rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
March 5, 2008 at 11:22 am · Filed under .NET
This is the second of three posts on the MIX08 keynotes. This is like live blogging without the live, since I’m writing this in Oakland. You can follow my comments at http://twitter.com/rwandering.
IE8, Dean Hachamovitch, GM IE
Focus on standards compliance. This will be a great productivity boost for web-site developers.
1. CSS 2.1.
2. CSS cert.
- Funny that Microsoft is claiming that ambiguities in the specs make it hard to prove correctness. They are correct, but it sounds a little like whining. It also reminds me of the Server 2008 test.
- Test cases from Microsoft, good.
- IE 8 transition might be painful. For users.
3. Performance.
4. HTML 5.
- Back button can work with AJAX. This is a very big deal for improving the consistency of the browser user experience.
- Connection events in HTML 5 / DOM storage, re-connect, “make content available” later. Cool.
5. new dev tools
- Cool script debugger in IE8. Looks like the developer toolbar has gotten much better.
6. Activities
- User activities added to browser by users (kind of like smart links).
- Activities are defined in XML. Kind of cool, though I can see the browser becoming hard to use as a user adds a bunch of activities; however, that is up to them to manage.
- This format is the OpenService Format Specification. Share/Share-alike spec.
7. WebSlices
- Users can subscribe to parts of web-pages (driven by sites providing this as a service).
- This is the WebSlice Format Specification. Public domain spec.
8. IE8, Beta 1 for developers
- Released today. Cool. I will be checking this out. At first in a VM. I hope IE7 can live along side IE8. Since they didn’t mention this, my guess is no.
[tags]Microsoft, MIX08, IE8, IE7, IE, Silverlight[/tags]
Tags: IE, IE7, IE8, Microsoft, MIX08, Silverlight
December 21, 2006 at 9:35 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
The GestureBank beta 2 went live yesterday. This beta is open. Go to http://attentiontrust.org/gesturebank for more info. Special thanks to Cori Shlegel for his work to get this done.
The GestureBank will be rolling out new Affinity Service capabilities next. This is where it will start to really resonate.
By the way: IE is not supported in this beta (as it was previously); it will take a bit of effort to get a new IE port. This is because managed extensions are kind of a dead-end for IE. So the existing managed port will be discarded in favor of an (eventual) unmanaged one written from scratch. See this (techie) thread for more information: Create a Shell Extension Handler thumbnail extractor with .net?. In this thread you can think of the words Explorer, Shell, IE, IE6, IE7, and Excel as synonyms.
[tags]GestureBank, AttentionTrust, AT, Firefox, IE7, BHO[/tags]
Tags: AT, AttentionTrust, BHO, Firefox, GestureBank, IE7
October 25, 2006 at 12:29 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Last week I wrote in Bug in IE7? that I thought there was a problem viewing this site:
In Firefox and IE6, my horizontal list (menu) works correctly. The picture below shows the “Link Blog” item highlighted and mouse-over.
In IE7, all of the text is crowded together, but the mouse-over regions are in the correct place. Again, the picture below shows in the “Link Blog” item highlighted. Noticed that the highlight is in the same place, but the text is all crowded to the left.
This alone looks like a bug. I don’t see how the text and the highlight can be in two different locations.
It turns out that this is related to the zoom feature. This site looks fine if zoom isn’t used (i.e., at 100%). More or less zoom crowds just the text, but not the mouse-overs.
Must be a bug.
[tags]CSS, Firefox, IE, IE6, IE7, IE7 Bug[/tags]
Tags: CSS, Firefox, IE, IE6, IE7, IE7-Bug
October 19, 2006 at 5:52 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Before I report this as a bug, I thought I’d write it up and see if any CSS gurus can help me.
In Firefox and IE6, my horizontal list (menu) works correctly. The picture below shows the “Link Blog” item highlighted and mouse-over.
In IE7, all of the text is crowded together, but the mouse-over regions are in the correct place. Again, the picture below shows in the “Link Blog” item highlighted. Noticed that the highlight is in the same place, but the text is all crowded to the left.
This alone looks like a bug. I don’t see how the text and the highlight can be in two different locations.
I have run this through the CSS Validator (here) and the XHTML Validator (here) and sounds nothing I can pin this on. (Note the XHTML Validator reports several errors having to do with individual posts).
So, is this a problem in my site or a bug in IE7?
[tags]IE7, IE6, Firefox, CSS[/tags]
Tags: CSS, Firefox, IE, IE6, IE7
October 18, 2006 at 6:20 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
There seems to be much interest in the release — I’m getting a lot of people coming to this blog for the answer.
I don’t know if it is true; but, the rumor has it that today, October 18th, is the day.
[tags]ie7, ie6, Microsoft[/tags]
Update: and it looks like the rumors were correct.
Tags: IE, IE6, IE7, Microsoft
October 12, 2006 at 11:21 am · Filed under .NET
IE7 is coming out very soon (some say any day). One thing to be aware of: if you need to keep using IE6, don’t install IE7. This isn’t just an issue in the IE7 installer (i.e., IE7 upgrades IE6), but they cannot both be installed on the same machine.
I trust (and Microsoft really hopes) that this doesn’t affect users in a negative way.
My guess is that the only people who really care about the side-by-side issue are developers. Of course, IT managers will care too, but they can keep IE7 from being auto-updated.
My guess is that this due to COM (because IE programmability is all through COM).
Side-by-side COM is anywhere from hard to impossible. One more benefit for a browser built on managed.
Tags: .NET, IE, IE6, IE7, Microsoft
October 7, 2006 at 7:03 am · Filed under .NET
It appears that IE7 has been decoupled from Vista. According to the IEBlog, the final release will be in “a few weeks”.
On a couple of occasions, I have requested that IE7 and .NET 3.0 be released when ready (post here) — presumably before Vista. I guess I have gotten part of my wish, though it is really the RTM of .NET 3.0 that I would like to see released.
On a side note: the last I checked IE7 is not dependent on .NET. Unfortunate to say the least. I would like to see managed Browser Helper Objects (BHOs) being easy without requiring COM — that could have gotten IE7 much closer to the Firefox extension model. What will ever drive .NET installs onto XP so that it is, in fact, ubiquitous?
Tags: .NET, .NET3.0, Firefox, IE, IE7, Vista, WinFx
May 2, 2006 at 11:05 am · Filed under Web 2.0
A lot has been said about Google complaining to the government about IE7 (from NYT).
Don Dodge says that Google’s honeymoon is over. Perhaps this is true. Their complaining about the way search is handled in IE7 does seem disingenuous.
In the past I’ve said that Google’s goodwill will wane. From Dave Winer’s Geek Dinner for Scoble with relevant excerpt here:
Google has enjoyed a great deal of popularity as an answer to Microsoft’s dominance. They have a stockpile of goodwill and trust from people simply because they are not Microsoft. This is not permanent. The bigger they get, the more profitable they are (if that’s possible), the more people they piss off with their own kind of over-reaching, the more this is going to wane.
Google has some great products, of which search is #1. But, please Google, don’t try to lock in your users by complaining. Do it by making your products better.
Tags: Attention, Google, IE7, Microsoft
April 26, 2006 at 10:41 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Nick Bradbury has an excellent post on how Dvorak is wrong about Internet Explorer (perhaps Dvorak is reading Kevin Burton’s blog).
I agree with Mr. Bradbury on the value that Microsoft brings to developers by making IE easily embeddable into applications. Having this capability built into the OS makes it all the easier for the distribution of new products without the weight of an IE install.
So, yes, I too am glad that Windows has a browser. I do wish it were better and easier to extend; but, I think IE7 will help us there too.
Tags: Dvorak, IE, IE7, Windows
March 25, 2006 at 10:18 am · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
Kevin Burton suggests that the Vista IE7 delay can be eliminated by tossing IE7 and adopting Firefox. I would be surprised if IE7 is on the Vista critical path, but the idea of Microsoft replacing IE7 made me laugh.
At first, I thought he was kidding, but he is serious (see the discussion between Robert Scoble and Kevin in the comments for that post). Fundamentally, Kevin’s idea is an interesting one, but that ship sailed a long time ago. Too many developers have products that rely on IE (e.g., NewsGator uses the IE browser control) with large installed user bases. Microsoft cannot just leave those developers and users in the lurch without a migration path.
Kevin suggests that since Firefox is a whole new application, that existing applications wouldn’t break. Good point, but remember, IE6 is considered a security problem. Abandoning IE7 doesn’t solve the IE6 problem for Microsoft.
They own the problem by winning the first Browser Wars and then letting IE stagnate.
Tags: Browser-Wars, Firefox, IE, IE6, IE7, Vista
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