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Microsoft Drops Hints on IE8
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed May 02, 2007 09:04 PM
from the new-and-improved dept.
from the new-and-improved dept.
benuski writes "Lost in the hype about Microsoft's new Siverlight platform, there has been some information surfacing about IE8. It will include improvements in RSS, CSS, and AJAX support, and will follow Firefox 3 in supporting microformats. Also, the developers are going to try and improve UI customization, which is one of the main criticisms of IE7."
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Patches are out! (Score:5, Funny)
Enough of comparing it to Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
It wouldnt be a good comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It wouldnt be a good comparison (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It wouldnt be a good comparison (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks, guys! I've just got an ad hominem, an assertive statement with no backup and a condescending rebuke in two posts! I'm going to win Slashdot Logical Fallacy Bingo for sure!
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Re:It wouldnt be a good comparison (Score:5, Funny)
Why do I see a FF bloatware joke coming?
Yo Firefox's so fat, you have to DOUBLE-click it to run.
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Re:Enough of comparing it to Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, Firefox has a look and feel a lot more like IE than Opera does. I'm not exactly sure in how many ways this fits in, but I know it makes it easier for people familiar with IE to switch to Firefox, and perhaps it also makes Firefox and IE easier to compare than say IE and Opera.
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Re:Enough of comparing it to Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know that it ever will be, but I also don't know that it needs to be. Opera has never been aimed at the "everybody and their mother" market segment. I don't think that was even a goal for them.
Opera has consistently been, since the mid nineties, on the dividing line between the major browsers and the minor browsers -- always having a smaller market share than second place, but always rather larger than any of the obscure players. Every webmaster who can name more than three browsers knows about Opera, and everyone who's at all serious about supporting "all the major browsers" tests in Opera at least a little. I don't see any reason to expect any of that to change.
Is it going to take over the world and force IE and Gecko into second and third place? No. But it's not going away, either. It's an _alternative_ browser for a minority of users. It occupies that role by design, and always has.
The reason they're not comparing rumors about upcoming IE features to information about upcoming Opera features is because IE8 isn't aiming to compete with Opera. Microsoft is not bothered by Opera. Opera is a very benign competitor for them, and fairly predictable. They understand its place in things, and it doesn't scare them.
Firefox is another thing. It came, from Microsoft's perspective, out of nowhere. Mozilla was doing what it had always done, occupying the role it had occupied for several years, and then whammo, over the course of a few months there was this Firefox thing, and ordinary users, not just web geeks, had heard about it, tried it out, and were using it. In droves. Its market share broke (by some measures anyway) into double digits and threatened to continue climbing. The release of IE7 was a direct response to that threat.
Further, the really scary thing about Firefox, from Microsoft's perspective, is not just that it breaks up their monopoly on the web, but more importantly that it's open source, and if too many users -- ordinary end users, not IT geeks -- start using and liking open source software, that could have implications beyond just the web browser market. I mean, if an open source web browser became the cool thing everyone had to use, then another open source application (an office suite, for example) could potentially do the same, and *that* outcome could directly cost Microsoft a lot of money. This isn't so much of an issue with Opera.
That is why IE8 rumors get compared to Firefox development information, and not Opera. It isn't because Firefox is better than Opera (though I do personally prefer it), but rather because Firefox is, in Microsoft's view, the primary competition IE must beat.
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Re:Enough of comparing it to Firefox (Score:5, Funny)
-1 Troll, +1 Inciteful?
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Re:Enough of comparing it to Firefox (Score:5, Funny)
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UI customization? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Security (or lack thereof)
2) ActiveX
3) The fact that it came from Microsoft
4-50 other things
51) UI Customization or skinning or whatever useless thing that is
Seriously, if that is one of the main criticism, then no wonder IE is the dominant browser on the planet (which I say tongue-in-cheek as I type this in Firefox so I have spell checking).
Re:UI customization? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:UI customization? (Score:4, Funny)
Numbers 37 and 38 are ??? and Profit!, respectively.
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No, IE has plenty of ui customization. (Score:5, Funny)
oh, you wanted voluntary ie addons! sorry, my mistake
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ars Link Broken (Score:5, Informative)
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/04/19/what-
Information? (Score:5, Insightful)
Extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
Until Microsoft figures out a way for people to create extensions easily, without having to know C++ and COM/ActiveX, they're not going to get people like me back. I don't care about tabs. I don't care about skins. I don't care about aggregators or fancy micro-whatevers. I don't care about security (in the sense that I was secure enough with IE since my IQ is above that of a jellyfish). Without the extensions and the community that needs to build behind them, it's a no-go for me at least. Holy shit, it's 2007 and I still don't have an easy way to turn off Flash on demand. Really, WTF?
Re:Extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem IE faces is the level to which it is beholden to other companies that rely on it to not allow end users to block their content. If IE were to introduce an AdBlock-type ability into IE they would get their pants sued off by every one of their competitors. Just look at Google--it's completely ad-dependent, and yet, with AdBlock the end user will never have to see "ads by google" ever again. In one fell swoop, leveraging their 85%+ marketshare Microsoft could destroy Google's revenue source. As a monopolist, they can never fix their inability to offer an AdBlocking solution.
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Re:Extensions - adblock for any browser (Score:4, Informative)
wait a fucking minute. did i just make IE more attractive?
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My Adblock policy (Score:4, Interesting)
Google ads don't really bother me - they're text ads, rasy enough to ignore.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Extensions (Score:4, Interesting)
I would guess it's probably an extension that's causing this, but I'm not sure; I only have a few installed and enabled now.
(I just restarted FF a couple times so now it's only at 55 MB with 2 tabs, but when I posted that comment above I was over 400 MB of mem usage (with a VM size over 900 MB) with 10 tabs.
So he's probably not making that up.
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Re:Extensions (Score:5, Informative)
It seems to me that only 1 enterprising individual needs to make a free one for IE. (there might already be one. I didn't do a through search)
Is C++ and COM/ActiveX so hard to use?
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Re:Extensions (Score:4, Insightful)
Now your only remaining problem is to work out which one of those is actually spyware which will hijack your browser, install half a dozen trojans and send every password you use to a crime syndicate in Miami.
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MS losing some of its charming 'tude ? (Score:5, Funny)
I want to see "it looks like you're typing an email" and animated puppies running off into the distance when I turn off animations
You know what I want? (Score:5, Insightful)
I want a little more attention paid to standards. What is the point of developing standards compliant, accessible websites if the most used browser in the market screws it up without crappy hacks? Oh, wait.. Notgetting sued [456bereastreet.com] is a pretty good reason, I guess. Still, the overhead IE creates for web developers (especially ones in areas with a low budget for design work) tends to make things cost much more than they should for the client.
We'll probably just see them get a little above 60% compliance on this round, though. Apathy is great, isn't it?
Re:You know what I want? (Score:5, Interesting)
Amen. I want to see DOM 2 support (not just their crappy 1.0 support from 1998), CSS that works, caching that actually works, Canvas (ok, so it's not a W3C standard; but IE is the only one missing it), SVG, a Javascript debugger that doesn't suck, so on and so forth.
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Re:You know what I want? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me see if I got this...you want Microsoft to pay attention to standards, but only the ones other browsers don't ignore? That's a standard right there...a double standard.
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Re:You know what I want? (Score:4, Insightful)
And what is wrong with that? The W3C aren't responsible for JPEG, that was standardised by ISO. Does that mean that web browsers shouldn't implement JPEG?
You are talking like there is a wall between the W3C and the rest of the world, where implementing a non-W3C technology means that you must inevitably throw away W3C stuff. This is nonsensical. You can implement W3C specifications and non-W3C specifications simultaneously just fine,and this has been the norm for as long as the W3C has existed.
Huh? You are talking about something that the OP already pointed out was already implemented by the other browsers. How is keeping up with everybody else an impossible expectation?
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Re:You know what I want? (Score:5, Insightful)
"We were so awesome!"
"Yeah, it was awesome... compared to BULLSHIT!"
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will any win32 FF users actually go back? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is real and (IMHO) the computing experience for many users right-now.
So are MS trying to pull back users who have turned to an alternative browser, or they are desperately trying to plug the drip drip drip of users who still haven't moved?
Either way they will have to make a hyperspace leap to get ahead of the curve.
I began using FF at something like v0.83 and its now mature, secure and stable.
After occasionally dipping the big toe into linux over the past 5-6 years (Redhat 7.3; Fedora 3, 4, 5), just this week I installed ubuntu 7.04 and have fallen in love with it. Restored a ghost backup of XP to a partition and have booted into it just once.
IE's CSS hassles should have been fixed years ago - MS really needs to do more to stop the millions of users like me that are dabbling and finding that OSS is more than just a viable alternative.
They may switch back; Firefox, don't be complacent (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox lit a firecracker under the butts of Microsoft (who actually disbanded the IE team after IE6 --can you believe it?), and made them scramble to build a web browser that was a first in the world of Microsoft: it was standards compliant. Okay, actually, it wasn't, but it was a heck of a lot more so than the old IE, and for the first time MS actually paid attention to Web standards compliance. Whatever happens after that, we can thank Firefox for this historic watershed; even if people switch back to IE, it won't be to IE 6, and web page authors will realize that Microsoft doesn't necessarily dictate the standards.
In the same way, though, Firefox can't afford to be complacent. Microsoft has a long history of coming from behind and overtaking. There are quite a few ways in which Firefox could be improved, and if MS makes this improved browser IE8, then I can very well envision people switching back.
I think the main thing Firefox needs to do is manage its extensions. There was an interview on Slashdot in which one of the developers said that there was no need for the Mozilla Foundation to vet and officially support extensions, which I think flies in the face of common sense. The MozFound needs to pick three or four extensions and make sure they work --which would not be hard to do since they work now-- but officially make it part of Firefox. These extensions are: Adblock [Plus], NoScript,
Firefox could do with a few other improvements, and I'm sure other posters will happily list them, but the point is: Microsoft is fully capable of overtaking Firefox again. This is a good thing only if it spurs Firefox to greater heights. I don't want IE to actually end up overtaking Firefox, because I want the dominant browser on the Web to be a cross-platform one.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I began using FF at something like v0.83 and its now mature, secure and stable.
Now by stable, do you mean that the manner in which it leaks memory and ultimately crashes is well characterized and predictable? Firefox on mac for me is nearly unusable. Sadly, safari is only slightly better. On my linux machine, it's a bit better but still a pig. Don't know about Windows.
Wow, what committment! (Score:3, Funny)
Hype about Silverlight? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone know?
Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Summary of article (Score:5, Funny)
competition is good -- what's the next big thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
If Microsoft had been broken into a variety of little companies like the judge wanted 10 years ago, we'd all have much better products now because of the resulting competition.
Now it's time for Firefox (or Apple) to truly think out of the box and blow us all away with the next big thing. What's the next KILLER APP? We all know Microsoft won't do it first.
boxlight
When will they learn? (Score:5, Insightful)
I generally think Microsoft provides solid products and I rarely stumble upon problems with aged products. Look at Office, Windows XP and other operating systems, that are doing just fine.
Internet Explorer is one of the few big mistakes Microsoft has had. IE4 knocked out Netscape and after that, we have seen little and rather futile competition, with Opera being the exception. But even with the release of Firefox, Microsoft has been utterly ignorant. They don't care about perfecting the CSS support and I have little hopes for IE8 after seeing IE7. Sure, it is far better but why is it so damn hard to follow standards?
In my opinion, Microsoft only needs to follow the standards to regain some trust from its lost users and it should have done so with IE7 as it had several years to do what Mozilla did.
Too much crap (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm generally rabidly anti-Luddite, but the web seems so broken sometimes.
Let's start over and make content matter. Please?
Oi MS! (Score:3, Funny)
IE8: Who Cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
By the time the first betas are out, MS will have announced that IE8 is Vista only, and given the amount of time they took to produce IE7 (a token effort at best), it'll probably require Vista SP1 to function fully. Another year of development means another 18 to 24 months, probably.
If they want to impress web developers (who are the catalyst for people moving away from IE), they have to stop paying lip service to web standards. Until then, developers will continue to do everything they can to save themselves wasted time and effort dealing with IE, by eroding IE's market share.
As a designer/developer, I don't really give a damn about RSS improvements. This is merely something they can use to bloat a bullet list of improved features. Fixes to CSS, DOM, events, floats, javascript, and making IE into a worthwhile developer's tool would be much more appreciated. And get rid of hasLayout while you're at it.
Re:I dont care... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I dont care... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know why not. Just lay a couple of coats of varnish and viola, polished turd, a pretty good description of Vista if I do say so myself.
*It was a joke, okay? I actually like Vista. Best Solitaire ever.
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Re:I dont care... (Score:4, Insightful)
Completely OT, but actually, I'd imagine you could. I'm not too sure about making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, though. I guess you'd need some kind of silk pig? Mythbusters need to step up here, both of these are long overdue.
Ahem. Back to the issue at hand, this particular turd has proven to be highly moldable, and polish is what it is lacking. Yes, incompabilities and poor standard coverage is a bitch, but the technology itself is adequate. If you had to make a web page/web app/whatever you had in mind when you wrote your comment, but with the guarantee that all visitors would use the same recent and 100% standards compliant browser, what would your main complaint be?
Core HTML is designed to represent a static document, yes, but the vast majority of the web is representable as such, animated interactive flash ads and embedded multimedia aside. What's new is mostly ever fancier styling, and loading some of that static content in a dynamic way.
I am not seeing the signs of age, but of immaturity. Browsers have aquired new capabilities that have made them a viable platform for more complex content, but early adopters face the hazzle of incompatible and incomplete implementations.
Going from your post, I don't think you really want a better successor to HTML and the browser. You sound like you want something completely unrelated, maybe a zero-install securely sandboxed app delivery system, but you are being forced to implement it as a web app? (Guessing wildly, sorry in advance.) Did you perchance have anything specific in mind as a successor to the common web page? Maybe one could do it in something portable, extensible and modern like XML... Oh, wait.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You can if you freeze it first.
-- attribution unknown
On a serious note, I'm ashamed, ASHAMED, that browsers have become thin clients. They suck at it, AJAX is a horrible kludge, they are all incompatible, that's not what they are for, etc. I thought Java would be the thin client foundation for the future, all that was needed was a small caching/comms/app management environment. No...that was too obvious, and nobody wanted to put Sun in a position to call any shots. Microsoft pu
Re:I dont care... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a list of things browsers do better than any other client application platform out there:
- Superlative, lightning fast text layout and reflow, including support for all languages
- Sandboxed code from untrusted sources that you can actually trust enough to run routinely without security prompts
- Extremely robust and effective yet easy to use transparent caching mechanism makes "installation" irrelevant
- Stateless nature forces architecture choices on developers that turn out to be a good idea anyway (despite the kicking and screaming)
- Emphasis on declarative content and text instead of procedural code and opaque binary blobs enables automated processing, unintended features: search engines, back button, bookmarking, form autocomplete and spell check, password managers, download managers, tabbed browsing, GreaseMonkey
- Easy centralized control using proxies
- almost completely platform-agnostic
- Free development tools
- Practically instant start-up
- Tiny runtime size (Firefox is a 5.7 MB install; Java and
.NET are how much again?)
- "Everything is a hyperlink" user interface simplifies and standardizes user experience
I'm not even counting the installed base as an advantage here, so don't complain that alternatives fail because of user apathy toward installation of alternatives; these are genuine advantages that the browser has over alternatives, ignoring its ubiquity. Now, the implementation of all of these features in browsers have flaws that I'm sure you can name, and browsers have plenty of other faults too. But no other alternative provides all of these features in one package. These are *all* really important features with huge advantages in the real world that any replacement for the browser as an application platform will need to address.Parent
Re:I dont care... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Web Developers (Score:3, Interesting)