Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8 RC1

mikemuch writes "IE8 has left beta as of noon Pacific time today. The development team now considers the browser platform- and feature-complete, but won't say how long until it goes gold. PCMag.com got an early look and has posted a full review of Internet Explorer 8 RC1. The release candidate differs only slightly from Beta 2, most notably in tweaks to its InPrivate Browsing feature, aka porn mode. That feature has been decoupled with InPrivate Filtering, which blocks third-party content providers from creating profile of your browsing habits. RC1 also improves on performance, especially in startup time, but still trails Firefox and Chrome in JavaScript speed. Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added — the first browser to include such protections. Versions for 32-bit and 64-bit Vista, as well as for 32-bit XP are available, but Windows 7, which will ship with IE8, is stuck with an older beta for now."

Comments

No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[elrous0]

They can keep all their little incremental security and interface updates. What use are a few little tweaks in IE8, when Firefox offers me add-ons like adblock plus, noscript, slashdotter, etc.? Besides, I can always open a site with IE Tab if I need to.

Firefox is even nice enough to spell check my form entries for me (it caught me misspelling "incremental" just now).

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[vux984]

They can keep all their little incremental security and interface updates. What use are a few little tweaks in IE8, when Firefox offers me add-ons like adblock plus, noscript, slashdotter, etc.?

Competition is good. And firefox has its share of problems. Hell, about 1 time in 3 when I close it it doesn't exit, and I have to terminate the process.

Besides, I can always open a site with IE Tab if I need to.

a) Why would you need to do that if Firefox was so perfect?

b) You do realize that IE Tab uses the IE rendering engine you've got installed. So if you have IE6 installed IE Tab uses IE6's rendering engine. If you have IE7 installed IE Tab uses IE7's rendering engine... etc. There is a reason IE Tab does sweet fuck all on Linux. You need IE to use IT Tab.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[denmarkw00t]

Just in response to point A: Firefox may be damn good, but if you are a web developer and need to make sure your site works across all browsers, IE Tab isn't a bad thing to have.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[hansamurai]

If it weren't for Chrome and IE8's privacy mode, then that probably wouldn't be the top priority it is right now for Firefox 3.1. Competition is good in the browser market. They'd still be on IE6 if it weren't for the success of Firefox.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[not already in use]

If you're going to post here on slashdot, you will need to follow a few easy-to-remember rules:

• Microsoft is inherently evil, their products are assumed to be inferior, whether or not you've actually used them.
• Firefox and Linux are inherently good. Any shortcomings are to be overlooked. Any references to either must be qualified with "(PBUI)" or "Praise Be Upon It."
• The only closed-source software in which praise can be given is Opera. You will receive bonus points for non-conformance, especially if you use the e-mail and bit torrent client.
• Google is evil because they haven't yet ported their browser for a community who will refuse to use it until they also release a plug-in that circumvents their primary revenue stream.

Thanks! And happy posting.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[peragrin]

and that my friend should be the whole point. MSFT basically stopped all browser development for 5 years. Then Firefox came along and showed people that you could have a free browser that could do more than IE(Opera wasn't free but adware). MSFT lost marketshare and then started to fight back.

MFT is and always has been reactionary to change. If their products are good enough they don't get improved upon. If MSFT only had 60% marketshare I would be happy. as MSFT would be forced to fight to keep customers by improving software.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[vux984]

Just in response to point A: Firefox may be damn good, but if you are a web developer and need to make sure your site works across all browsers, IE Tab isn't a bad thing to have.

True, but since you have to have a copy of IE around anyway, you might as well just use it.

IE-Tab doesn't really simplify things that much, and its not inconceivable that something will work differently in actual IE than IE-tab. (basic rendering of course will be the same, but some of the more goofy stuff like how various IE preferences and internet zones impact things might be different. I'm really not 100% sure where "Trident" ends and "Internet Explorer" begins, so to speak), nor exactly where IE-Tab fits -- is it 100% on top of IE or just on just on top of Trident?

So for casual layout testing I'll use IE tab, but for serious testing its done on 'honest-to-goodness-IE' and multiple versions of it to boot.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

And firefox has its share of problems. Hell, about 1 time in 3 when I close it it doesn't exit, and I have to terminate the process.

Are you using vista? Because vista thinks things break all the time.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

IE8 also implemented individual processes per tab.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Firehed]

I haven't tried (but will now...), but couldn't you use IETab with Firebug to actually figure out how to fix all of the stupid rendering problems caused by IE (read: screw with the CSS via Firebug until it works)? To the best of my knowledge, there's no good way to do real-time stylesheet editing with IE/the Trident engine, unlike Firefox which has Firebug and Safari/Webkit which has several tools on the Mac such as CSSEdit.

I still pray that someone will use one of IE's security flaws to force an upgrade to ANY standards-compliant browser, even IE8 by the looks of things.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

MFT is and always has been reactionary to change. If their products are good enough they don't get improved upon.

This is true of most companies.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

MFT is and always has been reactionary to change. If their products are good enough they don't get improved upon.

Microsoft is? You just describe business and government in general, not just Microsoft.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Chabil Ha']

a) Why would you need to do that if Firefox was so perfect?

Because we don't live in a perfect world where getting Windows' updates can be obtained via Firefox.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[michrech]

IE-Tab doesn't really simplify things that much, and its not inconceivable that something will work differently in actual IE than IE-tab.

Must be nice to have enough screen space to have two browsers open. Even with 2 22" monitors, I *still* find myself moving windows around, and constantly minimizing/maximizing windows (though just not as often as when I had a 17" and a 19").

Having all browser windows open in *one* program, in my mind, seems better in several situations.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Mr. DOS]

I never thought I'd say this, but score one (the first?) for Vista and 7 over XP - on both of those, Windows Update is in its own separate control panel, and isn't directly tied to Internet Explorer. You can still launch it through IE, sure, but it pops up in its own Window and you're not required to go through IE to get there either.

On a related note, I thought it interesting that Vista (and maybe 7 too, I haven't checked) provides an option in its newfangled file association manager to use as few Microsoft applications as possible. Are they - *gasp* - maybe coming to the realization that not everybody wants to use their stuff?!

      --- Mr. DOS

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[HungWeiLo]

By MS "improving software", you really mean "copying the competition and releasing it 5 years later."

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Thinboy00]

IE is NOT the first browser to implement anti-clickjacking tech. Firefox + NoScript has had a non-obtrusive (read:it works with the "globally allow scripts [etc]" option enabled) clickjacking blocker known as ClearClick for quite a while now. It is inaccurate to compare vanilla Firefox with other browsers since Mozilla intended Fx to be used with addons. NoScript is a perfect example.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[moderatorrater]

I'm 90% certain that there's no way for you to use firebug with IETab because firebug relies on hooks into the rendering engine that Trident won't provide. However, I do know that IE has a web developer toolbar that's moderately useful. I've used it when there's an IE specific bug that I can't narrow down without some help. It doesn't make IE as easy to develop in as Firefox + web developer toolbar + Firebug is, but it's better than nothing.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[vux984]

Must be nice to have enough screen space to have two browsers open. Even with 2 22" monitors, I *still* find myself moving windows around, and constantly minimizing/maximizing windows (though just not as often as when I had a 17" and a 19").

We're not that different. I have a 24" (HP LP2475w S-IPS) and a 19" (Viewsonic VP930b P-MVA), I had a 19" Viewsonic VA912b, which is TN, but it really was a terrible screen compared to the *VA and IPS panels. I had two of the Viewsonic VP930b's until one died. I'm extremely happy with the new HP unit though, and highly recommend it.

More on topic, having two browser windows open vs having two tabs in one window open doesn't really seem like much of a win to me, since its just as many clicks to switch between them, and besides --- I like to see FF and IE side by side for testing anyway, so that differences are more immediately apparent.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[moderatorrater]

When I come to a site that's IE-only, it's a lot easier to click on the icon in the bottom right than it is to open IE, copy the url over and wait for it to load. In addition, it allows me to use Firefox before and after doing what I need to do on that page, which is really nice. Also, if all you're doing is checking to see that the layout works, there's no reason to fire up IE either when you can get there with a single click. Finally, I've never seen any differences between the IETab version of a site and regular IE with the possible exception of security popups and other setting-specific things. For 75% of the things that I'd normally fire IE up for, IETab fills the void just fine.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right about competition, but wrong in labeling only MS as reactionary.

FF was the reaction to IE's dominance. Without IE we would have old Netscape.

IE was a reaction to Netscape in it's turn as well.

In this industry, almost everything is reactionary. You have an original idea every now that creates a new market/product/whatever -- and the rest is reactionary all the way.

IE's dominance in fact, can be blamed on the rest of the industry for not reacting with sufficient urgency.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[shutdown -p now]

They can keep all their little incremental security and interface updates. What use are a few little tweaks in IE8, when Firefox offers me add-ons like adblock plus, noscript, slashdotter, etc.?

There are IE plugins, too, including ad blockers (just search).

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[onecheapgeek]

"RC1 also improves on performance, especially in startup time, but still trails Firefox and Chrome in JavaScript speed. Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added -- the first browser to include such protections."

Or that too.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[shutdown -p now]

MFT is and always has been reactionary to change. If their products are good enough they don't get improved upon. If MSFT only had 60% marketshare I would be happy. as MSFT would be forced to fight to keep customers by improving software.

It doesn't even have to be 60%. It has to be whatever it takes for the majority of Web developers to move from IE-only policy to cross-browser policy. Judging by the look of the Web these days, with even Microsoft itself having to support at least Firefox and Safari apart from IE (check the official browser support tables for various MS web-base products!), the present 20% Firefox market share is already enough to trigger that.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[shutdown -p now]

Firefox and Linux are inherently good. Any shortcomings are to be overlooked. Any references to either must be qualified with "(PBUI)" or "Praise Be Upon It."

No, the latter one is reserved for RMS (PBUH).

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[mgblst]

This is one of the many reasons we hate Microsoft - this is to the few Microsoft lovers here who aren't paid shills.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[ConceptJunkie]

By MS "improving software", you really mean "copying the competition and releasing it 5 years later."

Hey, even if they're being dragged kicking and screaming out of 1998, they are still moving forward. Microsoft has been a boat anchor on the state of the art in software for too long. Any little bit they are forced to improve makes everyones live better. It's high time that Microsoft remembers their customers are customers, not slaves, not victims, not prisoners.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm always bemused that so many FireFox users seem to be blithely unaware that there is a rich universe of IE plugins out there that do many of the same things FireFox plugins do.

I never use IE, but it's not because of plugins ....

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Eirenarch]

You can in fact edit the CSS on the fly with dev toolbar, but here is an advice from me: IE8 is the best browser for web DEVELOPERS (I won't argue about users although I do use it when I'm not developing)

To answer the inevitable question "Why?"
1. The new development tools are comparable with Firebug. Probably Firebug is still ahead but you will rarely need functions that the new dev tools do not have. You've got the CSS editor, DOM inspector, JavaScript debugger and Profiler.
2. You've got 3 rendering modes that you can switch through the dev tools. IE6, IE7, IE8. So you need to debug IE6 specific problem? What are you gonna do? Firebug is no gonna help you. What about IE7? The new dev tools do work with IE6 and IE7 modes. On the other hand IE8 mode is close enough to the so called "standards compliant" browsers (yes I don't believe in standards and I think W3C are full of shit). At least the differences between IE8 and Firefox are comparable with the difference between Firefox and Chrome or Firefox and Opera. So IE8 is as good as any other browser in regard to the standards. To sum it up you get 3 different rendering engines in one browser and no other browser can debug the first 2 rendering engines (IE6 and IE7) which happen to be the problem in most cases.

You'll thank me later.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

You can usually tell when someone is posting from the cell of their asylum - a less than 6 digit uid.

p.s. Microsoft paid me to post this!!! Booga booga!!!

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[marcello_dl]

Microsoft is inherently evil, their products are assumed to be inferior, whether or not you've actually used them.

You are so totally right. Insead we should base our decisions about software on the immediate perceived advantage of one choice, without caring about the past action of the company selling the product. I mean, nobody ever needed that thing call experience, in life.

Financing advocates of software patents? why not! the worst it can happen is that they choose what ideas you can use no matter whose ideas they were to begin with.

note to editors, IE8 is the second browser to protect from clickjacking the first is firefox with noscript extension.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Toonol]

And yet, at the same time, it's inaccurate to compare features that are enabled on a default installation of IE with an add-on enhanced Firefox, since very few add-ons make it to the majority of Firefox installations. I have a variety of add-ons installed, for instance, but don't have ClearClick.

The models may be different enough that completely fair comparisons can't be made.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[QuestionsNotAnswers]

couldn't you use IETab with Firebug to actually figure out how to fix all of the stupid rendering problems caused by IE (read: screw with the CSS via Firebug until it works)?

If you want to screw with the CSS, do it for free at an element level using the Microsoft devtoolbar (google for it). Also AFAIK there are other non-free tools that allow you to fiddle at the CSS rule level. Your suggestion doesn't work because Firebug is integrated with the Gecko engine. IETab just uses the firefox tab purely as a rendering area using ActiveX so Firebug knows nothing about the IE CSS.

Alternatively you can dynamically add css changes for IE by pasting into the address bar:

javascript:(function() { var src = 'http://localhost:8000/Files/ggg.css'; var link = document.createElement('<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="'+src+'" />'); link.src = src; document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(link);})()

Similarly you can insert javascript into any page cross-browser using:

javascript:(function() { var src = 'http://localhost:8000/Files/my.js'; var script = document.createElement('script'); script.src = src; document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(script);})()

or you can dynamically change the css using the IE stylesheet rules DOM manually too.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[BikeHelmet]

I don't have a computer with IE7/8 on it. For those, I use IE NetRenderer.

http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/

Addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6455

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm always bemused that so many IE users seem to be blithely unaware that BHOs are running on their system with out their knowledge. Not trying to make light of IE's plugin architecture or anything.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[vux984]

I don't have a computer with IE7/8 on it. For those, I use IE NetRenderer.

That's pretty much the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. Anyone who is remotely serious about doing web site development professionally would have windows box to test with, or at least a windows VM.

I mean seriously, who is this really for?

Besides, there is far more for compatibility testing than just getting screenshots of the layout engine. All the ajax/dhtml/javascript/flash/animation/effects/events etc aren't going to be testable with this.

I'm at a loss at how anyone could find this especially useful outside of very limited scenarios.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[vux984]

Are you using vista?

Yep, this is Firefox 3.0.5 on Vista x64 SP1. However, FF2.x doesn't have this problem. And honestly, FF3.x is the ONLY modern application I use that gives me any trouble like this on Vista.

Frankly, I'm pretty satisfied with Vista, and even prefer it to XP. I certainly realize its not for everyone, and I don't dispute that there were a lot of launch issues in terms of bad drivers, a few nasty bugs, a giant cock-up in terms of what they said the requirements were, and rarely worth the price to upgrade an existing box.... but if you are buying a new system, actually get hardware that has good drivers and meets the actual requirements, Vista has been overall a decent successor from XP.

Of course here on /. everyone is going to argue that Ubuntu or something is a better successor, but while I have Ubuntu on my laptop and my home server is a linux VM host with a Windows 2003 and 2 linuxes (Debian and CentOS) guests to re-affirm "/. cred", but I need to use windows for a variety of things, so I have Vista on my desktop.

Again, FF3 is the ONLY app that gives me a hassle. I have Adblock Plus, ColorZilla, FireShot, HtmlValidator, TamerData, and WebDeveloper installed as add-ons, but only adblock is currently enabled. (I enable the others when needed.)

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[WARM3CH]

Sorry, you didn't do your homework. Have you tried IEPro (http://www.ie7pro.com/)? It's a freeware. From its website: IE7Pro includes Tabbed Browsing Management, Spell Check, Inline Search, Super Drag Drop, Crash Recovery, Proxy Switcher, Mouse Gesture, Tab History Browser, Web Accelerator, User Agent Switcher, Webpage Capturer, AD Blocker, Flash Block, Greasemonkey like User Scripts platform, User Plug-ins, MiniDM, Google sponsored search,IE Faster and many more power packed features.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[lamapper]

Let's see if I understand this correctly, Trident was first included with IE v4.0 in 1997, but did not pass the Acid 2 tests which promotes web standards (promoted by the Web Standards Project ) by exposing browser rendering flaws was released on April 13, 2005. On October 31, 2005, Safari 2.0.2 became the first browser to pass the test. Opera, Konqueror, Firefox, and others followed.

How many versions of Internet Explorer have been released with no desire, attempt or effort to pass the simple Acid 2 compatibility standards test? (...not that it matters as there are plenty of other browser options) Per the Wikipedia page on Acid 2, The only major browser that does not yet pass the test is Internet Explorer, although a version of Internet Explorer that passes Acid2 is in development.

IE. V 8.0.x was released publicly on March 5, 2008.

In March 2008, Ian Hickson released Acid3 as a follow-up to Acid2. While Acid2 primarily tests CSS, Acid3 focuses more on JavaScript and other "Web 2.0" technologies.[11]; Based on past experience we can extrapolate out that Microsoft Internet Explorer might pass the Acid 3 tests around 2012, but I doubt it.

Sure they believe in standards compatibility, sure they do...NOT. Simple historical reality exposes their hypocrisy!

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[ozphx]

As a Microsoft shareholder I'm glad they weren't pissing my money up a tree trying to improve products in markets they already dominated. Now FF is giving them some competition, I'm also glad they are getting their shit together to preserve the IE line (in the eyes of Joe Public, rather than developers on ten bucks an hour having butthurt over standards).

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[hdragomir]

dude, you just summed up the IT industry! kudos to you!

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can keep your gaping memory hole in Firefox. I use Opera and Chrome now specifically because Firefox leaks memory and refuses to return it to the system unless killed and restarted. The worst part is despite many people having the same issue, the arrogant Firefox developers refuse to believe that they could have made any mistakes and won't bother to fix the problem.

This has been ongoing since about Firefox 1.5.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Larryish]

Firefox 3.0.5 under Ubuntu Hardy gets 71/100 on Acid3

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Your.Master]

That's like saying OSX isn't the first OS with spellcheck because MS Office has been doing this for years. I mean, on some level you can argue the point, but we all know what was meant, and there's also a qualitative difference between having the functionality built in and having the functionality possible via a separate installation.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[KibibyteBrain]

Ok, think of this as an upgrade to your IE Tab extensions then.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Vertana]

note to editors, IE8 is the second browser to protect from clickjacking the first is firefox with noscript extension.

While it may be in an extension, it is not implemented via the main program itself. Therefore IE 8 is the first browser to implement this (as opposed to taking FF's stance and implementing an extension interface).

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Well, you have to ask yourself which method is more likely to keep you protected from emerging threats. A plug in that updates itself every other day, or a browser that releases a new version every other year?

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[DeadChobi]

The only thing that really sucks about Firefox is that I can't clone tabs from a right-click menu. That and it uses three times as much memory on my Xubuntu box that Opera does. And Opera does a lot of the same things as Firefox, with the added bonus of better tabbing capabilities.

The only real reason I use Opera on that Xubuntu box is because it's a laptop with a P3 700 and 256 MB of ram, so memory usage is very important.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

> (it caught me misspelling "incremental" just now)

Was it "escremental" the word you wrote?

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[beav007]

Well, you have to ask yourself which method is more likely to keep you protected from emerging threats.

Not in this instance. TFA does not discuss how effective the feature is, or how well it will be kept up to date. All it says is:

Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added â" the first browser to include such protections.

In this instance, discussions concerning effectiveness, usefulness, and potential for regular updates are completely off the point.

Unless you can think of a different browser with this feature included natively, then TFA is most probably correct.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[causality]

And yet, at the same time, it's inaccurate to compare features that are enabled on a default installation of IE with an add-on enhanced Firefox, since very few add-ons make it to the majority of Firefox installations. I have a variety of add-ons installed, for instance, but don't have ClearClick. The models may be different enough that completely fair comparisons can't be made.

It can be useful to contrast the "it's easy to use, so use its defaults out of the box" design with the "it's intended to be customized, so go choose your addons" design. My entire problem with the design of all or nearly all Microsoft products is the way they have twisted the idea of "easy to use."

There is a process of learning and gradually gaining mastery over the interacting systems that are software, computers, and networks. It is a dynamic process of gaining knowledge and transforming it into discovery and understanding by using it. The way "easy to use" marketing is done today is designed to cater to a large group of instant-gratification types who think that this beautiful process is an unwanted burden to be avoided or glossed over as quickly as possible. That is because they are not perceiving correctly (yes, there is such a thing).

If these folks were better able to use the machines as tools, or if they enjoyed them more, you could say that they were making a sort of trade-off. But this is not the case at all. These are the users who can operate a machine on a daily basis for five years and still know next to nothing about it. That just isn't natural, it is a self-imposed limitation. These are the users who abandon common sense and produce some of the most absurd tech support stories. These are the users who require retraining when only the interface, not the functionality, of a program is changed. If they were merely ignorant users, they would fix that on their own; they are helpless users. Helpless users require more support and support usually costs money, so business (including various software companies) will cater to and encourage this mentality and have no incentive to do otherwise.

It really is a mentality. This post may superficially appear to be about computing but it is not. Computing (or the differences between users) merely provides one instance of a general principle. Look around and you'll see that people who don't value knowledge and discovery and understanding don't limit the effects of their value system to computing. This is really about freedom and the idea that discovering the limits of your worldview can either frighten you or delight you. From the consumerist pill-for-every-ill perspective and its message that no effort is worthwhile, that idea can be horror itself.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but since you have to have a copy of IE around anyway, you might as well just use it.

But it's so damned *slow* even FF in ubuntu is faster than IE.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[aitan]

No, you can't use Firebug with IETab.

But if you use the real IE, you can use the IE Developer tools, so I don't understand why a web developer would ever want to use IE Tab.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[mgiuca]

a) Why would you need to do that if Firefox was so perfect?

Typically the reason one needs to run IE instead of Firefox is because

a) The website they are browsing has been designed solely for IE, which is well-known to make up its own standards instead of following the real ones. Therefore, many sites only work in IE precisely because IE is non-standards-compliant while other browsers are.

b) The website specifically blocks access from any browser other than IE (some banking sites used to do this).

c) You are a web developer and need to test your site in IE, to make sure it works despite horrific standards compliance.

Thankfully (a) and (b) are practically a thing of the past, due to a large uptake in alternative browsers. And (c) should be less of an issue with IE 8, which is a lot more standards-compliant, I hear. But those are the reasons.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Kalriath]

And yet, just like in Firefox, it takes only two clicks to see exactly what addons I'm running.

Firefox: Tools > Add-ons
IE: Tools > Manage Add-ons

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[kaizendojo]

I'm getting all this and more from IE7Pro, which is free. http://www.ie7pro.com/ It also supports user scripts like Greasemonkey does for Firefox. I switch between browsers depending on what I do, but IE7Pro really makes the comparison between the two a bit more even. Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with the IE7Pro project, just a satisfied user.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?familyid=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en

It's not great but the IE developer tool bar is better than what you get by default wit IE.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[JasterBobaMereel]

Playing catchup is good but when your catchup browser release is slower, less standards compliant than the competition and still has bugs in it then you are not playing catchup you are standing in the corner being laughed at....

Microsoft employs some of the (allegedly) best software developers in the world and they still cannot write a fast stable standards compliant browser ...!

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[BBandCMKRNL]

On a related note, I thought it interesting that Vista (and maybe 7 too, I haven't checked) provides an option in its newfangled file association manager to use as few Microsoft applications as possible. Are they - *gasp* - maybe coming to the realization that not everybody wants to use their stuff?!

No, they just realized that they can't win all the anti-trust battles and those cost them a lot of cash.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

One word, my friend. Addons. Look up "Distrust".

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[elrous0]

I did a search and couldn't find any ad blockers. Can anyone provide a direct link?

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[elrous0]

Sorry, I was talking about Microsoft's Internet Explorer, not some questionable third party browser.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I wasn't saying the article was or wasn't correct. I don't really care. Its pedantic and It doesn't really matter. What does the fact that browser A was first with feature Q mean for people trying to make a decision what browser to use? That is useful. That Matters.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[BBandCMKRNL]

As a Microsoft shareholder I'm glad they weren't pissing my money up a tree trying to improve products in markets they already dominated. Now FF is giving them some competition, I'm also glad they are getting their shit together to preserve the IE line (in the eyes of Joe Public, rather than developers on ten bucks an hour having butthurt over standards).

If I was a Microsoft shareholder, I'd want them to plan and implement improvements to ALL their products so they DON'T have to keep reacting to lost market share and have to do the fire drill/death march dance to catch back up again.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[plague3106]

Ya, and what the hell are those stupid things called Add-ons anyway?? I won't use IE until they get plugins!

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[plague3106]

Yes, there is. It's in IE8. Hit F12. You can edit anything in the tree, and see your changes in real time. You can also see what styles ended up being applied. Don't know if it's better or worse than similar functionality (because I never used anything like that in FF), but it's there now. I think it's call the Developer pane or something like that.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[cbhacking]

Actually, IE has (at least a few) such add-ons as well. In fact, there's even a link to go to MS's site where such things are aggregated, and browse.

Personally, I find IE7Pro (works on other versions too, though some of the features it provides are native to 8 and don't work in 6) to be an excellent tool. Adblocking, spell check, and lots of other features.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[cbhacking]

http://ie7pro.com/
Works on IE8 too. Provides a lot more than Ad Blocking, but you can turn off the features you don't need.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[elrous0]

Yeah, I said "Addon" not "Skeevy looking third-party browser that probably has more viruses than Paris Hilton."

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Anonymous Coward]

Extrapolating a trend with one datapoint is usually frowned upon.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[madprof]

IE Tab is useful but if you're being paid for the work then you really ought to use the proper browser, not just a tab in Firefox.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[shnull]

i tried the win7 beta when it leaked on piratebay and ie8 took about 2 minutes to display a blank page , let me add that i really don't have a computer that still has a turbo button either ... for now i'm stuck with a small (about 2 times my linux partition size) vista partition just to play the games that i cant get to work on wine ... really, once you go compiz, its kinda hard to turn back ... and that's just the front-end

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[quanticle]

To be fair though, there's little evidence that lack of standards compatibility has actually hurt Microsoft in any measurable way. It wasn't lack of standards compatibility that broke Internet Explorer's hold on the web browser market, it was the realization that allowing the web browser to have lots of hooks into the OS (via ActiveX and the like) was a bad idea from a security perspective.

So, I guess my point is, so what if Internet Explorer 8 doesn't meet the Acid3 test until 2012? If you absolutely need that functionality, you'll tell your users to use Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, or one of the numerous other browsers out there. And besides, its not like any other browser passes Acid3 either. Last I checked, the closest was Opera, and it still hadn't made it through the entire test suite.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[WARM3CH]

What are you talking about? IEPro is a plugin for IE that does all what you asked for!

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[Ilgaz]

You would be very surprised if you could run IE for Mac (including early OS X) and compared it to any browser of that date. It runs Tasman rendering engine, not Trident.

MS can code standards compliant browser with some really good real life features as seen on Mac. They somehow choose not to. It must be political/business rather than technical.

Mac IE had Download manager, auction watch and several other features which still doesn't exist on Windows one. Of course it was also uninstalled very easily :)

I don't think the release of Safari was the only reason of dropping it. It may have bugged their Windows camp very badly as people kept comparing it to Windows IE.

Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript

[prunedude]

I did a search and couldn't find any ad blockers. Can anyone provide a direct link?

http://www.ieaddons.com/en/details/Security/Adblock_Pro/

One giant security hole

[jollyreaper]

Is IE8 still the resource pig we've been hearing about since the early betas? I'll pass.

Re:One giant security hole

[dedazo]

As opposed to what, Firefox?

Re:One giant security hole

[h4rm0ny]

Heh. Not in comparison to Firefox, but my copy of Konqueror on KDE leaves both of them in its dust.

But aside from resource demands (and I'll wait until I can try it properly before I make any judgements), IE8 looks quite nice. I'd certainly be willing to try it out if they made a version for non-Windows systems. How about it Microsoft - fancy branching out? :)

Re:One giant security hole

[f1vlad]

Not necessarily, give it a try. You may be surprised.

Re:One giant security hole

[kimvette]

On the other hand, konqueror doesn't work with a lot of sites, and on Linux even Firefox will break on many sites, such as toyota.com

Re:One giant security hole

[janrinok]

Interestingly, the 'toyota.com' site opened on my FF (3.0.5) running on linux with no apparent display problems. What does it do on your computer?

Re:One giant security hole

[AndGodSed]

I tried installing it with crossover and no dice. Will keep trying though, but I do suspect that I won't get it right...

Re:One giant security hole

[Ilgaz]

If I were you, I would support any kind of IE update to version 6. IE 6 must go away in one way or another.

For the performance? Well, don't push the thing as it has "tabs as processes". What matters is Windows getting a good, more secure (compared to unfixable IE6) and said to be more standards compliant HTML framework. Other than that? Just don't launch the thing.

Re:One giant security hole

[kimvette]

On both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux the vehicle menus are inaccessible (the infamous flash-is-top-layer-no-matter-what issue, rendering DHTML menus worthless when a flash object is below it, the 360* views are inaccessible, and most of the other flash features on the site don't work. I need to either boot to Vista (which I won't do except to run games) or use my notebook.

In related news....

[Anonymous Coward]

Crackers salivate at the new opportunities for exploits sure to exist in any new Microsoft "feature".

Dear net-surfers:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use any version of IE and you are not:

1) Using it out of the box just to download another browser, or
2) A web developer who needs it on a test box

Then GTFO idjit.

Re:Dear net-surfers:

[gbarules2999]

My schools uses IE6 on everything. They refuse to let you install Firefox and even block it in their firewall. Are they asking for viruses? It's such a pain to use a browser that doesn't have tabs (though the huge, screen eating tabs in IE7 didn't help much).

Re:Dear net-surfers:

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a thumb drive and Firefox Portable, and all your problems will be solved.

Re:Dear net-surfers:

[aurispector]

Heh. The guy I work for has xp machines running on 256mb ram, unpatched ie6 & no sp3. The people he pays to "manage" his system send around a guy that runs spybot, ad-aware and some random virus scanner; He does not know what a rootkit is, nor does he insure all the machines are fully patched (a process that can be fully automated with a single click). When something breaks they order something expensive from Dell and mark it up.

Bottom line? Morons make the world go around. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the show.

Re:Dear net-surfers:

[clarkn0va]

I'm in the same boat, although Firefox is not blocked by the evil ISA server, I just have to tell Firefox to use the divinely-appointed proxy. In my case telling FF to automatically detect the proxy does the trick.

Of course they didn't permit me to install Firefox, I have to run it portable from a USB stick or from my network share.

portableapps.com

Re:Dear net-surfers:

[Anonymous Coward]

insure != ensure

Re:Dear net-surfers:

[Tubal-Cain]

And User Agent Switcher, if that is what the firewall checks.

Re:Dear net-surfers:

[ergean]

Oh yeah... tell me about that one click automation. I just came back from a client, they have 32 computers - all with more then 512mb and >2ghz cpus some brand name and some white boxes. I work alone so it took me ~7 days to backup everything, redo the network and clean all the machines. Had to clean install some of the machines. So I said to my self let's take CT's offline update, update all the machines to sp3 and latest and then let the autoupdate do it's work... in the first day everything was fine. All fine and dandy until the next day when almost every machine would lose the ability to print locally and in network... some would restart the print spool service others would just drop any print job given to them. All thanks to sp3. Most of the printers have drivers that predate sp2. So don't tell me that update would solve everything. For me autoupdate was a bigger pain then not having it.

Something to credit Microsoft for

[bogaboga]

I hope that those who loathe Microsoft for whatever reason, now have something to credit it for. This release is awesome in my opinion. Anyone in the know as to what it scores on the ACID 3 test?

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at the screenshot it gets 20/100 which is wak.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that those who loathe Microsoft for whatever reason, now have something to credit it for. This release is awesome in my opinion. Anyone in the know as to what it scores on the ACID 3 test?

Maybe it reached double digits.

Maybe.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that those who loathe Microsoft for whatever reason, now have something to credit it for.

Oh? And what, pray tell, is that?

This release is awesome in my opinion. Anyone in the know as to what it scores on the ACID 3 test?

Is there a point to your post, other than earning (reinforcing?) your fanboi status?

"Here's your sign."

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Bogtha]

I hope that those who loathe Microsoft for whatever reason, now have something to credit it for.

Yes, when Internet Explorer 8 is released, Microsoft will finally have implemented decent support for CSS 2, a specification published over a decade ago. I hope everybody here on Slashdot will join me in welcoming Microsoft to 1998. Truly, they deserve all the credit they are going to get for being so ahead of the curve. Keep innovating, Microsoft! Don't let those slow-coaches at the W3C hold you back!

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[thedonger]

Can I loathe them for shipping Windows 7 with a beta version of their own browser?

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[MrMr]

It's a huge improvement, they score 50% higher than IE 7.
That is 21/100
Pathetic

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank God Firefox makes supporting standards such a high priority.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[deraj123]

Not until they ship Windows 7. Then, if they do that, have at it.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[i.of.the.storm]

I agree that IE lagging on CSS support is a major PITA for web developers, but I don't think Netscape's CSS2 support was that great in 1998 either. Of course, I didn't know what CSS was in 1998, but I don't think it was exactly in wide use at the time, at least relative to the awesome <marquee> and <blink> tags.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is better than the 5/100 it gets in IE7, I'd hate to see IE6

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Bryansix]

Pfft. I had to take it off of all the computers here. It broke some many websites it was a total joke.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[huckamania]

Just because something is a standard doesn't mean it is a good standard and I wonder about CSS being a good standard.

I congratulate the committee that created it on actually getting something out the door, that is an accomplishment for any committee. However, I don't think it is too much to ask that the new standard actually work better then what was already there. Tables were clunky and misused, but for formatting a web page, they still work better and are easier to understand. It's frustrating to spend days trying to get CSS to render something simple to only tear it all out and redo it in tables in a few minutes.

Was there really a huge demand for floating elements back in 1998?

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[LiteralKa]

A 20? My mobile client gets three times that!

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[GrumblyStuff]

Ah, the marquee tag....

There was a beautiful time when this set of gamer forums I went accepted HTML in posts. They fixed that after one thread exploded in tags ending tables and just completely ruining the entire rest of the page. And, yes, there was immense abuse of marquee and blinking text and smilies.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, when Internet Explorer 8 is released, Microsoft will finally have implemented decent support for CSS 2, a specification published over a decade ago. I hope everybody here on Slashdot will join me in welcoming Microsoft to 1998.

You'd have had a point if, in 1998, there was any other browser, released or in beta, that had full CSS2 support. But there wasn't. In fact, the one that was closest to supporting it at that time was... IE.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[gbarules2999]

Ubuntu 8.04 shipped with Firefox 3.0 beta.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Derek Pomery]

The CSS specification includes support for display: table; display: table-row; and display: table-cell;
which are quite useful when you need table-like layout.

Shame IE never supported them. Until *drumroll* IE8 - shame they aren't doing so well on other fronts.

But, fortunately, you can work around this. Yes, it is a bit more work, but that is not the fault of CSS.

Additionally, working around it just takes a little getting used to.
Those singing the praises of table layout in some cases just never got the hang of a more fluid layout. Hopefully you're not in that camp.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Anonymous Coward]

Tables were clunky and misused, but for formatting a web page, they still work better and are easier to understand.

You can keep using tables, if you think they're easier. Simply ignore the snickering.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Vectronic]

On Mine (all the same machine)

IE8 = 12
FF = 71
Safari = 75
Chrome = 79
Opera = 100

However, IE8 only got 7, till it popped up with "this site wants to run mxl 3.0(or something)" and I clicked ok, but im ok with that, as I use Opera 99.99% of the time anyways...

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Vectronic]

More Specifically

IE8 8.0.6001.18371
FF 3.05
Safari 3.2 (525.26.13)
Chrome 0.4.154.29
Opera 10A B1229

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[g0at]

Can I loathe them for shipping Windows 7 with a beta version of their own browser?

How do you know that they will?

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[adamchou]

correct me if i'm wrong, but didn't ff just barely pass the acid 2 test when ff3 came out last year?

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[eaa428e6f46aa9f93f47]

Its not that I hate them for the quality of the browser not released yet, despite having probably a 100 chances to do something right, but because of all the years I spent having to deal with buggy and bloated code from a company whose business model embraces mediocrity and dishonesty -- on multiple levels. A leopard does not change its spots. They can't be trusted, period. They have done much more to harm the advance of technology than to help it. That's what chafes most people's arses. They are the problem (or part of it), not the solution.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[rwyoder]

Yes, when Internet Explorer 8 is released, Microsoft will finally have implemented decent support for CSS 2, a specification published over a decade ago. I hope everybody here on Slashdot will join me in welcoming Microsoft to 1998. Truly, they deserve all the credit they are going to get for being so ahead of the curve. Keep innovating, Microsoft! Don't let those slow-coaches at the W3C hold you back!

And with the release they're gonna party like it's 1999!

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Anonymous Coward]

More Specifically

IE8 8.0.6001.18371
FF 3.05
Safari 3.2 (525.26.13)
Chrome 0.4.154.29
Opera 10A B1229

If you are quoting figures for IE8, which is RC status and not yet release, then you should also quote figures for other browser still in testing stages.

For Firefox, the latest testing version is Firefox 3.1 beta 2, and beta 3 is due out next week.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=3295

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL the credit for a good browser release from microsoft goes to the competition.

Thank you netscape, thank you apple, thank you GNU, Thank you torvalds. And special thanks to google, without whose snooping IE would have no privacy filters whatsoever, even if a privacy aware browser on a closed source OS is a castle built on sand.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Anonymous Coward]

If other browsers are more compatible, their betas, which likely won't differ much, do not count. The idea is that if one cares for acid3 there are more mature browsers than ie8 that provide it.

I'd use free software even if it were inferior btw.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Toonol]

Step back a distance, emotionally, and look at your post, compared to his. If you're honest, you'll realize that your post is much more deserving of a 'fanboi' moniker.

Or, 'fanboy', if we want to use English.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[TheRealMindChild]

Yeah... I get it. Table layouts in Java, GTK, whatever dialog/form/window toolkit you use is GOOD, but on a web page, it's bad. Lets ignore the fact that browsers had table rendering mastered over 10 years ago... lets all just look the other way in the face that it is easier to follow.

In the realm of the world wide web, if you don't use the trendy technologies, you're a "n00b".

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[BikeHelmet]

Really?

I thought these guys were one of the first. They had CSS2 support in... 1999?

But they aren't releasing a free-to-the-masses browser, and it looks like the company hasn't been doing much lately.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Anonymous Coward]

bogaboga's post is nothing if not emotion. He hopes that MS haters will have something to praise them for, and that the release is awesome? He could at least highlight a particle of that awesomeness from the article or summary, if not from his own experience.

It looks like AC challenged him to back up his position, rather than just spreading fluff on top of the original article. AC could have pointed out some of the many reasons why somebody might not find the news of IE8 RC1 less than awesome, but then that's been done pretty thoroughly at this point, yes?

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[clarkn0va]

the one that was closest to supporting it at that time was... IE

What does that mean, exactly? I think they're probably still the closest to supporting it, while modern browsers actually support it.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[MadMidnightBomber]

No, I'm fairly sure Firefox 3.0 beta shipped with Ubuntu 8.04.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Derek Pomery]

I'm not sure how you missed the point so spectacularly.

Not only is there CSS to do the things people used tables, for, but table has always been an abuse of the semantic intent of that HTML document tag, muddying it and confusing parsers. Yes, HTML could use more tags, but tables are hardly necessary.

And setting aside the semantics, people who actually have to restyle your table layout later (when rewriting the site is not an option) will have every reason to curse you.

The decoupling of the layout CSS offers is a powerful tool.

And, no, web pages are not, and have never been intended to be, mapped to application UIs. Is nice that they can, but that's a very limited case, and not even the main use of web pages.

"Explore the intricacies of HTML and CSS here: http://www.htmlhelp.com/ , http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ , http://www.brainjar.com/ , http://www.htmldog.com/ , http://css.maxdesign.com.au/"
-- ZofBot db

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Jugalator]

Yes, when Internet Explorer 8 is released, Microsoft will finally have implemented decent support for CSS 2, a specification published over a decade ago. I hope everybody here on Slashdot will join me in welcoming Microsoft to 1998. Truly, they deserve all the credit they are going to get for being so ahead of the curve. Keep innovating, Microsoft! Don't let those slow-coaches at the W3C hold you back!

Be careful here in your sarcastic flaming. ;-)

Firefox 3 doesn't support CSS 2.1.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Jugalator]

Better provide the bugs btw...

I'll spare Bugzilla though...

1. Bug 2056: display: run-in not implemented
2. Bug 115199: @page in CSS2 not implemented
3. Bug 132035: Support all page-break-* CSS2.1 properties
4. Bug 137367: Implement orphans and widows

Those are needed for CSS 2.1 support. IE 8 doesn't suffer from at least bug 115199 there, I know that for sure. The thing is, is that Microsoft aimed for full CSS 2.1 support in IE 8 rather than e.g. Acid3 work.

It can be argued whether it's more important to focus on e.g. DOM standardizing behavior for the Acid3 test scores, or to support a decade old standard completely. From how I put this, I hope at least someone, somewhere, will have a sligthly better understanding of why Microsoft *are* doing what they are. You may not agree with them, but perhaps at least understand.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[blueZ3]

I think the point is more that if I lay out a page with tables ("Oh the humanity!") then I'm done. If I try and lay out a page with CSS, I have to lay it all out so it works, then create three different versions so that it renders in all the broken versions of IE, plus Safari and whatever else I want to support.

I'm sure that if you're getting paid by the hour, all that time spent doing browser-version tweaks is great. But for a lot of folks who don't want to bother with laying a page out three or four times, tables are fine.

As an aside, I'm not sure I get your point about maintainability. If I change the page layout, of course I'll have to create a new table structure. But I'm not clear on why this is inherently more difficult that creating a new CSS layout, and then doing all the browser-specific tweaks.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[cthulhu11]

The funny thing is that they *released* a Release *Candidate*. Something of a contradiction, no?

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Vectronic]

Fine...

Safari 3.2.1 (525.27.1) = 75
Chrome 1.0.154.43 = 79
Firefox 3.1 b2 = 93

Opera was already the latest.

Re:Something to credit Microsoft for

[Derek Pomery]

The point is you can add hundreds of styles to a single document (see csszengarden.com for hundreds of examples that work even in IE, using basic CSS) with a single included file.

In many cases, accessing the HTML is not as easy, and requires rewriting a great deal of code, or code templates.

As for the 3 different versions, that is utter nonsense.
Most people who have spent more than a few days getting the hang of CSS learn the few rules for working around IE (see haslayout.net which also gets into the abominable hacks that were crammed into Trident).

The other 3 browsers (Safari, Firefox and Opera) so long as you don't get too fancy, work fine with almost no surprises.

So. Basically, you make a style, easily, then you make a separate stylesheet for IE. Done.

Basically, you're defending this approach because yes, that's all there was when you and I started this sort of thing 15 years ago or more.
But you know, even then CSS was in the works to deal with the frustrations of hacking it into HTML.

Times have changed in past 15 years.
Deal with it.

Clickjacking

[DrYak]

Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added â" the first browser to include such protections.

No, not the first. Maybe the first to be shipped with the functionality turned on by default.

It's just that, with FireFox, anything that isn't related to bare simple display of HTML pages, is usually tucked into separate plugins.
But the Noscript plugin has featured click-jacking prevention almost from the next day after click-jacking came in the news.

Re:Clickjacking

[EvanED]

No, not the first. Maybe the first to be shipped with the functionality turned on by default.

It's more than "turned on by default"; that suggests there's a checkbox somewhere that is just off. The support isn't even installed by default.

Noscript may have deserved mention in the summary, but there is a difference between "including such protections" and "has such protections available in an add-on", and the difference is much more than between "including such protections turned on by default" and "including such protections turned off by default".

Re:Clickjacking

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not the first.

Yes, the first.

Re:Clickjacking

[Anonymous Coward]

Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added â" the first browser to include such protections.

ooooooooh yeah
i just clickjacked off there

CAPTCHA: verility

Re:Clickjacking

[Jugalator]

No, not the first. Maybe the first to be shipped with the functionality turned on by default.

Noscript isn't just disabled by default, it's not even included, and it's not even developed by Mozilla, it's not going through the typical QA process, and it's not exposed to novices for easy install, and...

I know this is about IE, but let's be fair here.

Re:Clickjacking

[fahrbot-bot]

but there is a difference between "including such protections" and "has such protections available in an add-on"

Great. Microsoft is bundling something else with their browser/os :-) Seriously, your point is good, but plugins allow someone to not install something if desired - even NoScript.

Re:Clickjacking

[EvanED]

But at what point should they stop? Should Firefox include pop-up blockers? After all, plugins allow someone to not install it if desired -- even the pop-up blocker. Maybe Firefox should try to decouple CSS rendering -- that can be provided in a plugin, so someone who only needs to see the content can do so without that overhead.

I mean, yes, there's a line somewhere, but I think it's hard to argue that something like this is over it.

Re:Clickjacking

[Ant P.]

Noscript deserves mention just for the fact that it patches a glaring deficiency in Firefox that IE had fixed ten years ago - the ability to say "let these sites run scripts, but keep the rest of that popup scum off my screen". Mozilla's insistence on not adding this one thing under the popup and image controls they already have is Completely Fucking Retarded.

Standards

[Mrs. Grundy]

I don't really care about their tabs, 'Awesome Address and Search Bars,' privacy or really anything else while they still only score 20 on the Acid3 Web standards test. IE has historically been such a pain in the ass for the entire world because of poor adherence to standards. The article says Microsoft takes standards seriously but the test says otherwise.

Re:Standards

[Sporkinum]

Pretty funny.. I ran it on firefox (which I can't update due to IS) and got 71, Opera (which I can't update due to IS) 85. IE Version 7.0.5730.11 (which IS may or may not update) and it was unintelligble (couldn't even see score), and IE 6 in Citrix which got an 11.

Re:Standards

[cwrinn]

On the flipside, do you prefer a browser that doesn't give a shit about users and only strives for the perfection of Acid3? *coughSafaricough*

Re:Standards

[pablomme]

I ran it on firefox (which I can't update due to IS) and got 71

Interestingly, I get 70/100 with AdBlock disabled, and 71/100 if I turn it on. I'm a bit puzzled.. does anyone get the same behaviour?

Re:Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

100% certain that you have no reason to give a shit about acid3 scores, and you are purely using it as a dick-measuring tool.

Re:Standards

[mikael_j]

I take it from your comment that you feel that Safari somehow provides the user with an inferior experience of using the software? If so then I have to disagree, I regularly use Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox (2 & 3 due to a couple of annoying bugs in FF3), WebKit and Opera, and generally speaking I actually find Safari/WebKit to be the most pleasant ones, there's also the fact that unlike Internet Explorer they understand the application/xhtml+xml MIME-type and are able to display SVG images without installing 3rd party plugins, and unlike Firefox they actually comprehend embedded fonts in SVG images...

/Mikael

Re:Standards

[heffrey]

None of the browsers I have tried pass the Acid 3 test so I have given up using the internet. There's really no point if you can't get Acid 3 to go to 100/100.

Re:Standards

[Phroggy]

I don't really care about their tabs, 'Awesome Address and Search Bars,' privacy or really anything else while they still only score 20 on the Acid3 Web standards test. IE has historically been such a pain in the ass for the entire world because of poor adherence to standards. The article says Microsoft takes standards seriously but the test says otherwise.

They're working on it; they haven't gotten there yet. IE8 does not pass Acid3, but neither do the current shipping versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Chrome. Most of these should pass Acid3 in their next major release, but Firefox won't pass Acid3 for awhile (probably not until 4.0).

IE8 does pass Acid2, which represents a major improvement in standards-compliance and compatibility over previous versions of IE.

Nobody's saying IE8 is a better browser than Firefox. If you're already running Firefox, that's great. Stick with that. Don't switch to IE. But for anyone currently running IE, this is a huge improvement (and, unlike the switch from IE6 to IE7, upgrading from IE7 to IE8 shouldn't break anything, because there's an IE7 compatibility mode for stupid broken web sites).

Re:Standards

[cwrinn]

Funny, outside of Internet Exploder, I find the most problems, in actual day to day usage, in Webkit based browsers. Opera and Firefox each have problems, yes, but I find they perform better than the competition, in terms of actual day to day usage. I, too, run many browsers routinely. Yes, SVG displays really well in Webkit, and there are other areas where Webkit outperforms Gecko, but often not in areas of general usage. But my actual comment focuses more on the fact that the Webkit developers seemed to drop everything and focus on passing Acid3, placing general usability in second priority. Standards are important, but not so much to drop everything for a silly test. A student that studies just to pass the test most often fails at life, and that's where I've grown to place webkit so far. Rush to pass the test, play catch-up in general usage. Other than that, kudos for taking a snyde remark overly serious. *thumbs up*

Re:Standards

[shutdown -p now]

Acid3 covers some standards which aren't even final yet, such as CSS3. Meanwhile, IE8 does pass Acid2, which indicates correct implementation of HTML4 & CSS2 - which is quite sufficient for true cross-browser development without resorting to browser detection hacks.

Re:Standards

[mikael_j]

You keep talking about failing usability yet I don't see how Safari/WebKit is worse than the horrible mess that Internet Explorer is, and Firefox certainly isn't free of issues. If anything I'd say that the user experience with Safari/WebKit is much more pleasant than both IE and FF. Or maybe you simply don't like how they're not filled with retarded crap like IE's "protected mode"? Or maybe you like how FF makes you jump through a bunch of hoops every time it encounters a self-signed SSL cert? (A warning I can understand and support but when I stumble upon someone's personal website that happens to use a self-signed cert I end up jumping through a bunch of hoops because they're assuming the average user will somehow read the warnings and not just click randomly until they see the website (or give up and call someone (me) to help them deal with the "problem").

I'm sorry but I just don't see these usability issues you're talking about, and I like having a browser that's actually follows the standards.

/Mikael

Re:Standards

[gbarules2999]

I'm running Firefox 3.0.5 with Adblock on under Xubuntu and I got 71. I didn't test it without the plugin, though.

Re:Standards

[sharkey]

IE 7.0.6001.18000 (Vista SP1) resulted in a 12.

Re:Standards

[DragonWriter]

Funny, outside of Internet Exploder, I find the most problems, in actual day to day usage, in Webkit based browsers. Opera and Firefox each have problems, yes, but I find they perform better than the competition, in terms of actual day to day usage.

I find that, too; I don't think its really a problem with the browsers, per se, as the fact that because IE is so dominant and non-standards-compliant, most web sites don't design to standards and then plug holes for various browsers, but instead design for IE, and then tweak to work with Firefox.

Re:Standards

[Phroon]

You jest, but WebKit is at 100/100 on Acid3 and passes the smooth animation requirement as well.

Re:Standards

[Bogtha]

Acid3 covers some standards which aren't even final yet, such as CSS3.

This is highly misleading.

The criteria for the Acid3 tests included the requirement that they be justifiable using only specifications that were in the Candidate Recommendation stage or better in 2004. Weblog article from the author of the test here. Candidate Recommendation stage is the point at which browsers should be implementing the specifications. You can't get to full Recommendation status until two or more browsers have implemented them.

So yes, they weren't "final", but only in the sense that browser implementations were lacking. The specifications were as ready as they could be years before the Acid3 test was announced.

Meanwhile, IE8 does pass Acid2, which indicates correct implementation of HTML4 & CSS2

It indicates no such thing. It's a collection of test-cases for functionality that would be very useful in day-to-day web development if only they were widely implemented correctly. The Acid2 tests do not indicate that a browser has correctly implemented HTML 4 and CSS, only that it has fixed many bugs that it had previously suffered from.

Re:Standards

[XMode]

Or maybe you like how FF makes you jump through a bunch of hoops every time it encounters a self-signed SSL cert?

Actually.. Yes I do.. A self signed certificate is almost no security at all, but dressed up to make it look secure. Making you have to do something to access those pages will also make you think for a second if what you are doing is right. If your not going to read the warning and randomly click things then your EXACTLY the sort of person who should not trust self signed certificates..

Re:Standards

[JStegmaier]

Webkit is a rendering engine, not a browser. All the "chrome" you see around the web pages? That's the browser.

The ONLY point of a rendering engine is to render pages and to do so correctly. Therefore, complying with standards (the only way to determine if a page is rendered correctly) should be their focus.

Re:Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with a self-signed cert is that it leaves you vulnerable to a MitM attack. You might think that no one runs those, but the web proxy at work (SmartFilter) keeps trying to hijack my Gmail sessions.

So while I agree that the CAs are lousy, money-grubbing enterprises, we still need trustworthy certificate authorities. The MitM problem is real and self-signed certs are terrible unless you personally know all of the users for that site (in which case, each one can talk to you and permanently approve the certificate).

People who don't know what they're doing should NOT be accepting self-signed certificates. This is honestly a case where those who don't know how shouldn't.

Re:Standards

[BZ]

It's also not a shipping browser, of course... yet.

Re:Standards

[naugrim]

It's also not a shipping browser, of course... yet.

Midori 0.1.2 ships with a copy of webkit that will render Acid3 100/100. Admittedly though, it is lacking in many other respects.

Re:Standards

[mikael_j]

I know perfectly well what the dangers of self-signed certs is, I also know (from spending way too many years interacting with users) that security information is considered "boring" and gets ignored no matter how many hoops the user has to jump through, so it just ends up bugging me.

If I really need security when accessing a site with a self-signed cert then I'll make sure I can verify the authenticity of the cert, but when I stumble upon some guy's website I'm not in the mood to have my web browser force me to jump through hoops.

Conclusion: I know the dangers, the users who don't know about the dangers generally don't care no matter how hard you try to inform them.

/Mikael

Re:Standards

[Man Eating Duck]

Interestingly, I get 70/100 with AdBlock disabled, and 71/100 if I turn it on. I'm a bit puzzled.. does anyone get the same behaviour?

71 on both counts here... Disabling the plugin, not removing it.

Re:Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, but standards compliance isn't geared towards the everyday user. It's for us developers- Quite literally, over half my current development time in any CSS project is spent making the damn page work in Internet Explorer. Things that Just Work in firefox, opera, and chrome bug out insanely in IE. If we could get them to be standards compliant, we could produce more, better looking web pages, faster.

Re:Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Not with Safari 3.0.4 on Windows. I just tested and it got 41/100. My guess is Windows is the problem but still it didn't pass.

Re:Standards

[Jugalator]

The article says Microsoft takes standards seriously but the test says otherwise.

That's because they're working to support CSS 2.1 first, and ended up supporting parts of that standard that not even Firefox does yet. :o

Re:Standards

[Jugalator]

How is running a highly network-enabled process in a protected memory space "retarded"? I can think of far worse junk to add to a browser than that.

Re:Standards

[mikael_j]

"Protected mode" in Internet explorer breaks stuff, lots of stuff. Sure in an ideal world people would work around the quirks of "Protected mode" but it's easier to just put "Disable protected mode" in the manual.

/Mikael

Re:Standards

[BenoitRen]

How many times does one have to repeat it before they get it?

THE ACID3 TEST IS NOT RELEVANT!

Acid2 is very relevant, and IE8 does pass it. But Acid3 is more about unimportant, little bugs in the current rendering engines that not all of them share. Plus CSS3, as said below, which isn't even a standard yet.

Re:Standards

[heffrey]

Why would Windows be the problem? Safari doesn't pass Acid 3 on other platforms. It's the Webkit nightly builds that do.

It's also not the most useful indicator of standards compliance it being for standards that aren't yet accepted, in place or even in widespread use.

It turns out that IE8 is by far the most standards compliant version of IE. It's very very late in the day but MS have taken a lot of heat for not being compliant. At least give them some credit for significant improvements where they are due. And yes, it's a shame it wasn't 5 years ago.

I just want 6 to go away

[bitcastle]

Yeah the obligatory complaint about those 30% or so that keep using 6 (according to my stats). Maybe with 8 out 7 will become the 6.

Re:I just want 6 to go away

[snowraver1]

I WISH I could use IE7. I am stuck in a tabless world with IE6. One day I went to the Windows Update site and downloaded IE7 and installed it on my work computer. Several weeks later someone dropped by my desk and asked that I uninstall it. Lame. From what I hear in CAB meetings though, we should be getting it soon (maybe before summer).

Re:I just want 6 to go away

[Anonymous Coward]

I was curious as to why my employer (a school division) uses IE6 everywhere, so I asked a tech. The answer: because many of our computers still run Win2k, which doesn't run IE7 apparently.

Our more recent replacements (starting around spring '08, I believe) run xp. If all the 2k machines get replaced with xp, then I suppose it's reasonable to assume that IE7 or 8 will be phased in some time thereafter. I shudder to think of having to choose between IE6 on 2k or IE8 on Win7.

Fortunately for me that's a choice I will never have to make. FF portable seems to run reasonable well from my network drive.

Re:Hooray!

[bigstrat2003]

As opposed to any other story, which doesn't pose any value to a decent percentage of the crowd? Nothing appeals to everybody, so why make snarky comments about a known fact of life?

I need stability

[skomes]

I still use Opera + IE6. Why IE6? Stability. These damn browsers never give up the memory they've taken, although chrome does a better job because it actually runs each tab in a seperate process. With IE6 I open a window, browse youtube, close site, and the memory is returned. I use Opera with javascript turned off, a low overhead browser that will save all my pages if a crash occurs.

Re:I need stability

[WankersRevenge]

You have no idea the IE6 memory leaks that our team dev deals with on a daily basis. It's pure madness. Nevermind the hell it takes to get a page to render proper. Once IE6 marketshare drops to insignificant proportions, you will start seeing its ugly face surface since devs won't be catering to its craptacular bugs. I'm sure you are already seeing the results of its drunken css renderer.

It's funny ... I used to be a diehard Mozilla supporter from .70 days. These days, I can't go a day without wanting to toss firefox out the window with it's "fat guy at the buffet" attitude towards my system resources. If it weren't for a couple of extensions, I would either be in Opera-land or swimming with chrome.

Re:I need stability

[Anonymous Coward]

These damn browsers never give up the memory they've taken

Firefox 3.0, some tabs open: 92.89K. Take a Google tab and play a YouTube video: 104.5K. Close that tab: 87.6K. Oops, that's not fair. Open a Google tab (like at the start): 90.2K.

Sure it's one data point, but it's enough to falsify your statement. Firefox had no problem returning memory used playing a YouTube video. This is under W2K if anyone cares.

Re:I need stability

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I'm seeing IE6 usage near 20% these days (I'm in the UK btw), and once it gets below 10% (9.99% will be enough for me!) then I'll be making less effort to accommodate it in new web sites. It'll take me *considerably* less time to develop web sites when I don't need to worry about IE6.... so I'm looking forward to that day! :D

Oh... and my point was that you'll probably find IE6 is less supported on many websites over the next year or two.

Re:I need stability

[QuestionsNotAnswers]

Both IE6 and IE7 leak memory even after you close the page. Most well known Ajax apps don't leak memory because they have spent plenty of man-hours working through the problems and designing the libraries around the issues by using leak detection tools. I personally have spent weeks and weeks resolving leaks.

Stability? You what?! It bloody crashes all the time. Their own web outlook client completely crashes IE regularly (and no, I am not talking about ActiveX plugins crashing IE - I have been forces to implement many hacks to work around plenty of horrid crashes in IE.)

On second thought perhaps you have just trolled me - although I try not to underestimate an IE user.

Re:I need stability

[cbhacking]

A) IE7 releases resources when tabs or windows are closed. It may have a larger footprint that IE6 does, but I'll bet 6 has a larger fotprint than 5, too. Stability-wise, 7 never caused me any problems (that 6 didn't have at least as bad).

B) IE8, like Chrome (though the first beta of 8 actually predates the Chrome public beta) uses separate processes for tab management. This actually increases RAM usage per tab (in both browsers) but does mean that closing a tab releases lots of RAM. Also, it means that if a tab crashes, it doesn't bring the whole browser down (looking at YOU, Firefox...).

C) All modern browsers, including IE8 (and possibly IE7 - I forget - but most certainly NOT including IE6) will restore tabs after a crash, and have the ability to restore tabs that were open when the browser was closed normally.

Re:I need stability

[Anonymous Coward]

firefox 3.x and up uses less memory than Opera. You say you are a developer, but if you don't know that, then you are a liar; or an idiot.

Re:I need stability

[Jugalator]

These days, I can't go a day without wanting to toss firefox out the window with it's "fat guy at the buffet" attitude towards my system resources.

Huh, I'm having far less problems with Firefox 3.0's new memory manager.

http://dotnetperls.com/Content/Browser-Memory.aspx

Re:I need stability

[BenoitRen]

Maybe you'd like SeaMonkey? It's based on the same rendering engine, but has meat on its bones, is maintained by people who know what they're doing, and doesn't go for flashy features (though I dread 2.0 will have the awesomebar...). Many popular extensions support it, as well, like Adblock Plus and NoScript.

Or maybe even K-Meleon, if you're on Windows, though it has far less extension support. Adblock Plus is available for it, though.

jsBalls Score

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it improve its jsBalls score? Last I saw ie8 was once of the slowest browsers. Has it improved since beta2?

Re:No shortcuts

[conureman]

The only way to open IE at the house is in the "run" tab, the wife and kid don't know where that is.

Awesome compatibility for developers

[Anonymous Coward]

I was about to install it when I noticed: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Visual Studio .NET (version 7.0 from 2002) are currently incompatible. If you install Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, Visual Studio .NET will crash. No workaround is currently available. Yeah, I kind of need .NET 1.1 to work for some parts of my job.

Re:Awesome compatibility for developers

[the 99th penguin]

Don't worry, there is a way to target .NET 1.1 with VS 2005 and even with VS 2008.

Re:Awesome compatibility for developers

[Anonymous Coward]

IE8RC and VS .NET (version 7.0 from 2002) are compatible.

You were looking at the IE8 Beta 2 release notes (It took a while for microsoft.com to update to the IE8 RC version - they use the same URL.)

Re:Awesome compatibility for developers

[shutdown -p now]

Um, VS.NET 2002 (7.0) targeted .NET 1.0. If you need to target 1.1, you want VS.NET 2003 (7.1).

Re:Awesome compatibility for developers

[Anonymous Coward]

You were looking at the IE8 Beta2 release notes (it took a while for them to update the release notes to IE8 RC)

Visual Studio .NET works without issue with IE8 RC

Re:Awesome compatibility for developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I really wish I had seen that before I installed ie this morning. Has been a day full of debugging dialogs.

Re:Awesome compatibility for developers

[Anonymous Coward]

I was about to install it when I noticed:
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Visual Studio .NET (version 7.0 from 2002) are currently incompatible. If you install Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, Visual Studio .NET will crash. No workaround is currently available.

Yeah, I kind of need .NET 1.1 to work for some parts of my job.

You're installing beta software on a work machine ?
Shame on you.

Re:Hooray!

[bigstrat2003]

Fair enough, but for real bonus points, you need to go for a score of 5, Troll/Flamebait. ;)

Re:Hooray!

[Beyond Opinion]

Of course we won't be using it to browse the web, but for those of developing for the web it's handy to keep up with this stuff.

Left beta? Huh??

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that a release candidate was still a beta, not a released, shipped version.

Granted, it MIGHT become the released code if not enough bugs are found and corrected shortly.

Shows you what little I know...years of beta testing and I had it wrong all along.

Still no SVG

[Anonymous Coward]

may we suggest upgrading to Firefox.

W3C Standards

[nitroscen]

Before I RTFA, I was going to make a snide remark about IE's refusal to follow web standards.
Skimming through it, I was surprised to find the article praise IE 8's 'improved compatability' -

"In my standards-compatibility testing, IE8 RC1 passed the Acid2 Browser Test (which evaluates CSS support) with flying colors. But on the Acid3 Web standards test, a program that focuses on DOM (document object model) support and JavaScript, IE8 RC1 did the same as Beta 2, getting a score of 20 out of 100, still much better than IE7, which only got a score of 12. But compared with Firefox 3's 71, Chrome's 79, and Opera's 100, IE still has a long way to go. "

So! My snide remark still stands.
What a joke..yay.. conditional stylesheets...

Re:W3C Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

But on the Acid3 Web standards test, a program that focuses on DOM (document object model) support

And such urgently needed features as SVG animation, SVG font support, as well as problems found in commonly-used browsers, i.e. FF and IE. The tests are incredibly biased.

David Baron said it best: what matters more, standards support before or after the test? After all, would you rather see worked on first or (one of the Acid3 tests) proper whitespace preservation of the class attribute?

Re:W3C Standards

[Fully Functional]

A lot of web developers are going to be very angry about this. They said there was going to be a 3rd Beta before RC1. RC1 wasn't to be expected before the Mix conference that MS has. Also originally IE9 was meant to be using the new Triton engine instead of being based on the Trident engine that started in IE3 and is in all the other ones since then. It looks like that isn't true anymore. Some more details about IE8 and IE9 here http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/more-details-ab.html

Re:W3C Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Biased my ass.

How can a PUBLIC test be biased?

Standards are important to provide INTEROPERABILITY. But I guess if you're a brain-addled MORON CONFUSED BY SUN EQUIPMENT with your degree from MOE AND CURLY'S SOFTWARE EMPORIUM and your ability to make a living was tied to a certain monopoly's attempts to actually prevent interoperability, you'd be a fanboi too.

Re:W3C Standards

[lamapper]

A lot of web developers are going to be very angry about this....

Do you really think their market position has weakened enough for them once again to feign that they care. One day perhaps, but not yet....

Re:W3C Standards

[lamapper]

"In my standards-compatibility testing, IE8 RC1 passed the Acid2 Browser Test (which evaluates CSS support) with flying colors. But on the Acid3 Web standards test, a program that focuses on DOM (document object model) support and JavaScript, IE8 RC1 did the same as Beta 2, getting a score of 20 out of 100, still much better than IE7, which only got a score of 12. But compared with Firefox 3's 71, Chrome's 79, and Opera's 100, IE still has a long way to go. "

Great catch and something I consider very informative, since I do NOT have mod points I wanted to thank you for posting this.

Also stated in that article,

Times are tough for Microsoft, with job cuts, the European Union breathing down its neck again, and Firefox slowly but steadily encroaching on Internet Explorer.

As you have factually pointed out, it is Internet Explorer (20 of 100) that is slowly catching up to Firefox 3 (71), Chrome (79) and Opera (100); hardly the other way around as they would like to try and SPIN IT!

Please someone mode nitroscen up!

Re:W3C Standards

[Bogtha]

The tests are incredibly biased.

Acid3 was deliberately designed to trigger bugs in all major browsers, because they all have problems. How is that biased?

Re:W3C Standards

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The tests are incredibly biased.

Yup, biased in favor of IE, since a requirement for inclusion was that it had to be broken in either Webkit or Gecko to get into the test so things that were only broken in IE were completely ignored.

Re:W3C Standards

[BenoitRen]

The Acid3 test is a nasty hack that's not really relevant when it comes to web standards. They really had to dig for little rendering bugs in the rendering engines. Plus, it tests for CSS3, which isn't even a standard yet!

In other words, Acid3 is unimportant. It'd be much better to improve overall CSS2.1 support. It's too bad that publications only understand automatic tests that anyone can take.

Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[AKAImBatman]

No? What's that? Microsoft closed out the bugs as "works as intended?" Fail.

Something to credit Microsoft for

In case it's not clear, I have a firey hatred for IE8. Not so much the product itself, but what it represents. What it represents is a flagpole in the ground stating, "We're going to stand in the way of progress for our own selfish reasons".

While I can understand that Microsoft feels that the market is slipping from their grasp, I cannot support their methods of attempting to compete. Which is to say that they are using their power to prevent competition rather than building a superior product. As Joel pointed out in his excellent article on the Windows API being lost:

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's [Windows] API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows.

It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: "Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client." You'll see that somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn. Joe Beda, from the Avalon team, says that "Avalon, and Longhorn in general, is Microsoft's stake in the ground, saying that we believe power on your desktop, locally sitting there doing cool stuff, is here to stay. We're investing on the desktop, we think it's a good place to be, and we hope we're going to start a wave of excitement..."

If you truly want to understand what is wrong with this browser, take some time and go through these examples:

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/wrongWithIE/

Those only scratch the surface of what is really wrong with IE and Microsoft's stance on improving their web browser. For further reference, RC1 of IE8 gets a 20/100 on ACID3. This compares poorly to FireFox3's 56-59/100, Webkit nightly's 100/100, and Opera dev version's 100/100(!).

Developers need to band together and stop hacking our sites for IE. Users who wish to use IE should either be directed toward download links for one of the many alternatives, or forced to deal with a degraded view of the site with a polite comment to upgrade. And by degraded, I mean "it works, but looks awful". If that right there doesn't sell users on getting an alternative browser, I don't know what will.

(Yes, I am aware that many businesses can't take the hit. But we have to start somewhere. And that somewhere can easily be everything from your personal site to your new venture that's betting on early adopters of advanced web technology. IE's market share is already plummeting. If we can get enough momentum, we can near-eliminate this unsightly browser from the web. Remember Netscape 4's inability to keep up? This is the exact same situation all over again, except this time the solution is not a total mono-culture.)

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[i.of.the.storm]

I'd like to note that the latest Shiretoko (Firefox 3.1) nightly gets around 93/100 on Acid3, since you're comparing nightly versions of Webkit and Opera. I also think it's been at 93/100 for a while, and I don't think they're focusing on getting 100% for 3.1 as much as just getting it out the door at this point.

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[AKAImBatman]

Thanks for pointing that out! I didn't have the nightly figures for Firefox, so I had to go with the figures I had on hand. Comparing the upcoming releases of these browsers is (IMHO) very fair considering that they will probably be out at the same time as IE8.

Even if we put that aside, it's worth mentioning that IE8 scores lower than any competing browser did at the time the ACID3 test was introduced. As I recall, not a single browser (other than IE) fell below 40 in the initial ACID3 results. Which is pretty good when you consider that the ACID tests are designed to target features that are under-represented in the marketplace.

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Very well said.

Users who wish to use IE should either be directed toward download links for one of the many alternatives, or forced to deal with a degraded view of the site with a polite comment to upgrade.

Actually, users should be directed to file a bug report with their vendor. Microsoft products are the broken window fallacy in action, it's about time everyone recognised this.

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep running into bugs in all versions of IE. So far IE6 is the worst of the versions which are still in use (no surprise there, that piece of shit must die). IE8b2 (the version in the XP browser compatibility image) is a step up, but has severe problems with floated elements. IE7 is better. The IE8b2 version in the Windows 7 beta is different from the other IE8b2, but it does not support CSS opacity. Instead it implements a proprietary filter: property, but not in the same way as the other versions of IE, because the old way makes for invalid CSS syntax.

If IE8 is not going to be a surprisingly standards compliant marvel of a browser, I will simply make all pages turn on IE7 compatibility instead of crafting yet another style&script special case. What the hell is wrong with Microsoft?

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[i.of.the.storm]

I think the Acid tests also focus on making sure things break gracefully, which is also important. I guess it's not so bad that IE8 doesn't pass ACID3 because as you mentioned, it tests things that aren't in widespread use, although it does hamper the ability of developers to actually use said features when everyone but IE supports them. And by the time IE9 is out, there will be something else to support that it doesn't support unless they start making more of an effort on that front. I guess the problem is that most people don't really care about standards support, so it's kind of a chicken-egg problem for IE.

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[dhavleak]

Is a comparison between a relatively old beta build of IE 8 and the most recent nightly build of WebKit / Opera really fair? Also -- are there just 100 test cases (Acid 3) that indicate standards compliance? Is it possible that there are actually several thousand test cases needed, and acing Acid 3 is just a question of public perception? (like tuning your software to ace a particular benchmark)? Do we know that these 100 test cases Acid 3 has chosen (out of the many thousands) are the most important 100 test cases of W3C's spec -- or is it possible that we give Acid tests more importance than they are worth?

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[AKAImBatman]

Is a comparison between a relatively old beta build of IE 8 and the most recent nightly build of WebKit / Opera really fair?

1. Beta 1 got a 17/100. The RC1 released TODAY got a 20/100.

2. Opera/Safari nightlies did it in March. You can download a pre-release of the Opera version here and test it for yourself.

3. The ACID tests focus on features that are useful in the marketplace, but have not been fully implemented. In result, attaining ACID compliance is a GOOD thing.

4. IE8 is BROKEN. Any web developer will hit a wall with its standards support in minutes. It is an indefensible piece of garbage considering where the market is today.

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[trawg]

Developers need to band together and stop hacking our sites for IE. Users who wish to use IE should either be directed toward download links for one of the many alternatives, or forced to deal with a degraded view of the site with a polite comment to upgrade. And by degraded, I mean "it works, but looks awful". If that right there doesn't sell users on getting an alternative browser, I don't know what will.

One of our sites (http://www.ausgamers.com) recently passed the 50% mark for Firefox users. We've ditched IE6 support entirely (the site mostly works but there's a bunch of rendering issues that we're simply not going to fix - if people point them out we explain why it's like that and advise them to upgrade to Firefox or at LEAST IE7, which many of them do).

We develop mostly in Firefox and IE support is now (as it should be) largely an afterthought.

I think ditching IE6 support (with clear explanations prepared for users that don't understand why something doesn't work) is a great start for most sites as it sends a clear message to users/customers that Microsoft can no longer set the standard.

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[Bogtha]

And by the time IE9 is out, there will be something else to support

Actually, by the time Internet Explorer 6 was out, there was something else to support. The DOM 2 Events specification, an intrinsic part of modern JavaScript, was published in 2000, almost a year before Internet Explorer 6, and even the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 still won't have support for it. That's why all the modern JavaScript libraries like jQuery have workaround code to translate the Internet Explorer event model into the standard event model shared by all the other browsers.

So yes, there will be plenty to work on for Internet Explorer 9, but it will be yet more stuff that other browsers implemented years ago, not a moving target.

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[dhavleak]

Beta 1 got a 17/100. The RC1 released TODAY got a 20/100.

Ah! My bad. Didn't read your comment properly -- I got the impression from TFA that RC1 wasn't generally available yet, so I just assumed you used IE8 Beta 2. As of now, I too am running IE8 RC1.

Opera/Safari nightlies did it in March. You can download a pre-release of the Opera version here and test it for yourself.

Not necessary -- I don't doubt the veracity of your claim.

The ACID tests focus on features that are useful in the marketplace, but have not been fully implemented. In result, attaining ACID compliance is a GOOD thing.

I don't doubt that ACID compliance is a good thing -- if they test any part of the standard at all, then by all means every single browser out there should aim to ACE the test. I'm just stating the obvious -- the HTML/CSS spec is gigantic -- 100 tests are an infinitesimal fraction of what you need to look at for compliance. Opera scoring 100/100 on Acid 3 gives the impression of Opera being 100% standards compliant -- which is not necessarily true. IE8 scoring 20/100 gives an impression of it being abysmably non-compliant -- which is also not necessarily true. When you put together a complete test suite, it's possible that both browsers score around the same -- just saying..

It's also possible (even likely) that a browser maker could give undue importance to Acid 3, at the cost of other test cases -- because Acid 3 is publicly visible, and sexy, and drives adoption, etc.

Besides, how would you define features that are 'useful in the marketplace'? In any normal test plan you would have priority zero test cases through priority 2 test cases (0 being the most important). It's very unlikely for a spec this size that you would have less than several thousand P0 test cases.

IE8 is BROKEN. Any web developer will hit a wall with its standards support in minutes. It is an indefensible piece of garbage considering where the market is today

That's a little strong, to say the least. It works, it's fast, it's feature rich, and it's secure.

If standards compliance is your main goal, it seems that IE8 is working hard to achieve it. I'm referring to the fact that IE 8 renders pages in strict mode by default, and only reverts to quirks mode when you click the "compatibility view" icon (right of the address bar). That's bound to cause IE users some pain (and consequently reduce it's adoption) because of poorly written sites that will render like crap. But considering IE's market share, this decision will have the largest impact on site designers to get them to author standards compliant sites -- much more than any other browser can have. So basically, considering where the market is today, wouldn't you agree that IE8 stands the best chance of improving where the market will be tomorrow?

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[AKAImBatman]

When you put together a complete test suite, it's possible that both browsers score around the same -- just saying..

I understand what you're trying to get at, but it's simply not correct. Take DOM2 support for example. IE8 is missing the ENTIRE Events section of the standard. In fact, most of DOM2 is MIA. That's a rather massive hole right there. And if you go through the list of items I posted above, you can find how many of the bugs they documented went unfixed in IE8.

You know the most frustrating part about the lack of DOM2 Events support? Microsoft closed the bug on DOM 2 Events with "Closed (By Design)". BY DESIGN?!?! What the--?

Worse yet, Microsoft ventured into HTML5 territory with IE8 but decided to pay it little more than lip service. The comments I've seen on the WHATWG list have them pushing proprietary extensions that would already be covered if they'd just implement the entire part of that spec! (e.g. They implement local storage, then attempt to include a transaction model for it. All while ignoring the part of the storage spec for local, transactional database storage.) Somehow Microsoft is attempting to implement various events features from HTML5 without supporting DOM2 Events. How in the world can they suggest that such broken implementations would even be close to the spec if their event system is wrong? (Closed "by design" remember!)

Interestingly, Microsoft has also seen fit to ignore the most implemented part of the HTML5 standard: The CANVAS tag. Internet Explorer thus remains the only web browser with no Canvas support.

These features that Microsoft is ignoring are the very foundations of modern web browsers. Without them, web developers have to work on a variety of workarounds to make their sites work with IE. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is the name of the game.

That's a little strong, to say the least. It works, it's fast, it's feature rich, and it's secure.

I posted a link above so that you could understand how BROKEN IE is. Why don't you take a tour and see how broken it is? Or more to the point, take a look at my sig. The game in it is a real-world application that is written to the standards. With no special work, the game worked in Opera, FireFox, Chrome, and Safari. If I had another standards compliant browser to throw at it, I'm sure it would work as well.

Yet nearly every feature it needs to operate is not supported by any version of Internet Explorer. No canvas, no DOM 2 Events, no Opacity (also "Closed (By Design)"), NUTH-ING. It simply will not operate in IE8.

I have the technology to patch IE8 at runtime. A Java Applet with a LiveConnect interface, a wrapper around Microsoft's event system, conditional use of opacity, it could all be made to work. But the God's honest truth is that I simply don't want to. Microsoft's piss-poor attitude toward developers has finally caught up with them. From the day I saw their blasted "closed by design" bug, I decided that it's simply not worth investing the effort in Microsoft any longer. Microsoft refuses to invest in their customers, so they can burn for all I care.

Apologies if I'm getting a bit melodramatic, but your comment about IE8 being "feature rich" is a bit of a trigger for me. As a web developer I have patiently worked around IE for the better part of a decade. I figured that support for the (OVER!) decade-old W3C standards would eventually arrive in future IE versions. But first Microsoft ignored pleas in their IE7 development. That was somewhat ok. They were just getting started again. IE8 was supposed to be the big standards fix'em up. Microsoft promised the development community upside down and backwards that IE8 would be the most standards compliant browser yet. In fact, they advertise I

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[AKAImBatman]

Oh, and before you decide to buy into the comment placed on the DOM2 bug, consider this:

1. DOM2 Events was introduced as a standard in 1998. It was formalized in 2000. Microsoft has had over 10 years to implement the standard. One would think it would be top on their list.

2. Here's a list of the editors for the Events section of the original spec back in 1998:

Tom Pixley, Netscape Communications Corporation
Chris Wilson, Microsoft Corporation

Notice anyone interesting?

3. Consider again: Why is Microsoft implementing HTML5 features that depend on DOM 2 Events and could still change if they don't have time to implement DOM 2 Events?

Remember: the HTML5 spec is not finalized. Pieces of it are, but not the pieces that Microsoft chose. DOM2 was finalized in 2000, yet Microsoft left it out of IE 5.5, IE 6, IE 7, and now IE 8. Sensing a pattern?

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[AKAImBatman]

I can't help but think that the entire web gets a little bit better every time IE6 support is dropped. Nice work! And nice site, too! :-)

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a little strong, to say the least. It works, it's fast, it's feature rich, and it's secure.

I don't know about the other parts, but I sure hope it will be fast.

A RIA app we're developing is giving us a ton of grief because parts of it are abysmally slow with IE7. It's not a problem if you are using a modern browser (FF3, WebKit etc.), but it's barely viable with IE7. The RC announcement sounded like great news to us, but then I saw this quote from a senior product manager on the IE development team:

"We're at the point, with what people do in the browser, that users can't really tell the difference between browser [performance]"

See the quote in context here. Yep, MS is still the arrogant itself, and us RIA developers will be in a world of pain in the future, too.

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[dhavleak]

I get your point -- that's a lot of very specific and very valid complaints that you have there.

Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Beta 1 got a 17/100. The RC1 released TODAY got a 20/100.

Didn't Beta 2 get 21/100, and thus the RC1 today is a step backwards?

Favorites: Make Available Offline

[imuffin]

I wonder if the put the option to make favorites available when offline back in IE? It's not in IE 7 anymore. It was actually kinda useful for traversing and downloading webpages to store offline for use while traveling. Though I must say HTTrack does a fine job of it.

Doens the popup blocker work on /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, how good is the popup blocker in IE8? Does it block popups on /. ? I don't know, but why have both /. and SourceForge decided to revive those ugly methods of advertisement?

Uninstall?

[GNUThomson]

Does it support uninstall feature? Aaaah, I knew it. They still have some catching up to do.

Interesting statistic

[elashish14]

IE shipping with a feature before FF has it ( private browsing mode).

Well that's something you don't see every day.

Re:Interesting statistic

[Matthieu Araman]

humm, both IE8 and Firefox 3.1 will include a private browsing feature but neither have "shipped".
But you're right that IE included it before in a beta and that increased the priority on the firefox people...
Time will say which of these version ship the first (in a non beta, non rc mode)

Re:Interesting statistic

[sootman]

Well, Firefox can't always take the lead. But Safari had private browsing years ago. :-)

Wikipedia: "Version 2.0 of Safari was released on April 29, 2005... includes a built-in RSS and Atom reader. Other features include Private Browsing..."

Funny. They even have a link to 'porn mode' which has a handy table showing which browsers had it when. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porn_mode

Re:Interesting statistic

[Jugalator]

That's not the only feature IE 8 is shipping with before Firefox. :p

I actually like the idea about getting update notifications for websites that have updated themselves. I earlier used a small freeware app for it, but wouldn't have to with IE 8.

Re:Interesting statistic

[Quantumstate]

That depends on how you define firefox. I think that the main advantage of firefox is the excellent plugin system and thus any plugins should be counted as features of firefox. This is a common standpoint since people often refer to firebug and adblock as major benefits to firefox. So firefox does have the feature under this system there appear to be a few plugins with the functionality.

Download resumption still missing

[phlegmboy]

I gave IE 8 a test drive on Vista 2.0b. I was not impressed. Plugins? What are they? But the biggest pain in the ass as far as I am concerned is that the IE crapware STILL does not support the incredibly simple function of resumption of interrupted downloads. This is typuical Macro$lut bullshit.

Re:Download resumption still missing

[Anonymous Coward]

What is Vista 2.0b?

Re:Download resumption still missing

[psetzer]

Plugins? What are they?

COM objects. More specifically ActiveX. Or was that a rhetorical question?

Re:Getting verrry old

[snowraver1]

Mod him flamebait, but he does have a point. Bashing MS is lame. It takes no wit.

Re:Getting verrry old

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you crazy? This is worth mentioning because browsers are important. Slashdot is pro-ms now? The most irrational ms haters in the world hang out here, like you. Youre so batshit insanse you see pro-ms where there isnt any.

Having this much hate isnt healthy. Chill out.

after how you've treated me?

[Onymous Coward]

There may be a number of good technical and use-oriented reasons not to bother with IE8. I don't know the details on it just yet. But it could be twice as good as the next browser and I still wouldn't use it. Not after what Microsoft did to us all with earlier versions. The standards compliance problems have been infuriating for developers. How much human effort has been wasted trying to cope with this? And the vulnerabilities have made popular computing a diseased seething mass. How many geeks have had to spend evenings or whole weekends taking care friends and family members' systems?

All of that and Microsoft let IE rot for how many years? Half a freakin' decade in the midst of humanity's glorious ascension into a networked era? It took competition forcefully wedging its way into IE's monopolistic stranglehold before Microsoft got off their asses to do anything.

Well, it's too late. Fuck off.

I'm no battered wife. I know that MS isn't "really a good husband, he just..." whatever. I'd rather other people not drag me into another round of this same neglected-until-it-matters-to-Microsoft bullshit. The fewer people who use IE, the better.

Re:after how you've treated me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that!

Re:after how you've treated me?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not want to bash Firefox here (so sorry for posting as AC), but Internet Explorer is nicely integrated into Active Directory. For business customers this is a very nice feature (think zone managment).

Don't get me wrong, for a private user this could not matter less. I use Firefox + Adblock + Noscript at home (and at work, thank you root access on developer machines and wonderful IT staff).

Re:after how you've treated me?

[eaa428e6f46aa9f93f47]

*sniff*, well spoken. They suck sh*t through a straw, and the quality of the current effort has nothing to do with that fact. Its based on *years* of history, and mega-hours of misery, not one steenkin release candidate that might arguably have some well done features.

Re:after how you've treated me?

[PNutts]

How much human effort has been wasted trying to cope with this?

Compared to, say, posting to /. from the office? Probably quite small.

Re:after how you've treated me?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if IE magically goes 100% compliant, what happens when your company realizes they can fire half of there developers because work gets done so quickly now.

I hate IE as much as the next guy, but M$ has kept many developers, me being one of them, employed for a vary long time.

The standards compliance problems have been infuriating for developers.

sure its infuriating, but it keeps us on our toes and forces us to be creative with the solution. The fact that we can find a solution in the worst situation (IE) is what makes us great developers. I've seen/done some very creative css hacks and there is always a sense of pride after accomplishing something that takes skill and creativity.

Be careful what you wish for.

Re:after how you've treated me?

[Onymous Coward]

There's plenty of work beside tweaking for incompliants. More gratifying work, too.

You can't seriously be advocating the "let's have the situation be worse so that we can be gainfully employed in handling that" scenario.

It's thinking like yours that holds back the whole of fucking humanity. Let's solve the browser compatibility issue and move on to the next situation. There will always be something. Let's make that something related to progress, okay?

Re:after how you've treated me?

[Ginger Unicorn]

That's the broken window fallacy. The time you waste (albeit paid) fiddling with incompatibilities, is time you could be being paid to do something that benefits the software ecosystem, the company you work for and ultimately the economy.

Re:after how you've treated me?

[Arainach]

You know, I don't understand your Slashdot people.

Microsoft tries to get rid of XP and replaced it with an updated version. You complain that XP is "good enough" and they should just keep using what they've got.

IE6 does everything people need for a few years, so MS keeps it around. They're evil for holding back progress.

Do you people willingly give in to raw hypocrisy or are you really that blind?

Re:after how you've treated me?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they need to fix their image, they should do some crazy, radical things like re-releasing IE for Mac, re-release IE for Unix (in Linux form), all new versions.

Once the guy dual boots to Windows or fires up a slowly running Virtual machine just to "test" the sites new addition, he will hate both it and MS.

About the binary IE for Linux... Why not? Ship it, let whoever wants it run it. Or open source the IE in MS open source terms?

If Ballmer browsed archive.org and see how was MS treated before and after IE 3, he would figure how much damage that model and childish IE tricks has done to them.

not really true with Firefox

[Trepidity]

It's just that, with FireFox, anything that isn't related to bare simple display of HTML pages, is usually tucked into separate plugins.

Firefox includes all sorts of "security" stuff turned on by default, some of it both pointless and really annoying, like the click-4-times annoyance when you want to visit any https site that doesn't have its SSL certificate signed by one of the worthless central authorities. Some of it is also useful, like popup blocking. "Clickjacking" prevention seems like it'd go in the same category of stuff, if Firefox were interested.

Re:Left beta? Huh??

[Anonymous Coward]

Shows you what little I know...years of beta testing and I had it wrong all along.

Yes, apparently you did.

Re:Getting verrry old

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone has a case of the "Monday's" now don't they. Forget your morning coffee perhaps?

Re:Getting verrry old

[malakai]

This has been a very active couple of days for MS stories. Lots of big things happening between layoffs and beta releases.
Let's look at some facts though.

30% of the postings on any given page are given over to MS. That goes beyond happenstance and statistical probability, right into an obvious bent for the evil empire. An empire that never deserved ink in the first place.

Windows marketshare is 90%.
IE's marketshare is 70%
Slashdot users run somwhere between 47% and 70% MS Windows based OS.(http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1516&aid=-1, http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=848&aid=-1)

In the last four days Slashdot has had 9 MS stories ( source: http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=109)
In the last four days Slashdot has has 97 stories posted ( source: http://slashdot.org/search.pl )

What percentage of stories about MS have run in the past four days?
9/97 = 0.092 * 100 = 9.2%

Facts hardly look as bad as you make them out to be.

Does this read like a political report to you?

[dangitman]

IE8 has left beta as of noon Pacific time today.

Doesn't this sound like some wartime political report or something? "Leaving beta" as if it's an actual physical act of moving somewhere else?

"President Truman boarded the naval vessel at 2PM local time, and departed on his return voyage to the US from the island archipelago."

Re:Does this read like a political report to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until now, IE8 has been kept safely contained on archive tapes made with Beta VCRs.
Time will tell whether letting it out of Beta and into real world PCs was a good idea.

Page-Ad

[Anonymous Coward]

Did everyone else get the Google Chrome page-ad when loading this page?

Re:No shortcuts

[Chabil Ha']

I'm not sure why you got modded troll here, but that's how I set things up for a lab back in the college days. Any trace of the 'Blue E' was hidden and replaced with the orange fox, its label changed from 'Mozilla Firefox' to 'Internet'. Management became a lot easier from that point forward.

One Additional And Vital Posting Rule

[Anonymous Coward]

* When you are composing your +5 Insightful masterpiece of a post that utterly eviscerates a company for an alleged GPL copyright violation you have to do so while listening to your multi-terrabyte pirated(aka copyright violation) music collection.

Third party tracking

[AnalPerfume]

I notice one of the features listed is the ability to prevent third parties from tracking your web browsing habits, which would presumably mean "anyone other than the owner". Since Microsoft believe in retaining ownership of the software and licensing it to you, do they consider themselves a third party? Or is this just a convenient little "block the competition, while leaving a loophole for us"?

Re:Third party tracking

[Ilgaz]

I don't know if it is indicator of anything but that "(evil?) eye" icon appears on some of MS sites too. I am speaking up to IE 7.

I really wonder what the heck happened with P3P, the standard had MS, IBM support and Mozilla didn't adopt it, I lost the track since then.

BTW MS will happily track you if you accept that politely written "Help Microsoft to improve products" or something, it comes as disabled by default but MS has setup many traps to enable it, e.g. network troubleshooting.

TFA is wrong

[petermgreen]

XP professional x64 edition is supported using the same version as server 2003 x64.

There don't seem to be any downloads for any version of windows on itanium though.

Re:No shortcuts

[PitaBred]

If his gay lover is anything like IE, I'd certainly hope so. No one should be exposed to that kind of depravity.

A million voices crying out...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought I just heard the sound of a million voices of web site developers crying out in pain.

Now we get to support:
      -IE 6 (for the 10-20% of users who will never upgrade)
      -IE 7 (for the soon to be additional 10-20% of users will never upgrade)
      -IE 8
      -Firefox
      -Safari
      -Opera

Re:A million voices crying out...

[Dan Ost]

meh, some number of developers will decide IE6 support isn't worth the effort which will cause some IE6 users to actually look for an alternative. Eventually, IE6 will only be used for internal apps that will never be upgraded and not regular browsing. Similarly, IE7 will eventually fade away.

Give me FREEDOM and 100% Control or else....

[lamapper]

...The latest IE also solves a problem that's a leading cause of browser slowdown...

Yea right, you have gotta be kidding me, Microsoft must think we are idiots.... I did not stop reading the article at that point (but should have) and just laughed, poor, poor fools that keep buying the marketing BS.

My suggestion to all, do NOT adopt any new product offerings from them for at least a year after they are released. You will probably be glad you waited. Not only will you get them cheaper if they are legitimate improvements, you will avoid unnecessary hassles and problems by letting others work them out for you. You have to admit their track record of late has been dismal at best.

The newer operating systems (since mid XP, Vista and now Windows 7) slowly bloat up and slow down, no matter what you do. There are many reasons, most that we the end user can NO LONGER control â" even a little and/or prevent from happening, thanks to auto updates, audit, compliance and validity checks, etc....

I was not surprised to hear a caller on Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy s radio show just this last weekend mention that he attempted the normal method of re formatting his PC's hard disk and re installing all his software to get his computer running faster again like it use too and it simply would not work. Leo as usual asked him a few intelligent questions about how he went about it and what exactly he did and to each and every question the callers responses were intelligent and right on the money. It was obvious he knew what he was doing, had done it before, but this was the first time it simply did NOT work. Leos response was classic and not unexpected for any and all that have listened to him for years. Basically that is should not be doing that. Too funny and too sad for all that use Microsoft Operating System and the Internet Explorer browser. The slow down, loss of privacy, general bloat that causes slower and slower internet surfing over time due to Flash tracking BS, cookie tracking BS, spyware, Viral injections, etc...; can NO longer be fixed via a re format and re install of all software.

I knew this would happen sooner or later, with the CWA, auto detect, auto update BS that we have to deal with to use their software, however I did not expect it to happen this soon. I sincerely thought this type of Microsoft forced bloat would not happen until some time next year after the Windows 7 early adopters were forced to install Vista via updates, compliance checks and having no other supportable option and/or upgrade path.

Yet another violation of trust in my opinion.

I should have stopped reading there, but I read the article to the end and read this under Security and Privacy around page 3 or 4 of the article I believe. I admit that I did smirk and laugh at combining IE with Security and Privacy....

Well, call Microsoft a copycat once again, but IE8 does a little more than just duplicate this capability...

Another funny one there, is it just me or does Microsoft continue to implement more and more functionality found in Linux, FOSS and Open Source software. Too rich. Further in that page it stated....

Microsoft reps claim that their engineers agonized over making sure that Shift-Enter took you to the desired site.

I have been using Shift Enter to launch URLs from graphics, URLs copied into OpenOffice.org Writer and other Open Source software under Linux for years now. It is one of the many reasons I say Linux is my share point, because you can copy/paste from almost anything to anything with Linux application software.

IE8 can block the script while still giving you access to the site. In my testing, Firefox failed to block the sample XSS site provided by Microsoft,

Where is the Windows 2000 version?

[Pepebuho]

Really, where is the Windows 2000 Version? There are lots of us who did not want to tangle with XP and stayed at Windows 2K and still, we are productively using our computers.
I am slowly migrating to Linux, unless Windows have anything compelling to keep me on the Windows camp

Re:Where is the Windows 2000 version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did it completely slip your mind that they didn't even release Internet Explorer 7 for 2k? Why do you think they would release 8 for it?

Re:Where is the Windows 2000 version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea! My Windows 3.11 WFW install could use some updates too! The man is keeping me down, man.

Re:Where is the Windows 2000 version?

[AndGodSed]

Come on over to the Dark Side... complete your migration young padawan - we have sudo.

Re:Where is the Windows 2000 version?

[Ilgaz]

If you really want to use Win2K, I suggest you convert to Opera. They have a very good history of never abandoning their users (they even support win98!) and thanks to their mobile developer culture, they always take security and performance as first priority. When you say "This is it", you can also use same browser on Linux with same settings too.

Of course, I hope you run a good firewall/AV combination there. Blaster doesn't really care what browser you use :)

Quote of the day

[serbanp]

From the article:

Internet Explorer looks ready to give Firefox 3 a real run for its money.

Re:Quote of the day

[fahrbot-bot]

From the article:
Internet Explorer looks ready to give Firefox 3 a real run for its money.

The delicious irony being that they're both free...

WTF is "private browsing mode"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that like the reverse of "Your computer is broadcasting an IP address"?

ch-ch-changes!

[Tumbleweed]

  Issue One: IE8 RC1, when in standards mode, no longer reserves space for the vertical scrollbar if it isn't needed by the current content, rather like Firefox. Unlike Firefox, the '-moz-scrollbars-vertical', IE8 wants 'overflow-y: scroll;' in the body portion of the CSS. The problem: IE6 and IE7 both react ... badly to that, by putting a *second* vertical scrollbar to the left of the main one, but which only spans from the top of the canvas to the bottom of the content (not the bottom of the canvas). Note, the overflow-y thing DOES work in FF3 (didn't bother testing in FF2).

  Pedantic-Man's(tm) Solution: Use the following CSS conditional statement for the body tag in your CSS*:
      <!--[if IE 8]>
            overflow-y: scroll;
      <![endif]-->

    Go ahead and keep the -moz-scrollbars-vertical in your html tag in your CSS for FF, and enjoy the sweet taste of multi-browser happiness.

  * Void where prohibited by law.

Re:ch-ch-changes!

[Kalriath]

Unlike Firefox, the '-moz-scrollbars-vertical', IE8 wants 'overflow-y: scroll;' in the body portion of the CSS.

That's quite reasonable, since "-moz-scrollbars-vertical" is invalid CSS (well, it's vendor specific... you may as well use DXTransforms).

Re:Left beta? Huh??

[adamchou]

yup, in the software release life cycle, release candidate comes after beta. check this out for more info on the software release life cycle

Re:No shortcuts

[Randle_Revar]

I bet there are at least two other ways open IE on your computer

IE8 not coming out until Windows 7

[MadClown69]

Unfortunantly I have a bad feeling that there not going to release IE8 until Windows 7 comes out. I personally don't care because I'm a die hard Chrome user, but I feel bad for the 60% of internet users that still use IE. :-(

Um, nice try I suppose.

[Gordo_1]

I was curious to see what they'd done since the last beta, so I installed it this morning. I had to reboot not once, but twice (once to uninstall IE8 beta2 and again I'm guessing so that it could hook into some OS files that were in use.)

After restarting the second time, it popped up some shenanigans about some add-ons not being enabled and some being out-of-date and not working. Huh? There's apparently two dozen different plugins and "helpers" installed, including 3 java widgits, a slew of Adobe stuff, and a whole lotta live.com and other MS cruft. Hmmm... Gotta admit, I have no idea what half this stuff does and I'm in Computer Security. Can you imagine the average user figuring out which one of these is the rogue add-on responsible for stealing their credit cards and redirecting their search queries to a click fraud site? Firefox's extension system is a breath of fresh air compared to this.

IE8 beta2 scored a pitiful 21/100 on acid3, RC1 now scores 20/100. Apparently acid3 is not yet a development target for MS. Seeing as their answer to web developers wanting more freedom to be creative is to "do it in Silverlight", it doesn't surprise that MS is dragging their feet here. I honestly wonder if half the stuff acid3 tests for will ever see the light of day in a top 500 website. I suspect FFx + Chrome + Safari + Opera and others will need to achieve greater than 50% market share before MS gets serious about SVG and company.

I find it amusing that IE8 gives users control over rendering like "older browsers" for incompatible websites (read: websites that were designed to work under the standards-ignorant IE6).

On the plus side:
- as for most modern browsers, it seems to render most of the top websites reasonably well.
- it has some privacy thingamajig which allows you to manually disallow sites one by one from storing cookies on your system (or at least that's how I interpretted the vague MS description)

Yeah, but I eventually had to close it when I realized how insanely annoying the web is without AdBlock Plus.

Re:Um, nice try I suppose.

[Jugalator]

Apparently acid3 is not yet a development target for MS

Just to be clear on this one, Microsoft have blogged about this and why it isn't one the past year.

Re:Um, nice try I suppose.

[BenoitRen]

Acid3 isn't relevant! Read my two previous posts to know why.

"the first browser to include such protections" ??

[miknix]

Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added â" the first browser to include such protections

NOScript does this for years.

Re:No shortcuts

[conureman]

Yes, but THEY don't know any of those, either.

Excuse me, did you say IE 4,234.5 ?

[unity100]

as a web developer, im still having to deal with IE6 to ensure cross browser compatibility, and a little lost on the versioning now. how many shitface versions of ie out there that i have to test for x browser compatibility as of now ? 3 ? 5 ? 234,643 ? will it ever end ?

Re:Excuse me, did you say IE 4,234.5 ?

[Dotren]

My last job was a position as a web developer and the company policy was basically to ONLY develop for IE as that is the only market my boss seemed to care about. Of course that didn't stop me from testing in Firefox too...

What I found was that IE6 is horrible. Really, quite possible the worst browser ever considering it's rendering behavior in a time of web standardization.

IE7 was like a breath of fresh air. Normally, any rendering differences between it and Firefox were due to a box model rendering difference. Often, I could develop in one browser and then make small modifications at the end to get a nearly exact viewing experience in the other browser.

I only got to test IE8 for a short time before I moved on to my current job, but I was very impressed with the standards-compliance improvements (the Expression Web product line is focused on the creation of standards-based websites so it does seem like Microsoft is finally listening to the masses on this one). The backwards-compliance mode was a good compromise and seemed to work well. My latest sites all either worked very well in IE8 or needed only small visual tweaks.

I'm hoping IE8 helps bump IE6 off the map completely and promotes the development of well-coded sites in the future to comply with the default strict doctype mode.

Re:Excuse me, did you say IE 4,234.5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best thing for all web developers to do is to exclude IE6. If every web site is broken under IE6, perhaps those last people clinging to it will finally upgrade to a real browser.

Re:Excuse me, did you say IE 4,234.5 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think MS has picked up the open source credo 'release soon, release often', and is trying out this concept on their browser...

Re:Excuse me, did you say IE 4,234.5 ?

[Ilgaz]

If you have x86 machine, it should be easy. Get Sun VirtualBox or Microsoft Virtual PC, set IE 6, 7, 8 virtual machines (with dynamic expanding and NO system restore) and basic net connectivity.

It shouldn't occupy more than 12 GB in worst condition. Also remember to set that "Internet Cache" value to something sane level rather than 546 MB!

I test my sites with MS Virtual PC for OS X which I also have to emulate Intel x86 and IE 8 loads. Horribly slow but good for testing.

Standards?

[Nemyst]

"WebSlices give you an easy way to access frequently updated Web data, such as eBay listings or sections of a news-site page. When you hover the mouse over a content area on a page that supports this IE feature (...)"

Uh... And of course that's not something that completely goes in the opposite direction of standards, right? Making YET another thingy that only works in IE and requires specific code?

I guess I'll be waiting for IE10 before remotely thinking about the possibility of eventually using it very occasionally.

Re:No shortcuts

[Anonymous Coward]

So not only are you controlling, you think your wife is an idiot?

No Minimum Font Setting?!

[Anonymous Coward]

They still haven't added the capability of setting minimum font. I hate reading small font sentences while browsing.

Re:No shortcuts

[NotBorg]

The only way to open IE at my house is with Wine. Fortunately they don't know where to get a copy of IE.

Exactly how much IE6/IE7 does it emulate?

[TheSunborn]

How does this handle conditional html. I make all my websites in valid html4+css and then include a special style sheet for ie6, and an other for ie7 to patch for those. And there have been a problem where ie8 even in ie6 render mode would not include the stylesheet for ie6, because it knew that it was really ie8. (A similary problem, happend if you used the hack to install ie6 and ie7 at the same time. They would both handel conditional html like if they were ie7.

And does the IE6 and IE7 modes, include standards mode? (The one triggered by a valid html tag, og does it only include ie6 in tag soup mode?

Might be interesting to use ie8 for testing, if I am to build a new website again, if it really can emulate the ie6 standards mode.

Re:Exactly how much IE6/IE7 does it emulate?

[Eirenarch]

You can set the user-agent string if that is what you are asking for. I am sure IE8 fully emulates IE7 and it also uses quirks mode (which is IE6) but I don't know how much that differs from IE6 but I have yet to see any differences.

Re:Getting verrry old

[slashtivus]

Shut up, twitter.

A large proportion of the desktop installed O/S's installed out there, where browsers count, are from Microsoft (like it or not), so yes this IS news for nerds.

Re:No shortcuts

[Anonymous Coward]

...and the IE 8 installer, like every app more complicated than calc.exe, doesn't work in wine. You clever devil, you!

May their stock burn in hell!!!!

[cenc]

Well, they screamed about the glories of the unregulated market, now let them pay the price. They consistently produced inferior product lines for too long, and now we do have choice in open source.

Re:No shortcuts

[Anonymous Coward]

don't worry - you're well protected, "anonymous".

Re:Getting verrry old

[Viceroy Potatohead]

Damnation and hell for you and your kin for all of eternity. I hope the money you received burns right through your pocket and into the ground you stand on. May your petard be hoisted and forever flutter in the stench of foul winds and acrid smoke. May the bird of short-sighted bitterness fly up your rectum and build a rocky perch where only the seeds of deceit and low-mindedness find purchase until the end of time.

Sheesh. Where did you get a copy of my wedding vows??!?!?

You're just like Microsoft, I say, just like Microsoft!

Forced upgrade?

[ainsoph]

Does anyone know how they are going to release this? Will it be a forced upgrade for all?

Re:No shortcuts

[Tubal-Cain]

You imply calc is more complicated than StarCraft.

6, 7, 8, E.I.E.I.Eight

[deanston]

This is a true story: 6 mo. ago I got a new xp pro box at work. After I installed IE8 beta I started getting BSOD in the mornings when I came in, like Windows was doing something in the middle of the night and just froze. IT support took the box away and could not find anything wrong so they brought it back but mentioned that they noticed there was a new IE 8 "update" so they installed it. I booted it up and lo and behold IE6 is now the default browser, and no matter what I do I cannot get it to upgrade to IE7. The installer would just quit before it's finished. Finally had to re-image the machine.

What I'm saying is - if there is ANYTHING that will convince most IT shops to move away from IE 6 finally would be a relief for me as a web developer and for most PC users in general. (kinda like saying Windows 7 HAS to be better than Vista, right?)

And they open sourced it!

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA

You can get the code at www.microsoft.com/ie8.

Re:"the first browser to include such protections"

[Kalriath]

NoScript isn't a browser.

IE8 homepage has IE7 compatibility mode tag

[Anonymous Coward]

So much faith in their own products.

Its #1 breakthrough feature is the button to put it into IE7 mode too. Awesome!

Any better than the last beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone confirm if this beta has working SVG, MathML, XHTML, and usable Javascript yet?
I tried the first beta and was shocked by the either dismal standard of the above (sometimes completely missing).
It would be really nice, if I could rely on new Windows machines to ship with a working web browser.
It's a real pain having to roll extra stuff into OS images for deployment to my companies desktops, as most of our corporate web apps depend heavily on the above technologies.

Download Links?

[tmuka]

I can't find the download links for IE8 final on microsoft.com, only RC1... Any the only links with this story are the ads to download Google Chrome :)

Re:Download Links?

[tmuka]

oops. this story is about RC1. not beta does not equal final. check.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari has had Private Browsing for a while, now.

ran it through sunspider and dromaeo

[buddyglass]

Previously I'd tested current and nightly versions of Safari/Webkit, FireFox, Opera and IE. I tested IE8 RC1 on the same machine under the same conditions. Results here. Short story is that RC1 significantly outperforms Beta2, but still falls short of the competition. It also seems to have added some regexp code that lets it perform freakishly well on Dromaeo's "regular expressions" suite.

Re:No shortcuts

[tobiasly]

The only way to open IE at the house is in the "run" tab, the wife and kid don't know where that is.

And if they ever figure it out, you can always run a transparent web proxy to block the MSIE user agent for all sites except Microsoft.com :)

Staying ahead is important

[Nerdposeur]

If I was a Microsoft shareholder, I'd want them to plan and implement improvements to ALL their products so they DON'T have to keep reacting to lost market share and have to do the fire drill/death march dance to catch back up again.

Agreed. Google is good at this - Gmail has been the best web-based email since it launched, and Google seems intent on improving it. Every time I turn around it's faster or has more features, and my storage keeps going up and up.

That's the kind of thing that generates fanatic users who tell their friends to switch. My perception of MS is that they only play catch-up, and generally fail to emulate their competitors well. It doesn't exactly inspire loyalty.

Plugins

[DrYak]

But at what point should they stop? Should Firefox include pop-up blockers? After all, plugins allow someone to not install it if desired -- even the pop-up blocker.

Indeed I'm partisan to the idea that anything that doesn't directly have to do with rendering HTML pages, should go into plugins. - even if those plugins are bundled by default with the main installer (the same way the bug feedback is a plugin although packaged with the installer).

* Pop-up blockers
* Spell checkers
and lot of similar functionality would better go into plugins - even if those plugins go through mozilla QA and are installed by the mozilla installer.

This could enable people doing bare minimal browser installs (obtain the same level of functionality and ressource requirement as, say, Dillo) if they want.