Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Says IE9 Beta Demand Overwhelming
cgriffin21 writes "Microsoft expected Internet Explorer 9 to be popular, but after more than two million people downloaded the IE9 beta in the first two days after its release, the software giant is having a hard time choosing which eye-popping statistics to cite. Microsoft says its "Beauty of the Web" site, which illustrates the aesthetic advantages of IE9's support for HTML5 and hardware acceleration, has had more the 9 million visits and 26 million page views since the IE9 beta launch on Sept. 15. Microsoft's developer-oriented IE Test Drive Site has had 4 million page views during the same period."
Everyone just had to see if they were actually doing a browser without the retarded gene.
I for one am happy to see IE becoming competitve again. It is good to have more than one viable alternative out there.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Two million malware distributors want an early start on the game...
UTF-8: There and Back Again
... insert "must not be running on IIS..." joke here.
The main thing with me is does IE9 deal well with IE8 plug-ins?
I would love to see his reaction to this
did you forget to take your meds?
Now I can go on 4chan and view the full beauty of... oh god is that an anthropomorphic hermaphrodite squirrel orgy?!?
Say what you want about IE's history (and lets face it, the jokes that come to mind are bountiful), but with Firefox and chrome pushing them that Microsoft has again started pushing IE development. Im not happy about that because I want IE to dominate, but because it keeps ALL the vendors honest.
Say it with me, competition is GOOD.
No, it's not being pushed, believe it or not people do have to download it. Although, you are correct in that the "Beauty of the Web" is the first page it loads up to.
I must find out for myself!
ie9.downloadAmount++;
Say it with me, competition is GOOD.
Unless it threatens a brand you like or comes from a brand you don't like.
(the general "you", not "you, Sprouticus")
Living With a Nerd
A lot of people have websites. They want to see how their website is looking in the next version of a major browser. Some dudes like epSos.de do not care at all, but others who live from their websites want to know the future of their business.
Today you have to download it. I'm sure, just like previous iterations, that this will eventually be a pushed patch.
I can see a few reasons for this:
1. Lots of intranet and other internal company websites are I.E. only. It would be good to know now if those sites will continue to function.
2. Lots of employees are locked into I.E., and want to know what is coming up.
3. I.E. still means "the internet" to a lot of people.
4. Everyone who has a plug-in or toolbar needs to know if this will work with their "product."
5. There are about 2 billion internet users worldwide. I.E. has about %50 marketshare. 2 million downloading a beta out of a group of 1 billion users is about half of a percent. That's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn't seem out of line with expectations.
The ______ Agenda
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ :)
Browsers do not excite people. Getting their problems resolved does. Microsoft's "overwhelming" response is a strong indicator that people are displeased with what they have now and are looking for it to be fixed.
This is nothing new. Nearly every upgrade from the previous version of Windows was enthusiastically received by users who were hopeful that the problems of their previous version are resolved in the new one. People were happy with Windows98 and so WindowsME did not receive any welcome from users. (If they called in Windows98enhanced it might have gained popularity though) And the same happened when trying to get people to go from WindowsXP to Vista... people were happy with XP (and still are!) and see no compelling reasons to move to another OS. (The use of 64 bit will be the draw that will finally move people to Windows 7 though)
If there is a reason people WANT MSIE9, it is because the previous versions are not good enough.
It's not surprise that IE users are quick to try IE9 - IE7 and IE8 suck.
IE7 and 8 are too slow, don't work right with many websites (it's amazing how many sites look different with a browser that support CSS round corners), are difficult to use (Internet Options, security zones, and the functionality blocker ribbon works anyone) and offer only the advantage of being able to access sites built exclusively for Internet Explorer (that number is dwindling and will continue to as people continue to run to Firefox, Chrome, Safari and other alternatives).
-- $G
Hell may have frozen over. A JS engine that rivals the best, support for most of the CSS3 goodies, and budding hardware acceleration. This is looking like the best IE release in a while.
If they can keep security snafus down, alternative browsers are going to be a harder sell.
What do you expect when you advertise your new software that replaces an old bad one?
Scientology could produce far more impressive numbers- they just have to make a browser and call it "4chan <3" and their page will get millions of hits every second.
My webcomic
IE8 must be pretty uncompetitive.
I haven't tried the new IE9, but I hope it turns out alright. I have been interested in their campaign to promote it. They've produced some really cool websites that show off some creative uses of HTML5.
It seems like too many people get caught up in the video debate and forget about all of the other exciting uses for HTML5. If those are just early examples, I can't wait to see what creative professionals will be able to produce in a few years.
-- amazed? Microsoft says something about a product of theirs to try and generate hype and interest in it. This is news? OMG!
Why not one for Linux or Mac too....Why compete on your turf only ?
I feel the same way with the AC. Microsoft seems to use this marketing technique a lot, after picking it up from Apple. It tells people "Hey, this thing is like SO popular, everyone is doing it, so you need to do it too" to use artificial peer pressure to make them use its products. I personally think it's a despicable way to operate, and makes me like them even less.
Can you cite some sources for this?
Download free e-books, lectures, and tutorials at bookgoldmine.com
i just gave beautyoftheweb.com two hits, one from chrome, in which all worked fine, but the fonts/scaling was borked to give me horrible alliased text, another in IE8 produced correct text, but all nice visual effects where gone, and surprise, all moving effects slowed to a crawl...
People, what a bunch of bastards
Actually I think this number not completely honest. 6 Days ago Microsoft because a sponsor of Reddit and asked the Reddit community to test it out and give feed back.
"See, Microsoft is getting ready to release Internet Explorer 9, and they reached out to us because they genuinely want to start a dialog with the reddit community. In fact, they've taken the unprecedented step of putting the reddit team in charge of this entire campaign. This is a great deal of trust for an advertiser to offer, and we should both take it as a huge compliment."
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/depct/and_now_for_a_word_from_our_sponsor_because_for/
And that's a good thing, no?
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
I'd really like to see the statistics of hits to www.beautyoftheweb.com by browser.
When are people going to grow up and admit MS has released several top-of-the-line products recently? IE is getting much nicer, especially with 9, and Windows 7 blows away any other OS available, except for certain *nix distributions for specific reasons. Likewise, if you would actually give the .NET framework and its associated languages a try you may find yourself impressed with the capabilities.
I guess I just feel like people should upgrade and quit whining like we're still in the early 00's. Technology advances, and with it comes a need for stronger hardware and new programming frameworks.
They probably did something similar with other tech sites too. Well, you certainly can't criticise Microsoft's marketing department..
which is totally what she said
1) Pinned pages in Windows 7 are a great feature, but addons are disabled for pinned apps. It seems likely to me that MS is saying to online developers that if they customize their pages for pinning MS will grant them full control of the look and feel of the pages (including if ads are displayed) and what functionality the user can access in that window (spell checkers, password databases, etc). This makes the feature all but unusable for many pages that would be great as pinned pages like Gmail and Facebook or even Slashdot
2) The absence of a built-in spell checker. I would be willing to make a small wager that more people write more words in browsers today than in dedicated word processing programs. Think how many people use a web browser as their primary email client. Think how much stuff is written daily on Slashdot and other community sites. The browser is a major tool for creation of text content. It should have built in tools to aid in that process.
People testing out a beta? You don't say...
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
If your requirements include sharepoint and other microsoft web-apps, then you need IE. IE9 looks to be the first version of IE that doesn't genuinely suck monkey balls, so of course people are keen to test drive it.
Will IE9 replace the other alternatives in general use? Who knows - but it will certainly replace the browser people need for IE-only microsoft apps, and I know plenty of people, myself included who are all too keen to see IE8 (never mind 7 or 6!) die in a fire.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Write to the published standards. Also, if you're a proper developer, get a technet subscription and get access to whatever software of theirs you need and never pay full price for an OS again. There are solutions to your problems - you just haven't found them.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Why on earth should he have to buy an entire OS - discounted or not - just to test a browser?
If those are your primary concerns, then it's unlikely any OS upgrade is going to offer you any value.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I find Windows 7 to be thoroughly mediocre. Sure, it's got a lot of shine, but it's broken a few of my old programs, and doesn't offer anything new and useful to me.
I find .NET to be thoroughly abominable. It's a forced-standard version of the Windows API, working in the Windows way, and requiring distribution headaches to get applications to run anywhere.
The one big improvement I had hoped for was search capability. I was impressed the first few times I used it to look for system goodies (control panel, downloaded programs, etc.), but then I tried using it to find text within ASCII files. Fail. Still broked as shit. Long live Windows Grep.
.Net is not necessarily evil, but it allows desktop developers to play web developer and generate really shitty HTML, in-line CSS, JavaScript on every control, ViewState several times the size of the actual generated code, etc.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Even with automatic updates fully on, you have always had to specifically choose to upgrade IE. Yes, it will show up in the "optional updates" list - but it was never checked by default. Expect the same for IE9. It's not like Chrome which silently updates - no questions asked.
(disclaimer: I use Chrome and I am quite happy with it. But I do understand how silently updating software will give some admins pause).
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
There is something called "Windows XP Mode" and it is provided for the sake of compatibility (it is a stripped down and integrated VirtualPC which shares the file system with host Windows 7). MacOS and many others do not support previous versions of Apps (i.e. Binaries).
Every product is marketed. People do not find a product out of nowhere. And that's good. MS did a splendid job with Win7 marketing.
However first essential thing in a successful marketing is having a good product which offers something new and competitive. And both Win7 and IE9 offer that.
you have a very good point... although, actually, an upgrade to linux + wine (and maybe reactos when it gets more mature) might allow better compatibility in some cases :)... I know it's not completely there yet, but eventually, the only way to run old applications on modern hardware will be emulation :)... it is already especially true for some dos applications with dos box vs ms dos where the processor is too fast for the application to run decently.
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
I might be wrong, but hasn't Firefox had a lot of this since they introduced canvas with version 1.5 back in 2005? Firefox History Just scroll down to the release history, couldn't find an appropriate anchor.
Silverlight absolutely only has the market share it does due to nagging Windows update. In fact, Microsoft has a feature that allows you to turn off the update prompt, but when you do, the next time you check it, it is back on. None of the other updates operate like that. You turn them off indicating that you don't want them and they are off. But Silverlight is different. It will remain as an update prompt forever.
And as far as Silverlight goes there's really no one using it (that I know of) except Netflix--and that implementation is pretty sucky--the video quality is terrible.
As far as IE9 beta goes, no it isn't being pushed out via Windows update, that I know of.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
You are at risk using IE. I agree with that. There's more to just patching the browser. If you understand how it is integrated into the OS and how you can download and run ActiveX controls (along with the other exploits) you'd know that you expose your whole OS to the world just by using the web via IE.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Our Corporate IT Overlords haven't been willing to jump to IE8 yet, though apparently on some laptop brands we're running IE7 at least.
Needless to say I run Firefox to do actual work unless I'm using an IE-only website, and even most of those aren't really stuck at IE6.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This isn't Youtube, FFS.
If you mean "you", then fucking write "you" - not "u".
That community should know when it is being played.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Surely you jest. Just because IE 9 and Windows 7 are vastly better than their horrid predecessors does not make them top-of-the-line. And .Net is just Java with a flood of feature creep and syntactic candy. As Microsoft has done so many times before, they took something successful and copied it, while completely overlooking the reason for its success: Java's strength was and is in its lack of syntactic fluff. It makes the code take slightly longer to write but dramatically and mercifully faster to read and maintain.
The Internet is full. Go away.
IE 6 may be that way, but IE 8 on Windows 7 is one of the most secure browser/OS combinations out there. It's still the widest target (read: most users) so it will have the most security activity but it's really quite good on the security side these days.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
I've been seeing horribly aliased fonts in alot of microsoft sites, this and technet included - happens in chrome and firefox so, but not opera. Perhaps a truetype issue?
Can any web devs give us a clue as to what MS are doing wrong on these sites from a W3C standpoint?
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
XP mode is not trivial to get set up. It is not always clear to average users how to use it, and rarely easy for them to deal with problems (other than to reboot). Some applications that ran fine in XP are problematic for users trying to use them with XP mode. I am telling my customers to view it as a bridge that should help to get through to when we can upgrade the apps.
It looks fine in Lynx. Wants me to download IE9, though. Seems like just a trick to get me to download another stupid piece of software I don't need. Moving on.
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
XP mode caused the application (an old thing that I think dates back to Windows 98) to crash even more violently.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I'd be more interested to hear that in some magical way all the remaining IE6 users have been forced to upgrade to IE7 at least...
argh, when can that browser whither out of existence? For good!!! On our site (it's a corporate one) we still get a healthy 42% IE users, 40% of which are still IE6!!!! (which means... you guessed it... we still have to support it as web developers)
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
MacOS and many others do not support previous versions of Apps (i.e. Binaries).
Wat. Rosetta?
What was the purpose of hitting it from ie8?
Yes, 2 million+ web developers are very interested in how you are going to continue to make their lives a pain.
So you'd find a constant upgrade to Linux + WINE worthwhile to get more (but not yet 100%) compatibility. Yet Windows 7 isn't a worthy upgrade when it DOES offer 100% compatibility?
lol u mad?
And .Net is just Java with a flood of feature creep and syntactic candy. As Microsoft has done so many times before, they took something successful and copied it, while completely overlooking the reason for its success: Java's strength was and is in its lack of syntactic fluff. It makes the code take slightly longer to write but dramatically and mercifully faster to read and maintain.
Java's strength was in its simplicity, but that time is long gone. It was okay in mid-90s, but it's hopelessly outdated in 2010 (guess what, programming languages evolve, too!). Any simplicity that may be in the language has long been drowned by the complexity of the overengineered standard library and various "enterprise" frameworks with miles of XML configs, factories of factories, and other creative architectural decision.
In the meantime, C# has been adding features that actually make code both easier to write and clearer. LINQ is a prime example of that. Lambdas are another (when used with a well-designed framework of higher-order functions). A more obscure example, which might nonetheless resonate with Python developers, are iterator methods (Python calls them generators - with "yield" keyword).
And - "syntactic fluff", really? Then why did Java scramble to copy large parts of that "fluff" for 1.5 release?
Oh, and what about all the people begging for closures/lambdas in Java today (in C# since 2005)? Just to remind, it got postponed again, from Java 7 to Java 8. And a lot of people are quite angry about it.
Maybe it's just the languages I learnt on (delphi and to a lesser extent VB) that biased me but I find code that uses properties* far more natural than code that has get and set all over the place and has extra brackets all over the place.
*To clarify I mean properties at the language level like in VB and delphi, not what java calls properties. Can't comment on C# because I haven't used it yet.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
For what it's worth, I use Linux primarily, and Wine has no major problems running what I need. A few graphical glitches here and there, but it does its job, which is far more than it did under Windows 7.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Because it uses less hardware time combined across the components than it used to use on strictly CPU time?
trying the latest IE i have to see how that compares with chrome (on my work machine here, which is XP, so no IE9 here...)
just curious i guess..
People, what a bunch of bastards
IE might have improved, but it has still a far worse rendering engine if it needs to use 2 CPUs and a GPU to reach the speed that ff opera and chrome have on 1 CPU...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Sounds to me like it's bias. Personally, I can't stand the thought that "x = y" might actually do anything at all.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.