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."
So, basically... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:security (Score:1, Insightful)
Security? (Score:2, Insightful)
We've heard this many times. Let's just wait for it and then make claims.
Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently an important factor is security? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are they basing it on the IE6 code? If so, why? If they're completely rebuilding the Windows code for Longhorn, wouldn't it be smart to do the same with IE?
printing (Score:5, Insightful)
in other words, theyve fixed it so printing from IE isnt as retarded?
how hard can it be to print a page without chopping parts off
many useful features... (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet I IE5 and IE6 will still annoy us for many many years...
Security (Score:5, Insightful)
Good for them, it's about time. SP2 was a step in the right direction: blocked ActiveX & Java by default was a good move. I'll be interested in seeing how they deal with
Not too keen on Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0.
Microsoft still wants to be the one to set the standards
Built-in news aggregator (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds great but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:security (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting Codename... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that I anticipate that in this case...
Re:So, basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
This, is why a monopoly shouldn't be allowed to bundle software.
Re:So, basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually used NN 5 years ago. It was a buggy, slow, crash-prone piece of shit that couldn't handle even moderately complex nested tables without slowing to an absolute crawl and needed to reload the entire page to resize it(!), and I speak as a former ardent Netscape user (I have *never* used IE as my primary browser).
I'd rather user IE6 than NN 3/4 if I had to choose; it's simply not worth that much pain.
Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate (Score:5, Insightful)
This is all they need to do to maintain dominance (Score:4, Insightful)
Getting rid of the surprize factor (Score:4, Insightful)
Wonder if Microsoft will pull an Apple and sue Microsoft Watch [slashdot.org]. Seriously think about it, information on MS products are leaked on to the web everyday.
what about the real important stuff.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Examples: digest authentication is not implemented correctly in IE hence most webservers use a work-around to make it work, which also happens to make it not be truly digest authentication...or the fact that if u gzip-encode all files and you have zip files, IE will convienently forget that the zip file was gzipped, leaving a file that most zip programs like Windows own built-in Zip Folders can't handle (WinRAR will correctly ungzip it before processing the zip file).
Of course, alpha-blending support for PNG would be nice...as well as CSS2 support (for those dynamic pulldown menus that can be done purely in CSS).
FF killer. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Security? (Score:2, Insightful)
Security is claimed as a top priority for many things, by many people for varying reasons.
ActiveX (nuff said)
Personal information in the hands of CALPERS, ChoicePoint, Nevada DMV, Nexis Lexis, et al.
T-mobile Sidekick
Unguarded ammo dumps hundreds of miles from oil fields
In all cases security has had problems and some spokesperson states the obvious, that "security is very important to us", but leaving out, "before the sh!t hits the fan."
In short, it pays to be vague. Who'd trust you or give your their money if you came out up front and said, "Nope, no better than a hen house built over a foxes den."
Re:So, basically... (Score:2, Insightful)
When you add it all up, it does cast rather a negative light on things.
Re:many useful features... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'll be the first to Admit (Score:3, Insightful)
For me, tabbed browsing is not a major goodie for firefox, but it's adblock, spurl.net extension, foxytunes, dictionary search and alot more. And three of them does not have any equivalent for IE and not even opera.
What makes firefox strong is the extensibility and the open source, which made it browser of all time.
Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate (Score:1, Insightful)
Isn't that the whole essance of competition? Personally, I don't give a crap's pants about Firefox. I use it because I think it's better then IE, but if IE7 turns out to be better I will definently use it.
I look at all things this way. I'm not a fanboy of any kind; I use what's better at that time.
Think of it in another way; If IE7 turns out to be better then what the competition is offering, they too will have to improve they're product.
No matter who loses, we (the consumer) win.
Re:This sounds great but... (Score:5, Insightful)
This was mentioned in the article, and it is not exactly great news:
Which features are they not going to support? Given my experience with them, it will probably be the very ones that I would actually like to use. :-) Why is it that they are so loathe to adopt standards? Is their code that flaky, or is it truly their monopolistic tendencies?
Re:FF killer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FF killer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is slowly, but certainly gaining ground, so will alternative browsers.
Re:Not Totally (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya know... such a decision may not be entirely based in ignorance although I don't doubt that your boss is in fact ignorant (most are). There will always be people using old systems and software and those of us that want our stuff to be available to a wide audience will always be stuck supporting it. Hell, even Microsoft has a huge problem with this. A lot of the broken stuff in their products remains broken not because they don't know about it or don't want to fix it. It remains broken because people come to depend on this behavior because they've already encountered it and have had to work around it. This is just the nature of software development I'm afraid.
Um...WTFN? (Score:5, Insightful)
From article:
Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.
My only question is...um, why the fuck not? Even Apple's Safari is already plunging ahead with preliminary CSS3 support.
I predict IE7's "additional support for CSS2" will really just mean fixing the major box model and table width bugs and not changing anything else.
Re:So, basically... (Score:2, Insightful)
Verichat, a well known app for palmos and blackberry handhelds, might be getting undercut by t-mobile when t=mo releases updates for the blackberry. Essentially, they'd be doing a similar thing to bundling software. That is anti-competitive... isn't it? So how is a company able to bundle software? Are there a set of "ethical" bundling practices established?
I'm not trolling, or even being sarcastic, but as I was thinking about this, I didn't understand how anyone can logically bundle software without running into these anti-competitve issues.
Re:So, basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor (Score:2, Insightful)
However, since Microsoft's modus operandi is to pre-announce products themselves many years in advance to discourage competitors from coming up with competing products, I doubt if they would get upset about anybody pre-announcing features. Bear in mind that feature set can and will change in the final release...
Re:So, basically... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'll be the first to Admit (Score:2, Insightful)
CSS Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, basically... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Um...WTFN? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but even today, some companies still force Nutscrape 4 support - a six year old browser IIRC.
I've been absolutely pining for improved css2 support so we can use css selectors. It'd make a lot of tasks much simpler if we were able to use all the css selectors available in the spec.
Re:So, basically... (Score:1, Insightful)
Quicken's market share would dry up pretty quick.
Re:So, basically... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:security (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they can't; they've never shown this before.
What you're seeing now isn't innovation, unless you're using some alternate definition of the word. They're simply implementing features that already exist in other browsers. That's "copying".
They may be "performing well", but don't confuse that with "innovating". You can do a marvelous job at implementing someone else's ideas, but that doesn't make you an innovator.
Re:So, basically... (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no hive mind.
I happen to be opposed to software patents. Other people might have a different opinion. That doesn't make Slashdot hypocritical.
no way they'd do that (Score:5, Insightful)
In the Microsoft view, IE must remain compatible with IE. Even "better", stubborn Open Source developers will continue to be incompatible instead of changing or ignoring the standard. This means that many web sites will remain IE-only.
Adding support for extra features is fine though. You can count on Microsoft to do so.
Firefox R&D for Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
No CSS2 (Score:1, Insightful)
Web-based applications like maps.google.com scare the hell out of them, and rightly so. If you can recreate the interface of locally running software using a server/client over the web then why bother having a thick client. Any OS will do.
They are only improving IE because they have to. If people start questioning their browser software they might start questioning their other software. They'll be kicking and screaming before they submit to full CSS2 and DHTML.
Re:security (Score:3, Insightful)
Its not just unicode wildly extended characters that need catering for, it is all characters which can be alternatives to standard characters.
We used to use full ascii, and unicode to allow us to have "normal" looking nicknames in the chatroom where I used to hang out, but still kept unique short names - for instance "liquid" can be entered as "líquíd".
To the passing eye, they are identical, but they have been modified.
At what point would you cut it off, and how would you determine the domain characteristics.
The original paypal.com example can be modified numerous times to similar effect.
paypál.com or paypa1.com.
If the bar changes too often, then the user will ignore it.
If it doesn't display often enough, then things will be missed.
Hence my original show the various types of characters in various colours (extended further)
Black = Normal flat 7bit text.
Blue = Numerics.
Red = 8 bit ascii.
Purple = extended Unicode.
You could even put a throbber on for mixed type domain words.
We cannot rule out colorblindness, so would have to come up with some alternative to cater.
Re:This sounds great but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway realistically they only need to improve IE enough to supress firefox growth. I'm sure they don't really care that much about CSS support. For advanced web-applications they'd much rather people use the proprietary Avalon stuff soon to be released in 2009*.
(* Give or take a few years)
Re:security (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe banks and other sites need to implement real goddam security instead of the rest of the net having to do it for them. Passmark, securid fobs, validators compiled into the client, something other than a bloody username and password.
Right now, these sites want us to authenticate to them, well how about them authenticating to us? Then I don't care how similar a domain name looks.
Re:security (Score:1, Insightful)
Under your scheme there could e.g. be an all-cyrillic unicode IDN that looked identical to an all-korean unicode IDN (both all purple!).
OK - I know that specific example won't work, but you get the idea... you have to make language blocks look distinct from each other as well as from ASCII!
Re:security (Score:5, Insightful)
How many Alan Kays or Tim Berners-Lees could be hired with the immense pile of wealth they've reaped off the Windows/Office juggernaut? A lot. Lots of money means the potential to be hella innovative by hiring the right people.
In fact, Microsoft already has some top-notch researchers working for them (the inventor of Haskell, I believe, is among them) and they *could* turn that stuff into product; they choose not to for profitability and empire-maintenance reasons. Should their empire crumble they would by necessity go into shark mode: move forward (innovate) or die.
Re:So, basically... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So, basically... (Score:4, Insightful)
*cough*OpenOffice*cough
You mean Firefox is going to have these features removed??
Re:I'll be the first to Admit (Score:3, Insightful)
Fascinating (Score:2, Insightful)
IE exists because some loud-mouthed goofs at a startup called Netscape were making a lot of noise about the Web being the new Operating Environment. They said that as long as an application ran "on the web" it didn't matter what OS it ran on.
Microsoft adeptly applied their tried and true tactics to kill the loud-mouthed poster boys, and become the overwhelmingly dominant player in the web client arena. They made a better web browser than anybody else.
For a short time, they continued to develop and improve their web browser until it was better even than Netscape. Then somebody figured out that, although they had crushed Netscape, they were actually fulfilling the vision set forth by Netscape. Any solid standards-compliant web app had a very solid client waiting on the dominant OS of the day.
MS froze the development of IE, fearing that any more improvements would only make web development even more attractive to developers. They began earnestly searching for ways to extend web technologies in proprietary ways that would make the most clever web apps only work on Windows platforms.
They quickly found that they couldn't just build tricks into the browser and set out on an ambitious plan to rebuild an OS to be a platform for proprietary extansions to web technology. The new OS would make it possible to build incredible web applications, as long as everybody involved was running an MS OS.
This was a monumental undertaking, and has experienced its share of setbacks. But MS continues to work on the dream, and it is nearing completion. It should fulfill the original Netscape vision--except for the part about minimizing the importance of any particular OS.
Meanwhile, the web has become ubiquitous. It is more used than cell-phones, automobiles, or any electronic gadget except televisions. Soon, televisions will receive their content over the internet.
And IE, with as minimal improvements as MS can get away with, is proving inadequate to the demands of web users. Speed, features, and security of IE have become unacceptable, and users are wandering away.
So MS is in a race on a tightrope. They need to keep the loyalty of IE users by improving security, features, and performance of IE. At the same time they cannot risk luring more developers into the web arena until they have a proprietary "web platform" that can lock developers in while providing users the features they demand.
This is amazing drama for spectators. Will MS complete their proprietary "web platform" in time? Will they be able to maintain IE loyalty until the new platform can gain traction? Will the rebel Mozilla Foundation be able to gain enough ground to matter? Does anyone have an answer to the proprietary web killer once it has been completed? Will the police finally believe that there is a pattern and catch the culprit before he can kill the most important figure in the movie? Will I have enough popcorn to make it to the end? Wow! This is intense!
Re:Um...WTFN? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Um...WTFN? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because standard conformance is a loss for MS. The more lazy and incompetent web page creators they can keep making non-standard conforming, IE-only web sites, the better for MS.
Re:So, basically... (Score:4, Insightful)
Saying that the whole Mozilla effort hasn't been given a chance to compete is simply bogus. They have succeeded in creating a growing market of converts and forced a convicted monopolist to get up and respond. That sounds like competition to me.
It doesn't have to be 50-50 to be competitive.
Re:many useful features... (Score:1, Insightful)
it's about time (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Um...WTFN? (Score:2, Insightful)
Embrace & Extinguish (Score:2, Insightful)
Then when they released, there was huge press coverage with fanboy-like praise for a mediocre product and gigantic marketing campaigns (connection?) that left the underfunded competitor in the dust despite the competitor's superior product.
Like it or not, I see that happening again with IE7.
I'm also thinking someone at M$ has probably recommended IE7 to be a huge memory/bandwidth/CPU sucking hog with DRM hooks into the system as far as they can get them.
Then, Microsoft gets to say they are protecting their users because they delivered a more secure browser. And...
(Cue gameshow announcer voice now!)
The best way to enjoy more security is to buy a new Dell/Intel PC!!! Ohhh... Ahhh... (cue applause) Your new computer will have all these great Media Conglomerate entertainment "features" you couldn't get on your old PC because your old PC was just too old... wash, rinse, repeat.
Mod me flamebait/off-topic/whatever now.
Re:not even (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So, basically... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, I don't know about you but I think this is commendable, especially as Opera has to make a profit from its browser whereas the majority of its competitors (MSIE, Firefox, Safari, etc) do not and are either subsidised or supported by donations.
I agree with you that software patents are a bad idea but I'm afraid that they're the reality of the world that we live in. Most companies wouldn't (and don't) hesitate to use software patents to their advantage. Opera choses not to go down that route and, in this day and age, I find that highly commendable.
But what if? (Score:2, Insightful)
The concern is with the *appearance* of security (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahhh...G....where have we seen this before?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox Already Has this...
native IDN support
Yep it has it, but it's turned off by default because of Phishing....do we really want/need this??
new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE
Um....ok..does it matter? No.
and, of course, tabbed browsing.
Big deal...have had this for what...almost 2 years now??
The new browser also will likely include a built-in news aggregator.
Firefox has it and it looks like Safari will to way before IE 7 sees the light of day.
Apparently an important factor is security
With integrated IDN? Well, I hope it's not on by default. Will it still do Active X? Of course it will and until this part is GONE or TOTALLY REWORKED and REWROTE security isn't going to be a true concern.
I hope they do make IE 7 better....by the time it's out, it wil be even further behind Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari.
Re:security (Score:5, Insightful)
As a side note, I wouldnt use the word "empire" when not referring to government. The MS situation isn't pretty, but its hardly geopolitics regardless of how strongly geeks identify with the issue.
On a more related note, yes, MS isn't so much a software company as a monopoly maintaning machine. Certain changes and innovations that could potentially hurt its monopoly status get tossed out the window and fast. This is also why so many talented people dont work as MS. MS's R&D department isn't comparable to other companies that court talent like this and the talent knows their work will be for nothing unless it actively helps lock customers into the MS-only path. At least in general.
As far as the "empire crumbling," well, I personally doubt they'll become more innovative. I would think they would become more restrictive. Less interoperability, more proprietary stuff, etc to keep their customers to keep from hemorraging more.
Case in point: IE7
First off, it wasnt supposed to happen. Now its happening.
Secondly, its still IE. We're not seeing MS, say, announce that activeX wont be supported in x amount of years. Even though it would be in everyone's interest if the activeX system was dropped in a planned fashion because of abuse and because its pretty much not needed when you consider what Java and web services can do. But its not going away. In fact its tied into the uber-critical windows update page. This is typical MS monopolistic control.
MS can and will only go further down the proprietary spectrum. More activation stuff, more big discounts if your organization goes all MS, more big discounts if you dont sell competing OS's, more embrace/extend/extinguish, etc.
Re:security (Score:3, Insightful)
If the next version of IE comes out with tabbed browsing, pop up blocking and support for cascading style sheets, would you call that innovation? I would call it a monopolist trying to play catch up after being caught flat footed and unprepared for real competition after leveling Netscape.
If history repeats itself, MS's contribution to "innovation" will be in the form of MS only extensions designed to lock out all other competing products. There are still a number of IE only sites on the web. And don't be surprised if MS files with the US Patent Office to protect their "innovative" IP.
Re:So, basically... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, like tabs? Predates firefox.
Oh perhaps pop-up blocking. Predates firefox.
Maybe that little info bar in FF 1.0. Whoops, that was shamelessly copied ffrom IE SP2.
First off, Firefox isnt all that original, its just a good implementation. Secondly, its the LACK of patents that keep Mozilla going. Imagine if Netcaptor (or whoever it was) got a patent on tabbed browsing. Whoops. You think they'd politely share? Yeah right. Not to mention, if the OSS did patent stuff, then it would kinda defeat the purpose of going open source. No OSS developer has the ideological spirit to turn down a million dollar check from MS, not to mention most OSS developers arent going to drop 5 grand down for a patent and defend it (more legal fees!) because they felt like making and sharing some software. Goes against the whole DIY and share approach.
Re:security (Score:2, Insightful)
They would have gains in the security by doing so, but at the expense of possibly losing their strangle hold on what 95% of users use to browse the web. (I wonder which is more important to Microsoft?)
From a sys admin perspective tying the browser to the OS scares me. I'll patch it up completely (critical, important patches) but I'm always wary of IE updates because it a partial OS update too... what system files does IE want to poke around with? And what will break?
Lastly, why are they turning their backs on Windows 2000? Surely they can make IE 7 available to that OS too... if Win5.2 (Win2003 Server) and 5.1 (WinXP) can get it, surely Win5.0 (Win2000) should be able to.
-sp-
Re:security (Score:5, Insightful)
FWIW, I'm of the opinion that this "IDN exploit" that shmoo.com publisized has been overblown. While I agree that the "exploit" is certainly serious, I do not concur that it is isolated to IDN. Instead, the "exploit" is common to all DNSname processing.
With the right (or wrong) font, http://slashdot.org/ and http://s1ashdot.org/ look like the same URL. But they are not. And neither of these two URLs are expressed in IDN.
The key is that the two URLs look alike, and this is an exposure with all URLs.
So, is IDN at fault for the shmoo.com "exposure"? No, since the "exposure" exists without the use of internationalized URLs.
Re:So, basically... (Score:4, Insightful)
Their "competition" from Moz is a charity case from AOL, the Moz people, and maybe a few general-population contributors, with most outsiders contributing no more than bug reports. Opera is minor in the desktop market, being forced into embedded/portable stuff, and STILL has to give away an ad-supported version for free.
The long and the short of it is that nobody can make money on browsers, and MS can ensure that ninety-whatever percent of desktops have IE installed.
Re:Transparent PNG support (Score:3, Insightful)
Stinkin' open source and it's willy-nilly practices.
Tiny fact (Score:4, Insightful)
Except for the fact that Microsoft is a convicted Monopolist. All the spin in the world won't erase the fact that they broke the law and were convicted.
Of course, thanks to the current big-business-iz-good administration, their punishment was abysmally lenient.
Re:security -- Not just anglaphones (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other hand, occasionaly people have no idea where they want to go, and simply click on the first site they can find that seems relavent. This is a prime opportunity for fraud, since the user is unlikely to be familiar with the set of websites that they are trying to access. If the Internet is to continue to make such random connection between vendors and customers possible, there needs to be a better infrastructure to prevent fraud outright, instead of relying on silliness like SSL certificates tied to an arbitrary (for the user) domain name. Who cares which character encoding a site uses, even if it's similar to another site? If the user didn't know which site they wanted in the first place, applying browser based restriction on IDN characters is silly, and it limits users to a subset of the Internet. It would be much better to establish a higher order level of trust, possibly with a web of trust design. Generally, people will shop where their neighbors and associates shop, because they will have more information about possible trouble or incentives for shopping there. A web of trust for online vendors is exactly the model the Internet needs to increase security and reduce fraud. Make user feedback an integral part of search engines and trust rankings. Abstract an interface for conducting online transactions so that they can be cryptologically verified and anonymized and made available for inspection by users. To buy a widget, search for vendors who sell widgets and have a high number of incoming edges in the web of trust as well as a high percentage of appropriately completed transactions. Make the system voluntary, and it will generally work out. The majority of people won't care and won't leave feedback, so a higher ratio of negative feedback to positive will result, but it can be offset by the company releasing lots of successful transactions. The negative transactions will all be listed, and the company will only have to release as many as needed to keep a favorable image (if possible) without subjecting themselves to too much data mining.
Re:Aren't you rather missing the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a time when Nutscrape was busy inventing proprietary extentions, and Microsoft was the one implementing W3C standards like CSS and DOM1. (Not to mention the XML stuff.) In most cases, MS shipped their version years before the Open Source world got around to it.
Yea, Microsoft dropped the ball later on, but without their support for W3C specs, the idea of non-proprietary web standards might have just faded away. So, I think Mozilla/FireFox actually owes a lot to IE.
Giving birth (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Um...WTFN? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you took all the "business/marketing assholes" out of Microsoft, there'd be nobody left.
Re:Nothing but Vanity on Microsoft's part. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:security (Score:4, Insightful)
Hover over the colored letters. Works in Opera and Firefox. You could add some kind of "Do not warn about this domain ever again" to the UI.
Tortise and Hare (Score:3, Insightful)
In a way it is like the tortoise and hare.
The hare( firefox ), has the advantages of being able to get new end user desired features to market very fast and not being tied to the operating system ( albeit, that is not something non IT end users seem to care about much ).
The tortoise, IE, lately, seems to have wait for the next release of Windoze to "catch up". However IE has the tremendous advantages of coming with Windoze which comes with most end user PCs. As all regular slashdotters know, most people will just use what is on their computer instead of downloading something else.
IE also has the advantage of a huge amount of programming muscle on the payroll at Microsoft( not mention managers to manage hissy fits among the development staff ) and they can just sit back and let firefox do their market research for them. They can see which features work for firefox in terms of popularity and copy them into IE for the next release cycle
It will be interesting to see if IE 7 puts IE back up past 90% market share.
Re:He means PNG (Score:3, Insightful)
Preach it, brother! If they fixed they're goddamned PNG handling, my life would be simpler, and our sites would look better. It's inexcusable that the only way to get PNGs to almost work right in IE is with a bleeding javascript hack.
The one thing I want even more, though, is a proper box model. CSS hacks (which only work because of other bugs in IE) remind me of the bad old days of v4 browsers and table layouts. Of course, it will still be two or three years before we can safely ignore IE6, but at least I'd have something to look forward to. (And if they fix the box model without fixing things like * html { } I'll be ranting for days...)
Neither of these things are really a big deal. I have no idea why they're so resistant to fixing them, except that it might confuse their FrontPage users.
Fix those two things, and suddenly almost all of the crappy hacks we currently have to use go away. Sure, I'll find something else to bitch about, like missing selectors or something, but I'll deal. PNGs and a box model. Tiny requests, and they seem to be the things that piss off the web development community the most. I wish they'd get over it and just commit to the damned things.
Debatable solution to a different problem (Score:3, Insightful)