Microsoft to kill off Internet Explorer
THE DARK SATANIC RUMOUR MILL has manufactured a whisper that Microsoft is planning to kill off its much loved and hated Internet Explorer browser.
The rumour was sparked by this article on InfoWorld and claims that IE8 will be the last version of the browser.
The story is based on things what a hack "heard on the grapevine" which is a snootier way of saying, "a fat bloke down the pub said".
Clearly the Vole will still need a browser to fulfil its glorious Web-based plans for global domination, but it seems that Internet Exploder is starting to show its age, however well dressed it has been getting.
The question is, what will the Vole be looking for next? Some have suggested WebKit which is being seen under the bonnet of the Safari Browser and Google Chrome. Our guess is that the people who are suggesting this are Apple fans because the article suggests that Safari is popular when it is leagues behind others in the market.
Infoworld claims that it has be become the de facto standard for anything that is not IE or Firefox. It begs the question why the hell would Microsoft leave IE for something that lags IE or Firefox?
What is more likely is that the Vole will come up with something different. Given that it has time – IE8 has not even come out yet – it is likely it will use the mysterious browser being hatched by the boffins in its research division called Gazelle.
Last week Volish boffins released a paper on Gazelle which makes it look a lot more interesting than Safari.
Basically it is a browser that is constructed to act like an operating system with the browser kernel exclusively protecting resources and sharing across Web sites. This may make it a lot more secure and can handle more dynamic web pages.
Currently the boffins have not got it to work well yet. While it managed the top Web pages, its performance on Internet esoterica was a bit patchy.
The Mighty Vole has a few other problems if it wants to kill off IE. The first is the awful lot of investment some outfits have put into Active X. The other is that too much of the Web was tweaked to handle IE 6 and there would be some difficult HTML problems for any new browser.
When Microsoft tried to bring in more standards in IE, many webmasters tore out their hair and stamped on their rabbits. There is also a lot of code out there which is based on IE's engine.
In short, the poor Vole is a victim of its own success and, even if it wants to kill off Internet Exploder, it could find it a hard habit to break. µ
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they're killing off Trident, the rendering engine.
IE will still be here, still called IE, but will likely use a new rendering engine.
You've got a bit confused when you've suggested people are saying they'll start using Safari. That's just silly Nicholas. They might use the rendering engine that Safari uses though - it's called Webkit, and it's very fast. It's open source, too.
Gazelle is the more likely option though. That's also got you a bit confused - it's a rendering engine, not a browser.
So the next version of IE will still be called IE, but will likely use Gazelle instead of Trident.
Sometimes actually doing a bit of digging around results in a more factual article ;-)
Of course you could just link to the original article you found, copy/paste its mistakes and file copy. After all, that's easier I suppose...
Not Only is Television Signal Changing for Next 10 Years, Somewhat & For Public Good. Here Anyone Whom Wants IE6 can just Download it. Public Has Gotten GOOD Taste of Some Fine Stuff with NT6 & IE8, Plus Pogo, Safari, & Other Thumbnail Capable weblinks, its really IMPROVED Already from 6. What Question IS, Are You Afraid To Let Go Of Unicorn Horn of IE8 Beta For Improved Model, with MORE Functionality than Whole Mix, Mixed? No Freeze, No Glitch, Just Stream, Listen to Those Inards HUM, Trident Today, Next Is On Its Way, Eyeigh Haight+.STeWie drashek Fiber Specialist.
it's a research project. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/helenw/papers/gazelle.pdf. It's a novel approach to browser architecture, to keep components of different websites well separated.
Most likely InfoWorld saw this research project and assumed that this would replace IE. Highly unlikely. Much more likely that some ideas from it will inform future versions of IE.
MS Research is largely a pure-research organization. They are left to pursue whatever research they want to. Successful ideas then may get adopted by a product group in some shape.
"It begs the question why the hell would Microsoft leave IE for something that lags IE or Firefox?"
- No it doesn't... It may 'raise' (or ask) the question, but it certainly does not 'beg the question' See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
and then go to journalism school..
Well I wouldn't exactly call it that. For many years people knew that IE sucked ass hence the nick name Internet Exploder but what is more the problem is twice over lobotomy victims had the thought "Hey instead of following the actual standard I will just do it so it works for IE so piss on everyone else" when "developing" using such farces as FrontPage to """"Develop""""" a website are more to blame then MS in this case. I was always given crap when I was scripting a website and made sure that the most code nazi browser out there Opera would work fine with the code, this always took a little more time to develop but hey these websites worked with everything on any OS with any browser.
What caused most of the problem with IE6 centric sites out there is lazyness and tools that create code for you. All you need to make a website is an advanced notepad tool (such as Notepad ++) and that is it.
"awful lot of investment some outfits have put into Active X"
Take out "lot of" and it's about right.
I hope they're in no hurry with this. It's a big enough pain at the moment writing hacks to get IE6, IE7 and IE8 to work properly (Firefox, Safari and Opera all behave themselves), I don't want another version of Internet Exploder to have to write CSS hacks for.
That's great news! Are they swapping Windows for Linux, too?
Sorry, couldn't resist ;-)
One thing to say to Microsoft: " you reap what you sow".
No one forced Microsoft to adopt such bizarre and insecure standards, so I feel no sympathy for them now that they're having difficulties moving on.
This mess is entirely of their own making.
After playing with IE8 beta it already looks like they do not want to put much effort into it. I am pretty pleased with Windows7 (except my system struggle more with Blu-ray now), but IE8 crashes and locks up a lot and has lots of little bugs. I think with a bit more polish Google Chrome would do just fine.
How has MS ever made money from IE other than bundling newbies off to it's search engine by default? Perhaps I'm missing something...
"The other is that too much of the Web was tweaked to handle IE 6 and there would be some difficult HTML problems for any new browser."
No kidding. I hope all those morons who produced such web pages are going to lose their jobs.
The real success story behind MSIE is NCSA Mosaic, but who remembers how these two are related.
Microsoft just knows better than anyone (especially those EU commission clowns) that it's a dead market. No matter what Safari or Firefox adds, it will not make most people switch anyway, because all browser technology is stagnant. Really, what else is there to even add to web browsers these days? Shutting down browser development is more a statement that it has achieved its aims, and there's no point in pushing forward.
That Infoworld statement is hilarious too. De facto standard for browsers with absolutely insignificant marketshare. What a prize that is!
Internet Explorer makes no money for Microsoft. Whereas the Mozilla Foundation gets a tidy income from Firefox. Therefore there is the incentive on Mozilla to continue to make Firefox better, while there is none on Microsoft to continue improving IE. Simple as that.
Everyone stop mentioning web "standards" right fucking now!
Those shitty "standards" are actually "guidelines" and "recommendations".
In order for something to be called a standard it has to be MANDATORY, i.e. it has to be written using words "MUST" and "SHALL".
As for sites tailored for IE -- it is because it had the sanest interpretation of those retarded "standards" which made pages look good (read: they way you intended).
Try doing a CSS master reset, make a HR tag 1px high, put three of them in a row, and in Firefox you will have a single 3px line instead of three 1px lines each separated by a line-height.
If that is Gecko doing it by the standard then the "standard" should be pissed on and burned down together with Mozilla developers who accept it as such.
What standard is that when it requires that IMG be underlined if enclosed in A HREF tag?!? Isn't cursor changing into a hand when you hover over the image with a mouse a clue enough that there is a link to follow?
How about trying to set border style to ridge for a table and checking out how broken Gecko renderer actually is?
Why target="_blank" attribute was excluded from XHTML "standard" when there are valid reasons for opening links in a new tab or window?
I am sick of all that crap! Web standards have to die, together with browsers which support them -- the whole notion of a markup language is idiotic, web should be all built from binary files by now instead of wasting gigabytes on descriptive text which everyone interprets to their liking.
Whole www is stagnating piece of crap.
Look at email as an example -- how many years ago was it invented, and we still encode attachments adding 1/3 to their size!!!
Is it possible that 21st century hardware and software isn't capable of passing 8-bit data?!?
Nope... one word... STAGNATION!
Wake up and smell the ashes, Internet is dead, we need a better one right now!
"After playing with IE8 beta it already looks like they do not want to put much effort into it. I am pretty pleased with Windows7 (except my system struggle more with Blu-ray now)"
IE ended with version 6. It was only revived when Firefox came on the scene and tabbed browsing became a big hit. Until XPSP3, only very few installed IE7. I'm pretty pleased with Windows XP (and hopefully with Windows 7), even though I'm also a Mac and Linux user. I just hope MS works more towards creating good products, and less towards "business impact" driven products (bundled apps, forced updates, etc.)
try ... run - mplay32.. u will get WMP-5.1 despite u have WMP-11 installed. Hence u can have IE8 for some years to come and the new browser will be playing front role...
I've begotten more than you will beget, but here, do I beg you hear? It is a simple word problem. You do the maths... Please, keep you smug anti-semantics to yoself.
@Pink Slips for Web Designers:
IE has started with the Spyglass license, but it has been rewritten completely. Up to IE2, if I remember right, it was based on Mosaic, but since then, it is all based on Microsoft's own brains.
Should have happened with IE6, but better late then never.
IE is closed source rubbish with the option to extent it.
It never grow beyond a picture viewer where Firefox turned into Photoshop for Internet.
On top IE is a very dangerous product that easily kills Windows.
Maybe other browsers now get the attention they deserve, like Firefox, Opera and many others.
You are completely right, man. Besides all you said, moving to binary would save a lot of hassle in building Web applications, and making them work off-line also.
And would get us rid of the f#cking plugins like Flash.
Assuming you're NOT talking about laws and legislation, standards are never mandatory. You can choose never to follow any standard if you wish. But in many cases doing so will place you outside the mainstream which may not be optimum. But it is your choice. Now, if you're a dues paying member of a certain group, it'd be kind of stupid to not follow the standards you've previously paid to buy into huh? In those cases such bodies can exact vengeance. But coding for IE hardly falls on that playground.
A standard is usually a formal document that establishes uniform engineering or technical criteria, methods, processes and practices. But in that context they are not a requirement.
And oh yeah....I'll talk about standards or any other subject any time I want to, any place I want to, and in any context I want to. Assuming of course I stay legal in my statements. You see igor, you're not the boss of me and you certainly have no control over me and my musings.
But have a nice ya heah ... all God's chilluns got free will and, well, so do you in fact.
It probably is, IMO Internet Explorer should become like Firefox in everyway, then we would no longer have to use hacks/tweaks to get Cross Browser Compatibility. The internet needs consistency.
I tried IE8 Beta when it first became available & it used to hang quite frequently,in the end I had to re-boot XP Pro.
I wouldn't go back to it,I'm quite happy with IE7,it would be nice if the Vole could add the 'Privacy' feature to IE7 though,even though M$ monitors ALL activity.
Perhaps they ought to take a leaf out of NVidia's book & do a bit of re-naming on IE?
If I could use IE7 on W7,then I might think about buying it?
It would be cool if M$ spent a bit of time improving features like Defrag & System Restore amongst others.
Why not code for DX10 on XP,or at least an official API?