Microsoft delivers second preview test build of IE 9

Hmmmm.... I'm not holding my breath. It will have to be good to get me back as a regular user.

 

Good, more browsers the merrier

 

Nice release, but I'm still disappointed with Microsoft's recent announcement that only H.264 will be supported in-box by IE9's implementation of the HTM5 video tag...

 

Erm... eh. There's large part of corporate users who are on XP and stuck w/ IE6 b/c their internal apps don't work w/ anything else. Don't see them ditching XP because they won't be able to run IE9 really. They might ditch XP since W7 is finally a decent desktop OS, which can't really be said about Vista at all.

 

Let's stop this discussion right here.

Anyway, IE is becoming more interesting with each new version, but I still think I will stick to another browser.

 

Sorry for my double-post btw. I posted it as soon as I saw the news release this morning on Twitter.

yeah, I guarantee it'll be a long time before we ditch XP in my businesses, any of the networks I manage or my house. Only reason we upgraded to SP3 at all was because the end of support for SP2 is coming in July.

~Comment removed~ Sorry, but I'm not a fan of what they have done with Windows. Haven't been since the first keynote meeting unveiling vista all those years ago.
It's clear that they hired Fisher Price for their GUI design. UAC is a joke in all forms.

Heck, watch any commercial for Windows 7 or even Vista and what is the 1 and only thing they advertise: Picture organization, slide-shows and presentations. Nothing about office usage, networking, speed, ease of administration, security, etc.. Their big push is being able to organize your pictures better.
No offense, but if I'm going to be buying a computer for multimedia management, I'll get a mac.

And I think its rather naive that think that IE 9 will get people to move from XP. That's just funny. "Lets charge people a few hundred dollars to get them to upgrade their OS so they can use IE 9". Not to mention the fact that a lot of users and companies don't have the hardware to really run Vista/7 appropriately, so add the cost of new computers to that.

It's interesting how many customers we have that moved to Vista/7 and hate it, can't use it, break it completely, or hire us to revert them back to XP.

It's been so long since I even loaded up IE on my computer, I don't remember what version I even have installed.

 

hey Capp,
I have some facts and questions for you:

If microsoft start an advert talking about the new networking features or administation in windows 7 most people wouldnt understand it so thats why they dont put that in the adverts. there is enough articles on the web on the new features for administrators see the links below to get started.
Have you ever looked at the changes between windows xp >vista in the wikipedia article?
link 2

If the display driver crashes in windows xp you have to do a hard reboot because its running in kernel mode
if the display driver crashes in windows vista or 7 it will restart and after 1 or 2 seconds you can carry on as if nothing happerned because the display driver run in user mode.

read about the "under the hood" changes like my example above.
vista introduced improved sound stack, better memory management, the desktop effects being offloaded to the gpu so the cpu does less work etc etc.
so there is alot of improvements in vista and 7.
Uac is there for a reason.
Limited user accounts in windows xp suck you cant even view the clock/calender. UAC in vista was designed to force devlopers to stop creating applications that need admin rights. I feel it worked. most programs now run with less rights so are harder to exploit.
if there is to many uac prompts from some software complain to them not microsoft. why do you feel uac is a joke?

Windows XP wasnt good until SP2 people forget that.
I used vista from before SP1 and a few things did crash but SP1 solved that.
windows 7 works fantasticly without a service pack thats progress IMO.

I havent had any of my customers complain about vista or 7.

btw one of the reasons directx10 and IE9 are only for vista and 7 is because they make use of the new graphics stack that was introduced in vista.

What sort of applications have your customers run that dont work on vista/7?

 

@lodore
OH trust me, I've spent enough time reading about the under the hood improvements. Kind of a responsibility of an IT company and a tech person. That is the stuff I read in my spare time.
I am more referring to the fact that those ads targeted towards the non-tech person don't reveal something like "we made it easier to understand how to use your computer" and "feel more secure while surfing the web", no...they chose the "look what you can do with your pictures" campaign.

While that is a good feature for sure, I can honestly say, in 8 years of using XP and supporting it, I have never once had a display driver crash. In fact, in that same amount of time, I've only seen a BSOD in XP once and that was user error related.

While offloading the desktop effects to the GPU is definitely a huge plus, if they hadn't redesigned the GUI to look so cartoonish, it wouldn't be a problem anyway. I can't even stand the default view in XP, it is always reverted back to classic view. Personally, I can't stand graphics full of gradient, bouncing icons, animated folder views, semi-transparent windows, etc..
And the redesign of the entire start menu and explorer window....can't stand it.

Starting from the first demo of Vista I saw and continuing on, being asked more than 1 time of "are you sure" for anything is overkill. Want to edit the registry...are you sure...are you really sure...yes...well ok ,but are you really really sure? People like me like to get from 1 task to the next with keyboard shortcuts and as fast as possible. When I have to wait for Windows to check in and see if I actually typed regedit for the 4th time, it makes me want to just format the hard drive so I don't have to see the message again.
If you've ever had to administer a network, deploy anything past XP or do anything past general web browsing in mass quantity, you would loathe the UAC too.

Actually XP SP2 broke A LOT of stuff before they got it fixed. If you used Time Warner, SBC, or a couple other internet providers, SP2 prevented internet access and caused multiple problems. There was a mass newsletter sent out to myself and quite a few customers warning not to install it yet due to the breakage.

My biggest complaint of where Windows has gone is the GUI. As mentioned above, I loathe all the unnecessary graphical "upgrades". Yes you can do some serious tweaking and stuff to get it to look more efficient and normal, but why should I have to put that much effort in removing all the stuff they throw in as default.

Never said I had any apps that didn't run on Vista/7...I said I have tons of clients that hate using it. They hate all the new graphics, how they changed around the system files, start menu, explorer window, desktop, etc.. You'd be surprised how many times I heard someone complain about changing the start button from a normal button to the round thing they put in Vista/7.
If you don't do it very often, it is surprising to learn that the majority of computer users are novice at best. A huge % of my business is elderly individuals that can barely navigate Win2k. Moving them XP was quite a mess and not much even changed. The first time they saw Vista...I got a lot of "What did you do with all my stuff" questions.

Directx10....good for playing games, but not really needed for the rest of the users. IE9...dont even use IE, so no loss there. I have users in my personal office that barely know how to find their my documents and prefer FireFox over IE. lol.

 

I acually prefer the new start menu.
Why do people care that the start icon has been changed to a windows logo in a globe shape?

The old style start menu takes up to much space IMO.
in safe mode the old start menu is a real pain in the ass.

Desktop effects is a personal thing. I have no problems with desktop effects. I like how in windows 7 i can preview another window by hovering over it without acually opening it.

with windows 7 i can finaly change the order of applications on the taskbar so they dont just get added to the right when i open a new program.
being able to pin programs to taskbar is great to. for the most part you shouldnt even need to use the start menu much.
the search box at the bottom of the start menu is useful and makes finding things easier. opening device manager,regedit etc can be found right away. much quicker than having to navigate through several menus like on xp.
I did find vista horrible for changing locations of certain things. Trying to find out where to change network card settings was a major pain. that was sorted in 7 with a simple change adapter settings on the left side of network and sharing centre.

If UAC wasnt created most people would still be using an administrator account and if they visited an infected website it would take over there computer.
I do wish when you install windows 7 it asked you to create one admin account with a password then on the next step create the rest as standard users.
I dont think windows explorer has really changed that much. there is lots of little things that have changed in 7 that i have wanted to be changed for ages. for example with windows 7 if you change settings to say taskbar after 30seconds the settings are saved to disc. where as with older versions of windows they are saved when you log out. notication area is much better in windows 7. by default it hides the new icon and only shows the notifications from them. For windows alerts you no longer get nagged by tasks such as not automatic windows update settings etc instead you have a flag icon which opens the windows action centre which shows all the potential issues. its much nicer and neater.

as for file location changes i feel Users/(username) is much better than documents and settings/(username)
plus its easy to change the location of the user folders to a second partition /second drive so users wont lose there data if windows has a problem.

One thing i dont like about windows 7 is the insistence of ribbon menus in bundled applications. what is wrong with the menu paint has used since windows 95?
I am glad windows 7 doesnt have a bultin mail client. its one less security hole and if someone wants a mail client its an easy download.

I do feel that overall windows vista and 7 offer good improvements over XP in both under the hood changes and interface changes.
Microsoft cant please everyone with such a a huge market share they have to work out what is wanted most.
I dont have a problem with change. If you get a new phone the interface is different. skyhd box has a different interface over standard skybox, ps3 has a different interface than PS2.

I feel windows 7 is the best windows so far and is the best desktop operating system.
Interface of windows 7 is fantastic.
I would say the worst retraining exercise is office 2007.

 

I totally understand and partially agree with what you said.
A lot of it comes down to preference for sure, and from my personal experience, many don't prefer the changes. I'm a bare-bones kinda person. I never have more than 4-5 icons in my systray, if that many. I disable the security center and any other running task that likes to tell me when something is outside the parameters it feels. Thats just me, not my clients.
Call me "old-school", but I was perfectly fine with the way Windows looked in W2K. The first time I saw XP, i was like "What is this...Windows Bob part 2?"

As with most change, it takes time. Yes they changed the interface between the PS2 and the PS3 and between xbox and xbox360, but did you hear how long people complained about the change and how many tweaks they had to do to just the basic navigation to get people to quiet down.

As far as IE goes, Its a lost cause in my opinion. Going 5 years without any improvements when everyone around you has, does nothing for your image. That and I like things to be fast, efficient and minimal. I even use FireFox for sites requiring IE. Just a quick click to IETab and boom, works just fine.

 

Most websites work with firefox now. the problem i have is that not all websites are designed for opera.
IE8 does have some improvementsfor example tab seperation which i wish opera had. but i dont see the need for things like accelerators.

 

I'd watch how you phrase that. Most websites aren't "designed for firefox". They are designed for IE, but most website authors also patch in code with firefox in mind, so that they look the same. Where as before, the only browser in consideration was IE.

 

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Whether or not you would benefit from GPU acceleration depends on how you use the browser. I like to watch videos on Youtube, and as the resolution goes up so does the CPU utilization. Youtube is already offering some videos in 720p HD and I expect the resolution will continue to increase. If the browser must rely exclusively on the CPU things are going to start bogging down.