IE7 Released and Available for Download

Luis Escalante writes "After over a year and a half, IE7 has been released to the public as of Monday afternoon. Download it directly here. Word hit the streets after several mangers of the IE division posted on the IE blog."

Re:What happened?

[da_foz]

It is important news because we are the people who will have to help family and friends after they upgrade if things go wrong. Now at least we know that if mom calls tomorrow what it will be about...

A year and a half?

[gumpish]

After over a year and a half, IE7 has been released

I hate to break it to you Luis Escalante, but IE 6 was released in August 2001.

(Yes, strictly speaking 5 years is "over a year and a half", but the point remains.)

Competition

[Concern]

Once again, competition wins. Microsoft, after leveraging their monopoly power to win the browser wars, had summarily decided that there was no longer anything else in IE that needed work. IE was effectively frozen for years, bugs and all - cracked open, by stern policy, only for security fixes.

It took a free software effort with no hope of profit to do so, but MS has at long, long last bestirred themselves to code again. This has once again demonstrated the baseline of what MS' monopoly will do. Since it is not economically feasible to confront MS's monopoly powers, the commercial market for product X (browsers, office apps, OSs, etc) is effectively destroyed (sorry Opera), but at a minimum, MS is forced to compete against what the community can develop for free.

Never forget - human beings are lazy by design, and so are our organizations. No business, no politician, no religious leader, will exhibit much virtue except under threat. This is why competition and democracy have been largely effective as policy.

Whether MS wins or loses the browser war (or these days, the browser cold war), or the OS war, we have already won, because we have pushed them to innovate, to make their products more stable, more credible, and more powerful.

Actually

[the-amazing-blob]

Actually, there will be quite a few people downloading it. I upgraded to IE7 beta to test out my pages on that. Now I'll upgrade to the final. Sadly, you still can't ignore IE.

Re:Difficulties with install...

[Shados]

It matters for web developers. A LOT. The faster IE6 can be ignored (it won't for years for mass scale sites, but for smaller stuff, web applications, etc it will be able to soon, relatively speaking), the least likely web developers will be to go totally bonker. I do feel for the ones that DO have to support everything from Netscape 4 and up though, it will be a nightmare to support in paralelle with IE6.

Re:What happened?

[eebra82]

How come this is on Slashdot before news about Flash Player 9 for Linux?

Let's see now.. It's the world's most widely used internet browser. It's probably the most commonly used application in the world. It marks the date when Microsoft finally started to worry about Firefox. It is a huge improvement over IE6. Yeah, I guess that makes this news more important, despite the fact that Slashdot is more Linux oriented.

Last but not least, your complaint is ignorant because not only is there no such thing as a race for news, but a lot of people might find the IE vs FF wars more interesting, too. You know, almost 90 percent of the world's users browse with IE, so there's a pretty good chance that at least a few Slashdot users will enjoy this story.

Headline 3-4 years from now...

[suggsjc]

I completely agree that not having *all* of the CSS support is a bummer. However, it is a minor piece of the puzzle in the grand scheme of things. You can't count on all of your users having an updated browser. You (in general) have to code to the lowest common denominator. Sites are just now starting to drop support NN4, but IE5 is still a big player. So...this is actually a headline for about 3-4 years in the future when people are considering having to accomodate IE7 and its shortcomings, and consequentially considering dropping support. Today, I still sit in backwards compatibility hell...tomorrow doesn't look good either.

Re:I can hear...

[Kelson]

Yep. Now we just have to see how quickly IE7 and the rest supplant IE6.

Personally, I'm hoping that anyone who can't install IE7 will instead try out Firefox or Opera. And anyone who can install IE7 will do so quickly, or switch quickly.

Unfortunately there are plenty of people who can't install *anything* because IT locks the machine down, and plenty of people who won't install anything because they're afraid they'll break something.

Still, the sooner IE6 disappears, the easier things will be.

Re:What happened?

[RuBLed]

even if we don't like IE 7 (I use Opera), it is much better than IE 6 and for us who work in a company where some previous systems were tweaked to work on IE better, this new version would certainly be a welcome change. (or a welcome headache, whichever comes first)

Re:Competition

[Kelson]

And best of all, Microsoft has realized they have to keep going [microsoft.com]:

Dave Massy (Moderator):
Q: Now that IE7 is nearing completion, can you give any information on how regularly you plan to release future versions of IE?
A: We definitely plan to release on a regular basis. Exactly when the next release will be is difficult to predict adn we still have plenty of planning and work to do. You can be assured that it will not be 5 years until the next release of IE though :) we are plannign the next two versions now.

Re:What happened?

[njchick]

There are many web developers here. IE7 will affect them much more than Flash for Linux.

Re:I wonder how long...

[arth1]

is ie7's release really "Stuff that matters"

Rather "matter that stuffs", if you ask me.

The Microsoft Way (not to be confused with the street) is to have the poor browser do a whole lot of thing a browser never was meant for, including being a distribution channel for executable libraries, a pretty border around other applications (which in turn can embed IE (which in turn can embed other apps (et cetera))), and a trust inheritance engine that hides the trust chain from the user.

This overloading wasn't exactly what admins meant when they told Microsoft to go stuff it.

Re:What happened?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were real friend, you would have installed Firefox on their PCs (well, Linux is fairly easy these days, too).

Re:What happened?

[abandonment]

'previous systems were tweaked to work on IE better'

this is exactly where most of the problems are going to arise - custom applications / systems that rely on IE quirks that should never have been there in the first place.

from what i've heard, this new IE is going to break most of these custom IE applications - consultants, prepare your RFP's!

Microsoft updates == consultants dream, everyone else's nightmare

Re:What happened?

[Kelson]

Hmm... Number of people worldwide who use Internet Explorer vs. number of people worldwide who (a) use Linux, (b) want to have Flash animations in their browser, and (c) are OK with installing the proprietary Flash player.

I'd say based on numbers alone, the new IE release qualifies as "stuff that matters."

(P.S. Thanks for the link -- that's great news!)

"funny" but true

[User 956]

It's completely telling that the first comment on that page, is a comment by a guy who's worried IE7 is going to trash his computer [digitaltrends.com].

If that's the first reaction people have, firefox has a pretty good chance.

Re:What happened?

[bshellenberg]

I... (gulp, I know my karama is going to go to hell for this)... think IE7 is a nice step up. The two things I'm happy to see are transparent PNGs and the font rendering is much nicer. If that was all IE7 provided, then at least we can sit back and say all of our websites just got a facelift. Not exactly a bad thing.

Re:User interface?

[Z34107]

Hmmm... a cleaner interface is a bad thing because it was Microsoft that innovated?

IE7 leaves much more space open on your screen for actual web browsing compared to IE6 (or Firefox, or most any browser minus lynx). Everything's accessible from a toolbar that uses the same icons Windows and IE have used since the dawn of time. And your precious menus that'll make it look like a "real Windows app" are hidden by your "alt" key.

Office 2007 uses a "ribbon" - a tabbed toolbar. It's pretty damn slick - you don't need your drawing tools open unless you're editing a picture, so you go to your drawing tab. (Or, you can use the toolbar that hovers by your mouse when you start editing a picture, or the formatting toolbar that appears by your mouse when you select text, etc.) It's so much cleaner, and intuitive.

But Microsoft changed things. They're not ugly and just-barely functional anymore. That's why I'm getting a Mac.

Re:Security patches

[moresheth]

What's that sound?

Oh yeah, it's thousands of webmasters scrambling to test their sites on the latest mutilation of web standards.

Re:What happened?

[MillionthMonkey]

Oddly enough it won't. It will only affect web developers who code to non-standards. Most of us code to a set of standards so that all our code can work well in ALL browsers not just IE. Those who focus on IE only and use IE specific tags and ActiveX usually put themselves out of a job by neglecting a large percentage of the market

You've obviously never coded a page that had to display correctly on IE.

Re:What happened?

[Ucklak]

I've stayed with the `!important` in CSS and used that javascript hack to display transparent PNG. Other than that, I should be fine.

Re:What happened?

[MikeFM]

Dude, Flash is one of the few things that sucks worse than IE. On any OS it's buggy, poorly designed, and frequently misused. When Flash is cleaned up and opened up enough to be fully intergrated into IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari in the least then it might be worth caring about. The general concept of plug-ins has proven to lead to a sucky web browsing experience even if the average user isn't aware that it's these crappy plug-ins making their browser crash, run slow, give confussing plug-in required messages, and sites that are poorly indexed by search engines, have strange hard to use interfaces, and difficult to use for people with accessibility needs.

Just say no to plug-ins for things like Flash. They can be useful at times but in the vast majority of uses they are only used because programmers are to lazy, stupid, or harried by lazy stupid bosses to use more compatible solutions that do the exact same things.

IE7 isn't that big of news to us geeks but it is a huge relief to us as it goes mainstream - it isn't as good as Firefox, Safari, or Opera but it is worlds better than IE6 and will make it much easier to develop nice websites without having to disable everything cool because it doesn't work in IE. Of course it'll be a few years before the majority of users have updated but at least the process has begun.

If only Microsoft wasn't so lame as to make it difficult for developers to run IE6 and IE7 side by side.

Re:User interface?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Are you serious? You're calling IE7's interface "cleaner?" IE7 doesn't expose any more space than IE6 does for the web view, and it actually gives you less space on the tab bar by jamming the toolbar onto it. Worse yet, they stupidly put it on the right side so you have to mouse further to get to it, as well as placing the stop and refresh buttons on the right side of the address bar. And even if you only have one window open, you're always stuck with a tab that has a weird, pseudo-mini-tab to the right of it which looks hideous.

If anything, Microsoft is getting even uglier (have you seen Vista or Windows Live Messenger? Blech).

Re:"funny" but true

[Anonymous Coward]

While this may be true, it is possible to determine if other programs currently have your (old) library loaded up, and if they don't, you can safely replace it. Yes, it's even possible that one might ask the user to terminate the specific programs that are using the library, and if they don't want/can do that at the moment, to schedule the update for the next boot up.

What is amazing is that there are installation programs who can do this, and they work very, very well (for me). Barring some very strange coding in the rendering engine libraries, which seem likely, I do not see why this can not be done. Yes, it would require some extra coding, but seriously, the inconvenience caused by unnecessary reboots would be greatly lessened, especially if they'd retrofit this change to other downloads... reinstalling Windows 2K wouldn't be the nightmare of 13+ reboots it usually ends up at (yes, you can avoid this, but I don't see why I must fiddle with making special installation discs).

Afterthought:
Actually, it *might* be that there could be a race condition, where a program loads up the old library just as it gets replaced (should be possible to lock out, but mayhap not), and that program crashes. This seems unlikely, and caused to a large extent by impatient users (I should know, I'm one!).

Re:"funny" but true

[masklinn]

However, the IE rendering engine is provided as a library for other applications to use. Any other applications that have embedded browser controls depend on IE -- and as they should. Applications should not have to deal with HTML rendering on their own.

As such, a system reboot is neccesary as the rendering engine itself, exposed as a library, must be updated. Basically it just ensures nothing is using the browser control at the time of update.

Yeah, code hotloading is for t00pids

Re:"funny" but true

[dodobh]

The only time a reboot should be necessary is when the kernel is updated.

Re:"funny" but true

[dabraun]

What would it even mean for it to "require DRM" ... methinks you don't actually know what DRM is. DRM "support" is like support for opening acrobat documents. If you install it, you can play the content, if you don't then you can't. If you never play the content it makes no difference whether or not you've installed it (ok, Acrobat is probably a bad example ... :)

It's not like having the code on your machine to support playing DRM'd WMA files is somehow going to change what happens when you play MP3s or run other applications.

Re:"funny" but true

[Erik Hensema]

What if glibc contains a security hole? What's the faster, more reliable option: rebooting or manually restarting ALL processes?

On a desktop, does it really matter if your reboot or logout/login?

MSIE is first and foremost a html rendering library. Surely it's bundled with a webbrowsing frontend named msie.exe, but msie.exe is just one of many users of the library. On a major upgrade like this, how do you guarantee all applications are linked against the new version of the library? And please take into account that most of your user base are users, not admins.

Rebooting is just a sane thing to do. I've seen way too many rooted unix boxes with uptime > 2 years...

Re:User interface?

[baadger]

If anything, Microsoft is getting even uglier (have you seen Vista or Windows Live Messenger? Blech).

Vista isn't that bad once you tweak it. The first things I have been doing with the beta/rc versions are:

• Disable Glass/Transparency and Desktop Composition (Using the advanced system settings dialog which they buried)
• Switch to the "Aero Basic" theme (Yes, this is a seperate step)
• Remove the useless 4 pixel "border padding" on windows
• Get rid of the Segoe UI font (I use Tahoma) and tweak the font sizes
• Put Run back on the Start Menu and switch the start menu and tweak a few other bits on it
• Disable UAC (I don't trust it)
• Enable DEP (x64 only) for "All Programs and Services" (It has mitigated quite a few of the XP critical issues recently). I add a few executables that don't work with it on (printer software) to the exception list
• Disable IE7's phishing protection (for privacy reasons)
• Disable the built in Firewall (i'm behind a well managed router), Automatic Updates (I'm in a routine for the 2nd tuesday of the month and read Slashdot so it's no big deal for me) and some other miscellaneous security warnings.
• Switch my account to a Limited User account (By adding it to Users and removing from Administrators groups using MMC)

.... once again MS has just chosen shitty defaults.

Re:User interface?

[AaronLawrence]

Sounds like you turned off the "Vista" part of Windows Vista

Re:What happened?

[jez9999]

Dude, Flash is one of the few things that sucks worse than IE. On any OS it's buggy, poorly designed, and frequently misused.

I don't think I agree with that analysis. With the arrival of things like YouTube and Google Video, it's starting to be used properly and implemented well. These companies get large numbers of people using their services mainly because they can pretty much assume Flash 7 is installed on the vast majority of browsers and they know they have it available. Would streaming video over the net be anywhere near as popular if they required an MPG-compatible embedded media player? I rather doubt it; we had those before, and they never got as popular.