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'?"

Comments

IE has had these for ages

[TheSpoom]

Ever notice the "Internet Explorer provided by Dell" title bar?

Re:IE has had these for ages

[plankrwf]

Hmmm... No, mine says: 'Slashdot | MS To Slip IE8 Into Vista and XP Trough OEMs - Mozilla Firefox'.

Oh... Wait...

Re:IE has had these for ages

[cbhacking]

It's a single registry key, easy to change. I've seen it used by everything from OEMs to non-malicious viruses.

Re:IE has had these for ages

[Anonymous Coward]

Fap fap fap

Re:IE has had these for ages

[Aphoxema]

We could just start naming the articles "Microsoft still exists" and the content could be "Microsoft is still out there doing something and it's that time of day to bash them for it".

I'm quite happy with this idea, myself, for I find bashing Microsoft regularly to be a healthy practice. Everyone should do it and most people probably do in their own privacy.

I understand some people may need some 'stimulation support' with unclothed Firefox logos and centerfolds of penguins and free software ganging up mercilessly on bound bits of Windows and Photoshop. I, personally, have no need of these devices and will happily sneak a Microsoft bash in when no one's looking. Sometimes I do it out in the open, but only in places I'm sure nobody knows me.

Re:IE has had these for ages

[RonnyJ]

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.

Re:IE has had these for ages

[Rary]

Just accept that Slashdot needs at least one masturbatory Microsoft bashing article every day and let the geeks get on with the wanking.

What, kdawson's previous "some guy tried to pirate Photoshop and then failed to understand how reparse points work so therefore Windows 7 is full of evil DRM" pseudo-article wasn't enough for today?

Re:IE has had these for ages

[LMacG]

Exactly. On the very rare occasions I need to use IE, it amuses me to see "Internet Explorer provider by Robot Aliens".

Re:IE has had these for ages

[Anonymous Coward]

We could just start naming the articles "Microsoft still exists" and the content could be "Microsoft is still out there doing something and it's that time of day to bash them for it".

I'm quite happy with this idea, myself, for I find bashing Microsoft regularly to be a healthy practice. Everyone should do it and most people probably do in their own privacy.

I understand some people may need some 'stimulation support' with unclothed Firefox logos and centerfolds of penguins and free software ganging up mercilessly on bound bits of Windows and Photoshop. I, personally, have no need of these devices and will happily sneak a Microsoft bash in when no one's looking. Sometimes I do it out in the open, but only in places I'm sure nobody knows me.

Sweet Merciful Crap, did you just invoke Rule 34 on Microsoft bashing? I just got an image in my head of what that would look like. The horror... the horror.

Re:IE has had these for ages

[RonnyJ]

As an addition, even those who have serious issues with Microsoft would do best to ignore these 'stories' and even perhaps make a stand against them themselves.

Posting half-truths, exaggerations and downright untruths discredits Slashdot probably more than it does Microsoft. If Slashdot focused on legitimate problems and grievances, and actually verified the accuracy of what they post, it would give those legitimate grievances far more weight than Slashdot carries right now.

Re:IE has had these for ages

[nmb3000]

Recently the standard of Slashdot articles about Microsoft has taken a huge nosedive

You're completely correct. The second link (the "story" from yesterday) was obviously the rant of a Windows luser who didn't have a clue what they were doing. The fact that it actually got accepted and posted to Slashdot was somehow both unbelievable and sadly also not that surprising.

Oh, that's right! Both of your examples were posted by the worthless "editor" kdawson. Since we can't do anything else, I suggest everyone who is sick of this crap exclude articles posted by kdawson in their preferences. Maybe if enough people do it Taco will get the message (assuming, of course, that kdawson isn't just a puppet Taco uses to post the asinine anti-Microsoft stuff which always gets plenty of adviews).

Re:IE has had these for ages

[Aphoxema]

There is no exaggeration to Rule #34.

Re:IE has had these for ages

[Rary]

Since we can't do anything else, I suggest everyone who is sick of this crap exclude articles posted by kdawson in their preferences

For years I've left my preferences untouched, preferring to just take the good with the bad, but now I have finally resorted to filtering kdawson's articles out of the front page.

For new Slashdot users, however, I wouldn't recommend this tactic. If you're looking to quickly build up your karma, there's no better way than to just browse the kdawson stories and be the first to point out how horribly distorted and flawed they are.

(assuming, of course, that kdawson isn't just a puppet Taco uses to post the asinine anti-Microsoft stuff which always gets plenty of adviews)

Allegedly, "kdawson" is this guy.

Re:IE has had these for ages

[hairyfeet]

The problem isn't just the stupid "branded by" crap, which I admit I have fun screwing with. On any of my builds if they hit "My Computer/properties" They get a little crest along with my phone number under the general tab. The problem is according to TFA(I know, but I got bored) they have an "extra" gotcha in the form of, and I quote:"Web Slices and Accelerators are additional web services within the IE8 monetization ecosystem which content providers have built specifically for IE8. These services will be used (by OEMs) to deliver brand exposure (Editor : Ads?) and content updates to the users."

So from the looks of it IE8 may have an extra "backdoor" or two built in so OEMs like Dell and HP can hit you with even MORE crap ads than they do on first bootup. It sounds to me IMHO that MSFT has added some adware hooks designed for third parties directly into IE8. Gee, I wonder how this could go wrong?

Re:IE has had these for ages

[jonadab]

> Recently the standard of Slashdot articles about Microsoft has
> taken a huge nosedive, any opportunity to bash them seems to be taken.

Recently?

You must be new here. Microsoft-bashing has been one of the major purposes of slashdot since the mid nineties.

Re:IE has had these for ages

[syousef]

Ever notice the "Internet Explorer provided by Dell" title bar?

Hey mine says "Internet Explorer provided by l33tHax0r69". Does that mean I have an older version or something?

Rule of thumb.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Anybody who uses the word "monetize" or any variant thereof, is not to be trusted.

Re:Rule of thumb.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Profit isn't evil; but when people start spouting grotesque pseudowords referring to it, I get nervous. "Incentivize" is another troublesome one.

Re:Rule of thumb.

[Anonymous Coward]

Profit isn't evil; but when people start spouting grotesque pseudowords referring to it, I get nervous. "Incentivize" is another troublesome one.

Tell me about it. This guy on the street offered to galvanize me for free. I thought, hey, that sounds cool. The next thing I know I've got a face full of hot zinc and I'm getting tazered.

Re:Rule of thumb.

[gardyloo]

They're just verbing their nouns, thereby incentivizing efficiency.

Re:Rule of thumb.

[spun]

No, because it's a euphemism for "let's find a way to take this previously free thing and charge people for it." It is a deceptive phrase, spoken by pointy haired bosses and marketroids with black little hearts and the morals of rabid weasels.

It's not that profit is evil, and money itself is not the root of all evil. The desire for money is the root of all evil, and this phrase is used by people who get a stiffy thinking of all the ways they can screw you out of yours. They fall asleep dreaming of ways they could monetize breathing. "Hmmm, zzzzz, poison the atmosphere... znurk, hmph, sell oxygen.... yeah... zzzzzzz"

Re:Rule of thumb.

[Lord Ender]

So if I say "doing X would provide incentive to do Y" I am just fine, but if I say "X would incentivize Y" I am grotesque?

I don't think so. Your insistence on using tedious phrases when equally meaningful, but much more convenient terms exist is sort of pathetic, though.

Re:Rule of thumb.

[Locke2005]

I thought only steel could be galvanized... say, you haven't been though any cosmic radiation storms or bitten by any robotic insects lately, have you?

Oh wait... people can be galvanized, just not the way that you said. "galvanize: to startle into sudden activity; stimulate." Yeah, I think I was pretty galvanized last time I went to the strip club.

Re:Rule of thumb.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am Iron Man.

Re:Rule of thumb.

[Gonoff]

I do think so.

There are a number of real words that would fit the bill in your example. They include...
encourage
cause
incite
persuade
and lots more. The English language has an enormous number of words. Sometimes, when there isn't an appropriate word, one needs to be invented. Sometimes they are imported from other languages and sometimes they are existing ones used in a new way.

What it does not need is sub-literate PHB buzz-speak. That fits the word "pathetic". That sort of excuse for communication just shows the need for basic literacy.

standards

[incripshin]

I'll be happy when the Internet becomes more standards compliant. If it needs to be funded by Dell, so be it.

Re:standards

[davester666]

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.

MS claims that IE8 will offer better performance.

[Anonymous Coward]

"MS claims that IE8 will offer better performance and security."

I have heard this joke before somewhere!

Anonymous Coward

Re:Oddly enough

[cryfreedomlove]

You're lucky!

At my place of employment, we're still using un-networked Apple II computers so we can utilize a rocket thrust calculator written in BASIC by our founder. He's been promising us 64K Macs for the past 20 years but I'm not holding my breath.

IE must be architecturally borked

[mcrbids]

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!

Re:IE must be architecturally borked

[mcrbids]

No ball dropped, just optimized for your platform. Really now - that 300 MB of RAM apparently sets you back about $6. Is that exorbitant? Firefox USES that RAM to speed up performance, and this can be fairly easily tweaked if the $6 is more than you can stomach.

For example, Skyfire is Mozilla based, and is quite usable on my 400 Mhz, 64 MB RAM Windows Mobile Pocket-PC phone.

Re:Wow, you make IE sound like a roofie

[mc1138]

Bad enough to want to switch to a text based browser...

New computers need *SOME* sort of browser

[sunderland56]

A new out-of-the-box computer with no browser at all would not be fun - especially for the non-computer-literate user who doesn't have another system to download with.

So, if a manufacturer is shipping a box with Windows, why not supply the latest version of Internet Explorer??

Re:New computers need *SOME* sort of browser

[sakdoctor]

Start->Run

ftp ftp.mozilla.org
cd /pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0.6/win32/en-US/
get "Firefox Setup 3.0.6.exe"

IE is one of the most bloated firefox download tools there is.

Re:New computers need *SOME* sort of browser

[the_humeister]

Yes, because command-line ftp is feasible for the general populace.

And Microsoft deserves it.

[weston]

Just accept that Slashdot needs at least one masturbatory Microsoft bashing article every day

One Microsoft bashing article a day isn't what Microsoft deserves.

One for every 10 hours their product flaws and aggressive monopolistic practices have stolen from developer productivity (or general productivity) is probably about right.

The problem is that if you use that metric, even considering IE6 alone, you've probably got enough for 5 stories every day since Slashdot's inception.

Sometimes people act like the Microsoft bashing is simple knee-jerk or personal dislike. I'm jealous of the strain of ignorance that allows this belief to continue.

Re:And Microsoft deserves it.

[Anonymous Coward]

But how can one disagree with the truth?
Microsoft sucks, it is a widely known fact.
I know i will be moderated troll, but you are just abusing it, i am being 100% serious here.

Microsoft pushed out crappy tools that held people back, terribly optimized, full of bugs and bad practices. (Oh hey Visual Basic, case-sensitivity would like a word!)

Not only that, they have abused their position by allowing their software to stagnate.
IE versions being the major one here, they are terribly bad compared to others through the things entire life.
And to stick an even bigger finger to everyone else, they created that crap ActiveX, which when combined with their large marketshare has led to countless millions still being held up in Microsoft stuff because they went with some shitty company to design their software.
And to take it even further, they shat all over those people when they decided not to support them.

This is just some major examples that sticks out.
So, please, for the love of computing, tell me why this is classed as opinion?

Re:And Microsoft deserves it.

[mstahl]

If you're on a laptop either put down two fingers on the trackpad or hold down ctrl then click. If on a desktop just click the right sid of the mouse. Seriously why is this still a reason people make fun of macs for?!

Re:And Microsoft deserves it.

[pohl]

So, please, for the love of computing, tell me why this is classed as opinion?

As long as there are masochists, there is always room for that point of view.

Re:And Microsoft deserves it.

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Re:And Microsoft deserves it.

[bondsbw]

"They invade our space, and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far and no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!" - Jean Luc Picard, Star Trek: First Contact

If there's ever been a quote that represents people who disagree with Microsoft, this is it.

Take from it what you will: either that Microsoft bashers primarily want revenge, or that Microsoft represents an overwhelming force that stands on the principle of Embrace and Destroy.

Re:And Microsoft deserves it.

[weston]

Your post has some truth if we're talking web development, but even that is quickly becoming irrelevant heading into IE8 whose quirks are not so much standards related as they are just different in the way that Gecko is different than Webkit.

I sure hope so, because the quirks historically have meant that even many of the MS ways of doing things are half-broken. I honestly wouldn't have half the contempt I do for Microsoft if IE6 had even provided MS-only way of doing things that worked where their standards were broken.

And while I've got a little bit of hope that IE8 will be a real improvement, I'm not holding my breath, nor am I really going to give them a lot of credit for basically remaining 5 years behind everybody else. We'll *maybe* have more or less trustworthy cross-browser support for CSS 2.1. I'll believe CSS 3 when I see it, and I'd be willing to bet HTML5 will wait a few years at a minimum. At any rate, I doubt the differences will be irrelevant.

However, Visual Studio and its debugging facilities are second to none. C# is a great language. SQL Server and it's tools are awesome.

I agree with this by and large. These are good tools, my shallow usage of which has been largely pleasant and free of horror. In particular, I think C#/.NET does a good job of being a better Java or C++ for a good chunk of development niches.

But I don't agree they're standout examples of products that provide some evidence of an internal drive to quality at MS. Even C# and .NET, which I think are an achievement, are hard to recognize as essentially MS products: they're more or less a Borland project that happened inside Microsoft because they had enough intelligence and market power to brain-drain and essentially buy Borland. And it's surprising, in fact, how many Microsoft products and tools started life outside of the company and essentially only found their way in because of the company's position in the market. Or, perhaps it's not so surprising if more or less, to a business deal with IBM based on a product they didn't develop but purchased.

When it comes down to it, I can't think of a single product that I'm pretty certain wouldn't have been produced by the industry -- and in fact, wasn't competetively produced by the industry, with someone else holding a real lead at some point -- if Microsoft had mostly kept to the operating systems niche. And there's enough examples of ways in which they've held everybody back for their own interests that I'm not sure their good points are a net win.

Not everything they do automatically sucks. Their net effect on the industry and on developers within it is another matter.

**applause**

[ivoras]

Is there anyone here that wants users to CONTINUE USING IE6??? Because IE6 is what's included in stock XP. As for Vista, well, IE7 isn't so great, maybe IE8 will be more standards-conformant.

Re:Oddly enough

[Nerdposeur]

Luxury.

At my place of employment, we have to use an abacus with razor-sharp beads, and when we get done, we have to verify our numbers by writing longhand division with the lump of coal we all share.

Anything but IE6

[spinkham]

IE 8 isn't my favorite browser,but it's worlds better then IE 6.. It's quality related to IE 7 is harder to discern at this point, but anything that encourages businesses and other IE 6 holdouts to move forward is a good thing in my view. I'd rather they move to Gecko(Firefox), Webkit(Chrome, safari), or Opera, but please, I'm pleading, let IE 6 die...

"Incite"

[XanC]

The word is "incite", not "incentivize". There's no need to make up a new word when the word you're looking for already exists.

Negative tone

[Lord Lode]

Why the negative tone? I'm glad to hear that even XP will come with IE8. Do you know what the alternative is? IE6. IE6 is old and useless, the less people use it the better. For web developers it's better not to have to support IE6 anymore. It doesn't even support transparent PNGs, you know? So yay for IE8 instead of IE6 in Windows. Even if I don't use nor like it, the fact that it gets shoved on everyone's PC instead of IE6 is good.

Re:Oddly enough

[Kalriath]

How about getting your systems to render properly on somewhat more standards compliant browsers - Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome

... IE8.

Why branding ?

[billcopc]

I never really understood the value of OEM branding. I've already bought the damned PC, what more do they want ? Having a stupid Dell logo spin in IE while their site fails to load, is not going to make me want to buy more Dell gear.

People take branding way too seriously, especially when we're talking about major brands that everyone knows.

Re:F*ck Microsoft

[Aphoxema]

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.

March? They're rushing IE8. This could be bad.

[TodLiebeck]

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.

Re:IE8 for people already using Windows XP?

[Saija]

it can be installed in XP, i just installed a release candidate some days ago and work great, don't use it much but the few pages i've opened with seems to work good

Re:F*ck Microsoft

[Starayo]

What on earth are you doing to it?! I don't remember the last time I reinstalled windows because my PC still runs like a dream, and I've punished the crap out of it.

Now, I dislike Microsoft, and I would be using a linux distro full-time if it weren't for my PC gaming, but I never run into any of the problems people go on about. Hell, I've only had one or two bluescreens since Win98 due to some crappy display drivers! This PC is on practically 24/7, and I only ever turn it off when I'm going to be away for more than four days!

Hardly just an "opinion," certainly not personal

[weston]

It's not ignorance - it's disagreement with your personal opinion.

If you have some kind of refutation regarding my "opinion" about IE6, then I'm interested. have my doubts that you've got any such thing, however, if you can casually dismiss it as "just an opinion."

It's certainly not just my personal opinion. It's not just groupthink opinion. It's a rather deserved judgment shared by just about every person I've ever encountered who's tried to do any serious client side development on the web, it's the opinion of tens of thousands of developers who've had to do systems or application-level development on anything Microsoft touched before Win2k, it's the opinion of tens of thousands whose projects and employment were touched by anti-competetive practices back in the day when Microsoft's market power wasn't just great it was genuinely frightening.

Re:Emulate IE7

[Firehed]

Well, cross-browser javascript problems go away* with JS frameworks such as jQuery, and unless you're doing something insane (read: probably wrong) with CSS, coding logically and to standards** will get it correct in Firefox/Safari/Opera/IE8, pretty damn close in IE7, and still quite reasonable in IE6. I'm certainly not defending IE6/7 nor the practices of the developers who cater to those browsers - if you can even call them developers - but a lot of problems are as much the fault of bad CSS/HTML as they are the fault of IE6's FUBAR CSS rendering.

Thankfully, Microsoft seems to have listened to the outcry of developers when it comes to IE8 - I've had no issues with it so far, other than it still having very poor JS performance. It seems to be pretty smart about when to render in standards mode and when to render in IE6/IE7 fallback mode. It certainly won't become my every-day browser by any stretch of the imagination, but it'll take a good chunk out of the "time spent cursing Microsoft" wedge of the web development time usage pie chart.

*well, 99% of the time, at least. Of the rare problems I've seen, it's more a DOM issue than one specific to any one browser. Like innerHTML always returning HTML instead of XHTML, even with an XHTML doctype. Honestly, that's about it, from what I've noticed.

**CSS2 is pretty safe, at least. As you rightly mention, some properties such as opacity fall apart in older versions of Firefox, not to mention the -webkit/-moz properties and pseudo-selectors.

Re:F*ck Microsoft

[fonduesatdawn]

I still have the same Windows XP I did when I met my girlfriend almost six years ago. Yes, I had lots of sex since then. I also partied a lot. I have intimate knowledge of Windows (and my girlfriend, but let's leave that)

chill out dude, this is slashdot, we know!