Topic awaiting preservation: Internet Explorer 7 ... in beta this summer (Page 1 of 1)

The news has spread quickly. A summary is available on the the Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog, an article about Gates declaration at the RSA Conference 2005 on News.com and a non exhaustive list of links is available on webgraphics.

Well, nothing earth shattering. MS is just making some noise about a beta due in 5 months without giving any concrete infos. We can't expect a final release before this fall or winter. But it is interresting to note that MS is wetting their pants with the growing visibility of FireFox and ready to release a new standalone version of IE though the declaration they made last year.

Cherry on the cake, the development team of IE is "commited" to deliver IE7 for Windows XP customers leaving half of the windows users out in the cold.

If IE7 includes the same crappy support of XHTML, CSS, PNG, ... it's more likely to look like IE6 SP3.



(Edited by poi on 02-16-2005 00:37)

Please, please, let them get it right.


 

*hopes for proper CSS3 support*

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke
"Any sufficiently arcane magic is indistinguishable from technology." -- P. David Lebling

(Edited by Iron Wallaby on 02-16-2005 02:34)

My oh my, those IE users are a fiesty bunch - slandering Firefox and its users openly doesn't exactly say much about the person(s) doing the slandering now, does it?

quote:

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Please, please, let them get it right.

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...and when was the last time that happened?


/Dan

{cell 260} {Blog}
-{ ?The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.? (-Barlow, John Perry) }-

(Edited by DmS on 02-16-2005 09:17)

quote:

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Please, please, let them get it right.

---

And what would "right" be, in this case?

Like FF?

I wish MS will not make a simple SP3 with a new version number to catch some attention, but will also implement once and for all some standards like PNG (1996), CSS2 (1998), XPATH (1999), XHTML (2000), DOM2 (2003), SVG (2003), ...

Otherwise we'll have to filter and hack our CSS and scripts to work in 4 different versions of IE with their respective bugs. The anger of the web authors will grow and the next real version of IE ( I mean, the next release that will not be a simple cummulative security patch ) will walk in the foot steps of NN5. Project delayed too much, the concurrence getting stronger every day, and bam! The only solution left to match the concurrence is a complete rewrite. Notice it would certainly be a better solution than adding several Mb of security patch every quarter.

Whatever with its extensions FireFox has become the must have tool of the web authors. MS will have a hard time trying to convince them to switch back to IE. The web authors may represent a small percentage of the web but they already managed to open the eyes of some big companies on the advantages of the standards.



(Edited by poi on 02-16-2005 12:53)

Poi, do you still believe in Santa ?


I don't

----
If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.

Neither. BTW my main PC is running W2K. It means no SP2, and for the moment no hope to see IE7 ( or rather IE6 SP3 ).

As I said, FireFox is the tool. How could MS match its usability with some features like ( to name some ) the custom CSS2, the web developper tool bar, colorZilla, the Live HTTP header, the DOM inspector, GreaseMonkey, EditCss, ... ? even if they improved the standards support in IE7 it'd still be far behind all this.

poi is right. There are dozens of standards for doing things in the programming world and on the Internet and MircoSoft has show repeatedly that they have no intention of following any of them. The reason designers use Firefox as a development tool is not that they like the interface or the colors chosen by the people who wrote it. They use Firefox because it is written as close to the standards as possible.

Until the mid 1980s most programmers thought that the one person who had delayed the development of computers and computer programming more than any other was Grace Hopper. By the mid 1980s Bill Gates had taken that position away from her and has continued to widen his lead ever since.

If it were possible to write a web page once and have it look and operate the same everywhere, no matter whether the user was on Windows, Mac or Unix, whether they were using Firefox, Opera, Safari, or InterNET Explorer, it would save hundreds of thousands of hours a year and allow us to focus on something more important, like the content or the design.



.

-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.