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Internet Explorer Microsoft The Internet IT

Microsoft to Force IE7 Update on February 12th 480

Posted by Zonk from the they-know-best dept.
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'."
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Microsoft to Force IE7 Update on February 12th More

Microsoft to Force IE7 Update on February 12th

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  • Good in some ways... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dyefade ( 735994 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:14AM (#22125488) Homepage Journal
    At least now there is only IE7 to support - IE6 should quickly fall from use.

    • Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Funny)

      by 6Yankee ( 597075 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:22AM (#22125566)
      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... (Score:5, Informative)

        by afidel ( 530433 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:35AM (#22125650)
        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... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Gr8Apes ( 679165 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:46AM (#22125772)
          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: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by framauro13 ( 1148721 )

            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. They all have their bugs, including IE7. 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.

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

            • Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Informative)

              by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @10:01AM (#22126456) Journal
              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... (Score:4, Insightful)

                by slackmaster2000 ( 820067 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @10:59AM (#22127036)
                The grandparent isn't talking about HTML/CSS concerns. That would be silly. I'm assuming that his document management system uses ActiveX controls or some Microsoft proprietary features to improve the interface. They could also be doing SSO to IIS which can be difficult with a non-MS browser.

                Yeah it's short sighted to rely on a browser that you can't install and uninstall like a regular application. But it's understandable that people will be upset that IE7 is being forced.

            • Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Informative)

              by Mad Merlin ( 837387 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @11:19AM (#22127246) Homepage

              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... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @09:05AM (#22125910)
          I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's a good idea to use IE as an application platform. Sure standard HTML forms with CSS are fine, but why would you rely on IE specific features? You know that in a few years when MS reworks IE that you are going to have to rework your application to work on it. Also, there's a lot of other issues like limiting your user base.

          • Re:Good in some ways... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Ephemeriis ( 315124 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @10:22AM (#22126664)

            Also, there's a lot of other issues like limiting your user base.
            This has always frustrated me. A well-implemented web-based solution will run on literally anything. It doesn't matter if you've got Windows, Macintosh, Linux, BSD, or what. You just need a (mostly) standards-compliant browser. You'd think companies would love that.

            Instead, you've got all these web-based applications that only work on IE and then break when a new version comes out.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Richthofen80 ( 412488 )
            I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's a good idea to use IE as an application platform.

            Because if you're a salesman who wants to sell said application, its easier to pitch JUST the application. If you decide to standarize your app to a platform that only 20% of the browsing public is using, your sales team not only has to sell the merits of the application, but also they must sell the potential client on switching their IT infrastructure, in part. That is a hidden cost that companies often don't want to bear.
      • "Ah yes, that feature is working in most browsers but we're still working around yet another bug in IE. Should work on IE also within 24 hours but we suggest using firefox in the meantime".
      • Same of your clients may have found that IE7 broke some of their other systems. For example, in the company I work for upgrading to IE7 has messed up MS Access connectivity to our database server. Granted, we could fix it, but at this point going back to IE6 is cheaper and requires much fewer man-hours.

      • That would be me (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Mycroft_514 ( 701676 )
        FedEx has declared IE 7 off limits until further notice, so there is one place it won't get implemented. And all employees that want to access the LAN infrastructure are further forbidden to go to IE 7. Makes my decision easy on what to do about this, as I need my machines to be able to access that net.

    • Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:30AM (#22125608)
      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: (Score:3, Funny)

      by QBasicer ( 781745 )
      The quicker Microsoft gets rid of non-standard software, the better the alternatives work. I know there's quite a bit of sites that don't work under firefox, but the user doesn't have a choice (like my parent's payroll site at the gov't). While IE7 is still a long ways away from ideal, we must say that it's better than IE6 (using the lesser of two evils theory), and I'm happy that they made this choice.

      The firefox penetration has increased to the point where people don't know what it is, but they've been

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Peet42 ( 904274 )

        The quicker Microsoft gets rid of non-standard software, the better the alternatives work.

        While this is true, it's also not relevant. Microsoft make a deliberate choice to look at a standard then figure out how much "wiggle room" they have to interpret it "creatively", producing something that is different from everyone else in the market yet arguably (with the correct dictionary) "compliant". Then they blow the marketing budget of a mid-size company on changing the public perception of their product from

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Peet42 ( 904274 )

      IE6 should quickly fall from use.


      Except for those people using (the still legitimately supported) Windows 2000 Professional who were deliberately prevented from upgrading as an "incentive" to convert to XP.

  • Take that Firefox! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:15AM (#22125500)
    Now we'll see which browser has the greatest growth rate in January!

  • translation (Score:5, Funny)

    by v1 ( 525388 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:17AM (#22125512) Homepage Journal
    Microsoft claims that the decision was made due to 'security concerns'."

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

    Go firefox!

    • IE7 for Win2k? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by whoever57 ( 658626 )

      Microsoft claims that the decision was made due to 'security concerns'."
      So does this meant that IE7 will be available on Win2k? Win2K is still in "extended support" mode until 2010. Extended support means that MS fixes security problems.

  • Yes, finally! Get rid of IE6 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FooBarWidget ( 556006 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:19AM (#22125540)
    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).
    • 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. In addition, there are a number of companies which in-house sites which are *not* IE7 compatible (yes, sometimes due to less than spectacular coding that IE6 compensated for... but it's still not a good idea for an upgrade to *break* compatibility across the board).

      I wonder if it would be possible for MS to allow use of both legacy IE6 and IE7 somehow. At least
      • I've had quite a number of pages that worked fine in IE6, worked fine in firefox (and others), but totally bombed in IE7.

        In my experience, most on-screen IE7 oddities come from it doing strange things when calculating the width and height of elements; it doesn't seem to inherit in the same way other browsers do. Nine times out of ten when IE7 is being weird, I can fix it by setting the height/width of the parent element to the same as the child element. Annoying, but at least the final code remains standa

      • Re:IE7 is better? (Score:5, Informative)

        by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:38AM (#22125692)

        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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nmg196 ( 184961 ) *
        > there are a number of companies which in-house sites which are *not* IE7 compatible

        That's usually a problem with the site - not the browser.

        > but it's still not a good idea for an upgrade to *break* compatibility

        Yes it is. Why try and maintain compatibility with a BROKEN and BUGGY browser? Fix the browser, then let the web developers fix their sites.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nevali ( 942731 )
      As a web developer, I've been watching IE 6's share of the browser market decline steadily. I can only agree with the above comment--the sooner it dies a death, the better.

      Unfortunately, we still have clients who insist on using Windows 2000 (which can't run IE 7). Thankfully, they don't stick to IE 5.5 and complain that the sites "don't look right" in it--they at least update as far as they can.

      I've lost track of the number of occasions that I've held back on replacing all of the IE6-specific styling and s

      • Re:Yes, finally! Get rid of IE6 (Score:4, Funny)

        by Carrot007 ( 37198 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:34AM (#22125646)
        > Unfortunately, we still have clients who insist on using Windows 2000 (which can't run IE 7). Thankfully, they don't stick to IE 5.5 and complain that the sites "don't look right"

        Ok, I'm not at work today but let's just pretend like I am...

        1. Fires up IE

        2. These sites just don't look right in this ;-)

        3. Things are updated as far as they can be.

        4. Oh yeah that's right NT 4.0.

        Damn you microsoft.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nevali ( 942731 )
          Looking at the stats for the sites we run, the proportion of NT 4.0 users who don't install an alternative browser is so small that the time would be better spent just disabling CSS and JavaScript for older versions of IE.

          If you've been running IE on NT 4.0 all this time and haven't noticed sites are broken, you either don't view many sites, or have a really warped view of the web :)

      • I've had one client complain last year that the site didn't work in their browser, which turned out to be Netscape 4.7. I foolishly used the <button> tag which is not supported by Netscape 4.7.

        There will always be one weirdo still using antique software.

  • Web developers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wzzzzrd ( 886091 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:22AM (#22125560)
    What's with web developers that have to test html code on IE6? It's really a shame for MS that you can't have IE6 and IE7 installed side by side (I know it IS somehow possible, but that's way too complicated and not the point here). To bad that you always need a second (virtual) machine, just to test html code. And now they are forcing the upgrade...Stupid.

    • Re:Web developers (Score:4, Informative)

      by cdrudge ( 68377 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:36AM (#22125664) Homepage
      We have to test with IE6 as our clients demand it. Of the couple of sites that I've done since starting here, all of the corporate big wigs that sign the payment checks use IE6. So what is pretty simple to do with IE7 or any other browser we have to spend 3x the time checking things out with IE6. Then go back to more modern browsers and make sure none of the hacks we put in affected those browsers.

      And it's actually very easy to install multiple versions of IE. See here [tredosoft.com]. It's a nice, tidy installer.
      • Have you made clear the monetary incentive to move to a better browser? After all, you do charge them more because you spend more man-hours complying with their ridiculous requests, right?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nevali ( 942731 )
      You can do it with MultipleIEs, an unofficial hack to install multiple versions of IE on a machine.

      It works pretty well nowadays--it was a bit shaky when it was first released, though.

      We use it for testing internally, though I do have VMs lying around for "just to be sure" testing.

    • (I know it IS somehow possible, but that's way too complicated and not the point here).
      It's actually quite easy.
      • Go here [evolt.org].
      • Choose the browser you want and download.
      • Unzip and click executable
      I know that wasn't your point but it is very possible ... just not through Microsoft (which is where the real shame is).
  • ...For web standards at least.

    Quite frankly only those who have built IE-only sites for IE6 should really suffer. I think it's all worth it if we can finally have a critical mass of users supporting standards even a little better. As a former web developer I'm biased though. :)

  • iptables (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nako ( 228625 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:27AM (#22125600) Homepage
    iptables -A INPUT -s update.microsoft.com -j DROP
    at least for a month

  • Silverlight (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sjaguar ( 763407 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:31AM (#22125622) Homepage
    Will this upgrade also include a (forced) installation of Silverlight?

    • Re:Silverlight (Score:5, Informative)

      by jacksonj04 ( 800021 ) <nick@nickjackson.me> on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:49AM (#22125786) Homepage
      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sabernet ( 751826 )
        Except that there's a known issue with nvidia boards for the last half year that MS has yet to fix, causing all Silverlight audio to clip like crazy and be at 200% volume with no control.

        http://silverlight.net/forums/p/3668/10602.aspx [silverlight.net]

        Still haven't fixed it. Though at least now it seems their devs have acknowledged its existence.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CarpetShark ( 865376 )

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


      I'm betting that's the real reason for this update. After all, they can hardly migrate microsoft.com to silverlight if no one can use the site.

  • Good for them (Score:3, Informative)

    by nekokoneko ( 904809 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:34AM (#22125644)
    I think this is great news. Quote: (...) and it has posted guidelines on how to ward off the automatic update if admins want to keep the older IE6 browser on their companies' machines. So you can keep IE6 if you want to, but all the non-tech savvy users get a safer, more standards compliant browser.

  • IE7 tabbed browsing sucks (Score:5, Funny)

    by Qrlx ( 258924 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:40AM (#22125706) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • ... on dialup access?

  • While I coud use the money... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by capnkr ( 1153623 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:42AM (#22125734)
    ...I wish there was another way of making it.

    OK, note to self: week of Feb 12, expect many calls from windows-using clients...
  • Ah, well if it's a security thing, then Microsoft should add this to the critical update list:

    Wubi [softpedia.com], which "is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click."

  • IE6 has fallen behind Firefox in browser share and IE7 is behind as well - at least by W3 stats [w3schools.com].

    IF M$ forces everyone to IE7 it will combine the two IE stats and make it the #1 browser by share again. But if you look at the trend Firefox is growing at a steady pace every year. By doing the force upgrade more IE users may say "enough" and take another look at downloading and installing Firefox. The way to tell that would be if the IE share drops drastically and the Firefox share jumps drastically. I'm kind o

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nevali ( 942731 )
      Uh, the w3schools stats are only for visitors to w3schools.com, which given their high ranking in SERPs for HTML element and attribute names, CSS properties and JavaScript objects, are primarily web developers quickly looking something up via Google instead of reaching for a nearby book.

      I'd be concerned if w3schools' stats showed Firefox at the same kind of penetration level it is on consumer sites.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by darthflo ( 1095225 )
      Oookay, kiddo. Now let's start the thinking, shall we?

      1. The stats you quote are taken from w3schools.com
      2. w3schools.com is a website containing some tutorials for web-related languages and technologies.
      3. People interested in the topics covered by w3schools are a small subset of all web surfers.
      4. People reading or using w3schools are another subset of this subset of surfers; according to their stats mostly Firefox users

      Conclusion: Looking at those stats as an indicator of browser usage on the ww

  • Talk about innacurate (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MSFanBoi2 ( 930319 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @08:53AM (#22125822)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @09:53AM (#22126372) Journal

      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

  • Argh,

    On my home PC IE7, not only makes it crawl (even if it is a 2Gb dual core machine), but also breaks the Creative device explorer. Not to mention the that the poorly crafted render and input loop minces a WTS server with only a few simultaneous IE users - last month we reverted back to IE6 and saw a 100% performance increase!!

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

    Yeah, the security of IE6's place as the monopoly browser is in jeopardy, so Microsoft has to force its customers to install a Microsoft browser that has a chance of competiing with FireFox.

  • IE7 ? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Spc01 ( 1188301 )
    I don't like what they have done with IE7.. especially removed support for Active Desktop that was very good and being a standard for 12 years..

  • Screw HTML and CSS standards compliance; the only thing I'm holding out for is sweet, sweet 24-bit PNG support. No more stupid matte colours, and no spending ages getting fiddly non-square image shapes to layer onto complex backgrounds nicely. Plus: 'glass' background effects. Hoo-fucking-rah.

    The sooner Microsoft push this update on everyone, the better. After all, it's not like I use IE - why should I care whether people want the update or not?

  • Accurate Statistics? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dbc001 ( 541033 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @09:04AM (#22125900)
    Does anyone have accurate statistics on IE version usage right now? Unfortunately my own stats really only break down between browser vendors and it's difficult to get per-version stats...

    It's probably wise to start planning to stop supporting IE6 when it's usage drops below a certain percentage - the sooner we get rid of IE6 the better. Of course, a lot of users are stuck with it - but when things start breaking, they'll get the hint to either upgrade (if that's even possible) or just switch to a better browser.

    Some stats here [w3schools.com] and a little blurb here [wikipedia.org]

  • Our intranet site uses IE6 activeX... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @09:14AM (#22125996)
    The place I work uses activeX components to log into the citrix-based intranet client. They have big signs for the last couple years stating that they will not support Firefox. Over the last year they also had to add a sign that they will not cover IE7. Should be interesting to see what they do now. Maybe I'll drop them an email and ask. :-)

  • 6 or 7 p0wned by Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)

    by starglider29a ( 719559 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @09:42AM (#22126224)
    I have a Canadian Dollar here that says that this "update" is to shift the stats. As of right now [w3schools.com], Firefox is p0wning IE6 OR IE7, but not IE6 AND IE7.

  • IE7 sucks just as much as IE6 (Score:3, Informative)

    by acoustix ( 123925 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @09:48AM (#22126282)
    My company can't switch to IE7 yet because of web applications from 3rd party providers that don't work with IE7. Thanks again to Microsoft for totally fucking up the web.


    Nick

  • Includes "Windows Genuine Advantage validation"?! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mrand ( 147739 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @10:09AM (#22126540)
    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

  • Just so everyone knows (Score:3, Informative)

    by bogie ( 31020 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @10:27AM (#22126722) Journal
    WSUS or Windows Server Update Systems is an addon for Microsoft Windows networks. It allows you to control which updates clients get and instead of every client going to MS's servers, clients go to the WSUS server which can save a crapload of bandwidth. Regular home users are not affected.

  • Developers still use IE6 (Score:5, Funny)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @10:54AM (#22126986) Homepage
    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.

  • Can IE 7 be skinned to look like IE 6? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ciggieposeur ( 715798 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @11:17AM (#22127224)
    Seriously, the interface is the main reason I can't stand IE 7 (well, that and my copy of Win2k running in Parallels). If I could have the IE 7 rendering with the IE 6 "look and feel" then I would update it.

    (Of course, I generally use Seamonkey on Linux and Firefox on Mac, so this is just for the times I find myself stuck on a Windows machine.)

  • MS coders have it made, no longer update old prod (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Locutus ( 9039 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @11:29AM (#22127386)
    Microsoft is finally pulling the 'security' card to force users to new versions of their products. It must be nice to be a MSFT programmer when you don't have to work on one rev old products no matter how large the install base.

    Seriously, it blew me away in the mid 90s when the press+dog just let Microsoft refuse to provide USB support for the previous OS product and claimed that if you want USB support, you must purchase a new computer or fumble through an upgrade. IIRC, Windows 98 and NT v4 were such products though NT v4 was a larger update since they both moved the graphics subsystem into the kernel and added the win95 shell/desktop along with adding USB support.

    I would love to be a fly on the wall for all those meetings they have on how to get customers to upgrade. There's got to be some very funny and some very scary recommendations being thrown around those meetings. It's got to be tough for Microsoft, wanting customers to be lame enough to not look outside of Microsoft for software solutions yet at the same time, be willing to keep upgrading Microsoft products every couple of months and like it.

    LoB

  • HP Printers!!! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ender77 ( 551980 ) on Monday January 21, 2008 @12:44PM (#22128396)
    Prepare for HUGE problems with some older HP printers. When I updated to IE7, my HP software (HP director) for my all-in-one 1350 HP printer stopped working, it is a known issue with IE7 that HP has known about but has refused to release a real fix(updated installer). As long as you do not uninstall the software you can find fixes online, but if you uninstall it (like I did), you are screwed unless you do a rollback before IE7.

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