IE8 May Be End of the Line For Internet Explorer 380
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy reports on rumors that IE8 may be Internet Explorer's swan song: 'IE8 is the last version of the Internet Explorer Web browser,' Kennedy writes. 'It seems that Microsoft is preparing to throw in the towel on its Internet Explorer engine once and for all.' And what will replace it? Some are still claiming that Microsoft will go with WebKit, which is used by Safari and Chrome. The WebKit story, Kennedy contends, could be a feint and that Microsoft will instead adopt Gazelle, Microsoft Research's brand-new engine that thinks like an OS. 'This new engine will supposedly be more secure than Firefox or even Chrome, making copious use of sandboxing to keep its myriad plug-ins isolated and the overall browser process model protected.'" The sticking point will be what Microsoft does about compatibility for ActiveX apps.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:2, Interesting)
Mod parent insightful.
A browser designed for a netbook ought to run just fine on my aging laptop.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:0, Interesting)
I just like posting "Jew" every once in a while. It's always interesting to see how it gets modded. The fact that it almost invariably turns into "troll" says a lot about those who get blessed with mod points around here. It's a simple adjective, it has absolutely no context in the conversation, and yet people take it as some sort of epithet. What does that say in the larger scheme of things, I wonder?
Browser as a milli-application (Score:2, Interesting)
http://blackfiber.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/the-web-browser-as-a-milli-application/
I am obsessed with microkernels. This idea's been in my head for years, since I looked at how KDE sandboxes Flash and thought, "Hey, this should be for every piece of the whole application!"
Nobody Will Use IE By Version 9 (Score:5, Interesting)
I would also argue that a lot more 'dumb consumers' (people like my parents) are buying Macs now to be trendy which will help IEs market share drop.
Also has anyone used IE8 yet and tested sites out on it? I've used it and it rendering engine is pretty terrible, even when set in emulate IE7 mode which then introduces a complete new set of rendering bugs.
Russian Roulette with a Fully Loaded Gun (Score:4, Interesting)
This is obviously a dream, but it would be nice to have some sort of standard system for Internet Cloud and Browser software and hardware not unlike the telco and cellular market. There would still be billions to make for all of the Tech companies.
Re:ActiveX won't matter (Score:1, Interesting)
No site should depend on javascript, flash or other client side scripts to function but that still happens.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:WebKit?! (Score:3, Interesting)
> Their goal is lock-in. A standards-based engine would negate that.
True enough, but they are learning of late. They were so hellbent on pushing OOXML they perverted the ISO. But enough people stood firm and resisted so they are putting ODF support into the next Office service pack. We will see if they manage to put a sting into it. I'd bet they won't make it possible to set ODF as the default save format. Or ensure subtle conversion errors force large instituitions to not use ODF as their primary interchange format.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:3, Interesting)
This full admin lazy programming thing drives me nuts.
I did some part time IT work at an agency, and I was severely annoyed when I found out that their booking system REQUIRES local admin privileges to run.
It needed local admin... TO INTERFACE WITH AN SQL DATABASE ON A SERVER.
I intended for all the users to run with limited local rights, since they had a high intern turnover rate and interns can't be trusted... but screw security, some program originally written in the Win98 days still has this idiocy in a new version released this year.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:3, Interesting)
And Firefox does the same thing. If I don't have Shockwave installed and I navigate to a website that contains Flash content I will be presented with a little yellow information bar telling me that there is content on the page that requires a plug-in and asks me if I want to install that plug-in. Is there any browser that doesn't do this by default?
There's still a difference. In Firefox, if you click "yes", it will send you to Adobe's download page for Flash; but you still need to initiate the download manually, and then run the downloaded installer. In IE, if you click "yes", it immediately downloads the ActiveX binary and executes it, all by itself.
How to make 30% of planet hate a browser? (Score:4, Interesting)
Have a stupid blogger who could say things like ''This new engine will supposedly be more secure than Firefox or even Chrome''
That is 30% of entire Web browser market, you have guaranteed that they will do everything to joke about your code without being even released to public.
Also very advanced coders who are talented enough to work on Mozilla or Google will come up with real information debunking your allegations. They may ask a very basic question: ''How can people review your code?''. Mozilla, Google and even Apple has answer, you don't.
Re:Coming full circle? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no alternative namespace, there are merely alternate streams in a file - named locations for storing meta data. The file is right there in the filesystem, obvious to all. The file data may be a bit hidden, requiring normal Windows system calls to read (just like one uses normal Windows system calls to create alernate data streams), instead of Notepad. Oh, wait, you can read them with Notepad too. What a bunch of FUD.
This... is actually not the whole story.
NTFS is actually a case-sensitive file system. You can illustrate this by installing Services for Unix. This is an alternative subsystem that doesn't go through the normal Windows API (or the DLLs implementing it) and collection of Unix programs that have been "ported" to it. Once you install this, programs that are part of SFU are able to create files with the same case-sensitive name but different case.
Instead, the reason you normally can't do this is because the DLLs that are part of the Windows subsystem (the one providing the normal Windows API) hides this case-sensitivity in concert with the file system driver. (IIRC, open commands in the driver get a flag saying whether to be case-sensitive or not.) Instead of making calls through the Windows API, you can either use another subsystem like SFU or make native system calls directly (though that interface isn't supported).
Finally, the implementation of the Windows API is such that if you create two files with different case but the same name, only one will be visible through the Windows API, at least with NTFS's implementation of all of this.
This means that if you want to write security software for Windows, to catch malware written by people who know about this hole, you need to make API calls to an undocumented interface if you don't want to require people to install SFU. (Of course, security software does so much other stuff that's even worse that's hardly a drop in the bucket.)
Re:Russian Roulette with a Fully Loaded Gun (Score:4, Interesting)
The .Net framework is very closely tied to the IE engine
In what way is .NET tied to IE? WPF doesn't use Trident at all, and that's the only thing I can really think of that might be in .NET that could be tenuously tied to IE. So what am I missing?
Re:Nope, not webkit... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nokia basically knew (a good guess) that Apple will enter smart phone market and become the ultimate rival to their smart phone business but that didn't stop them from implementing Webkit S60 Browser to near hundred million phones giving Apple the ultimate credibility.
Of course, Nokia is a company which is run by market rules. If there is an opportunity, no matter where it comes from, they will pick it.
Somehow, MS can keep acting like a spoiled kid and keep pushing a technological and PR disaster since first ever IE exploit was released and it was proven that it is not a fixable thing, it was design flaw.
They are acting like an insane person who tries the same thing and expect different results. Ask Windows Mobile owners about their browsing experience with IE. They ported the very same junk to their mobile OS who runs on things that doesn't even have the power to run a full feature security suite like on Windows. That is the insanity.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:2, Interesting)
Using quasi-mystical language like "deep connections" in a technical discussion is a good sign the person doesn't know what he's talking about.
But didn't Microsoft way that Internet Explorer was "tightly integrated" into the OS? Seems to me like a "tightly integrated" application would have "deep connections" to the OS.
Hold it, that explains a lot!
*goes out and doubles efforts to convert people away from Windows*
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:4, Interesting)
Even the decade before it existed it was known how stupid an idea it was. Remember this was the time when one of the main talking points about java was it running in a sandbox.
Even a librarian warned me about the danger of ActiveX just proir to it's release (training session on using search engines for academics). I have never understood why it was released. Just when everyone had learned how to disable it they had to turn it back on to get OS updates.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:5, Interesting)
Or even better: let's write code for yesterday's hardware. Not everyone has a computer of today, and the more computers that can use your software, the better.
Clippy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mobile computing educates them (Score:5, Interesting)
I always kept saying that every developer should be forced to use a slow machine, at least where compilation and automated tests are not involved. If you sit your butt at a fast box, you simply never notice anything is unacceptable slow.
I've personally caught myself ignoring complaints that a piece of my code is slow and noticing it only after seeing it crawl on a slow machine myself.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:3, Interesting)
I see this argument occasionally on /. and always find it more than a bit puzzling: if software that you think is "bloated" continues to be used (and to be sold to people willing to pay for it), then it must be of more value to its users than whatever hypothetical small and beautiful software that you're imagining. In fact, Joel Spolsky wrote a pretty good article called Bloatware and the 80/20 myth [joelonsoftware.com] attacking the very line of thinking you're espousing.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:3, Interesting)
MS have already made and released a sandboxable and verifiable COM.
They called it COM2+ for a while, and then released it as .Net.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:2, Interesting)
Sig response:
A truly clever developer will create code so easy to understand that a less than average developer could debug it.
I'd say that a truly clever developer's code won't need debugging. My measure of a truly clever developer is one that can create code so easy to understand that a less than average developer can elegantly extend it. :)
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:3, Interesting)
Then again it could be much worse. One girl I tutored used to use the File|Open dialog box in MS Word for ALL her file management. Just goes to show that if you make it possible, someone will do it.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:2, Interesting)
Note also that processors haven't gotten much faster in the last few years. If anything they've only really added more cores or made memory cheaper. In reality it seems that moore's law has stopped.
Re:Russian Roulette with a Fully Loaded Gun (Score:1, Interesting)
One word: Debugging. In ASP.NET you can set breakpoints in your website code and the break will be triggered *only* if your site is running in IE.
Re:Misleading headline, and ActiveX (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, but when have you seen the last ActiveX anything?
The only plug-ìns that are widely spread are Flash and Java. They both can run as NSplugin. So if IE9 adopts that interface, and maybe another new one, they are good.
Korean websites use TOOOOOOOOOOONS of ActiveX. If you break ActiveX, then you basically break the entire Korean-language internet.