Microsoft offers Internet Explorer 10 preview for Windows 7 As promised, Microsoft has shipped a new build of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7, bringing the "fast and fluid" web experience of its latest web browser to the earlier version of its OS ... almost. A production-ready version of IE10 has come bundled with Windows 8 since it began shipping in October, and with Windows Server …
It's great that MS have created a highly standards-compliant browser, but if it's only available to the users of the latest one or two versions of Windows us devs will still have to waste time coding for all those users who are quite happy with their copy of XP thankyouverymuch.
Corporates are still moving to Windows 7 and while this means that users are moving from IE 8 to IE 9 they are moving to Chrome faster. Stats from a fairly typical corporate site look a bit like
IE 9 18 %
IE 8 16 %
Chrome 30 %
FF 28 %
Safari 8 % (mainly IOS devices)
In comparison, a year ago IE 8 was around 30 % and Chrome around 10 %
It's worth going back to the
first IE 9 preview release which promised a release early, release often schedule which the first IE 10 preview seemed to continue including availability for Windows 7. I seem to remember fairly firm release dates being mentioned but I may be mistaken.
IE 10 does seem to have got a lot of things right but it's also trailing from the word go. HTML 5 coverage is below the previous generation of the other browsers, and nice as the JS optimisations and hardware acceleration might be, users are more likely to notice and appreciate support for SPDY as companies move to adopt it for their servers now that more and more browsers support it.
In any case it doesn' t really matter. For Microsoft IE 10 is too little too late. For them to stop the possibly irreversible slide in the corporate space they need to release IE 10 for Windows 7 as soon as possible. Corporates are overwhelmingly skipping Windows 8 so the next version change won't be before 2014 by when IE could easily have been overtaken by Chrome, Firefox and IOS.
There's a reason for that.
Chrome will install in userland, so it's the only one that grunt users can put on their locked-down desktops. What you've actually got is 100% IE, with 30% also having Chrome sneaked in for accessing the wibbly wobbly web.
Something else obviously wrong. Where's yer honking great IE6 stat? Presumably many of those Chrome and FF users "officially" (i.e. within the corp world) use IE6.....
"The head of windows dev has gone, and we all know it's because of windows 8"
I'm going to hang onto as many things as I can without upgrading, for as long as I can, simply because I hate what they did to developers, and I'm a microsoft guy.
They've actually promoted the woman who came up with the Ribbon. It's sick.
I still dont get why MS have spent money advertisting a browser that everyone knows is shit, and its one of the worst browsers to use and probably the most unsecure.
I know they probably still want to have a hold on the browser market for whatever reason, but for the sake of the internet and progression, please just give up and tell people to get a proper browser, otherwise devs are forever held back by the evil blue E
actually,in terms of security, resources and stability, Firefox is now about the worst at the moment.
IE 8 introduced the accelorator feature, which is pretty awesome once you know how the get the most out of it.
IE9 the introduced the pinned sites feature. This is a major boon, as a pinned site acts more like an installed application than a webpage. Sites that support this feature, such as facebook, outlook etc. can display notifications on their taskbar icon. This is an extremely useful feature for webmail!
Oh, and who wants yet another browser slowing plugin (FF, I'm looking straight at you!) like adblock, when you can import the ad list URL into inprivate browsing to achieve the same result?
By comparison, other browsers have demonstrated little or no new innovations that have really been game changers for me, at least. Firefox came close with the new tab management system, but while I was quite excited initially, my usage of the feature quickly subsided, consigning it to the 'gimmick' catagory.
Mozilla have screwed up royally to lose their userbase to Chrome so badly.
Don't get me wrong. I used to be a devout FF user for many years, until later versions became slow, unstable and a massive resource hog. I also hate the combined URL/search in IE and Chrome! I've gone through the gamut of browsers over the years. These days when I need raw performance for something like a flash game, I load the site in Chrome. But I soon start to miss the notification indicator and the ease of quick searches using accelerators, so it's not long after the game I revert to IE9. If IE10 delivers on performance, then Chrome will get kicked to the wayside too.
I do pity those who can't keep up with the times. Sorry, but 90s called asking for your opinions back.
Being an IE user I can understand the disdain for browser add-ons, but there are many useful extensions out there that do things users want to do and cannot easily do otherwise... like HTTPS Everywhere.
If you're content with IE and manually recreating the adblock experience then 'good on ye mate', but please don't slag us gearhead types that like making our browsers work in ways that, quite frankly, they shouldn't by default.
I'm by no means against the basic principle add-ons. Plugins, filters, bolt-ons, themes and extensions have been the saving grace of many applications. The problem comes from too many, or badly designed add-ons that cripple performance or cause instability in the host application.
Another feature I quite like in IE9 is the way the add-on manager not only keeps you alerted to changes, but also displays the performance hit you accrue with each one.
Given the amount of time I spend using web-based systems, disabling Java made a huge improvement. Alas, the only way I could streamline the browser any further would be to disable the AV add-on.
I only re-enable Java when I have to deal with certain network switches and printers etc. I can't remember the last time I stumbled on an actual website that required it.
The real attraction of IE for me is that I no longer NEED the miriad of add-ons that were prerequisits in the past. Back in the glory days of FF, websites weren't such resource hogs, and therefore if your browser was a little flabby round the mid section, it was barely noticable.
It still amazes today how much of a drain a website can be on your system. I've frequently seen browser instances of all 3 top 300Mb memory usage. With this in mind, streamlining makes a lot of sense
I was a firefox user when it first come on the scene, its was like a revolution where you didtn have to use the big blue E as some people put it, and it was nice to use something not by MS.
But yea firefox feels really clunky now, and takes ages to start up.
I converted to chrome a few years ago, mainly cos of how lightweight it is but also being a web dev the inspection tools, firebug, developer toolbar are soooo handy for the work I do.
IE may have a few nifty features for the average facebook masterbater, but IT heads should be using something better. Plus dont forgot all the security vuns that pop up with IE every so often.
No matter what they do with IE I will never like it, purely on the fact that web designers have had years of having extra work cos of the piece of shit old versions of IE that have clinged on like a slimey turd through the years or web evolution
If you try to suggest to any knowledgeable IT heads that they switch their corporate usage to Firefox or Chrome, you will be laughed out of the office, and rightly so.
Neither Firefox or Chrome can be centrally managed to any level even close enough to warrant a few seconds consideration. They are barely even written correctly for the windows platform.
Until only a few revisions ago, Firefox used to store its internet cache in the roaming profile folder, and Chrome used to install itself in the application data folder.
These are primary school mistakes that barred them from any serious network infrastructure on their own, but it doesn't end there. How do you set the corporate homepage? While the bigwigs in management might be allowed to play, how do you lock down all the configuration options so the plebs in the call centre don't drum up hundreds of support requests a day? How do you restrict Java so it can only be used on your intranet?
You can't even prevent them from installing crippling browser toolbars. When you've got 30,000 workstations to run and maintain on multiple sites, these aren't inconveniences. These issues will bring the world crashing down around you.
As a network administrator, priorities most often run by uptime of services, and then security. Where are their central update services? How do we ensure that every copy on every workstation has been patched against the vulnerability which has just gone wild?
In just the user section of Group Policy Management, IE has 801 configuration options, allowing you to customise everything from the proxy, homepage, activeX filtering, AJAX cross document messaging, autocomplete, plugins, allowable downloads and a miriad of others that could potentially be security vulns.
These options can be applied based on the user, the computer, a safe list of websites, IP range, certificate validity, and more, or any combination of the above to provide such granular control that a good sysadmin can lock down the browser to almost read-only levels when entering the wild, yet allow unprecedented access within intranet applications, without the user being aware.
By comparison, an unmanaged copy Firefox can do as much damage as a virus.
Oh, and if you want to moan at someone for the lingering existence of IE6, look unto your own profesion. Do you think we enjoy our users moaning about that crappy old version? Or that we like being out-of-date on patching? It's because the sprawling corporate intranet hasn't been updated to cope with the newer versions (and certainly won't work with Chrome!).
I'm not calling your ilk lazy. Naive, yes. That intranet is probably tied into 100,000 POS systems whos OS is hard coded in such a way to make it unfeasable to upgrade.
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