Internet Explorer Not Dead Yet 498
turnitover writes "The future's not all Firefox, Deer Park and Camino, insists Microsoft. At its Mix '06 conference in Las Vegas, reports Microsoft Watch, company execs insisted that there's a bright future for IE. They not only distributed a 'layout-complete' build of IE 7.0, but offered hints about what the new version of the browser geeks love to disdain (yes, it will include ActiveX) will include. Also shown: tools to test IE compatibility. But with what? Standards or IE 6?"
ACID 2.0 Test (Score:2, Insightful)
Sincerely,
Firefox Fan
In other news.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it news when a company advertises its own products?
Well, Not too "Bright", but... (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as the Gecko crowd and Opera manage to hold on to enough marketshare to force web developers to use REAL standards instead of Microsoft's so that my browser of choice works, I'll be content.
What's bright.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing is when you're a company like Microsoft and you've got this huge, unstoppable cash flow: you never really have to pay for your mistakes. Which makes it hard for you to stop making them. I hate to be the one to point this out, but Google has the same problem!
Extensions (Score:3, Insightful)
I just can't imagine installing IE7 on my machine except if I REALLY have to to verify that my websites load and operate with it. And that would be really sad.
NOT DEAD YET? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure I wish it was dead just like everyone else, but last I checked my grandmother wasn't going to download firefox so she can receive RSS feeds and use tabbed browsing...
what a bias misleading subject...
i thought
muahahahahahahaha
Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure Joe Average user doesn't care about these things (at least not directly) but he does care about the indirect problems that these things incur. All he knows is that with Firefox, he doesn't get POPUPS, it lets him modify it to what he wants it to look and act like and it's simple easy and fun to use. Most users completely forget about IE until another applications forces them to open it and asks if they want it to be their default browser.
Now even universities, schools and businesses are installing Firefox and doing their best to remove all pointers to IE due to security risks. And once the end user becomes familiar with the brwser at work or school, they will be more likely to download it and install it at home.
There is a reason why some sites show Firefox usage as high as 30%; hell even internally at Microsoft, 8-11% of people use a Mozilla based browser (based on stats from exclusive third party vendors to Microsoft).
In this case, Microsoft is their own worst enemy and needs to modify their business strategy or else continue to lose market share in the browser.
Re:ACID 2.0 Test (Score:1, Insightful)
Sincerely,
Another Firefox Fan
Re:Standards? (Score:3, Insightful)
What you're talking about is what takes place between F/OSS projects working on the same thing; each takes ideas from the others while coming up with its own ideas, which may be copied.
Sometimes it happens in battles between commercial products, but often each starts implementing things differently for the sole purpose of breaking compatibility with the other. The result is documents, pages, et cetera that will only work with one company's product. There's no progress there.
Re:Oh boy! (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't WAIT to watch the objective analysis that this thread will surely contain.
Analysis? What is there to analyze? MS issued bunch of PR about Internet Explorer that fails to address the most egregious failings of the product. It has control of the market with this pile of crap simply because they bundled it with their monopoly OS. The consumers are suffering, but that is old news and this does nothing to make most of us believe it will change.
ActiveX has to stay (Score:3, Insightful)
The summary implies that the "right" engineering decision would be to eliminate ActiveX. This is complete bullshit.
ActiveX is a mechanism that allows compiled code delivered via the web to run on the client. This feature is an absolute must-have for many corporate environments.
Was Microsoft's ActiveX security framework insufficient? Absolutely. Were their implementation buggy? Yes. Were their security defaults too lax? Certainly. But with a feature as important to your customer base as this, the right solution isn't to cut the feature. It's to fix the problems.
Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me. (Score:3, Insightful)
Er, certainly a few companies have inhouse ActiveX applications, and that's fine. I imagine your company is among them, or you wouldn't be making this post. But get a little perspective: those people represent a tiny fraction of the market.
*How very 1984'ish.
Uh huh, right. The grandparent "Pantero Blanco" controls a vast world-controlling network of agents, and he will soon deploy black helicopters to your house for daring to dispute his assessment of the best web browser.
Re:Not Dead Yet but Still Being Flogged (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, IE has had a popup blocker for years now, and the average user doesn't even know you can plug things in.
There is only one reason Firefox has gained marketshare: IE's vulnerability to spyware. If they fix that, then no one will have any incentive to move to Firefox. Hell, I use Firefox for this reason, and if IE finally becomes fixed (and has tabbed, which I've grown to like), I probably won't bother with Firefox anymore. Why should I if IE works well enough?
People need a really good reason to use something other than what works well enough. Firefox managed to gain a foothold when IE wasn't working well enough, but I think that probably won't last.
Re:vista only? (Score:5, Insightful)
My wife is already sold on a MacBook (she's waiting for the design to mature a little, we've been burned before buying the first generation of a product). I'm happily running Windows 2000 and Ubuntu and they suit my needs just fine. In fact Windows 2000 suits all my needs right now, however I am trying to get used to Ubuntu just for fun.
Re:ACID 2.0 Test (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing. (Score:4, Insightful)
A friend of mine who is fairly computer literate and uses (the official) Netscape didn't know it had tabs until I showed him a few days ago.
Re:Extensions (Score:2, Insightful)
BS. It's not extensible through HTML/CSS/Javascript like Firefox, but it is extensible, and in many ways even moreso than Gecko-and-XUL-based browsers. You can add new functionality to IE via Browser Helper Objects (BHOs) [wikipedia.org], or embed/extend the browser by referencing the browser COM object.
BHOs are actually a very powerful way of extending IE. For example, when popup blockers started showing up in other browsers way back in the day (~2001?), I wrote a BHO to add popup blocking support in IE. Toolbars provided by developers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are also BHOs, though you don't have to have a toolbar if you don't want to (BHOs require no UI interaction). At one point, I even wrote a Greasemonkey work-alike for IE, though I ended up abandoning the project due to time constraints (but the goal of building a proof of concept was successful). The MSN toolbar added tabbed browsing to IE6, and while it was a little flakey it still worked very well. So, what can't you do with BHOs?
That amount of power is also a problem, though. Like ActiveX, BHOs can be used by bad people. Also like ActiveX, IE has built incremental improvements to security to protect you from bad BHOs. It never should've been possible to have a drive-by badware-BHO installation in the first place, but Microsoft has learned the lesson. Good and bad, with great power comes great responsibility, whatever. You may not like the extensibility options in IE, but that doesn't mean that they're not there, nor that they're not as powerful, if not more powerful, as Firefox extensions.
Re:ACID 2.0 Test (Score:2, Insightful)
As stated on the ACID 2 test webpage:
"Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification"
What's important is that IE 7 is WAY more standards compliant than the previous version, and shows that Microsoft is clearly making a commitment towards standards compliance in their browser. Perhaps IE7 won't be perfect by launch, but no other browsers are yet either (including Safari).
Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me. (Score:2, Insightful)
I developed a solution in the late 90s that used ActiveX, and it was very good for the time. I'd use a different technology if I were to do it again.
In any case, the number of firms with solutions like that is absolutely miniscule. On the public internet ActiveX is close to non-existant, and in corporations it is certainly a rarity. That accounts for a tiny fraction of the users who use IE.
The sad truth is that most users stick with IE simply because it's there and it's easy (which normally qualifies as laziness), and even if it were a decade behind it would still see prevalent use. What we really need is a jazzy, cool looking Firefox (or Opera) by default, and installation by computer vendors. Corporation IT departments need to get off their asses and figure out how to do their jobs, and at least seriously consider alternatives to IE.
Re:ACID 2.0 Test (Score:3, Insightful)
Sincerely,
Firefox Fan
(disclaimer, not bashing Opera, just found the previous comment to lack perspective.)
------
In all seriousness, Opera is a fantastic browser. I used it for a while and enjoyed the experience immensely. However, I prefer to use Open Source apps whenever possible, and since Firefox is as good as Opera and open source to boot, I prefer it. Personally, I don't care whether people use Firefox or Opera or Professor Whantunkel's Fantastical Whizz-Bang Browser, as long as the browser they use strives to be standards-compliant. IE purposefully breaks compliance.
The Acid 2.0 Test is not the end-all of compatibility. It is merely a goal to strive for. And, for the record, Safari beat us both.
Re:ACID 2.0 Test (Score:3, Insightful)
As a web developer, I'd love it if IE would support fully CSS, but as web developers, our loyalties are to the end user; writing code that will break on 30% of their browsers is a failure to perform our job adequately. That's like a doctor saying, you know, I'm just not going to help fat people with exercise because it's their fault for not eating healthily. Until they fix their nutrition, I will not help them with an exercise regimen. That's ridiculous, and as painful as it may be, it is our responsibility to enhance the end user experience, not exercise our compupolitical beliefs.
Re:ACID 2.0 Test (Score:5, Insightful)
But conformance with W3C specifications guarantees passing Acid2 test.
Acid2 is not the ultimate goal, but it's a pretty and easy to understand by non-techies indicator of progress in HTML/CSS support.
Re:IT narcs (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html [webstandards.org]
Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing. (Score:3, Insightful)
I would think -- based on my own experience and observations -- that number two on the list of things that is pushing people towards Firefox, after security, isn't tabbed browsing, but Adblock. FWIW, Opera 9, currently at "technical preview 2", also has a "content blocker" -- see here [opera.com] -- and though it's reportedly less powerful than Adblock, I for one am likely to find that Opera 9 will suit me better than Firefox does. (Yes yes I know that it's been possible to block content in Opera for ages, but it's never been very convenient.) The fact that it isn't Free gives me qualms, but only mild qualms.
Anyway, IE 7 may (may) turn out to be more secure than IE 6 (not difficult), but that's only one of the things that has been pushing people away from IE.
That and the fact that once you've had one security nightmare with IE, or one spate of never-ending-popups installing malware/adware, you never ever trust it again. IE 7 might possibly close the stable door (yeah, right), but the horse has already bolted ...
Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In other news.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, Not too "Bright", but...Be like me. (Score:3, Insightful)
This proves that you don't understand what ActiveX really is. Flash in IE? ActiveX. Java in IE? ActiveX. ActiveX is nothing more than IE's plug-in system, so to say that it's "close to non-existent" on the public Internet is completely fallacious.
Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's exactly the same principle as other standards, such as the standard rail gauge [wikipedia.org] that allows standard trains to ride on all standard tracks. Do you want websites to just work? If so, you should care about standards.
Re:Standards and Bueller, both missing. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like phones, all the different phones only work cause there is a standard for them to plug into. Remember how much fun it was renting the one and only phone from ma bell? Some people don't want to do that with computers either.