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Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

arstechnica.com

41–50 of 78 posts

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#41
This will only be more of a pain in the ass for me. 50% of my IE users are still on IE7. I dropped support for IE6 last year because I personally couldn't handle the ridiculousness of debugging it, even though I still get hits from it. But now I'll have to test my site in IE7, IE8, and IE9, because it'll take years before IE9 replaces all previous versions completely. (And by then, IE10 and IE11 will have come out). Fuck you, Microsoft.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#44
post #24

I'm still trying to decide how I want to install it. Being able to test all versions of IE on a single machine is getting impossible. I have a Windows 7 virtual machine for testing IE8, a Vista vm for IE7, and an Windows XP for testing IE6. And I only have one license of each system, and I don't really want to drop my ability to test IE7 or IE8. Fuck you Microsoft!!

Do you know that Microsoft supplies VHD images for free that you can use to test any version of IE? YOu don't need a license or anything, just Windows and their free Virtual PC software. They're intended to work only with Windows and Virtual PC (of course!) but apparently it's possible to get them to work with other VM software on other OSs. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=...

Cool, no I didn't know about these. But I'm on MacOSX and use Parallels. I'm not sure if Parallels supports these types of images.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please stop bashing MS for the continued usage of IE6? For it's time IE6 was a fine browser (honest), and what exactly is so bad about supporting software long after it is obsolete? If you're tired of supporting IE6 on your site, then stop. Foisting off the cost of transitioning everyone off IE6 onto a big company like MS is comforting but ultimately unrealistic and selfish.

What's bad about supporting software long after it is obsolete is that it encourages people who know very little to think it is perfectly legitimate to continue using it long after it is obsolete. It's their lousy software, it IS their responsibility to transition people off of it.

It's just not smart to replace a system that only works well in IE 6 because it might mess up your employees' ability to waste their time on some guy's random startup.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons why a corporation would continue to use IE6, despite its countless flaws.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#46
post #23
post #15

While I am happy too that the new version of IE is coming soon and it supports the latest standards, let us not forget that we all were saying the exact same thing when IE7 and IE8 came out: This new release will help developers very much by supporting the latest standards. The problems is not with supporting a subset of the latest standards. The problem is that the latest standards change over time and IE stays the…

They could shorten their release cycle but it wouldn't change the behavior of their largest customers. Consider a large organization that finally installed IE7. [Welcome to 2006!] I'm sure we'll have to deal with this for years to come (unfortunately), and neglecting corporate customers leaves a lot of money on the table.

A thousand times this. I have clients who are site-wide IE6 to this day. Ironically, Firefox worsened this problem, because all those clients also allow you to run Firefox (because IE6 barely works), but have apps that require IE, so (a) there's little incentive to upgrade (just use Firefox!) and (b) it's still likely that your first visit from a user there will be from IE6.

IE7 is also much easier to work with than IE6, having had the semirecent pleasure of getting a jQuery-ish Rails app working on both.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#47
post #5

Now it just needs a semi-decent debugger.

The dev tools in IE8 are pretty darn good. I still use Firebug as my primary, but when I'm chasing an IE specific bug, the dev tools are pretty solid. I even prefer them to Chrome's.

I don't like Chrome's developer tools at all, well I do like some of it, but I almost always prefer and use firebug. Maybe I'm missing something?

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#48
post #33
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part webapps will work under any OS with a browser, you can't really say the same thing about Windows/Linux software.

Windows NT was designed to have "multiple personalities". It has a Win32 personality most Windows programs see, a POSIX personality (that I think doesn't exist anymore) and an OS/2 personality (that I never saw). Each one could run binaries designed for the respective environment. Few Windows programs ever touch the NT kernel. OSX is also modeled like this. There is a Mach kernel and a BSD-like personality on top of…

the posix personality still exists - it's called SUA; the Subsystem for UNIX Applications. the guys at interop systems have made a really nice ports-esque system for it so it's easy to get up and running with the usual pile of apps.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#49

It seems like the tech sites that end up with mega-publisher owners are a bit soft in articles that cover products from major potential advertisers. Conde Nast owns Wired, arstechnica, webmonkey, and reddit Tabs to the side of the address bar? Using the URL space for search? What are they smoking? We'll see how standards support actually turns out...

URL space for search? That's one feature that Chrome had first, and most people seem that I've seen to like it. Of course, for me, Chrome's best feature is that it picks up sites you search on and automatically adds them to the search engine list ... that's convenient.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#50
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know that Microsoft supplies VHD images for free that you can use to test any version of IE? YOu don't need a license or anything, just Windows and their free Virtual PC software. They're intended to work only with Windows and Virtual PC (of course!) but apparently it's possible to get them to work with other VM software on other OSs. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=...

Cool, no I didn't know about these. But I'm on MacOSX and use Parallels. I'm not sure if Parallels supports these types of images.

They used to work in VMWare/etc if you converted the VHD files, but for the last several months the new ones MS has been providing are made to only work with VirtualPC on Windows.
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