Microsoft IE 7 Goes (More) Beta

Hans W. Smith writes "Microsoft has unveiled Internet Explorer 7, releasing the new "preview" version of its Web browser to the general public for testing. The latest version works only with Windows XP Service Pack 2 and includes many of the features Microsoft has been touting for months such as: privacy protection,tabbed browsing and a search box similar to Firefox. They tried to outdo Firefox tab browsing with a feature call Quick tab which shows thumbnail view of all open tabs in a single window." Yup, you saw it yesterday. Posting before coffee never works.

Arn't they bored?

[el_womble]

Is it just me or does Micorosft appear bored by IE7. Its not like its a finished product, they're are tens of standards that they don't conform too, its leaky and yet they're taking years between major revisions.

I know in the 90s it looked like who ever won the browser wars would take over the world, but 10 years on that seems to be the business logic of the underpant gnomes. Why don't they just give up, and distribute Firefox, SeaMonkey or some Gecko based wonder, instead of IE?

css fixes?

[oyenstikker]

Did they fix the 3 pixel shift bug?
Did they fix position:fixed?
Did they fix float messing up other blocks?

(I can't try it, as I use Windows 2000 Server.)

Re:IE7 is a dupe!

[Anonymous Coward]

. . .which in itself is still a copy of OmniWeb for Macintosh; which has had this feature for a while now. ;) (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/ [omnigroup.com])

Re:Thumbnail view

[sucker_muts]

So much for IE having features that FireFox does not.

How many regular browser users ever change a setting for that browser? How many firefox users install extensions?

Microsoft realises the mose people use software out of the box, and never touch settings. They don't expect the mainstream of people wil tweak into oblivion and so they choose to make a browser which has everything as it should as default.

(This is about the same way opera does their browser. Did you ever check how many extensions there are for firefox? Are they all the same quality/stability? Do you check all those extensions once a month to see for any new ones?)

Look, I'm not trying to be a flamebait here, but simplicity is key for the most Microsoft software users. It's just that simple...

Ajax?

[cablepokerface]

From the FA: IE 7 also includes a number of new features for Web developers, including support for up-and-coming Web-programming technologies known collectively as AJAX. How would they go about supporting this? Would it have a javascript extension for it or something? Really the only thing a browser needs to do for ajax is support the xml http request object, which IE does since 5.0 (I believe). The rest is up to the server side code. or not?

MS flip flop

[NoSuchGuy]

Didn't Microsoft tell me about 2 years ago that their customers don't want tabbed browsing?

In 5 years they tell everyone they invented tabbed browsing years befor Opera and Firefox...

Its still not firefox

[jmazzi]

They seem to be just copying firefox, but it's still gonna be lacking in two major areas. Extensions and Security, in my opinion, are what makes firefox stand out.

So?

[stlhawkeye]

If it can't render basic shit like min-width and respect viewport positioning, I don't care. Are they CSS 1 compliant yet? As in... fully?

Re:"Quick Tab"

[virtualsid]

That's a cool feature - something that I've been using with Omniweb on the Mac for a few years now. Once browsers like Firefox have this functionality by default, I'll probably have little need for a commercial browser like Omniweb.

The drag and dropping of the tabs was a welcome addition to Firefox for me - it's still not as slick as Omniweb, but it's getting there.

Now they just need to implement 'Workspaces' from Omniweb into Firefox/Seamonkey in as simple a way as possible, and then I can say a sad farewell to it.

I know this post has no content about Internet Explorer in it :-)

Sid

Now, I am an Opera fan

[beforewisdom]

As I was reading this article I kept thinking how MS copied these features that already existed in firefox and being annoyed how MS would get the glory for them all.

I realized at that point, I had become one of the many Opera fans who have made similar posts about firefox and how Opera had x,y, & z first.

Re:"Quick Tab"

[zrenneh]

I know it's no trouble to the slashdot crowd, but if the average user doesn't know how to change their homepage, how will they install the many extensions required to bring Firefox initial functionality up to the standard of IE. Firefox has many benefits for nerds, but it isn't as functional out of the box.

Re:Thumbnail view

[Ubergrendle]

Mod parent up. I consider myself a bit of a software gear-head (love to try everything and the kitchen sink, tweak until the cows come home, etc) and I've stopped experimenting with the plug-ins. Most work -- by themselves! But once you get 20 or 30 plugins running, the often conflict in terms of user experience, and ultimately lead to browser instability.

Don't get me wrong...I won't be going back to IE. But I think a 'vanilla' version of Firefox or Opera is what most people will be considering, when moving away from IE. a better approach would be to 'adopt' plugins into the base code with each major release...gradually increase the featureset, that can be enabled/disabled via the default install.

Re:IE7 is a dupe!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

And M$ says to dev, please install IE7 Beta and test your pages... except that if I do that, it kills IE6, and I can't check my pages as they'll be seen by 90% of visitors...

This is part of the problem with the archaic install/uninstall system for programs on Windows. On OS X, most programs are completely self contained. They use a "folder is the application" metaphor, where double clicking on the folder (which ends in .app) launches the application, but at the same time you can open up the folder and see the different binaries and resources used by that application. Further, each program writes a preferences file in the appropriate user, or system library. That means you can easily install five versions of a program side by side as simply as dragging the programs where you want them. You can uninstall them by dragging them to the trash. You can copy them to another machine by dragging them onto a network volume or portable media. Since the preferences file lives independently of the application, different versions can share one file. All your instances of a browser can easily share the same bookmarks and settings. If you trash one version and then install another it will likely still have all of your preferences and settings.

The only drawback is a privacy one for users who share accounts for some reason and are not knowledgeable enough to know that preferences can live on without an application. I think it is well worth it though to be able to easily test all the different versions of web browsers and PDF readers without having to jump through hoops.

Re:Run IE7 locally without replacing IE6

[Gnascher]

"The interface gets a bit messed up but it's definitely running a new engine (still some CSS bugs I can see tho, tut tut....)"

Ok, so installing IE7 as a stand-alone with the hack you mentioned messes up the interface. That's a bug you can see that's obvious. What are the non-obvious bugs that get introduced as a result of this hack? I don't know, and there is no way of knowing without some serious regression testing.

For now, the only option for a developer is to have IE7 installed on another machine for testing. That's just plain stupid.

Re:developers

[Gnascher]

My sarcasm detector is ringing. :) However, I think your point is misplaced. MS in fact won the browser wars precisely by making it easier for developers. So much so, that even bad HTML markup was tolerated, as were many other sloppy coding practices. In the early days, sites were far more likely to "Just Work" in IE. Nowadays, however the developer-world is re-embracing the idea of producing clean, standards complient code, and Microsoft is finding themselves in the position of playing catchup ... and tripping over themselves to get there. If MS would indeed re-embrace "MS' long, solid history of making things easier for the web developer", but do so by rigorous implementation of established standards, then I think they could produce yet another dominating browser. The only reason that IE hasn't lost the majority market share is because most users are too lazy to bother installing an alternative browser when the pre-installed IE6 is "good enuf" for most users. Heck, I even delayed for quite a while installing Firefox on my laptop because I use it only infrequently, and just never got around to it.

Where's the...

[MarkVVV]

"Open in new tab" in the context menu?

Re:Needs "Genuine Advantage" validation

[jisatsusha]

Not a problem [fluxiontech.com]

Re:MS flip flop

[mickwd]

"You do know Opera had tabbed browsing before Firefox don't you?"

I think you missed the words "Opera and" in the post you're replying to. But maybe I'm being too critical - after all, he used a whole TWO sentences, taking up a massive TWO lines of text.

Re:"Quick Tab"

[imess]

If the average users don;t even know where to change the homepage, how would you expect them to find out all the functionality of of Firefox even it's provided by default?