No more development on IE according to Microsoft.

[CougTek]

Read that at WinInfo :

Microsoft Drops the Ball with Internet Explorer

If there are truly people still working on IE these days, they should be ashamed of themselves: As I noted yesterday, the product hasn't been demonstrably improved, from an end user application perspective, since 1998. However, reader Terje Sten Bjerkseth (and subsequently, several others) sent me a link yesterday (URL below) that presents Microsoft's take on the future of IE, and the news just went from bad to worse. When asked in a recent online chat about the next version of IE, Brian Countryman, an IE Program Manager, said, "As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation." The reason? "Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," he said. "Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS." Sadly, this perspective is skewed, and suggests Microsoft believes IE is somehow at the "zenith" of the Web browser heap. But as I also mentioned yesterday, IE lacks basic yet important features, especially automatic pop-up ad removal, that virtually all the competition has, and adding any of these features wouldn't require changes to the base OS. So here's the problem, in my opinion: Microsoft believes that the browser is functionally complete, and can only be improved by adding eye candy that's made possible by the underlying platform (Longhorn, in this case). That's baloney, and as several people mentioned via email, suggests IE development is only important when it can be used to steal market share from other browsers.

And yet there are still people using IE by choice (doesn't include those who are forced to use it at work)...

 

[Adcadet]

that's just sad.

 

[Mercutio]

Guess if you want IE 8, you'll have to constantly update with Windows Update.

I more-or-less figured this was coming. It's really hard to get a standalone IE install right now, anyway (you can make your own with the IEAK, and that's about it).

Since support for Windows 98 ends at the end of this month, I can see a lot of people really being left out in the cold by this. Normally when MS says something isn't supported any more, they specifically write a detection routine that says "Don't install on this" for their new products.

 

[Adcadet]

didn't the Windows Update stop working for Win98 last year?

 

[Fushigi]

didn't the Windows Update stop working for Win98 last year?

It still works for 98. I use it on my wife's 98 first edition box.

95 no longer works with Windows Update.

- Fushigi

 

[Howell]

I guess the third-parties will have to continue to fill the gap.

 

[zx]

MDI browsing windows must be a feature incorporated in IE. At work, i must use IE (because all the intranet is made with frontpage!). I use at least 2-3 web pages, 2 word documents and 2 outlook windows at the same time. My taskbar is loaded. I'd really like IE to be MDI (word and access also. Why did microsoft switch them to SDI!!).

 

[Will Rickards WT]

There only needs to be changes to the rendering engine to properly support the standards. Other than that you can use one of the plethora of web browsers that are just wrappers around IE's rendering engine and provide the more up to date features like popup killers and tabbed browsing.

Is MS under any legal constraints regarding IE development?

 

[honold]

MDI browsing windows must be a feature incorporated in IE. At work, i must use IE (because all the intranet is made with frontpage!). I use at least 2-3 web pages, 2 word documents and 2 outlook windows at the same time. My taskbar is loaded. I'd really like IE to be MDI (word and access also. Why did microsoft switch them to SDI!!).

MDI stands for multiple document interface. In an MDI application, more than one document or child window can be opened within a single parent window. This is common in applications such as spreadsheets or word processors - one window, usually called the MDI parent or MDI container, contains many other windows, usually called child forms.

you know, you could just call it tabbed browsing like everyone else :-?

 

[Will Rickards WT]

MDI doesn't necessarily mean tabbed.

And I believe MS moved away from MDI to SDI to put the window managing in the hands of the OS not the app.

 

[honold]

MDI doesn't necessarily mean tabbed.

whatever the switching mechanism is, i don't think i'm out of line when i say that this is the name for the functionality (esp in web browsers) that everybody understands

 

[zx]

At first I wrote tabbed browsing, but I thought that was the feature's name only in mozilla. I thought the term MDI would be clearer...

Is it called tabbed browsing in Opera?

 

[e_dawg]

Only Opera has MDI. Mozilla and all the SuperIE's (CrazyBrowser, myIE2, NetCaptor, etc.) offer tabbed browsing within an SDI interface.

 

[e_dawg]

Sorry, myIE2 is MDI capable as well. Funny, because I use myIE2 as my official IE replacement every day, but I have never used the MDI feature. Shows you how useful it is... (I did actually find it somewhat useful in Opera... at times... when there's a blue moon...)

 

[Howell]

MDI doesn't necessarily mean tabbed.

And I believe MS moved away from MDI to SDI to put the window managing in the hands of the OS not the app.

Office 2000 absorbs two "spots" on the task bar but you can also switch douments through the Window menu. What's that?

e_dawg, Define: "tabbed browsing within an SDI interface"

 

[e_dawg]

SDI tabbed browsing: I mean that you can have multiple tabs and switch between them, but you can only have one tab active at a time. Only one document is shown in a browser instance at a time, and it is always maximized. This is like Excel when the worksheets are in a maximized state.

MDI: Opera, OTOH, has always encouraged the (often) ridiculous tiling of multiple un-maximized documents in the same brower instance. This is like Excel when you cascade or tile the worksheets.

 

[e_dawg]

MDI is useful, however, when you want to use one document as reference and want to work in another one. (for the small percentage of us who don't have dual head displays )

 

[Will Rickards WT]

Office 2000 absorbs two "spots" on the task bar but you can also switch douments through the Window menu. What's that?

SDI

This explains it and what is required to implement it.

 

[e_dawg]

Will,

Since you seem to know about SDI/MDI, would you agree with my definition of SDI tabbed browsing vs. full MDI? It my own proprietary definition based partially on some documents I read on the web, so I am not sure what the "industry standard" is.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

I haven't used opera so I really don't know what it looks like.
I have used mozilla and that tabbed browsing seems like a form of MDI to me. But it is like SDI because you can only have one child active at a time. However, they are all within one browser window and thus children of the main browser window, I'd say it is MDI tabbed browsing.