Internet Explorer 8 Delayed Until 2009 204
Barence writes "Microsoft has confirmed that Internet Explorer 8 will not be officially released until 2009. According to a blog posting on the Internet Explorer 8 development site, a release candidate of the browser will be released in the first quarter of next year, to be followed by a final release at an unspecified date. This news comes on the same day that Google is considering bundling its Chrome browser with new PCs. Will the IE delay and Google's tactics help to steer users in Chrome's direction?"
Re:how (Score:5, Interesting)
They give it away from free and still have a huge majority of the market share.
So...
1. They don't have any financial motives to make it excellent just to keep it from being left behind.
2. As long as they keep the majority in market share developers will still develop and test with it.
All the changes and features are basically keep up features with some easy to program "innovative" stuff just to keep it on the radar. If you have done any software development you need to realize it is difficult to have a clean timeline of code especially with scope that Microsoft needs to have (Works for all Systems, Business and Personal Use, Good Security, Huge Flexibility...) In general Microsoft hates saying no to its customer so they often end up creating applications that meet all the customer request but fail to do what the customers want.
This is part of the Apple popularly surge. Apple likes to say no to a lot of good features. As they realize if it is implemented the majority may suffer to make the minority a little bit happier.
Google not serious about browser (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:how (Score:4, Interesting)
It's definitely part of the recipe for these kinds of projects. The main thing we see in big projects that are beyond a first or third iteration (like IE) is that most of the original team is gone and most of the original vision has changed, either for political reasons or for necessary course corrections, and both of which must be true for IE. Nobody on the IE team shares the exact same vision for IE. Many fragments of the IE userbase have likely caused conflicts between team members from design to production. Conflicts cause issues in every aspect of development, but also they cause turnover.
We know people were promoted out of the IE team, and promoted out of the company. In a case like Microsoft, it's been years since the first iteration, and IE has gone through so many revisions that there is a high likelihood for spaghetti code and feature creep to crush project fluidity. They have rewritten the whole thing, how many times now?
While team members wielding political weapons must be crushed on sight by worthy adversaries, it doesn't happen enough because people are afraid of repercussions. Unless you are Steve Ballmer, then you throw a chair and hit the wrong person.
We can only hope... (Score:1, Interesting)
They've realized that their current offering doesn't stack up to modern browsers, so they're buying some more time to actually make it worthwhile.
Last time I checked, their beta looked more like an alpha build. It failed to render everyday sites reliably, what's left for doing it in a timely manner.
Here's to hoping they actually engineer some of the showstoppers out of it, instead of just patching it up so that it behaves most of the time...
I bet it still be (Score:5, Interesting)
I may dump Firefox. (Score:3, Interesting)
I went up to Mozilla the other day for a plugin and what do I find? A login/registration screen! WTF! I am going to have to register with them too just to get a plugin? I create phony logins, but it's the principal. I'm sick of having of this registration BS. What benefit does a website gain from it? Is it an incentive for advertisers? What? It just makes the site a bigger pain in the ass.
Registration is a pain.
Re:how (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a difference here. Putting chrome on a PC that automatically has IE (thanks, microsoft) means you have a choice. If we included firefox and safari, even moreso. It is at this point people can then say that they want IE completely removed from a PC. It may not be the same as selling PCs that don't have windows bundled but it is a step in the right direction.
Microsoft have nothing right or wrong in this instance, all they are doing is pushing back development as they are doing a crappy job as always.
Re:Google not serious about browser (Score:3, Interesting)
And MS shouldn't be either. I can see them including a basic browser to get you going. Notepad and Wordpad are free but if you want something more then you get a real word processing program.
IMHO MS stays in the browser war because they are paranoid they will miss the next big thing. Ever since MS was late to get on the Internet bandwagon they have made sure they get involved with thing across the board just enough. Just enough to have something so they don't miss out on the next big thing .... whatever that might be.
Re:how (Score:1, Interesting)
It's the best browser that has ever been distributed for the average computer user to use. IE 8 will be better. That's why they use numbers at the end of the name to let you know there is a better one out there.
Firefox may be superior in some respects and not in others. I use both. When IE won't render a page correctly then I go use Firefox. Works well for me.
I am not sure what part of IE 7 is not solid. It never crashes and it displays web pages, media content and downloads files. What more is it supposed to do?
Re:Avoiding the issue (Score:2, Interesting)
A 1000+ seat installation means you have lots of resources available. Guys dedicated to packaging software and testing it.
Now think of a 100 seat installation, where you often don't even have one full time IT employee.
Almost no resources - now create your own deployment package, and update it everytime Mozilla releases an update, and deploy that alongside an already existing webbrowser that more or less does it's job?
Why? Where's the business case? It costs hell of a lot time and money, of which you have neither, and doesn't really change all that much about the situation.
Re:how (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, nice word-games you're playing there but no, I'm not google's "product". They didn't make me.
Google's products are Gmail and Search, they created them and I am using them.
Google is using a fairly novel approach to monetize their products but I don't agree with you swapping the definition of "product" and "customer" for them.
Re:how (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, ofcourse you have a point. The Firefox integration could be better and MSIE has better integration (obviously - it's coming from the OS vendor).
What I was trying to say is that pretty much everything you need can be done with a bit of elbow grease and it's a one-time investment.
The larger your deployment the more likely do you have the ressources to make that investment. And the more likely will you benefit from using Firefox over IE because of better security and indeed better customization options (XUL, Chrome, Addons) in the long run.
I'm talking a bit tongue in cheek here as I know that stuff first-hand (having supported large deployments and knowing a few people in the biz of *really* large deployments). Reality is that indeed, many large enterprise deployments use MSIE. Not because it is in any way superior but rather because IT is outsourced to a MS-contractor...
Re:how (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not that bad with him, that I had to hide FF behind the blue "e", but yes, I already did that in hopeless cases when doing tech support for 200 not quite computer literate social workers 2 years ago :-)
But I have serious doubts that there are many people out there who would start up a new PC for the first time, look at the bizarre parade of a compass, an "e", an "o", an earth-cuddling fox-like creature and a multicolored ball and think: "Ah, feels good to have the choice!".
Re:Should be delayed further! (Score:1, Interesting)
It isn't true that Firefox 3 and 3.1 obliterate IE8 in standards support.
IE8 beta 2 has better CSS2.1 support than Firefox 3 and 3.1. In particular, Firefox has a lot of problems with position: and display: whereas those already work perfectly in IE8. Firefox sucks at printing, mostly because it doesn't support any useful page-breaking properties of CSS 2.1, whereas IE8 beta 2 supports them all. That means you can actually generate nice printable reports for your IE8 users without having to generate PDFs, which is a big deal in corporate settings. IE8 also has better internationalization support--with Firefox, you still have to download extensions to get proper Asian language support. Plus, IE has much better support for downloadable fonts than Firefox 3.1 (Firefox 3.0 doesn't support them at all); the EOT mechanism results in much faster downloads and will probably have have a lot more fonts available for use than Firefox's mechanism will. Firefox does implement some proposed CSS3 properties (most notably opacity), but IE8 supports about the same number of CSS3 properties--it just supports different ones.
IE8 beta 2 already supports more HTML 5 features than Firefox does.
Firefox does have much better DOM compliance, but hardly anybody uses the DOM nowadays anyway--jQuery and similar frameworks make every browser work the same way.
IE8 beta 2 has a slew of security features that Firefox hasn't even started to implement: process isolation for pages, automatic XSS prevention, and secure Javascript APIs for parsing.