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Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8 RC1
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jan 26, 2009 04:51 PM
from the too-little-too-late dept.
from the too-little-too-late dept.
mikemuch writes "IE8 has left beta as of noon Pacific time today. The development team now considers the browser platform- and feature-complete, but won't say how long until it goes gold. PCMag.com got an early look and has posted a full review of Internet Explorer 8 RC1. The release candidate differs only slightly from Beta 2, most notably in tweaks to its InPrivate Browsing feature, aka porn mode. That feature has been decoupled with InPrivate Filtering, which blocks third-party content providers from creating profile of your browsing habits. RC1 also improves on performance, especially in startup time, but still trails Firefox and Chrome in JavaScript speed. Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added — the first browser to include such protections. Versions for 32-bit and 64-bit Vista, as well as for 32-bit XP are available, but Windows 7, which will ship with IE8, is stuck with an older beta for now."
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No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:5, Interesting)
They can keep all their little incremental security and interface updates. What use are a few little tweaks in IE8, when Firefox offers me add-ons like adblock plus, noscript, slashdotter, etc.? Besides, I can always open a site with IE Tab if I need to.
Firefox is even nice enough to spell check my form entries for me (it caught me misspelling "incremental" just now).
Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:5, Insightful)
If it weren't for Chrome and IE8's privacy mode, then that probably wouldn't be the top priority it is right now for Firefox 3.1. Competition is good in the browser market. They'd still be on IE6 if it weren't for the success of Firefox.
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Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:5, Insightful)
and that my friend should be the whole point. MSFT basically stopped all browser development for 5 years. Then Firefox came along and showed people that you could have a free browser that could do more than IE(Opera wasn't free but adware). MSFT lost marketshare and then started to fight back.
MFT is and always has been reactionary to change. If their products are good enough they don't get improved upon. If MSFT only had 60% marketshare I would be happy. as MSFT would be forced to fight to keep customers by improving software.
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Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't even have to be 60%. It has to be whatever it takes for the majority of Web developers to move from IE-only policy to cross-browser policy. Judging by the look of the Web these days, with even Microsoft itself having to support at least Firefox and Safari apart from IE (check the official browser support tables for various MS web-base products!), the present 20% Firefox market share is already enough to trigger that.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As a Microsoft shareholder I'm glad they weren't pissing my money up a tree trying to improve products in markets they already dominated. Now FF is giving them some competition, I'm also glad they are getting their shit together to preserve the IE line (in the eyes of Joe Public, rather than developers on ten bucks an hour having butthurt over standards).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There are IE plugins [ieaddons.com], too, including ad blockers (just search).
Dear net-surfers: (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Using it out of the box just to download another browser, or
2) A web developer who needs it on a test box
Then GTFO idjit.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Get a thumb drive and Firefox Portable [portableapps.com], and all your problems will be solved.
Re:Dear net-surfers: (Score:4, Interesting)
Heh. The guy I work for has xp machines running on 256mb ram, unpatched ie6 & no sp3. The people he pays to "manage" his system send around a guy that runs spybot, ad-aware and some random virus scanner; He does not know what a rootkit is, nor does he insure all the machines are fully patched (a process that can be fully automated with a single click). When something breaks they order something expensive from Dell and mark it up.
Bottom line? Morons make the world go around. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the show.
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Re:No shortcuts (Score:5, Interesting)
The only way to open IE at the house is in the "run" tab, the wife and kid don't know where that is.
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Re:No shortcuts (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks! And happy posting.
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One Additional And Vital Posting Rule (Score:4, Funny)
* When you are composing your +5 Insightful masterpiece of a post that utterly eviscerates a company for an alleged GPL copyright violation you have to do so while listening to your multi-terrabyte pirated(aka copyright violation) music collection.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
a) Why would you need to do that if Firefox was so perfect?
Because we don't live in a perfect world where getting Windows' updates can be obtained via Firefox.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Just in response to point A: Firefox may be damn good, but if you are a web developer and need to make sure your site works across all browsers, IE Tab isn't a bad thing to have.
True, but since you have to have a copy of IE around anyway, you might as well just use it.
IE-Tab doesn't really simplify things that much, and its not inconceivable that something will work differently in actual IE than IE-tab. (basic rendering of course will be the same, but some of the more goofy stuff like how various IE prefere
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I haven't tried (but will now...), but couldn't you use IETab with Firebug to actually figure out how to fix all of the stupid rendering problems caused by IE (read: screw with the CSS via Firebug until it works)? To the best of my knowledge, there's no good way to do real-time stylesheet editing with IE/the Trident engine, unlike Firefox which has Firebug and Safari/Webkit which has several tools on the Mac such as CSSEdit.
I still pray that someone will use one of IE's security flaws to force an upgrade t
Re:No plugins like Adblock and NoScript (Score:4, Insightful)
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Clickjacking (Score:5, Informative)
Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added â" the first browser to include such protections.
No, not the first. Maybe the first to be shipped with the functionality turned on by default.
It's just that, with FireFox, anything that isn't related to bare simple display of HTML pages, is usually tucked into separate plugins.
But the Noscript [noscript.net] plugin has featured click-jacking prevention almost from the next day after click-jacking came in the news.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, not the first. Maybe the first to be shipped with the functionality turned on by default.
It's more than "turned on by default"; that suggests there's a checkbox somewhere that is just off. The support isn't even installed by default.
Noscript may have deserved mention in the summary, but there is a difference between "including such protections" and "has such protections available in an add-on", and the difference is much more than between "including such protections turned on by default" and "including
Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Standards (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty funny.. I ran it on firefox (which I can't update due to IS) and got 71, Opera (which I can't update due to IS) 85. IE Version 7.0.5730.11 (which IS may or may not update) and it was unintelligble (couldn't even see score), and IE 6 in Citrix which got an 11.
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Re:Standards (Score:5, Funny)
None of the browsers I have tried pass the Acid 3 test so I have given up using the internet. There's really no point if you can't get Acid 3 to go to 100/100.
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I don't really care about their tabs, 'Awesome Address and Search Bars,' privacy or really anything else while they still only score 20 on the Acid3 Web standards test. IE has historically been such a pain in the ass for the entire world because of poor adherence to standards. The article says Microsoft takes standards seriously but the test says otherwise.
They're working on it; they haven't gotten there yet. IE8 does not pass Acid3, but neither do the current shipping versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Chrome. Most of these should pass Acid3 in their next major release, but Firefox won't pass Acid3 for awhile (probably not until 4.0).
IE8 does pass Acid2, which represents a major improvement in standards-compliance and compatibility over previous versions of IE.
Nobody's saying IE8 is a better browser than Firefox. If you're already running Firefox, tha
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You keep talking about failing usability yet I don't see how Safari/WebKit is worse than the horrible mess that Internet Explorer is, and Firefox certainly isn't free of issues. If anything I'd say that the user experience with Safari/WebKit is much more pleasant than both IE and FF. Or maybe you simply don't like how they're not filled with retarded crap like IE's "protected mode"? Or maybe you like how FF makes you jump through a bunch of hoops every time it encounters a self-signed SSL cert? (A warning I
I just want 6 to go away (Score:4, Insightful)
I need stability (Score:3, Interesting)
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It's funny
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Oh... and my point was that you'll probably find IE6 is less supported on many websites over the next year or two.
Awesome compatibility for developers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Don't worry, there is a way to target .NET 1.1 with VS 2005 [codeplex.com] and even with VS 2008 [devlicio.us].
Interesting statistic (Score:5, Interesting)
Well that's something you don't see every day.
Re:Interesting statistic (Score:5, Interesting)
humm, both IE8 and Firefox 3.1 will include a private browsing feature but neither have "shipped".
But you're right that IE included it before in a beta and that increased the priority on the firefox people...
Time will say which of these version ship the first (in a non beta, non rc mode)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, Firefox can't always take the lead. But Safari had private browsing years ago. :-)
Wikipedia: "Version 2.0 of Safari was released on April 29, 2005... includes a built-in RSS and Atom reader. Other features include Private Browsing..."
Funny. They even have a link to 'porn mode' which has a handy table showing which browsers had it when. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porn_mode [wikipedia.org]
after how you've treated me? (Score:5, Insightful)
There may be a number of good technical and use-oriented reasons not to bother with IE8. I don't know the details on it just yet. But it could be twice as good as the next browser and I still wouldn't use it. Not after what Microsoft did to us all with earlier versions. The standards compliance problems have been infuriating for developers. How much human effort has been wasted trying to cope with this? And the vulnerabilities have made popular computing a diseased seething mass. How many geeks have had to spend evenings or whole weekends taking care friends and family members' systems?
All of that and Microsoft let IE rot for how many years? Half a freakin' decade in the midst of humanity's glorious ascension into a networked era? It took competition forcefully wedging its way into IE's monopolistic stranglehold before Microsoft got off their asses to do anything.
Well, it's too late. Fuck off.
I'm no battered wife. I know that MS isn't "really a good husband, he just..." whatever. I'd rather other people not drag me into another round of this same neglected-until-it-matters-to-Microsoft bullshit. The fewer people who use IE, the better.
Um, nice try I suppose. (Score:3, Interesting)
I was curious to see what they'd done since the last beta, so I installed it this morning. I had to reboot not once, but twice (once to uninstall IE8 beta2 and again I'm guessing so that it could hook into some OS files that were in use.)
After restarting the second time, it popped up some shenanigans about some add-ons not being enabled and some being out-of-date and not working. Huh? There's apparently two dozen different plugins and "helpers" installed, including 3 java widgits, a slew of Adobe stuff, and a whole lotta live.com and other MS cruft. Hmmm... Gotta admit, I have no idea what half this stuff does and I'm in Computer Security. Can you imagine the average user figuring out which one of these is the rogue add-on responsible for stealing their credit cards and redirecting their search queries to a click fraud site? Firefox's extension system is a breath of fresh air compared to this.
IE8 beta2 scored a pitiful 21/100 on acid3, RC1 now scores 20/100. Apparently acid3 is not yet a development target for MS. Seeing as their answer to web developers wanting more freedom to be creative is to "do it in Silverlight", it doesn't surprise that MS is dragging their feet here. I honestly wonder if half the stuff acid3 tests for will ever see the light of day in a top 500 website. I suspect FFx + Chrome + Safari + Opera and others will need to achieve greater than 50% market share before MS gets serious about SVG and company.
I find it amusing that IE8 gives users control over rendering like "older browsers" for incompatible websites (read: websites that were designed to work under the standards-ignorant IE6).
On the plus side:
- as for most modern browsers, it seems to render most of the top websites reasonably well.
- it has some privacy thingamajig which allows you to manually disallow sites one by one from storing cookies on your system (or at least that's how I interpretted the vague MS description)
Yeah, but I eventually had to close it when I realized how insanely annoying the web is without AdBlock Plus.
Excuse me, did you say IE 4,234.5 ? (Score:5, Insightful)
as a web developer, im still having to deal with IE6 to ensure cross browser compatibility, and a little lost on the versioning now. how many shitface versions of ie out there that i have to test for x browser compatibility as of now ? 3 ? 5 ? 234,643 ? will it ever end ?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Heh. Not in comparison to Firefox, but my copy of Konqueror on KDE leaves both of them in its dust.
But aside from resource demands (and I'll wait until I can try it properly before I make any judgements), IE8 looks quite nice. I'd certainly be willing to try it out if they made a version for non-Windows systems. How about it Microsoft - fancy branching out?
Re:Something to credit Microsoft for (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, when Internet Explorer 8 is released, Microsoft will finally have implemented decent support for CSS 2, a specification published over a decade ago. I hope everybody here on Slashdot will join me in welcoming Microsoft to 1998. Truly, they deserve all the credit they are going to get for being so ahead of the curve. Keep innovating, Microsoft! Don't let those slow-coaches at the W3C hold you back!
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Re:Something to credit Microsoft for (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd have had a point if, in 1998, there was any other browser, released or in beta, that had full CSS2 support. But there wasn't. In fact, the one that was closest to supporting it at that time was... IE.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And with the release they're gonna party like it's 1999!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because something is a standard doesn't mean it is a good standard and I wonder about CSS being a good standard.
I congratulate the committee that created it on actually getting something out the door, that is an accomplishment for any committee. However, I don't think it is too much to ask that the new standard actually work better then what was already there. Tables were clunky and misused, but for formatting a web page, they still work better and are easier to understand. It's frustrating to sp
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The CSS specification includes support for display: table; display: table-row; and display: table-cell;
which are quite useful when you need table-like layout.
Shame IE never supported them. Until *drumroll* IE8 - shame they aren't doing so well on other fronts.
But, fortunately, you can work around this. Yes, it is a bit more work, but that is not the fault of CSS.
Additionally, working around it just takes a little getting used to.
Those singing the praises of table layout in some cases just never got the han
Competitive support for W3C Standards? (Score:5, Interesting)
No? What's that? Microsoft closed out the bugs as "works as intended?" Fail.
In case it's not clear, I have a firey hatred for IE8. Not so much the product itself, but what it represents. What it represents is a flagpole in the ground stating, "We're going to stand in the way of progress for our own selfish reasons".
While I can understand that Microsoft feels that the market is slipping from their grasp, I cannot support their methods of attempting to compete. Which is to say that they are using their power to prevent competition rather than building a superior product. As Joel pointed out in his excellent article on the Windows API being lost [joelonsoftware.com]:
If you truly want to understand what is wrong with this browser, take some time and go through these examples:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/wrongWithIE/ [howtocreate.co.uk]
Those only scratch the surface of what is really wrong with IE and Microsoft's stance on improving their web browser. For further reference, RC1 of IE8 gets a 20/100 on ACID3. This compares poorly to FireFox3's 56-59/100, Webkit nightly's 100/100, and Opera dev version's 100/100 [opera.com](!).
Developers need to band together and stop hacking our sites for IE. Users who wish to use IE should either be directed toward download links for one of the many alternatives, or forced to deal with a degraded view of the site with a polite comment to upgrade. And by degraded, I mean "it works, but looks awful". If that right there doesn't sell users on getting an alternative browser, I don't know what will.
(Yes, I am aware that many businesses can't take the hit. But we have to start somewhere. And that somewhere can easily be everything from your personal site to your new venture that's betting on early adopters of advanced web technology. IE's market share is already plummeting. If we can get enough momentum, we can near-eliminate this unsightly browser from the web. Remember Netscape 4's inability to keep up? This is the exact same situation all over again, except this time the solution is not a total mono-culture.)
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Re:Competitive support for W3C Standards? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, by the time Internet Explorer 6 was out, there was something else to support. The DOM 2 Events [w3.org] specification, an intrinsic part of modern JavaScript, was published in 2000, almost a year before Internet Explorer 6, and even the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 still won't have support for it. That's why all the modern JavaScript libraries like jQuery have workaround code to translate the Internet Explorer event model into the sta
Re: (Score:3)
1. Beta 1 got a 17/100. The RC1 released TODAY got a 20/100.
2. Opera/Safari nightlies did it in March. You can download a pre-release of the Opera version here [opera.com] and test it for yourself.
3. The ACID tests focus on features that are useful in the marketplace, but have not been fully implemented. In result, attaining ACID compliance is a GOOD thing.
4. IE8 is BROKEN. Any web developer will
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Re:Getting verrry old (Score:5, Insightful)
This has been a very active couple of days for MS stories. Lots of big things happening between layoffs and beta releases.
Let's look at some facts though.
Windows marketshare is 90%.
IE's marketshare is 70%
Slashdot users run somwhere between 47% and 70% MS Windows based OS.(http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1516&aid=-1, http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=848&aid=-1 [slashdot.org])
In the last four days Slashdot has had 9 MS stories ( source: http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=109 [slashdot.org])
In the last four days Slashdot has has 97 stories posted ( source: http://slashdot.org/search.pl [slashdot.org] )
What percentage of stories about MS have run in the past four days?
9/97 = 0.092 * 100 = 9.2%
Facts hardly look as bad as you make them out to be.
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