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IE 8.1 Supports Firefox Plugins, Rendering Engine
KermodeBear writes in to note that according to Smashing Magazine, the newest version of Internet Explorer, codenamed "Eagle Eyes," supports Firefox plugins, the Gecko and Webkit rendering engines, and has scored a 71 / 100 on the Acid3 test. The article is pretty gee-whiz, and I don't entirely believe the claims that IE's JavaScript performance will trounce the others. (And note that the current Firefox, 3.0.8, scores 71 on Acid3, and Safari 3.1.2 hits 75.) No definitive date from Microsoft, but "sources" say that an IE 8.1 beta will be released in the summer.
Nothing to see here, move along...
Breaking News: April Fools joke leaked on March 31st
...it isn't April 1st yet :)
If it actually does do all that (support FF plugins, Gecko and Webkit [and I assume Trident], score competitively on Acid3 [I would assume that is at least some indication of being more standards compliant], good JS performance), that would be a pretty big Wow.
Wow, this article is pure satire. I dont think I saw one unaltered image in the bunch.
Dubbed "Eagle Eyes" because it has FireFOX in its sights.
:(
Evil bastards
ilovegeorgebush
If it is all true. IE is finally done playing catchup and the general populace still using IE won't be behind. But so far IE doesn't really offer anything that FF doesn't. Chrome for example is missing a lot of things but it has stuff no one else does. All in all this can only cause good things to happen on the internet.
I smell bullshit.
How on earth would IE 8, a browser with a UI not written in XUL, be able to "flawlessly" use a Firefox plugin like Tab Mix Plus? Unless IE 8.1 embeds all of Gecko, plus XUL, XPCom, the XPI to install the plugins, you couldn't install or run a plugin on it. And why on earth would Microsoft suddenly give in and embed other rendering engines? That's not something the dominant browser does, that's something that a low-share browser does to help with compatibility, ala Netscape 7.
I don't buy it. Furthermore, the article is light on details, has some dubious screenshots, and was published just before April Fools' Day.
P.S. If you want to use Firebug in non-Firefox browsers, then use the Lite version. It works great in IE.
Is that obviously MS won't be packaging firefox with windows so don't count on having gecko as the default rendering engine for your website visitors anytime soon.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer Development Team has teamed up with the Google Chrome Development Team to create JSE in a seemingly grand plan combat Mozilla Firefox's growing market share. The result: a JavaScript engine that outperforms all modern browsers currently available on the market.
Yes of course Microsoft will team up with Google to "combat Mozilla Firefox's growing market share". When chairs fly.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
They also decided to release an OSX version again and while I was taking a shower, it fed and took my dog for a walk.
It's April 1st somewhere in the world already. :)
It's April 1 in the country of whoever "leaked" this "news," right? Note to self: just stay off the whole frickin Internet tomorrow.
Ah, who am I kidding...
You need to supply your own pony feed, though.
So, that's what the Conficker virus does...
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
John Titor brought it back with him from tomorrow.
I can't believe you don't know what a Hasemalphaginnojinglanaporphomism is.
I think the new build of Opera 10.0 and Safari4 Beta get 100% on Acid3.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
When Duke Nukem Forever comes out. Microsoft is waiting for the DNF rendering engine plugin to come out. :P
Server-side code decompiler
If youâ(TM)ve ever wished to know how sites and web applications work, Eagle Eyes (the name is fitting in this context) will let you view the server-side source code of a web page. We didnâ(TM)t explore this feature much, but from basic tests, the server-side code decompiler was able to tell us how the Mixx promotional algorithm worked.
And they show this picture ... hehe.
Usability still matters, not just raw speed or ability to supports other vendor's plugins. I have and occasionally use IE8, and while it is a huge improvement on the previous versions of IE, usability-wise it still cannot hold a candle in my book to Firefox. It insists on its own way of arranging menus and bookmarks, so that if I want to have what I have in Firefox, I need 3-4 rows of text and icons at the top instead of 2 in Firefox. That kind of inflexibility irritates me. I don't like wasting screen space. I also don't like using software that irritates me. It's strange because Microsoft was one of the pioneers of the "Customize" concept of the application's interface, where you could remove and rearrange items as you saw fit.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
- iPhone
- Amiga
- Mac OS 9
- Atari
and many more via there new "really universal binary".
Look at this image from the article:
http://88.198.60.17/images/ie8-eagle-eyes/graph_js_performance.jpg
See the "Graph created with microsoft excel to showcase MS's greatness in the software market? This is a hoax.
Ride the skies
I am in Europe, and it's not 1 April here yet either.
This BS has got to stop. I'm going to go and burn some karma, but websites should not be pulling April Fools jokes a day or two early. Why? Because sarcasm is lost in text. The humor in this article was not obvious that I ended up thinking it was true. Haha I was fooled! On march 31st! Stop the jokes when they're not supposed to be done. This article would have been easier to spot in the late 90s with IE 4 and 5. Nowadays they're doing better.
And they are not in the same timezone as the US. Let alone mentioning the International Date Line!!!!!!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
...the 24 hour endless stream of April Fool's day jokes. Will there be ponies?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think I can safely say that Slashdot will be running on empty for at least the next twenty-four hours.
Hmm, when I voted it said 1337 votes for Yes. I thought that was part of the gag.
that 71/100 score looks _exactly_ the same as Firefox. ... and when on Earth is MS going to use opensource to this degree!?
Can I run IE Tab on Internet Explorer and make the world explode?
Do not read slashdot for the 24-36 hours. Especially if the article has anything to do with your line of work.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Check out the author's tagline at the end:
My blog
Check out this statement from the article: ... will let you view the server-side source code of a web page. '
'Eagle Eyes
This accompanies a screenshot of this side-by-side.
You can't see the server side code when you're on the client side. Period.
Client requests page, server takes server side code and generates the client side code, server sends client side code to client, client parses client side code.
Part of the point of server side code is the fact that the clients can't see it. It's part of the security of it.
Even if the program were claiming to simulate the server side code to generate it, it isn't possible. There are so many technologies and so many methods to do things it just couldn't do it. It's not going to be able to tell you pulled user data X from the database at location Y, grabbed their forum icon from location Z, scaled it to 64x64, and then placed it there to be seen.
Isn't it about time to fire all the IE developers responsible for the Trident rendering engine and just use another open source rendering engine? I mean if they're going to go through all the trouble of incorporating the other engines in IE why even bother developing Trident anymore?
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Voice= Lil' John:
WHAT!??!?!
Sent from your iPad.
We need a +1 Fool for April Fools' articles.
I hereby turn in my Slashdot member card until it is 4/2/2009 or later in all time zones.
Thanks.
digitalunity
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I would love to see this happening. Alas, the 1st April is nearing and /. is to be taken even less seriously than it usually is.
If the IE team would support FF add-ons and the FF rendering engine I would personally send them a cake. Seriously. Here's to my vain hope that an MS exec will read this and think it's a great idea. Never take away a person's dreams.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I for one belief that this could be the next release of IE. Note, I said "could" not "would". Want to know how? They can get the source to Firefox (or any OTHER browser that isn't IE) and make that with their own modifications. That's certainly a good way to get it to run FF addons too ;)
Or a -1.
I love a good hoax as much as the next guy (the perl/python/parrot thing was great), but I dread April 1 every year now. Disabling every second news source on the planet for 24 hours leaves me with nothing to do but actual work.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
Yeah, but when the site's URL has the date in it, and it's 31 March, then it's really stupid. I'm in New Zealand so It's been April for 10 hours now.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ 2009/03/31/breaking-internet-explorer-81-eagle-eyes-leaked/
signature is pants
Early PONIES!!!
Change your name to Homer Junior! Your friends can call you Hoju
Little blurb in article:
"Graph created in Excel to showcase superiority..."
This is my sig.
Extensions are not plugins. Take a look in your Firefox addons menu if you don't believe me. Plugins are things like Flash, they're written to a specification (NPAPI) that originates in the Netscape days, it is supported by all major browser makers EXCEPT Microsoft. That's why on Windows there's two versions of Flash (not talking 32/64 bit issues here) one for IE and one for everyone else.
IE used to support the Netscape plugins API, but removed it around about IE5.5 if I remember, the idea was to force developers to write an IE version (ActiveX) if they wanted to support IE. They were probably hoping that plugin developers would have just developed for the more popular IE and ignore Netscape, finally killing browser competition off for good.
Fortunately the increase in popularity of alternative vouchers has kept the NPAPI alive, meaning that plugins written for one browser will work on them all.
Now the problem with plugins is they're written in compiled code and therefore a version needs to be written for each OS. Extensions on the other hand are usually written in XUL and JavaScript and so extensions will normally work on any platform, but extensions are specific to a particular browser. So plugins are OS specific, extensions are browser specific.
So when I read that IE8.1 supports Firefox plugins, my first thought was that IE was bringing back support for the NPAPI that they removed in IE5.5 making it easier for plugin developers. I knew that it was not possible that IE could support Firefox extensions. That would be almost impossible to implement for anything more than the most trivial extension.
It's been April 1st here for 10 hours now you insensitive clod!
Lucky for me, my computer went ahead and pre-emptively died this morning - won't even turn on.
You ain't gettin' ME, Conficker!
You can have your member card back. 4th of February has passed in all time zones I know of
If you skim the thing, it seems pretty real, but once you get into it, you find gems like:
"[Pauses to answer a call from his iPhone]"
"Internet Explorer has always been the leader of executing client-side scripts, but that didnâ(TM)t stop Microsoft from continuing its thirst for excellence by including a completely new JavaScript engine called JSE, which stands for JavaScript Speedy Engine"
This article is just great...what sucks for Microsoft is, everyone wishes this article were true!
This is my sig.
April Fool's deserves the full color treatment!
While the reference rendering fails on FF 3.0.7 with just gray background (no boxes).
Yet somehow IE6 gets all the colored boxes in the middle...
Why the hell did they make the REFERENCE rendering a web page instead of an image is just beyond me.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
I just ran the test and Safari 4 scored 100/100. I am fairly surprised about this.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
He might be using MM/DD/YYYY not DD/MM/YYYY. In that case the 2nd of April 2009 has not passed yet.
And I am most likely hearing a whooosh sound...
It is already well past the fourth of February, 2009. You may keep your card.
the newest version of Internet Explorer... supports Firefox plugins
Now if we could only get Google Chrome to do the same.
That is all.
This BS has got to stop. I'm going to go and burn some karma, but websites should not be pulling April Fools jokes a day or two early. Why?
In former Soviet Russian city of Moscow, is already April 1, so April Fools you, yanks.
As many others have said: the article is dated the 31st! "By Jacob Gube, March 31st, 2009." By the site's own admission, it's not on 4/1 for them.
you insensitive clod!
Don't worry, the sound will hit you on the 2nd of April...
In some time zones, they write dates inside out, so it is currently 3/31/2009, tomorrow it will be 4/1/2009, and the next day it will be 4/2/2009.
I find it confusing as well.
Smashing Magazine April Fools leaked in March
Oh you think that is confusing? Throughout Canada we use all of them! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_by_country#Canada
It's already past the 4th of February, what's your point?
If the trauma was not bad enough.
DD/MM/YYYY makes the most sense, IMHO, and I'm American. In fact, when I was a kid in school, I thought that dates should be written this way so I wrote my dates that way, and I was corrected by the teacher. I corrected the teacher telling her that if I were in Europe (I had looked this up at the library) I'd write it the way I was writing. Who then called in a parent teacher conference in which they told my parents that I was too much of a smart ass.
My blog
No, I'm pretty much in favor of making fools out of everyone every day of the year. April 1st, is supposed to be *a* day of practical jokes, but practical jokes shouldn't be *limited* to April 1st.
... it worked ... perfectly.
FYI, making you think something absurd is true is sort of the point of a practical joke. So in this case
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I still prefer YYYYMMDD. Automatic date sorting makes some things so much easier.
This image is a couple weeks old - I did the same thing months ago, but misplaced the image. http://s217.photobucket.com/albums/cc226/Runaway1956/?action=view¤t=Midori_Acid3.png I can't swear to it, but I think Midori beat them all to the goal of 100 on Acid3.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Oh, definitely. I use that format when I need to put a date stamp into something like a filename. For example, if I make a backup of a particular directory, I'll name it something like dirname_YYYYMMDD or dirname_YYYYMMDDhhmm (if I need that much granularity).
My blog
DD/MM/YYYY is better than MM/DD/YYYY, but still not as good as YYYY/MM/DD
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
This is certainly the best format when sorting by date is necessary, but DDMMYYYY is closer to how it's usually said: 2nd of April, 2009; not, er, 2009 of April the Second. (And the OP is of course an April Fool trick. Wouldn't be a bad idea for IE to start supporting Firefox extensions, though.)
ISO FTW
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
That's the best bit! But I could almost imagine the less security-conscious Microsoft of days gone by thinking: hm, how can we help developers debug server-side code in-browser? The PHP code example is funny too.
Well it is 1st April, here in Melbourne. Catch up already!
The BS has got to stop, definitely. Every year /. runs stories purporting to be funny "April Fools" jokes, but are actually incredibly dumb, unimaginative and far from funny. Thanks for reminding me not to visit this site tomorrow.
Except you were in Cincinnati at the time.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Where is the omgponies tag?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
To be fair, Felix, New Zealand just does not matter.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So you fell for an April Fool's joke...that's sort of the point :)
What, did you get to the bit about the server code decompiler?
If you read the whole article, it's so obvious that if you didn't get it, you probably shouldn't be on /. But then again, if you did RTFA, you probably shouldn't be on /. either.
I'm confused.
I don't therefore I'm not.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/31/1332257
...cosmonauts rename themselves to 'astronauts'.
"We're just going with the times. We see this is a value upgrade to our main product, cosmonautics, called "astronautics" starting April 1st 2009."
Oh and yes, we hope that we can also use the toilet too then.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
Willing to bet the /. editor let this through thinking it was real as well.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
nice to see slashdot is upholding the fine tradition of not running a single news story on this day of days.
Stink as, bro!
Messing with the poll results would definitely have made it better. I personally was wondering how many people would vote for it (obviously I encourage a Yes vote) but what I really wish is that there was a way to tell how many people voted one way or the other thinking it was real. How did you vote?
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
In what sense is it still "Internet Explorer" then?
Also, input validation can be done progressively! The Japanese write it that way...I think its also ISO compliant (ISO 8601)
You can have your member card back. 4th of February has passed in all time zones I know of
Don't listen to him, it's an April fools joke! We're really still in January!
I like YYMMDD.hhmm.ss (2 digit year, Month, Day, 24 Hour, Minute, Second, all with leading zeroes), it's what I always set my clocks to when I can. To me, it makes sense to descend from year to second...
-When it's a file it stays numeralphabetical (I totally just made that up).
-The average lifespan of a human being is still well within 100 years, I know it's the thinking the caused Y2K, but I won't need the use of 4 digit years in my lifetime.
-Separating by a period is clearer than a colon.
-It's easier to 'guess' when looking right at it than YY/MM/DD MM/DD/YY or whatever.
-Numbers alone sit better in logfiles than something like Tuesday 31 March 2009, especially when using monotype fonts.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
-When it's a file it stays numeralphabetical (I totally just made that up).
The term is "ASCIIbetical," I believe.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I personally prefer YY/M/SS/D/L/Y/UX/MD/Y.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Well maybe you shouldn't have taken it as truth without a second thought. The point of the day is made: learn from your gullibility and employ some skepticism next time.
I mean, come on... Slashdot is unreliable to begin with and you should know this by now. Firefox plugins and renderer in IE didn't raise any doubts?
Oh you think that is confusing? Throughout Canada we use all of them! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_by_country#Canada
I might feel sorry for you if I weren't from Indiana. You may not know what date it is, but unlike us, at least you can be relatively certain what time of day it is at any given moment!
i tend to use yyyy-mm-dd that way when you sort the folders/files then they are sorted chronologically
This BS has got to stop. I'm going to go and burn some karma, but websites should not be pulling April Fools jokes a day or two early. Why? Because sarcasm is lost in text. The humor in this article was not obvious that I ended up thinking it was true. Haha I was fooled! On march 31st! Stop the jokes when they're not supposed to be done. This article would have been easier to spot in the late 90s with IE 4 and 5. Nowadays they're doing better.
So you actually thought that an upcoming release of IE with Firefox extension support, multiple rendering engines, full CS3 support, and an entirely rewritten javascript engine, all by this summer, sounded reasonable? That such a release would only be considered a .1 version? That "server-side code decompilation" is even possible? It should have been obvious by the 2nd paragraph that the article was bogus, regardless of the date.
That is totally more fun to say.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
As lame as the rest of the article was, their "Mixx promotion algorithm" was good for a chuckle.
Judge me not only by my friends, but also by my enemies. Last year I resolved in part to make more enemies, and I'm feeling better about that now.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
yeah, I could elaborate, but that about sums it up. nt
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Cotton candy ponies that live in rainbows no less. I should have included the link for Google's lunar work: http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html but I was wrong about the year. Last year was Custom Time at http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
It isnt even the first of april yet. Why are they running the story now?
Lol why do you need to look at the caption to tell it is false- it indicates that the javascript performance of ie6 is higher than google chrome.
They didn't list Taiwan in that article but there is an additional problem here, they have two different ways of counting years. One is using western years, and the other is using dynasty, the latest having started in 1911, making this year 98.
When I first moved to Taiwan in 2006 I thought they were trying to sell me 11 year old milk when the container said good till 95/08/01.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
You need to disable it for 48hrs. From GMT-12 00:00 to GMT+12 23:59 1st April occurs somewhere in the globe.
Why? Dealing with a lot of daily paperwork and having to reference back to some that's weeks or months old I would rank YYYY/MM/DD the most useful and DD/MM/YYYY the least in terms of efficiency. You want to start with large divisions which you can bypass or zero your search in on rather than small ones.
or did you mean the Northern Summer
Now, now, don't be so sure. You know what they say about monkeys and the works of Shakespeare? Maybe the monkeys finally has had enough time, and are ready to replace the former MS developers.
All slash-delimited dates are subject to confusion (09/04/01 - what date is that? Today? 8 years ago?)
This is why ISO 8601 uses hyphen delimiters to remove the ambiguity.
Choose YYYY-MM-DD
Damn, I got so excited I almost wet myself... But once I got down to the part about using GNU LPL code it became too obvious. Ohhh well, maybe one day there will be a article like this which isnt a april fools hoax...
Antarctica has one of every time zone. Does that count for something?
This post was added yesterday. :)... but sounds like a joke
-- Simon said: Die!
Because it's logical? For your purpose yyyy/mm/dd works just fine, and it's the best solution since computers sorts it nicely to.
Insightful news which is factually correct without sensational headlines.
ZING! Happy April fools!
thank you.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
What does the delimiter have to do with it?
what date was 01-02-03?
4 digit years coming first remove ambiguity in the ISO standard (since no one uses YYYY/DD/MM). The delimiter could be anything, and it wouldn't matter.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
DD/MM/YYYY is better because it is logical. I can accept big-endian or little-endian, but "middle-endian"? Come on!
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
No Lynx support = teh fail.
I guess I don't get it. What makes that "logical"? If I have a big stack of paperwork where the dates all begin with 15 it could not only be *any* year, it could be *any* month within that year. In terms of sorting and filing, it's the least useful method.
Only one? Bah... the US has two of some time zones. That should definitely count for something...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
>it could be *any* month within that year
I have never experienced the 15th month. Tell me, what is it like?
Little endian is somewhat better than US style, because at least it can be easily reversed and sorted. And it is the logical opposite of big endian, whereas the the US system is the "logical" result of madness.
Of course, big endian is still by far the best, as "year first" dates are always 4 digits, and the construct YYYY/DD/MM does not occur (except maybe as a bad joke), so there is no ambiguity at all.
Big endian also allows for the easiest correct sorting - you can treat the date as one big number (instead of 3 smaller ones) and the biggest number is the most recent (or farthest in the future) and the smallest is the oldest. Still breaks on AD/BC, of course, but you can't have everything.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water