No IE7 For 2k, Now In Extended Service 469
Yankovic writes "Looks like MS will not support IE7 on Windows 2000. 'It should be no surprise that we do not plan on releasing IE7 for Windows 2000... [S]ome of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000.' While security fixes will still be available until 2010, I guess that means the only browsers with tabs for W2k will be Opera and Firefox." All the details about an MS product's fall into senility available at the lifecycle page.
Lazy FUDer (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/misctools/fwbro
Re:What is this obsession with tabs? (Score:4, Informative)
SlimBrowser [flashpeak.com] is on that integrates into IE seamlessly and gives you tabs, pop up blacking, and all the other "obvious to everyone but ms" features
Of course the better [mozilla.org] alternative [mozilla.org] is still available
Re:One More Reason to Keep Win2K (Score:3, Informative)
don't you just love the logic? (Score:2, Informative)
1. We are working on security, first we will do XP SP2 and then backport to 2K SP5.
2. Our customers don't need 2K SP5, we will give them a security roll-up to make their system safe.
3. IE7 will not come out for 2K since it does not have the OS features that XP SP2 has.
Hurray!
I for one, would have liked that 2K SP5 btw - it's not like there aren't patches to download after SP4 even with the newest security roll-up.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
OS Platform Stats (Score:3, Informative)
In two years, Linux and the Mac have shown little growth at all, while XP's share has doubled.
If this is what the world looks like to a web developer, I don't think Microsoft has much to fear in the mass consumer market, where the browser wars translate into serious money and power, W2K was never a factor, and where Win XP has been the default OEM install since August of '01.
Win XP... 64%i n.NET.. 1%
W2K........20%
Win 98......4%
Linux.........3%
Mac...........3%
W
Others.......0%
Re:What is this obsession with tabs? (Score:3, Informative)
In addition to Solaris, IE was also available for HP-UX though not Irix. I was seriously considering picking up a used SparcStation off e-bay and forwarding IE through X11 to my linux box in those days, but I was a poor college student and couldn't spare the $50 or so they went for. I think Konqueror became a web browser at KDE 2.0, but there were many sites it did not render correctly. Opera for linux was the first good browser on the linux platform I came across. I'm not sure when it first came out, I "discovered" it sometime after KDE 2.0 I think. I had still been using Netscape at the time, so Opera was like bread from heaven. Mozilla didn't come out for a few more years after that.
Re:OS Platform Stats (Score:1, Informative)
Re:One More Reason to Keep Win2K (Score:5, Informative)
Except they don't. Microsoft has one of the best track records in the business for backwards compatibility. Heck, 90% of their platform problems come from their overriding desire to provide legacy support.
Win2k vs Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
The other group (ans these are the ones Im talking about) are those that for one reason or another belive that win2k is the best Windoze OS (better than XP, better than 2003)...most of these will state stability as their reason for using win2k...others will say that XP has too much bloat and/or eye candy. What M$ is banking on is that these users will switch to a new version of Windoze (XP or 2003)...but what is keeping these users from switching to a Linux distro?
It pretty safe to say that the majority of these users will be looking for office support and not exactly games support...if the argument is that Lotus Notes doesnt work or I need M$ Office, you can always buy a copy of Crossover Office [codeweavers.com] for $40.00...much cheaper than even an upgrade to XP/2003.
And for most Windoze apps, you dont even need to purchase Crossover Office...all you need is a script like This [sidenet.ddo.jp] one.
They have played this move before, but this time it could come back to bite them.
Re:Why do so many people love Win2K? (Score:3, Informative)
I spend a large portion of my working day writing stuff that interfaces with Windows on some low-ish levels. Nothing like driver writing, but a lot of system management stuff, scripting, network mapping, AD stuff, system scripting. I'm up to my ears in API stuff most of the time.
Most of the tools I create have 9x and NT versions, for obvious reasons. 99.999 times out of 100 the 2K and XP versions are identical. IIRC, in 3 years, there's been only one instance of XP actually offering me something apparently better than 2k -- and that was a more complete implementation of the WMI classes. Although funnily enough, the WMI method proved to be less reliable than the "Registry Key Change + API Call" method I was using in 2K... so I used that in XP also.
Windows 2000 is as stable as I could wish for, even on my modern system (a Sempron-based beastie). I don't see any software (apart from Microsoft's own browser, apparently) which requires XP over 2K. From where I'm sitting, Microsoft's carrot to get me to use XP is "Look! Shiny!", and the stick to punish me for using 2K is "Bad Man! No IE7 for you!".... to which my reply is, "So what?"
Security? I browse with Firefox, and my PC lives behind a firewall (well, an ipfw-configured iMac). Although in all honesty the PC's turned into a Wintendo, so spends all its time running World of Warcraft at the moment. All the day to day stuff happens on the my Mac Mini.
Re:One More Reason to Keep Win2K (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. You can activate as many times as you want on the same hardware without a problem. Modify the hardware enough, and you'll have to phone in to get an activation code, which takes all of 5 minutes (on a bad day) if you're on the up & up.
http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.php [aumha.org]