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IE8 May Be End of the Line For Internet Explorer
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy reports on rumors that IE8 may be Internet Explorer's swan song: 'IE8 is the last version of the Internet Explorer Web browser,' Kennedy writes. 'It seems that Microsoft is preparing to throw in the towel on its Internet Explorer engine once and for all.' And what will replace it? Some are still claiming that Microsoft will go with WebKit, which is used by Safari and Chrome. The WebKit story, Kennedy contends, could be a feint and that Microsoft will instead adopt Gazelle, Microsoft Research's brand-new engine that thinks like an OS. 'This new engine will supposedly be more secure than Firefox or even Chrome, making copious use of sandboxing to keep its myriad plug-ins isolated and the overall browser process model protected.'" The sticking point will be what Microsoft does about compatibility for ActiveX apps.
I seriously doubt IE will have the majority of the market share by the time IE9 comes out. Many of the web usage reports out there are showing that Firefox is at 20% or higher and that Safari is around 5% or so.
I would also argue that a lot more 'dumb consumers' (people like my parents) are buying Macs now to be trendy which will help IEs market share drop.
Also has anyone used IE8 yet and tested sites out on it? I've used it and it rendering engine is pretty terrible, even when set in emulate IE7 mode which then introduces a complete new set of rendering bugs.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
There is no alternative namespace, there are merely alternate streams in a file - named locations for storing meta data. The file is right there in the filesystem, obvious to all. The file data may be a bit hidden, requiring normal Windows system calls to read (just like one uses normal Windows system calls to create alernate data streams), instead of Notepad. Oh, wait, you can read them with Notepad too. What a bunch of FUD.
This... is actually not the whole story.
NTFS is actually a case-sensitive file system. You can illustrate this by installing Services for Unix. This is an alternative subsystem that doesn't go through the normal Windows API (or the DLLs implementing it) and collection of Unix programs that have been "ported" to it. Once you install this, programs that are part of SFU are able to create files with the same case-sensitive name but different case.
Instead, the reason you normally can't do this is because the DLLs that are part of the Windows subsystem (the one providing the normal Windows API) hides this case-sensitivity in concert with the file system driver. (IIRC, open commands in the driver get a flag saying whether to be case-sensitive or not.) Instead of making calls through the Windows API, you can either use another subsystem like SFU or make native system calls directly (though that interface isn't supported).
Finally, the implementation of the Windows API is such that if you create two files with different case but the same name, only one will be visible through the Windows API, at least with NTFS's implementation of all of this.
This means that if you want to write security software for Windows, to catch malware written by people who know about this hole, you need to make API calls to an undocumented interface if you don't want to require people to install SFU. (Of course, security software does so much other stuff that's even worse that's hardly a drop in the bucket.)
Or even better: let's write code for yesterday's hardware. Not everyone has a computer of today, and the more computers that can use your software, the better.
I always kept saying that every developer should be forced to use a slow machine, at least where compilation and automated tests are not involved. If you sit your butt at a fast box, you simply never notice anything is unacceptable slow.
I've personally caught myself ignoring complaints that a piece of my code is slow and noticing it only after seeing it crawl on a slow machine myself.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.