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IE7 to be Pushed to Users Via Windows Update
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Jul 26, 2006 09:57 PM
from the have-some-explorer dept.
from the have-some-explorer dept.
dfrick writes "CNET is reporting that IE7 will be pushed to users via Windows Update. This has serious implications for e-commerce websites whose functionality might be affected by any bugs in the software. Also to have end users suddenly using a new browser right before the holiday shopping season could magnify the cost any bugs that might create a bad user experience on sites."
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Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Informative)
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers set to 0
Problem solved.
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem will be solved when either it's by default or they provide a clickie in the preferences panel to change it. In the mean time, it's simply a fix for those who know it's a configuration issue instead of a run-of-the-mill memory leak.
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never understood why people with 1-2GB of RAM freak out when applications actually use some of that available memory. What good is a ton of memory if it's not being used? Firefox is a memory pig, yes, but it's giving it back to Windows should other programs actually need it.
The same can be said about the aggresive memory trimming. Why are people willing to put up with a frozen UI whenever Firefox trims its memory is beyond me.
I have plenty of free memory and don't really care either way, so I value usability higher than low memory use. People should probably get their learn on about Windows memory usage [shsc.info] before posting any more wrong statements about Firefox.
That's not to say that Firefox (and some of the more well-known) extensions don't leak memory like a proverbial sieve. I'm just saying that the above instances aren't memory leaks and anyone claiming that they are should be modded down.
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the explanation I linked to on Windows memory usage. If the only leak symptom you're seeing on your machine is a scary number in the Task Manager, things probably aren't as bad as you think.
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Informative)
Here at home, FF has been running about 10 minutes, currently has 6 tabs open, and is using 56meg of RAM.
At work, it's been running for a couple of days, and is using 161meg.
I generally have to kill FF every few days due to the amount of RAM it uses. Now, I tend to go through tabs like nobody's business and have a couple of extensions installed (although not *that* many), so perhaps I'm not the typical user. However, just because *you* get it to run in next to no RAM on a POS machine doesn't mean the rest of us can.
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
I'm confused? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
wtf? (Score:5, Informative)
IE has to re-load all of its DLL even if another application has already loaded the Windows HTML rendering engine. So the memory reported in TaskMgr for IE is WHAT IE IS USING. Get it?
Um... what did the above just mean? If I remember my CS courses correctly, the reason DLL's exist is to REUSE the CODE by putting it ONCE in MEMORY and then allowing ACCESS from (gasp) DIFFERENT applications. Perhaps you are talking about DATA. There, you will have separate pages copied. That does no mean that CODE does not take space. If I am correct in assuming the HTML rendering engine code IS provided as a DLL, and the IE is just a wrapper around it, the rendering CODE could easily take 5-10MB of RAM, because rendering engines ARE COMPLEX.
Moreover, in Windows, fonts are bundled into the DLLs, making them shared as well. This means that IE can re-use fonts loaded into the HTML rendering engine, while Firefox probably cannot (It would make no point to write a browser that depends on another rendering engine, IMHO).
That's what I think the parent meant.
If you need substantiation for these claims, here you go (wikipedia):
The shared library term is slightly ambiguous, because it covers at least two different concepts. First, it is the sharing of code located on disk by unrelated programs. The second concept is the sharing of code in memory, when programs execute the same physical page of RAM, mapped into different address spaces. It would seem that the latter would be preferable, and indeed it has a number of advantages. For instance on the OpenStep system, applications were often only a few hundred kilobytes in size and loaded almost instantly; the vast majority of their code was located in libraries that had already been loaded for other purposes by the operating system.
In Windows, the concept was taken one step further, with even system resources such as fonts being bundled in the DLL file format. The same is true under OpenStep, where the universal "bundle" format is used for almost all system resources.
And, BTW, you're wrong about denied access. There is a function in the Windows API that allows any process run a thread in another process. Yep, any app can do that. From the Phrack magazine, issue 62:
The CreateRemoteThread function creates a thread that
runs in the address space of another process.
HANDLE CreateRemoteThread(
HANDLE hProcess,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpThreadAttributes,
DWORD dwStackSize,
LPTHREAD_START_ROUTINE lpStartAddress,
LPVOID lpParameter,
DWORD dwCreationFlags,
LPDWORD lpThreadId
);
Two more functions:
VirtualAllocEx()
WriteProcessMemory()
give us the power to inject our own arbitrary code to the
address space of another process - and once it is there, we can
create a thread remotely to execute it.
Parent
Re:wtf? (Score:5, Informative)
#1) DLLs can be shared, but the IE HTML COM objects are NOT shared, IE launches them in its own process. This shift was a security change in WinME and Win2k, that was even further extended in WinXP. IE 'could' in theory piggy back some of the HTML DLLs if another application like the shell had them loaded, but it 'specifically' DOES NOT for security reasons. (Go look this up, please. Do a google or a search on microsoft.com about COM isolation, also do a search on DLL isloation, and do a search on IE's Engine isloation from the OS.)
#2) Your assertions about DLL sharing and submitting that FireFox cannot use the Font sharing abilities of Windows are crazy. If ANY application is running under Windows and is writing to the screen in some matter, they are 'inherently' using the Win32 GDI+ API and 'shared' DLLs that all applications have access to, although there is distinction between shared core libraries and ones that are not.
#3) Your example of pushing code into another process is not needed, this is something that is well known by most people, and is not isolated to just Windows. It is something that Vista deals with in a way that shattering cannot allow process elevation. (Go look this stuff up.) Also this has NOTHING to do with whether Firefox or IE have a smaller memory footprint.
FireFox 'being a Win32' Application has JUST as much advantage to using the shared core OS DLLS as any windows application from Notepad to iTunes to Photoshop. I realize that some of the UI elements and programming in FireFox forgoes using some of the Windows APIs, but that is the FireFox teams decision and why cross platform applications often end up appearing slow and bloated and often uncompatibile with new OS releases because they do not adhere to the common UI structures or APIs provided.
This is true of FireFox running on KDE, OSX, or Win32. FireFox does employ 'some' optimizations on 'each' platform using the core OS, so FireFox is not Win32 free in any respect. For example it draws to the display context, it is using the standard Windows GDI APIs and DLLs as well.
The silliness in the responses I have seen are people are trying to define Firefox as sometihng it is and something it isn't, just as they are IE. Applications that run on ANY OS take advantage of the 'platform' available to it, the core or underlying APIs or Libraries that makeup the UI portion of the OS. (Yes we are sticking with GUI concepts here)
So Firefox can use any Windows TrueType Font, because it uses the WIndows Font API and therefore the Windows Font Rendering technologies. That is why you get cleartype in Firefox when running it on Windows, because it is LETTING Windows draw the fonts to its display bitmap, which is also something it is using Windows to maintain.
See, this is why I find your comment on the 'Fonts' as an example of something Firefox 'might not' have access to to be insane. Prove yourself wrong, next time you are at a Windows Machine, option the Option and change the Default rendering Font in FireFox to ANY Windows supported Font, and bingo, it will use that font, because it is LETTING Windows do the Font Rendering. Also notice that if cleartype is enabled, it is used and the Windows Font Hinting technology is also used.
FireFox is NOT at a loss of advantages when it comes to comparing itself to IE. If FireFox does eat more Memory (and sometimes it truly doesn't) then this is a problem with FireFox, not BECAUSE IE gets ANY special treatment in Windows.
Ok?
Parent
Re:Windows...still... booting... (Score:5, Informative)
1) DLLs are shared across processes. If one process loads a DLL, it resides in physical memory, at a specific virtual address. If another process loads the same DLL, it reuses the same copy in physical memory, but in a different virtual address space. It may even be loaded at a different virtual address in the second process. The pages are read-only so any attempt by either process to modify them will result in an access violation.
2) Windows explorer is a process which exists as an application called explorer.exe. It is started when you log on to Windows, and explorer.exe links to mshtml.dll and shdocvw.dll. These are the IE core DLLs (the Microsoft HTML parser and the Shell Document View, respectively). It also happens to link to gdiplus.dll, gdi.dll, user.exe, ntdll.dll and a bunch of others.
3) Internet explorer is a very small application (a few hundred KB compiled) which links into shdocvw.dll and mshtml.dll. It also happens to link to a bunch of other DLLs like ntdll.dll.
4) Firefox is another application. It links to such Windows DLLs as ntdll.dll and user.exe. It also happens to link to gecko.dll, which no other Windows application will load. Therefore when Firefox starts up, it is going to be the first to load gecko.dll.
5) Going back to point 1; every time any application loads a specific DLL, the loader will check to see if it is already present in physical memory, and will create a new virtual mapping for it. The physical memory used is shared across each process. When Windows starts, it loads the IE core DLLs. Most of IE is in memory by the time you can view the desktop. Firefox however, has a much smaller percentage of the application in memory before you click on it.
Hence: Most of IE is loaded before you click on the IE icon. Most of Firefox is not loaded until you click on the IE icon.
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
All this coming from someone who DOES dislike the my-broswer-makes-coffee-too mentality so common today. But really, why do you single ActiveX out?
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Why single out ActiveX? (Score:5, Informative)
You must be new here. Here are a few reasons, some of them obvious:
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
I believe they are calling it a 'feature'.
Parent
Demonizing ActiveX... (Score:5, Informative)
a) It's a security risk waiting to happen - ActiveX controls have no limits placed on what they can do to your machine. Even Internet Explorer has finally heaved a sigh and is now blocking them by default.
b) It's more Microsoft lock-in. An ActiveX site is a Windows(tm)-only site.
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference with FireFox extensions is that they can't be embedded in a web page; you need to download them and install them manually. You will never visit a site which requires a particular FireFox extension (running with the same privileges as the rest of your applications) in order to navigate.
Now COM is an idea I like. It's a logical extension of the VMS Common Language Environment from procedural to pseudo-OO languages. The problem is not the underlying technology, it is the deployment. If ActiveX controls were run through something like systrace, which would validate arguments to system calls and block any that didn't match a fairly restrictive security model, then it would be fine.
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Informative)
The internet is, by its very nature, to be considered an insecure and hostile network. Pages you surf to are by definition to be seen as hostile until proven benign. And even then, it's happened more than once that a page considered safe was hacked and turned into a malicious site.
AX is a "direct link" between net applications and your system. Which is incredibly convenient, but also incredibly dangerous considering the described problems with the internet. If the internet was a trusted medium, this would be THE technology. Since it is not, it is THE threat.
Yes, PEBKAC is part of this danger. But then, think again how many of the "killer viruses" that spread within the last few years relied ONLY on the stupidity of people and how successful they were. ILoveYou, Kournicova (or however she's spelled) and their variants required user interaction to become active. Without a stupid user, these programs would have had zero chance of spreading.
A web application or technology has no business with my machine's system. It may run in a sandbox, which is great, it may read/write in certain, predetermined places (which are secured against the rest of the system), that's it. Giving an application from an insecure, potentially malicious, source the ability to run at system level is simply and plainly stupid. It's like playing russian roulette with 5 chambers loaded and, after hearing the 'click' once, thinking that nothing can happen and it's safe.
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
2. I actually discovered one of the first activeX security holes, way back in 1999.
The problem with AX is that it is really Ole Controls, OCX, upgraded for the internet era. OCX was nice, a version of Visual Basic (VBX) controls that was language neutral. Their goal was to make it easy for anyone to embed their controls inside their apps, and so have fancy apps with less coding. Classic Java Beans were sun's ill-fated attempt to copy this. VBX and OCX were probably the enablers of the best market in re-usable client-side components. Want fancy reports in your app? Crystal Reports OCX. Want good database access? Use the db access controls that ship from MS. OCX was a really nice design.
The trouble with ActiveX was that they turned the web browser into a container, with the ability to download and run any activeX control. By default, all OCXs that are installed on a PC are enabled for use in IE, even though they were never written for the assumption that their caller was trusted. There's nothing wrong with an OCX to be embedded inside a C++ app letting you open files in the local filesystem. delete files there, overwrite things. But have some random javascript do that and your box is owned. Most emergency patches by MS and PC manufacturers is for built in controls. to mark them as unsafe for scripting, or to mark them as revoked.
Failing one: ActiveX is only secure if the controls are designed to be called by untrusted people. Even if the controls arent scripted, they can still take params which can be malicious and read/write illegitimate files. Example: windows media control lets you pass in a path in the local filesystem. Script doesnt have access to the contents, but you can work out if the file is present or not. It is leaking information.
Auto control download is the other problem. AX controls are pulled down, their signature verified. There is no sandbox, so the system is built entirely on the model that the people who write the controls are well meaning. The spyware industry showed the lie for that.
Failing two: there is no sandbox for control.
Now, for a few hundred dollars verisign will sell a cerificate in the name "Microsoft requires you to install this component.ltd" and that is what appears on the click-here-to-be-0wned dialog.
Failing three: the vendors of certificates are more interested in certificate sales fees than the safety of the box. If verisign took some financial hit for every bit of spyware they signed off, things would be different.
AX controls are usually written in C++, which is one of the C/C++ family of 'buffer overflow enabled' languages. I know I always get marked down for flame baiting when I say that, but the truth is while compentent people can write really secure code in C/C++ (eg. Apache HTTPD, openSSH), too many developers are in a hurry that ship something that just about works on the deadline required. Because AX controls are not in a sandbox, every single attribute and method has to be treated as something that a malicious piece of javascript can call.
Failing four: the lack of a sandbox forces AX developers to write secure code, and they don't appear up to the job.
If you find a security hole in an active x control, it can be rereleased, a new
failing 5: its nearly impossible to stop malicious sites pushing out buggy versions of other people's AX controls.
Parent
Re:Another Get Firefox day coming soon... (Score:5, Interesting)
ActiveX allows arbitrary code from an arbitrary web page to run on your machine with full administrative priviliges, and the only defence against it is the computer-savviness of the user.
.305 Magnum that automatically points at your foot, or a cruise missile that automatically targets friendly units. Sure, it requires user-intervention to cause a disaster, and if something happens it's technically the user's fault, but it's clearly also the bloody stupid design of the system that contributed to the disaster.
Uh-oh.
Now, you can argue that technology shouldn't be castigated because of user-error, but that's like saying there's nothing wrong with a
And in case you've missed it, it's no longer considered professional as any kind of IT engineer to go "Oh, ID10T error" and wash your hands of the problem. Users will ever be clueless, but well-designed technology has a learning curve that allows for this.
ActiveX offers a simple Yes/No dialogue choice, and to fully comprehend the implications of each that answer could take the average user weeks of study.
Microsoft (as ever) badly dropped the ball on security, and rather than fix the problem they just slapped a dialog box in front of it and claimed any disasters caused were now officially the fault of the user.
Indeed. However, when you've got an interesting idea with some nice applications than also just happens to cause the apocalypse, don't be surprised if the people huddling in craters across the broken, sulphur-spewing landscape happen to, y'know, not fixate on the few things it did pretty well.
Erm, not really. The first thing any sensible user wants any technology like that to do is to not open his machine to infection from every scumbag on the net... and make the browser do something more than render (D)HTML. See, the thing is, that first part is so freaking obvious that most people forget it's even a consideration.
An analogy:
People want tasty cakes, but they also don't want to be poisoned.
Microsoft produces a range of tasty cakes, some of which (at random) are chock-full of arsenic.
When people complain, they "solve" the problem by printing in big letters on the front: "WARNING: cake may conceivably not be perfectly free of element number 33".
Sensible people who can afford to thus avoid the cakes altogether, but people who can't read and people who don't know element number 33 is arsenic all risk ending up dead with every bite. As do people who work in Microsoft-only offices, who save with Microsoft-cake-mandating banks and a whole range of other people.
So whenever bakers gather to talk about Microsoft Cakes, unaccountably they ignore its fluffy texture and pleasing aroma, and bizarrely fixate on the fact that it regularly kills anyone uneducated enough to ingest it.
See the point now?
Because Java applets run in a sandbox, plugins weren't generally produced by anyone but large, trustworthy companies, and have massively dropped out of favour (because of lack of security) even so, and FF extensions and Opera widgets are both (i) somewhat insulated from the operating system, and (ii) selected, once, by the user due to their utility, and not pushed at the user by any weirdo third-party
Parent
Re:Demonizing ActiveX... (Score:5, Funny)
Here are the minutes from the meeting where this was decided:
Some Dev: Let's use DURRRRRRRR our OS-level component model for DURRRRRRRRRRR web plugins *grand mal seizure*
Billy G: That will help fucking kill Netscape
Ballmer: *throws chair in a way indicating approval*
Parent
Force-Feeding (Score:5, Informative)
My favourite quote: (Score:5, Informative)
My favorite quote FTA: "It will be available from Microsoft's Download Center Web site, Schare said. "We're really trying to get the world ready for a major new browser release."
Sorry, I already got my "major new browser release" about the time Microsoft were claiming "nobody needs tabbed browsing." IE7 is too little, too late, even for the poor unfortunates I know who are still stuck running Windows.
Re:My favourite quote: (Score:5, Insightful)
I seriously doubt it will end up on 90% of the worlds' computers.
First off, Microsoft is releasing a tool that will allow businesses to block the upgrade, and you can be sure that after the problems with other forced rollouts, business is taking a wait-and-see approach.
Second, its to little, too late. Firefox already has more than 10% market share, and as people continue to use it, they get used to not using IE. Case in point - I asked a friend of mine to check out one of my sites using IE. After talking with him on the phone, and checking 3 or 4 times "You're sure you're using Internet Explorer, right?" - it turned out that he was so used to using Firefox that it had completely replaced IE in his mind for "connecting to the internet"
Third, WGA is going to be mandatory for downloading the final version of IE7. What's the piracy rate for Windows XP again?
Parent
Most CSS bugs are fixed in IE7 (Score:5, Informative)
Well the good news is, they fixed most CSS2.1 bugs in IE7. They killed almost every bug mentioned at positioniseverything.net [positioniseverything.net]. They also added support for CSS2 selectors.
The bad news is they didn't add ":after" support..
If you used this to clear floats without structural markup [positioniseverything.net], you need to find another way.
And worth mentioning:
Note that pages render fine now without this hack!
Parent
Re:I like your favourite quote and I hope M$ dies. (Score:5, Interesting)
If it takes 60 hours, then it takes 60 hours. This is what happens when you take on responsibility for something. If you agree to do it and got paid to do it, then you can't complain. Nobody forced you after all. Your inexperience with business shows that you didn't require them to pay for 'support' either on an as-needed basis, or with a regular payment to.
You get what you pay for. If the poster doesn't know how to manage his clients expectations properly, then he deserves to find out the hard way that working for someone requires more effort than just knocking up some website practically for fun.
Suggestion: contact clients, tell them IE7 is coming out and will be automatically updated. Suggest that some changes will be required to their websites to support the new browser and that these changes will be charged at £xx a hour, with estimated times for the sites. All the clients will be thankful you informed them before the changes occurred, all will pay for the changes. All will assume that upgrades are necessary because that's the way of the computer industry - we all upgrade to the latest version all the time, its ingrained as normal.
You then start work on upgrading the sites to support IE7 today, keep the changes stored away so that, in a few months time when the browser does come out, upgrading your client's sites is a simple matter of uploading the changes the day before. No stress, no weeny complaints about how 'fucking microsoft' ruined your life, no problems. This is how professionals do it. Learn.
Parent
Halo 2 (Score:5, Funny)
Bugs? (Score:5, Informative)
I've fiddled around with beta 3 for a bit, it's just as stable as IE6 is (even moreso, if you can believe that). I think this summary was written by someone scared of "beta" software.
As for breaking webpages, big deal. IE6 has been breaking webpages for years. Now at least the web designers who built pages for the IE6 "standard" instead of the STANDARD standards will taste a bit of our pain.
Only IE7 bug I noticed is that IE7 REFUSES to remove borders on iframes (or maybe it's the body tag inside the iframe). Using CSS or deprecated HTML attributes have no effect. IE6 does not have this problem.
Really a problem? (Score:5, Funny)
He has also been referring to himself in the third person since earlier this morning.
Re:Really a problem? (Score:5, Informative)
More information here:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=890830 [microsoft.com]
Parent
They will push it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay... on a more serious note, I actually (don't flame me) like Windows XP. It is incredibly stable on my PC. But it is Microsoft style to push their products onto users my force. So my bets are on MS putting this out as a critical security updates.
I'll give 2 to 1 odds. Who's placing a bet??
Good... (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one welcome this. IE6 sucks. Badly.
IE7 has a few problems, but the faster IE6 dies, the better.
This and as a web developer, I hope the bugs associated with pushing this app out will create a bad user experience and force developers that rely on hacks and nonstandard practices to get screwed over. I've had several sites I use not work with IE7 and the simplest has been because their simple javascript that detects IE versions tells me I need to use IE5.5 or greater. I've had others not work with the activeX controls because of new security models (or so I imagine).
The sooner developers move towards standards the better. IE7 is a good push towards this goal, and having it pushed out buggy and forcing developers to address the idiotic IE Only Features is just another milestone on this route.
Do it the simple way (Score:5, Funny)
What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the ecommerce sites being broken, it's not like they haven't had time to check to make sure their sites work in the new version. When the first beta came out, even I checked to see if there were any problems with my sites. I didn't fix them straight away, but I made sure to note down where the issues were for later repair.
How Ironic (Score:5, Informative)
Ironic that I received that message as I was reading this story, and about to post that automatic update will only download IE7, but will give the users a choice of whether or not to install it. Kind of like the message I just received for Firefox.
Bandwidth is really the only issue with this release method, but not so much for a single user. Businesses who would be affected by the download can install the IE7 Update Blocker Toolkit to prevent even the download.
This really isn't that big of a deal.
Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes sense. IE6 is obviously a critical security vulnerability, and apparently it can't be fixed without IE7 (I doubt IE7 will actually "fix" the problem, but it'd be pretty hard to make the situation any worse at this point).
The sooner *any* versions of MSIE go away (even if they're only replaced with new versions), the better, IMHO.
instructions (Score:5, Funny)
msi http://microsoft.com/xp [microsoft.com] ie6 main
and replace it with this:
msi http://microsoft.com/xp [microsoft.com] ie7 main
in your c:/etc/apt/sources.list file. then do:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
Genuine Advantage Rears It's Head Again (Score:5, Insightful)
As it turns out Microsoft isn't that benevolent. You run smack dab into a check to see whether or not you've installed Windows Genuine Advantage. I haven't. My copy of XP is perfectly legal and has never touched another computer. But I still am not comfortable with my computer calling Microsoft every day telling them what a happy customer I am, so I have no intention on installing it in the near future. Call me paranoid, but any software from Microsoft that will be doing any sort of hidden connection and any sort of transmission of data that I'm not allowed to monitor or check on crosses a boundary for me. Today it's that my copy of Windows is legal. Tomorrow it's what my favorite websites are. The day after that it's what DVDs I stick in my hard drive. But we've all heard this rant, so I'll just move on.
I hope somebody brings this up within the tech community or in the blogosphere. It doesn't seem kosher to have to install spyware in order to get my legal copy of Windows to behave like I'd like it to. Oh well, time to go buy a MacBook Pro.
Link:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.a
We can call it good and we can call it bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good
Security is much higher than IE6
IE7 supports CSS and XHTML 100 times better than IE6 so sites can start using them
Too many people still use IE6, and IE7 is better than sticking with IE6
Bad
Sites that use some of the 'old' IE6 hacks to make stuff work, will break
--- Actually, that might be a good thing
Companies that have used 'old' IE standards instead of moving forward with
compliance like XHTMl and CSS will face problems if their work arounds
Assume that IE7 is just like IE6. So some web sites need to be testing for
IE7 Now.
I think the good does out weigh the bad, as it will push users that are still using IE6 to get a more standards compliant browser. And it might even educate some of them, so they understand their browser has changed and explore other browsers as well. It will probably help Firefox downloads even.
The other thing this article seems to miss is that IE7 'will be forced' on users in Vista as well, so this will be good for Web Sites to get ready for the Vista Launch, because Vista simply does not do IE6. (And IE7 in Vista is like the stupid cousin, as it runs in protected mode on Vista, several levels below the user's own security even.)
MS has made a lot of big press about IE7, has supplied what it does and doesn't do to developers and beta testers for a long time now, and any reasonable web site administrator or developer should already be ensuring that their sites doesn't assume IE7 is as stupida s IE6 and make things fail.
It would be different if the IE7 list of supported standards, and testing of the Browser itself was not widescale. It has been available almost a full year before its release date, and if that is not enough time for web sites to rip out the crap IE6 kludge code, then maybe this will be a wake up call for them to do so.
MS fek'd up bad with IE6 and I still don't like that IE7 still maintains some backward compatibility for the IE tags, (hence why it won't pass the ACID2 test), but IE7 is the first push from Microsoft to support standards that are not only MS standards, and if anything we should welcome Microsoft and keep encouraging to do the right thing. (It might actually work.)
So in the end, we can start using more advanced CSS and XHTML concepts in the next year without having separate coding to make it display properly in IE6. We can also just send the users to Firefox or the IE7 download site and finally write sites like we should have been doing for a while now but couldn't because of the widespread use of IE6.
Re:We can call it good and we can call it bad... (Score:5, Informative)
You are very misinformed.
I quote from the Internet Explorer developers' weblog [msdn.com]:
No version of Internet Explorer supports XHTML. If you label XHTML as text/html, Internet Explorer will render it because it thinks it's HTML. There's a problem that XML prologs cause because of this, so they implemented a special-case workaround.
All of this is very well known to web developers, I suggest you actually ask your developers about this if you don't believe me.
XHTML is being treated as a buzzword these days. The document included in that video included a <meta> element that claimed the media type was text/html. This is not XHTML being parsed as XHTML. It's XHTML pretending to be HTML and being parsed as HTML - which is the only way in which any version of Internet Explorer can understand XHTML as it doesn't support XHTML.
In every way in which XHTML differs from HTML, Internet Explorer follows the HTML rules. If you disagree, please give examples. If you don't disagree, please explain how that means that Internet Explorer supports XHTML rather than "pretend XHTML".
Are you seriously making assumptions about what Internet Explorer supports by trying to spot implications from marketing material for a tangentially related product by the same company?
I'm sorry, but this simply isn't the case. Have you looked at the Acid2 test at all? The problems Internet Explorer has with it are either parsing problems or outright lack of support for various features of CSS and HTML. Internet Explorer's support for non-standard CSS extensions are not a factor.
You can argue that people should upgrade all you like, it makes no difference as to whether they actually do it or not. I'm saying that lots of people don't upgrade for years. Telling me that they should is completely irrelevant. It's not up to me whether they upgrade.
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Re:Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
The argument here isn't idealistic or puritanical or religious - it's practical. CSS allows web developers to effectively separate content and presentation, which in turn allows for more efficient development. It's not about laziness either. We web developers have finite time. We either spend that time working on new features/content/layouts/whatever, or chasing down 4 year old bugs in IE.
Take as an example a group of mechanical engineers plotting designs for a car. Group A favors one brand of mechanical pencils. Group B favors another. An astute engineer might attempt to settle the matter as you do: "all mechanical pencils have their quirks." Unfortunately, group C is using crayons that are worn nearly to the nub. IE is a crayon that is worn quite to the nub.
To write off the pitiful state of IE's HTML, CSS and javascript support as "quirks" is to let MS off the hook. They leveraged their monopoly and "won" the browser wars. Having done so, it appears that they intend to use their dominant browser in order to defend their Big Two products by retarding the progress of web technologies indefinitely.
As a side note, why does "realist" now refer to people who give up on ethics (and other such long term concerns) for short-run gains?
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Re:Backfire (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, it's the "major website admins" who block non-IE browsers, then? I could have sworn that was opnly something 12-year-olds, and deluded MS fanbois do.
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The choice of default browser is unaffected (Score:5, Informative)
Secondly, even if you don't install the blocker, and the user does elect to install IE7 (after downloading IE7, Windows Update presents the options "Install", "Don't Install", "Ask me later" (if you select "Don't Install", you're never asked again, even for future security updates)), IE7 will not be installed as the default browser, unless an older IE was already the default browser.
From the IE blog [msdn.com]: "If you decide to install IE7, it will preserve your current toolbars, home page, search settings, and favorites and installing will not change your choice of default browser. You will also be able to roll back to IE6 at any point by using Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel."
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