IE7 To Be XP-Only
Dean
So, Microsoft has announced that it plans to require Windows XP in order to run its new Internet Explorer version 7. The folks at the Firefox project are reportedly very excited, since they assume it will boost interest in Firefox for all those people running Windows 2000, Millenium, 98, etc.
I doubt if it's going to make all that much difference, but I imagine they'll see at least some bump in interest from people who want browser improvements but don't want to pay to upgrade to XP.
The thing is I fully expect IE7 to copy most of Firefox's enhancements, and to add some typical Microsoft-only "features" that are hard for the Firefox people to emulate. And the users of earlier Microsoft operating systems will shrink over the time.
The really interesting thing to see will be whether or not the Firefox folks can reverse-engineer whatever Internet Explorer 7 has in order to remain compatible with it. Or better yet, find some way to add features that Microsoft feels they have to emulate.
Paul Burgess
Opera/7.54 (X11; Linux i686; U) [en]
"We are Microsoft. You will be assimilated. We will add the functional and technological distinctiveness of your products to our own. Your products will adapt to service ours.
"Resistance is futile."
I'm not a huge MS basher. MS does serve a useful aggregation-for-convenience function to the consumer, and generally the people innovating useful products get rich anyway. Still, like everyone else, I love to see them get tweaked by Firefox and others.
What the heck is up with that name, anyway? "Vista"?
An auspicious beginning, no?
There really is no other reason. Innovation is nice. But sometimes it is the enemy of standardardization. And that is not nice.
If you are in business, and doing data processing in which you have to connect with and download files from and upload files to numerous customers, all of whom use more or less the same computer operating system, then that is exactly what you use.
Rule forever, oh great god Microsoft. Or at least until you fuck up, your empire crumbles, and you are replaced by some other great god.
That's always been the way the cookie crumbles.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Associating Microsoft with "standardization" in any meaningful sense is laughable, and borders on the insane.
From what I understand, IE7 won't even include all of CSS 2 properties. They can't even support the "standards" they helped write!
Article here
The best thing that ever happened to my web surfing was when IE gave up support for the Mac.
JPEG? Nope.
MPEG? Nope.
MP3? Nope.
TIFF? Nope.
GIF? Nope.
PNG? Nope.
RTF? Nope.
TXT? Nope.
PDF? Nope.
HTML? Double Nope.
if anything, MS Word's .doc format is the *bane* of standardization, because you couldn't open the freakin' things with anything other than Word back in the day.
Standardization is NOT the same as forced conformity to asshats in Redmond, Wash.
Lotus? VisiCalc.
Navigator? Mosaic. (And speaking of standards, one word: <blink>).
WordPerfect? WordStar.
True ex-nihilo innovation is rare.
IE7 should be XP-only. XP is the standard Windows platform these days, and anyone still using the 95-ME branch is beyond help, as far as MS is concerned, and quite rightly.
The genius of Firefox is the extensions. People can pick and choose, a la carte, what features they want for their browser. Do you really think Microsoft will be able to offer anything close to this?
Note that if they do so, the motivation for most software publishers would be to write IE extensions rather than Firefox extensions....
Thus demonstrating why Microsoft can never win (and has to settle for a few tens of billions in dollars in consolation prizes): the people who are anti-Microsft aren't interested in looking at what Microsoft actually does.
With my programming skills, I have been able to write extensions and add-ins to IE since at least 1998. Some companies did just that, producing custom versions of IE and plug-ins for IE and so on. For a good while there, AOL's browser was an IE customization; and I thought it was just last week I saw a story that AOL had announced a new browser which is, yes, an IE customization.
And what they mostly learned was: nobody cares. The market for extensions never grew large enough to matter. You can still build IE extensions today. Nobody cares much, except for rare successes.
And now seven or more years later, Firefox does the same thing, and it's Microsoft who's accused of imitating.
And speaking of which... Tabbed browsing? Pfah. I had that on a non-IE browser for GNN back in 1995. I'll admit that I missed it when I moved to IE. It was kinda cool. But it's hardly a Firefox innovation. But I guess if you're not Microsoft, no one cares if you build on good ideas that came before.