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Microsoft will no longer make IE available as a stand alone download.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t278-s2136732,00.html
The main concern I have is...
What if you are already running XP on a system that came with the OS pre-installed? You do not have an XP cd rom. What if your browser fails. How do you reinstall?
I think this may indeed be an effort by Microsoft re-build after their anti-trust action. Maybee they are in effect removing the term browser and simply making it a "feature" of their operating system.
I dont think Microsoft can loose out in this case because internet explorer has always been a free product. Them may loose browser marketshare, but then this does not convert to $$$. Perhaps MS are simply giving up on browsers all together and concentrating on the next generation OS. I'm just hoping that this doesn't mean we will be using something in any way similar to MSN explorer any time soon. Perhaps the inclusion of this in XP was Microsoft testing the waters.
This could be a great day for Opera.
Mack.
MSIE: 97%
Safari: 0.9%
Netscape: 0.7%
Konqueror: 0.4%
Gecko: 0.2% (without netscape in UA-string)
The missing 0.8% is grub, i still don't know if it is a browser-with-a-spider-built-in or just a spider with no browser.
The IE-position seems to be less dominant among Mac-users already. Most MAC users still use IE (83.3%), but an amazing 16.6% use Safari (netscape=nil). The OS'es were:
Win-something: 93.3%
Mac-something: 5.4%
Linux-something: 0.5%
The missing 0.8% is grub. Neither of these lists may be representative to your site or even to your part of the world.
And yes, i still say code to standards, not to browsers :)
/claus
I don't see any hospital with 5000+ client pc's upgrade everything to Longhorn just because M$ suddenly decides to stop supporting IE6, because that would be way to expensive.
I don't think we are the only victims of this, I can think of dozens web applications written for IE only ...
M$ is just stopping the evolution of the web for a while, and we'll have to try and live with it ...
amznVibe: Not to make this a debate, but from a webmaster perspective, I'd go with Opera 7 over Mozilla as a replacement. Opera 7 loads 90% of the IE 5+6 pages out there with little to no code modification. Mozilla is a whole other animal. I usually code for IE, then test in Opera with a few tidy changes, then curse for the next hour while I patch the CSS, etc to work properly with Mozilla.
I find the opposite true. If your code is good enough, it works exactly the same in Mozilla and IE, with the odd difference in line-heights. But Opera seems to have a mind of its own sometimes. Maybe my code isn't good enough?
Sadly also I find Opera struggles with many pages written for IE. It is reknowned for its Javascript problems. Opera has to cheat by setting its User Agent String to the same as IE6 just to work. But I always set it to "Opera". Often I have to switch back to Mozilla though when it can't cope with certain sites.
Lastly, any figures giving MSIE the top percentage of browser usage fail to consider that some of the figure is Opera faking itself as IE. But who knows the true figures?
any figures giving MSIE the top percentage of browser usage fail to consider that some of the figure is Opera faking itself as IE. But who knows the true figures?
True. These figures do only consider the user-agent string, which is subject to manipulation, not only by Opera.
In my case, I wouldn't think that the opera share was far above the stated shares for Netscape or Safari (after all the much hyped Mozilla browser is included in the Netscape figures).
Anyway, it's rather easy to obtain more accurate figures for the javascript enabled browsers. There's more to browser identification than HTTP_REFERER, also such things as navigator.appName and other fields that can be queried by script.
Cook a nice script and link it to a webbug, and you've got it - for that particular fraction of the web that your script covers. Otherwise there are readymades out there on the market that you can implement in minutes - just pay and watch.
MS dominance aside - to me, your argument that you don't know the "real" figures sounds sooo much like another good reason to code according to standards :)
The fuss about browserX vs browserY concerns something else - ie. the visual appearance of pages, and the rendering engines of the browsers.
AOL:
Well, personally i couldn't care less as i live in Europe, but that's not a general attitude here i would imagine.
/claus
Holding it back from what? What great new development is in the offing? Am I missing something?
In most cases, we create cross-browser webpages. By not releasing a next stand-alone version of IE, most of us will still be writing css and html for IE 6.0 in 3 years ...
This means that we cannot use new standards (css 3) and not even the complete old standards (IE has no full css 2 support) because we must stay compliant with IE.
Yoeri,
So what? Get used to being bored.
The vast majority of the browsing public wouldn't notice a difference between pages crafted using CSS2 and CSS3 if they jumped off the screen and bit them on the rear end.
On the contrary, people find comfort in seeing information presented in the same format day after day, week after week. It's no accident that every major newspaper and magazine presents it's info in columns, thirty five to forty characters wide, at about an 11pt type size.
(At least for only the last hundred years or so.)
Except for the creation of images - which is a craft separate and apart from page markup, what is html and css except a sophisticated form of typesetting?
Wanna get into something more interesting? - streaming media. People want it, bad. And as bandwidth has increased and become less expensive, video over http is finally coming into it's own.
I would be very surprised NOT to hear of/see IE 6.5 by the end of next year. They may never officially do a 7.0 standalone release but they will be forced to do what their bigger market demands to patch and subtly improve 6.1
It's no accident that every major newspaper and magazine presents it's info in columns, thirty five to forty characters wide, at about an 11pt type size.
(At least for only the last hundred years or so.)
Except for the creation of images - which is a craft separate and apart from page markup, what is html and css except a sophisticated form of typesetting?
I think you're making the classic mistake - thinking of the web as merely an extension of print. It is completely different. Newspapers use the same format because they cannot expand on it any further! Paper is only so big so columns have to fit the page and be comfortable to read. The web is dynamic. This means we can have text that changes, moving text, a small or large number of columns. If everyone were on 1600 x 1200 monitors, we would all be using even more columns.
Another point is that the web is still a new thing. It's evolved very fast and is still evolving. New ideas may come along to change the look of websites again.
Programs like Flash and formats like SVG leave newspapers standing. There simply isn't a comparison. (The nearest would be television.)
After some deep thinking about this, I have a conclusion that Microsoft is very corporate demand driven.
This is news?
Years ago in music school I was in a class where non-piano playing students were writing for piano. Every once in a while, a student would write a chord that would call for "an eleventh finger". Unplayable. The class was all-male
and the teacher would quip that "you would need a pretty active digit to play that!"
Nothing can "progress" beyond what humans can efficiently see and hear and absorb within a limited amount of time. And it can and has been measured. And we're all pretty much the same.
If you would feel comfortable dealing with text positioned in twelve columns on a 1600 x 1200 res screen then more power to ya! Most would find it overpowering.
My point about newspapers has nothing to do with the limitations of paper and ink.
I can scan the headlines and get the gist of the entire New York Times front page above the fold in just a few seconds. And I can retain what I've scanned long enough to decide whether I want to read any of the articles any further.
Many of the web pages I see are way too busy - just a morass of text and images with no clear focus. In trying to point to too many things, they end up pointing to nothing.
Hey, why have a web site with 'pages' at all? Why not one giant page with everything on it that scrolls endlessly downward.
Why? - because the human device that is the ultimate recipient wouldn't find it as comprehendable and satisfying to use as a site divided into pages.
We only have two eyes, and two hands and ten fingers.
Computers and the web could certainly take us beyond that but could we follow? Of course not.
And who would want to try?
If you would feel comfortable dealing with text positioned in twelve columns on a 1600 x 1200 res screen then more power to ya! Most would find it overpowering.
Since most corporate sites I see seem to cram as much as possible into every spare space, I can definitely see a future where a larger screen size just means even more content, banners, adverts, links etc. How would they resist?
Many of the web pages I see are way too busy - just a morass of text and images with no clear focus. In trying to point to too many things, they end up pointing to nothing.
This can only get worse as monitors display a larger area.
Hey, why have a web site with 'pages' at all? Why not one giant page with everything on it that scrolls endlessly downward.
Why? - because the human device that is the ultimate recipient wouldn't find it as comprehendable and satisfying to use as a site divided into pages.
Sadly there are sites all on one page. Some sites stick to 800 x 600 but put in several iframes, so all the content is on the one page.
Even some of the W3C documents go down the screen for ages making navigation a pain. (Imagine a newspaper that's pages went down to the floor!)
Umm, you need to go look at your average Chinese or Japanese website to really get a feel for just how much can be crammed on a screen, and just how many animated graphics and brightly flashing logos can be wedged in as well.
Stuff like home.sina.com is clean compared to many out there.
I admit - they have a point. Any blank space is not going to sell anything. The counter argument is that a clean, spacious site may attract more visitors.
Any blank space is not going to sell anything
Filled up space doesn't sell either. The advertising industry sussed this one out a long time ago. Compare any advert from 2003 with one from 1903 - and even in 1903 they were producing adverts that contained more space than in the mid-nineteenth century.
Space is good. It lets the customer see the message.
This can only get worse as monitors display a larger area.
I keep waiting for browsers to offer 192 pixels per inch, with nice, anti-aliased text and making some aestheic use of that bigger screen. The web still looks a lot like a cartoon to me and it needs to keep growing - even if we don't know what it's going to be when it grows up.
