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IE7 on the way with something called "standards" in mind

Mon, 04/25/2005 - 18:36 — charlie.collins

According a blog entry on an IE developers site (here, at the time I am writing this it wont load, its hosted on msdn and with the publicity the related stories have generated it probably is getting more than 2 simultaneous requests right now) the new IE 7 will have better support for something totally crazy called "standards". And these will be actual W3C standards rather than what Microsoft traditionally calls a standard. Some of these crazy standards are called things like "CSS".

IE7 will also get PNG support and guess what MS people, TABBED BROWSING. I have been saying for years thats one of the coolest things about Opera/Konq/Moz/FF and I get static back from some of my MS friends. It really changes the way you use a browser once you adopt it and makes it much easier to multi-task-browse. Yes you can alt-tab or whatever the hell and open 17 different windows and have all that across your task bar (or unix style have 17 different x windows open) but thats inefficient, you dont have things as organized (the little "tabs" across the top identifying each, and you cant get back and forth as quickly. Yes you can still just use the keyboard to hop around, open new tabs, etc. I cant believe people argue about the usefulness of tabbed browsing, but hey, they are MS people I guess.

Anyway, hopefully it takes a long damn time for IE7 to make it to market and FF and others continue to pick up market share. Seems like a shame for browsers that "innovated" (strange use of the word) to use "standards" to get crushed again after making so much headway, but it could happen. I personally wont use IE7 for a variety of reasons beyond just the actual features of the browser (security, ms centric, etc) but the mainstream inertia probably will lead most people back that direction. The longer it takes to get out the more people will learn and learn to love, the alternatives.   Microsoft discloses some IE 7 plans

Comments

Mon, 04/25/2005 - 19:25 — cooper (not verified)

RE: IE7 on the way with something called "standards" in mind

I don't really think anything IE7 might do is going to slow their market erosion anytime soon. Standards support is a huge deal for people like us, but for your Mom or even for Joe Helpdesk, the advantages of Firefox come more from not getting pwned every week.

Really, though, good standards support ironically, may actually help erode IE's market share. I mean, if I know KHTML will work as well as MSIE on the whole web, I get even less likely to care about IE. Avalon might be a real threat in extending the MS-dominance, but every time Longhorn gets pushed out again, that becomes less and less likely.

Mon, 04/25/2005 - 21:01 — atrox (not verified)

RE: IE7 on the way with something called "standards" in mind

You know your standards-inverse argument is a great point and makes total sense. That might indeed HURT market share.

Yet I think part of the updates to IE will be security related and get 0wnZ0r every week should be addressed, thus the reasons, for you and for mom, may be lessened when it comes to alternatives. (But of course that assumes they do it and do it well when it comes to security, and to date that has NEVER BEEN DONE at Microsoft.)

Mon, 04/25/2005 - 22:35 — scott (not verified)

RE: IE7 on the way with something called "standards" in mind

I think Microsoft has resisted supporting tabs in their browser because it acknowledges the deficiencies of using windows for the same functionality, thus undercutting the desktop metaphor.

I expect Avalon to end up being primarily used as infrastructure for MS's future browser based platform, similar to how XUL will be used by Mozilla.

Mon, 04/25/2005 - 22:52 — cooper (not verified)

RE: IE7 on the way with something called "standards" in mind

The thing is, though -- and I agree that at first Avalon will be the "Microsoft XUL" -- it has the potential to expand well beyond that if the marketshare doesn't shift signifigantly more before Longhorn ships.

Avalon is really a vastly superior technology to anything MS has offered. Even ActiveX was never that great from a developers standpoint, but you take a databound XMLish declarative markup lanugage, coupled with WS adoption, and you have something really compelling for developers who already are living in that space. Much more so that "Look, you can serve a VB progam on a web page".

Avalon really does concern me. The W3C has proven, while a good guardian, to move very slowly in certain areas. If KHTML and Opera could get a XUL implementation going, that might turn into an interesting fight, especially since I could always embed Gecko as an ActiveX control.

As it stands now, however, I think the lure of Avalon vs the arcane dialects of AJAX, the underdistribution of XUL and the high cost of FLEX is going to be very very strong.

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