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IE7 Announced for Longhorn and WinXP

Posted by Zonk on Tue Feb 15, 2005 02:34 PM
from the coming-soon-to-a-pc-near-you! dept.
Internet Explorer The Internet Microsoft IT
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.
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  • I wonder what MS has stolen from firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Prophetic_Truth (822032) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:36PM (#11680258)
    Who wants to bet we'll see 'tabs' in IE7

  • Good (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:36PM (#11680261)
    Firefox could use a little competition.

    • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jugalator (259273) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @04:35PM (#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. ;-)

      • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Pionar (620916) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @03:32PM (#11681017)
        No, I don't think it's a surrender, it's more of a call to arms.

        Why did IE become the dominant browser? because Netscape stopped at 4.5 while IE kept updating and improving. Once IE got far enough ahead (about 5.0), it stopped still in the water, only releasing versions because of security bugs. So why is Firefox gaining popularity? Because IE hasn't done anything new since 2000, and doesn't have the kick-ass features Firefox has.

        Surrendering would involve using something other than IE as the default Windows browser.

        Improving it significatnly (which MS has been working on for about a year now, with not much to show for it besides popup blocking) is a step to stem the tide of defections to Firefox and win back the 5% Firefox has taken from it.

        • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

          by cayenne8 (626475) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @03:54PM (#11681306) Homepage Journal
          "Why did IE become the dominant browser?"

          I think mostly because IE came pre-installed with the OS on new computers. Most idiots out there came to associate Internet = IE. They don't know the concept of different parts and protocols of the internet...they don't know about other 'browsers' or how to download and install them. This was a few years ago when the 'Web' was new in the public mind. And most people weren't too internet savvy.

          Problem is....still lots of idiots like that out there today, probably more so....

          • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Tim C (15259) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @06:28PM (#11683496)
            "Idiots"? People are idiots because they lack knowledge and experience in computers? A little less arrogance might be a good idea...

            As for why IE became the dominant browser, you're only telling half the story. IE up to and including version 3 sucked big time; Netscape Navigator wiped the floor with it. Then IE 4 was released, and suddenly Navigator was the one looking a bit sick. Netscape then compounded its problems by throwing away the codebase and starting again from scracth; by the time they finally managed to get NN 6 out, it was far too late. Everyone but a small hardcore group of us had switched to IE, and with good reason. IE 4 was at least as good as NN4, but IE 5 trounced it (and I speak as someone who went NN->Mozilla->Firefox; I have *never* used IE as my primary browser). NN4 crashed frequently, had to reload the page to resize it, choked on moderately complex table structures, and the rendering engine was dog slow for all but trivial pages.

            In short, IE became dominant for two reasons:

            1) it's bundled with Windows, so every Windows user already has it
            2) it was just plain better than the alternatives for a long time

            Sorry to burst your superiority complex, but people being idiots had nothing to do with it.

  • Beta Release? (Score:4, Funny)

    by NardofDoom (821951) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:36PM (#11680263)
    Hasn't IE been in beta since, well, it was released?

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

      by moosesocks (264553) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @03:20PM (#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:5, Informative)

        by diamondsw (685967) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @07:08PM (#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.

  • Yippee (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nkuzmik (528366) <<moc.oohay> <ta> <kimzukn>> on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:36PM (#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:5, Insightful)

      by pilgrim23 (716938) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:43PM (#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, @03:03PM (#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:5, Insightful)

      by jsebrech (525647) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @06:08PM (#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, @02:37PM (#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.

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

    by ip_freely_2000 (577249) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:37PM (#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:5, Insightful)

      by RaisinBread (315323) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:59PM (#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, @03:20PM (#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.

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

        by Ziviyr (95582) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @03:11PM (#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.

  • So? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FuzzzyLogik (592766) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:37PM (#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?

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

    by bigtallmofo (695287) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:38PM (#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, @02:38PM (#11680301) Journal

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

  • IE.Net? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Repugnant_Shit (263651) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:41PM (#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:5, Informative)

      by irokitt (663593) <archimandrites-iaurNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday February 15 2005, @03:43PM (#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).

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

    by OmniVector (569062) <see my homepage> on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:43PM (#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.

  • So what.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 706GL (172709) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @02:55PM (#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, @03:12PM (#11680743) Homepage 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.
  • 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!

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

    by Dracos (107777) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @04:34PM (#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.

    • Consider, though, that almost everyone I know either uses Firefox now or avoids windows altogether. Heck, Firefox is even the default browser on the public computers on the UC Berkeley campus these days. I work there - I know how notoriously slow the PC techs are to change anything.

      Kudos to Berkeley, but they are the exception in most cases, and this is no exception to that rule. :)

      As long as IE is even almost as secure and almost as feature rich as Firefox, it will probably win the browser war. That is, unless and until Linux wins the OS war (or at least makes a bigger showing).

      IE7, great. Microsoft will probably integrate it more tightly into the OS. In the meantime, the Mozilla foundation has at least 4 more months to get even better. Lets hope they build an even stronger lead.

      About that word "lead". I don't think it means what you think it means. :) (Ob. quote.)

    • Re:Longhorn and XP converging (Score:5, Interesting)

      by the arbiter (696473) on Tuesday February 15 2005, @06:14PM (#11683343)
      While I won't use the language that the first replier did, I've got to agree with his fundamental point; if you've really used OSX or Fedora, you wouldn't be saying what you're saying. They're different from Windows, but just as versatile and easy to use.

      I'm also not going to accuse you of being a Microsoft shill, but busting out with a marketdroid line like "No OS, however, can truly compare with the compatibility and versatility of the world's most popular OS", well, it's hard for me to believe that you could be anything else.

      I suppose it's equally possible that you just work in marketing and describe all things that you like in that manner. But I'm doubtful.

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