The new version of Internet Explorer in Longhorn 4051 is version 6.05.4051.0. Even though Longhorn is many years away (if ever!) the folks at Microsoft have realized that people want more from their browser, due to popularity of the competition, ex. Mozilla. UPDATE: Longhorn 4051 review.
Blocking Pop-Ups
This version of IE fully supports blocking all of those pop-ups the internet
has to offer. It’s very easy to access, and
stands out on the tools menu. There are
more options available to this
instead of just blocking some of the pop-ups available at the bottom of the
privacy tab in internet options. Here you can exclude some
sites, or make every site you ever encounter blocked. Very handy if you
want the pop up on www.weather.com to ask you for you zip code, but want
everything else to be blocked.
Clear Browsing Records
Disk Cleanup made a very feeble attempt at this. When you are online,
there are .temp files, temporary internet files, cookies, history, passwords,
form data, and internet address that are stored on your computer. Disk
Cleanup doesn’t get even half of those. Microsoft has implemented this new
Clear Browsing Records option under
tools to do this quite nicely. It even
prompts you and gives you
a nice explanation of what it will do.
Managing Add-Ons
This feature isn’t exactly new, but it
is much easier to find, making dealing with add-ons, like shockwave player
or the QuickTime plug in, easier than ever.
Download Manager
All major internet browsers have had this feature for some time now.
Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. I think even Konqueror and whatever
the GTK+ based GNOME browser is have it. Now Microsoft has put it in
Windows. Nothing really big here, except that managing a
lot of downloads at one time is
so much better and you can prioritize the
downloads so the one you want first gets the most bandwidth.
Small Changes
The only other small changes that I have seen is that the default history
has went from 20 days down to 14. The setup of the menus are just a little
bit different, mostly due to the new features that were added. Also of
interest is the new Favorites flashing
star in the right hand corner of every IE and Windows Explorer window now.
Right beside it is also a Search button.
Longhorn is shaping up to be an exciting release with many new features.
Be sure to check out my other page with info on other aspects of build 4051 from
PDC.
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![]( "Internet Explorer Version 6.05.4051.0")
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Internet Explorer Version 6.05.4051.0 |
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![]( "Clearing Browsing Records Explanation")
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Clearing Browsing Records Explanation |
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![]( "Managing Add-ons dialog box")
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Managing Add-ons dialog box |
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![]( "Download Manager and Individual Window")
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Download Manager and Individual Window |
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As long as 90%+ of people were using a browser that allowed pop-ups, I think the marketing scum were pretty happy and the rest of us using ‘alternative’ browsers were in the clear.
However, now that pop-ups can be blocked in IE, I cringe to think of what they will come up with next
Already, i’m starting to see a new kind of pop-up; I don’t know what it is .. it looks like a pop-up, but it’s actually inside the browser window.
What about speed? Is it faster, same? Anyone knows. What is MS touting?
I think we’re going to see this ‘new’ IE in WinXP SP2
It will be those CSS banners that popup in the middle of the page. You can’t block it with conflicting the other classes on the page. :/ Only way to beat it is to just boycott sites using this method and find an alternative site for you info.
http://www.phoenity.com/newtedge/effective_banner/
“As long as 90%+ of people were using a browser that allowed pop-ups, I think the marketing scum were pretty happy and the rest of us using ‘alternative’ browsers were in the clear.
However, now that pop-ups can be blocked in IE, I cringe to think of what they will come up with next
Already, i’m starting to see a new kind of pop-up; I don’t know what it is .. it looks like a pop-up, but it’s actually inside the browser window.”
Ummm well…that already exists. You can use a layer in the same way you would a pop up.
Only way to beat it is to just boycott sites using this method and find an alternative site for you info.
If all the sites that are using the ‘old style’ popup switch to the new style, what are you gonna do … boycot the entire WWW?
I love mozilla and its spinoffs (Camino, Firebird, etc), but honestly, there is really that much competition based on popularity. What % share does the Mozilla family really have? Less than 10% (this is maybe a bit high; I am just guessing)? Anybody know?
I long for the day when Mozilla, Safari, and all the other browsers out there can put up a real fight with IE. Unfortunately, the web is becoming more and more IE-centric.
IE is the best web browser there is, and if Microsoft has its, way will ever be. I used to use Netscape back in the browser war days, but now I clearly see that a mixture of good OS and good browser make my computing experience that much better. With Windows XP sp2 and Longhorn on the way, Office XP and future office products, XBOX and Microsoft possibly buying up AMD you can’t help but see that Microsoft just will continue to dominate PCs, Office environments, console games, home media, PDA’s, and coming soon processors. I can’t help but wonder how soon it will be until I see cars with the “Designed for Windows (Insert newest Microsoft OS here)”
For me personally, I just go to another site. Simple. There are hundreds of places out there that offer the same thing. The main ones I see really using the banner popup crap are spam sites, news, and porn sites.
I’m not worried. The free browsers are among the best open source projects out there. They’ll stay one step ahead in the ad arms race for sure. Blocking spam and ads are two of the biggest hacker itches. We are ahead with Bayesian filters and popup blockers now. We’ll stay ahead no problem.
The first thing I noticed was the toolbar buttons are not grayed out any more. This is one of the things I really dislike about standard MS programs, but I will probably still prefer MozillaFirebird especially if they would intergrate the mail back into the browser.
um yea IE is the best browser if you want your computer hacked. What is the current number of holes in IE that allow a site you are visiting to take over your computer. 5, 6? I have used mozilla since 0.9 and there is no way I go back to IE. I only use IE to download the latest version of mozilla, or firebird on freshly installed systems. I have had to many computers comprised because of it. Also mozilla has had nearly all of those features since 1.0 how long ago, 2 1/2 years. Microsoft is playing catch up again.
As for IE only sites, if they don’t render under mozilla I just don’t visit them. Then agian I haven’t had a problem with any site that I wanted to visit. I haven’t been to every site on the web so there is lots I haven’t experinced, then again I haven’t had a virus in 3 years since switching away from IE.
I might have missed it but I didin’t see any tabs. They are one feature I can’t live without. open up 10 windows, and with a single click change which site you are on, very useful for comparing notes and info between multiple sites.
Is the newest version compliant with W3C standards yet or will we still have to code special IE workarounds for websites?
Lack of competition is never a good reason to use anything. I’m not bashing Microsoft but what you are talking about is an obvious monopoly. That isn’t good for prices or innovation. And I wouldn’t say IE is the best browser. My personal favorite is Firebird, but the fact that MS is emulating the alternative browsers with integrated pop-up blocking, download manager, and other things, proves that they AREN’T the best. Maybe they will be in some day, but the fact that they have to put these features into future versions of IE while the alternatives have them already shows that they are playing catch-up, and are actually inferior. It’s just a pain to go and download something else and install it, then have to deal with changing it to your default, etc. etc. that most people stay with IE.
It probably still blunders any attempt to write standards compliant xhtml/css.
Oh, but it has pop up blocking. Hurray.
Few care about “standards compliant” xhtm/css. When 97% following the same rule, it is called “de facto” standards.
It’s not about kludgy standards or anything it’s about the fact that internet explorer cannot do half of CSS 2.0 right. It doesn’t do the float property right, it kludges up the box model, and – in general – is absolutely worthless at rendering CSS 2.0/xhtml content.
See what you’re missing here, http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/demo.html among other places. There is plenty that IE won’t support which is what web designers complain about. CSS allows for no javascript pop-up menus and many other nice things but IE usually messes them up.
– Nothing about tabbed browsing 🙁
– I only see a [back] button any more. Where’s the [forward] button? I use it a lot.
now I clearly see that a mixture of good OS and good browser make my computing experience that much better.
Agreed, I really got an Epiphany with GNOME.
“IE is the best web browser there is, and if Microsoft has its, way will ever be. I used to use Netscape back in the browser war days, but now I clearly see that a mixture of good OS and good browser make my computing experience that much better. With Windows XP sp2 and Longhorn on the way, Office XP and future office products, XBOX and Microsoft possibly buying up AMD you can’t help but see that Microsoft just will continue to dominate PCs, Office environments, console games, home media, PDA’s, and coming soon processors. I can’t help but wonder how soon it will be until I see cars with the “Designed for Windows (Insert newest Microsoft OS here)””
No IE is far from the best browser out there, if anything it’s near the worst browsers on my list. IE seems to be one of the slowest browsers out there, why do you think they dropped IE on the Mac? MS claimed they couldn’t compete with Safari because Apple has integrated it into the OS even though there isn’t one bit of Safari integrated into Mac OS X. MS really dropped IE for Mac because they realized IE sucked in comparison to Safari,Camino & Mozilla Firebird and the only reason alot of people used it was because it came with OS X. As soon as Apple began including Safari with OS X Microsoft realized they lost the only good way to keep people using IE. As soon as more and more Windows users try Firebird and other alternative browsers IE will lose more and more users. If it wasn’t for Windows update site I wouldn’t ever use IE on Windows.
Also whats changed on that IE Longhorn screenshot? IE still has a bad interface & no tabbed browsing and supposive pop-up blocking. In comparison Mozilla browsers have had pop-up blocking & tabbed-browsing for a while and Safari has had it since it was created. Microsoft would have to make major improvments to IE to impress me even a little.
I would be lost without MyIE2…
http://www.myie2.com/html_en/home.htm
What about native SVG support in new IE?
anyone?
Will it handle the “phishing” vulnerability??
And I bet it still doesn’t support transparency in PNG images. After all, it’s “not created here”.
Did they fix 24-bit PNG alpha? Or do we still have to use the style: filter dxload hack?
– I only see a [back] button any more. Where’s the [forward] button? I use it a lot.
I noticed that too, I use back and forward buttons a lot.
IE is the best web browser there is, and if Microsoft has its, way will ever be.
Actually, Konqueror on Linux and Safari on Mac OS X are both superior to IE.
On Windows, I much prefer Mozilla, which is natively skinnable, already blocks pop-ups and has tabs. It does not benefit from the pre-load trick like IE does, but the three extra seconds are well worth the wait.
And despite your marketing sales pitch, MS does not dominate console games. Please check numbers of Xbox sold vs. PS2s…(not to start a console flame war here, I have both).
It also doesn’t dominate the PDA and Home Media markets. As far as the processor market is concerned, MS will have to be very careful if it doesn’t want another anti-trust trial on its hands.
Few care about “standards compliant” xhtm/css. When 97% following the same rule, it is called “de facto” standards.
Yep. “De facto” translates to “moving target.” Right before IE 6 hit the market the line was “IE is the standard,” but then suddenly sites that conformed to the “standard” broke.
It is going to happen again. Something important is going to be fixed to work the way the w3c’s standard says it should, and web developers are going to pressure users to IE 7, which in this case is going to mean Windows YP.
As a designer I have a few BIG problems with IE. I guess I can look forward to having one of them fixed. I bet it will support transparent png’s.
Still, has anyone noticed and differences in rendering in this version of IE? I think that is what I was really going ask in this post.
OK, I will be nice, and explained to Microsoft what their current browser lacks to be able to compete with Mozilla.
Ask yourself how little this new version bring in this list (except a new skin by default, amusing job 😉
* For the Web Standards
+ Support of alpha transparency for the PNG format
+ True support from CSS2(1999!!! What’s the fuck) and CSS3
+ A true Strict Mode, who works even with a XML declaration
+ Support <<position : fixed>> damnit
* For the web developer :
+ A true Javascript deboguer
+ A Dom Inspector who try to understand how works a site, and to which element apply a JavaScript property
* For the End-User
+ suppress advertisement banner in webpages (plus the popups), via right click and <<block images from this server>>
+ supress spam in the mail module (this will _never_ works well with Microsoft stuff, because since they have 95% of the market, spammers just need to bypass _their_particular_ anti-spam filter, which is fairly easy)
+ possibility of tab-browsing
+ multi-platform support (Yes, not everybody use Windows !)
* For the security
+ suppression of Active X
+ A master password to crypt all the passwords of the system
+ A real security model
+ A versinon without security holes by default, to not impose your grandma to buy a $$45 ADSL connection/month, because of the massive security updates every wednesday
+ A mail module who don’t relay virus
+ A free access to the code source, so that we can see that nothing is hidden, and, as such, avoid a new scandal like with the famous NSA keys
* For the accessibility
+ Type-ahead find, to quickly find a link or a word in the current page
+ The possibility to change caracters size, even in the case it is fixed in pixels
If _that_ shows us the future of Longhorn,…
Btw: Mozilla’s marketshare has reached 6%. Nice job if we take into account their monopoly.
Microsoft is not going to support svg. They are going to support their own thing called sparkle. They claim it is 90% the same as svg.
Oh and (re: someone else) I don’t see how they are stopping people from using xhtml1.1. I am just finishing up a website for a client that is xhtml1.1 based. The beauty of xhtml+css is that you can work around crappy browsers with different stylesheets. keeping browser specific work arounds in an isolated section of the code.
It is great, you can use a real browser like mozilla to design the site without the hassle of working around all the browser bugs and limitations. This lets you focus on creating a good design. Then once you have the design down you can work on trying to trick ie into rendering it. You can repeat this for other browsers if you want. Though for the site I did it for had traffic of 73% ie, 24% gecko with the marjority of the rest being random spiders, so they were not concerned about other browsers (though safari1.1 and opera7.1 work fine with the mozilla/standard style sheet). Since you used a logical structure for the document (we are doing real xhtml here not table based crap) it is even be usable in text based browsers.
Ok, I’ve keep my flamebate for another post, so that you can read the interesting part, and mod down this one.
I think we lives an interesting moment. IE has not changed for a while, and this version is just a little better. Wait two other years to have Longhorn, and wait two other years before a significant part of the population as switched to Longhorn.
This truly reminds me of the glory of Netscape since version 2.0, the 3.0 was a little disappointing, and the version 4 which was here for a while with no progress and really sucks made them go to bankrupcy.
IE6 new version == Netscape 4.7
The point is that you shouldn’t have to have browser specific workarounds.
If only the Mozilla Foundation would have played the Microsoft game and patented the process of blocking pop up web pages. I’m so tired of watching open source companies teaching Microsoft how to write good software and then be locked out of using the technology it developed.
Nick doesn’t match with IP, nor match with usual opinion… Stolen nick ?
If only the Mozilla Foundation would have played the Microsoft game and patented the process of blocking pop up web pages. I’m so tired of watching open source companies teaching Microsoft how to write good software and then be locked out of using the technology it developed.
Except Mozilla came up with neither tabs nor popup blocking, as both features were in Opera long before. And come to think about it, I don’t even think Opera pioneered either of tehse versions.
Though I don’t give props to IE, I certainly don’t to Mozilla either. Whatever advantages Mozilla hs over IE is made null and void by its speed, or lack thereof. (Firebird is a different story though.)
Though I don’t give props to IE, I certainly don’t to Mozilla either. Whatever advantages Mozilla hs over IE is made null and void by its speed, or lack thereof. (Firebird is a different story though.)
To be fair, Mozila was always meant to be a development platform, rather than an end-user product (which is what netscape, firebird, galeon, epiphany and so on are).
Please don’t feed the trolls!
My gf and her sister will not use mozilla because of the UGLY ICON. They use IE on both their xp and mac because the icon looks prettier. Talk about crazy.
Has anyone tested?
http://www.avantbrowser.com/
AWANT BROWSER – a tabbed web browser!
Top 11 reasons to use Avant Browser
Flash Animation Filter: More than 85% of all flash animation on web pages is advertising. These flash files are pretty large, and normally take up to 90% of the size of the page you’re visiting. With Avant Browser you can save this bandwidth by blocking the download of these flash files with just one easy click. Avant Browser also provides options to block downloads of pictures, videos, sounds and ActiveX components. With these options users can control their bandwidth and speed up page loading.
Built-in Pop-up Stopper: Easily eliminate unwanted pop-up pages automatically with just one click.
Additional Mouse Functions: If you click a link in the web page with the middle mouse button, the link will be opened in a new window in the background. And there are two handy mouse gestures in Avant Browser. The first allows you to navigate backward one step by holding the right button down and then clicking on the left button simultaneously. The second allows you to navigate forward one step by reversing the buttons used: hold left, and click right.
Multi-Window Browsing: Browse multiple web pages simultaneously. All opened pages can be easily stopped, refreshed, closed or arranged with one click.
Real Full Screen Mode and Alternative Full Desktop mode: When you enable Full Screen Mode, all you see is the webspace, with no toolbars or other clutter. They are simply autohidden! Move your mouse over the top or bottom and find the toolbar and tab bar respectively. Avant Browser also provides Full Desktop Mode, which is the same as Full screen mode, but differs in that your windows task bar stays visible.
Built-in Google Search Engine: Avant Browser provides a built-in search engine, Google. Built-in search engine enables user to search for web pages, images, groups, directories, news, lyrics and software in Internet. International users will be glad to know that you can set avant to utilize any of up to 64 google mirrors by default!
Full IE Compatibility: Avant Browser comes with all Internet Explorer functions, including Cookies, ActiveX Controls, Java Script, Real player and Macromedia Flash. IE bookmarks are automatically imported into Avant Browser.
Records Cleaner: With Avant Browser, you can easily keep your privacy by deleting Typed Addresses, Auto-Complete Passwords, Cookies, History of Visited Web Sites, Temporary Internet Files and Search Keywords.
Safe Recovery: If Avant Browser is closed improperly, all open web pages are saved and will be automatically reopened at next startup.
Translation: Avant Browser is available in many many languages to suit our international audience. If you your language is not available yet (see above), you can easily translate a small file and support for your native language can be included in the next version. It’s quite simple.
Skins: Express your creativity by making a skin for Avant using a custom, easy to use program called Avant Browser Skin Factory, or use any of the many and varied skins made by other users.
Just swap the icons of IE and mozilla
tell them to have a look at moz 1.6 or firebird on the mac they do have nice icons as does firebird on the pc
though so does sarfari, chimera etc….
i’m quite impressed with firebird/moz on mac its a lot faster loading and doesn’t look out of place, it used to take a fourtnight to load and was a unispiring greyness which didn’t really lead to best imprestions. which does count if a app looks ugly people will assume its not well done…
The Forward button shows after you hit the Back button and have pages that you can navigate forward to. It fills in the empty circular space to the right of the Back button.
http://themes.mozdev.org/
Smoke(mozilla theme) + Expose(gtk theme) = sexiest browser ive ever seen!
Here we go. This is a pic of mozilla 1.5 + expose + smoke:
http://picserver.student.utwente.nl/getpicture.php?id=559752
…I take it he must feel my posts are a threat to MS’s hegemony. I’m both flattered and annoyed. At least it shows that my views are known enough that I don’t have to report him myself.
To stay on-topic, it’s not that IE is a bad browser, but just that other browsers offer more functionality and are standards-compliant. The biggest effort is to educate web site providers – especially government ones – to make sure that their content is accessible by all modern browsers, not just IE.
It’s not that hard – just stay within standards and test your site with IE, Mozilla, Opera and Safari/Konqueror, and you’ve pretty much got everything covered.
>>>Oh and (re: someone else) I don’t see how they are stopping people from using xhtml1.1. I am just finishing up a website for a client that is xhtml1.1 based. The beauty of xhtml+css is that you can work around crappy browsers with different stylesheets. keeping browser specific work arounds in an isolated section of the code.
How are you serving the xhtml 1.1 pages? The MIME type for xhtml 1.1 SHOULD NOT be text/html. It SHOULD be application/xhtml+xml. It MAY be application/xml or text/xml.
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/
And serving xhtml 1.0 as text/html (while allowed), but be discouraged anyway.
http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml
Can anyone tell me whether IE 6.05 in Longhorn can be served with application/xhtml+xml?
You can’t say that something is the best just because a lot of people use it (as many people on this site argue constantly about windows). Here’s one example: AOL. If anyone can honestly say it’s the best ISP then they haven’t tried anything else. It would be a good idea to stick to reasons and logic, rather than “Everyone else does it so . . .” I don’t think we even need to say the old bridge saying.
>>>To stay on-topic, it’s not that IE is a bad browser, but just that other browsers offer more functionality and are standards-compliant. The biggest effort is to educate web site providers – especially government ones – to make sure that their content is accessible by all modern browsers, not just IE.
The biggest problem is the FrontPage is really an Internet Explorer production application (now SharePoint production app as well), and not a HTML design app.
Mine you that in FrontPage 2003, you can TURN OFF all the Microsoft specific codes. But the problem is that half of the features in the menu are greyed out.
The best way to create a webpage is to write and group the contents semantically — with zero formatting. Then you apply the layout with css. Then you apply the skin with another css file.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot/
http://www.alistapart.com/d/slashdot/indexwithoutcss.html
http://www.alistapart.com/d/slashdot/indexwithoutmarkup.html
http://www.alistapart.com/d/slashdot/index.html
If only the Mozilla Foundation would have played the Microsoft game and patented the process of blocking pop up web pages. I’m so tired of watching open source companies teaching Microsoft how to write good software and then be locked out of using the technology it developed.
How are they locked out ? Given they came up with it first – and thus have prior art – how could they *possibly* be locked out ?
Still no tabbed browsing? I’ll stick with Firebird…
My gf and her sister will not use mozilla because of the UGLY ICON. They use IE on both their xp and mac because the icon looks prettier. Talk about crazy.
http://themes.mozdev.org/
Caveats
Themes are Mozilla version-dependent; thus, themes created for Mozilla version 1.x will not install on Mozilla version 1.2, and above. The same is true with using version 1.2 Mozilla themes on earlier versions of Mozilla.
Look at those smaller than peanuts ugly icons and
version 1.2 != version 1.x logic
No wonder AOL has to dump mozilla
My gf and her sister will not use mozilla because of the UGLY ICON. They use IE on both their xp and mac because the icon looks prettier. Talk about crazy.
They are not geeks for sure 😎
You can’t say that something is the best just because a lot of people use it (as many people on this site argue constantly about windows). Here’s one example: AOL. If anyone can honestly say it’s the best ISP then they haven’t tried anything else. It would be a good idea to stick to reasons and logic, rather than “Everyone else does it so . . .” I don’t think we even need to say the old bridge saying.
AOL brings a lot of ordinary people online for sure, while it might not be the best ISP, it doesn’t force its users to RTFM either.
Mozilla might have hundred “features” that IE doesn’t have, the irony is that no web site, except a handful of zealot exclusive ones, will use them at the moment.
Smoke is the buggiest theme I have ever used. Looks nice, but it’s a piece of shit.
“AOL brings a lot of ordinary people online for sure, while it might not be the best ISP, it doesn’t force its users to RTFM either.”
Hm, hm… maybe. This mess of an AOL CD ruined my sister’s W98 after she picked it out of the mail and installed it out of curiousity. So I had to reinstall 😛
I reckon the CDs got waay better nowadays, but honestly, in the early days these things were terrible. Appart from the software, the service itself is shit as ever. Go search the forums to online games like Medal of Honor, Battlefield, or what ever — problems, problems, problems for screwed AOL users. Hint at AOL: Hey lamers, this is the 3rd millennium, it’s about time you get something right for a change.
“…I take it he must feel my posts are a threat to MS’s hegemony. I’m both flattered and annoyed. At least it shows that my views are known enough that I don’t have to report him myself.
To stay on-topic, it’s not that IE is a bad browser, but just that other browsers offer more functionality and are standards-compliant. The biggest effort is to educate web site providers – especially government ones – to make sure that their content is accessible by all modern browsers, not just IE.
It’s not that hard – just stay within standards and test your site with IE, Mozilla, Opera and Safari/Konqueror, and you’ve pretty much got everything covered.”
I work for NASA and am involved with a number of web sites. There is a big push to have full standards compliance. It is actually part of the law now for web sites to 508 compliant. 508 compliance generally has to do with designing sites with those with disabilities in mind, but also states that browser independence is an issue. Any new sites taht are launched by the U.S. government must be 508 compliant/standards compliant. Old sites are slowly but surely getting tuned up.
The U.S. government also has numerous documents at several levels that cite the need to use Mozilla rather than IE because it is a standards compliant browser and that IE produces so many security leaks. Further, the mac rendering of IE is just crap.
There are still lots of gov sites that have IE in mind, particularly high traffic sites…but that has to do with avaialability for the masses. Not every part of the government has had the time to redesign a fully standards compliant site, but it is happening.
Internet Explorer allows people to make mistakes in their HTML coding. It like fitting a square block in a round hole. Internet Explorer will round the corners of the square block for you. You do not need to learn the correct way of HTML coding. I suppose people like it that way.
Standards are good for communicating to the widest audience. You can code with special tags but doen’t expect everyone to be able to see your masterpiece. It is like using slang words. Your slang words might not even exits somewhere else or they may mean something different.
It would be nice for a browser that has the greatest market share to comply with the standards for web communication but the company making the browser would have to really care.
“Smoke is the buggiest theme I have ever used. Looks nice, but it’s a piece of shit.”
Are you sure? Ive been using it for about a 1 1/2 months and havent had any problems.
Screw Avant Browser, try MyIE2:
http://www.myie2.com/html_en/home.htm
If you’ve gotta use IE for whatever reason, MyIE2 is the way to go. I’ve tried about 6-7 of the IE ‘shell’ browsers and MyIE2 is the best hands down, IMHO.
Do you realize how irrelevant your arguements are? I hate to bring a little realization into the scene, but the following selling points from MyIE2 (these are from their web page).
1. Tabbed browsing – already in a number of browsers (Clinton era stuff)
2. Mouse gestures – “Command your browser with your mouse! Mouse Gestures are another revolutional invention among the browsers.” Already in other browsers.
3. Super Drag&Drop – Saving search results or highlighted search text and opening new tabs. Key strokes in other browsers.
4. Privacy Protection – Does it matter if it takes one or two clicks to erase your history?
5. Ad Hunter – Can’t we block all these pop-up adds? Oh yeah another Clinton era trick in other browsers…
6. It appears that they skipped reason number 6 so that they could jump right into number 7 (a much better number IMHO)…
7. Google Search Bar – As far as I can tell, Netscape, Mozilla, Safari, etc already had this. Unfortunately, this feature cannot be used in win9x as they say, “Note: Due to the limitation of the Google Bar, it can not be used under win9x with MyIE2. Trying to use the Google Bar with MyIE2 under win9x may cause unexpected errors. We hope Google could release a fix for this problem soon.” Is this an error in Google, or a lack of win9x ability? Please tell this non windows user. I cannot understand how this is an issue.
8. External Utility Bar – Wow, I can start the notepad with IE. What a concept… I don’t feel the need to respond to this “feature” as any OS with IPC can do this (Does XP have real IPC?).
9. They seemed to skip this number as well. It appears that both 6 and 9 are magic numbers…
10. Skinning – For how long have we sought to change the icons for the button bar? Nothing new here.
Is there anything new here? Tell me how this expands my “internet experience.”
R
Well, I would have supported that, if they would get the patent. But afterall, they aren’t even close to being the first browser that supports pop-up blockings. In fact, their first implementation stinks the high heavens.
—
As for the rest of you people, I think the main reason why Microsoft hadn’t changed IE much is
1) Antitrust concerns. Just imagine, if IE had *all* of Mozilla’s features around the same time each new version of Mozilla is released? AOL wouldn’t think twice about suing – hardly anyone would use Mozilla (most people use Mozilla today because of the features, not because of philosophical reasons.
And just imagine if they had even more features than Mozilla? Mozilla wouldn’t be running with 6% marketshare -nobody would bother downloading it.
Personally, I hope Microsoft would keep anything more than the bare neccessities off IE. New download manager? Fine. Pop-up blocker? That’s about time. Anything more, and it would terribly hard for any competitors to compete with Microsoft anymore. (Oh yeah, probably that’s because I’m a Opera fanboy). You want real cool features that would confuse grandma and grandpa, go to http://www.opera.com and download the latest version (or http://www.mozilla.org/). Whatever that floats your boat.
2) On IE’s lack of standards compliency, I think it is IE’s weak point. It is one thing to snub standards for your own things, but it is completely another thing if you snub standards but couldn’t come up with an viable altenative. Microsoft is having the same problems as Netscape had back then.
Why? Both are based on Mosaic. Remember pre-Netscape 6 browsers? They found it hard to support new standards or new features. Sure, there are exception to the rule – like PNG transperancy, but this is largely the case. I’m quite sure somewhere on Microsoft’s campus, somebody is rewriting IE’s Mosaic-based core.
But you see, Netscape took 4 years to finally say “The rewrite’s done!” with Mozilla 1.0. But for Microsoft, things are even worser – they have to do something like a rewrite, yet keep binary compatiblity with the old Mosaic core because so many applications use it.
Mozilla might have hundred “features” that IE doesn’t have, the irony is that no web site, except a handful of zealot exclusive ones, will use them at the moment.
Tabbed browsing is not dependent upon the web site you’re visiting. Nor is pop-up blocking.
I know you’re just trolling, but I wanted you to know just the same.
Not every part of the government has had the time to redesign a fully standards compliant site, but it is happening.
Good to know things are changing – in the meantime, Mozilla can pretty much render anything you throw at it, and so does Konqueror (3.2beta), although you may have to change its identity sometimes to fool the site into giving you the content.
“I’m sorry, you need Internet Explorer to view this site.
-Wanna bet?”
🙂
Yes, Internet Explorer is the best web-browser, bar-none!
What an empty life you must lead, to waste time impersonating others on web site forums.
Oh well, all your impersonation won’t change the fact that IE, while very popular, is not the best web-browser. That crown is currently the matter of dispute between Mozilla, any one of its derivatives, Opera and Konqueror/Safari. I’m personally favoring that last one.
Konqueror is the ideal file manager/web browser/ftp client/remote access application that IE could never be. It is KDE’s killer app. And with pre-loading (KDE 3.2Beta), it loads as fast as IE does.
native SVG support in new IE?
Well, SVG is an Adobe plugin under WIndows OS. IE6 doesn’t even support transparency of .PNG files (this would be on the critical dev list).
NBo native support when it is dealing with Adobe and Microsoft. Not even with .PDF files where all Office Applications from the competition already have PDF support (namely OpenOffice and WordPerfect). Don’t with for it under Windows, use Linux/KDE/GIMP for native .SVG support instead.
My 0.002
Has anyone tested (PNG)? (Eike Ein)
Don’t worry, PNG is an almost open standard, Macromedia choosed it because it’s superior over gif but not MS. MS doesn’t waant to support .PNG because that’s not within their tech alliances.
Man is that interface ugly. I can understand trying to minimize some aspects of the browser, but the logic behind the placement of the “operator” buttons and drops down menus seems to be counter-intuitive. Plus all the “new” features have been available in just about every other browser out there for a few years now. Hey Microsoft, welcome to the party finally. I’ll stick with Mozilla…I switched when the pop-ups got out of hand and I’ve been hooked ever since.
Don’t worry, PNG is an almost open standard, Macromedia choosed it because it’s superior over gif but not MS. MS doesn’t waant to support .PNG because that’s not within their tech alliances.
Eh, “don’t worry”? Web design needs a lossless compression format with support for alpha blending. Badly. We can’t keep using fixed backgrounds, etc. This is madness! PNG is there, PNG works, every graphics software on earth supports PNG. I’m SO mad at MS for not acknowleding this.
You do not need tabbed browsing especially in WindowsXP.
It’s called the taskbar, use it. WinXP can even group application windows together.
Man, are these M$ developers something else. The single most important innovation in web browsing over the last few years has been the into of Tabs. And IE STILL DOESN’T HAVE THEM.
So lame.
ooohhh another story about an OS that might not even exist until 2008… maybe OS.news has shres in M$?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/34500.html
“…Mozilla can pretty much render anything you throw at it…”
Yes I know. I haven’t used IE in about 1.5 years (except for Windows Update) and web site cross testing. I have also been playing Mozilla Advocate at NASA and got a couple of the IE/Windows zealots there (fellow developer) to switch to Mozilla. They’ve been pretty pleased with it.
Prior to fully switchint to Mozilla, I was on it about 25% of the time and using it to cross test stuff. Now I am 100% Mozilla/FireBird.
Microsoft is mysterious to me and here is my way of looking at it:
I’m a heavy Mac user, but also use XP and Linux. I’ve always liked XP since the public beta. Anyway, when Microsoft and Apple signed that five year deal in ’97, Apple, with the return of Jobs, really had their work cut out for them. With the iMac coming out, all they had was Netscape 4.7.x and there was really nothing else for the average user because this was also the time of Netscape 6.x, which was the most god-awful thing ever put out. Internet Explorer 4.0 was a complete dog.
With the new deal, Microsoft came out with a new, innovative version of Office and the Entourage module was a godsend as Apple had ceased development on Claris Emailer and had sold Claris Organizer to Palm. Outlook Express was pretty much a clone of Emailer in many ways which made that transition easy. But, what a sensation in the Mac world when IE 4.5 came out! It was fast, it had innovations – the Download Manager, a retractable sidebar that was actually useful. And then the 5.x versions just kept getting better. For those who want to always start Microsoft vs. Apple flamewars, please remember that Microsoft really delivered the goods and helped pull Apple out of the hole with this software.
My point is that I have seen Microsoft produce innovative and creative software for the Mac platform over these years. Yet, on their main platform, the PC, they seem constrained and much more conservative. The features lacking in even the new IE…surely they can include those if they wanted to. My question is, why is that so???
@Darius – that MyIE2 looks really slick – I have to give it a whirl!
I’m not gonna go into the whole IE thing, since most of us seem to agree that IE is inferior to alternative browsers. I personally have been following and using Firebird since its Pheonix .4 release.
What annoys me is that the current slate theme looks terribly like Mac OS’s brushed theme, except much, much worse. I know that Aero will be replacing it, but doing such an obvious ripoff is totally unprofessional.
And if you guys took a look at the Aero demo video, notice how long it took between the opening of the folder and the actual appearance of the files? This also happened from Win2k to WinXP. If you use the two in conjunction, there is noticably more lag in XP when doing simple tasks like opening folders. Hopefully Aero will feel as fast as 2k does on the 4357930 ghz machines in 2006.
Do you realize how irrelevant your arguements are? I hate to bring a little realization into the scene, but the following selling points from MyIE2 (these are from their web page).
…
Is there anything new here? Tell me how this expands my “internet experience.”
In the context of IE, there is a LOT new here. In my case, I work for a company that has an Intranet full of ActiveX controls and IE-only crap. So in my case, using Opera or a Mozilla-based browser is not an option. (Even if it would work, it’s wouldn’t be allowed.) In this case (and for the few websites that are non-IE hostile), MyIE2 definitely comes in handy.
As I said, it’s a browser to use when you MUST use IE. Otherwise, it’s not good for much.
It’s an advance for customers, … having less commands despite the new richness that’s there, and using capabilities around the agent to take and put you in control, so that understanding your privacy and what mail is coming into you.
I think Bill took fewer time learning grammar than he needed, using capabilities around the computer to take and put him in control, so that not understanding his sentences and what he is trying to say into me.
I love Moz and all, and I use firebird as my main browser on Linux and Windows, but I wonder how the author can say that Microsoft is responding to the popularity of Mozilla. Frankly speaking, Mozilla hasn’t gained more than a little market share. See http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/sep03_browsers.gif .
It’s just the normal evolution of IE. They made big changes going from IE 4-> IE 5 -> IE 6. If anything, it’s probably because of the popularity of third party tools for IE, like popup blockers and download managers (which, conincidently, have more downloads on popular Windows shareware/freeware sits like CNET’s Downloads.com than things like Moz do)
Mozilla has a only a little bit more market share than IE 4. That’s unfortunatly quite sad since it’s so much better than current incarnations of IE are.
“You do not need tabbed browsing especially in WindowsXP.
It’s called the taskbar, use it. WinXP can even group application windows together.”
Well DEs in Linux can not only group icons in the task bar (which really isn’t that user friendly anyhow because it often makes it confusing as to which one to click on to maximize or minimize windows if multiple windows are open), it can also utilize tabbed browsing with a variety of browsers including Mozilla/FireBird/Galeon/Konqueror etc etc which is easier to open close, set to the back ground or bring to the foreground of the browser viewing area.
Where the hell is the tabbed browsing? Once again MS fails to innovate and only does the minimum.
Not to mention tabbed browsing stops the pop ups.
Even if they included tab browsing and the other stuff like pop-blocking it’s still not inovating. It’s called playing catch up, seeing as other browsers like Mozilla, Opera, Galeon, Safari, Konqueror etc…. already have these features and much much more.
@erm
“Mozilla has a only a little bit more market share than IE 4. That’s unfortunatly quite sad since it’s so much better than current incarnations of IE are.”
These september figures are probably already outdated. Actually google included gecko in its stats last summer precisely because they suddenly saw it rising quickly. It is the first time *ever* that a browser is gaining market share against Internet Explorer. Most of the web sites I know of had between 2 and 8% gecko browers in december. My company’s site only has 84% IE users, I live in France where Mozilla is probably a bit more popular than in many other countries. The fact is : all alternative browsers gain market share every month, with this trend non-IE browsers may represent 30% of the installed base in one year fromnow and that’s why standards-compliance is so important.