IE7 Details Emerge 946
Varg Vikernes writes "Microsoft Watch has a story about new features we can expect in IE7 (code named 'Rincon') which they gathered through Microsoft's key partners. Apparently we can expect 32 bit PNG support, native IDN support, new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE and, of course, tabbed browsing. The new browser also will likely include a built-in news aggregator. Apparently an important factor is security."
I thought... (Score:2, Informative)
I guess he's wrong.
Re:Tabbed Browsing? (Score:1, Informative)
From the article:
'Sources say that IE 7.0 - which is code-named "Rincon," they hear - will be a tabbed browser.'
Does that constitute hinting?
Correction (Score:2, Informative)
The article says PNG "transparency" but it's actually opacity or translucency. Sorry.
Re:security (Score:5, Informative)
the original idn exploit:
http://www.shmoo.com/idn/
unicode draft technical report on security and UTF8:
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/tr36-2
Re:Interesting Codename... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:So, basically... (Score:2, Informative)
not even (Score:5, Informative)
And when you take into account the vast amount of tab control you have in FF when you have 'Tabbrowser Extensions' installed, no way is IE going to approach that level of functionality.
Looks like there may still be a place for the 'real' IE7 [edwards.name] . *sigh*
Re:This sounds great but... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, IE6 in strict mode, although still heinous, is reasonably good in terms of CSS. The box model is largely OK, although not entirely without faults. The floats model is still a bit buggered though, with various spurious margin bugs and soforth. Overall, IE6 in strict mode is sufficiently functional that cross-browser development is for the most part fairly straightforward, unlike IE6 in quirks mode [quirksmode.org], where the broken box model makes life hideously dificult.
If they can get strict mode cleaned up for IE7, sort out the doctype switching to allow for XML declarations, recognise the XHTML MIME type, and generally get the CSS implementation properly in line with CSS2.1, then things will be good.
I find it a little ironic that much of the CSS work has already been done within the Microsoft camp in the form of IE5 for the Mac, which in my experience has the most CSS2 compliant rendering engine of all the major browsers (excluding Opera, which I have practically no experience with). It's certainly the case that Gecko and KHTML lean much more towards the more practical CSS2.1, and sometimes oddities in CSS2 can actually spring the odd surprise in their manifestation within IE5 Mac.
Re:Interesting Codename... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Written in C#? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:This sounds great but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:CSS2 or Fight! (Score:4, Informative)
Make'em support CSS 1 [meyerweb.com] first.
Re:security (Score:2, Informative)
Re:security (Score:2, Informative)
Making changes to firefox or the browsers will surely be easier to impliment than going to each and every website out there and telling them to change all the code they have up there at the moment to something that hasn't been confirmed as globally viable to the customers.
Miss one site, and the spammers will hit that one.
The address bar is the only place in your browser that IS static, that IS a flat color. I'm not talking about coloring the links as they are displayed on the page, but in the address bar at the top.
I want to be proactive and give myself a fighting chance at not being a victim.
I don't personally do much financial stuff online, and certainly not without checking the company out first, my idea just allows ME to instantly identify a possible problem at a glance.
Re:I'll be the first to Admit (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not Totally (Score:2, Informative)
Re:security (Score:3, Informative)
He means PNG (Score:5, Informative)
Think about it this way... You know those icons with drop shadows at the top of Slashdot? If they were PNG's, you could swap them across any background and the icon would look great, the shadow would fall correctly. You could anti-alias edges without worrying about what the background image is. You can layer multiple images on top of eachother so that the front page of websites don't have to be chopped up into millions of individual images. And it all just works.
And Microsoft promised full PNG support [joeyday.com] in I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, I.E. 4. They bragged that they were going to be the first to implement full PNG support. They're actually the last. By about 7 frick'in years.
As a rough guess I'd say their lack of PNG support has cost over a million hours of web designer headaches. But they couldn't afford to put one lousy intern on the task of adding alpha channel support to PNG support. Which they promised in I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, which they promised in I.E. 4.
They even have a perfectly suitable though terribly hacky series of workaround, using javascript. If they just fed their PNG's into their own functions which you can call through javascript, you're golden. But no, they've had to have broken PNG support for the last 7 years. Since I.E. 4. Let me repeat that, frick'in I.E. 4.
If there is any reason why webdevelopers hate Microsoft, this is it. PNG support. I would guess on a big project it would shave an hour off everybody's day, for everybody who works with images. Hell, people were shouting that they would pay Microsoft to do this. People volunteered to do this for them. But no, they "couldn't figure out how to do it," for 7 frick'in years.
Push it out to everyone. I don't care if they're on XP, ME, or OS9, proper Alpha Channel PNG support would save a ton of time. It's about bloody time.
Opera supports it. Mozilla supports it. Firefox, Konq, Netscape, Safari, iCab, and Omniweb support it. The Dreamcast and Web TV browsers support it. Everyone but Lynx supports it. Oh, that is everyone but Lynx and frick'in I.E.
[/Rant]
Re:So, basically... (Score:2, Informative)
How to downlad a web browser without a webbrowser.
1) start/run/cmd
2) ftp
3) open ftp.mozilla.org
4) anonymous/getaclue@slashdot.org
5) cd pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0.1/win32/en-U
6) get firefoxsetup.exe
Wow! No I just got a web browser, without using a web browser.
Re:Firefox R&D for Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)
They're called homographs with good reason (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:1, Informative)
Nothing but Vanity on Microsoft's part. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor (Score:2, Informative)
Now the browser market leader is following ... (Score:2, Informative)
The competition from better alternatives like Firefox and Opera is showing its effect.
First they ignore you.
Then they ridicule you
Then they laugh at you
Then they copy you
Maybe now Mozilla guys can move on to adding more new features to the browser now that tabbed browsing is going to be the norm. Heck, how else can I say to the guy sitting next to me whats cool abt mozilla
Re:security -- Not just anglaphones (Score:5, Informative)
But you have a valid point.
That's spin, too. (Score:4, Informative)
Fact: Microsoft could never be convicted of anything. No criminal charges were filed, after all.
Microsoft has been found by a court of law to be an abusive monopolist, that's true. They are not convicted monopolists.
Using the word "convicted" is, itself, a kind of spin. It makes Microsoft out to sound even more slimy and unpleasant than they are. If you want to be spin-free, then avoid using the word "convicted" in connection with the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit.
Re:security (Score:1, Informative)
That does not work.
For example, Japanese as commonly written can, perfectly legitimately, contain characters drawn from half a dozen distinct Unicode ranges. But within each of those ranges, only SOME of those characters are valid in Japanese! For example, the "CJK Unified Ideographs" range contains many characters that are only used in Japanese, and many more that are only used in Chinese, all jumbled together.
And, of course, there is still the problem of similar-looking characters within a range. For example, U+3070, U+3071, U+307C, and U+307D (hiragana "ba", "pa", "bo", and "po") all look extremely similar at typical address-bar font sizes; in some fonts, "ba" and "pa" are completely indistinguishable. But they're right next to each other in Unicode!
Also, your proposition would cause "paypaI" and "paypa1" and "paypal" all to be displayed in a single colour - i.e. there are still a huge number of false negatives where fradulent domain names would be misidentified as "legitimate". This is not typically considered a desirable aspect of any proposed "solution".