IE7 Beta - Usual Microsoft Comedy Of Errors? - another crap of an update?

Transcendum

Mar 25 2006, 12:40 AM

I personally haven't tried the IE7 Beta yet, and probably never will. I can't say I'm a big fan of IE6, either, but I have to admit that I think its down-sides are highly over-rated. It fixed many of the previous problems, and its rendering engine is decent. Not perfect, mind you, but decent.

And I agree that Microsoft's products have always been notoriously famous for their bugs. But since this post is about IE7, I feel that we shouldn't judge it so harshly. After all, it is a Beta version. It's supposed to have bugs. If we don't want to deal with them, then perhaps it's best if we don't test this version at all.

I just want to make it clear that I'm in no way a Microsoft fan. But still, lately it seems that everyone is bashing it for everything that's wrong with the world. I wouldn't be surprised if someone came and told me that Microsoft was responsible for World War II. A bit of anachronism, I realise, but still....

Anyway, I wouldn't judge IE7 until it's, at least, in the RC (Release Candidate) stage. And even then, I'd wait before I bring my wrath on it, just for the sake of being fair and objective.

 

 

 

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sparx

Mar 25 2006, 06:32 AM

Although a proponent of Open Source software and collaborative development, I have to admit that the IE7 roadmap / feature list is finally bearing some semblance of being a "team player". How is that you might ask?

It's because the dev team have sat up and taken notice of what the community has to say... I will say, in no uncertain terms, that IE has the easiest interface to get used to (especially for people for whom the Internet and WWW are unfamiliar territory). IE 7 is making headway in a few departments like RSS and OPMl feed gathering, anti-phishing warnings and the ability to render pages in a sandbox-like environment. Part of this has to do with the fact that Vista and all its allied components are part of the LUA framework or Least privileged User Account.

Case in point - the IE dev team sat down with devs form the Mozilla / Opera / other browser dev teams and reps of the W3C and agreed to use a standard icon for RSS feeds - the globally recognized orange icon -

The MS Outlook 12 dev team have also agreed to use the same icon in the interests of maintaining consistency between platforms

Quite a few people don't like the new large size buttons and other inherent frailties in the interface but no one will deny that it is far better than IE 6.

I also agree completely with Transcedum's post - a BETA is exactly that. You're under no compulsion to check it out and use it. Better to have a buggy BETA than an RTM version which is as full of holes as swiss cheese.

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doudou

Jul 1 2006, 03:49 AM

I downloaded IE 7 Beta last week and it wouldn’t launch at all and so I had to get rid of it. Suprisingly it wasn’t hard all ( I have Window XP Pro, so I don’t know if this is the same way for all the windows). Just go into your control panel and open up add/remove programs. You will see the new version of explore on it and just click uninstall. After you are done, you should have your old version automatically without reinstalling it.

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Opethian

Apr 30 2006, 01:05 AM

I don't know man...

To me, installing Internet Explorer 7, is like getting back with your girlfriend. That girlfriend that cheated you twice, and got pregnant in an orgy, and says she loves you while grabbing stuff from your wallet everytime you go to the bathroom.

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evought

Apr 18 2006, 03:32 AM

QUOTE(abhiram @ Mar 25 2006, 10:58 PM)

Hehe ... you sound as if Microsoft was is your mentor. I mean come on, who in this world has actually started with Linux? Everybody has started out on computers with some product of Microsoft. I don't see why you feel obligated to Microsoft.

<snip>

Ha! I started out with Color Basic on a Z-80 microprocessor and then went to TRS-DOS when I could actually get one of the new floppy drives. I used Wordstar, Visicalc, etc. When I actually got an MS-DOS machine, I still used either PFS-First Choice or Word Perfect. It was quite a while before I got into MS products. I have never liked Word or Office applications. In college I regularly used NextStep, Solaris, Dos 6.0, Linux, Mac OS 7-9, OS/2 Warp, and Windows. I beta tested Windows 95.

No, MSes problems are not quite as bad as sometimes made out, but they are pretty bad. A Beta is supposed to be feature stable and lacking in critical defects. An Alpha (internal or limited test release) is for the real trips through the looking glass. as a vendor, it is considered bad taste to nuke your customer's computers, even with a Beta. I have Beta tested for a number of companies (back in the day when you had to apply to be a Beta tester and actually got paid, at least in free software, for the effort), and MS was really the worst of them.

Linux's unstable tree, for instance, is usually better, and Betas of OS/2 Warp were nowhere near as rough as the Betas of Win 95. Most of IBMs products tend to be more stable when they go beta (I have worked in their test labs and have seen exactly what criteria they use to pass the software for Alpha or Beta releases).

It is all a matter of having a defined *process*, which MS, by admission, just does not have.

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