According to PC Magazine, Microsoft has just released the newest edition of Internet Explorer, in a Beta at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. You can grab yourself a copy.
In a nod to the trend of “backgrading” Vista machines to Windows XP, the IE beta will run on XP SP2 or newer – although it seems to require a different download for every possible flavour of OS. At 14.4 Mb, it weighs in a little heavy, but not unusual for a Microsoft product.
I’ll admit right off that I haven’t bothered to fire up Parallels to try it out – so what you’ll be getting here is purely jaded commentary.
First off – the Out-Of-The-Box experience. Come on, people, it’s 2008 – why should I have to restart my entire machine every time I upgrade a piece of software? Last time I restarted my linux machine, was when I rebuilt the kernel. Enough said.
Their major “feature upgrade” in this release, is standards compliance. Wow. I can’t even come up with a witty retort.
Two other features, “Activities”, and “WebSlices”, continue to highlight the hallmarks of “good browser development” – lock-in, and rip-off.
“Activities is intended to provide quick access to services from any Web site, Microsoft said.”
“Services”, being a limited set of locked-in Microsoft partners, with the weird and notable exception of Yahoo Mapping Services. (On second thought, not that weird – it makes more sense than the alternative.)
“WebSlices” – Although at first glance this looks like a simple rip-off of Safari’s Dashboard Widget integration, it turns out it’s not even that sophisticated. WebSlices are a proprietary alternative to a standard microformat, once again highlighting lock-in with Microsoft partners.
Users can now add links to Word or Excel documents… to their IE favorites bar. Why would I ever want to do that?
“…automatic crash recovery, which restores tabs in the event of a failure.” Um… Firefox?
“…the beta will include a phishing filter to warn users of possible phishing Web sites.”
That’s actually a great feature – and one that I helped build in Netscape 8, back in 2004/05. It’s great to see they’re catching up.
#1 by Kevin Nguyen on 06Mar08 - 9:03 pm
It seems that you haven’t read the Automatic Crash Recovery whitepaper.
It goes into some details about ACR. I personally think it’s a pretty unique idea in that the tabs are isolated from other tabs. And as far as I can tell, it’s not available in Firefox. Firefox has a simple session recovery.
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ie8whitepapers/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=582
#2 by admin on 06Mar08 - 11:57 pm
Just read it, and you’re right – it does go into some detail. However, you’re wrong about Firefox – FF3 beta has a fairly complete session state recovery, including form contents, nav history, etc.
While the idea of running each tab in a separate process is an interesting workaround for a buggy and insecure execution environment, the fact that iexplore.exe is so likely to crash, that it’s worth designing an entire user experience workflow around capturing and managing such crashes, simply reiterates my previous position.
Since I’ve not profiled it yet, I won’t go into any speculation about the performance impacts of running a separate executable for each tab, with asynchronous communication with the chrome. However, you can look at the sad and sorry state of RoR scalability (using mongrel clusters and apache, etc), to see the impacts of this sort of architecture.
I *was* heartened to see that, although MS recommends some site-specific implementations to fully support bookmarking of page state, they have embraced the HTML5 W3C draft, and used the onHashChange event for this.
From a development community standpoint, I find it interesting that Microsoft asserts that “Over 70% of all Internet Explorer crashes and hangs are caused by extensions, such as ActiveX® controls, Browser
Helper Objects (BHOs), and Toolbars”. While Mozilla is even more exposed to abuse by extensions, and has a thriving developer community (1,986 extensions listed in AMO this evening), a constant plague of crashes caused by extensions doesn’t seem to be such a problem in the open-source world.
From a user-experience standpoint, it simply shouldn’t crash. While mitigating the damage done is a nice band-aid, *I* wouldn’t label it a “feature”.
#3 by shidan on 22Mar08 - 11:52 am
“the fact that iexplore.exe is so likely to crash, that it’s worth designing an entire user experience workflow around capturing and managing such crashes, simply reiterates my previous position.”
LOL. You could not have said it better. Been telling stalwart IE users this for years.
#4 by Jack Rayen on 01Dec08 - 3:49 am
You really are a loser. Writing about something you haven’t even tested. Very good. If you don’t have anything worthwhile, why don’t go take a nap instead ? Maybe you will get some other good ideas to write about.