Microsoft finally told Web developers what they’ve wanted to hear for years, promising support for graphics and style sheet standards.
Microsoft discloses some IE 7 plans
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Eugenia Loli
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This will make life so much easier (once it achieves market penetration at least).
I wonder if they are going to rewriting a lot of the rendering engine, or using a completely different engine, like say, Tasman, which is impressively css compliant as of IE 6 Mac (aka MSN for Mac).
I can’t wait :-D.
What does that have to do with the the content of the post?
They’ve mentioned security in every other post about IE 7. Go troll somewhere else.
they said fixing bugs in CSS, not fully implementing CSS
“How about better security?”
what specifically would you like them to do? Users need to take responsibility for failing to read warnings. Microsoft has made IE 6 rather secure with the release of SP2 for Windows XP (as with other service packs for Windows 2000). Microsoft can’t force people to keep these security features turned on and when users install other applications that defeat the firewall or other security measures it’s not Microsoft’s fault. What more should they do (and I want specific examples, not broad generalizations)?
Personally as a webdeveloper I’ve been wanting to hear that noone is using IE anymore and that Microsoft has quit developing it.
Well, better late than never I guess. But we still have to consider all the IE6 users out there, which will be plenty, even years after IE7 has been released.
Why couldn’t they just have done it right from start instead of fixing it years later? Oh right, that’s the microsoft way of doing things.
Also, I’m curious, they mention that they will make CSS support more consistant. Does that mean following Mozilla?
Because even if they follow the W3C specs, those specs doesn’t say how things are supposed to be rendered exactly, we might still end up with things like the annoying box-size problem (which I actually think MS did right, but someone has to fold). So I still fear that I’ll have to do ugly hacks to keep websites looking good in all browsers.
Heh, btw is this the innovative new way of using the web they were talking about a couple of months ago?
That was what IE7 was supposed to be all about right?
Great news, not that I can finally use PNG transparency for web sites any time soon. It will probably take some time for people to upgrade to IE7 or switch to other browsers with good PNG support.
Though it is possible to do it with ActiveX, or whatever it is called, and use a PHP script to use ActiveX only when the user is using IE. The solution can be found at http://koivi.com/ie-png-transparency/ .
>what specifically would you like them to do? Users need to >take responsibility for failing to read warnings
That is a really stupid statement. Users generally read the warnings the first time, but have you actually read a lot of the warnings you get in IE? Some of them are just techno mumbo jumbo, some of them just explain that something was not displayed “because”, and some of them are like “Oh my god! run away”. Users eventually end up discovering that if they listen to all these “oh my god” messages they can’t do anything they expect to be able to do, they don’t understand the techno mumbo jumbo ones, and if something is just blocked “because” and something isn’t working the way they think it is they do whatever they can to make it work, regardless of warnings.
Users shouldn’t have to be technically oriented or a security expert to be able to avoid all the malware that is out there. Don’t be an elitist about it and blame it on the users.
Simply put, I’m not a security expert or a web browser designer, but some things microsoft should be able to do are: use better default security policy, allow easy overriding of security policys with appropriate warnings, remove technoligies that are redundant and prone to security errors(such as activex), unintegrate ie from the rest of the system(why shouldn’t I be able to run ie in it’s own little sandbox under user guest or something like that).
As for SP2, it’s a good step, but if users don’t understand why something stopped functioning and one of their friends tells them to disable the firewall on the ethernet device to make it work, they are just going to do that, if they can’t find an easy way to get the features they expect to work working(AIM file transfer, VNC, a game server, ping).
I’m not neccesarily going to comment on how ie7 or longhorn are going to improve on it. It sounds like with steps like LUA microsoft is finally moving toward the right direction. They certainly have a lot of room to improve, so anything would be a step in the right direction, it’s when we actually see results from these steps that we can say microsoft is actually doing something right security wise.
Full css support would be nice and there are still easy java-script tricks to crash the IE browser. Still glad they will finally fix PNG support. Better late then never and I really hope they will be erase most of the cross browser compatibility problems which are a pain in the ***. If it wasn’t for market share not a single webmaster would even bother to fix those.
They said they’ll make things more consistent, with what? Such that the behaviour is more predictable, how standard will it be?
Following some links, starting from this article I got onto ACID2 test page. I understand this should test full CSS2 compliance. Find this page at:
http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/
Now, if you do the test using IE output is a mess… not even close to what is expected to be. But then surprises come: tried to run the test using Opera 8 BETA or (King o’ Web) Firefox 1.0.3. None of them renders such page as expected by standards. So now tell me about standards again…
Does anyone see such output as it is supposed to be? If so, which browser?
Yes, there is a browser that can pass the acid2 test and that is Mozilla 1.09beta3
No browser renders it completely correctly, but Safari is the closest. Some developer has a blog and has shown his work on it (don’t remember the address). Apparently he’s pretty close to getting everything working.
a browser that FULLY supports w3c standard i say will be pretty bloated. theres alot of w3c rules out there and ill tell something. alot of them aint used
so while firefox currently supports like about 95% of the w3c standard. ti think is better for them to concentrate on other stuff like implementing features etc
my 2cents
😀
Acid2 seems to test more than just compliance. I’m not sure this is a good thing or not.
It includes things like corrupted/invalid css (that supposedly should be ignored, but are often required because the specs are vague or they are deliberately the wrong way around (for a given value of wrong))
and Doctypes (the most insane thing ever)
I’d like to see a more realistic test. One that doesn’t include Doctypes for a start. And one that includes only standard CSS. I’m not sure I care how browsers treat bad css (not crashing would be nice) but bad css should be discouraged not grudgingly tolerated.
it seems IE will be the same over and over.
I have choose other browser…
so while firefox currently supports like about 95% of the w3c standard. ti think is better for them to concentrate on other stuff like implementing features etc
So adding features does not add a lot of bloat that few people use?
If apps only did what the avarage user wanted them to do they would be very small and fast. But that wouldn’t sell upgrades I guess.
Firefox has all the features most people use and more so. The advanced stuff is available as extensions.
I’d rather have them focusing on optimizing the beast even more.
But I hear you, I wish that we could ditch html alltogether, but that won’t happend over night.
deathshadow, you are very correct in saying that IE is the de-facto standard. So aren’t you very gload that the standard is finally improving?
Isn’t PNG alpha support great? Isn’t IDN nice thing to have? Isn’t CSS bugs annoying? And… will IE 7 finally supports position: fixed? Do you know how many bytes of JavaScript got wasted to reimplement position: fixed as stupid “moving menu”? And…
I can go on, but this is good.
“Standards” my ass. IE’s way of doing things is a standard, as the majority of people USE IE.
Well, the thing is that I can’t know that IE will be the standard browser in a couple of years. If I build websites for my clients around IE, then what would happend if suddenly two years later Firefox is the most popular browser?
I’d like to be able to give my clients a website that will work as expected for at least five years. That is possible if everyone follows one standard.
It’s a pretty stupid idea to let the product that has the largest marketshare set the standard. Especially since that standard is poorly documented and under closed development. All the others will have to guess what microsoft is up to next and try to implement it as quickly as possible. MS will always have the lead that way. And that’s not fair competition to me.
Also if IE is the standard, then why are all professional web developers trying to develop for every browser out there? Perhaps because IE isn’t the only player. 10% of all the webbrowsers out there is a lot of browsers.
It’s costing us a lot of time and money to develop websites in the current environment. Something has to be done. MS will need to learn how to work together with the other browser developers or they will loose even more users.
Well deathshadow, remember IBM ? At certain point they rule market share with ~100% personal computers. Remember Intel ? At certain point they had ~90% market share. So why are they now with less market share ?
Agreements, escaping anti-trust and standart’s(ex:x86),etc. i guess amd and intel use some kind of standarts or not
?
Using standarts is right. Not using standarts is a way to big company who see their product with all share, become for over and over in the top. Is cool have just one company in the top ? Or is cool have other choices ? That is why we have standart’s, to choose freely other products without loosing features and other stuffs.
If you don’t follow standart’s then it will never be freedom to choose other products !!! is that right, guess not.
IE is the most used browser out there, so in one sense its the “standard”, but its inconsistent in terms of HTML layout. It can be a huge pain in the butt for a web designer who needs to support other browsers. It might be tempting to say that “90% of the computers use IE, who cares about other browsers”, but you can’t ignore the 10%. Plus, its probably more than 10% that use an alternative browser. Macs, Linux, BSD, Solaris, cell phones, PDAs, the PSP, etc. There are millions of people who need web pages to display correctly on whatever device they’re using to surf the web, and they might not be using a Windows machine. IE updating to support actual standards (not defacto ones) is a good thing. It’s a godsend for web developers, who don’t have time to deal with inconsistancies.
IE7? I can’t see any working version, why should i care what Micrsoft is shouting into the world?
They announced so much stuff, that
a: never saw the daylight
b: came too late to be interesting
When they announced Windows, they didn’t have 1 line of code written, however shouted, there was work going on for ? years,
…who remembers what they announced for Longhorn and then said:”no, it’s not going to be in Longhorn”.
It’s just so pointless to watch a toothless tiger bawl.
How is it that fixing some CSS and PNG bugs warrants a major version change?
I don’t know about you, but to me 7.0 sound like something that support html, and as xhtml was published 6 years (!) ago, it should probably make some effort of supporting that too.
I would even go so far as to request some XForms support, that would be somthing to hype about… four years to late bug fixing isn’t something to speak loudly of…
Following some links, starting from this article I got onto ACID2 test page. I understand this should test full CSS2 compliance. Find this page at:
This test does NOT test full CSS2 compliance. This test checks for compliance of things web developers depend on and/or are one of the top wishes for browsers to support.
Now, if you do the test using IE output is a mess… not even close to what is expected to be. But then surprises come: tried to run the test using Opera 8 BETA or (King o’ Web) Firefox 1.0.3. None of them renders such page as expected by standards. So now tell me about standards again…
IE’s output is not even that bad if you take away the red background which Firefox surpesses (the way FF works now it should show the red background) and take away the ERROR comment. Specifically that “<!—” and “—” comment tag is a complete bull. You should read up the blog of the Safari developer about this (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mt/comment.cgi?entry_id=7953) to see what I mean. Full CSS compliance is not necessaray, because most of it is either not used or completely unnecessary (like that comment tag for example).
Does anyone see such output as it is supposed to be? If so, which browser?
As of time of this writing no browser is able to render the correct (correct meaning the way the W3C visualized it) output. But Safari is getting _really_ close to this – as a matter of fact, the developer of Safari is set to pass the Acid2 test and I must say he is doing extremely well (2 weeks and Safari can almost pass it without any errors).
Acid2 seems to test more than just compliance. I’m not sure this is a good thing or not.
It includes things like corrupted/invalid css (that supposedly should be ignored, but are often required because the specs are vague or they are deliberately the wrong way around (for a given value of wrong))
and Doctypes (the most insane thing ever)
The W3C standard (well, the most of it) is in a complete mess right now (again, check the “—” thing a little up). Either they themselves don’t know what they want or it is poorely documented.
I’d like to see a more realistic test. One that doesn’t include Doctypes for a start. And one that includes only standard CSS. I’m not sure I care how browsers treat bad css (not crashing would be nice) but bad css should be discouraged not grudgingly tolerated.
Well, for start if you remove the doctype the page is no longer valid (standard compliant) and the browser enters quirks mode.
I would think the only browser it should function in is Amaya, at which point you might as well just use lynx…
Haha! Yes, the browser written and maintained by the W3C. I strongly suggest you to not install that piece of crap. See screenshots below what Amaya did to that poor page.
Isn’t PNG alpha support great? Isn’t IDN nice thing to have?
IE already has PNG transparency (only 8-bit though) and IDN (through plugins) but they need to cleanup the CSS part of the browser. Today, Firefox is the only browser without IDN support.
Agreements, escaping anti-trust and standart’s(ex:x86),etc. i guess amd and intel use some kind of standarts or not
?
x86 is not and never has been a standard (it’s a de facto standard if that’s what you mean – but those aren’t _real_ standards).
Using standarts is right.
Tell that to Mozilla/Firefox’s prefecthing.
Anyway, here are the screenshots of the most popular browsers (excluding Safari) and how they do with the Acid2 test:
Firefox 1.03
http://www.imagehop.com/show.php?id=a3b1f1d67226d&n=firefox.jpg
Internet Explorer 6.0 (SP2)
http://www.imagehop.com/show.php?id=a3b2f2b5c0146&n=iexplorer.jpg
Amaya 9.1
http://www.imagehop.com/show.php?id=a3b3f652f64bf&n=amaya.jpg
Opera 8 (final)
http://www.imagehop.com/show.php?id=a3b4fbc9b2bd9&n=opera.jpg
You can clearly see that all browsers (again, excluding Safari) pretty much die when it comes to W3C standards. In fact, even W3C’s own browser (Amaya) fails miserably. Just keep in mind that this test does NOT test full CSS compliance, just some of the most wanted features.
When watching this I’m thinking two different things; on one side I think today’s web standards (make that “standards“) are very difficult to support (correctly) and on the other side I can not post this without mentioning that Safari’s developer has almost fixed his browser in a week (or was that 2 weeks?) to render Acid2 correctly – still not there, but by far the nearest (btw, he even noticed a bug in the test, and the test was updates to v1.1).
Safari 2.0 (internal build)
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/images/acid2-6.png
developer’s blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt
“”Standards” my ass. IE’s way of doing things is a standard, as the majority of people USE IE. If it were not a standard, we wouldn’t be bending over backwards to support it. No matter how much the fans of XHTML/CSS stomp their feet and pout like little children, saying “This is the standard anything else is not” it still sounds like utter bull.”
Think TCP/IP, that is a standard that allows you to connect to networks. Now, if every vendor on this planet made some little change, then now you wouldn’t be able to connect to certain networks. Why, because its their standard.
As for MS standard (based on market share only), well, that means that no one can create a competing browser because their rendering engine is off limits.
Having a standard, give everyone a chance to compete.
Try a Firefox build based on Gecko 1.8 and you’ll notice that it’s much closer to passing Acid2 than the current stable Firefox build, which is Gecko 1.7-based. It looks better on my box than the above posted Safari build.
@ Sérgio Machado
Yes, I remember Micro Channel and price-gouging, why do you ask? IBM NEVER ruled with 100%, and when they were finally in a position to do so they shot themselves in the foot by switching to an architecture nobody could afford and even less people wanted. As to Intel, you sit around with your thumb up your ass with a serious competitor is snatching up the market and watch what happens to share.
Oh, and as to Acid2, try changing your system font sizes from small to large (or for you *nix folks 75dpi to 100) and laugh as the attempts to render it get worse. Real fun just change the rendering sizes in a gecko based browser. Fixed pixel height fonts and CSS declarations ARE NOT supposed to resize…
and I AM looking forward to IE7 for it’s support, because I’m stuck on IE6 because none of the alternatives even come CLOSE in stability or speed. I don’t know where the @#$% people come up with firefox being faster, especially since gecko STILL leaks memory like a sieve.
RTFA – They did not promise support fot style sheet standards, they promised fixes for current bugs (like guillotine).
MS have not yet promised full CSS2 support – RTFA!
>MS have not yet promised full CSS2 support – RTFA!
It’s too less too late what MS is doing. It’s gonna take years before there’s enough market penetration for full css2 support. how sad.
When the beta version will be out, let me know. For now, all Microsoft have announced is just vaporware since there is no alpha version available.
i use a PHP work around to call the ActiveX filter when IE browsers visit my site and it doesn’t work completely as advertised.
try taking a semi-transparent div layer and placing a PNG (using the ActiveX filter) in an opaque div over it. it work in literally every other browser (Firefox, Safari, Konqueror (with better results then IE at least)). IE still leaves a huge box around the transparent parts of the PNG: WORTHLESS.
its always great when they choose not to fully implement an open standard. it really shows what they’re all about.
Get out of the nineties, please.
W3c has stated a few times that the new official browser to took at is (you guessed it) Mozilla.
Ironically, if IE supports CSS 2.1 fully, it will surpass the mozilla.org browsers. I’m still waiting for counters in Mozilla… See http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#counter
It’s not a very exotic feature (I need it for automatic section/subsection numbering in a document) and seems trivial to implement, but they’re not doing it anyways.
Opera supports it, IE will probably support it… Let’s hope that’s enough motivation for mozilla.org.
It’s too less too late what MS is doing. It’s gonna take years before there’s enough market penetration for full css2 support. how sad.
I think you would make a mistake if you think that CSS market penetration is related (or mostly related) to MS or IE. CSS(2) is not popular because it could look clever to a bunch of people at W3C but it just doesn’t compute when Usual Joe needs to design a Web page. If you use CSS, you will loose most important HTML feature: visual design. That’s what made HTML so popular and CSS broke that.
Did you check code for ACID2 test? It’s a total mess! That’s kind of code you would design to be able to tell your friends you’re smart…
Things should evolve to be easier, not harder to do…
I think you all didn’t get it. When Microsoft says they are going to work with the standard they mean:
a) They are going to read the standard and see what can be done to follow the standard at the same time that they show something absolutely different that mozilla does.
b) Try to find things inside the standard not really suported by gecko and make them apear all around their next Frontpage version.
That’s what they’ve done for 20 years. Why should it be different now?
I agree. When you just want to get something done quick and easy, tables are still the best way to lay out your page content. CSS may be cool to some people, but it’s sometimes not too practical — especially when browsers don’t render things the same way.
what specifically would you like them to do?
I’d like them to make it so that I can’t hit a webpage and have malicious scripts automatically downloaded and set to run on my system.
Users need to take responsibility for failing to read warnings.
You don’t always get warnings because IE is such an fing POS.
I was looking for information on removing a piece of spyware from a system at work and upon simply viewing a web page the computer was infected with malware that took 30 minutes to kill and clean.
This was on an sp2 machine with all the security bells and whistles running.
Its obvious to me that even with sp2 IE is still not anywhere near safe for web surfers.
I’ve dumped it for firefox. IE only runs for windows updates on my system now.
strangely enough I haven’t had a single malware infection since making this change to my usage of the computer.
This is a fine example of what happens when there is no competition.
IE has sat with the same features for years. It was not until mozilla firefox started pulling headlines that MS actually got off its ass to do anything about IE.
I’m afraid you’re missing the point. IE7 is not about CSS or Tabbed browsing. MS doesn’t care anymore.
IE7 will need to be Avalon-compatible browser for WinXP/2003 systems. If MS cared about such features, it would have patched IE long ago.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that MS is really scared about FF or whatever. They could introduce tons of features in a very short time, if they really wish.
I’d like them to make it so that I can’t hit a webpage and have malicious scripts automatically downloaded and set to run on my system.
done. next.
You don’t always get warnings because IE is such an fing POS.
You do get warnings, Microsoft allows users to turn them off. I think you need to actually use IE 6 instead of believe all the rhetoric you read on Slashdot.
I was looking for information on removing a piece of spyware from a system at work and upon simply viewing a web page the computer was infected with malware that took 30 minutes to kill and clean.
This was on an sp2 machine with all the security bells and whistles running.
Its obvious to me that even with sp2 IE is still not anywhere near safe for web surfers.
I call bullshit and I’ll explain why in a minute.
I’ve dumped it for firefox. IE only runs for windows updates on my system now.
strangely enough I haven’t had a single malware infection since making this change to my usage of the computer.”
I use Windows XP SP2, IIS 5, IE 6, Outlook 2003, the Windows Firewall (for warning me about individual programs trying to communicate out to the web), MS Anti-spyware beta, and an MN700 firewall and I have NEVER bee infected by malicious spyware, viruses, trojans, or worms. I know I’m not that lucky because I still haven’t won the lottery. Something else must be keeping my system free from all these problems. The only problem I’ve ever had was when I accidentally left a new FTP site open to anonymous users and some jackass warez monkeys started using it to dump their files. Since they used non-Windows compliant file names it was a bitch and a half to remove all the files after locking down the FTP site.
its called “tagging”, basically renaming files to reserved words (like “com1 ” or adding / / into the name, like “locked / /”). dont know anyone over the age of 13 that does it anymore though ;-). basically makes it so that you cant open or delete the files, and you can only access the folder if you know the complete path.
as for the spyware thing, ie6 + sp2 + ms anti-spyware is about as good as firefox. as a web developer, i have a strong bias here, as microsoft controlling the defacto standards has made for some god awful standards. but as things stand now, firefox offers FAR more functionality through plugins then is available in ie. theres FAR more functionality available in opera, and its quite a bit faster. in the years ive spent using firefox, ive run into a grand total of 2 sites that didnt work right; windows update, and fileplanet (not counting some wierd rendoring bugs in the earlier versions). while the w3c arnt exactly perfection when it comes to a standards body, microsoft has shown us that if they arnt forced to work on something, they wont. so until ie becomes standards compliant, i will continue to evangelise firefox to everyone i know.
@moronpeeceeuser
IE6+SP2+Outlook+Antivirus Scanner+ Firewall+ Antispyware
you could tich the antivirus and antispyware if you move towards Mozilla and another email program,
you even can ditch the firewall (which does not belong into the same machine as the rest anyway) if you move away from Windows…
See the scheme?
The root of most problems lies in IE and its cloes ties with ActiveX. Every antivirus/antispyware software is just a symptom treatment not the cause treatment.
while you may prefer the IE box model, they did not get it right, the spec is 100% clear on the issue. So for compliance with CSS 2.x IE has to fold, which IE 6 has done in standards mode.
As for folding, no one has to. check out draft CSS 3 and you will see that you can toggle between IE and W3 box models.
ACID2 does not test some of the most wanted features of CSS 2.1. It mainly tests obscure little details that most gets wrong because they are so obscure. The only usefull things it tests are correct fallbacks, which if all browsers implement them will help very knowledgeable web developers to write code that works despite missing features.
while you may prefer the IE box model, they did not get it right, the spec is 100% clear on the issue.
Sadly, they are not. If you go and read the specs you will notice that it only mentions how you define the box size, margins etc. not how it’s supposed to be rendered. This led to mozilla implementing one version and MS another. The mozilla thinking is from a technical perspective while the MS implementation is from a practical webdesign point of view.
They are both right, but they differ, and that’s the problem. Someone has to fold. It would be easier if Mozilla gave in, but after several denied bug reports to bugzilla it doesn’t seem like it will happend.
Rain, actually they seem very clear to me… http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/box.html shows a very nice diagram on how it all works. This is the stuff that IE has wrong.
All I care is they fix the PNG support. Everything else is irrelevant to me.