IE 10 Almost Finished For Windows 7 With Final Preview 187
Billly Gates writes "IE 10 just hit the final preview yesterday for Windows 7. Windows XP and Windows Vista support has been dropped. Most slashdotters have a complex relationship with Internet Explorer. Many of us hate it but have to use it in the office. Microsoft had tried last year to make IE good again with the release of IE 9 which had some fanfare on slashdot, such as hardware acceleration and better standards compliance. MS even launched a full campaign to get us to switch. IE 10 is supposed to continue the new process and promises to be much faster and support more HTML 5, CSS 3, W3C HTML 5.1 and CSS 3.1 with a score of 320 on HTML5test. As a comparison, last years IE 9 only scored 138. "
Seriously, who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
Corporate use (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of us hate it but have to use it in the office.
Yes, and that's mostly because Firefox developers steadfastly refuse to add integrated domain authentication, which a lot of corporations use for their intranet access. The other component is group policies; Which again, Mozilla in its infinite wisdom has made its product neigh-impossible for administrators to configure and control remotely. Open Source often fails in corporate environments not because corporations are opposed to its licensing terms, but because the software can't have its functionality limited or modified via a centralized framework. They jabber on about how it's restricting the "freedoms" of its users, but nobody has freedom at work. It's work, dammit, not a playground, and your IT staff needs to be able to control and restrict things -- not because they're some kind of authoritarian jerks but because corporate environments have a very different set of requirements than consumer environments.
Internet Explorer would be dead by now if Mozilla and friends would just get with the program and include group policies and the ability to restrict software functionality (like automatic updates!) from a centralized source. But the community keeps bringing it back because it simply refuses to listen to what corporations ask for.
Re:Seriously, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
It matters because we have to deliver content to several hundred sites via Web/Intranet, and we can't dictate the end user's infrastructure. They will invariably use IE as a standard. This is industry talking...
Re:Corporate use (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet Explorer would be dead by now if Mozilla and friends would just get with the program and include group policies and the ability to restrict software functionality (like automatic updates!) from a centralized source. But the community keeps bringing it back because it simply refuses to listen to what corporations ask for.
Besides that I doubt IE would be dead, I also don't think that's a good thing.
Why is it always that competing products have to be killed? It's not just with browsers, it's with other software and hardware too (think "iPad-killer" kind of stuff).
Wikipedia lists four browsers at >15% market share, with Firefox at #3, behind IE. Corporate-developed Chrome is #1, IE is #2.
This looks great to me. There is choice, there is competition, and there are four popular choices meaning no single browser can define the web like IE did with their IE6-specific code. IE is still competing in this market, down to a 22% level, which means they have to really work to stay alive. And we see that with the vast advances MS has made with their browser.
I don't like IE, tried it recently again (new laptop with Win7) and it just didn't work right. Somehow the UI was way too cluttered for me, so I went back to Firefox. Other people may like IE, well good for them. It's not that bad a browser any more. Microsoft is actively developing it, is adding new features, and now they're pretty much done catching up to the competition in that field they can start trying to surpass the competition by adding innovative features. And if those are good, FF will copy them again, just like IE copied a lot from FF and other browsers.
That's what competition is doing to you. Just killing off all competitors, and have FF be the >90% browser will bring us back to the late 90s and early 00s, the heydays of IE6. With a stagnant web, little to no innovation. It's not something I am longing for, at all. If anything Chrome is currently the one to go after.
Re:Seriously, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
It matters because we have to deliver content to several hundred sites via Web/Intranet, and we can't dictate the end user's infrastructure.
But many end users will be glad to dictate their infrastructure to you. Starting from President/CEO and his VPs, and going down to program managers, and then to senior engineers... when your (IT) interests and their interests collide the IT will not be the winner. Those guys are bread winners, and IT is the cost center, with the sole purpose of supporting bread winners. They tell you what they have and you accomodate. Not the other way around.
For example, there may be a frantic phone call from one of your sales guys. He is trying to set up an elevator pitch since he just arranged for three minutes with the Big Customer. But his iPad cannot access your Web site!!! Disaster!!! Can you tell this sales guy that he should bring the customer in front of a company-issued laptop? These three minutes may well be on a golf course or when jogging. Nobody will be on your side (nobody who matters, at least.)
Besides, your Web delivery of materials will be just fine unless you go out of your way to support only this or that version of the browser.
Re:Corporate use (Score:5, Insightful)
Whitelising a site in Firefox is about as hard as it is for IE.
Okay, now multiply that by 96,000 workstations. Oh wait, you don't think your users can be trusted to follow those steps? Well, it's a good thing we have Active Directory and PAC files to upda--oh, you mean Firefox doesn't have those? Oh. You mean, you have to update the file manually, by patching it? For every user?
Hmm. Well... I guess it's a good thing you didn't make any assumptions then about how easy it would be.
Re:Seriously, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a web developer, I care. And as as user, you should care.
Not because you should use IE. Use what you like, that's what makes standards with multiple implementations great. But there are tons of things that simply aren't done because browsers don't provide the necessary infrastructure, or because it'd be extremely difficult. Like it or not, as a major browser, IE dictates a lot of what happens on the web, even if you don't personally use it.
IE better supporting standards means those standards are more likely to be used, which means that your standards-supporting browser will work better, faster, and take less development time. For the browser developers, not having to implement work arounds for web pages that work around IE bugs means more time can be spent on new features, so your own preferred browser gets better, faster. Web pages take less time to create, so they're better, and us developers can work on more interesting things than working around some weird focus bug. Maybe the Slashdot developers will even have time to implement UTF-8 support so we can all post Zalgo and smilies that accurately depict our feelings.
It's a good thing all around! Lighten up!
Re:Seriously, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, there may be a frantic phone call from one of your sales guys. He is trying to set up an elevator pitch since he just arranged for three minutes with the Big Customer. But his iPad cannot access your Web site!!! Disaster!!!
If your company's website doesn't already work on the iPad (or Android phone/tablet), your company's web developer(s) and IT supervisor should probably have been fired by now.