I am not talking about the bells and whistles.

I have been using Windows 7 for the past few days and it looks like this is going to be a great Operating System from Microsoft.

The UI looks similar to that of Vista, but with a lot of tweaks. The new taskbar is exciting as well.

The main feature of Windows 7 I liked is that it lets you do your work the way you wish and it gets out of your way. Windows 7 makes doing your job easy. Performance wise it is better than Vista. Hardware support is also great and I did not have to install any drivers in my Acer laptop.

There are many other exciting features in the software. You can read more about these all over the web. Also remember to visit the Windows 7 development blog. The blog tells the exciting story of building a great operating system. It is a must read blog for programmers/designers.

Windows 7 is already getting a huge amount good press. People are giving positive reviews. Microsoft should be excited by this.

Currently a pre-beta test build for windows 7 is in circulation in the file sharing networks. You will have to do a bit of hacking to get the new taskbar enabled.

Download Windows 7 and check it out. You will surely fall in love with it too.

IE8 supports standards mode by default. Great move from Microsoft. Here are some random thoughts about IE8:

The ‘Emulate IE7′ Joke

From the IEBlog:

For the Internet Explorer 8 Beta, we’ve added an Emulate IE7 button to the command bar. It will help you with everyday browsing and with quickly checking your site as you work on it

Quickly means that you have to stop all your work and restart the browser to test a webpage in IE7 mode.

What is the need of the Emulate IE7 button? I have IE7 installed in my system.

Why should someone make a website for IE7 when IE8 is around? I can’t see any need. Make your websites to the standards. Thats it. There is no need to support any non-standard browser. It will make the already broken web worse.

Hopefully, the button will be present only in the IE8 beta.

Unstable

IE8 frequently crashed while I was using it. Having a session restore feature does not mean that you can hang my computer and lose my unsaved work.

Address Bar Woes

Microsoft has introduced many features to the address bar of IE8. But there is a problem that seriously affects my style of browsing. When I paste a URL to the address bar and change the tab (without navigating to the URL), the URL is lost. When I switch back to the tab, I see the URL of that tab, not the URL I pasted there. This happens to me a lot. It should be fixed. It is a simple improvement that I think is very much needed.

From the latest developments it looks like IE8 will default to the IE7 behavior. It will render websites in the original IE8 mode only if a special meta tag is inserted into the webpages by developers. I have already written about this pathetic solution of version targeting. In addition, I think the defaulting to IE7 behavior has some other far reaching consequences.

Jeremy Keith supports the IE8 version targeting, but opposes the idea of IE8 defaulting to the IE7 behavior.

Let’s say you’re building a website right now that uses a CSS feature such as generated content. Any browsers that currently support generated content will correctly parse your CSS declarations. Future browsers that will support generated content should also parse those CSS declarations. This expected behaviour will not occur in Internet Explorer. IE8 will include support for generated content. But unless you explicitly declare that you want IE8 to behave as IE8, it will behave as IE7.

Jeffrey Zeldman responds to this:

Jeremy, since you are among the tiny minority of enlightened web developers who know what generated content is, and who care that IE8 will support it (and since you read ALA), you will know to include a meta element that instructs IE8 to act like IE8—or you will use “edge” to instruct IE14 to act like IE14. Easy-peasy. No hardship for you.

By contrast, the many developers who don’t understand or care about web standards, and who only test their CSS and scripts in the latest version of IE, won’t opt in, so their stuff will render in IE8 the same way it rendered in IE7.

I agree with Zeldman when he says that developers don’t care about standards. At the same time I have to disagree with him on the issue of the default behavior.

The point is that IE8 is the same as IE7 if it defaults to IE7 behavior. Then what was the point in developing a new browser version? As Zeldman notes, only a handful of the enlightened web developers care about browser versions and standards. Many will not know that they have to include a special meta tag in their webpages. So what happens when IE8 ships?

Most of the developers will think they have a new version of IE and they will test their pages in the default mode of IE8 which is actually IE7 mode. So in effect, nearly all of the web developers out there will still be developing websites for IE7. Thus we will have people writing webpages for IE7 even though IE8 becomes widely used. This not backward compatibilty. This move from the Internet Explorer team will only result in more problems in the future.

Only time will tell whether the idea of version targeting was good or bad. But the defaulting thing is just a flawed idea. It will dampen the growth of the web, the standards and the other browsers too. This also will reduce the spread of standards awareness.

Even though Eric Meyer supports the IE move, he raises some important concerns in his article - From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey:

The biggest concern is fidelity. Will the backwards-compatible code for IE8 always act exactly like IE8 did, or will there be subtle changes that still break old sites? Might there even be, dare we mention it, new bugs that affect the backwards compatibility of future browsers? After all, the door swings both ways: vendors might get lax about their backward-looking code just as developers might get lax about their forward-looking code. Talk about irony.

A small concern is the effect of version-targeting code on the size of browser applications themselves. Could this be a step toward browsers becoming bloatware? Someone will chime in with “Who cares? Hard drives are huge now!” but I remain solidly unconvinced by “resources are cheap” arguments. No matter how cheap they are, people still keep filling them up. I sincerely hope the browser of the future won’t require a gigabyte or two of storage space, chained to every previous version of itself like Jacob Marley to his past misdeeds.

The world is still not flat

A cold chill was sent down my spine when I read the following paragraph from Jeffrey Zeldman:

… it’s actually good, because it means that their “IE7-tested” sites won’t “break” in IE8. Therefore their clients won’t scream. Therefore Microsoft won’t be inundated with complaints which, in the hands of the wrong director of marketing, could lead to the firing of standards-oriented browser engineers on the IE team. The wholesale firing of standards-oriented developers would jerk IE off the web standards path just when it has achieved sure footing. And if IE were to abandon standards, accessible, standards-compliant design would no longer have a chance. Standards only work when all browsers support them. That IE has the largest market share simply heightens the stakes.

Yes. This does mean that IE can make or break standards. It is true that IE dictates the terms in the market. And we should support the IE team in making the web a better place to live. But that doesn’t mean that all of us must bow down in respect every time they screw things up and make a the web a mess. We could fight back.

There is a great deal of debate going on about the upcoming version of the Internet Explorer - IE8. It looks like Microsoft is going to screw up this time too.

From the A List Apart article Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8:

All of these factors leave us, the website developers, in a bit of a pickle when it comes to making websites. How do we ensure that browsers continue to render what we want them to?

We could specify the version of the languages we use, such as CSS 2.1 or JavaScript 1.5. Unfortunately, browser vendors often implement only part of a spec and the interpretation of a specification often differs from browser to browser, so any two contemporary browsers may offer completely different renderings of the same CSS or may trigger completely different events from the same form control.

With this spanner in the works, we’re really only left with one option for guaranteeing a site we build today will look as good and work as well in five years as it does today: define a list of browser versions that the site was built and tested on, and then require that browser makers implement a way to use legacy rendering and scripting engines to display the site as it was intended—well into the future.

This is exactly what our group decided to recommend for IE8, and we hope to see it implemented in other browsers as well.

Basically what they say is that every developer should add a meta tag specifying the version of the browser the page was tested on, to every web page he creates. This must be done for every browser - Microsoft recommends.

What kind of a solution is this? Certainly not scalable.

What are the implications of this foolishness? Every browser will have to carry the previous browser editions too. This is to ensure that a web pages are rendered exactly as the developer intended it to. For example, a page designed for IE5 should be rendered exactly as it was rendered in IE5. This means that IE8 will include rendering engines of all the previous editions of IE.

Here is what Ann Evan Kesteren of Opera thinks:

You’re shipping a lot more code, and it grows a lot with each release. If the user browses a mix of pages, you’ll actually execute a lot more code too. Good luck competing in the mobile space when you ship half a dozen engines and your competitors only need one.

Pathetic solution I would say. It is sure that this solution will not go beyond IE8. I predict that by IE9, Microsoft will be looking for another solution to break up the web.

Kesteren continues:

Solutions? We can ignore this all together. We can get popular Web server software to set IE=edge. We can convince the world to use a browser that does not have the ability to lock pages into a specific rendering mode. Bah.

And Robert O’Callahan from Firefox says:

It seems clear that for now we have no market need for drastic multi-engine compatibility, and therefore there’s no need to even consider the pain it would cause. One could argue that by slaving themselves to the needs of the corporate intranet, IE is actually being hobbled for the mass market.

I wonder why we took all the pain of developing our websites to the standards if Microsoft had this brilliant idea of breaking up the web.

Asirra is a web service developed by a Microsoft Research team to replace Captcha as an HIP. (If you don’t know what Captcha is, click here). Asirra uses pictures of cats and dogs to distinguish between an automated bot and a human. The visitor should distinguish between the cats and dogs correctly to continue in the sign-up page (or wherever you use Asirra). Currently Asirra is given as a web service and anyone can implement it in their websites by pasting some code provided by Microsoft.

The research team claims that Asirra is secure because they use a “large” database of cats and dogs. The pictures are obtained from the Petfinder website. They also claim that the database contains more than 3 million pictures. Now how useful is the product? Can it really be used instead of Captcha? Continue Reading »

Microsoft had its website (www.microsoft.com) long before most of today’s biggest IT companies were even founded. They have been renovating and developing the look and feel, as well as the usability of the website homepage. The website was once the most visited website in the internet. Not now. Let me put forth some of the glitches I noticed in the website homepage.

Continue Reading »