After a long silence, the Microsoft IE team finally announce some long awaited news on IE8, it’s going to be called Internet Explorer 8. After months of silence I’m glad they cleared that one up! No news on features, bugfixes, etc. Ex-Microsoft employee Al Billings (who was responsible for a lot of the IE7 blogging) puts it well.
On the 10th July a patch was checked in for bug 384384 which is a bug that needs both Firefox and IE to be exploited. The command injection vulnerability affected users of Internet Explorer who browsed to a malicious page assuming that they had Firefox installed but not running. Opinions vary as to whether this was a Windows vulnerability or a Firefox one. In my opinion both had some degree of responsibility for this.
A lot of jokes as well as serious criticism has been made about Microsoft’s user access control (UAC) in Vista. The main problem with UAC is caused by applications that are poorly written and expect to run with administrator rights. This has been caused by shoddy development over the years where many people had written software with the assumption it would be run as the administrator user or sometimes the software was old and written for the Windows 9x series that had no access control. (more…)
Marketing Pilgrim have taken a look at the feedback the blogging world has produced about IE7. Most of it has appeared not so good. Although when I done my IE7 review a week after release I said the browser was an improvement over IE6 I did mention that the non-standard user interface could be very off putting to users who have the automatic upgrades enabled. Although Firefox tries to make their interface comfortable for migrating IE6 users, the interface in IE7 is drastically different.
Although I was fairly positive with IE7 when I did the review, I’ve recently had to use the browser fairly frequently over the past week (work related testing) I do find the flaws in IE7 a lot more apparent when it’s used alongside Firefox. Therefore, if I had used IE7 alongside Firefox when I had written my review I probably would have given IE7 a lower rating. Like their Zune, IE7 just appears to have been rushed out too early.
What I think they should have done is make a user interface for the XP version of IE7 that fits in with the XP user interface standards and left the new look to Vista. Their best bet for XP would have been to resemble the look of IE6 as much as possible but with the addition of tabs.
Brian Krebs of the Washington Post has looked back over a year of IE6 vulnerabilities and came to the conclusion that a fully patched IE6 installation would have been unsafe for 284 days in the year.
Microsoft have made mention of the ‘IE7 optimized for Google‘ which was recently brought to my attention through a posting on Blake’s blog.
Yahoo was the first company I spotted doing this, also USAtoday and web.de also have their own customised versions of the browser. (more…)
The IE team have written their interpretation of the file:// URI specs. With most operating systems the file: URI is simple, due to the common root used by most non-Microsoft operating systems. For example on Linux /home/dave/index.html would be file:///home/dave/index.html on Mac /Users/dave/index.html would map to file:///Users/dave/index.html but Windows with drive letters and UNC paths had made this more complicated and caused a lot of people using technically invalid URI’s.
One disagreement between Microsoft and Mozilla developers is their interpretation of UNC paths on Windows. These look like \\servername\content\index.html in the blog posting they state:
Incorrect: file:////applib/products/a%2Db/abc%5F9/4148.920a/media/start.swf
Correct: file://applib/products/a-b/abc_9/4148.920a/media/start.swf
However, Mozilla treats the ‘incorrect’ form as the valid form and IE accepts both forms. There’s a reason for this, Mozilla considers all file: URL’s as local even though a UNC path is residing on a different machine it is dealt with by the operating system filesystem layer rather than Mozilla’s network layer.
However, this really doesn’t matter as there’s very little use of file: URI’s for most applications. But it does show how one standard can have different interpretations to different people.
A while ago I mentioned Yahoo’s customised IE7. Now a blog posting linked to from Slashdot is mentioning that Yahoo is promoting IE7 at the bottom of search pages if you view the site in Firefox or an older version of IE (see here).
I still don’t see how promoting IE7 can be in the long term interests of Yahoo, with Microsoft pusing their Windows Live Search promoting IE is just supporting a feirce rival. Then again some people would say if they’re supporting Firefox they’d support Google but that’s not quite the same. Both Yahoo and Google are in the search drop down list in Firefox. Google may be the default in Europe and the US, but Yahoo is the default in most of Asia. For each Firefox localisation they pick the most popular search engine for each area and it happens to be Google in most of the west and Yahoo in most of Asia.
Even if they felt unsure of Firefox then they could partner with Opera, it’s a much smaller download and a more trustworthy partner than Microsoft. Their special edition of IE7 is almost 17MB to download (even though according to the system requirements you need 12MB of disk space - is this the first app that takes up less space than its installer?), why encourage Firefox users to download that massive browser when to get them to default to Yahoo all they need to do is select Yahoo on Firefox’s drop down.
What’s also odd is the ads don’t appear if you’re using Opera or Safari but appear on Firefox even if you’re using Mac or Linux.
UPDATE: What are Google thinking? Thanks to Blake for spotting this.
Microsoft’s recent announcement about making a free XP image for VirtualPC available for testing has raised an interesting question. As VirtualPC is available for Windows 2000 users (and XP is not) does this mean that Windows 2000 users can now download the free Windows XP image for testing that Microsoft has made available and upgrade the bundled IE6 to IE7 and therefore be able to legally test IE7 under XP from a Win2k machine without needing to buy a separate XP licence?
If this is the case this would be great news for companies that don’t want to upgrade to XP or Vista any time soon but do need to test their websites under IE7.
Any experiences with this please leave your comments
UPDATE: Reading some articles in Slashdot it appears that the WinXP virtual image does not validate as ‘Genuine Windows’ so will not allow installation of IE7 on the image. So it looks like the only way to install IE7 on this image would be to bypass the WGA verification. Of course doing that would be of questionable legality.
As many know testing different versions of IE can be a pain, there’s no supported way to run two versions side by side (people have done it, but Microsoft don’t recommend it and can’t guarantee accuracy of results). Their reccomended way was to run another instance of XP in Virtual PC, Microsoft have made Virtual PC free as they’re competing with VMware in the virtualisation market, however XP is not free and so to legally use this solution you needed another XP licence. A rather expensive solution just to test one browser.
Microsoft have now decided to make it free and slightly easier, they’re producing time limited images of XP with IE6 installed for Virtual PC, this means that you and legally run XP within a virtual machine for IE6 testing purposes while having IE7, Firefox, Opera, etc installed on your primary machine. The draw back is that this image is time bombed and will expire in April 2007, however, Microsoft plan to keep releasing updates to this image. I guess the idea is to make it too inconvenient to use this image for anything other than browser testing, if the image did not expire then people could use it for whatever they wanted and in effect get a free XP licence. So it’s not 100% perfect solution, but it’s a major improvement so it will make the lives easier of many web developers and testers.