Microsoft has released the 2nd beta of Internet Explorer 7 to the general public. You can read the release notes, or watch a tour of the new features. Microsoft warns you not to use this beta a production environment: "Evaluation of Internet Explorer 7 should start now, but the software should not be used on production systems in mission-critical environments. Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview will only run on Windows XP Service Pack 2 systems, but will ultimately be available for Windows Vista, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and Windows Server 2003." Update: You might have been expecting this, but there's already a DoS attack out there for this new beta.
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Member since:2005-10-05
Wasn't there a similar bug with Firefox and the dashes?
I googled and found this:
http://news.com.com/Unpatched+Firefox+flaw+may+expose+users/2100-10...
I find it odd that both browsers have suffered from what looks like a similar bug. I wonder if it's a flaw with how International Domain Names were specified (what the original bug in FF was).
Member since:2005-07-06
Rewriting everything from scratch is almost never the answer. That's the real reason Netscape lost the browser wars.
That wasn't the sole cause - if you used Netscape Communicator, you would know.
Netscape left it too late to correct the problems in it, they then turned around thinking that if they simply threw the code out into the wild, it would spontaneously correct itself throw the 'power of opensource', as if it were the panacea to all that is wrong in the world.
The code got out, there was a blood curdling scream by the opensource community and so a rewrite was started - with that being said, however, what will be interesting is not whether IE 7 brings back people, but whether those who use Firefox stick with it, regardless of what IE has to offer - that will be the big testament to the brand pulling power of Firefox.
Member since:2006-01-20
I agree with your point of view. Parsing text is definitely not what a computer does best 
Still, I find it a pretty low-profile bug, in the sense that the handling of HTML tags should really be the basics for a web browser. IE or Firefox or Opera or $browser, this is not about IE itself.
Member since:
2006-01-02
Rewriting everything from scratch is almost never the answer. That's the real reason Netscape lost the browser wars.
If you were a programmer, you'd realize how hard it is to get even relatively simple things, like correctly handling arbitrary strings from the outside world, to a bulletproof level. This is the kind of bug that would be caught by the testers before final release, but perhaps it should have been taken care of by the testcases for urlmon.