Gates promises free antispyware, new version of IE
–
Microsoft by midyear plans to release a test version of a new Internet Explorer (IE) browser that better protects users from scams and malicious code while surfing the Web, the company announced Tuesday.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=77816035&eid=-180

So my question is: will the browser (IE, OS-integrated, or something else) for Longhorn have actual new features? Will it have a rendering engine that implements all of CSS 2.1, PNG transparencies or even some CSS 3?

I don’t want details (okay, I do, but I don’t expect them). I just want to hear that this will happen

Stephen, sorry if this is hijacking your thread, but it seemed to be veering in this direction, anyway

At home, I try to have a browser of the week, cycling through a bunch of odd browsers and IE hosts as well as the usual suspects. I’m not going to name names, because I’d leave someone out, or get misinterpreted and/or misquoted. “So good, even IE’s development manager recommends it instead of Internet Explorer !!!!”

My family mostly uses MSN Explorer from MSN Premium which provides content filtering, integrated mail client, etc. Before I joined IE, I was a development manager on the MSN Client team working on the various features in MSN Explorer, mostly browsing but also things like Photo Email.

but it still perplexes me to hear IE folks talk about all the added features in IE when it still lacks the most fundamental, IMO, in tabbed browsing.

to that point, what do you use - IE or Maxthon?

The purpose of the XPSP2 release was security; the features the IE team added are security features. IE in XPSP2 was not intended to be a competitive response to features in other browsers. Sure, the popup blocker was last to market. It’s fine by me if you want to define what we added as “filling holes”, or design mistake corrections, or preventing things from going wrong, or even minor functional alterations. Regardless of semantics, our customers have a better and more secure browsing experience because of what we added to XPSP2.

English and Vamos have nothing to do with the IE team. What these two guys in Australia said is not informed by what we’re doing on the IE team so their comments give no special insight. You shouldn’t take what they said as representative of anything but ill-advised comments by two people who probably should have known better.

As for tabbed browsing, I like it. It’s a nice addition to the browsing experience. And since I actually am in a position where my opinion matters (unlike our Australian executives) that should carry more weight.

but to be honest i find the use of the word “features” extremely problematic.

take Popup blocker. this would have classified as a new feature about 2 years ago. not now. as you’re no doubt aware, competing products have had this for quite a while. to me, this was more about plugging a product hole.

or what about ActiveX installation and blocking? i’d lump those more in the category of correcting an old design mistake than new feature. ditto for the other security improvements. remember that these don’t actually improve the actually improve the users browsing experience, they simply prevent things from going wrong.

look, i’m not religious about this - i happily jumped from Netscape to IE when IE became the better browser, and were i still on Windows, would happily jump back if you improved IE. see the link here (http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/000016.html) for why i switched.

but c’mon, you can’t sit there with a straight face and tell me that in 4 years, the addition of the “features” you mentioned is honestly a competitive effort, can you?

it’d be very nice to hear someone from MS actually admit that tabbed browsing is actually a very nice - although certainly not revolutionary - addition to the browsing experience. instead we get commentary like the following:

Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia’s managing director:

“I don’t agree that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don’t have, that feature is important,” he said. “It is not. It is only important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don’t have. We have plenty of features that our customers don’t use.”

Ben English, Microsoft’s security and management product manager:

“I don’t believe it is a true statement that IE doesn’t have the features that our customers want,” he said. “We take user feedback very seriously. If you have that feedback, then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team.”

(link http://news.com.com/Microsoft+says+Firefox+not+a+threat+to+IE/2100-1032_3-5448719.html)

as for Mr. Massy, say hi for me. he was kind enough to weigh in here (http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/000057.html) with some comments on just the article you mentioned, i think.

BTW, the IE in Windows Server 2003 SP1 and the XP 64 bit editions will have the XPSP2 feature set.

It’s certainly true that there was a time when IE didn’t get enough attention, but that time is long past. I didn’t join the IE team until 7 months ago, when the team was nearing the end of XPSP2 work. I spotted no resting on laurels, instead there were a lot of people deeply engaged on the problems at hand.

What do you mean by “lack of new features”? What about IE in XPSP2, where we delivered a host of new security-oriented features? A few of them are UI features, such as Manage Add-ons, the Popup Blocker, and the changes around ActiveX installation and download monitoring. Others are internal, such as local machine lockdown as well as many root cause mitigations for various types of potential exploits.

But if you’re looking for innovation, well, IMHO that has been scarcely seen in web browsers in quite a few years. Check out iRider for something I thought had an interesting, even “innovative” approach.

Tony: thx for the clarification. i try to take a balanced view on the topic - based on most of the metrics i see, Firefox has made serious inroads into IE territory and is trending up. that said, IE is still far and away the dominant platform and likely to be there for a while.