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Of course it will...

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It doesn't have too. Firefox functions fine without it. The only useful need for ActiveX, in my opinion, is for Windows Update. They can make Windows Update a separate program from IE, therefore having no legitimate reason to include ActiveX in the browser. This will also make IE alot safer to use and help it win back users.

If 7 still uses ActiveX, I'll stick with Firefox.  If it doesn't, I'll use it.

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whats wrong with ActiveX ? its a nice technology... poorly implemented. If they do it right...there should be no problem

Just disable activex in IE if that's such a problem. Truth is that ActiveX is not a security issue anymore. It's very hard for a user to, by mistake, install an activex control these days. It can potentially be very dangerous for a system, but so can any exe file that you get from the internet. Heck, running the wrong file could potentially erase all your disks... if that's what the writer of it wants to.

The problem isn't windows and IE most of the time, it's stupid/ignorant users.

The only useful need for ActiveX, in my opinion, is for Windows Update.  They can make Windows Update a separate program from IE, therefore having no legitimate reason to include ActiveX in the browser.  This will also make IE alot safer to use and help it win back users.

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Yeah, I'm sure it would bring tons of users back to IE if they disabled activex so that you couldn't install plugins such as flash and quicktime or browser add-ons!

From what I've seen, Internet Explorer 7 will only be slightly better than Internet Explorer 6. I do mean "slightly." The overall progress that has been made with Internet Explorer 7 is depressing.

The rendering engine has had some show-stopping bugs fixed in it, but relative standards support will remain poor. Web designers currently have to devote a lot of time and effort to work around Internet Explorer's lack of standards-compliancy. The extra work usually results in sites being more expensive and longer to construct; more expensive and harder to maintain or redesign; and the overall user experience plummits because the resulting sites are bloated with extraneous (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (or "JScript", as Microsoft calls it) and the extra bloat makes the sites much slower for end users and cost much more to keep online for visitors.

Speaking of standards support, I found it moderately funny earlier when someone said they had no problems writing valid XHTML for Internet Explorer. It is *impossible* to write valid XHTML because it requires the XHTML mimetype to be sent and that causes Internet Explorer to choke. When Internet Explorer chokes, it prompts the user to download the XHTML page instead of render it. If the page is working in Internet Explorer then that is because it is rendered as an HTML 4 document in quirks mode.

I wish the Internet Explorer team would stop working on extending RSS support to do things it wasn't meant to do. All of the things they are touting that will be possible with the enhanced RSS support is already available to us, they are simply wasting their time. Bundling RSS support into the operating system is a good idea, but the effort they are putting into making it a publicly-usable API is pointless; it's not exactly hard for a programmer to find a powerful XML parser if they actually intended to use RSS (plus, if an exploit occurs to the RSS API then it would effect almost everything, whereas individual solutions wouldn't be as vulnerable.) The majority of people that will be creating RSS feeds are web designers and RSS is always a smaller priority than getting the site working (so they should fix their standards-compliancy issues first.) Don't get me wrong, I love RSS - what I don't love is extraneous effort being put in to create a universal API for an XML parser that totally defies the RSS standard and claims that it is an RSS API (oops, another standards-compliancy problem we'll undoubtedly have problems with for the next decade.)

I'm not impressed with the security of Internet Explorer either. They keep touting the least-privilege user access system and protected administrator system as features of Internet Explorer 7. Those aren't Internet Explorer features, they're Longhorn features. All of the applications running under Longhorn will have this extra layer of protection. They keep touting their efforts to prevent phishing attacks, what are they? Perhaps you could start by fixing all of the spoofing issues in the interface: the status bar can be spoofed, the title bar can be spoofed, the whole document can be spoofed, dialogs can be spoofed, the "save picture as" dialog can be spoofed, I'll just say that everything can be spoofed just to keep things simple. All of the "security enhancements" I've heard about Internet Explorer is hype, nothing of substance.

As far as I can see, this is just Internet Explorer 6 with a few fixes and unneeded additions. That's just my opinion, anyways.

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have you tested IE7,otherwise you cuould be talking Bull**** on this thread you know?

Bah... like I say, we'll see it when we see it... but yeah, it doesn't look too impressive, just like the rest of Longhorn's upcoming software. It will be better (duhhh) and I might still continue using IE (I'm doing it right now), but as of now, I'm not surprised of their progress. I don't really like firefox either... Its version 2 should be MUCH MORE interesting, but since I should leave for a mac within the next too years, I'm not too worried about IE and FF. I just wanna know what's happening with all this, because I MIGHT stay with windows and IE.

It surely resembles Safari but as other people pointed out again and again, there is not much you can do about it. Browser is still a browser. (Maybe Steve Jobs might want to reinvent it in the future, i dont know :)) And I personally think it looks awesome. I always liked the MS's colorful UI more than the Apple's somewhat minimalistic design.

The important thing about IE7 for me is its W3C compliancy. I had enough trouble making web pages look the same in all browsers while using CSS (ironically, we did not have that many problems in tables) with all those browser-specific hacks.

have you tested IE7,otherwise you cuould be talking Bull**** on this thread you know?

What is wrong with what I've said?

The IE team has already explicitly stated that the rendering engine is such a mess that it would be almost impossible to bring it to current standards (you can find this on the IE Team blog.) The lack of standards-compliancy is well known through the web development community (SitePoint is a good place to learn about these things) and the results are well known. The security exploits (how practically everything can be spoofed) I mentioned are readily viewable in big red blocks at Secunia.

It doesn't have too.  Firefox functions fine without it.  The only useful need for ActiveX, in my opinion, is for Windows Update.  They can make Windows Update a separate program from IE, therefore having no legitimate reason to include ActiveX in the browser.  This will also make IE alot safer to use and help it win back users.

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Yes, it does. You are naive in thinking that only Windows Update uses ActiveX... there are many other legitimate plugins that use this model and their authors would be displeased having to rewrite them (in Java?). Among them, the most important are corporations. Microsoft is primarily a B2B company and they will never do anything to hurt their corporate customers.

Microsoft will also minimize changes to their software that break compatability. Removing ActiveX will have a tremendous impact on this feature... it simply will never be removed; but Microsoft will certainly make improvements to how the code is run and add further security measures.

IE can become safer with ActiveX still intack. Removing ActiveX will push away more customers than it will win back. If you don't like ActiveX... don't use IE, simple as that.

It doesn't have too.  Firefox functions fine without it.  The only useful need for ActiveX, in my opinion, is for Windows Update.  They can make Windows Update a separate program from IE, therefore having no legitimate reason to include ActiveX in the browser.  This will also make IE alot safer to use and help it win back users.

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see...it's not only about YOU...we as individuals might want Active X gone, but big companies that relay on Active X will say that's a big no no. Microsoft can not afford to "break" anything especially when people have started to develope their own way of using it around the software...that's one of the main reasons why MS can't build a new version of IE from the ground up..because if they do that...alot of applications will be "broken" and people will be angry...

see?...that's why you really can't be mad at MS or the IE team because they need to be careful what they PUT on and what they TAKE out. Any slight changes that will break anything will be...bad... to say the least..

MS have the technology to build the best damn browser we've every seen. But it's because of IE's close intergration with Windows and the fact that they can't "break" anything that have made IE the way it is today...give'em a break, they don't exactly have too much to work with here..

Edited by dark kyuubi

XHTML 1.0 doesn't need to be sent as application/xml+xhtml, it's 1.1 that has to have it, so you can have valid XHTML in IE (for that matter you can have it in Netscape 4.x). Also, valid != compliant. W3C's checker will gaily tell you the XHTML1.1 page you've submitted is valid, just below the content type of text/html...

see...it's not only about YOU...we as individuals might want Active X gone, but big companies that relay on Active X will say that's a big no no. Microsoft can not afford to "break" anything especially when people have started to develope their own way of using it around the software...that's one of the main reasons why MS can't build a new version of IE from the ground up..because if they do that...alot of applications will be "broken" and people will be angry...

see?...that's why you really can't be mad at MS or the IE team because they need to be careful what they PUT on and what they TAKE out. Any slight changes that will break anything will be...bad... to say the least..

MS have the technology to build the best damn browser we've every seen. But it's because of IE's close intergration with Windows and the fact that they can't "break" anything that have made IE the way it is today...give'em a break, they don't exactly have too much to work with here..

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Best comment I've read today! (Y)

I wonder how many casual firefox users will switch back now that i.e. has tabs. It could also be the extensions that have the attraction, and that's another idea I can see Microsoft borrowing.

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Not me since ms hates me :ninja:

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