's too inconceivable to understand how this happens to non-techies. In the recent years, I now only stick to open source software, and it works without any bullshit.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[ildon]

Firefox crashes on me all the time. Something about wowarmory.com not liking cached data or some crap.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[Midnight Thunder]

Firefox has the same feature too. Browsers have to accept tons of different types of input (html, js, css, different image formats, ...) and try to make sense of it all. Third-party extensions and plugins can cause the browser to crash.

This is why, IMHO, XHTML is the better approach. If your page follows strict XHTML then there are likely to be less surprises and then parser is likely to be more robust. There is probably more handling of bad HTML in the rendering engine, than anything else.

Re:Crash recovery, eh?

[MadMidnightBomber]

This is not funny; it's true.

However, the crash recovery does provide an excellent 'save state' for us lazy bastards. Instead of shutting down cleanly, just kill -9 the process and when you restart it, get it to restore the previous session.

My first thought, too

[Anonymous Coward]

I was like "So... like OS X and Safari?"

WOW!

[quaketripp]

First they introduced tabbed browsing, now they've upgraded the context menus and integrated feeds! I just don't know how anyone can keep up with them. OMG and they're integrating group policy options to block sites! finally! that was impossible to do on a firewall! viva la revolution!

Re:WOW!

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

It's not just integrated feeds, it's screen scraping a page to create a feed. It's similar to one of the features of Yahoo Pipes.

Re:WOW!

[MrNemesis]

Hey, we can at least be thankful that they didn't move the "back" button to the bottom right hand corner, remove the option to configure connection settings from within the app itself, reverse the direction of scrolling (i.e. scroll right and left to go up and down and vice versa), raster bitmaps and GIF files in CMYK as opposed to RGB and turn sentences begining with prepositions into French swearing. All these new UI paradigms we're missing out on!

In a rare moment of originality, a young MS exec, having just read the hitch hikers guide, sent a binary of IE7 back in time in an attempt to sue the companies developing firefox, opera and a million and one other more inventive browsers in the future for copying IE's features. Unfortunately, the court dismissed the new IE interface as a crude hoax perpetrated by 4chan, and the budding young exec was made Ballmer's personal chair man.

Not that I think the IE7 interface is an abomination of consistency and style or anything ;)

Re:WOW!

[mtmra70]

OMG and they're integrating group policy options to block sites! finally! that was impossible to do on a firewall! Actually, this is something to look out for. For example, your company firewall may block google.com on port 80, but if you company does not block SSH connections, you can easily bypass it.

Simply setup PuTTY to create a localhost tunnel and establish a SSH connection to an outside source. All of a sudden you can browse the web through the encrypted tunnel. If you need a little more help for apps that open various ports or need to resolve the DNS externally, throw in SSHProxy and you can force all ports/DNS queries to run through the SSH tunnel.

Will someone please...

[AKAImBatman]

...tell Microsoft that we don't give a flying hoot about Activities and Internet Julian Fries. As developers, we want to know if they'll support CSS2 (and God-forbid even some CSS3 *gasp!*), DOM2, SVG, ECMAScript 3rd Edition, and half-a-billion other standards that they've been ignoring. If they want to make developers really happy while future-proofing their browser, they'll support HTML5 and ECMAScript 2.0.

I'm not holding my breath, though.

Re:Will someone please...

[GregChant]

If you read the article, you'd have noticed the linking page, Everything a developer needs to know, which explains IE8's CSS2.1 compliance (with provisional CSS3 compliance), among other developer-related information. It's hard to be indignant and informed, I know.

Re:Will someone please...

[jpmorgan]

Insightful? We had the discussion you were asking for yesterday. Just because all you're interested in is one facet of IE8 doesn't mean every discussion should revolve around that single aspect.

Re:Will someone please...

[Anonymous Coward]

"julienne".

Re:Will someone please...

[AKAImBatman]

We had the discussion you were asking for yesterday.

No, no we didn't. Yesterday we had the discussion that Microsoft promised standards mode to be on by default rather than their previous promise to turn it OFF by default. At no point did Microsoft say *what* standards they were actually promising to support.

Re:Will someone please...

[AKAImBatman]

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, Microsoft is NOT promising any of the features I'm referring to. I read the white paper on Circular References. Are they building a better, more standards-compliant Javascript engine? No, they're only fixing circular references, a problem that never should have existed in the first place. I read the white paper on "DOM Core Improvements". Are they adding DOM2 features? No, they're just fixing a few minor differences between the W3C spec and their implementation of DOM.

About the only spec that Microsoft MIGHT actually be taking seriously is CSS2.1. And even then, I'm not holding my breath that they do a good job of it.

Re:Will someone please...

[sm62704]

No way, man. The only "standards" they care about are the pseudostandards they and they alone have. For instance, IE can fade from page to page - but it has to use MS's nonstandard commands to do it, and it only works on IE.

There are still too many web sites that refuse to let non-IE browsers in, and the list has probably been shrinking since the growth of Firefox, Opera, and other browsers has gone so well.

Now according to the summary we have "Activities". The term "contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage" sounds pretty useless to me; what services are they talking about? The Associated Press, or more likely OS (Windows) services?

"WebSlices" is another. You can bet your bottom dollar there are going to be idiot web designers (or ignorant ones using Front Page that don't know or care that they're using IE-only features) that shut out anyone using Konqueror or Safari or any other non-Microsoft browser.

Once just for laughs I coded my homepage so that if the user-agent was IE it would redirect to a page that said "sorry, you need to upgrade to a modern browser" with a link to Firefox, even if it was Microsoft's latest incarnation of their pathetic browser. The site was (and still is) plain vanilla HTML, looks pretty much the same on any browser.

Microsoft annoys the hell out of me.

-mcgrew

Re:Will someone please...

[thomas.me]

Well, if it's CSS2.1 compliant why has this fact to be "explained"? I mean, it's either compliant or it's not, there's nothing to be explained about it.

Re:Will someone please...

[tobiasly]

It's hard to be indignant and informed, I know.

Hardly. Reading the developer link reveals the following gem on an example for implementing WebSlices:

<div class="hslice" id="1">
<p class="entry-title">item - $66.00</p>
<div class="entry-content">high bidder:buyer1
...
</div>
</div>

Wow... I hope there are no existing web pages that happen to use the CSS class name "hslice" for anything, otherwise they're in for an unpleasant surprise when IE8 begins interpreting them in their own special way!

So now the whole "IE8 will break existing sites" discussion comes into clearer focus. Microsoft's definition of standards-compliant (which should surprise no one I guess) is that their proprietary "extensions" now happen to be (X)HTML compliant.

Re:Will someone please...

[freaknl]

So when will Slashdot have an element with a hslice class? Nothing major, just a or perhaps the ? Just to pick on the Internet Explorer users? Aw common Slashdot, we know you want to.

Re:Will someone please...

[MOMOCROME]

I like the part where the guy before you said "It's hard to be indignant and informed, I know."

your half million standards are obnoxious and useless.

ie6 is still the defacto standard, and MSFT is make a huge effort to get everything ready for your birthday with ie8.

now stop whining and get back to work.

Re:Will someone please...

[crush]

And not just the above, but the "WebSlices" crap is just another way to muddy the Atom/RSS waters. We do NOT need another feed "standard" thanks.

Re:Will someone please...

[Kihaji]

Why don't you look for yourself? http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/csstestpages/default.htm/

Re:Will someone please...

[Your.Master]

You could just look at the explanation.

It's really short. It says that IE7 implemented some things wrong, which were fixed, and listed some things IE7 didn't implement at all that IE8 does with a quick example and screenshot, and listed a couple of the same for implemented CSS3 features.

Besides which, do you seriously expect everybody who reads that webpage to have a clue what CSS2.1 compliance means? Perhaps it's best if they explained it...

Re:Will someone please...

[EvanED]

We did have an article a bit ago about IE8 passing the Acid2 test.

It's not positive confirmation that they are going all standards compliant, but it can't be bad news.

Re:Will someone please...

[Dan Schulz]

Did anyone notice that the value of the ID attribute in that example is invalid? (ID attribute values cannot start with a numeral.)

Overall though, I'm starting to like what I'm seeing with IE 8, especially now that my main complaint against the browser (having to opt-in for real standards support) has been consigned to the deepest darkest pits of Hell (and I don't mean the town in Michigan either).

Of course, I do reserve the right to reserve judgment until I can finally get around to playing with the browser to see what works, what doesn't, and how it handles the way I develop Web sites.

Re:Will someone please...

[uhlume]

Take it up with the Microformats folks. WebSlices are just an extension (and a fairly minor one) of the hAtom microformat. Most of your objections to WebSlices could be applied to microformats in general, or to any framework (jQuery, for instance) that uses class attributes for non-CSS semantic purposes.

About the only difference I see here is that the browser itself knows to take advantage of a microformat, and hopefully it's smart enough not to generate false positives from CSS classes with the same name. I can quickly think of a couple of easy ways to make that determination: namely, 1) look for the other required elements of the microformat ("entry-title", "entry-content", etc.), and 2) look for a CSS definition matching the class name. If the the other required elements don't exist in the correct relationship to the matched class, and a CSS rule with the same name exists, it probably wasn't intended as a WebSlice. That seems simple enough, and reasonably bulletproof — and if I could come up with it that easily, I wouldn't be surprised if someone on the IE8 team did as well.

Re:Will someone please...

[mweather]

1E6 is not the de facto standard. It has about the market share of IE7 right now. And both of those market shares are SMALLER than Firefox's market share.

Re:Will someone please...

[uhlume]

Again, as noted further on in this thread: you might want to raise that complaint with Microformats.org in general, and David Janes in particular. Janes invented the hAtom microformat, around which WebSlices is based.

To be honest, though, I don't see how hAtom muddies the feed-standard waters any more than they were previously. It's intended to address a different problem space than RSS and Atom, so it's not really competing with either. The RSS/Atom issue, by contrast, arose from the introduction of competing standards to address the very same problem.

A more interesting issue is raised by Janes himself in the blog post linked above, namely Microsoft's decision to implement only a subset of hAtom as WebSlices, with their own top-level element to distinguish WebSlices from general hAtom feeds. I hope he makes his suggestions known to Microsoft, on this count, and I hope they listen.

Re:Will someone please...

[Midnight Thunder]

About the only spec that Microsoft MIGHT actually be taking seriously is CSS2.1. And even then, I'm not holding my breath that they do a good job of it.

With three (Opera, Safari, Firefox) major browsers getting it right, why the hell do we have to put up with this godforsaken browser known as IE. Yeah, I know that they have the largest market share, but I wish they didn't, they just don't deserve it. Please would they just EOL it for pities sake. Yeah I know that this is probably keeping me in a job, but try explaining to management what a PoS the browser is and they still want it done yesterday. /rant off

Re:Will someone please...

[ad0gg]

IE has support ECMAScript Version 3 since IE5. Do you mean version 4?

Re:Will someone please...

[darthflo]

...on slashdot, apple.com and kernel.org.

It'll all end in tears....

[caluml]

Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do ... Oh god. This sounds just like the "Hey, let's let the email client run scripts", and "Let's hide the nasty, confusing file extensions from the users" decisions.
Some things should just be a little tricky to do. Like saving a file from an email, locating it, (chmod u+x in *nix), and only then executing it.

Re:It'll all end in tears....

[Knuckles]

Also, "users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another"? Really? So much more than from one Word file to another that we need to invent this feature for an internet-facing app of all things?

Re:It'll all end in tears....

[Your.Master]

Yes. I hack around an old firefox dictionary definition extension to make it do what IE8 is doing natively. It was one of the killer things for Firefox for me. Opera has a set, unchangeable list of the same sort of things.

Re:It'll all end in tears....

[Knuckles]

And how exactly is this proof that this activity occurs more often in IE than in Word?

Re:It'll all end in tears....

[Your.Master]

It isn't, but only because your question was malformed. I was trying to explain the use case here. If you think this relates at all to Word documents, then you don't understand the feature.

You select text, right-click, and then select an action (installed from some other provider in the same sense that search engines are installed into the search widget) which navigates using that text as part of a URL to another site. The concept just doesn't make sense when applied to Word documents (the closest thing I can think of is already possible via Word macros).

Re:It'll all end in tears....

[Knuckles]

You are right, I didn't understand the feature. I had thought it had something to do with copying between pages/files. Thanks for clearing it up.

Re:It'll all end in tears....

[whomeyup]

This sounds just like the "Hey, let's let the email client run scripts"

Funny, first thing I thought of was that it was just like right clicking a piece of text in FF and being able to search google, or a dictionary from the context menu. Of course, I haven't looked at IE8 so in the end you may very well be correct.

Re:It'll all end in tears....

[ZzzzSleep]

Just letting you know that Opera's set of search terms can be updated. For example I could right click on the search edit box at the bottom of this page and choose "Create search". Now I'm able to select random text and send it through to the slashdot search.

Get FF3 out already

[RiotingPacifist]

FF3 is much better than IE7 but with its new found standards complience perhaps IE8 will be good enough to stop people switching. SO if FF wants a big market share it needs to ship FF3 soon

Re:Get FF3 out already

[ilovepolymorphism]

So if IE8 supports standards and is better than the alternatives, what's wrong with using it?

Re:Get FF3 out already

[Brett Buck]

Consider the audience, then repent your heresy!

      Brett

Re:Get FF3 out already

[jo42]

Depends on your definition of "better". Not to mention that it is a Microsoft by-product. In /. we poo-poo anything from Microsoft.

Re:Get FF3 out already

[JohnBailey]

So if IE8 supports standards and is better than the alternatives, what's wrong with using it? Because it is inadvisable to surf while drunk, high, or under prescription medication. Which is th only circumstance where Microsoft would appear to release software that played nice.

Re:Get FF3 out already

[Hatta]

Are we talking about the american SNES FF3 or the japanese famicom FF3?

Re:Get FF3 out already

[RiotingPacifist]

Nothing, only apart from processes per tab, where it beats most competitors its barely on feature parity with the competition.

If you buy into FOSS then there's also a fact that by using it you only help MS where as if you use an OSS browser (or even just an OSS rendering engine like safari) you help everybody (i mean look at webkit from conqueror, which nobody uses)

un, effing, real.

[sootman]

This is hysterical. 'WebSlices' are similar to Safari's Web Clip feature. Crash Recovery... aka Session Restore in Firefox. (And Saft gives it to Safari.) And can anyone decipher the marketing BS that somehow says the Links bar is new? In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. So... it's called a "favorites" bar now so users will think "aha! I can put links to my favorite things here!" rather than the old "links" name which led users to think "aha! I can put links to my favorite things here!"? Ooh, and it can hold links to documents as well? Er, yeah, that makes a lot of sense... I've always felt that the biggest thing missing from a web browser was access to random local documents. Because there aren't enough other ways to access often-needed files.

Re:un, effing, real.

[rucs_hack]

All they're really doing is saying that IE8 is now pretty much equivilent to the other browsers.
Of course these features already exists in other browsers, they know this, or they wouldn't have bothered. They left IE6 alone for ages until Firefox got a foothold. They're hardly going to put that in a way that makes it sound like its just a catch up exercise though, are they, it has to sound exciting and new. After all, to them, and most IE only users, it *is* new.

Actually, any improvement over IE's favorites system would be a good thing, I have to use it from time to time, and it's quite badly implemented.

Re:un, effing, real.

[sm62704]

It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

That's not what annoys me the most about it. What annoys me is the fact that they can't keep anything the same from one version to another. Not just IE but all MS apps and OSes as well; it's apparently a dilbertesque company policy. Also what annoys me is they can't stand to call anything the same thing everyone else calls it.

And "favorites" highlights both these idiotic user-hostile Microsoft insanities. Everyone else calls them "bookmarks" so MS has to call them "favorites". Well, if they change the "favorites" to "bookmarks" like everyone else (it would surprise me) that's great, but why do they have to confuse their present customers by naming something else with that name? I get the feeling that they want their customers to feel stupid so when they come across a bug or idiotic feature they chalk it up to their own stupidity instead of Microsoft's arrogance andr stupidity.

Trying to change anything from its default has always been incredibly hard with a new version of IE because it's in a different place in the menu system with every release. Once it was under "file", once it was under "edit", once it was under "tools", and IIRC once it was under a menu that isn't in IE any more.

And I'm completely with you on the last part. I don't want my web browser opening a spreadsheet or word processing document! I don't even want it opening an Acrobat document in its window. If there's a link to a Word document it should open Word with a strong warning that you might get infected with a virus if you open it.

I wish Microsoft would take an ethics course. I think if they did their software would improve, maybe to the point that I could actually like it. As it is now, Microsoft is my least favorite software company.

Re:un, effing, real.

[IBBoard]

And can anyone decipher the marketing BS that somehow says the Links bar is new?

I think the important bit is

a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents

They've only just added "WebSlices" (which look like they're poorly implemented because they'll show a button for people who can't install/use them) so it must be that that's the difference that now makes it "favourites" instead.

I guess it could be documents as well, but having not used IE for years and Windows for months then I couldn't be sure.

Re:un, effing, real.

[Gumbytwo]

I wonder if they're doing this as a reaction to the practice of bookmarking Google documents.

Re:un, effing, real.

[recoiledsnake]

Crash Recovery... aka Session Restore in Firefox Sorry to nitpick, but Opera had that feature atleast back from 2000 or 2001 if not implemented earlier in other browsers. While correcting a misattribution of a 'new' feature to IE, you yourself are misattributing it to FireFox.

Re:un, effing, real.

[bigstrat2003]

Everyone else calls them "bookmarks" so MS has to call them "favorites". Everyone else came after IE, and as far as I know, IE called them favorites from the beginning. By all rights, everyone should be calling them favorites, not bookmarks. Besides, how you can berate IE for following a naming convention they've had since the beginning is completely beyond me.

Re:un, effing, real.

[Jonwww]

I think they're going to put little hearts next to the favorites too.

Re:un, effing, real.

[Phroggy]

That's not what annoys me the most about it. What annoys me is the fact that they can't keep anything the same from one version to another. Not just IE but all MS apps and OSes as well; it's apparently a dilbertesque company policy. Also what annoys me is they can't stand to call anything the same thing everyone else calls it.

What do you want them to do: keep things the same from one version to another, or call it what everyone else calls it? Microsoft has called bookmarks "favorites" consistently in every version of IE that ever existed, and they are continuing to do so. Changing the name could be confusing to anyone who has never used a non-Microsoft browser. They've decided to remain consistent.

And "favorites" highlights both these idiotic user-hostile Microsoft insanities. Everyone else calls them "bookmarks" so MS has to call them "favorites". Well, if they change the "favorites" to "bookmarks" like everyone else (it would surprise me) that's great,

They should have decided to call them "bookmarks" twelve and a half years ago, but they didn't. That decision is in the past; it's done. They may decide that the benefit of changing the name outweighs the benefit of remaining consistent, but they haven't reached that point yet. If Firefox, Safari and Opera continue to grow in popularity, I suspect Microsoft will reconsider this decision.

but why do they have to confuse their present customers by naming something else with that name?

What we're talking about here is renaming the Links toolbar to the Favorites toolbar. The Links bar is equivalent to what other browsers call the Bookmarks bar, so it makes perfect sense for IE to call it the Favorites bar. Currently, few IE users are aware that it exists at all because 1) they don't recognize the name, and 2) it's not prominently displayed by default (by default only the word "Links" is visible on the right side of the screen, and users don't know they can move it to where they want it).

Naming it the Links toolbar originally was, of course, a terrible idea; I believe that decision had something to do with a poorly-named feature in Windows Explorer that they were trying to integrate with. They did something stupid, and they're finally fixing it now.

Trying to change anything from its default has always been incredibly hard with a new version of IE because it's in a different place in the menu system with every release. Once it was under "file", once it was under "edit", once it was under "tools", and IIRC once it was under a menu that isn't in IE any more.

I'm assuming you're talking about the "Internet Options" menu item. It was originally under the View menu (consistent with the "Folder Options" menu item in Windows Explorer, which was logical to put under the View menu). In IE5, the Tools menu was added and "Internet Options" was moved there. This became the standard menu location for preferences across all Windows applications.

It's Apple you're thinking of who put Preferences under the Edit menu, and Netscape followed this standard on Windows and Linux. When Microsoft created their own standard location, other Windows applications (including Netscape) adopted it, except for anything made by Apple, which still puts Preferences under the Edit menu. Mac OS X, meanwhile, puts Preferences under the new Application menu (between the Apple and File menus, labeled with the name of the frontmost application), and has defined Command-, as the standard keyboard shortcut. Several Windows applications including Firefox have adopted the equivalent Control-, shortcut for Options, but I don't expect Microsoft to follow suit.

As for IE7, since by default there is no menu bar, there is only a Tools menu on the right side of the screen, and Internet Options is under that.

And I'm completely with you on the last part. I don't want my web browser opening a spreadsheet or word processing document! I don't even want it

Re:un, effing, real.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because we all know that if one browser implements "Crash Recover" then NO OTHER BROWSER HAS THE RIGHT TO DO THE SAME, DAMN IT!!

BTW, did you bitch this loudly when Firefox ripped off IE7's "info bar" (the one that stops drive-by downloads and plugins)? Did you bitch when Firefox ripped off IE7's anti-phishing feature?

Fuck you, hypocrite.

Re:un, effing, real.

[I'm Don Giovanni]

I rather like IE7's lack of menu. I've found that I don't use the menu at all, so why have it? It's cleaner to just have the Page and Tools drop-down.

Also, I don't understand the fawning over Safari. Safari is garbage, IMO. On my Mac I always use Firefox over Safari, and don't even get me started on how absolutely horrible the Windows version of Safari is (the beta of that was released a long long time ago, and we've not heard a peep from Apple about it since; have they abandoned that monstrosity?).

Re:un, effing, real.

[sm62704]

Everyone else came after IE

No they didn't. Mosaic was the first browser, and it used bookmarks. Netscape came next, and it, too, used bookmarks. Microsoft came after Netscape and changed "bookmarks" to "favorites".

I don't know where you got the idea Microsoft had the first browser. They were a "me too" also ran. BTW, Excel wasn't the first spreadsheet, either, and Word wasn't the first word processor.

Re:un, effing, real.

[bigstrat2003]

I understand that. And those browsers are not in common use today. Firefox, Safari, Opera... the major browsers of today all came after IE.

Re:un, effing, real.

[Jesus_666]

You mean Microsoft finally implemented the elusive file:// protocol? No way!

Safety Filter

[losethisurl]

We can filter if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
'Cause your friends don't filter and if they don't filter
Well they're no friends of mine

Working Links

[Peeet]

Microsoft has also posted links to download the beta, but none of them are working right now.
I think I can be of some assistance. Here are some working links to download the next generation browser's beta...</!lying></!goatse></!toworry,still!lying>

Re:Working Links

[sm62704]

Here's another great Microsoft link. And here's Internet Explorer. Choice quotes:<choicequote>

Whoops! Maybe you were looking for "shit"?

This article is best viewed on Mozilla Firefox.

"Interweb Exploder isn't compatible is NOT compatible with the internet. Unable to connect. Would you like to download an update?"
~ Internet compatibilty on Internet explorer

"Health Warning: Using Internet Explorer could cause your head to asplode."
~ Microsoft on Internet Explorer

"I'm sorry. Your web browser has no idea whats going on."
~ Mozilla Firefox on Internet Explorer

"I'm dissapointed in you."
~ Opera on Internet Explorer

"I Ate it and threw up something even more Bloated"
~ Advant Browser on Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer(often called Interweb Exploder, Ayyyiiieeee or Internet Explwhorer) is a spyware and adware deployment tool developed by Microsoft. It can be used to visit warez and pr0n sites and download spyware and adware, which are microorganisms that live in symbiosis with it. Internet Explorer is not to be confused with Netscape or Firefox or Ninjas that were all popular forms of pr0n viewing before the third coming of the Flying Spagetti Monster which wiped out all companies in the world to be replaced with roving bands of pirates. Everyone hates pr0n but this stupid so called "Internet exploding thing that whoops your ass off" keeps on spreading it.

<alt>I'm sorry, this page is not compatible with non-Microsoft browsers. Click here to download the new Internet Explorer8<\alt><\choicequote>

the classic joke...

[Tumbleweed]

Microsoft: "Hey, wait for us - We're the leader!"

I'm glad they're going to be supporting all these 'new' standards. :)

Automatic Crash Recovery

[The Aethereal]

Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is a feature of Windows®Internet Explorer® 8 that can help to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users' browsing sessions. That is actually pretty cool. Firefox should steal that.

Re:Automatic Crash Recovery

[BrentH]

It has, for a long time, had this.

Re:Automatic Crash Recovery

[sm62704]

Hey, if I download that and put it in my car and run into a telephone pole does that save me the cash for car repairs? Damn I'm downloading that sucker right now!

Re:Automatic Crash Recovery

[cloud1494]

firefox does have automatic crash recovery. I know this because I cheat and end the process if I need to shut down or reboot.

Re:Automatic Crash Recovery

[Your.Master]

Not actually. IE8 recovers on a per-tab basis as well as on a per-window basis; great for when the browser crashes with lots of tabs or with some tabs in a secure site that cannot be trivially recovered. Also, now tabs can hang without affecting other tabs so you can keep going.

Re:Automatic Crash Recovery

[stonedyak]

Sounds nice in theory. However, I've just installed IE8 beta and visited http://www.crashie.com/ and guess what? The entire browser interface (including all other tabs) is hanging.

Re:Automatic Crash Recovery

[Your.Master]

What? I'm using it on Vista x86 and IE didn't crash or hang at all, it just browsed there normally.

Re:Automatic Crash Recovery

[Daengbo]

Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is a feature of Windows®Internet Explorer® 8 that can help to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging.

This reminds me too much of "In the unlikely case of a water landing ..."

And what's up with Activities?
Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.
I actually rarely do anything like that unless I'm composing a post like this, but usually I'm quoting from the parent (on the same page) not from another page. Besides, what's hard about copy/paste?

Anyway, Epiphany allows me to "look up" selected text with a right click and Smart Bookmarks. I can share the web page via CTRL-L and other javascript bookmarks. Doesn't strike me as a big feature.

Re:Automatic Crash Recovery

[isorox]

Besides, what's hard about copy/paste?

In windows it's not just highlight/middle click, which is a great way of moving text around from a surfing POV (with a mouse), to a data entry POV (keyboard), it's a more involved
highlight/rightclick/leftclick -- highlight/rightclick/leftclick
or highlight/ctrl-c highlight/ctrl-v

Re:Safety Filter (continued)

[denis-The-menace]

I Say, we follow standards if we wannoo
A thing we call "the embrace"
And we extend them 'til they gonna break
Leaving the real standards far behind
And we can innovate (Yea, right..)

Re:WinXP ?

[Anonymous Coward]

IE7 has a special Vista-only protected mode. I imagine IE8 has the same.

/. now Microsoft propaganda pit?

[Cyclops]

The number of excessively-Microsoft-friendly (beyond what could be considered reasonable, for instance this article which talks about nothing that matters for nerds and only mentions some ridiculous luser features instead of non-standards compliance, or the other one where a fake Open Source operating system from Microsoft was published, etc...) articles has increased hugely.

Re:/. now Microsoft propaganda pit?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are reshaping the meaning of slashvertisement.

Re:/. now Microsoft propaganda pit?

[kellyb9]

A browser that is used by roughly 85% of the market is releasing a new version into beta testing. A company that is mostly closed source has released an open source kernel for testing new features. OH yeah and its OS is used by 95% of the personal computers in the world. It may be coincidence that this was all on the same day - regardless, i think all of these items are significant as far as technology goes.

Re:/. now Microsoft propaganda pit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck both you and Microsoft's propaganda machine.

Re:/. now Microsoft propaganda pit?

[RightSaidFred99]

Oooh, yeah. SlashDot so pro-Microsoft now. It's sheer craziness, I tells ya! Where in God's name will all those ridiculous MS-haters go to rant and rave about MS now that SlashDot is effectively owned by MS now, according to Cyclops.

Give me a fucking break, dude. And I'm not sure why you bolded fake Open Source operating system. Because CmdrTaco used a bad article title, you seem to be making some retarded implication that Microsoft is "pulling one over" on you and not really releasing something as open source when in fact they never claimed it was open source.

Re:/. now Microsoft propaganda pit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's really sticking it to the man...

AJAX Navigation Support

[jeremyds]

One of the more interesting features included with IE8 is "Ajax Navigation":

AJAX Navigation enables users to navigate back and forth without leaving the AJAX application and could be used navigating a page without performing a traditional full navigation. This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components like the address bar by setting the window.location.hash value, firing an event to alert components in the page and even creating an entry in the travel log. This is actually a proposed standard in the HTML 5 specification and it's nice to see Microsoft implementing it. The inability to bookmark or navigate to a page that's been updated using AJAX has always been a pain in the ass.

Re:AJAX Navigation Support

[nevali]

I've built sites in the past fortnight which use document.location.hash to allow navigation to/from different AJAXified or otherwise dynamic sections of a page (either by typing the URL with the anchor directly, or by using back/forward), and it works wonderfully in every browser I've tried including IE 6.

About the only "clever" bit here is firing an event automatically when it changes, which just removes the three lines of code I have checking whether window.location.hash is myfoo.savedHash or not in an interval ticker. ...and they turned this into a whole complete feature, and got somebody to think up a name for it?!

Re:AJAX Navigation Support

[seandiggity]

...sounds like a new attack vector to me. Cuz IE needs more of those.

Re:AJAX Navigation Support

[Your.Master]

I really hope you aren't one of the developers that claimed the meta tag should default to standards mode. That was only one line. Yet you are asking everybody to add three lines of code, that nobody is adding, instead of a simple browser tweak (which harms no standards) to make things Just Work.

Honestly. Who the hell cares if it's clever. It certainly is a feature that I can click back and forward in Ajax and have it work properly.

Re:AJAX Navigation Support

[Jugalator]

That and process isolation by tab to not have your stupid PDF plugin crash the entire browser (no IE only issue, it's being heard of in e.g. Firefox too).

Personally, I think IE 8 for once looks promising! Combine this with the PNG transparency of IE 7 and the vastly improved standards compliance in IE 8 with improved security too, and MS may actually have something competitive on their hands *gasp*

Re:AJAX Navigation Support

[nevali]

You miss the point--people will have to write code specifically for this feature (which, incidentally, won't work in other browsers for a while yet), when if they were going to do that they could just have written it to work in the first place.

What makes you think people who can't manage to beat out a couple of lines of pretty simple code are going to be able to write code for "AJAX Navigation support" and do it in a way which degrades gracefully?

The whole thing is something that will make life easier for web developers in the long term, but have little effect in the short term. What it won't do is magically make life any easier for end users.

Re:AJAX Navigation Support

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent funny.

ACR

[RiotingPacifist]

The "Crash Recovery" actually seams to be quite good, better than Firefox anyway, if its implemented well, it means each tab runs in a separate thread (although for some reason they called them processes) and can crash/recover separately, as well as implementing the standard session restore.

Re:ACR

[Skuto]

>it means each tab runs in a separate thread (although for some reason they called them processes)

Processes and threads are vastly different things.

For example, one thread crashing means all other threads in the same process go down with it.

This is probably exactly why they use processes instead of threads.

Re:ACR

[weicco]

I've tried for some time now figure out what's the idea behind thread per tab. And it seems to me there isn't any idea in that. And if you take under consideration that in Windows the whole messaging stuff is done in the context of the main thread there is really no idea to spawn threads for every tab. You'd still have to receive every message in one thread and then pass them to others and use nasty synchronization objects and stuff. Brrr.. I wouldn't want to implement that :)

Now process per tab and one container to rule them all is totally a different thing. Tab page doesn't have to wait other tabs to handle their messages. It can go on and process it's stuff when ever processor(s) gives time for it. And if one page crashes and burns, all the others won't follow it. But a lot of context switches here also and even nastier than in multi-thread scenario.

Ps. I hate tabs

features?

[poticlin]

First thing to cross my mind -> List of features by M$, aren't they calling them list of bugs? or is it the other way around...

Here we go again...

[Anonymous Coward]

if IE3 ....
else if IE4 ....
else if IE5 ....
else if IE6 ....
else if IE7 ....
else if IE8
    GetFirefox()
fi

Mmmmm.....

[Stanislav_J]

I'll take a couple of WebSlices with pepperoni and mushrooms, please....

Just installed it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is from the license terms WINDOWS INTERNET EXPLORER 8 BETA 1 FOR WINDOWS XP SP2, WINDOWS XP SP3, WINDOWS VISTA, WINDOWS VISTA SP1, WINDOWS SERVER 2003 SP2, AND WINDOWS SERVER 2008 I guess XP SP3 is coming pretty soon.

Activities - more IE only "standards"?

[nixeagle]

Looking at the developer guide, I noticed that the activities require the website designer to program this IE only feature into their sites. As it is XML, I suppose it would be fairly easy for others to catch up, but this does sound like something developers will have to do just for IE... unless I'm looking at this one wrong. Anyone care to clarify?

Re:Activities - more IE only "standards"?

[Your.Master]

It uses the OpenService Activities. Only IE implements that right now; maybe others will later. New APIs are not inherently bad things, that's how all the current APIs came into being. Nobody there said it was a Standard yet. And if developers don't want to do it just for IE, they don't have to. Just like if developers don't want to make extensions just for Firefox, they don't have to.

No IE8 will require WinFS

[EmbeddedJanitor]

so that means it will be available in Win98, sorry Win2k, no WinXP, ummm Vista, aww fuck!

It is easy to promise features, but a bit harder to deliver them.

Now with bonus crashiness!

[themushroom]

Opera and Firefox can go back to the page one was on when the browser crashed -- it's about time IE had that capability.

Since, afterall, it needs it the most. But if one instance of IE blows up (historically, taking all other instances with it), does it open up as many instances were open and reload all the pages that died? Like those other two do?

I'll have the usual please (resistance is futile)

[Adoxographer]

Nothing surprising about MucousShaft finally caving into existing standards after they've wrought immeasurable havoc on our web development through their half-assed and semi-proprietary implementations of those standards.

What I want to know is, what MessyStandards is setting it's sites on next. (After all, article only only lists "some" new features, not the ones that may require the element of surprise.)

I'm looking forward to finding out what widely supported standard they'll be bastardising next so web developers can have the heartwarming experience of having to learn and use the crippled and incompatible cousin along with the Standard standard that everyone else will try to use.

Any ideas? Maybe the standard mouse pointer will be replace by a muddy stick (ha, there's another MS acronym) that the user daubs onto a touch sensitive screen.

Some links work

[GottMitUns]

The links for Vista/ Server 2008 and server 2003 work.

Re:Nice screenshot

[xerxesVII]

Excellent catch. Don't know what's up with the mods, though.

Whats with all the change?

[flowpoke]

It seems that with each major version, they (and most other folks) try to reinvent everything and cloud it with branding. NO ONE enjoys radical change with little to no benefit. The interface needs to be more transparent, not cluttered with new terminology and features that matter NONE when compared to things like speed, stability and security.

I don't think MS will ever get it...

Re:Whats with all the change?

[Your.Master]

Good point. They should just leave the browser with no changes for 5 or 6 years.

Oh, wait...

Re:Whats with all the change?

[flowpoke]

What I mean to say is, they are focusing on the wrong thing, IMO. esp with the bad reputation they have already - I think they would do much better if they first catch up (doing it properly) and then release all the copied ideas...

Re:Whats with all the change?

[Jugalator]

I don't think MS will ever get it... What do you mean?? MS disabled ActiveX by default in IE 7, for example.

And IE 8 further improves security by improving its anti-phishing code.
Phishing are among the most problematic things that plague the web today, that's why IE 8 joins the crowd with Firefox and Opera here.

You may still not be satisfied, sure, but you smell and read like a troll.

Re:Whats with all the change?

[Your.Master]

That's a fair point, but there's only so much parallelism you can get in focusing on one thing. They can hire X guys to work on standards pretty much in parallel with Y guys to work on these other features. But they can't necessarily get any more standards support out of using X+Y guys on standards and 0 on these other features.

Re:Whats with all the change?

[Phroggy]

What I mean to say is, they are focusing on the wrong thing, IMO. esp with the bad reputation they have already - I think they would do much better if they first catch up (doing it properly) and then release all the copied ideas... Many of these new features are attempts to catch up. As others have pointed out, the Activities feature is vaguely similar to Mac OS X's Services menu (except the Services menu is available to any Cocoa application, not just within a browser). IE8's WebSlice feature is equivalent to Safari's WebClip feature on Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard". The newly-renamed visible-by-default Favorites bar is equivalent to the Bookmarks bar in Firefox and Safari. Automatic crash recovery is similar to a Firefox feature, but improved. The new Safety Filter is a simple improvement to the phishing filter.

These are new features they can advertise to normal everyday users, that we Slashdotters don't care about (because we already have them, or because they don't appeal to us). That doesn't mean they aren't also fixing a bunch of stuff at the same time.

Re:Whats with all the change?

[brad-x]

Many of these new features are attempts to catch up.

These are new features they can advertise to normal everyday users, that we Slashdotters don't care about (because we already have them, or because they don't appeal to us). That doesn't mean they aren't also fixing a bunch of stuff at the same time.

Some bad reputations cannot be redeemed, and sometimes those who are unrepentant, persistent and relentless can no longer be forgiven.

Beta download

[Thelasko]

Microsoft has also posted links to download the beta, but none of them are working right now.

Actually, page was DoSed by malware coders trying to be the first to exploit IE8's laundry list of security vulnerabilities.

Webslice sounds a lot like Apple's new widget

[Vidar Leathershod]

You know, the one that allows you to capture a portion of a page and look at the latest version of that section (a la "subscribe").

Beauty, they didn't even take a year to snag that feature and rename it.

Re:Webslice sounds a lot like Apple's new widget

[Your.Master]

It is different. It's a portion formed by the web developer and not necessarily like the web page as viewed by HTML (so it can be trivially reformatted to fit in a smaller space). Since the site designer makes it, it's easier to get things right for things like Ajax pages.

I find it funny...

[AnomaliesAndrew]

That they'd sooner build in an entire bloated crash recovery system, instead of just making it not crash.

Been playing with the XP Version for the last hour

[homeslice3]

And it's not that much different than IE7 - though the install hosed some settings. For some reason .Net sites seem to load really fast, while others (like Slashdot for example) there's a noticable delay in loading the page and rendering the display.

Interface

[mrsmiggs]

Until they make the interface usable I'm sticking with IE6 for all my incompatible with firefox browsing needs. Is it me or did they just redesign the IE interface just to make it different to Firefox, what exactly is wrong with old faithful IE6 and Firefox style layout?

Re:Crash recovery, eh? Crash Recovery...

[davidsyes]

What i like about Firefox's crash recovery is that it not only works during a crash, but when i task-kill it to recover RAM when AutoCAD drawings are huge or print spooling is dragging.

When it recovers my tabs (20+ in one instance for personal sites and 20+ tabs in another FF instance for work-related sites) and two instances of FF, it makes me feel good.

Someone questioned IE8 beta's design origins. That XP and 2K STILL (seemingly) have no patch to enable the sysadmin to come along and lock the current user and do some admin tasks without killing the apps/processes in play, and no apparent ability to restore the complete prior crashed or saved session, it makes me feel very good that i use KDE.

It appears to me that even in vista there is no memory of previous sessions to open up or restore all apps from the previous session. Why is this. Are they afraid it will give ammunition to Open Source to counter ms' dubious patent infringement threats?

Back to browsers: i LIKE Flock, but found it crashes when some myspace profiles start up the music applet. Even clicking on STOP loading in the browser menu and on the music applet is not enough to stop the crash. Killing the tab on restore previous session does work, as a workaround. i LIKE FF, and wish it would use the KDE file exploring/management widgets to which I've become so attached. i can't stand that older file display interface. i LIKE KDE. Nautilus it interesting, but i'm mostly in KDE or minimal interfaces.

(lower-casing/deprecation of "I" and "I'm" intentional; many other languages do not arrogantly case-place the self of the speaker above the listener or observer-- even though other languages tend to have separate words (honorific and plain/familiar) for the western/Latin "I"). So, it is my mission to start a movement to deprecate the importance of "I" and force it to "i"...

Join me: i will try to lead the way...

Wasting Time

[DigitalisAkujin]

By wasting their time on these so called "features" they are falling more and more behind Firefox.

Firefox 3 now supports Animated PNGs, CSS3, and AJAX File Uploads. IE8 is playing catch up to 2 years ago and still isn't making any headway.

They need to stop wasting time with useless features, hunker down, and start pushing out standards compliant code.

This is unacceptable and will continue to erode on their market share as user's reasons for staying with IE wither away as they continue to do so.

Re:Wasting Time

[DigitalisAkujin]

IE8 = All the features of FF2

FF3 = Beta 3, Beta 4 coming out within 2 weeks. Release before summer.

IE8 = Beta 1.... won't be in RC till summer.

Get your facts right before talking next time. :P

Re:Wasting Time

[innocence18]

Standards compliant code? You mean the way my freshly downloaded IE8 Beta 1 correctly renders ACID2, whilst my FF3 beta 3 doesn't? Granted there is more the web standards than just passing the ACID tests, but this is certainly a big step in the right direction from the IE team.

Re:Wasting Time

[nixeagle]

Are you sure you are taking the right test? I'm using Firefox 3 Beta 3 on Gentoo linux (x86) and it works here. Go to http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html and try again. I do recall that the main site for the test has a broken link, resulting in it appearing to fail on all browsers.

Pop-up Blocker Now *disabled*?

[Bodero]

I just installed the IE8 beta. Overall, it's slow, but I'd expect that from a beta. My main concern is that, at least on my machine, the popup blocker was disabled by default. Is this the new standard?

Welcome back, Popups.

Re:Pop-up Blocker Now *disabled*?

[Shippy]

Mine is on by default. IE8 on Vista SP1.

Re:Pop-up Blocker Now *disabled*?

[strange dynamics]

I still use IE6 on all my machines (not for any real reason, it's just what I have always used). As a result, I have never had popup blocking. While they do still appear occasionally, I find that during most regular web browsing, very few sites use popups anymore, presumably because everybody blocks them.

The result is that on the off chance I am using a diferent machine with FF or IE7 installed, I spend far more time dealing with the popup bar blocking legitimate popups than I would normally spend closing unwanted ones. Obviously if IE dropped popup blocking, sites would probably start using them again, but for now I'm happiest being a popupblockingless minority.

Really? Insightful?

[Bladesonfire]

How did this get modded "5, Insightful"? Just because he uses a car analogy to complain about a MS product? I probably would have credited you with something if you at least made some substantial comments, like "where the hell is the refresh button?", but instead, you just fall back on the safe thing to do and just complain about MS generally. Seriously, what the hell do you mean by the analogy that there's no seatbelt?

I guess I already answered my first question: I mean, you are complaining about MS and you did use a car analogy. I must be new here.

Download links working

[Xogede]

The download links are working now.

IE8 Features

[Stan Vassilev]

I'm reading through the comments here and I can't believe my eyes. Boy, are you bitter, or what...

The features IE8 implements are a direct answer to what most users on Slashdot I've seen whine for years on an on, and still there's barely few mildly positive responses here, it's just so sad (for Slashdot).

Let me list a fraction of the improvements of IE8, should it be too hard for you to RTFA-s:

- Much improved compliance with the CSS 2.1 standards, compliance with certain most requested CSS3 features. This includes, but not limited to features such as display:inline-table, :after, :before, content attribute, counter-reset / counter-increment, box-sizing (implemented as -ms-box-sizing, similar to -moz-box-sizing as it's not finalized in CSS3), fixes on the p/div handling, CSS outline, improvements to text orientation rendering,

- Data URI support would dramatically simplify dynamic content generation in some instances, and improve the performance on pages with many small images (you can embed those images in the HTML and save yourself some 10-20 additional HTTP requests).

- More complete support for the CSS attributes related to page printing, such as @page, left/right/first page selectors, page-break-inside, widows, orphans properties.

- Kick-ass development and debugging tools that rival FireBug for Firefox (honestly, check the white-paper). If you're a web developer, you're probably using FireBug intensively, now you can debug with the same ease on IE.

- Hooks for AJAX navigation (I had to implement JS navigation on a project as recently as a week ago, and I know this will save me quite some time in the future, if the other browsers follow suit), DOM Storage (super-cookies :) ) that allow much richer offline storage, and combine this with ability to detect if the network is down/offline or not, and let your JS handle the situation! XHR has timeout now as well.

- CSS selectors API exposed to JS. Do you have any idea how *important* that is? Look at any popular JS library today: Prototype, jQuery, MooTools. They all *emulate* this feature. Some browsers, are starting to implement this, and now that IE is among them, those JS libraries can act as a simple proxy to the native Selectors API, and thus deliver substantial performance boost to pages doing lots of selections.

- 6 connections per host, versus 2. Before you start complaining how this will overload some servers: IE will start with 2 connections, and if it detects the connection is speedy, it'll build up to 6 dynamically. This means if you're being Slashdotted, for example, IE will detect this and keep connections 2 at a time.

- OBJECT tag was boosted to support all MIME types, using standard markup, the way other browsers handle it. That includes images.

- ActiveX plugins can now easily hook to an element namespace and provide rendering services, for example MathML, SVG etc.

- Cross-domain messaging and requests! This will make certain (safe!) application a *lot* easier. Currently the only workaround to safe cross-domain communication is a hack involving multiple iframes and hash manipulation. No more, this a really forward-looking of Microsoft to implement, hopefully the other browsers follow-suit.

- Sane versioning model, so if your site breaks in IE8 you can request IE7 mode via simple meta tag. The default would be the most compliant mode (as covered on a previous article).

- I've heard lots of whining here on Slashdot in the past about the circular memory 'leak' IE JS had. Now this is fixed. It's not as trivial as you might thing it is, and IE JS doesn't suffer alone from this problem (popular languages like PHP for example exhibit the same issue). A new garbage collector was implemented to fix this.

- Performance improvements to the CSS/HTML/JS subsystem will deliver speedier browsing without expected compatibility issues.

Re:IE8 Features

[dhavleak]

Holy crap I wish I had mod point to use right now. Thanks for the intelligent post.

Re:IE8 Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks a lot.
Your post was way easier to read than the main marketing bulls**t coming with a truckload of shallow technical pdfs on Microsoft website.

Re:IE8 Features

[Riskable]

Let me list a fraction of the improvements of IE8, should it be too hard for you to RTFA-s:

- Much improved compliance with the CSS 2.1 standards, compliance with certain most requested CSS3 features. This includes, but not limited to features such as display:inline-table, :after, :before, content attribute, counter-reset / counter-increment, box-sizing (implemented as -ms-box-sizing, similar to -moz-box-sizing as it's not finalized in CSS3), fixes on the p/div handling, CSS outline, improvements to text orientation rendering,

"Improved compliance" still isn't compliance. Why we're cynical: We've all been waiting for Microsoft to "catch up" to every other browser and it seems that their future holds nothing but further catch-up. I guess we'll all have to wait until IE 9 or Linux/Mac desktop dominance?

- Data URI support would dramatically simplify dynamic content generation in some instances, and improve the performance on pages with many small images (you can embed those images in the HTML and save yourself some 10-20 additional HTTP requests).

- More complete support for the CSS attributes related to page printing, such as @page, left/right/first page selectors, page-break-inside, widows, orphans properties.

More catch-up: Data URI is already supported in everything else and the page printing CSS attributes are just more standards compliance catch-up.

- Kick-ass development and debugging tools that rival FireBug for Firefox (honestly, check the white-paper). If you're a web developer, you're probably using FireBug intensively, now you can debug with the same ease on IE.

So Microsoft is trying to court developers back to their platform by providing more proprietary development tools? I'm going to give you an imaginary quote from Microsoft-of-the-future: "Microsoft cannot guarantee that pages developed with their tools will work in other browsers"... Just like the old days! Build a site in Frontpage and who cares what it looks like in anything but IE? Here's some advice for developers: Microsoft's tools are only ever good for developing/debugging sites for Microsoft browsers.

- Hooks for AJAX navigation (I had to implement JS navigation on a project as recently as a week ago, and I know this will save me quite some time in the future, if the other browsers follow suit), DOM Storage (super-cookies :) ) that allow much richer offline storage, and combine this with ability to detect if the network is down/offline or not, and let your JS handle the situation! XHR has timeout now as well.

It is sad, really... More proprietary "features". Just what we DON'T need. Let me explain it to you: If you've added a feature to your browser that requires developers write code to take advantage of it you are undermining standards. I see no reason to trust Microsoft's implementation of this. In fact, I'm so jaded at this point I'm not in the "Well, we'll see" camp I'm in the "don't even think about using this" camp. When Microsoft's got a few YEARS of demonstrating real support for standards then I'll start reconsidering their platform/browser as something other than an anti-competitive wedge.

Here's some wisdom for everyone to copy down: Never implement a feature invented by Microsoft until an open source product implements it *completely* and *successfully*. Their history is too full of broken implementations of their own "standards" to trust them not to A) break it, B) claim patent rights on it, or C) make it so obfuscated and difficult to duplicate the only way to ensure compatibility is to use Microsoft's own products.

- CSS selectors API exposed to JS. Do you have any idea how *important* that is? Look at any popular JS library today: Prototype, jQuery, MooTools. They all *emulate* this

Re:IE8 Features

[Your.Master]

I find it hilarious that half your complaints are that other browsers already implement the function, and the other half are that other browsers do not already implement the function.

To address one specific point:

Just curious how a existing product can "emulate" a non-existing product (IE 8)? They are emulating the Selectors API, an open standard implemented by IE8 beta 1 and not implemented by other major browsers.

Re:IE8 Features

[dhavleak]

The gist of your post was:

OP called out some feature You pan the feature because it will be proprietary, or has already been implemented (therefore MS should not even bother). And then rinse and repeat.

To address your first point: "Improved compliance still isn't compliance". Can you please give us a link to a complaint web browser? There are only less complaint browsers and more compliant browsers! "Improved" standards compliance is a Good Thing!

No real need to respond to the rest. Just frustrated with the way this site and its moderation have become so shamelessly biased.

Re:IE8 Features

[Riskable]

I could see why this might appear confusing... I'll break it down for you:

Microsoft has a monopoly. By bundling a web browser into their OS they are "setting the bar" for what most users web experience will be. Because Windows is a monopoly with such a huge installed base that means that every web designer has to take Microsoft's browser into account when they develop a web site. This concept isn't a problem by itself but it becomes a big problem (and an anti-competitive wedge) when...

1) Microsoft adds proprietary "features" or extensions to their browser that require web pages to be coded in a non-standard way in order for them to work. Other browsers are not at fault for not implementing these things... They are merely doing the right thing by adhering to the standard.

2) They don't update their browser for a very long time. By failing to upgrade the rendering engine of IE for nearly a decade they've essentially put a brake on improvements to the web. It stifles innovation. Even though other web browsers are more standards compliant developers can't take advantage of these improvements since they have to develop for the "lowest common denominator": Internet Explorer. This problem also makes developing for the web a lot more time consuming and difficult.

3) Their web (as in, the standards-based web) development tools are only good for developing sites that run in their own browser. They're marketing Internet Explorer development tools as general web development tools. (Some) Managers believe this marketing BS and then force these tools on their developers (or hire developers who are experts at using them). Microsoft's whole development tool library is designed to lock people into their platform (Windows + IE) making it extremely hard for competing browsers to enter this space (and for the web to progress!).

4) The whole point of all these things is to make "write once, run on any OS/browser" as difficult as possible. If people can use any web site or any web-based application on any platform then Microsoft will be forced to compete on features, price, quality, etc... These are all things they've worked so hard to avoid!

What it comes down to is that Microsoft is a convicted anti-competitive monopolist and there's no evidence so far that they've changed their tune. It is right to be sceptical of everything they do. Especially in regards to Internet Explorer and their constant push to undermine standards.

-Riskable
http://riskable.com/
"When a government fails to police monopolies it is enabling tyranny."

Re:IE8 Features

[Bullfish]

It's not about bitterness, it's about insecurity for some, and about making jobs easier for others. On the insecurity side, the if MS really does succeed in improving windows, it makes their position stronger and automatically makes the position of Linux, mac et al weaker (in the view of the insecure). Also, a lot of people have made a lot of money plugging holes in MS products. Witness the howling of "evil" by symantec and macaffee etc when vista cut them out of accessing the kernel, which they never should have had access to in the first place.

In implementing their own code standards (or favouring them) (I am not a developer), it means developers have to make exceptions in their code for MS making more work for them. This is what I have gleaned from reading comments on slashdot over time. Maybe, my interpretation is flawed, but it seems to be more about having to do "extra" work than being impossible to program for...

My theory is that if MS ever really does makes a rock solid, superb OS, a lot of people on this board will piss themselves. Truth be told, they want MS weaker, not better. Whether or not IE8 addresses a lot of MS's problems in the browser arena, time will tell, but I can say that in many quarters, true improvement by MS is feared.

Re:IE8 Features

[dhavleak]

I didn't ask for an explaination. I didn't say that you should not be wary of MS's intentions. If you didn't notice, that point was covered about 100 times prior to your post. GP's point (actually discussing the features of the beta) was not.

Hence, I said, that your response to GP was pointless and devoid of information/insight. So was your next one. Do you seriously think you enlightened me in some way? If I understand your signature correctly, my tendency is to bracket you as an instance of typical slashdot groupthink, which I find tiresomely unoriginal and consistently missing the bigger picture (and yes, that includes your current post I'm responding to -- we can discuss in detail, if you wish, though I doubt eiher of us is likely to budge).

Group-think represents the lions share of this website. Its the other posters (the original thinkers) that I keep coming back for. That was my second point -- that its getting harder and harder to filter through the group-think BS and find actual insightful comments -- the comments that got me hooked to this site in the first place.

Re:IE8 Features

[Jesus_666]

Yes, IE8 is a marked improvement. But... I don't know what the proper antonym for "goodwill" is, but the IE devs have accumulated a lot of it over the years. Their and their product's reputation is so bad that in order to be seen as anthing but clowns they need to release not just a better product but the best product. They need to decidedly out-perform at least one of Gecko, Presto and Webkit in terms of standard compliance if they want any actual respect.

Microsoft didn't just drop the ball, they tossed in into a ditch and let it rot there for a few years. When they finally remembered they had a ball in the first place the competition was already miles ahead of them. If they want to actually play the game and be taken seriously again they don't just need to move in the same direction as everyone else; they need to do that and be faster than everyone or they will always play catch-up.

Yes, I know that it's not entirely fair to expect the IE devs to do better than everyone else faster than everyone else. But that's what they need to do if they want recognition.

Quotes

[pete-classic]

Finally got the download. Still doesn't support the Q tag correctly. On the up side it supports the application\xhtml+xml MIME type now!

-Peter

Re:Quotes

[pete-classic]

Oops. No it doesn't. Looks like it's the some old crap after all.

-Peter

What's the most secure mainstream browser(for me)?

[recoiledsnake]

I run Vista x64(yea burn down my karma for it, it works well for me and I like it more than XP) at home and was wondering what the most secure browser for me would be while still having flash and javascript etc. on. The main contenders are IE7, Firefox and Opera. Opera is my current browser because Firefox was a dog on my old 256MB laptop(my current machine has 8 gigs). Opera has a low chance of exploits in the wild because of the low number of users. IE7 on Vista has a sandbox so that a big buffer overrun exploit that gets past the DEP protection would still be sandboxed from damaging my user documents unless I give it express permission. Firefox doesn't have such protection and is mainstream enough to have exploits in the wild for it. Since IE7 is kind of clunky to use, am I better off with Opera?

IE8 supports the latest features

[R3d Jack]

In keeping with this theme, I suggest that the IE8 name be dropped in favor of something to reflect just how up-to-date this new browser is. How about IE 2005?

From a developer perspective

[an.echte.trilingue]

From a designer's perspective, IE7 is a huge improvement over IE6. They fixed really a lot of the css problems, to the point that, if I am careful, I can write a site that is both css/xhtml valid and renders properly in IE7 (even with a css-only drop menu). No hacks or anything. The new version of Trident (IE's rendering engine) isn't perfect, but it's much better.

They also finally implemented png alpha channel, which lets us overlay images such as logos with nice, smooth, aliased edges. To get an idea of the difference this makes, compare these two logos:

• png
• gif

Alpha channel support also allows people to do some other nice looking effects, such as drop shadows, with little fuss.

Unfortunately, the people who designed the IE7 UI appear to have been retarded monkeys. The result is that now, almost 2 years after its release, almost a third of my users are still on IE6. Personally, that is really frustrating.

I am not optimistic about MS's commitment to continue to improve standards compliance in IE8. It does not support svg, as somebody already pointed out, nor will it support E4X, which is going to hobble AJAX development.

Re:From a developer perspective

[ianare]

Hey that's a cool stats monitor. Where did you get it?

Regarding IE6 usage, I found it varies greatly on the site. My open source project site gets 60% FF, about 30% IE of which 40% is IE6. This site breaks in IE6, and frankly I don't care.
The business site gets about 70% IE, of which 55% is IE6 (we get mainly corporate and government visitors). So obviously for that site I do try to make everything work properly.

It's one of those catch 22, if you make changes that cause your site to break in IE6, you lose business, but if no sites are broken on IE6 no one will want to upgrade.

Re:From a developer perspective

[Angostura]

Judging from the URL in the picture, it is from http://xiti.com/

Re:From a developer perspective

[an.echte.trilingue]

It's from Xiti... you just sign up and put a little script in your page that displays their marker. They have a free and a pay for version... I have the free version.

It can be a bit light on certain key features, such as tracking user paths, but it is really good at producing quick, attractive, easy to read overview charts that you bring into meetings or post on /. Of course, you also have the disadvantage that you are running 3rd party scripts on your page.

As for browser usage, I think that my site probably represents a pretty accurate sample of the European market. We sell a product (language courses) that is decidedly non-technical, but still applies to technical people.

As for how to get people to upgrade... very few people will upgrade on their own. My father has been a software developer / project manager for nearly 40 years and he still has SP1 at home. We have to rely on the people who produce our software to write a good product that updates nearly automatically, like FF is and does. I have little faith in MS's ability/desire to do this, though (they update, but the quality part...).

Re:From a developer perspective

[Crazy Taco]

The result is that now, almost 2 years after its release, almost a third of my users are still on IE6. Personally, that is really frustrating.

Actually, that's probably not the reason people are still on IE6. I work for a major Fortune 500 company, and we are all still on IE6. This post is brought to you on IE6. Why? Because businesses, especially large ones where all the people are, are really cautious to adopt new technologies. They want to be sure they will work with all the custom software they've written. In our case, some programs depended on very IE6 specific things, or were hacks of some sort, so we are STILL on IE6, and that's all that is supported here. And as a web developer, I have to develop in IE6 so I can see what my users will see. I would love to upgrade, but can't until the company moves us all forward. So that's probably why you have so many IE6 hits; anyone on a laptop issued by a large corporation is probably still using it.

Re:From a developer perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

The real reason 1/3 of your users are still on IE6 is because IE7 is not a forced upgrade on XP, yet.

Re:From a developer perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

The real reason 1/3 of your users are still on IE6 is because IE7 is not a forced upgrade on XP, yet. Actually it has been a high priority update for a month now.

You can still refuse to install it, sure, but the path of least resistance is to install it now. And if it was an against-your-will-forced-upgrade then there'd be even more outcry here.

Re:From a developer perspective

[Spliffster]

"Because businesses, especially large ones where all the people are, are really cautious to adopt new technologies."

may i rephraze this for you:
"Because businesses, especially large ones where all the people are, were really stupid to adopt new properitary IE6 technologies."

I, also, do work for a large company. And we are still on IE6 because rewriting all internal intranet applications will take another 2-3 years (let alone costs).

Cheers,
-S

Re:From a developer perspective

[PSdiE]

Also, Windows 2000 users (I'm one - never felt the need for XP eye candy and Win2K is a rock-steady OS) are capped at IE6 - MS decided to prevent IE7 running on Win2K.

Re:From a developer perspective

[Xacid]

I'm doing IT support over on my side of the world for a little bit and the mentality seems to have been the same. However, we've been trying harder to resolve those nitpicky issues that have the ability to kill productivity. It IS easier to just say "screw it" and stay with older versions that don't have the same issues, but it doesn't exactly resolve the problem. Here's an easy example that may affect a lot of corporate people: outlook webmail on ie7. There's some S/MIME add on that gets installed during some update at some point somewhere that will actually put the user in a situation where the minute they hit "Send" the browser crashes and all their work is lost. Simply disable that add on and the problem is solved and life goes on for IE7. And that's really been the *only* major problem we've had on our end, but an enormous problem it was for productivity. Hopefully IE8 is an massive improvement though and something our users could more easily adopt than say....vista.

Re:From a developer perspective

[David Gerard]

I notice that WordPress and Blogger themes are increasingly slightly broken in IE 6. It looks like Web 2.0 developers actually want standards-based rendering, and the IE users can get a non-sucky browser or just fuck off.

Re:From a developer perspective

[David Gerard]

We got Firefox as part of our new desktop build in the following manner. We'll be using similar methods to make sure they can't move us to Vista, ever.

1. Get Firefox onto desktops, even as a second option.

2. Make sure small groups of people use in-house web apps are written for Firefox and SeaMonkey, and specifically break in IE. This is easy: just write to standards.

We have one vital app for twenty people that was broken for six months in IE with no-one realising ...

Re:From a developer perspective

[rabblerouzer]

pretty good overview on IE8 here

I'm shocked!

[porneL]

The technical side of Activities and WebSlices does not suck! They've used a pretty straightforward and not-very-IE-specific XML file + JS call for adding Activities, and WebSlices are based on hAtom Microformat.

Loads of features reveiled over time

[V!NCENT]

These aren't security holes... they're features!

XP version?

[Jabbrwokk]

There's an XP version? BRB I gotta go turn off automatic updates

Will someone please shut up about the Acid 2 test?

[tjwhaynes]

We did have an article a bit ago about IE8 passing the Acid2 test.

The Acid2 test is NOT designed to demonstrate that a browser has done a good job of implementing all of CSS 2.0. It is designed to demonstrate that the browser can cope with horribly broken input and still display the correct output. The Acid2 test doesn't validate against the CSS spec. Pulling the 'IE8 passes the Acid2 test' line every time standards support comes up is a bad case of apples-to-oranges comparisons.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

download links for IE8 beta!

[ionix5891]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

Re:Crash recovery, eh? Crash Recovery...

[Shippy]

i LIKE Flock...

i LIKE FF...

i can't stand...

(lower-casing/deprecation of "I" and "I'm" intentional; many other languages do not arrogantly case-place the self of the speaker above the listener or observer-- even though other languages tend to have separate words (honorific and plain/familiar) for the western/Latin "I"). So, it is my mission to start a movement to deprecate the importance of "I" and force it to "i"... Um, ok, good for you. You're still supposed to capitalize the beginning of a sentence, though.

Also, it's not due to arrogance. It does have some history behind it. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%28pronoun%29:

In orthography, this pronoun is comparable to proper nouns. In most writing I is always capitalised. This convention dates to the late Middle Ages, when the form i first developed from the earlier ic. Writers of handwritten manuscripts began to use a capital I because the lower-case letter was hard to read and sometimes mistaken for part of the previous or succeeding word. This practice continued after the introduction of printing partly because it was already established and partly because it improved readability.

It ain't hard

[erikharrison]

They use the computer. For god's sake, you didn't have to go to a website to get the Sasser virus, infected machines would attack random IPs. If you bought an XP machine when Sasser was rampant, I knew many people who were infected on first boot, before they could even install a firewall or virus scanner.

You've never been emailed a Word document (with a VBA virus)? You've never installed AOL (which overwrites your netstack)? Never been redirected to a warez site (via a compromised legit website)? Hell, for years Wal-Mart used to sell software packages full of dubious "shareware", TurboTax was at one point under legal fire for installing a backdoor, you can't put a Sony audio CD in your machine for fear of installing DRM crippleware behind your back, and OEM machines are loaded with potentially insecure adware begging you to upgrade to the full version.

While it's not entirely inconceivable that you have always run Windows machines behind a hardware firewall, run expensive third party antivirus packages, never run other third party software (thus discarding the best reason to use Windows), and use your machine only for browsing websites you are 100% sure are uncompromised, it is absolutely beyond belief to me that you can be running Windows since 3.x days and not be aware of how easy it is for a machine to get loaded with garbage. As I pointed out, it's not even safe to plug in a vanilla XP machine into the internet without risk of being immediately infected.

Re:It ain't hard

[bigstrat2003]

They use the computer stupidly. Fixed that for you. It only takes a modicum of computer intelligence to keep your computer clean, under Windows or otherwise. I've been using Windows since 3.1, and have had spyware infest me all of once: when I stupidly went to keygen.us on the advice of a friend. I've had a virus once (twice, if you count the spyware incident): when I was 10 or 11 and hadn't yet learned that running random .exes from the Internet (particularly one that claims to be Super Mario Bros, heh) is a bad idea.

It's not that damned hard to run a virus/spyware-free Windows install. Seriously.

Re:It ain't hard

[RiotingPacifist]

I had a friends who was fairly computer competent (on a technical side he knows some stuff in more detail than me, e.g fragmentation until i read about reiserfs), and after switching back to windows from duel boot (apparently he needed the HD space and one partition is 'nicer'), It took him five minutes before he came into the kitchen saying 'shit, ive got a virus what do i do?', he was setting up some software (ironically i think it was a defragmenter) and had run keygen.exe

In my time on windows i think i only got one piece of 'unwanted software' i wasn't playing with (yeah i was the type that played about with sub7 or whatever it was called) and that was a dialer program.

Re:It ain't hard

[Z34107]

Windows Update patched the Sasser vulnerability seventeen days before the virus was released. Reason why sheep need automatic updates on by default. Even on dial-up, I managed to hit update every Tuesday.

I have never run into a VBA virus, despite working with some rather unintelligent people over the years. Virusscanner nails most of them, as does setting whatever security settings the older versions of Office came with. Unless you're in a business environment with some crazy need for it, the default security settings will generally keep the nastier stuff from operating.

I installed AOL on my microwave, on high for 8 seconds. The 1100 watt DUN client was still fine for food cooking, as the disc had yet to smoke.

I have always built my own computer, or instructed my parents to buy their machine from a systems builder. The first thing I do to family computers when they buy a new one is wipe the drive clean, although that's nigh impossible on machines that don't come with an actual Windows disc.

It's by luck that I haven't put a Sony CD in my computer, although I would have formatted the drive afterwards. I keep everything difficult to replace - music, movies, anime, homework assignments, code, etc - on a separate partition, and backed up. I can format C at any time without even losing my Outlook PST.

Simple thing is - don't install crappy software! Cheap scanners will find VBA and macro viruses, and just don't enable that feature in Word! XP SP2 comes with a decent enough firewall; ZoneAlarm is free for everything else. Vanilla XP machines should be behind a NATed router until patching, or should have a firewall installed from a CD or a flash drive prior to lighting up the ether.

I know how easy it is to get junk on a computer - most come with it. Have someone technically inclined remove it for you - most are happy if you phrase it in terms of negative future opportunity cost.

My Vista machine didn't have any virusscanner software on it for a long time, but I got into a beta test program for what turned into Windows Live OneCare, and got an offer for a discounted subscription when the product was released, so I said, "eh, why not" and put the other two licenses on my parents machines (you get 3.) And if you have to browse porn, at least use Firefox, or use a patched IE7. (Vista will update itself during the install if you're connected to the internet, solving the "vanilla XP" problem, too.

Re:It ain't hard

[erikharrison]

Windows Update patched the Sasser vulnerability seventeen days before the virus was released. Reason why sheep need automatic updates on by default. Even on dial-up, I managed to hit update every Tuesday. The vulnerability patch was an optional update due to the fact that it altered the behavior of patched machines. Mom and Pop who ran Windows Update religiously were still vulnerable.

You miss my point - Windows machines are insecure by default and by design. I had uninfected Windows machines when I ran Windows, but I understood why others were so easily infected. We live in a world where malware is everywhere, and legit software is distributed by exactly the same means as damaged goods - via the internet. I wasn't presuming you were lying about having an uninfected machine. I was presuming you were being ignorant in not understanding how this stuff spread. In retrospect perhaps you were being facetious.

windows Update won't work in IE8 mode

[holiggan]

I've just installed IE8 and trying to go to Windows Update with it, gives this message back:

Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site. To use this site, you must be running Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later.

If you switch to IE7 mode, it works.

Re:Will someone please shut up about the Acid 2 te

[EvanED]

However, do you not agree that if browser X correctly renders the Acid tests, it is more likely to be compliant than if it does not?

Must be said

[kahrytan]

  But does it work with Linux?

Dev Tools

[c00rdb]

How about something which will actually help the developers out? A lot of IE only developers are even using Firefox just because Firebug is definitely the best tool available for web development. IE has a developer toolbar but its not good enough and debugging javascript is incredibly painful with this. MS definitely has enough resources, I'm sure a lot of people could care less even if they just stole all the ideas from Firebug- this is software that is desperately needed!

ies4lin?

[unityofsaints]

Damn it won't install in wine :D I wonder when the first ies4lin version will come out?

Expected

[Tarlus]

Microsoft has also posted links to download the beta, but none of them are working right now. That's an IE8 omen if ever I saw one.

Using IE8 to post this

[pcause]

I downloaded and installed IE8. SOme things that were problems with accessing /. with IE7 are better (but not fixed) and some new things are broken. For example, I lost the box for replying using the new response system and the links at the top of the personal page for firehose, etc are better but still wrong.

There are real issues with displaying normal text (looks jagged), many sites just don't display correctly, etc. Windows Sidebar gadgets (Vista SP1) don't display correctly. Many other issues, but it is *beta*.

looks cool...

[the brown guy]

Don't forget, Vista looked cool too...

Wow...

[CrazyTalk]

Looks just like Safari on my circa 2004 iBook (especially the toolbar).

Re:Wow...

[Jesus_666]

I think it's weird how the big OS vendors can't make consistent interfaces if their lives depended on it. Apple usually test-drives new UI concepts in iTunes before putting them into the next OS X release. Windows has been a mess of application-specific look-and-feels for quite some while now. Now even IE looks completely unlike everything else.

Am I the only person who's a bit bugged by that?

(By the way, iTunes is not that bad - it still looks mostly like the other apps save for the occasional new widget and the ugly scroll bars.)

Re:Crash recovery, eh? Crash Recovery...

[AeroIllini]

Join me: i will try to lead the way... Ok, and when we're done fixing English to be less arrogant, we can hold hands, sing Kumbaya, and complain about how rich people are evil.

The Germans capitalize *all* their nouns, the arrogant bastards! What makes a noun so much more important than a verb? Nouns don't even *do* anything!

Things I miss from Firefox

[TheDreadedGMan]

When I use IE7 (which I do at work for our internal software site)

I miss these features most:

1. Find bar (the search _within_ this page), IE7 is still using the popup-find-dialog-which-is-annoying
2. "Awesome" bar address bar (FF3 only, if you have not tried it, please do, I find it useful)
3. Spell-checking built in to text areas (minor, but handy)
4. Default menus in normal places and back/forward/stop buttons in logical/standard places.

Has anyone tried this beta?
Are any of these things fixed/improved?
Or is it just useless things like web slices etc...

PNG fix

[pavon]

Actually, IE 5.5 and 6 do have an exposed method for loading PNGs with an alpha channel - but for some inexplicable reason they didn't use that method when loading a normal image. Someone wrote a javascript filethat modifies the DOM to replace IMG tags pointing to PNGs with IE's proprietary method at load time.

Works like a charm, and allowed me migrate entirely off of GIF years ago.

Designing more than IE?

[Midnight Thunder]

Unfortunately, the people who designed the IE7 UI appear to have been retarded monkeys. The result is that now, almost 2 years after its release, almost a third of my users are still on IE6 [languesvivantes.com]. Personally, that is really frustrating.

The worrying thing is that they were allowed to design a bit more than the browser. I am thinking that maybe these guys were also responsible for Vista.

IE8 Fails slashdot test

[EmperorKagato]

Out of the box IE8 seems to have trouble with the CSS based login on the frontpage of slashdot.

Has anyone else seen this issue?

A tribute to Top Gear

[gnarlin]

A new Internet Explorer from Microsoft. Will it smoke the Firefox? Will it outsing the Opera? Well, let's find out!

First, it only runs on ONE platform. Microsoft windows. Making a multi-platform program today is easy. Even a toddler can do it. All the cool programmers and companies are doing it. There are so many toolkits that can do it that you are really spoiled for choice. Even if they really want to use the windows API they could still check to make sure it runs with wine. Google can do it, so could Microsoft. There really is no excuse in 2008 not to, except perhaps if you are trying to hold on to a sagging monopoly.

Second. You can't modify it, redistribute it or use it to run a nuclear powerplant. Simply put: It isn't Free software. Looking under the bonnet is a must for any youngster that wants to know what makes the engine go and to tweak it. Sadly, Microsoft aren't up to that challenge.

Finally, I don't like the icon or the color. It's a letter, you know, from the alphabet. Here try clicking this: e

Ugly, isn't it.

So what happened when I tried to run it? Well, since I don't run an operating system from that particular company I instead tried to run it, with some WINE (http://www.winehq.com). This is a piece of software that Google use with great success to run its windows native Picasa application on GNU+Linux and BSD operating systems.
Right from the getgo: The wheels spin, but the installer crashes and burns as it fails to install the program right at the beginning. What a letdown.
My conclusion then: It's simply rubbish. You can have Mozilla Firefox for half the price and all the benefits of the Freedom it brings. Also, Firefox has a new beta out that smokes IE8 right from the starting line. In fact it can be installed and run right now on almost any platform you can think of! Microsoft are still stuck in the 1990s thinking that you only make cars for one type of road and that people aren't interested in modifying them. Until they change their ways they will always be second class.

Final lap score:
0 out of 10.

Re:A tribute to Top Gear

[EmperorKagato]

That's why this is a prototype and not the final product.

I was expecting some pages to not render correctly since I did find out from a fellow web developer that some pages try to cater to Internet Explorer which Internet Explorer 8 intercepts thereby rendering "fixed" code incorrectly.

If only the web developers code look for specific versions of IE (IE 7 and lower )to render the page in then this would not be an issue.

Firefox DID steal that...

[I'm Don Giovanni]

from Opera, the same folks from whom they stole tabbed browsing.
(BTW, all apps that have tabbed windows stole the concept from Excel to begin with.)

Re:Firefox DID steal that...

[The Aethereal]

I haven't used Opera for a while, but Firefox does not currently do this. There best it can do is restore the tabs that were open after a crash. This seems to be saying that single tabs will crash, instead of the whole browser. (Presumably each tab has its own thread or process.)

Re:Firefox DID steal that...

[Crayon Kid]

Can we give a rest to the "who stole what from who" stupidity? You can't steal ideas. There's no ownership of ideas. There's only implementations, some worse, some better. I don't give a shit who did what first, I care who's doing it best right now. As long as everybody gets a fair shot at doing it, whoever does it best "wins", fair and square.

WebSlices?

[Max_W]

WebSlices? Sounds like a marketing blur from a TV seller.

Why these MBAs at Microsoft cannot get that we do the serious things on the electronic networks and we deserve a serious attitude from the software providers.

It is not about sprites, webslices, and activexes anymore. Human livelihoods and even lives themselves depend on the computer programs. And they offer us what? WebSlices?

Re:Crash recovery, eh? Crash Recovery...

[background image]

(lower-casing/deprecation of "I" and "I'm" intentional; many other languages do not arrogantly case-place the self of the speaker above the listener or observer-- even though other languages tend to have separate words (honorific and plain/familiar) for the western/Latin "I"). So, it is my mission to start a movement to deprecate the importance of "I" and force it to "i"...

Join me: i will try to lead the way...

Because in English we never capitalize the words we use to refer to other people, and there are no cases where we use uncapitalized words to refer to ourselves...

Re:Will someone please shut up about the Acid 2 te

[tjwhaynes]

However, do you not agree that if browser X correctly renders the Acid tests, it is more likely to be compliant than if it does not?

That's a loaded question. Passing the Acid2 test tells you that the browser understands the elements and correctly renders the Acid2 test. It tells you nothing outside those narrow parameters.

For a full idea of what is and isn't supported, you want information like this:http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/bugspecs/REC-CSS1.html

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Correction

[Jesus_666]

It's not as bad as I thought; apparently I just happened to run into a screenshot from someone's rethemed Windows. Of course, IE8 still looks different from everything else, but not quite as atrociously as I originally thought.