Microsoft to Force IE7 Update on February 12th

Z80xxc! writes "InfoWorld is reporting that on February 12th, Microsoft will roll out Internet Explorer 7 through Windows Server Update Services to all systems - regardless of whether or not the update had been requested previously. The piece also mentions ways to prevent the update from occurring, for sysadmins who do not want to use IE7 on their systems. Microsoft claims that the decision was made due to 'security concerns'."

Good in some ways...

[dyefade (735994)]

At least now there is only IE7 to support - IE6 should quickly fall from use.

Re:Good in some ways...

[6Yankee (597075)]

Except I can guarantee that at least one of my clients will cling doggedly to IE6, just to piss me off...

Re:Good in some ways...

[afidel (530433)]

Probably because they are in the same boat we are, we implemented a large financial system last year and went to the newest available version and yet it still isn't certified with IE7, between that system and our document management system it will probably be years before we can run IE7. The financial system is going through its first year end right now so we are still tweaking and optimizing it, I can't imagine doing an upgrade just so we can support IE7!

Re:Good in some ways...

[Gr8Apes (679165)]

That's why you don't implement for IE at all. You build for Firefox, Opera, Safari, or something else that supports standards, and then make little tweaks to fix IE displays. Doing anything else puts you in a world of hurt.

Re:Good in some ways...

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

It's a difference in how they fail to support standards. While there are bugs in WebKit, Gecko and Opera, most of the time they don't support a particular feature of CSS they simply ignore it. IE, in contrast, often does completely the wrong thing. It's easy to design web sites for browsers that partially support the spec since HTML and CSS were both designed with graceful failure in mind. It's much harder to support a browser that implements the spec wrongly unless you do it at the expense of browsers that implement it correctly.

Re:Good in some ways...

[Mad Merlin (837387)]

You build for Firefox, Opera, Safari, or something else that supports standards

Last time I checked, none of these browsers are 100% compliant on most W3C standards.

Yeah, and nobody's perfect, so we should all be killed. Kidding aside, standards support is not a binary property, and I shouldn't have to point out that there's a world of difference between something that's 95% correct and something that's 5% correct.

IE7 is far more standards compliant than IE6, so I would think if you're truly worried about standards compliance in Internet Explorer, you'd welcome the upgrade.

...and 35% is a much greater percentage than 10%! IE7 is still much worse on standards than pretty much any other browser worth mentioning. The fact that IE7 still manages to be that much better than IE6 should simply give you an indication of how bad IE6 is (it's very very bad). So, while it would be nice if IE6 never existed and they skipped straight to IE7 in 2000 or so, that's not what happened, and now we're stuck with adding in a whole new host of workarounds for IE7, because it still doesn't render pages correctly a non-trivial amount of the time, provided that you want to support IE at all.

On the opposite end of the scale, I can develop a page in Konqueror (which is very standards compliant), and then check it in Firefox and Opera, and not end up needing to make any changes, because everything works the same. Checking in IE will almost certainly result in IE producing something largely wrong, but at least IE6 is a relatively known commodity [positioniseverything.net], with a well known set of workarounds. IE7 on the other hand is still largely undiscovered. Given Microsoft's past and the fact that they have no reason to produce a browser that doesn't suck, don't be surprised when people treat a new release of IE with scorn.

Not supporting IE at all is, without a doubt, the easiest approach. Supporting IE6 but not IE7 is still easier than supporting both IE6 and IE7. Supporting IE7 but not IE6 probably won't be feasible for most people for several years yet.

Firefox is the closest, but Opera and Safari are in no way better than IE when it comes to implementing standards.

I don't really test in Opera, but limited experience shows that to compare it to IE is no less insulting than comparing Firefox to IE. Konqueror (and presumably Safari, given that it was forked from Konqueror (or rather, KHTML)) is generally better about standards than Firefox, and unquestionably better than IE. Firefox is compatible with more pages on the general Internet than Konqueror, because it tries to emulate a lot of IE quirkiness, but that doesn't push it any closer to following standards.

Re:Good in some ways...

[Dan Ost (415913)]

In software development Implementation is the phase where a system is being deployed, it is not a phase where you develop the system.

That really depends on where your culture got its vernacular.

In research and academia, you implement a design or algorithm by writing code. You then deploy your implementation when you install it for your users.

In marketing and some production groups, "implement" is a synonym for "roll-out" or "deploy". Near as I can tell, they don't have a word that makes a distinction between designing software and actually coding it up. This causes no end of confusion in meetings between marketing groups and research groups.

Re:Good in some ways...

[peragrin (659227)]

Damn straight Active X is solely responsible for what percentage of viruses in the past 9 years since it's introduction? 50-60% more?

Coding for Active X is stupid because it is a virus magent. poorly designed, lots of buffer overflows, etc, etc.

design to standards and you will won't have nearly as many problems.

Re:Good in some ways...

[KiloByte (825081)]

It's not so good -- Win2k and 98 will still be affected. And they're quite widespread -- Win2k in bigger corporations, Win98 in smaller businesses. Private computers tend to use XP, mostly of questionable legality. And of those who run XP, a vast majority seems to have updates disabled.

And even if everyone switched from IE6 to IE7 overnight, it's still a steaming pile of crap. Sure, it may be mere bullshit instead of military-grade toxic sludge, but either version makes me glad I don't have to do webmonkeying for a living.

Re:Good in some ways...

[nevali (942731)]

Seriously, that's fine. You keep using IE 6 all you like. Just bear in mind that once your preferred broken browser is in the minority, us web developers will stop spending hours or days at a time going out of way to make our sites not look and work like complete and total ass in it.

The standards were created so that we didn't have to do that for every site that gets built, and by and large they apply--except for IE 6 and IE 7 (IE 7's so much better than IE 6, though; it's a breeze in comparison).

So yeah... you use IE 6. Then you'll discover how its rendering engine really copes with standards-compliant mark-up (hint: it's not pretty).

Re:Good in some ways...

[Phillup (317168)]

If you are so head-in-the-sand where Windows security is concerned...

Anyone truly worried about Windows' security would not be running Windows.

translation

[v1 (525388)]

Microsoft claims that the decision was made due to 'security concerns'."

So this means they're feeing insecure about their market share?

Go firefox!

Yes, finally! Get rid of IE6

[FooBarWidget (556006)]

IE6 is a huge pile of ******. These days, whenever I write a website, the procedure is always like this:
1. Test website in Firefox initially.
2. Verify that it works in Opera.
3. Verify that it works in Konqueror.
4. Verify that it works in Safari.
5. See it totally break down in IE6.

IE6 has too many rendering bugs. It's the sole cause of hours and hours of lost productivity. It's about time that it dies. IE7, although not as standards compliant as... uhm... pretty much every other browser on earth, is orders of magnitude better than IE6. People should be forced to use IE7 (or Firefox, or Opera, or whatever; just not IE6).

Re:IE7 is better?

[jrumney (197329)]

The funny thing is that I've had quite a number of pages that worked fine in IE6, worked fine in firefox (and others), but totally bombed in IE7.

These pages are probably detecting that you are using IE, and enabling ugly IE6 hacks (or more likely the sites are "designed for IE6", and only enable the standards compliance hacks when they detect Mozilla/Firefox and perhaps Safari and Opera. Nothing is perfect, but IE7 is miles better than IE6 when it comes to standards compliance and rendering CSS properly.

iptables

[Nako (228625)]

iptables -A INPUT -s update.microsoft.com -j DROP
at least for a month

Silverlight

[sjaguar (763407)]

Will this upgrade also include a (forced) installation of Silverlight?

Re:Silverlight

[jacksonj04 (800021)]

Doubtful, Silverlight is already a recommended updated so I doubt they'd bundle it. It's got some nice tricks up its sleeve, especially compared to Flash when it comes to tying in with AJAX.

IE7 tabbed browsing sucks

[Qrlx (258924)]

This is somewhat off topic, but whatever.

Has anyone else noticed how terrible tabbed browsing is in IE7?

Let's just say, hypothetically, I'm at my favorite porn site, looking at thumbnails. The plan is to ctrl-click the thumbnails and open them in tabs.

Once you get enough tabs open, there comes a point where IE7 bogs down tremendously when asked to dispaly jpgs, each in her own tab. Symptoms include clicks on the first tab are no longer acknowledged, and tremendous slowness moving between tabs.

After that, there comes a point where your ctrl-click won't even spawn a new tab.

Tabbed browsing is a great "innovation" in the IE product line, but in terms of performance and not being a resource hog, IE7 is easily outpaced by Mozilla and many others.

Talk about innacurate

[MSFanBoi2 (930319)]

IT still needs to approve the update via WSUS for IE 7 to get deployed. If its not an approved update you don't get it.

Of course this is Slashdot, you are allowed to spout all the innacurate crap you want, as long as its crap slung at Microsoft.

If people had bothered to read they would have noticed this in the "warning" from Microsoft: you have configured WSUS to "auto-approve" Update Rollup packages (this is not the default configuration), Windows Internet Explorer 7 will be automatically approved for installation after February 12, 2008 and consequently, you may want to take the actions below to manage how and when this update is installed

Thanks again Slashdot for proving the Linux camp really are full of a bunch of anti-Microsoft loonies who read only what they want to read.

Re:Talk about innacurate

[Penguinisto (415985)]

IT still needs to approve the update via WSUS for IE 7 to get deployed. If its not an approved update you don't get it.

...because everyone knows that every house and SOHO computer install has WSUS and an IT department, right?

(you know, those places where the bulk of MSFT's cutomer base can be found?)

/P

Includes "Windows Genuine Advantage validation"?!

[mrand (147739)]

So the handy dandy window listing the 100's of updates you are missing to keep your WinXP machine up-to-date just popped up over the weekend. No clue why. After seeing this slashdot story, I scrolled down and saw "Windows Internet Exploer 7.0 for Windows XP". I read the details and the last line says:

"This update includes Windows Genuine Advantage Validation."

I guess so few people are "choosing" to install their spyware that they now they are bundling it with other stuff? This is AFTER Microsloth said they weren't going to do such a thing:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/10/04/internet-explorer-7-update.aspx [msdn.com]

      Marc

Developers still use IE6

[MobyDisk (75490)]

I work on an AJAX application, and Microsoft Visual Studio's debugger doesn't work with IE7. Most of our dev team still uses IE6 for this reason.

Re:Tsk Tsk

[Kjella (173770)]

They must be pretty damn bad applications in the first place if moving from IE6 to IE7 'breaks' them!

1. Get spec: Must work on IE6
2. Design methodology: Hack it around until it looks right
3. Test methodology: Click around in IE6

If you have paid no heed to standards or alternative browsers, it's trivially simple to make a site that breaks on IE7.

Re:Take that Firefox!

[somersault (912633)]

Tumours can have high growth rates too, doesn't make them a good thing :p

Re:IE7 breaks corporate intranet apps and Moodle

[nmg196 (184961)]

> ASP.Net apps work only with IE6 with ActiveX enabled.

Sorry but this is rubbish. ASP.NET is a *server-side* engine. It's rubbish to say that ASP.NET sites only work with IE6.
And ASP.NET does NOT require any ActiveX support in the browser. Properly written ASP.NET sites work properly in ALL browsers - even ones which don't have javascript support.

I think your website is broken for other reasons - not because of ASP.NET or it's supposed incompatibly with IE7.