Ready or not: Microsoft preps early delivery of IE10 for Windows 7 Get ready for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 – it’s coming sooner than you might expect and faster than Microsoft had planned. Microsoft’s IE team has accelerated its ship date for IE10 on Windows 7 and is now targeting “end of February/beginning of March”, sources tell The Reg. According to the insiders, the IE unit had …
We're already there, and its not MS' worst nightmare either...
Check out Windows XP mode. A freely available add-on for users of Windows 7 Professional and up; you basically get Microsoft's virtual PC combined with an ISO image which contains a full version of Windows XP Professional.
I'm using this critter myself and can say it works excellent. My main usage is when I have software which I need to use temporarily; as such I don't want it to "pollute" my Win7 environment. Then I simply install on XP and run it using the virtual environment. Eventually I roll back a snapshot and I have a clean environment again.
The best part is the integration; software inside XP can be propagated in my regular Win7 start menu. So I can start programs seemingly fullscreen as native Win7 applications while they obviously retain their specific XP look and feel. Best of both worlds IMO.
>Check out Windows XP mode
Also check out: XP-More ( http://xpmore.codeplex.com/ )
A very handy tool to help administer Windows 7 VM's ...
If you are feeling a little more adventurous you can download Microsoft's Hyper-V Server 2012 for free (need to login to Microsoft) and use this as the native machine manager (unlike VMware's offering this isn't a cut down version). [Aside: I'm assuming a preference for MS products.]
If it works, why not?
I still know places that have actual DOS machines (not even virtualised, though they could be as they only really communicate with serial and network interfaces). If it works and does everything you want and isn't a liability, that's good. In fact, I'd say it's probably safer to have something in a virtualised instance rather than forgotten about, exposed to the network, and instead put in an even more locked-down environment than it had ever been deployed physically (i.e. virtual networking on the same machine preventing exposure of inter-machine communication to the network).
Certainly the deployments I've done so far of Server 2012 and Windows 8, I've kept in a VM while I'm testing to ensure a) I don't break my existing network and domains by playing with the settings and b) the settings from the network don't interfere with my tests. I see no reason why things like public-access kiosks, internal processes and obsolete software that can't be replaced can't just run in a VM. Hell, if anything, it guarantees you against a Microsoft "cull" of products. Who cares if the OS in the VM isn't supported or updated so long as it's not acting on untrusted data or connected direct to the network - the easiest way of which is to virtualise the machine and then put a REAL machine around it to sanitise access to it with up-to-date security (and on the OS of your choice).
I also personally hate anything that tries to lock itself to a particular machine. The damn door-control software I have does it for a start, not to mention boiler-control software for a huge, proprietary, £100,000-a-shot boiler. Who cares about the £40 bit of software that can only control that brand of boiler anyway, especially if it needs reinstalling and reactivating every time the old machines in the boiler room go a bit funny. Virtualise it (to be honest, if you do it right, the installers would NEVER know the difference from a real machine!), then - within the bounds of your EULA of course - re-deploy and shift the base hardware as much as you like.
Though I'm still reluctant to work inside a virtual environment ALL the time on a desktop, I think that's just my old-fashioned side coming through. The amount of things that can benefit from being virtualised is humongous. Hell, we've even been virtualising our old games for years - we call them emulators.
My girlfriend works in a genetics lab in a hospital. It's taken the IT guy there five days to rebuild the old custom interface running on DOS that runs a million pounds worth of microscope. Sure, the manufacturer has more up-to-date software... for a price. But the old stuff does EVERYTHING you ever need to do already, and the attached bog-standard PC dies and is replaced all the time because of the amount of work done on it. The microscope's still going, the software is still licensed. Virtualise it and never have to pay the license fee even if someone stops making PC's with that interface - so long as you can get an adaptor and convince the virtual machine that it's direct hardware, it's all to your benefit at much, much, much less cost. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the manufacturer update was their old DOS software running in a licensed VM that you can't see.
Would it be fair to expect that the usual hype is to be ignored? It sounds very much like their idea of the internet experience is not one I'd like. My opinion of IE9 is "why did they bother" and no doubt of IE10 will be "why should I risk taking on this when I can use something else I'm used to?"
Yes you can ignore the hype - not much difference from IE9 in everyday use. Using it on Win8 is quite pleasant because
(1) Your favourites follow you around between machines by default, if you log in with a Hotmail or similar account - but that feature isn't likely to appear in non-Win8 implementations
(2) The tabs are detachable - real handy if you have a multi-screen setup
Overall though the big issue is lack of support for decent ad-blocking - Firefox with AdBlock and NoScript (or the equivalent Chrome setup, I haven't investigated) will be preferred by most readers here.
I thought that, and had despaired of protecting my mum from this nonsense - she can't seem to keep using Firefox no matter how many times I install it and Chrome just sends all your traffic to Google so fuck that - but then I was lucky enough to discover Tracking Protection Lists.
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Browser/p3p/Default.html
Throw EasyList and Fanboy's List on there and it's like you just put AdBlock on IE.
My gut instinct--not having run it--is broad adoption of IE10 will make webdev's life easier, since it implements more of the standards more completely. It may not be perfect, but it's better than IE9, which is itself better than its diabolic predecessors.
Now, if only we convince MS to implement webgl too...
Yes there were / are. It's a great idea in principle however getting lower level access to GPU hardware is frought with security minefields, particularly given just how capable and powerful modern GPUs are.
I believe the Win 7 driver model helped a bit with this, as more drivers, or more accurately their interfaces, run in user mode than at kernel level but this isn't something I'm particularly up on.
Some detail here - http://www.contextis.com/research/blog/webgl-more-webgl-security-flaws/.
The other reason Microsoft doesn't support it, is that WebGL is not a W3C standard. It's interesting that the WebGL Wikipedia entry states that "...WebGL is integrated completely into all the web standards of the browser...".
Whatever that means.
In other news, Eadon isn't at work today.
@David D. Hagood
WebGL is a specification for a JavaScript API and as such has no dependencies on anything. It so happens that existing implementations are based on OpenGL butt there's nothing technically stopping Microsoft from wrapping DirectX with a WebGL -compliant wrapper.
Seeing as you mention DirectX, on Windows 8 IE10 uses DX 11.1 for rendering. Which is why Microsoft had to port IE10 back for Windows 7. The reason being that for marketing purposes DX11.1 is not coming to Win7 and is Win8 exclusive.
So if instead they had "allowed" DX11.1 for Win7 they would've had an easier time making a version of IE10 work on this popular flavour of Windows.
Also might've encourage game developers to use DX11.1 features, which is plainly not happening ATM due to tiny markets share of Win8.
Herein lies the conundrum: the more standards-compliant it is, the less reason there is to install it.
Has to be a good idea for corporates though - the more often you deal with change, the less likely you are to end up with entrenched oddball apps which can't with change.
One of my current clients mandates that browser stuff must work with IE, chrome, ff and safari. That sounds sensible to me.
My guess is that it will at least support HTML5.
My hosting provider uses KVM and thus provides console access to the VPS using a HTML5 enabled browser. Because it is a Windows server I'm hosting there I figured I might as well use MSIE9. Needless to say; that didn't work too well.
SeaMonkey otoh has no problems at all with the HTML5 interface, pretty odd indeed given MS' touting of HTML5 and JavaScript as of late.
Even so; I'm not so sure I'll be implementing this update myself. For the sporadic use I have for MSIE the current 9 suits me just fine.
Severity: Critical
Propagation: Enters the brains of the browser developers via unknown vector.
Symptoms: Rapid increase of version number, ridiculous expansion of 'features'.
Treament: Place developers in dark room without power. Feed on cold porridge for three weeks.
is that web interfaces on older devices don't like them
I've got a network switch and a router which don't like being connected to by recent versions of IE or Firefox Fourtunately I've a old desktop with a 3-4 year old version of Firefox on it that they will talk to.
I understand the problem is down to too many sessions being opened to the web interface but given how little I need to use the interface I'm loathe to spend too much time on fixing the browser and while the device is working I see equally little incentive to upgrade the firmware with the result of interupting work and the risk of bricking it.
A lot of the companies that are still on XP and are planning to move to Windows 7 (and there are quite a few) this year already have their software distributions sorted and that includes IE 8 / 9 plus either Firefox or Chrome on Windows 7 with no plans on changing that before rollout is complete.
Not releasing IE 10 for Windows 7 at the same as it was released for Windows 8 was a total fuckup. I can imagine some companies might bring forward migrations, assuming IE 10 can still be used on their fucked app "web apps" that require IE 6, but for the rest even Stevie B on his knees in a gimp suit isn't going to move them.
Maybe feature-wise, the end-user doesn't see much difference between IE9 and IE10, but at least Microsoft have finally broken the 300-point barrier (out of 500!) at html5test.com for the first time with IE10.
IE9 scores a wretched 138 out of 500 which is why many web developers still hate IE - at least IE10 manages a mildly respectable 320. It should be remembered, however, that most recent browsers have already exceeded or are about to exceed *400* points, so even IE10 has a lot of work to do to catch up.
We might see Windows 9 and IE11 catch up to where other browsers are now, but that's probably almost 3 years away! Essentially, IE remains the least HTML 5 compliant browser of all the major browsers and it's probably going to be that way for a very long time. It's still going to be cursed at by the vast majority of Web developers!
Several of the sections on html5test are not part of HTML5, they are 'related' technologies or unratified standards. We're back in the land of "standards are what the majority support" since the official HTML5 stuff is such a small subset of "HTML5".
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