Microsoft floats 'site-ready' IE10 preview Microsoft has released another preview version of Internet Explorer 10, and it has used the occasion to once again explain how it loves the enterprise more than Firefox. On Wednesday, the company released the second platform preview of IE 10 featuring what it called the "HTML5 engine" behind recent demos of the browser on …
I keep seeing people say oh don't use a MS web browser as they will hold up the web again like with IE6.
Now either you and these people are trolling or are just regurgitating what others have said without thinking. Look at the market now and then, there are no similarities. There are many players in the browser game now not just 2 big ones. If they hold back again or deviate from standards (after everyone has designed to standards, if the developers didn't that is their fault not MS's) then developers and users can use another browser. After all your all developing standards compliant sites now aren't you?
No, they'll have a choice. They can upgrade, if they wish, or stay on a old, supported version, if they wish.
Which is a choice Mozilla is choosing not to offer.
Don't overlook that enterprises have different needs to individual users, and being at the bleeding-edge of technology isn't usually one of them.
it's not like there are a lot of other options. Business need:
1) Widespread adoption of a consistent platform
2) Stable predictable release cycles so planning and testing can be performed for updated software.
3) Transparent standards for coding the systems.
Mozilla provide 1 and 3, and until recently had 2. Granted there wasn't much business adoption, but now there will be none. MS have 1 and 2 down cold, and like it or not, as far as most businesses are concerned, they meet requirement 3 as well.
Microsoft may imagine that what it’s doing is good for Enterprise, but it means that for the next decade, they will continue to patch and bug fix a product which should have been discontinued long before that.
IE 9 is not up to scratch, and certainly will be far behind the opposition in the years to come. However, Enterprise will be fooled into thinking that it’s OK to continue using it because MS says it’s OK, they’re still supporting it. Just like IE6.
Deja vue all over again ...
I have been trying IE10 preview for a couple of my own sites and honestly it doesn't appear to be too bad.
As for the Enterprise lock-in, the only people that care are the competition. Firefox, Opera et al. but just how would they be able to grab enterprise finance anyway ? If MS are capable of offering something my company wants and that the others cannot then I will stay with MS.
Companies don't really give a shit about who they buy their products from as long as the product helps to earn the company more money.
I like MS poducts except for one "Sharepoint" and thats probably how MS will keep companies locked in.
Tuppence, that was my tuppence
Mozilla are a bunch of cocks for not getting why they need to support the enterprise.
As much as I malign MS for also being a bunch of cocks, they are (in some places) actually supporting [emerging] standards and not poisoning the well for others. IE9 is the best browser they have ever produced and is arguably the best browser available. Certainly for the enterprise now that Mozilla have finally admitted they don't give two shits.
"Mozilla are a bunch of cocks for not getting why they need to support the enterprise."
Why exactly? why should Mozilla care about the millions of 'enterprises' out there, each one unique and demanding in their own respect.
Simply because they don't have to, and because it would be a spectacular waste of resources and time to make their browser do everything the enterprises want it to and break it for the rest of us.
Let the enterprises do their part instead and slot into the Internet properly, instead of attaching themselves upside down and sideways onto one of it's branches with their proprietary deprecated crap.
They don't need to produce a special browser per enterprise, they need to make it possible to manage FF in an enterprise environment in general.
If you want to stop enterprises "attaching themselves upside down and sideways onto one of it's branches with their proprietary deprecated crap", then you have to make it possible for them to use something else.
One can do this with IE, the fact one cannot do it with FF is a fail of epic proportions.
"They don't need to produce a special browser per enterprise, they need to make it possible to manage FF in an enterprise environment in general."
I stand by my words and give you this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gpo-for-firefox/
"They" don't need to do shit. Somebody else already has.
Previously there was FireADM. Another way to manage Firefox through ADM and Group Policy, killed by general disinterest.
If these enterprises are so interested in having the possibility to use something else, why aren't they doing something with this interest? All they need to do is to pull their heads out and look around.
If firefox could be bothered to build an MSI installer, and release an adm pack to be able to configure FF installations then I'd consider it as an option. Chrome is just as bad.
The main issue is keeping the damn things patched across the organisation.
If there was support for Chrome and Firefox I'd add it as an installable option via group policy.
And yes, I do know that there is 3rd party msi support, and that there are adm files out there - but really, it wouldn't be so hard to maintain the msi and adm as part of the regular build.
Discontinuing Firefox 4 support within months of it's release sounds a little premature on the part of Mozilla, especially as plugin development and support lags behind the main browser version - the ritual of finding experimental dev releases, or hacking the maxversion number of assorted plug-ins has always been my biggest roadblock going up through Firefox versions.
However, trying to plan for software releases over a decade in the future is a big ask. Browser development is going ahead at a breakneck speed - Perhaps too fast, in fact: Do we really need to retrain and upgrade for new GUI and Browser Bugs every six months?
I think there should be a happy medium - somewhere around the three year mark seems sensible. in tems of making sure it's around long enough to properly support, and short enough that it's older standards don't hold the web back.
Firefox is a very nice browser for home users, but that's it.
Nearly every aspect of the softwares architecture under the bonnet is wrong in every particular.
Self update should be done by an installed service, not by the running program trying to write back to its program folder, hence the UAC alarm.
Firefox abuses and incorrectly uses the local/roaming profile folders with a jaw-dropping lack of understanding that I would barely expect from a first year student of software engineering.
Finally, your software preferences and configuration need to be stored in a registry. Locally saved config files were passé in the early ninties.
Despite many tweaks and changes in the details, these 3 basic rules have been the backbone of the NT family from the very start. If you can't grasp them after 20 years, then frankly your maturity as a software engineer is in serious doubt.
It's pretty obvious that software developers who ignore these aspects of the Windows OS do so out of a hypocritical disdain for the very operating system they are writing for, and ironically, are the very cause of the Windows insecurity. You don't run your Linux install as root all the time, but you have to with Windows because of 3rd party software that breaks all the rules.
On a corporate network, IE is vastly more secure than any of the alternatives, not because of the underlying code, but because it uses the host OS correctly, it can be centrally managed using Group Policy, and configured to such a granular level that it can be locked down completely when viewing potentially dangerous zones.
You can't even centrally manage the bloody homepage of these rinky-dink browsers.
So, excuse me if I'm a little cynicle about Mozilla and Googles attempts to ratify the next web standard when they can't even comply with the standards of the host OS they are writing for.
Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are designed as multi-platform browsers. Because different operating systems handle configuration in different ways, I'd assume they write their configuration files locally to enable the developers to write one browser that can easily be compiled for different platforms, as opposed to writing a different browser for each platform - which could quickly lead to different release cycles for each platform, depending on the number of developers writing for it.
There is no cross-platform API for handling configuration files. Although Windows migrated from having separate configuration files for each program to a single unified registry, *NIX doesn't - probably at least partially because although system / user configuration files can be unwieldy, they're almost infinitely customisable and a lot easier to code for than a single unified registry.
While I certainly understand your point, it is hardly justification for lazy and badly written software that forces you to run as administrator, making your entire OS vulnerable.
That's like me designing a generic fuel injector, and when asked why it's squirting petrol all over the manifold, replying "oh, that nozzle is there for a different model of engine, I can't be arsed to redesign it just for your car!"
If you install nothing but well written software, then you can quite happily run Windows under a limited account *as it was intended to be used in the first place*, only elevating to admin status to install software and drivers.
In an ideal world such as this, if the UAC pops up while you're NOT installing software or drivers, then it will give the user genuine pause for thought, rather than just assuming its Firefox/java/adobe et al trying to update itself in a non-compliant manner.
Instead, we have become so punch-drunk from the constant bombardment, most users blindly click OK everytime it appears, allowing any virus to run with YOUR administrative privileges, which you've been forced to use because your badly written software breaks otherwise.
That said, I am steadily seeing a shift in trends since the appearance of Win7, with more software becoming compliant. Even Adobe are pulling up their socks.
Nvidia still have a fair way to go with their new driver models, I am seeing a lot of buggy drivers. So much so we now buy ATI cards for our graphics workstations.
Not sure the multiple platforms would make any difference. After all, the source code already has to deal with different text and graphics rendering methods used in each OS, so I wouldn't have thought writing extra code to deal with different ways of configuring the browser would be that much more difficult.
The one thing it would stop (if they did that) is users copying their profiles to the same browser on other platforms.
I think you've nailed the problem there..
The problem is that firefox (along with a lot of software) is designed to be run by a single user on a single machine. A lot of Windows software is also designed with the assumption that it will run as Administrator in mind, so will assume it can do things like write to it's own folder..
Now, Microsoft HAVE to take some of the blame there. When you install Windows, the default account it creates is an Administrator. Microsoft assume that the user will do the sensible thing, and create themselves another limited account. This almost never happens. Apple, for their part, aren't actually much better for this alhough at least OSX does actually require a password for doing any admin actions rather than just clicking "OK".
Introduce software that requires admin access to a corporate network and you are sure to have problems..
Still, some software that is apparently designed for enterprise use also does stupid things in an enterprise or corporate environment.
Adobe Master Collection CS 5.5 gets 1 point for coming with a rather nice Enterprise Deployment tool for creating automated installs, but loses several million for asking to download an updated copy of the help files (for speed), then dumping the whole 1.2 Gig of data it downloads and extracts into the current user's Roaming profile.
If you want to know why that's a bad idea, try explaining to a user that it's going to take 10-15 minutes to log in or out because Windows is having to copy that 1.2gig to/from the local machine each time they log in or out.
It would make more sense if Adobe allowed the company to host the help system (which is essentially HTML with some non standard extensions) on a local webserver and direct the help system to look at that.
..I know that there are more than 4 Opera users in the world. Thank you for failing to prove anything apart from your lack of a GSOH. '10% of Internet Explorer's market share' isn't that impressive. It's 2.4%. And that, my good coward, is pathetic.
There is a vocal minority of fanbois ruining the image of Opera for everyone else. Stop it. Please. you might find your market share reached the dizzying heights of 11% of IE's market share, if only certain elements within the user community weren't so obnoxious.
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