Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 Reviewed 221
An anonymous reader writes to mention a review of the latest Beta release for Internet Explorer 7 on Paul Thurrott's SuperSite. From the article: "While it's not enough to make me switch from Firefox yet--I still love certain Firefox features such as inline search--it's no longer an object of ridicule either. IE 7.0 Beta 3 includes huge functional and security advantages of IE 6 and is an absolute no brainer for anyone choosing to stick with IE. If you are an IE user, head over to the Microsoft Web site and pick up IE 7.0 Beta 3 today." ZDNet has some first impressions of the release as well.
a finer compliment (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article (emphasis mine): "While it's not enough to make me switch from Firefox yet--I still love certain Firefox features such as inline search--it's no longer an object of ridicule either. "
A finer compliment (no longer an object of ridicule) couldn't be had. This from Thurrott, a Microsoft sychophant. So, it's come to this, Microsoft feints and jabs, feints and jabs, and after ten years (more?) of internet browsing that's how high the bar is set for them. I can't wait for Vista.
Re:a finer compliment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:a finer compliment (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, to put it another way, as long as there was viable competition, Microsoft continually improved their browser. When Internet Explorer achieved its objective of killing the competition, Microsoft cancelled development and left it to rot. Now there is viable competition again, Microsoft is scrambling to get back in the game.
This is precisely why monopolies abusing their position to kill the competition is so harmful and why "it's a better product" is no defence.
Re:a finer compliment (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft basically cut the rug from under that. By dumping a product with the OS. In '98 and beyond, everyone that bought a PC already had a browser in. By putting the cost of the browser in with the OS, you'd already paid to have IE with your machine. Netscape didn't have a look in. So, in other words to get Netscape, you'd have to buy two browsers (if you'd bought windows). First IE, which was paid for in the OS price, then adding Netscape on top (if you bought the properly licensed version).
With revenues cut off at the knees, the company couldn't afford to throw money at research and development the way MS could (people were still buying Windows, so they were still selling browsers by default). So, the inevitable decline went on. As a company, you can't fight the bottomless purse (which is what MS had to fund their browser with, funding it from their profitable OS & Office side) who is dumping product for free.
They killed Netscape the company stone dead. It was sold eventually for a fraction of what it was worth as an open market company in a competitive environment.
And it's been languishing ever since.
Firefox, as an open source project, and an incredibly successful one, can compete on price, as it doesn't require the kind of funding that Netscape did as a company.
Opera does a good job of keeping it's brower around, but still, it's marginalised by MS having the browser in the OS, and also by Firefox. It's a hard fight to keep that running.
MS killed a lot of things. Jobs, tax revenues, competition. And the other browsers. It wasn't a beating, it was scorched earth policy. Nothing survives (even their own browser stagnated, thus, marking the segment of the market as 'dead').
But like all scorched earth, in time, shoots grow again, and eventually an ecosystem can develop once more (Firefox, Opera etc).
We just see if MS gets to play the same cards again this time round.
Re:a finer compliment (Score:5, Informative)
Netscape was licensed as a 'pay for' browser, but it was purely by license. Most people (and businesses) ran the freely downloadable version and very, very few people ever paid for Netscape (unless they bought it with a book). It's like saying that WinZip is a 'pay for' product -- what you're saying is factual, but in practice most people who use it aren't paying customers.
Netscape's business model was to sell server software, not browsers. IIS and Apache did them more damage than IE did.
Also, Opera's completely free now.
Re:a finer compliment (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:a finer compliment (Score:3, Informative)
Re:a finer compliment (Score:2)
In March 2006, Weblogs, Inc. founder Jason Calacanis reported a rumor on his blog that Mozilla Corporation gained $72M during the previous year, mainly thanks to the Google search box in the Firefox browser...The rumor was later addressed by Christopher Blizzard, a member of the Mozilla board, who wrote on his blog that "it's not correct, thou
Re:a finer compliment (Score:2)
What has chang
Re:a finer compliment (Score:5, Funny)
Re:a finer compliment (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:a finer compliment (Score:2)
The quicks mode box model will, by definition, always be non-standard, because that's there for compatibility. Want a compliant box model, make sure the browser is running in strict mode.
Re:a finer compliment (Score:3, Informative)
Re:a finer compliment (Score:2)
How strange... (Score:4, Funny)
I guess we'll start seeing flames any minute now...
Very positive! (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm, let's see:
"it's not enough to make me switch from Firefox"
"it's no longer an object of ridicule either"
"...for anyone choosing to stick with IE"
"If you are an IE user..."
"I still feel that most users would be better off with a more feature-packed browser like Firefox"
I'm not quite sure that "non-negative" is the same as "positive". I also need to look up on the definition for "lukewarm reception".
Re:Very positive! (Score:2, Informative)
"it's no longer an object of ridicule either"
is what is technically known as 'damning with faint praise'.
It's not any good at all, but at least people aren't pointing and laughing at it?
Re:How strange... (Score:3, Funny)
CSS? (Score:4, Insightful)
does not install (Score:2, Funny)
shit, once again I am stuck! I tried to install it on my SuSE 10.1, but it does not work... this damn Windows Genuine Advantage. If Novel only had a SuSE Genuine Advantage.
[/irony]
or... (Score:2)
BTW, he used it corectly.
Re:or... (Score:2)
Re:does not install (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:does not install (Score:2)
Re:does not install (Score:2)
Not Feature Complete (Score:5, Informative)
IE7 may have all of the features Microsoft wanted it to have, but it still lacks reak XHTML support [msdn.com].
They've had how many years to get their shit together, but we're still stuck with 'sorry, our implementation is a hack even though we helped write the standard, maybe you'll get THE BASIC FEATURES OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB implemented in 2015!
Re:Not Feature Complete (Score:2)
Wow, look at my awesome complete sentences!
Sorry, I'm just really annoyed by this. It's great that IE7 users are getting some UI hotness, but I (as a web developer) am still getting boned. That is not acceptable to me.
Re:Not Feature Complete (Score:2)
Why do you neglect all the dozens of CSS fixes made in IE 7? To make your point more easily? To ignore that they felt their resources is better diverted at CSS now than XHTML? Many web developers coding in "XHTML" even belives it's mostly just a matter of casing your tags properly, which it's not [hixie.ch]. I really think layouts on web pages are more important for a web browser than following a reformulation of HTML in XML. Sure, the latter can be useful for e.g m
Re:Not Feature Complete (Score:2)
Probably because there are still at least one hundred left...
Re:Not Feature Complete (Score:2)
Re:Not Feature Complete (Score:2)
Yeah, they fixed like five CSS parsing bugs
Yeah, like the Peekaboo bug, Guillotine bug, Duplicate Character bug, Border Chaos, No Scroll bug, 3 Pixel Text Jog, Magic Creeping Text bug, Bottom Margin bug on Hover, Losing the ability to highlight text under the
Re:Not Feature Complete (Score:2)
The development leads have indicated that they are going to be doing more agressive updates in the future, and i wouldn't be surprised to see an xht
News for nerds! Ahah (Score:3, Insightful)
Review Outline:
- They scraped some of the crap off IE 6
- They've "improved it under the cover".
- It's now got features that most other browsers have.
- It'll be released when vista comes around.
What the review should've had:
- Memory usage comparisons
- Backwards compatibility
- Some screenshots of how it miserably fails the ACID2 test.
- Does it finally have 32-bit colour PNG support?
- Whats all this 7+ crap and why is it different?
Sorry Paul you're coming across as a hardcore Microsoftie in it for the money rather than trying to give an honest opinion, hope you make lots of money from advertising, but this is a piss poor review.. maybe I should so it to my grandma so she's got something to discuss while she's getting her hair done!
Re:News for nerds! Ahah (Score:2)
Maybe that's who it WAS written for. I know my grandmother isn't going to understand memory usage, png support, or ACID2 results...
Re:News for nerds! Ahah (Score:2, Informative)
Back compat: Seems fine to me
ACID2 test: It fails miserably, just like every other browser out there
Transparent ping support: It has it
7+ crap: basically, sandboxing of IE and other Vista only features
Re:News for nerds! Ahah (Score:5, Informative)
Except Konqueror, Safari and Opera 9.
Re:News for nerds! Ahah (Score:4, Insightful)
it's unrealistic.
The ACID test isn't just some sort of browser back patting wankfest. Well ok, it sorta is, but it's still important. The point is that the internet is based off of standards. All browsers that feature the latest HTML and CSS specs should display pages in exactly the same way. If they don't interoperability goes out the window, and we get hack-laden web sites (a-la sites that depend on bugs in IE6 to make sure they display correctly across all browsers), or worse yet, browser specific web sites. ACID2 is designed to make it easy to test consistency across browsers.
if the functions that are implemented there were so importat every browser would support them.they don't... [sic] there for nobody really gives a fuck about the acid test.
That's a fallacy, pure and simple. A lot of web developers would LOVE to take advantage of the features CSS 2.0 has to offer. The reason why they're so rarely used has nothing to do with their usefulness, and a lot to do with Internet Explorer. Microsoft's browser is notorious for inaccurate, incomplete, or nonexistent standards compliance, but it's still the most popular around. Until Microsoft gets off its duff and makes its browser compliant with modern standards, the internet will be stuck with a 6 year old version of the W3C conventions, and a buggy one at that. If/when they get it done, I'm sure a lot of the features ACID tests will go into wide use.
Re:News for nerds! Ahah (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, if the Web standards project wanted to come up with a *COMPLETE* compliance test, that would be a different story. In fact, one could argue that the lack of
Re:News for nerds! Ahah (Score:5, Informative)
Re:News for nerds! Ahah (Score:2)
Opera and Firefox both suck on memory usage. Opera 9 freshly opened with three tabs was taking 150MB+ last night. Nice program, but I wish they could get the freaking memory usage under control.
Re:News for nerds! Ahah (Score:2, Informative)
If you take into consideration how much I use it compared to the other programs and how much I value it in my day to day business, I'm perfectly happy setting aside 5-10% of my systems memory. If it were to start climbing into the mid 300-400mb range *cough*firefox*cough* then I'd start to get concerned.
No help for web developers (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you are an IE user, head over to the Microsoft Web site and pick up IE 7.0 Beta 3 today."
Except of course unless you're a web developer in which case you still need IE6 on your machine for testing those delightful CSS quirks and, as ever, you can't run two versions of IE on the same machine.
It's odd. MS's developer tools are generally pretty good but they do seem to fall down a bit for those of us who write web applications, especially given the recent rise in far more complex scripting and so on with the whole Web 2.0 buzz / AJAX thing. Oh well.
Re:No help for web developers (Score:2)
To be honest, virtualisation beats side-by-side installations for testing purposes anyway. You can set a bunch of virtual machines up, with varying resolutions, one with JavaScript disabled, one with images switched off, etc. Then just load them all up and tick them off the list as you test in each one.
Re:No help for web developers (Score:2)
But does Microsoft make you pay for each copy?
What is their policy on virtualization licensing, anyway?
Re:No help for web developers (Score:2)
You can get , and you can even switch between the [mozdev.org]. [mozdev.org]
IETab is truly one of the most valuable extensions for Web developers that actually care what their pages look like in IE vs. Firefox, Makes it nice and easy to quickly compare and see where things break down.
Re:No help for web developers (Score:2, Insightful)
PS: everyone who says that IE6 renders CS
Re:No help for web developers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No help for web developers (Score:2)
Re:No help for web developers (Score:2)
Re:No help for web developers (Score:2)
Re:No help for web developers (Score:2)
To use this product, you need to install free software
This product requires Microsoft© Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft© Media Player 10, and Macromedia Flash 6. To download these free software applications, click the links below and follow the on-screen instructions.
Funnily, if you read the EULA, it informs you that WMP and IE are not free, but are licensed to users of the commercial Windows product...
Re: (Score:2)
Re:No help for web developers (Score:2)
Because our customers don't give a shit whose fault it is, or who has the moral high ground, they'll go to the competition if our site looks like ass and/or doesn't work and the competition's doesn't. Sad but true.
Re:No help for web developers (Score:2)
Oh and what if you don't have customers? I think every vanity and personal site on the internet should not even work with IE. Finally porn. Make a porn site that onl
Re:No help for web developers (Score:2)
If you think Microsoft is letting down those who write web applications (particularly cross-browser ones) check the the AJAX features being demoed in Scott Guthrie's ASP.NET + Atlas Tutorial [microsoft.com]. Very impessive stuff - a cross browser AJAX app written in minutes.
Try count how many times he says 'go ahead'.Re:No help for web developers (Score:2)
microsoft users (Score:2, Informative)
WGAS (Score:2, Informative)
meh (Score:5, Funny)
my review (Score:3, Interesting)
First have to validate the system about it's "genuity" and get a key and who knows what it's doing during that process, in any case some sniffing around is done and probably the systems Serial number is recorded.
Once the key is gotten and pasted into a field, download startd...
Then execute the install file - first the system will need to be upgraded, with the "Automatic" upgrade option prominently displayed.
No, I want to do the manual install and see what is coming onto the system.
Well, well, well -the Windows Genuine Advantage is one package in a bundle and _has_ to be installed.
Once the system is upgraded with all the goodies, the IE7B3 installer runs but complains that there is already a previous version of IE7B? installed and it has to be uninstalled first from the Control Panel.But this program has no uninstaller!!
Result: Live with the old IE7 version and have the WGA phone home every day...
Does this suck? Yesssss!!!
M$ is digging their own grave with this type of BS!
Re:my review (Score:3, Informative)
Follow the wizard to uninstall.
You're welcome. -ed
Re:my review (Score:2, Informative)
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/06/29/65003
-Goose.
This is great news (Score:4, Funny)
I am going to switch immediately, and you should too.
It breaks the new slashdot layout (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It breaks the new slashdot layout (Score:2)
Re:It breaks the new slashdot layout (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It breaks the new slashdot layout (Score:3, Informative)
Bug has been discussed between slashdot and MS! (Score:3, Informative)
the Right Direction (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem I have is this: if IE7 reverses the spread of Firefox, what's to stop Microsoft from repeating history and ceasing all serious development again?
Re:the Right Direction (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, funny thing about firefox is that it isn't going away. As long as the mozilla foundation remains focused and/or as long as there are developers out there willing to take up the slack if they do. Microsoft complacency will only fuel firefox development and Microsoft arrogance will fuel its adoption. A new release of IE will not significantly hurt
Re:the Right Direction (Score:2)
Use FileMirrors to find download URLs (Score:5, Informative)
Software freedom still matters more than features. (Score:4, Insightful)
MSIE is proprietary. Those three words cover a great deal of what is wrong with Thurrott's review, even granting him his status as a Microsoft sycophant (as another poster pointed out).
Re:Software freedom still matters more than featur (Score:2)
Yes, I do believe freedom is important, and it is what allowed Firefox to be what it is today... but if that was the only selling point, I doubt many people (outside of the commonly called "zealots" circle) would have fully swi
Missing a crucial point (Score:5, Interesting)
Once IE7 becomes widely adopted, we can finally start USING some of these features without worrying about them not being compatible with IE. We need to encourage people to upgrade, and if they won't upgrade to Firefox or Opera, then at least they can upgrade to IE7 and give us an easier time developing web pages.
IE Users?? (Score:3, Funny)
Who are.....these people?
Slashdot Web dev commenters out of touch? (Score:3, Insightful)
Web Developers can bitch all they want about standards etc, but the fact is that all Microsoft are worried about is backwards compatibility, which is the 100% correct way to go. Deal with it! Microsoft build products with the end user in mind. Web Developers are not the mass market end users.
What would happen if Microsoft decided to start making the browser entirely standards compliant? A number of websites would stop working. You guys would moan about Microsoft again, saying how it was all their fault anyway. No change there, no incentive for Microsoft. Microsoft would lose market share because they made their browser the same as everyone elses. Theres no money to be made because you are the same as everybody else. Again, no incentive for Microsoft.
I think you guys should get a reality check, and stop thinking that Microsoft should be impressing you somehow.
Disclaimer. I am a developer, not for Microsoft, and I work on developing, recommending and implementing software based on open source products.
Re:Slashdot Web dev commenters out of touch? (Score:2)
Uh
Re:Slashdot Web dev commenters out of touch? (Score:2)
Why not say that you are liar and save all that typing?
Re:Slashdot Web dev commenters out of touch? (Score:2)
Power users & standards support? Count me out (Score:2)
Mod me troll or whatever, but IE7b3 is still an object of ridicule, for Firefox and especially for Opera 8+ users. It comes up short in two important areas - power user features and standards support. It just can't compete with Opera's MDI, customizeable shortcut keys, and mouse/rocker gestures, among a plethora of other features. I just u
Re:Anyone have (Score:5, Funny)
So wannabe web designers will still be able to create broken pages and get away with it on IE6 AND IE7.
Re:Anyone have (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Anyone have (Score:2)
Re:Anyone have (Score:2)
Re:Anyone have (Score:2)
Re:Anyone have (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, the Lawful Evil solution would be to pop up a message saing "Invalid HTML document" if no DOCTYPE was present.
Re:Anyone have (Score:5, Funny)
- Microsoft HTML(tm)
- Microsoft CSS4(tm)
- Microsoft XHTML(tm)
- Microsoft XForms and ActiveX and other eXotic eXtensions.
Re:Anyone have (Score:2)
Like XPS [wikipedia.org]?
Or maybe XAML [wikipedia.org]?
Yes, it's a bit funny, especially since those two technologies are definitely something IE 7 might have integrated support for.
Re:Anyone have (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't tested Beta3, but without looking I can tell you that the standards support is relatively unchanged since Beta2. The CSS team for IE7 has stated, point blank, that virtually no further changes will be made to the engine on this front. A freaking catastrophe.
Why is this a nightmare? In order to avoid unnecessary workarounds MS eliminated ALL (yes, ALL) the workarounds used by client side devs to solve the core issues with regard to how MS renders CSS and HTML. This includes things like the guillotene bug (where content and images inside a floated box just disappear enitely), etc. However, THEY DIDN'T FIX ANY OF THE BUGS.
This means that we're now going to be headed back to the days when we have to render separately for different browsers, meaning XSLT is going to see a resurgence, costs are going to double, and folks are going to have to go back and recode all their existing apps so they render correctly in IE7.
Welcome to the wonderful world of IE development. By incompetent retards, for incompetent retards, led by a visionary bonobo chimp.
-rt
Re:Anyone have (Score:2)
That's funny, they claimed to have fixed a number of bugs [msdn.com].
Not that I'm pleased with IE, as they've fixed the Star-HTML [positioniseverything.net] Hack while other bugs not mentioned in the IE Blog still remain.
Re:Anyone have (Score:2)
Wow, you spun that in a unique manner. The fact is MS didn't "eliminate the workarounds" they "FIXED" the CSS parsing bugs. And they added support for additional selectors IE didn't use to have. People previously used those BUGS to trick IE to parse or not parse specific CSS code. This was simply a poor h
Re:Anyone have (Score:2)
This is really only going to be a problem with people that were using strict doctypes and hacks and may have one of t
Re:Anyone have (Score:2)
Simply continue to produce standards compliant websites, and if you get a person visiting who is using a broken browser simply inform them of the fact that their browser is broken and give them a list of properly working browsers with URLs for them to click on.
I'm all for this idea... however, I doubt my clients would be. You know, the people with money.
Re:Anyone have (Score:2)
Re:VALIDATE IT????? (Score:2)
Re:VALIDATE IT????? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:VALIDATE IT????? (Score:2)
I'm using it just fine right now.
Re:Do you have to be 'genuine' and run WGA first? (Score:2)
Click to validate the OS, click to download the software. Done.
Click to validate the OS on installation. Done.
That is sum total of time and thought the average user will give to WGA.
Downloads through Download.com: 213,000 (June 29th-3PM ET July 1st) Internet Explorer Beta 3 (SP2) [download.com]
Re:It's fine (Score:2, Interesting)
I refuse to do extra work just to satisfy microsofts refusal to play along with standards they usualy pushed for and/or helped write. I also do not care about people who use IE, and after a breif explination neither do most of my clients... and so if you view my companies site in IE it is a bit off and will politely ask you t