Microsoft postponed the introduction of the next test release of its Internet Explorer 7 Web browser until sometime in 2006, according to comments posted to the company’s site for software developers. In a blog posting on the software giant’s MSDN developer site, Dean Hachamovitch, product line manager for IE at Microsoft, said that the company will post an “updated pre-release build of IE 7 for Windows XP publicly” during the first calendar quarter of 2006. The IE team leader indicated that people interested in gaining access to the browser preview would not need to be members of the MSDN community. In related news, there’s an exploit in Firefox 1.5 on Windows SP2.
Just base it on the Mozilla engine and be done with it. MS could probably bang it out in a week if they did.
That will never happen. Then all the sites that don’t render in Mozilla today will suddenly break, and we know that Microsoft would never allow that.
“Just base it on the Mozilla engine and be done with it.”
No thanks. Everyone on the planet isn’t having a love fest with Mozilla-base browsers. Some of us think they totally suck.
The originator based their choice on security and ability to correctly render CSS2, and you base your opinion on personal feelings over a few million lines of code with a name tacked on it? Mozilla UI is seperate from the render engine, perhaps you do no understand this and were thinking that the originator was implying that MS not use IE but Firefox etc. The gecko engine could be used in IE, keeping the same UI on top as before, and then you’d hate it just because the rendering engine is made by someone else?
What is it with you?
Na, I think the funniest part would be if they adopted Webkit
Anyway, regarding the IE web engine, I’ve always wondered, if they made the WHOLE core of their browser, that is, the parts that do the heavy lifting, and re-wrote it in c#, wouldn’t that in theory make their browser alot more secure being that everything would occur in a sadbox, so even if the built in boarder of the HTML rendering engine is broken, the VM sandbox is still there to protect the end user.
Microsoft postponing a release? And this is news…why?
Same ol’, same ol’.
The “exploit” in FF1.5 isn’t that big of a deal though really, an inconvenience at best and a bit of a problem for the computer illiterate. Heck of a lot better than the spyware that easily creeps in through IE.
As a general question, if IE were released and was really good, would people ditch Firefox and Opera to go back to it??
‘As a general question, if IE were released and was really good, would people ditch Firefox and Opera to go back to it??’
I don’t think it would matter so much, because IE users probably still make up 90% of the market. A lof of the reasons why people ditch IE is because of security concerns. If those security concerns went away with IE7, I doubt a lot of people would bother switching. Most of the ‘Joe Users’ I’ve evern seen using Firefox or Opera (that I have installed for them) don’t even bother to use the features (such as tabbed browsing) that are currently missing in IE, even if I sit down and show them how those features work. For example, I taught my dad how to use mouse gestures in Opera. His response ‘Wow, that’s cool … I think I could get used to this’, but he never used them AFAIK.
Edited 2005-12-08 21:01
I have a mac, and I can’t even use Safari and Camino solely because of the damn Gmail Delete Button extension!!
They’re going to do IE 7 for the Mac?
BTW, gmail works fine in Opera 8.51 for OS X.
Gmail Delete Button is a Greasemonkey script. It does NOT work fine, because it only works in Firefox. As far as I know, there is no way to extend Safari or Opera or Camino like that.
What “people” are you talking about? Even if IE7 was a hundred times better and worked on linux with an open source license I still doubt people would use it.
I am developing websites, and I am not going to wait on IE 7 any longer… I am going for clean XHTML/CSS2 design, if people use IE6 then they will not get as good experience as Mozilla or W3C compatible browser(s), those will be the “recomended” for my sites. Of course my pages will work under IE6, but not optimal…
Then 90%+ of the web page viewing public will not have an optimal experience. Good call.
Did you get fired from your last web developer job?
Do you even develop websites?
A lot of people who like to do a proper job with webdesign (i.e. actually give two planks about maintainability and _not_ use Dreamweaver) feel the same. Even if IE is 90% of the market, I’m not wasting 90% of my time on forever maintaining bad webcode to appease IE. I code as best as possible for standards and then go back over and make the necesary fixes so that it works in IE until it is good enough. The amount of time I save by writing the site properly in the first place is more than worth having an only slightly degraded experience in IE. Here’s my own personal example http://aupair.uk.com but I by no means claim it to be a good one.
Yes, I do do web design, and giving IE users the same experience as Safari/Firefox/Opera users only requires a slightly deeper understanding of XHTML/CSS. You need to be consciously aware of IE’s bugs, and work around them.
Ugly code is not needed. Creativity is.
Well, there is optimal experience in IE, and there is optimal experience in Firefox.
As Firefox have more to give, chances are that the pages will look better in Firefox but that doesn’t nesessarily mean that they look bad in IE, just not as good as they do in Firefox.
As Firefox have something between 5 and 30% of the market (depending on what market you aim for), it probably would be a good call in most cases to make the pages look good in both or more browsers.
If you write code that conforms to standards, your pages will probably look good in IE. It is not that bad after all. It is only that int Firefox, the web developer will have a few more standards to play around with to make the pages even better.
If you ever looked at the old Firefox home page in IE and compared it to how it looked in Firefox you know what I mean.
Besides, if you make standards compliant pages, there is much less risk that the page will not work, if users for one reason or another decides to switch browsers as users tend to to as soon as there is a security alert. If you follow the standard it shouldn’t matter if they use IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror or something else.
And yes, a professional web developer can make beautiful pages that follows even the limited set of standards given by IE.
In related news, there’s an exploit in Firefox 1.5 on Windows SP2.
Is the problem isolated to Windows SP2?
I generally consider an exploit to be a security problem. This FF 1.5 exploit is nothing more than a bug. It shouldn’t even affect all users (even those on Windows SP2). If people choose to erase their history file every time they close FF (v1.5 gives them the option), it seems to me that this bug wouldn’t even be noticed.
I’m all for fixing the bug, but calling it an exploit seems a bit misleading (if not inaccurate).
I don’t understand how you can delay a product that has not had a release date announced? Microsoft has never said when IE7 was going to be shipping, aside from the fact that it will be included in Vista…nice try!
Microsoft also said that a public beta was to be expected – summer, This Year!
The beta release has been delayed. It was announced to coincide with the next beta release of Vista, which was scheduled for Dec 7. So yes, the beta release has been delayed.
What the hell is with that news.com firefox article? A DOS attack consists of hammering someones connection until it is useless. Not denying them from using firefox. I mean good lord. What sensationlist journalism. NOT ONLY THAT, but the people that wrote the article posted a correction at the bottom of the article stating that they can’t prove that it actually happens.
So now we’ve got a story about a potential crash bug in firefox that doesn’t even exist. Awesome. Way to go sensationlist journalism.
Anyone else see a problem with articles like this?
DOS = Denial Of Service. In this case, they can’t use Firefox until they delete the history file. Sounds fitting to me.
Firefox sucks. Opera rules. I use IE when I need to, and anyone that says plug-ins don’t work with Opera, are idiots. They all work fine.
> In related news, there’s an exploit in Firefox 1.5 on Windows SP2.
A reproducable application crash isn’t an exploit but a bug to me. You cannot compromise a systems security with this bug.
Furthermore the bug occurs in many browsers on every platform they run on. Be it Firefox, Opera, Windows XP, Fedora, BeOS or whatever. It simply fills up the history with thousands of random characters by changing the title of an entry. (Once again, as in 90% of all other cases this only works with Javascript enabled.) Then the browser crashes and/or cannot be started anymore, until you clean up the history.
> Gmail Delete Button is a Greasemonkey script. It does NOT work fine, because it only works in Firefox. As far as I know, there is no way to extend Safari or Opera or Camino like that.
You can extend Opera with Scripts easely. However I have no clue what the Gmail-delete-button is, so I cannot say if this one works fine. http://userjs.org
Not that it hasn’t served me nice (sometimes), but IE just “feels” better to me. I can’t really exaplin, but IE doesn’t lock up when loading QT or Flash plugins and I can at least enjoy _real_ smooth scrolling.
I guess this delay is good news for Mozilla people. I don’t think they could match IE7 with FF 1.5. Anyway as someone pointed out already, not everyone is happy with today’s Gecko browsers and no matter which side you’re on, competition is always good so I look forward to IE.
Why not ditch FF and IE for k-meleon instead its more advanced than ie and loads faster than both IE and FF?
and I can at least enjoy _real_ smooth scrolling.
That’s the first time I’ve seen someone say that the like IE’s smooth scrolling. I’ve always found it made scrolling less accurate/responsive (especially on slow machines) and seems like a poor way to compensate for how jerky the “non-smooth” scrolling is in IE.
That’s one thing I’ve always liked about Opera, even years ago when I was stuck on a P75 laptop at work, it still felt smoother when scrolling pages than IE does.
Varg, if you want smooth scrolling in Firefox…try this extension, SmoothWheel:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=357&applicatio…
For the “locking up” issue, you probably need to tweak Firefox’ GUI settings with FasterFox:
http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/
Someone might be care, but for me, forget the buggy IE (and feature-less browser)…
Actually, I am realy curious what IE7 will look and perform like. I never used IE for years by now (except some of our intranet sites) so I can’t say. I didn’t left IE because of security problems.I consider myself an educated user so IE spyware etc was something I got rid extremely easy ( a weekly scheduled job and voila). I switched to Firefox for features. I like tabbed browsing, I like various skins and I like some extensions ( I have to be careful because lot of extensions is also not good).
So, I’m realy looking forward to see this IE7. Competition is good.
I’m also waiting for IE7 and using Firefox but i don’t understand why Microsoft didn’t release updates for IE6? They should have been fix the standards support in IE6.
I don’t understand at all.
I think the post about security flaw in Firefox 1.5 could only be made or told by MS, it doens’t make sense at all. It’s not a security flaw.. it’s a bug, it does not compromises the machine… so why spreading rumors? Just to prove that firefox is also buggy and not secure like IE? I think browser users know why they use firefox… so rumours won’t change their minds, just facts. And the fact is IE is insecure and featureless.
http://my.opera.com/quiris/blog/show.dml/78645 — MS is making progress ๐ Maybe they will pass this test with IE12…
Have you seen the Acid test in Firefox 1.5? They already said they won’t pass Acid2 in FF 1.5 or 2.0.
Yes, I know but Acid2 looks much better in Fx than in IE ๐ Only few bugs need to be fixed -> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480
WIll it have tabs? If it does, many people will leave FireFox for what it is and use IE again..