Windows Vista & IE7 Beta 1 Released

gdsotirov writes "Today on the IE blog the availability of two new beta tests - Windows Vista Beta 1 and Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 - was announced. These tests are mainly targeted to developers and IT professionals. Thus the betas are only available to MSDN subscribers. Tom's Hardware has details as well." From the article: "While the code also includes an early look at the new user-interface design, the majority of end-user features in Windows Vista will not be included until Beta 2. In addition to these fundamentals, Windows Vista Beta 1 also includes the Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 built into the platform. The technical Beta of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2 also is available today." Any early thoughts, MSDN subscribers?

Early Thoughts

Any early thoughts, MSDN subscribers?

Nothing to see here, please move along.

Re:Early Thoughts

I personally have noticed no speed difference [between IE and Firefox], but I have a fast machine.

For reference, on my PII-400 I'd say firefox takes about 2-3x as long to start up, and frequently suffers long delays in various actions. Particularly grievous is the long (~200ms) pause that frequently occurs after typing the second letter of a URL in the address box while it looks up history items starting with those two letters. This pause is also noticeable on a Celeron 1.3GHz laptop, although nothing like as annoying.

Firefox also seems to use about 50% more memory on average for the same operation. It is also noticeable that it only uses single threads for many things where IE uses multiple: if one window starts a plugin, for example, all the others freeze until after the plugin has finished initialising.

Thunderbird is worst -- my entire machine grinds to a halt while it displays the new message notification window.

Even if you do notice a difference, any semi-intelligent human being knows that a 10% increase in speed isn't everything. Firefox has so much more to offer.

True, and that's why I continue to use it, despite the inconvenience. I wouldn't give up tabbed browsing for anything, for instance.

I'll be giving IE7 a try once it comes out of beta.

Re:The Pirate Bay

Just because someone charges a lot for something doesn't mean that they are price-gouging.

Just because you can't afford it doesn't mean you are entitled to a copy of it.

Re:The Pirate Bay

Thousands upon thousands of hours of work go into the production of information and software for MSDN subscribers. Do you think that all of the content and software on MSDN just *magically appeared* one day, and Microsoft just decided to put a gate around it and charge a ton of money?

Get a clue!

Your logic is severely, SEVERELY flawed.

Re:The Pirate Bay

So a guy calls up a mechanic, because his car is acting all funny, running like crap, belching blue smoke, the works.

The mechanic looks at the car for a few seconds, rummages around in his tool box, pulls out a nut and a washer, crawls under the car with a wrench, and comes out a minute later without the nut and washer.

Then he leans in and starts the car, which runs perfectly.

Then he goes into his office and returns with a bill for 500 dollars. The customer goes nuts, screams rants yells, "You just put on ONE nut! And you're going to charge me 500 dollars for ONE NUT?"

The mechanic shrugs, goes back into his office, and returns with a new bill.

It reads:

Nut: 50 cents.
Knowing where to put the nut: 499.50

Total: 500.00

There are many things that you can't hold in your hand that have intrinsic value, moron.

Re:The Pirate Bay

It is simply my position that knowlege has, or rather, ought to have, no monetary value since it takes nearly zero effort to reproduce.

Forgetting about the huge costs of education, be that University fees, exam fees or even just books or Internet access, is not the time spent learning worth anything? If I spent 5 years of my life learning how to fix your problem, is that nearly zero effort? I think you are getting confused with the copyright infridgement isn't stealing diatribe!

Re:The Pirate Bay

It is simply my position that knowlege has, or rather, ought to have, no monetary value since it takes nearly zero effort to reproduce.

I can only conclude that you have almost zero education, because I seem to remember that my degree took significantly more effort than "nearly zero" to obtain.

Re:The Pirate Bay

Knowing where to put the nut: $0

Knowledge is power. They teach this even in first grade. In my school, they taught it in kindergarten.

Your comments show why you are not a mechanic. Its actually a simple idea. If the mechanic "price gouges" you on your car, you simply do it back when he walks in to get his computer fixed.

I feel appalled at how much I get paid for doing things that seem simple, like changing a registry key, and etc. That kind of work *doesn't even involve changing a nut and washer*, but do I think I should be compensated for it? Certainly!

$500 is a bit excessive for knowledge and labor, but if a mechanic charged me a hundred for fixing one thing with a simple nut and explained what to watch out for in the future so it didn't happen again, I'd gladly hand it over to him and thank him for not dragging out the work over the next two days.

Re:The Pirate Bay

That's so dumb.

Lets turn it around. Say the mechanic doesn't know where to put the nut, and it takes him 20 hours to figure that out, which isn't unreasonable if experience and knowledge count for nothing.

Hell, the mechanic is probably a former fry cook who thought, "What the hell, I'll be a mechanic from now on" and the guy who owns the auto shop also thought that was a good idea, because, like you, he doesn't value knowledge or experience.

So, in that case, at 50.00 an hour, which seems to be the figure you're using, that mechanic would give a bill for 1000.00.

Down the street, the first mechanic, the skilled one, would be billing people a dollar to fix problems the guy up the street is charging a thousand dollars to fix. He would have to fix one...thousand...cars...to make the same as the unskilled mechanic made fixing one car.

Take an example shamelessly cribbed from a book I'm sure a lot of people here have read...

Take the raw materials for an apple pie. Flour eggs, apples, butter, sugar, etc. These things are intrinsically valuable. No one would disagree with that.

Now a skilled chef could take those ingredients, and, in a short time, produce a superiour pie.

A less skilled chef could take those ingredients, and, in a longer time, produce an acceptable pie.

An unskilled chef, could take those ingredients, and, in a still longer time, make an inedible mess.

By your standards, the last chef would be the one that produced the most valuable product, because he put the most immediate work into it, followed by the second chef, with the skilled chef coming in last.

The problem is clear; the value of the object produced is not dependent on the amount of work put into producing it. The unskilled chef produced something of value zero, or even negative value because he destroyed something of intrinsic value to make something of no value. Conversely, the skilled chef produced something of higher value, because, with his skill, he produced a superior product.

That is why, here in the real world, people are rewarded based on their skill, and not based on their effort. Life is not a gimpy little league game where everybody gets a trophy, and out here, if you don't get results, you don't get paid. But if you get more and better results than someone else who is doing the same thing you get paid more than they do, even if it took you less time.

Re:The Pirate Bay

The price gouging claim comes from the idea that anything that is not a tangible object should cost nothing.

We better get rid of the FSCKing stock market too, then. Not a lot of TANGIBLE stuff gets traded there. Maybe all the STOCKs should be free too.

You'd expect the price of the service to be proportional to how much work it takes to render the service.

Uh, hundreds of programmers * several years == a lot of work. When you buy software, you are paying just a small part of the total cost of producing the software. THE COST OF PRODUCING THE SOFTWARE IS MUCH GREATER THAN THE COST OF COPYING THE CD. YOU ARE PAYING PART OF THE AMORTIZED COST OF THE ENTIRE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS.

Stop making pathetic excuses for your behavior. If you're going to steal, say, "I'm stealing." If not, then don't, but don't try to delude yourself and especially the rest of us into thinking that you have some kind of moral justification for what you are doing.

Assertions like yours just make me ill.

Re:The Pirate Bay

Except they do have competition, come on this is slashdot, you can't just conviently ignore apple and the 50 or so popular linux distros.

Either mac osx and linux are viable desktop os's or they aren't but you can't pretend they are half the time and then pretend ms has no competition the rest of the time.

Re:The Pirate Bay

I'm sure all the linux devotees will have something to say about your 'no competition' comment.

THis again

Windows Vista Beta 1 also includes the Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 built into the platform

So they're trying this again are they?

Re:THis again

How often do we have to go through this? IE is integral to the platform in the same way Konqueror/KHTML is to KDE. It is part of the standard libraries/components and applications can expect it to be available to view richly formatted data. It is not a deep kernel integration or any of those wacky Slashdot conspiracy theories, it is just an example of good old software reuse.

I don't think anyone can actually suggest that Microsoft throw it out, having a good rendering engine of type in the platform SDK is pretty much a requirement these days. The OSS desktops all leveraging HTML engines is just one example, check out Apple who are relly going at it building applications based on WebCore. It just so happens that Microsoft got into the game early (one could in fact use the word "innovation" here, but I guess that would be a bit too flamebaity on Slashdot).

Re:THis again

How often do we have to go through this?

Obviously a few more times.

IE is integral to the platform in the same way Konqueror/KHTML is to KDE. It is part of the standard libraries/components and applications can expect it to be available to view richly formatted data.

This is not true. Applications don't give a damn if Internet Explorer is installed. Applications depend on Trident. Trident is the rendering engine that transforms web pages into something you can see and interact with.

Internet Explorer is nothing but a (pretty poor) shell around Trident. Internet Explorer is simply not necessary for the correct operation of Windows or Windows applications. Trident is. Internet Explorer is an application bundled with Windows.

As an MSDN Subscriber...

I, for one, can tell you that this new beta is fantastic! I have only been using for about 10 or 15 minutes, but already I am quite impre^D

HELO
MAIL FROM: [e-mail]
RCPT TO: [e-mail]
DATA

First Post?

I'm sure not..

Anyways, both these betas are already available everywhere.

The Vista Beta comes with a WPA bypasser.

IE7 beta requires online activation.

Anyone see any bit torrents yet?

Just curious. I would not do anything illegal like making use of one.

Re:Anyone see any bit torrents yet?

Not that I actually looked, but maybe http://static.thepiratebay.org/downloadtorrent/336 2112.torrent/Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Codename.Long horn.Beta.1.32Bit.DVD.READ..3362112.TPB.torrent [thepiratebay.org] is what you are looking for.

MSDN subscribers?

"Any early thoughts, MSDN subscribers?"

Do those actually read Slashdot?

Re:MSDN subscribers?

> Do those actually read Slashdot?

I have an MSDN Universal Subscription! And I read /.! I guess that makes me a masochist or something, but I like seeing how misinformed, short sighted, and downright stupid some people are.

/. has really turned into a parody of itself. It's just "FREE SOFTWARE is Great. And Macintosh (the most expensive platform!) is also Great! And anything that Microsoft does is Bad!"

Re:MSDN subscribers?

I have an MSDN Universal Subscription! And I read /.! I guess that makes me a masochist or something, but I like seeing how misinformed, short sighted, and downright stupid some people are.

So that was why you got the MSDN subscription? ;-)

For the first time I agree with John C Dvorak.

For the first time I agree with John C Dvorak.

pcmag [pcmag.com]

"Vista? As in "Hasta la Vista, baby?" That name might be appropriate as a symbolic goodbye since it might be the end of the line for Microsoft's dominance in the OS business."

"The new OS is getting zero buzz. Zero. now the name Vista, along with the new Microsoft Vista logo, has made it worse. Could anything be less exciting?"

"THE FUTURE OF DESKTOP COMPUTING: Apple. Vista will open the door to what I believe will be a radical change in the computing landscape. The trends are clear. Once the new Mac OS appears next year it will gravitate toward the existing x86 community much more rapidly than anticipated..."

"Right now, and as much as x86 users do not want to admit it, the Mac OS is already better than Windows in its modern look and feel as well as its functionality. I see too many smart people with Mac laptops nowadays."

"...it is always possible that Apple doesn't understand the power play position it's in and might actually believe that it's better off somehow keeping its OS in a small niche rather than the big market. If the world changed tomorrow to 85 percent Mac "OS x86" its laptop sales alone would triple overnight. Apple didn't put together what many consider the finest in-house industrial design teams in the world to fool around with piddly sales and more redesigns of the iPod."

"That said, how much more of Steve Jobs can we handle? Do we really want to hear him say "I told you so?" If it gets some excitement back into desktop computing, yes, we do. I think we can take it."

Uhhh...

A Slashdotter agreeing with John C. Dvorak, who is saying nice things about Apple?

Quick, can someone post a current weather report for Hell, please?

Re:Uhhh...

Quick, can someone post a current weather report for Hell, please?

Here you go [bbc.co.uk] - apparently it's cold and rainy there today, but improving by next week.

...

Oh, hang on, you said Hell? Surely the two are synonymous? ;-)

Or, Michigan, better yet

Here's the current weather in Hell [epodunk.com].

Re:Uhhh...

Quick, can someone post a current weather report for Hell, please?

It's windy here right now, Craig, but as you can see on the horizon, the storm clouds are gathering. As we go to the satellite, you can see in the southern region of Hell, Dvorak's comments have unleashed a massive cold front, which is quite different from the hot air that we're used to from him. That by itself wouldn't be a huge problem, but to the North, in Gehenna, we've got the fallout caused by the Slashdotter agreeing with Dvorak. We've never seen that before, and Craig, I don't have to tell you, nobody knows what these two systems will do when they get together. In the mean time I'll be here. Back to you, Craig.

Seriously...

FTA:

The privacy statement for Internet Explorer 7.0 beta lists a "phishing filter," which is said to be capable of warning users about the possibility that the Web site currently being visited is impersonating a trusted Web site. This feature is turned off by default

Why bother creating a feature like this and having it turned off by default. The people most likely to be taken in by a phishing scam seem to me to be the same people who won't know enough about a computer to turn this feature on to protect themselves. The more tech and internet savvy people could turn this off if it annoys them.

but in order for it to be used properly, the Web site's address and other information about the user's computer, are sent to Microsoft for automatic evaluation.

Then again it does scare me a little that MS would be taking a peek at my browsing habits. Hopefully it just asks a big database full of bad websites whether or not this one is good. I'd like to think that MS wouldn't be keeping tabs on my online activity. Makes me wonder if this is why that bought Gator... I mean Claria.

At last ! Revenge on Mac !

Finally I will be able to shut the mouth of my Mac OS 9.1 using neighbour !

Wine

Has anyone tried to run IE 7 with WINE on Linux?

Cool. IE7 has priveledge seperation

Protected Mode. Available in the Windows Vista beta 2 release and beyond, Internet Explorer Protected Mode will provide new levels of security and data protection for Windows users. Designed to defend against "elevation of privilege" attacks, Internet Explorer Protected Mode provides the safety of a robust Internet browsing experience while helping prevent hackers from taking over the browser and executing code through the use of administrator rights. In this mode, Internet Explorer 7 is completely unable modify user or system files and settings. All communications occur via a broker process that mediates between the Internet Explorer browser and the operating system. The broker process is only initiated when the user clicks on the Internet Explorer menus and screens. The highly restrictive broker process prohibits workarounds from bypassing the Protected Mode. Any scripted actions or automatic processes will be prevented from downloading data or affecting the system. Specifically, Component Object Model objects will only be self-aware and have no reference information by which to identify and attack other applications or the operating system. Internet Explorer Protected Mode helps protect users from malicious downloads by restricting the ability to write to any local machine zone resources other than temporary Internet files. Attempting to write to the Windows Registry or other locations will require the broker process to provide the necessary elevated permissions.