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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
Can I run IE Tab on Internet Explorer and make the world explode?
Check out the author's tagline at the end:
My blog
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.
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
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!
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!
Do not read slashdot for the 24-36 hours. Especially if the article has anything to do with your line of work.
Most of the slashdot April fool posts are totally unbelievable anyway. As for other times I know that slashdot is more for killing time than using as a reliable news source.
Now as there's still 2 hours to go before April 1st here I almost believed the headline. As I mentioned in another post plugins (e.g. Flash) are not extensions (e.g. Flashblock). All browsers except IE support the same plugin API, so if IE wanted to be seen to make developers lives easier they'd support it (they used to back when IE was the underdog). The API is the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) as it was first implemented in the Netscape browsers.
Extensions on the other hand are browser specific and serve a different purpose to plugins. Plugins are for displaying content that would otherwise be unsupported, whereas extensions add extra functionality to the browser.
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.
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.
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
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
Just randomly mod things "funny" until you run out of points. :)
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I still prefer YYYYMMDD. Automatic date sorting makes some things so much easier.
DD/MM/YYYY is better than MM/DD/YYYY, but still not as good as YYYY/MM/DD
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
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
If you ask most people what today's date is, they'll say March 31, 2009.
I'm not saying it's the best way, but that's how they say it.
For example, what's your birtday?
You are welcome on my lawn.
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 :)
I'm a Brit. To me that way sounds American. My birthday? The Twenty-Ninth of November, my good man, and I'll say yes to that pint of Old Peculier. Cheers!
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.
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.
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.
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!
You need to disable it for 48hrs. From GMT-12 00:00 to GMT+12 23:59 1st April occurs somewhere in the globe.
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.
A Plugin (flash/java/etc) is not the same as an extention.