Microsoft Drops Hints on IE8

benuski writes "Lost in the hype about Microsoft's new Siverlight platform, there has been some information surfacing about IE8. It will include improvements in RSS, CSS, and AJAX support, and will follow Firefox 3 in supporting microformats. Also, the developers are going to try and improve UI customization, which is one of the main criticisms of IE7."

Re:You know what I want?

[AKAImBatman]

I want a little more attention paid to standards.

Amen. I want to see DOM 2 support (not just their crappy 1.0 support from 1998), CSS that works, caching that actually works, Canvas (ok, so it's not a W3C standard; but IE is the only one missing it), SVG, a Javascript debugger that doesn't suck, so on and so forth.

Hype about Silverlight?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Microsoft announced a few major partners who were going to adopt Silverlight. I wonder, however, whether any of those were "wins" of content providers who were previously using Flash video ... or if they were merely content providers who were already using Windows Media and are merely going to take advantage of an easier way to distribute it.

Anyone know?

Re:You know what I want?

[Major Blud]

I wonder if IE 8 is going to be compatible with XP or Vista only. It seems to be to early to tell at the moment, since details are still lacking. I wouldn't be surprised if it was Vista only since it seems that MS is in a big hurry to discontinue support for XP.

Will it run on Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about Mac? Or anything other than just bloody Vista? The worst problem for anyone publishing on the Web (which is everyone) is having to own all the new OSs for testing our standards-deficient browsers.

On the plus side, I'm shocked to hear Molly Holzschlag is working with MS on the new release.
http://www.webstandards.org/2007/04/02/bringing-st andards-to-microsoft/ [webstandards.org]

Year after year MS has made promises about standards for the next browser and then never delivered. It's been pure Charlie Brown + Lucy + football every time. I'd expect no different for this IE8 hype, except for the mention of Molly.

I've worked with Molly and hold her in the greatest respect. I'm also thoroughly jaded about MS browser announcements and never believe a word anymore. One of these positions will have to shift with the release of IE8, and I'm very curious which it will be.

Re:Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

"Seriously, Firefox is nice and all but 700MB for three tabs is just a little extreme."

So is your hyperbole. I've had FF -- with 20 extensions -- running for about 6 hours now, and currently have 5 tabs open. It's using 90MB of RAM, with Peak Usage at 125MB. I won't deny that FF is a bit memory heavy, but I run it 8+ hours a day at work and the only time I've seen it go over 150MB was when I had a dozen tabs open.

Re:When will they learn

[skoaldipper]

When will they learn to hack an x64 flash plugin into IE6, 7, or even 8 already? Ubudoobie x64 and firefox are cracking white hot baby. I got this puppy firing on all flash fours with that nspluginwarper doobamajigger. Honestly, I love IE7 and all, but everytime I make love to it, I feel like firefox's hands have been all over it first - from tabs to customizing UI to ... you name it. Hey, I'm no fanboi either way fellas, but I call 'em like I see 'em. Microsoft ain't no turtle nor hare in this race - probably some granny with a cane taking the scenic route. It really is impressive when you stop and think how a collective group of worldwide contributors can surpass this organization in swift response to user demand. Personally, I think Microsoft is in dire need of further decentralization of their many software departments, or more personnel, or ... something. It use to be I only booted into Windows for the browser, now I only boot into XP when I'm not using a browser. Strange turn of events...

My Adblock policy

[SIGBUS]

By default, I let ads through. However, the instant $AD_NETWORK serves up an abusive ad, such as a fake dialog box, or circumventing Firefox's popup blocker, or playing audio by default, or anything else obnoxious (see also: Intellitxt, Rovion), said network goes into my blocklist. Needless to say, blocking the bad guys makes the browsing experience a whole lot nicer.

Google ads don't really bother me - they're text ads, rasy enough to ignore.

Re:I dont care...

[Urusai]

"You can't polish a turd."

You can if you freeze it first.
-- attribution unknown

On a serious note, I'm ashamed, ASHAMED, that browsers have become thin clients. They suck at it, AJAX is a horrible kludge, they are all incompatible, that's not what they are for, etc. I thought Java would be the thin client foundation for the future, all that was needed was a small caching/comms/app management environment. No...that was too obvious, and nobody wanted to put Sun in a position to call any shots. Microsoft pulls .NET out of its cloning labs, but it turned out to be a cheesy mix of Visual Basic API and Java, and nobody wants to catch the clap from sleeping with Microsoft. We have RDP, but seriously, can we get serious? Whatever this Silverlight thing Microsoft is shilling is poison from inception; I dismiss it knowing it only from this article.

Re:It wouldnt be a good comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

too bad more mobile devices use Opera than firefox... and what about the Wii? Granted those aren't windows based, but if enough people learned that's what their devices used, and that it was avaible for their pc, there's a good chance a decent amount would switch over.

Web Developers

[ProfessionalCookie]

Requiring Windows to run IE? This is exactly what Silverlight does. It requires that developers run windows. While the plugin will be cross platform all the development require proprietary tools plus windows. I will resist it as a user as long as is reasonable, but I will never touch it as a developer. I'm all for next generation web technologies but they need to have open development standards.

Re:You know what I want?

[hkgroove]

I would hope yes and I would hope no. If they're going to release another disappointment then keep it with Vista. I've had several friends who bought laptops / machines in recent months that were shipped with Vista, call and complain to Dell that they absolutely hated it. Two were able to jump through some hoops and ended up with a new copy of XP. This is interesting because the person who sells us our equipment (our leases are from Dell) said he gets a better rate in commission to push Vista (I don't know how truthful he was about this - maybe there were incentives, but not sure about commission...). We told him we weren't interested in Vista and he said that was no surprise that probably only 5% of his sales have been Vista - though his projections were to be 30 or 40% of new sales be Vista over XP.

Granted he sells primarily to businesses - was it this difficult when XP was released? And yes, I know many business are still stuck with Win2000 (the majority of his clients are smaller companies) not huge banks or corporations who seek conformity, but instead companies that traditionally are on the cutting edge of technology.

Re:It wouldnt be a good comparison

[Jarjarthejedi]

I'd be willing to bet a good quantity of imaginary dollars that the number of Mobile Phones, Wiis and other gadgets using Opera is far smaller than the number of computers using Firefox. And really even if it's not Opera is not one of the top 2 competitors, and with those mobile phones/Wiis coming with it pre-installed (sounds like another browser considered by some superior to Firefox due to higher numbers...just saying) that means the number of people who purposefully go out to get Opera is far smaller than FF. Say what you want about FF but it is the biggest non-IE, perhaps because of media coverage but still the biggest. (Why do I see a FF bloatware joke coming?)

Re:I dont care...

[spoco2]

On a serious note, I'm ashamed, ASHAMED, that browsers have become thin clients.

People like you must die young? Surely? You love to find things to bitch about, things to get incensed about, things to go prematurely gray about... urgh.

The world is the way it is now, browsers are being used as thin clients because they are ubiquitous. Java is not used because it's always had a shitty install process, version management and was historically slow.

So, we have browsers that can do an awful lot installed on pretty much every single computer out there, why not use that as a nifty way of being able to deliver applications?

And if you're so pissed off with the incompatibilities with javascript/DHTML, why not use a great dev platform like Openlaszlo [openlaszlo.org] where you code in one language and output to either flash or DHTML?

I'm currently building a flash based app using it as you get away from the hell of browser incompatibilities by way of the standard flash player.

Unless you're in a position to change the world, there's very little to be gained by spending your time bitching about how certain, quite insignificant, things are the way they are. (And why are you 'ashamed'? Did you cause this to happen? How can you be ashamed for something you had no part in... unless, of course, you did).

Re:Extensions

[EvanED]

Replying to myself this much is really lame, but, without opening more tabs or really doing much of anything, I'm up to 422,192K mem usage. Task manager reports a peak mem use of 890,164K.

Oh, hey, look, without doing anything but typing this message, I'm up to 428,628K usage.

I love Firefox, but either it or one of my extensions is absolutely horrible with memory.

(434,500K)

Re:Extensions

[EvanED]

This is something that some people have problems with and others don't it seems. I'm not sure what makes the difference, but I certainly can back up his claims [slashdot.org].

I would guess it's probably an extension that's causing this, but I'm not sure; I only have a few installed and enabled now.

(I just restarted FF a couple times so now it's only at 55 MB with 2 tabs, but when I posted that comment above I was over 400 MB of mem usage (with a VM size over 900 MB) with 10 tabs.

So he's probably not making that up.

Re:I dont care...

[Spy Hunter]

Everyone hates the browser, but nobody can replace it. Instead of denying it, it's time we (as a profession) accept that the browser actually *is* a good platform for applications, and start figuring out why, so that when we try to replace it we don't end up removing its best features.

Here's a list of things browsers do better than any other client application platform out there:

• Superlative, lightning fast text layout and reflow, including support for all languages
  
• Sandboxed code from untrusted sources that you can actually trust enough to run routinely without security prompts
  
• Extremely robust and effective yet easy to use transparent caching mechanism makes "installation" irrelevant
  
• Stateless nature forces architecture choices on developers that turn out to be a good idea anyway (despite the kicking and screaming)
  
• Emphasis on declarative content and text instead of procedural code and opaque binary blobs enables automated processing, unintended features: search engines, back button, bookmarking, form autocomplete and spell check, password managers, download managers, tabbed browsing, GreaseMonkey
  
• Easy centralized control using proxies
  
• almost completely platform-agnostic
  
• Free development tools
  
• Practically instant start-up
  
• Tiny runtime size (Firefox is a 5.7 MB install; Java and .NET are how much again?)
  
• "Everything is a hyperlink" user interface simplifies and standardizes user experience
  

I'm not even counting the installed base as an advantage here, so don't complain that alternatives fail because of user apathy toward installation of alternatives; these are genuine advantages that the browser has over alternatives, ignoring its ubiquity. Now, the implementation of all of these features in browsers have flaws that I'm sure you can name, and browsers have plenty of other faults too. But no other alternative provides all of these features in one package. These are *all* really important features with huge advantages in the real world that any replacement for the browser as an application platform will need to address.

TFA forgot to mention the real goal of IE8...

[fellip_nectar]

...XP incompatibility.