MS To Slip IE8 Into Vista and XP Through OEMs 289
crazyeyes writes "Microsoft says it's 'optional,' but they are already planning to slip Internet Explorer 8 into all Windows Vista/XP PCs by March. MS claims that IE8 will offer better performance and security. But what about unwanted stuff like 'Monetization opportunities (for OEMs)' and 'These services will be used (by OEMs) to deliver brand exposure... to the users'?"
IE must be architecturally borked (Score:5, Interesting)
IE has so many serios deficiencies that have been longstsanding and obvious, I can only conclude that these shortcomgs are architectural. Things that force web developers to implement two separate versions of their JS libs _ one for IE and one for everybody else who somehow, despite greatly reduced resource availability, are able to implement these features.
Whether you are talking about connection handling, spacing and padding attributes, or listen handlers, it's just a public embarrassment for the company that once cried 'DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!'.
At my company (a vertical niche information system vendor) we've become so jaded that we now tell our users that we actually support firefox and only test for IE. Not surprisingly, our users are about 90% FF.
MS, you're dropping the ball, here, and those developers you once coddled have been SCREAMING about it for years. You're getting exactly what you deserve with your plummeting browser market share!
Re:Rule of thumb. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh wait... people can be galvanized, just not the way that you said. "galvanize: to startle into sudden activity; stimulate." Yeah, I think I was pretty galvanized last time I went to the strip club.
Re:IE has had these for ages (Score:5, Interesting)
Recently the standard of Slashdot articles about Microsoft has taken a huge nosedive, any opportunity to bash them seems to be taken. It used to be mainly misleading summaries, but nowadays anything with an anti-Microsoft slant, even something basically made up or down to the incompetence of the submitter, seems to get posted.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/06/1544207 [slashdot.org] - bashing Microsoft for letting you download Microsoft software on another PC besides the one you intend to use it on.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/2259257 [slashdot.org] - the worst example I've seen - unfounded, unproven allegations with no substance whatsoever.
Re:New computers need *SOME* sort of browser (Score:1, Interesting)
In a word, laziness.
Any OEM is going to create some generic disk image that they can then push to *every* machine of the same (or similar) model. True, they may do some post-boot tweak for setting an individual serial number/activation code/product ID. It simply doesn't make sense for any large corporation shipping out hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of machines to install each machine by hand.
So, OEM's are lazy because something like Firefox or Opera are readily available and they could easily include it in their install image.
The only reason IE is dominant is because those same non-computer-literate users just don't know any better. If Opera or Mozilla were to push to have their browsers installed on new Dell or HP machines, then the market share would change. Those same users may not be able to visit those websites that are designed to fit whatever MS non-standard, but the developers of those sites should have had web standards in mind anyway.
Re:standards (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, if you want Dell to help make that happen, maybe encourage them to shovel money in a direction other than Microsoft, as it'll happen MUCH MUCH FASTER.
While IE 8 is more standards compliant, it is still significantly behind it's competition (Safari/Webkit, Opera, FireFox to name three). It's pretty sad, given that MS has thrown the most number of developer hours at it (except perhaps for FireFox), that IE 8 is still behind, but it's not the developers fault. Management has basically ordered them to make sure that IE helps them sell IIS and developer tools, because the corporate intranet sites will 'work best' with IE, and only with extra effort work OK with non-IE browsers.
Re:F*ck Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in "the day" when I still regularly used Windows, I made it a habit to reinstall Windows at least once a month. What I really did towards the end was just archive the entire Windows/Program Files/Documents directories in Ubuntu and restore them as needed.
Re:IE must be architecturally borked (Score:2, Interesting)
No ball dropped, just optimized for your platform. Really now - that 300 MB of RAM apparently sets you back about $6 [pricewatch.com]. Is that exorbitant? Firefox USES that RAM to speed up performance, and this can be fairly easily tweaked [mozillazine.org] if the $6 is more than you can stomach.
For example, Skyfire [skyfire.com] is Mozilla based, and is quite usable on my 400 Mhz, 64 MB RAM Windows Mobile Pocket-PC phone.
Re:And Microsoft deserves it. (Score:5, Interesting)
But how can one disagree with the truth?
It would be good if MS-bashing articles contained any truth than, rather than a random assortment of hearsay, wild conjecture, lies, and outright idiocy on behalf of the author, like that recent one about "super-DRM" in Windows 7, which ended up being just a guy using a bad crack for Photoshop, and not knowing what an NTFS junction is.
Oh hey Visual Basic, case-sensitivity would like a word!
BASIC has been case-insensitive since it first appeared. VB is a dialect of BASIC. What's surprising about it?
A lot of other languages are case-insensitive too, by the way, and quite a few people consider case sensitivity to be a bad idea. I'm not in that camp, but it's certainly not a strong point for you to debate on.
March? They're rushing IE8. This could be bad. (Score:5, Interesting)
As a developer of an AJAX-based web framework, I'm upset to see IE8 being thrown out the door so quickly. RC1 was nothing short of a disaster: it had a performance bug where nesting absolute-positioned DIVs would result in exponential performance decreases.
Test case here: http://echo.nextapp.com/content/test/ie8/ [nextapp.com]
The 25-nested DIV test would require killing the browser. Nesting absolutely positioned DIVs is somewhat fundamental to delivering application-style user interface layouts in a web browser.
I reported this bug everywhere I could, and Microsoft actually did a great job in responding to it. They say they've found it and fixed it. But there is no way for us to test this. We must simply take their word for it and wait. They're going from RC1 to final, and begging and pleading for an interim build didn't warrant much of a response.
From reading forums (e.g. Ajaxian: http://ajaxian.com/archives/push-back-digital-tv-or-ie-8 [ajaxian.com]), my IE8 experience is not uncommon with other web frameworks as well. The average developer's opinion there suggests RC1 is nowhere near ready for a final release. Every build of IE8 (beta1, beta2, win 7's "beta2+", and the RC) have each had major unique problems not found in other releases.
I have developers asking me if their software will work in IE8 on day 1 and the only honest answer is "I have absolutely no idea." Anyone (without a final build) who tells you otherwise, even offerring a rough estimate, is a liar, IMHO.
I don't understand the point of putting out a "release candidate" and then not using feedback to determine whether the next release is a "candidate" or a "final". Our bug alone means that IE8 RC1 has never been publicly tested with many complex web-based applications.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And Microsoft deserves it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Your post has some truth if we're talking web development, but even that is quickly becoming irrelevant heading into IE8 whose quirks are not so much standards related as they are just different in the way that Gecko is different than Webkit.
I sure hope so, because the quirks historically have meant that even many of the MS ways of doing things are half-broken. I honestly wouldn't have half the contempt I do for Microsoft if IE6 had even provided MS-only way of doing things that worked where their standards were broken.
And while I've got a little bit of hope that IE8 will be a real improvement, I'm not holding my breath, nor am I really going to give them a lot of credit for basically remaining 5 years behind everybody else. We'll *maybe* have more or less trustworthy cross-browser support for CSS 2.1. I'll believe CSS 3 when I see it, and I'd be willing to bet HTML5 will wait a few years at a minimum. At any rate, I doubt the differences will be irrelevant.
However, Visual Studio and its debugging facilities are second to none. C# is a great language. SQL Server and it's tools are awesome.
I agree with this by and large. These are good tools, my shallow usage of which has been largely pleasant and free of horror. In particular, I think C#/.NET does a good job of being a better Java or C++ for a good chunk of development niches.
But I don't agree they're standout examples of products that provide some evidence of an internal drive to quality at MS. Even C# and .NET, which I think are an achievement, are hard to recognize as essentially MS products: they're more or less a Borland project that happened inside Microsoft because they had enough intelligence and market power to brain-drain and essentially buy Borland. And it's surprising, in fact, how many Microsoft products and tools started life outside of the company and essentially only found their way in because of the company's position in the market. Or, perhaps it's not so surprising if more or less, to a business deal with IBM based on a product they didn't develop but purchased.
When it comes down to it, I can't think of a single product that I'm pretty certain wouldn't have been produced by the industry -- and in fact, wasn't competetively produced by the industry, with someone else holding a real lead at some point -- if Microsoft had mostly kept to the operating systems niche. And there's enough examples of ways in which they've held everybody back for their own interests that I'm not sure their good points are a net win.
Not everything they do automatically sucks. Their net effect on the industry and on developers within it is another matter.