Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's New Multiple-Browser Tester
Z80xxc! writes "Microsoft recently announced a new product called Expression Web SuperPreview, which lets developers view their web pages in any browser installed on their system, as well as in different versions of IE, all from the same interface. The product has one genuine innovation — a built-in tool for overlaying the rendering from one browser over another to compare (referred to as 'onion skins'). There are also HTML debugging aids and other helpful tools for web developers. A beta version is available for download. However, the current build only has support for IE — it will compare rendering in IE6 with either IE7 or IE8, whichever is installed. An internal build shows Firefox and Safari on Windows as well. The final product will appear as part of MS Expression Web Studio 3 when it is released later this year. (It will not be available in the Expression Mac suite.)"
There is a free service that does the same thing: browsershots.org
Tools like this, while helpful, should never have been necessary. If MS, owner of the dominant browser, wasn't among the poorest in W3C compatibility, stuff like this wouldn't be needed. Web pages should render the same in any browser, on any OS. The only difference should be in resolution.
Firefox already has (part) of this on them. With plugins it can view pages as IE
Is anyone surprised that it has a terrible name like that? I'm actually glad they didn't call it "Livesearch Expression Web SuperPreview Pro. For windows"
IETester ( http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage ) will let you test rendering in IE5.5, IE6, IE7 and IE8 on the same machine - you're not limited to whichever of IE7 and 8 is installed.
Safari but no Chrome or Opera?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
>The product has one genuine innovation a built-in tool for overlaying the rendering from one browser over another to compare.
Man, when animators get a hold of this "lay one image over another"-innovation, their productivity will go through the roof!
Tomorrow's Microsoft Innovation: Layering images to gauge object motion!
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Perhaps this is more an issue about Windows' dominance on managed corporate desktops.
IE6 is the version that gets most of the ire about compatibility. But the current version is IE8, which is quite standards compliant, and IE7 was much better in that regard than IE6.
Looking at the browser history timeline:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers
IE6 came out October 2001, the same month as Netscape 6.2, and the better part of a year before Mozilla 1.0 was released. Would Netscape 6.2 offer that much a better browsing experience for today's internet? Does anyone still regularly test sites against either?
How much of this is because non-IE browsers aren't commonly used in the enterprise, and thus older versions of them don't wind up deployed nearly as long?
My video compression blog
The OP mentions that this is not available for the Mac version of the Expression suite.
This is because that doesn't exist. The Expression Media product is cross-platform, as it is a new version of iView, a cross-platform product Microsoft purchased.
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/overview.aspx?key=media
The other products in Expression Studio began life as Windows-only products, and remain so.
That said, The Expression Professional Subscription does include a license for Parallels, so I suppose it's supported on Mac in that sense :).
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/ProfessionalSubscription.aspx
My video compression blog
Isn't it great how modern technology can do things like this? Back in the old days, we had to make do with defining a standard and ensuring that everything displayed things according to it. But now, we don't need the stifling constraints of consistency; browsers can be creative in their interpretation, and every developer can use a tool like this to see the amount of expression browsers put into rendering. I foresee a future where this innovation will be carried to things like simple desk calculators, where 2+2 is no longer shackled to equal 4, where one will have a "multi-calculator" that gives a range of results. I can't wait!
its called a virtual machine ;)
I knew that. Please let me rephrase my question:
You have one PC running Internet Explorer versions 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 in virtual machines. What kind of PC hardware would one need to run these virtual machines at an acceptable speed, and how many licenses for Microsoft Windows operating systems loaded into these virtual machines would one need to purchase?
There's a video demo of SuperPreview in the keynote from last week's MIX09 conference in Las Vegas. Jump to 28:50.
This rounds things off nicely:
Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in committing suicide.
However, the current build only has support for IE â" it will compare rendering in IE6 with either IE7 or IE8, whichever is installed.
Well, that's not too bad, at least. Webkit and firefox seem to render the pages I design just as I expect. It's almost always IE6 that has the issues, so if I could pick one...
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
MS: "But Firefox 0.7" /is/ a recent version"
Adobe did a demo of their next Dreamweaver release last fall at their Adobe Max conference. Similar feature there, except a bit better. Using a render farm your page is rendered in pretty much every browser, on each OS (rather than just what you have installed), including the "Onion Skin" feature shown in Expression Web. They even used the same name for the feature.
paul reinheimer
> I foresee a future where this innovation will be carried to things like simple desk calculators, where 2+2 is no longer shackled to equal 4, where one will have a "multi-calculator" that gives a range of results. I can't wait!
Sweet! I could really use a calculator that does mod 3 arithmetic! That will show those people who don't believe me when I tell them that 2+2 == 1!
.
When Microsoft ports a tool like this to Linux, then and only then will Microsoft be viewed as anything but a company that is trying to take over the computing world.
Everything breaks for mobile browsing. The interface and interaction differences are too great to try to reconsile the difference between a mobile phone and a "real" browser. That is why you do a seperate website for them.
It was never designed to display images either. Quite frankly I dont care what it was designed for. Times change and now days, we expect all browsers to render the way we specify. Please note nobody is saying "pixel perfect accuracy"--we are saying "behaves the way we programmed it to behave". There is a subtle, but important difference.
Funny, it is actually way easier to do this with HTML/CSS than it is to actually make a page that is *not* pixel perfect. Standards compliant, liquid layouts are a bitch to get working on all browsers. Fixed grid, "pixel perfect" is easy--just drop in a table and set all the "width=''" to whatever.
1998 called and want their arguments back.
I remember that we used an online service that did this in 2003. We also had Photoshop overlay scripts. A layer for every version, colorize them, and then substract them from each other. Or something like that.
As always, Microsoft tries to sell us something as their great new "invention", that was already old before they found it in the products of their concurrents.
(Mind you, that I am no Microsoft basher, and give credit where credit is deserved. As with having the most successful OS in history (by being the most talented in handling stupid people ^^).)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I prefer to use Xenocode's Browser appliances. With them I can compare IE6, IE7, and IE8. They also have FireFox, Safari, and Google Chrome. (I don't use these though. I have FireFox installed and the others have too small market share to really spend time testing against.)
http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Imagine the sum total of the economic cost to Web designers worldwide, if such a figure could be accurately assessed. I wonder just how large this number would be? First off, if we really wanted standards compliant browsing, we could just send bitmaps over the server back to the client. We can stream bitmaps to the client and remote desktop works like a champ. The concept of a standards compliant browser is retarded from the get go because all consumers really truly need is a standards compliant remote desktop client, and that exists in RDP. All you have to do is be able to send clicks and keystrokes to a server, and get bitmaps back. No need for all this other crap we put people through, no need to shoehorn state into cookies and other crap. If you ask me, standards based web has completely fucked up computing and the future is going to be more like RDP than it will ever be HTML. I am of the view that standards are nice in theory but impossible to achieve in practice. If we look at the track record of software standards, there's really only been one complicated standard that's actually worked out well, and that's C++. C++ works because, well, it leaves some basic things out of the standard and -doesn't- make promises about everything the way HTML tries to do. It's just impossible. Every other language either has an open source implementation that is a defacto standard, or there is a dominant vendor that people imitate. IE sucks now, I'll give you that. I think Chrome kicks the shit out of FireFox, hands down. Firefox is on my shit list right now for not obeying a z-order, but before Chrome I did prefer that to IE. Still, IE's break with standards was pretty damned good. Were it not for IE, we would have never have had InnerHtml. Nor would we have had a useful programmable DOM, event model and scripting language to go with in one package PLUS, the little chumpy that lets you go after a web server after the fact. You can blab about Netscape as much as you want, but IE had all the pieces in place to do Web 2.0 stuff as far back as IE 4. Back when Netscape fans were screwing around with layers, IE people could go and write real client / server systems in Javascript and HTML, as sick as that is. One more time. Netscape started out ok, but IE 4.0 kicked the shit out of it. I would have -loved- to see Microsoft just run away with the internet, tell the W3C to kiss its ass, and load up a web browser with 2d and 3d graphics, all of the windows controls, all from the get go. With at one time a 90% market share, everyone would have benefited. Frankly, if Google Chrome did it, I'd like to try it out. If FireFox did it, I'd like to try it out. But as it is, browsers are basically stagnant, hobbled by a standards committee that sucks. And, one more think. I am sick of greater than less than typing way too much tags.
This is my sig.
HTML is a markup language. It was NEVER designed to give a pixel-picture representation of content. EVER. That would break mobile browsing, not to mention different resolutions, and everything else. HTML was supposed to be a markup language but it is a layout language now. So now we have an ok markup language being shoehorned into a presentation langauge and let's throw some scripting on top of that. Dude, the internet is a train wreck. screw all this browser shit, and let everyone have some basic kind of RDP.
This is my sig.
This is a lot like someone kneecapping you and then expecting you to be thankful when they offer you crutches.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
it's trial software....this is a commercial product?
people have wasted a ridiculous number of hours dealing with specific issues related to nearly every version of IE to come along
and now they have the audacity to cash in on it? To pay THEM so we can deal with it?
First we invented the cross-browser compatibility problem. Then we worked hard and spent millions of dollars to make sure it persisted for more than a decade. Now we have the ultimate solution!!!
I started it from Start menu, it crashed. I rebooted PC, started it again, it crashed again. I uninstalled it. 1 hour of my time lost on this thing.
Did you MS people go insane? Why just not let me download a file of 300 MB, if you need this size, and let me start it? Like, say, Mozilla or Gimp do. Why I always have to OK-answer on countless meaningless questions? Why it installs so long? What is this installation checking something endlessly, it is your OS after all?
In fact, let me know when the Linux GUI gets -ANY- control that doesn't suck.
Hi. QT4.x is here. You might wanna check it out. (Check out KDE 4.2 [and 4.3 when it's released] while you're at it. You might be pleasantly surprised.)
...but on Windows I can cut and paste fairly often between my local desktop and a remote desktop.
I've not noticed "rich" cut and paste between QT and GTK-based applications fail in more than five years. I've never noticed plain-text cut and paste [0] fail between any apps, ever.
Any two dialogs that I can cut and paste between on my local machine, I can also cut and paste between if they're running the same remote machine, or one's on a remote machine and the other is local, or each one is running on a different remote machine. Moreover, I can run remote applications and have their windows appear seamlessly on my local machine, on the same desktop as my local applications. Let me repeat that, in case you missed it. I can manage windows created by a remote application just as if they were generated by a local application. Let me know when Microsoft adds that to the OOtB Windows Experience.
[0] Using the "drag-to-highlight, click the text box that's gonna recieve the text, then middle click (or press the left and right mouse buttons simultaneously) to past the text." method, that is.
Hi. QT4.x is here. You might wanna check it out. (Check out KDE 4.2 [and 4.3 when it's released] while you're at it. You might be pleasantly surprised.) I might. But I must confess that I like Wx's programming model better. Wx has the Windows style message maps that are really simple to use. I've looked at Qt and Wx screen shots and have played with Wx a bit, but in both cases the dialogs and widgets are comparable to Windows 2000 with some splashes of XP but don't really quite come up to Vista. Linux is just not emphasized to be a desktop application development environment. IT's a server at its heart and always will be. Still, with that said, the way user interface resources are handled in Wx is really rather amazing and if somebody ever integrated one of the very good Wx form designers into KDevelop, Microsoft would be in deep, deep trouble for C++. If I actually had money, I would take off a year and do the damn thing myself because it would be a really kick ass environment. Even the concept of using Wx as a basis for a more VB like language has a lot of promise to it. Wx forms editors really do outclass anything Microsoft has put out there for native C++ development, and its really because Wx just has a richer model for forms and both MFC and WTL are either built around code or the hopelessly obsolete Dialog resource. I really only want to program in C++...its an artistic thing. Which ever platform does the best for me, I'm game for. I was into Linux for a while, but Microsoft won me back with Vista and VS2008... but once I finish my WTL paint program, I'll check. I can run 64 bit Linux on my Opteron, but can't run Linux. Maybe I should make my program for wxWidgets...
This is my sig.
Ah, see that KDevelop 4 is in beta... that's good enough for me. By by ubuntu, here comes opensuse...
This is my sig.
Don't tase me, man!
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Turning the steering wheel, and having the change in your direction occur 45 minutes later?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Doesn't Flash solve all these problems? With video requiring the player and the player so widespread, why not just go RIA?
What's the big deal? Microsoft has provided this feature in Windows for a long time now. Whenever I open a URL from a Microsoft product, there's a good chance it's going to "allow me to preview the output" from the URL in Internet Explorer, despite the fact that IE hasn't been my default browser for about ten years.
The whole concept of separating content from presentation is what is crazy about HTML / CSS as a combination. You can't just go and shovel HTML through a different CSS renderer to get a different interface for some device or even a user that has different senses. You have to have the content, the pages, the meaning, the interaction all aligned to what users need for each medium.
This is my sig.
Two things. :/ Also, its GDB integration is currently nonexistant. However, its "Intellisense" [1] is really very good, IMO.
1) opensuse seems to package KDE 4.1.x. *A lot* changed between then and KDE 4.2. If you're having issues w/ their rev of KDE 4 [0], you might want find some way to get your hands on a newer version.
2) kdevelop 4 is still crashy.
[0] The OpenSUSE machines in the local Uni computer lab seem to be *extremely* crashy and slow when you enable OpenGL Composite acceleration. YMMV.
[1] Is there a word to describe that feature that's not covered by a trademark claim?
I've never used wxWidgets. I've done 99% of my work in FLTK's FLUID. [0] Given how the wxWidgets folks do things, I'm surprised that their Vista implementation doesn't use native Vista widgets. I'll make a note to check out their interface designer over the weekend.
Frankly, I think that MSFT's UI designing tools suck, hard-core. Even FLUID does a better job than what MSFT has put out there.
What has MSFT done to win you over with the Vista UI? Also, what does Vista have that you don't see present in Linux that makes Vista a better platform for desktop development?
I can run 64 bit Linux on my Opteron, but can't run Linux.
What? Is there a typo here?
[0] If this doesn't tell you how much I care about pretty UIs, I don't know what will. ;) Function over form, baby!
Normally I'd question the sanity of anyone trying to support anything before IE6, so I have to ask "Why bother?" I know on my company's sites, the main traffic last year was about 90% IE, with a 50/50 split of IE6 and IE7. I wouldn't even bother wasting time to support something that wasn't used (and have the stats to prove it!)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
] Is there a word to describe that feature that's not covered by a trademark claim?
Don't know, and the thing is, it's not even a good word. Intellisense, Intellimouse, all those "Intelli-gent" brands of Microsoft sound corny. "Smart"...
Maybe we should call it "TypeList", because, you type and get a list.
This is my sig.