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MS To Slip IE8 Into Vista and XP Through OEMs
crazyeyes writes "Microsoft says it's 'optional,' but they are already planning to slip Internet Explorer 8 into all Windows Vista/XP PCs by March. MS claims that IE8 will offer better performance and security. But what about unwanted stuff like 'Monetization opportunities (for OEMs)' and 'These services will be used (by OEMs) to deliver brand exposure... to the users'?"
IE has so many serios deficiencies that have been longstsanding and obvious, I can only conclude that these shortcomgs are architectural. Things that force web developers to implement two separate versions of their JS libs _ one for IE and one for everybody else who somehow, despite greatly reduced resource availability, are able to implement these features.
Whether you are talking about connection handling, spacing and padding attributes, or listen handlers, it's just a public embarrassment for the company that once cried 'DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!'.
At my company (a vertical niche information system vendor) we've become so jaded that we now tell our users that we actually support firefox and only test for IE. Not surprisingly, our users are about 90% FF.
MS, you're dropping the ball, here, and those developers you once coddled have been SCREAMING about it for years. You're getting exactly what you deserve with your plummeting browser market share!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Recently the standard of Slashdot articles about Microsoft has taken a huge nosedive, any opportunity to bash them seems to be taken. It used to be mainly misleading summaries, but nowadays anything with an anti-Microsoft slant, even something basically made up or down to the incompetence of the submitter, seems to get posted.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/06/1544207 - bashing Microsoft for letting you download Microsoft software on another PC besides the one you intend to use it on.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/2259257 - the worst example I've seen - unfounded, unproven allegations with no substance whatsoever.
Well, if you want Dell to help make that happen, maybe encourage them to shovel money in a direction other than Microsoft, as it'll happen MUCH MUCH FASTER.
While IE 8 is more standards compliant, it is still significantly behind it's competition (Safari/Webkit, Opera, FireFox to name three). It's pretty sad, given that MS has thrown the most number of developer hours at it (except perhaps for FireFox), that IE 8 is still behind, but it's not the developers fault. Management has basically ordered them to make sure that IE helps them sell IIS and developer tools, because the corporate intranet sites will 'work best' with IE, and only with extra effort work OK with non-IE browsers.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Back in "the day" when I still regularly used Windows, I made it a habit to reinstall Windows at least once a month. What I really did towards the end was just archive the entire Windows/Program Files/Documents directories in Ubuntu and restore them as needed.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
But how can one disagree with the truth?
It would be good if MS-bashing articles contained any truth than, rather than a random assortment of hearsay, wild conjecture, lies, and outright idiocy on behalf of the author, like that recent one about "super-DRM" in Windows 7, which ended up being just a guy using a bad crack for Photoshop, and not knowing what an NTFS junction is.
Oh hey Visual Basic, case-sensitivity would like a word!
BASIC has been case-insensitive since it first appeared. VB is a dialect of BASIC. What's surprising about it?
A lot of other languages are case-insensitive too, by the way, and quite a few people consider case sensitivity to be a bad idea. I'm not in that camp, but it's certainly not a strong point for you to debate on.
As a developer of an AJAX-based web framework, I'm upset to see IE8 being thrown out the door so quickly. RC1 was nothing short of a disaster: it had a performance bug where nesting absolute-positioned DIVs would result in exponential performance decreases.
Test case here: http://echo.nextapp.com/content/test/ie8/
The 25-nested DIV test would require killing the browser. Nesting absolutely positioned DIVs is somewhat fundamental to delivering application-style user interface layouts in a web browser.
I reported this bug everywhere I could, and Microsoft actually did a great job in responding to it. They say they've found it and fixed it. But there is no way for us to test this. We must simply take their word for it and wait. They're going from RC1 to final, and begging and pleading for an interim build didn't warrant much of a response.
From reading forums (e.g. Ajaxian: http://ajaxian.com/archives/push-back-digital-tv-or-ie-8), my IE8 experience is not uncommon with other web frameworks as well. The average developer's opinion there suggests RC1 is nowhere near ready for a final release. Every build of IE8 (beta1, beta2, win 7's "beta2+", and the RC) have each had major unique problems not found in other releases.
I have developers asking me if their software will work in IE8 on day 1 and the only honest answer is "I have absolutely no idea." Anyone (without a final build) who tells you otherwise, even offerring a rough estimate, is a liar, IMHO.
I don't understand the point of putting out a "release candidate" and then not using feedback to determine whether the next release is a "candidate" or a "final". Our bug alone means that IE8 RC1 has never been publicly tested with many complex web-based applications.