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Internet Explorer The Internet Microsoft IT

IE7 Announced for Longhorn and WinXP 755

Posted by Zonk from the coming-soon-to-a-pc-near-you! dept.
sriram_2001 writes "There is now an official announcement from Bill Gates on Internet Explorer 7. It will be available in beta form this summer for Longhorn and XP SP2. The IEBlog has commentary about the decision making process that went into the new browser version." Coming on the heels of the June Beta announcement for Longhorn, if things go as planned it will likely be here in early summer. The new browser's early arrival was first discussed last year.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

IE7 Announced for Longhorn and WinXP More

IE7 Announced for Longhorn and WinXP

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  • I wonder what MS has stolen from firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Prophetic_Truth ( 822032 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:36PM (#11680258)
    Who wants to bet we'll see 'tabs' in IE7

  • Good (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:36PM (#11680261)
    Firefox could use a little competition.

    • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:35PM (#11682068) Journal
      Funny? Why's that.

      It's true. I think it was rated funny for MS "never doing anything good ever in computer software history", but even if IE 7 won't be better than Firefox (and let's hope it is on par! competition is good), it might still get a few new features that the Mozilla team can copy. If it weren't for IE, Firefox wouldn't have had identical yellow "info bars" instead of annoying popup boxes for example. Or maybe the functionality down to the color choice and identical look was a pure coincidence. ;-)

  • Beta Release? (Score:4, Funny)

    by NardofDoom ( 821951 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:36PM (#11680263)
    Hasn't IE been in beta since, well, it was released?

    • Re:Beta Release? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:49PM (#11680466) Homepage
      Hasn't IE been in beta since, well, it was released?

      Doesn't 'beta' mean feature-complete? ;-)

    • Re:Beta Release? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:20PM (#11680859) Homepage
      Mod parent as insightful.

      The early releases of IE were rushed to allow microsoft to bundle their own browser with their OS. Let's ignore the whole DOJ thing though...

      The first versions of IE sucked. There's absolutely no way around saying that. They were horribly written, barely standards-compliant, and buggy as hell. Unfortunately, once Microsoft realized that the web browser would become an integral and vital part of the OS, it was already too late.

      You see, Microsoft prides itself upon backward compatibility. And they're damn good at it too. I can still run programs compiled for Win95/3.1 on my XP box. No other OS today will run a program designed for an Operating System 10 years old while still having the features one would expect from a modern operating system.

      Same thing goes for their web browser. They have customers using ActiveX that they ARE OBLIGED TO SUPPORT. The absolute worse move a company can make is to alienate its customers (SCO and the RIAA have learned this the hard way). And, to be frank, Microsoft is pretty nice to its users compared to other software vendors. Let's not forget that a lot of corporations are using ActiveX for much of their in-house development. They can't just rip it out; IE would lose most of its features that way. Netscape Plugins / Firefox Extentions are not necessarily any more secure.

      Now that Microsoft has their woefully buggy ActiveX implementation, it has certain quirks that programmers have grown used to. If microsoft squashes a bug, they risk breaking compatibility. Same thing goes for standards compliance -- back when HTML4 and CSS were in their infancy, Microsoft chose to support them, but did a crappy job at it. This set the precedent that now since developers had designed sites around these quirks, THEY COULDN'T FIX THEM. Some legitimate programs may inadvertently use security holes in the browser. Closing them up will break compatibility.

      That's one reason why this beta concerns me. If it has its own quirks, developers will start coding around them, and microsoft will once again have dug itself into a hole.

      that's what was easy for apple when it made OS X and Mozilla when they rewrote their browser. They were starting fresh and had virtually no expectations and were able to COMPLETELY break compatibility with older versions for the sake of standards compliance. NT could have been just as fast and secure as OS X or Linux had Microsoft chosen to dump compatibility for Win9x apps. NT started out as a lean, fast, secure operating system. It has the capability to do Unix-style file-permissions which would close up 99% of the security holes present. Implementing a system like that would, however, break compatibility for older programs which expect the operating system to allow them to write to any portion of the drive. Instead, microsoft had to maintain backward compatibility and painstakingly close up every tiny security hole.

      Microsoft's not stupid. I would be VERY surprised if IE 7 wasn't a huge improvement over 6. They've been working a long time on this release, and they're well aware of the competition from firefox. If it's secure and standards compliant, the reasons to use firefox become far less compelling.

      In short, IE sucks today because the first betas sucked, and that's what the developers based their apps off of.

      • Re:Beta Release? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by obrienb ( 579428 )
        Um, Max OS X runs applications from prior versions of the OS just fine. And they've done this at least twice that I know of (the first was when they switched processors). One of Apple's greatest achievments was maintaining backwards compatibility while moving forward cleanly.

        Microsoft broke all kinds of things when the introduced Win32. And they broke a lot more when they introduced NT.

        My experiences with "progress" from Apple and Microsoft definitely don't echo yours.

        I do agree, however, that they

      • Re:Beta Release? (Score:5, Informative)

        by diamondsw ( 685967 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @08:08PM (#11683969)
        No other OS today will run a program designed for an Operating System 10 years old while still having the features one would expect from a modern operating system.

        Mac OS X still runs almost all programs written for System 7 and up via Classic (not too dissimilar to Microsoft's approach), and even many programs from the original 128K (if you can find them - Illustrator 0.8 runs, for example, as do many old black and white games). Meanwhile, we've undergone a complete shift in processor architecture and OS architecture, but all of our ancient 68K software keeps on working.

        THAT is an amazing feat, far moreso than the pure evolution of x86 and Win16/Win32.
      • No other OS today will run a program designed for an Operating System 10 years old...

        I played through The Fools Errand [fools-errand.com] (1987) about a month ago on MacOS X 10.3 [apple.com] (2004). It ran flawlessly. That's 17 years. Granted it was under the classic environment- but it ran flawlessly alongside Safari (needed hints!).

  • Yippee (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nkuzmik ( 528366 ) <nkuzmik@ya h o o.com> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:36PM (#11680266)
    Any word yet on substantive changes? Like separating IE from the fabric of the OS?

    A friend's computer is virtually unusable because something corrupted IE, and that in turn broke Windows Explorer.

    • Re:Yippee (Score:2, Insightful)

      by FuzzzyLogik ( 592766 )
      Separate it? haha... that'd be stupid. they make more money on leaving it in than they would by taking it out. Even with the lawsuits, it isn't going to make a difference, they'll still make more money by leaving it in. They really have no reason to take it out

    • Re:Yippee (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pilgrim23 ( 716938 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:43PM (#11680367)
      I rememeber reading once that IE loads into memory at boot. That is, IE is substantially tied in as a portion of the operating system itself. This makes for superb integration with the UI for all system tasks, it also results in blazing fast speed as a browser. It ALSO means any threat to the browser becomes by nature a threat to the entire computer, its system its data, its hardware, and its user. If IE 7 has been decoupled from Windows that would be the one greatest security improvement Microsoft could perform.

      • Not gonna happen (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:03PM (#11680615) Homepage Journal
        MS really depends on blazing performance to keep its users happy. Shipping IE separately means an upgrade to those internal components, not delivery of a separate product. I doubt you'll be able to use it alongside the existing IE, for example.

        It's terrible for security, but MS's approach to security has never been to contain threats. Their approach heen been much more all-or-nothing; ActiveX signed certificates means that the program is either trusted or it's not.

        Security is always a double-edged sword. Users hate it when security interferes with them, and if it gets in their way before they see the benefits of whatever you're selling them, they'll pick something less safe but whose benefits are more clearly visible.

        It's vaguely possible that in Longhorn they might alter some of those balances between security and performance, since .NET gives you more control, but I'm betting not for this upgrade. Most users will always equate "faster" with "better", and "more secure" will come in a distant third.

    • Re:Yippee (Score:3, Informative)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      Any word yet on substantive changes?

      The stated focus is on security, so presumably that means better pop-up blocking, protection from rogue active elements and so on. Hopefully there will also be resources devoted to addressing at least some of the more glaring instances of IE's deviations from the W3C's HTML and CSS standards. Even though I use Firefox exclusively, anything Microsoft does to help remove all those CSS coding hacks and keep people from inadvertantly becoming yet another node of a BotNet

    • Re:Yippee (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jsebrech ( 525647 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @07:08PM (#11683266)
      Don't expect exhaustive feature lists soon. The purpose of this post was to communicate to large clients that they shouldn't switch to firefox because IE7 will be here "soon". It's classic tried and true delaying strategy from MS. Anyone who has been around long enough has seen them do this tons of times. They probably don't even know exactly what features IE7 will have. All they know is firefox is getting good enough clients are considering switching away from MS products, and they need to stop those clients from doing that.

  • Maybe they'll do it right this time... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by agraupe ( 769778 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:37PM (#11680276) Journal
    All IE needs to be good is: tabbed browsing, popup blocker, standards compliance, and fewer security issues. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Firefox was able to do it, let see if, given enough time Microsoft can do the same. Although I will still use Firefox, it will be nice to have a competent browser when I use, for example, a computer at school.

    • Re:Maybe they'll do it right this time... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Verteiron ( 224042 ) * on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:43PM (#11680382) Homepage
      Don't forget alpha-channel transparency in PNG files.

      (without the nasty DirectX hack)

  • Wow. It's been a long time since Microsoft blinked (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ip_freely_2000 ( 577249 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:37PM (#11680277)
    So they've admitted that IE is weak and Firefox et. al. is a compelling product. Knocks aside, I am very interested in seeing how this plays out.

    • Re:Wow. It's been a long time since Microsoft blin (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DaHat ( 247651 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:47PM (#11680439)
      I fail to see how they admitted that IE is weak.

      It is quite rare that a company releases a product that is so perfect that they do not need to create a new version. Such is the case here, IE can always better... and so can Firefox. Down the line when the next version of Firefox is released... is it their way of saying that their own product is weak?

      • Re:Wow. It's been a long time since Microsoft blin (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Ziviyr ( 95582 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:11PM (#11680714) Homepage
        I fail to see how they admitted that IE is weak.

        Microsoft terminates work on IE, they own the browser market, spyware runs rampant, all is good in the universe.

        Firefox appears and chomps into their dominance, offering features and spyware noncompliance that makes IE6 look like a Microsoft product.

        Microsoft internally goes,
        shit, our browser marketshare is weak, people are acting like IE is a Microsoft product for once! We need to make it look better, pull the browser team back together, do something, and up the version number!

        Actually, I dunno why they give a damn about browser marketshare, ignoring that having a dominant browser that only really works on their platform keeps people using their cash-cow OS so they can view MS-HTML websites without difficulty and reap the latest in spyware technology.
        • Yeah, this is real weakness. Firefox hasnt gotten above 10% on the desktop and they're panicking. What firefox has is "developer mindshare". That's what MS are scared of losing. That's the reason for Longhorn. That's the reason for this barely dead-in-the-water browser. The whole longhorn thing is about a "rich client experience", about the browser dieing and about you being *locked* into rich internet apps built with XAML. Not about some half-arsed "standards compliant" browser. Tabs? Nah. Just a side-sh

    • Re:Wow. It's been a long time since Microsoft blin (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RaisinBread ( 315323 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:59PM (#11680583) Homepage
      Here's my prediction:

      1. IE7 Ends up being pretty decent with tabbed browsing, increased security, and some sort of nifty integration with other MS stuff.
      2. Firefox 'market share' continues to increase, but begins to lose footing as MS begins to focus on IE once again.
      3. Browser battle ensues for all of a year and a half.
      4. The 600 lb gorilla continues to pour part of its billions into marketing, automatically including with its OS, etc., etc.
      5. Firefox hangs up its towel after a long hard battle. The general populous wins for a time, however, because IE and the last version of Firefox are what everyone needs.
      6. MS neatly places all of their IE developers back in cryogen, to wait until the browser monoply is again challenged.
      7. IE rots like a dead dog until another browser project starts up and begins to gain ground. The general populous loses.
      8. Goto Step 1.

      Haven't we all seen this story before? I *really* hope that someone else takes a strong enough hold to keep everyone in competition, but the way the Netscape dynasty played out, things aren't looking good.

      You can do it Firefox!

      • Re:Wow. It's been a long time since Microsoft blin (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ptlis ( 772434 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:20PM (#11680851) Homepage
        Doubtful. Unlike Netscape Navigator, Mozilla Firefox is not a commercial product and as such it doesn't need to keep getting new users at a high rate (to sustain it's influx of cash) - as long as there are people using at and developers refining it then it will live. Furthermore I feel strongly that the momentum behind Firefox now is such that Microsoft/IE won't ever be able to crush it and regain almost total market dominance... this can only be a good thing for Joe Public and for web developers everywhere because Microsoft will be forced to start improving IE & the lack of market dominance means that MS-only (x)html tags should start appearing again.

  • So? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FuzzzyLogik ( 592766 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:37PM (#11680284) Homepage
    This is disappointing because we all know microsoft won't fill the giant security hole that is active x. Sure they have a "popup blocker" and this beta will have "tabs." But will it actually follow the W3C standards or is it going to be as hard to work with as IE6? I mean we KNOW they won't clean the issues up because they're releasing their own Anti-Spyware application. So really, what's the point?

  • So surprised. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What? Microsoft suddenly decided to release a new version of IE now that FireFox is taking nearly 12% of its previously undesputed market-share? Shocking!

  • Catch up (Score:2, Insightful)

    by whats_a_zip ( 743877 )
    Now that there is competiton, Microsoft is suddenly interested again. But, losing brand loyalty is key, and I see lots of unsophisticated users using Firefox. Take IE7 and shove it Microsoft.

  • Part of Microsoft's Press Release (Score:5, Funny)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:38PM (#11680298)
    "In yet another example of innovation, Microsoft has invented a feature called Tabbed Web Surfing (tm) (r). Tabbed Web Surfing is a revolutionary user interface for web browsing that Microsoft as its inventor has received over 7,000 patents on."

  • The real question is: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lucabrasi999 ( 585141 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:38PM (#11680301) Journal

    Will all you Firefox users now be quiet [msdn.com]? Oh, they are talking about me, as well?

  • ...reading this article [gameshout.com] where it seems that they were their partners who asked for it

    Microsoft's people have said in public several times that IE is the best browser out there. Why are their customers asking for new versions then? Heh.

    This is a way of saying "IE 6 sucks, even the one in SP2". A new excuse to "sell" firefox - "are you going to expect until summer to have a decent browser?"

  • In other news.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    4 critical security flaws have already been found in the yet to be released Internet Explorer 7.
  • If Microsoft has any common sense left, they'll leave Internet Explorer as "beta" for the duration of its product life. That would serve to blunt some of the more obvious criticisms of security, interface, and data loss that are sure to crop up.

    Then again, if they were to truly mimic Google, Mozilla, and the rest of the "do good" gang, they'd release a Microsoft-equivalent finished product as their beta.

  • IE.Net? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Repugnant_Shit ( 263651 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:41PM (#11680338)
    I think the most interesting question about IE7 is: will it be written with .Net? Microsoft seems to think that developers should all jump on the .Net bandwagon, but they seem rather reluctanct to do it with any of their big products.

    IE.Net (or rather, mshtml.Net) would be a great way to show off the supposed security enhancements that .Net brings.

    (Aside: Is Visual Studio now written in .Net? If it is, no wonder it's so much slower than VS6.)

    • Re:IE.Net? (Score:4, Funny)

      by diegocgteleline.es ( 653730 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:46PM (#11680416)
      They don't have enought time for that.

    • Re:IE.Net? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Pionar ( 620916 )
      Of course VS isn't written in .Net. .Net isn't a programming language, it's a platform. It's like asking if a music program is written in LAME.

    • Re:IE.Net? (Score:5, Informative)

      by irokitt ( 663593 ) <archimandrites-iaur@@@yahoo...com> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:43PM (#11681154)
      Is Visual Studio now written in .Net? If it is, no wonder it's so much slower than VS6.

      I have VS6 and VS .NET on the same system, and performance is roughly pretty close. VS .NET seems a tad slower, but I think this is probably a result of "creeping featurism" (i.e. bloat, and every programmer is guilty of that) than any compilation or programming differences. The pretty, graphics-hungry interface of VS .NET may make more of an impact. But I find that it starts faster than, say, Firefox;)

      All things considered, both are good. I use VS 6.0 more because old habits die hard (same reason I still use Borland C++Builder for certain kinds of projects - I'm used to the debug/stepping interface in certain circumstances).

  • So Bill buys himself a reprieve. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by blcamp ( 211756 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:42PM (#11680356) Homepage
    Announcing IE7 allows Bill to spend some "capital" to get the unwashed computing masses to try IE one more time.

    They just better get it right this time.

    Otherwise the pendulum swings over to the browser with the Netscape Pedigree.

    Now... how ironic would *that* be...

  • Thats what i want to know!
  • Why has everyone gone 'oh i bet it has tabs'? Perhaps it'll have an even better metaphor for multiple web pages, and firefox will then copy that!

    Hmm, is that bacon overhead?

  • valid CSS and FULLY supported PNG? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OmniVector ( 569062 ) <see my homepage> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:43PM (#11680373) Homepage
    if we got just these two things, and nothing else, i might actually stop slitting my wrists as a web designer. PLEASE MICROSOFT. PLEASE. that's all i want god damnit.

    • Re:valid CSS and FULLY supported PNG? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This shouldn't be modded "Funny", it should be modded "So true I'm crying into my vodka".

      Unless you are a web developer that has to waste time every day working around Internet Explorer's eight year old screw-ups of the standards, you really don't understand how it feels.

      It's like being in an abusive relationship. Microsoft have billions of dollars to fix Internet Explorer, and instead they let it rot for years. But you have no choice but to support it because loads of people still use it.

      If you ad

    • Re:valid CSS and FULLY supported PNG? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TedTschopp ( 244839 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @07:15PM (#11683352) Homepage
      You also need them to support that on OSes other than XP. So they need to release standards support on all the OSes which are still under their support clock from MS. So 2000 would need to have all this as well.

      The real question is will this raise the bar for minimum features supported by a browser. If they build IE7 and no one upgrades than we are still where we are today.... Screwed.

  • Market speak translated (Score:3, Insightful)

    by acomj ( 20611 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:43PM (#11680379) Homepage
    IE developer/lead says "I think of today's announcement as a clear statement back to our customers: "Hey, Microsoft heard you. We're committing (to ie7)."

    What he means : "Damm firefox took a lot of market share. Even with our monopoly people are downloading this better and free product"

    Mircosoft intended to use its domenence in browsers to control the desktop. IE distribute apps with IE/Longhorn and proprietary extentions (.net) that only worked on windows.

    Firefox's success caught them off guard and now there running to catch up. I think MS was hoping to bundle ie7 with longhorn, causing massive corporate forced upgrades, but delay after delay nixed that idea.
  • To recover all the taxpayer money wasted by MS when it was claiming that the browser was "part of the operating system [washingtonpost.com]."
  • Maybe we'll finally have CSS3 support. Being able to referencing parent nodes would really nice.
  • I'll be shocked if it includes updated (and proper) CCS2/3 support. As a web designer its one of the things I am screaming to see. I somehow doubt they will do it. Updating thier code to do proper support will break most of the sites currently coded for it.

  • Just one request (Score:3, Insightful)

    by m50d ( 797211 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:48PM (#11680448) Homepage Journal
    Please, please, implement alpha transparency for PNGs. That's all I ask. CSS2 would be nice, but it's ok if you don't have time or whatever. But just get proper transparency working. Please.

  • So what.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 706GL ( 172709 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:55PM (#11680543) Homepage Journal
    Security isn't a feature, it's expected. To steal someone else's example, you wouldn't buy a toaster that says "Now blows up less often!" We don't need IE7 to fix security holes. It should offer real new features. I doubt they will, but they should come up with browsing enhancements that aren't in Firefox, beyond just copying it. Let's not forget supporting standards as well. IE is stale now, and so far it doesn't sound like IE7 will offer any improvements.

    Tell MS to call me when they have something new to offer. I'll be over here with Firefox that already works better and keeps it's security holes patched.

  • You mean. . . (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:12PM (#11680743) Journal
    I have to buy an entire OS AND a new system just to get the benefits of a 'secure' browsing environment?

    No thanks, I'll stick with my 2K system which happily runs Firefox.

  • Shortsightedness (of tabbed-browsing) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Peaker ( 72084 ) <gnupeaker @ y a h oo.com> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:00PM (#11681423) Homepage
    Opera added tabs. That was neat because it can let the user group similar tasks (web browsing pages) together hierarchially under the task of web browsing (and unlike grouping in Microsoft's/KDE's taskbar, remain one click away when in the browser).

    Mozilla added tabs, that was also neat.

    Konqueror added tabs, this was not neat! KDE's people, unlike Opera's or Mozilla's are in the exact right position to have a bit more of a vision, and encorporate tabs into KDE's general facilities, and not just a specific program (web browser).
    Instead, KDE's people choose to incorporate tabs separately in Konqeruror, Konsole, and other programs, such that non-KDE applications cannot benefit from it.
    Now it seems as though Microsoft is just as short-sighted and added tabs to Internet Explorer instead of adding tabs to the core window-switching facilities (by drawing a tab under title bars of a new concept of "window-group" that contains multiple windows of same applications or such).

    What I believe should have been done, is something more along the lines of what was done with Mouse Gestures in KDE. Mouse Gestures in KDE are handled by a general facility (KHotKeys) such that not only Konqueror can benefit from it, but any KDE/non-KDE application.

    This is what should be done with tabs!

    • Wrong (Score:3, Informative)

      by bluGill ( 862 )

      You have no clue what you are talking about. In Kde tabs are a part of kmdi which is a part of kdelibs. Konqueror and Konsole choose to show tabs differently, (as do most other apps), but the code for both is the same on the bottom level.

  • Transparent PNG support? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Helmholtz ( 2715 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:05PM (#11681527) Homepage
    I wonder what the chances are that it will support transparent PNG's. This is one of the most annoying left out features of IE, IMO. There is an ugly CSS tag hack that lets them be used currently, but it's _really_ nasty. It would be nice if the 256 gif colormap could finally be put to rest.

  • New IE 7 Beta Moniker (Score:3, Funny)

    by Zemplar ( 764598 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:26PM (#11681925) Journal
    "
    Try Internet Explorer 7 Today!
    "

    "It doesn't suck quite as much as it used to. [No Really!]"

  • Version numbers as marketing tricks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dracos ( 107777 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:34PM (#11682051)

    Nothing in the press release or IE blog post mentions improved standards support. Mixed in with the "Yay, IE7!" bandwagon blog comments are those from actual web developers still asking for better CSS and PNG support.

    Which we won't get. IE7 will be (spurious) security fixes, and the large version increase (6.0 to 7.0) would imply more sweeping changes than SP2 to the Windows security model. That may be, and considering the track record of SP2, also implies more software breaking.

    IE7 might include some candy that the average user can comprehend (like tabbed browsing or RSS feeds), but I'd give even odds on that. What we definitely won't see is a fixed CSS box model (or any standards improvements), and native alpha support for PNG. They've made such a mess for themselves out of the rendering engine that they can't fix it without a ground-up rewrite.

    MS has no reason to allow people to stay on XP or 2k instead of upgrading to Longhorn in now() + 2 years. IE7 has two purposes:

    • to show people that they care about security (while skirting around the fact that their security sucks now)
    • to attempt to take some momentum away from Firefox

    By not addressing standards at all with this release, the press has no reason to make an issue of it. Mainstream press isn't capable of making the link between standards support and interoperability anyway.

  • It doesn't really matter (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Orion Blastar ( 457579 ) <orionblastar AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:47PM (#11682242) Homepage Journal
    because only Longhorn and XP SP2 will be using IE 7.0, and the bulk of Windows users won't be using it.

    If Microsoft was smart, they'd release IE 7.0 for Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0 and help fix the security issues the older versions of IE has with those platforms.

    Yet in doing so, Microsoft is hoping to force upgrades to Longhorn or XP SP2, in order to use IE 7.0, and it may backfire on them. Not to mention more spyware and adware and trojan infections from older versions of IE not patched.

    So Microsoft's only option for legacy users is to upgrade to a new OS, possibly buying newer hardware.

    Yet Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, etc offer users the chance to use their old OS and switch to a new web browser.

    Linux, *BSD, Darwin, etc offers users the chance to keep their hardware and solve security issues as well, but at the cost of running legacy Windows applications.

    Apple does have that spiffy $499 Mac Mini, which users of older computer can upgrade to if they have a USB mouse and keyboard. That is yet another option.

  • from the blog (Score:3, Funny)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:57PM (#11682399) Journal
    Why? Because we listened to customers, analysts, and business partners. We heard a clear message: "Yes, XP SP2 makes the situation better. We want more, sooner. We want security on top of the compatibility and extensibility IE gives us, and we want it on XP. Microsoft, show us your commitment."

    through babelfish's bullshit -> english

    Why? Because we listened to customers, analysts, and business partners. OMG!!!1 IE is teh suckx0r!!111 viruses, trojans and worms, oh my!11 my pc is fux0r3d!!111 Wh4t is thi5 coolsearch toolbar doing here? my computer ate my homework! I fancy Ellen Feissssssssss! maaaaaaaaaaaarry meeeeee!!

    blame it on valentines day ok... OK... get fuzzy, dilbert... herman and pearls and some PA get my through.

  • no mention of standards (Score:4, Insightful)

    by drew ( 2081 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:54PM (#11683114) Homepage
    so, not one of those links even mentioned improved standards support. that doesn't sound good. if they aren't going to be improving their xhtml and css handling, i really don't see anything to get excited about....

    unfortunately i don't see much hope. in ie6, they could break backwards compatibility by adding the strict mode / quirks mode doctype switch. that trick isn't going to work again. so while they may add css selectors and javascript methods that are missing from the current implementation (e.g. the child selector, hover state on objects other than anchors, document.addEventListener())), i don't think they'll do anything that would break existing sites (e.g. hasLayout, the broken float model, boxes espanding to fit their contents)

    but i can always hope.

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