Internet Explorer Updates

[Taft]

Speaking of browsers...

Did anyone else notice this story didn't render properly in Chimera on the front page??? It seemed to get messed up after "This latest version" I think it didn't like the --- or whatever was there.

Must report this bug to the good folks at Chimera....

Taft

 

[fuge]

apple's plan

i just wonder what apple's long range plans are concerning the browser issue.

if they are going to be a company that provides services (.Mac) online making the digital management of our lives more secure and easy ...

...then

1. Are they going to rely on IE to accomplish this plan?
or
2. Will they provide their own browser to do things better on the web?
or
3. Are they waiting for chimera, mozilla, opera, and other browsers to catch up in the quality, functions, and acceptance of IE?
or
4. YOUR OWN IDEA or PLAN

personally, I think apple will rely on IE to help windows users make the switch and then come out with their own browser when they've got one that can match IE (as it is on a Windows machine).

thanks for letting me share my opinions.

fuge

 

[frogmella]

Before we get into another "my browser's better than your browser" war (ooops, too late), can I just suggest something: please, please, try out the latest versions of a few different browsers before making comments? Especially comments like "Stay away from Netscape. Although I hear ther latest version is ok." I mean, are we supposed to take that sort of advice seriously?

Yes, Netscape 6.0 was a pile of buggy crap; definitely IE 6 has an advantage because its code is (illegally) co-mingled with Windows; I'm sure it's true that some sites don't work with even the latest Chimera; undoubtedly some people just can't live without tabs; to be sure Mozilla's standards compliance is more rigid than others etc. etc.

What we are incredibly lucky to have here is choice: something that just doesn't exist in many other areas of the computing world, and in many ways because that's exactly the way certain people want it.

So before rubbishing browser X because you used it in 1998 and it wouldn't display site Y, get out there and download them all! Then, send a message to their authors and thank them for giving us a choice!

 

[Snowy_River]

Originally posted by Foocha
Netscape6/7/Mozilla is pretty good at CSS now - on a par with IE6 even. Still no full implementation of CSS 2 though.

Let's call a spade a spade.

IE on PC is a fantastic product. IE on Mac is a fair product - probably the best Web browser on the Mac platform.

The reason so many Mac users hate IE is because they hate Microsoft. MS is a large and aggressive company that has been found guilty of unlawful monopolistic practices, but it makes some great products - and IE is one of the best.

I'm a big Mac fan, so please don't flame me on this one. I just feel we should try to be honest and objective on this.

Not intending to flame you, but I'd suggest caution in making such blanket statements.

Personally, I don't particularly like IE. It has given me plenty of headaches over the years. When IE5 first came out I was very impressed with it. I think that it's the best version of IE ever. But that doesn't change the fact that it freezes up, crashes and does other obnoxious things. Still I stuck with it for quite a while. Indeed, if I honestly felt that it was the best browser for my needs, I'd still be with it. But I switched to Chimera when it reached 0.5

So, like I said, be careful with your blanket statements.

 

[elmimmo]

Originally posted by frogmella
definitely IE 6 has an advantage because its code is (illegally) co-mingled with Windows

Excuse me? I do not give a damn what programmers do in order to get the most performance out of the machine. Now what did you expect, an OS without a web browser? Today that is as useless as an OS without a text reader, dial up remote access sw, to say the least, because I could continue with calculators, ftp browsers, mail clients, IM clients, MP3 players, internet services central hubs, etc. ie, whatever is considered BASIC, the same as SimpleText, TextEdit or NotePad are considered obligued to be bundled with an OS. And MS tied the browser so tight to the OS that a "side effect" of it is that it turns so fast that it is too good to be "legal"?

I am for all against any brand's dishonest and illegal pressures on other brands to gain illegal and antimonopolistic exclusivity, be it MS or AOL, and that is what I found MS trials should have been centered around. The IE affair was a joke. AOL-TW (BTW owning a disgraced Netscape) just wanted to take MS out of what they consider their well-earned cake and started this theater (mind you, AOL-TW is the biggest, by far, entertainment company in the world, owning both the bigger content developer (Time Warner) and the widest distribution medium (AOL) which I find quite more amazingly shameless than whatever MS dominance over its market allows it to do.

I at least am a lot thankful to MS for including such a brilliant piece of free (and essential) software with the OS out of the box.

On the Mac side I tried several versions of Mozilla as betas were coming along even though I was quite happy with IE5. Not until 1.1 I considered speed was coupled. Now I consider them about the same, someone outdoing the other sometimes, the other viceversa some other times. Yet, IE5 still works like a charm for me, it is, despite what many insist to deny, VERY faithful to w3's standards (the same as before, at hands with Moz, sometimes slighly better, sometimes slighly worst; I work making web pages), crashes very rarely (which, by what I have read several times, must be something I can consider myself lucky about ), so I do not know why should I take the hassle to switch. (Yes, I've tried Tabs, and found them as great as the discovery of a sec*cough, cough*ond mouse button, but yet I am too used to what I consider a great browser so that one only thing is not making me swith an relearn what I do not need to relearn)

 

[elmimmo]

BTW, funny that even AOL bundled their own software with IE's rendering engine. Maybe it was because even they knew their own was such a big load of **** that should have never existed (N4 - now talk about proprietary corrupted standards...)

 

[Foocha]

Blanket statements don't start with words like "probably"

I don't fine IE unstable on Mac or PC - the two bugs that annoy me the most are the drop-down menu from the address field which does not follow the window around when you drag it and the rendering problem that makes parts of the page disappear until you resize the window.

 

[frogmella]

Originally posted by elmimmo
Excuse me? I do not give a damn what programmers do in order to get the most performance out of the machine. Now what did you expect, an OS without a web browser?

Yes, for many people a web browser, and the other programs you mention, are not considered essential! They're not even a part of the OS itself! Similarly, an MP3 player, office suite, photo editor, movie editor, calendar and so on are not essential to everyone. If it had been in M$'s interests to force people to use their versions of these products, and thus bloat Windows to still more ridiculous memory requirements, do you not think they would have done so? And why is it just IE that they have made impossible to remove and replace with a competitor's product? What they have achieved in one stroke is to control what were previously open Internet standards - with a virtual IE monopoly, web coders now are obliged to target IE and IE only, rather than the W3C's carefully considered standards. Thus, M$ can pervert these standards for their own material gain.

But I think you missed my point, which is that for every browser out there, and for every person that uses a browser, there is at least one opinion about which program's the one to use! Looks like my point's been proven!

 

[Foocha]

Depends on what you define as an OS, I guess.

Is Mac OS X an OS, or is Darwin the OS, and Mac OS X is just a GUI and a suite of applications that run on top of it?

Imagine if Microsoft released the underlying Windows OS as open source - that would certainly save us all a lot of money....

 

[Foocha]

Another thought - arguably, IE is not commingled with the OS, IE is commingled with the GUI and it's actually the Windows GUI that is commingled with the OS.

 

[elmimmo]

Originally posted by frogmella
for many people a web browser, and the other programs you mention, are not considered essential!

Of course, I do not either, I was just making a paralellism to other OSs such as Mac OS or other versions of Windows itself. I think the border to what is part of an OS and what is not is very diffuse. Are commands such as ls, cp or top part of an OS? Of course the core technologies of an OS must be quite more deep in its roots than that (please, excuse this babling, I am no programmer, at least not any near to that level), but an OS without a bundled program to copy files from one place to the other is uncomplete. If we jump from that sort of app to another such as Photoshop the border is clear, but if you go from copying to text reading and editing (to create your own "programs" like shell scripts or batch files for instance), windows GUIs, font/audio/static & motion image/etc services for other apps, players, full scientific calculators, etc... the border turns quite more blurry. And every new gadget, once an extra, becomes an essential for the next version (the goal is to add features, not to take out). BTW, so far I have seen as many readmes in html format as in rtf.

Computers have been bundled with a calculator since ages, and Windows 3.0's one was quite loaded with sci functions. Do most people need to calculate sinuses? I guess not. IE 2.5 came bundled with every version of w95, but it was such load of crap that nobody used it, most didn't even notice it was there. Obviously only when (IMO) IE started getting somewhat good, such as getting somewhat decent preliminary CSS1 support at v3, Netscape started to be bugged by it (Netscape never considered the lynx browser as a competitor for instance).

What I am trying to say is that if we start saying it is illegitimate (if not illegal) for an OS maker to include applications that arguably go beyond the point of laying down a common structure for other applications to be based on and work over it, everything beyond MS-DOS v1 in the Personal Computer world is out of the place.

And why is it just IE that they have made impossible to remove and replace with a competitor's product?

You cannot remove Windows Media player. IMO you are thinking of those as applications and not as application services. I agree with Foocha, IE is of course not part of the deep roots of the OS, but the GUI uses HTML all the time (unless you deactivate all GUI extras that came after W95, but most people find, for instance, a preview pane useful). Maybe you do not, but I do consider the GUI part of the OS. At that point I guess no one pretends that MS should have designed the GUI so that every other browser should be pluggable to it and thus act as that GUI rendering motor, substituting IE at that level.

You cannot remove Quicktime in Mac OS (well you can, but then 95% of all applications that try to display whatever picture, be it simply interface gadgets, will probably be broken). If a programmer found that PictureViewer just did not do the work, s/he could program an application so that it used its own imaging subsystem, but pretending to write imaging services for the whole OS and substitute Quicktime at that level AND demanding Apple to make the OS so that that feat is possible is IMO, besides a stupid task, a stupid demand.

web coders now are obliged to target IE and IE only, rather than the W3C's carefully considered standards.

Please, tell me. Which browsers were there as alternatives. Mozilla has been in beta at pre version 1 for ages, and you cannot expect the general public to experiment with betas. Netscape 6 was the first consumer oriented version of that browser, still on beta. That was 1 year ago (2?). If for one millisecond you think of Netscape 4.x (or 3 for that matter) to be the alternative that had into account "W3C's carefully considered standards", instead of IE's satanic disrespect for them, I am out of this thread, since for me you will be simply either talking about myths that you heard from others not knowing a thing about the matter, or lying.

Up until IE5 (and this is a very subjective argument, I agree), there has been absolutely no web browser that respected w3's standards at half decent level. The fact that IE was more popular does not turn it more guilty than Netscape. And at <5 versions, IE maybe was crappy at w3 standards, but N was obscene. I thank Internet's god that at least the less crappy won. For me maybe MS dropped us into the mud, after saving us from falling into lava.

for every browser out there, and for every person that uses a browser, there is at least one opinion about which program's the one to use!

I know this may sound similar to Microsoft's despotic and tyrannic way of acting, but I am sorry, I do not think every user is entitled to an opinion, by the very fact that the user of one single browser has no way of knowing how faithfull to the author's intention that browser is rendering a particular web page. I know many people which consider N4 was a great browser, mainly because it was dazzling fast. None of them have tried to write a web page that it drew consistent. Simpletext was quite fast at it too, btw.

 

[skunk]

OW?

Nobody has mentioned one other browser which used to be flavour of the month. Does anyone know why OmniWeb 4.1.1 doesn't work properly? There are quite a few sites (including the AppleStore) which it can't deal with, and it can't handle iCal either. This seems to be a rather obvious omission.

 

[Foocha]

elmimmo, I enjoyed your post - you make some interesting points.

I agree that for a long time IE has been the only act in town, and the most compliant with W3C's standards - standards that as yet no browser has truely reached.

I believe that Mozilla is just beginning to look like a worthy contender, and a bit of competition can only help both sides to achieve W3C standards sooner.

Your analogy between Apple's use of QuickTime and Microsoft's use of IE is an interesting one. It is ironic that many of the practices that some posters in these forums are quick to criticise Microsoft for, Apple is equally at fault in. If Apple's product was as widely used as Microsoft's, it would be interesting to see what would come from the increased scrutiny they would be subjected to.