Microsoft to Force IE7 Update on February 12th 480
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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)
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
...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.
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, Informative)
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Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead, you've got all these web-based applications that only work on IE and then break when a new version comes out.
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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.
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That would be me (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The firefox penetration has increased to the point where people don't know what it is, but they've been
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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
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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.
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope you don't have a similar attitude where Linux updates are concerned.
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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And, if you need to check if a page works in IE6, you have it right there. I just checked the IE history on my XP box -- there was not a single entry out
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox, Opera, Safari, and the various other Gecko/KHTML/WebKit derivatives aren't on their own significant enough to warrant special treatment, but taken together (which makes sense, as they generally adhere to the same standards) they're a pretty persuasive argument for standards-compliant mark-up: especially when you take into account the fact that IE 7 isn't remotely as bad at dealing with it as IE 6 is.
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Why on earth not? IE 7 is *SO MUCH* better than IE 6 it's ridiculous.
IE 6 is so bad that I can't understand why anybody would NOT want to upgrade as soon as IE 7 came out.
IE 6 is an seven year old web browser! It was released on August 27, 2001! a The web has moved on from then and so should you.
Re:Good in some ways... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because most vertical web apps are so poorly written that they rely on the bugs and problems in IE6 to function. Almost every single app I had to manage at my last job was IE6 specific and written by a bunch of blathering idiots, I regularly went into the asp code to fix something they said cant be fixed.
Most companies buy the low grade dog food webapp suites as they have no other choice and then they are stuck having to support it's quirks until that company actually hires competent programmers or someone else comes along and makes something different.
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You're right that a browser upgrade should never disable a driver. But the real question is, what the hell kind of shitty-ass driver relies on a web browser to function?!
Take that Firefox! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Take that Firefox! (Score:5, Funny)
translation (Score:5, Funny)
So this means they're feeing insecure about their market share?
Go firefox!
IE7 for Win2k? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, finally! Get rid of IE6 (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
IE7 is better? (Score:2)
I wonder if it would be possible for MS to allow use of both legacy IE6 and IE7 somehow. At least
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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)
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.
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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.
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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)
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.
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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
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There will always be one weirdo still using antique software.
Web developers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Web developers (Score:4, Informative)
And it's actually very easy to install multiple versions of IE. See here [tredosoft.com]. It's a nice, tidy installer.
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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.
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Good Thing... (Score:2)
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)
at least for a month
Silverlight (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Silverlight (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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)
IE7 tabbed browsing sucks (Score:5, Funny)
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.
How long will it take ... (Score:2)
... on dialup access?
While I coud use the money... (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, note to self: week of Feb 12, expect many calls from windows-using clients...
Suggestion for Microsoft (Score:2, Funny)
Wubi [softpedia.com], which "is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click."
This is about browser market share (Score:2)
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
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I'd be concerned if w3schools' stats showed Firefox at the same kind of penetration level it is on consumer sites.
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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)
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)
(you know, those places where the bulk of MSFT's cutomer base can be found?)
it breaks my system and makes WTS crawl!! (Score:2)
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
Security of what (Score:2)
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)
The only thing I'm holding out for (Score:2)
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)
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)
6 or 7 p0wned by Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
IE7 sucks just as much as IE6 (Score:3, Informative)
Nick
Includes "Windows Genuine Advantage validation"?! (Score:5, Interesting)
"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)
Developers still use IE6 (Score:5, Funny)
Can IE 7 be skinned to look like IE 6? (Score:3, Insightful)
(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)
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)
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Re:Firefox! (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully 3.0 will fix that, but for the meantime I'll stick with Safari.
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Literally the only time I've been annoyed with FF in a year is having to load IE6/7 to open a website that refused to recognize FF using IETab. And in that case, it's not FF that annoys me
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As for 3.0, I'm using the beta and I'd have to say that render times do seem to be improved. Memory usage doesn't seem to be much better than previous versions; After leaving it running for about 14 hours (mostly overnight) I'm at 200 mb memory usage with two tabs open, one be
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FF 3.0 reportedly is much lighter in memory and faster in performance, but I've not
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(And at Wikimedia we're very much looking forward to the VIDEO element supplying Ogg Theora support right there in the browser.
Try Opera (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Try Opera (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason I use Firefox instead of Opera is the same reason I use Windows instead of Linux: The former supports the plugins/applications that I want to run, while the latter doesn't. Specifically, the plugins I use in Firefox are:
Now before you pick a random plugin, e.g. "DownloadHelper", and make a guess as to what it does based on its name, and then claim "You can download files in Opera too, and you don't even need a plugin to do it!", you really should find out what the plugin actually does.
I'm happy with Firefox, and I don't have any incentive to switch to Opera. I'm open to switching, but I need a reason, as switching takes energy and effort. If you want me to switch, then you need to provide me with an incentive. So not only would Opera need to duplicate all of the functionality I have with my existing plugins, but it would need to offer something additional to make the switch worthwhile.
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Is seeing the source really worth using an inferior product?
No. But others being able to see it, modify it, and keep it updated and working indefinitely, certainly is. That's why I use Gimp instead of Photoshop. (Although I don't think Firefox is an inferior product.)
Opera could at any point suddenly decide it will not support Linux anymore, or it could start including advertisements again, or start charging money. It could be bought out by a larger company (e.g. Microsoft) and put to an end, never to see another update.
Firefox does not have to worry about that. Ev
Re:Firefox! (Score:5, Insightful)
As I've said before, the problem is that we can never seem to recreate the problems users complain about. When we ask for a detailed set of steps to reproduce the problem, we almost always either get none or we cannot reproduce the problem. You can't fault developers for not fixing problems, when hardly anyone can seem to point out any. You need to report the bugs first, and then the developers will fix them.
I do not seem to experience these problems you refer to. Others I talk to in the MozillaZine forums do not, either. When people come into the forums complaining about problems, we point them to the Knowledge Base, and when they follow the instructions there, they seem to quickly fix their problems.
If you are unwilling or unable to report or fix problems in Firefox, you should probably switch to another browser. There's no sense putting up with problems, as there are many good browsers out there. And it's even more pointless to keep complaining about vague problems such as "shoddy coding and bloat in general" when you cannot point out even one specific problem, no matter how trivial.
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They must be pretty damn bad applications in the first place if moving from IE6 to IE7 'breaks' them!
How does IE7 break them?
Re:Tsk Tsk (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You seem to have a pretty realistic view. Microsoft will release a standards compliant browser around the time that Ron Paul is actually elected president. You just forgot the cold fusion powered flying cars.
Re:Tsk Tsk (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tsk Tsk (Score:4, Insightful)
How long do you need? IE7 was released in August 2005 so Web developers could start testing and fixing their apps well ahead of the October 2006 release.
Re:IE7 breaks corporate intranet apps and Moodle (Score:5, Informative)
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.