Get IE8 Activities In Firefox
One of the new features in Internet Explorer 8 is Activities, which lets you contextually use the information on a page with other services, and because it uses some generally open formats, someone’s already adapted it for other browsers. This Firefox extension lets you practically seamlessly use Activities in Firefox, so check it out.
Microsoft’s Extreme Server Makeover Check out this video, spoofing Extreme Home Makeover for the IT world. It’s weird in places, but just watch it, k?
How To Tell If Your PC Supports Hibernation Milo explains how to use POWERCFG.exe to tell if your Windows Vista PC supports hibernation mode, as well as what other power modes your PC supports. It’s an extremely useful tip if you’re running into some power troubleshooting issues.
Halo 3 Heroic Map Pack Now Free
If you’re getting bored of playing Halo online, you’ll be pleased to know that one of its map packs is now free. The price has been dropped 100% on the “Heroic” map pack, giving you three new multiplayer maps for the sweet price of nothing. Enjoy.
Microsoft Releases Popfly Game Creator
Microsoft released a game creator that lets you use Popfly, their free mashup creation tool, to create Silverlight-based games that can run on webpages, Facebook, the Vista Sidebar, pretty much anywhere.
GTA IV Breaks UK Sales Record
Grand Theft Auto 4 sold 631,000 copies on launch day in the UK alone, beating San Andreas’ record from four years ago by over 100 thousand units. The Xbox 360 version beat the PS3 version by 101,000 copies sold, and 360 console sales were up 125%.
Vista Feature Pack Released Microsoft has released the first “Feature Pack” for Windows Vista, adding some wireless features that, while nothing huge, could represent a growing series of feature packs that improve the operating system over the coming months and years. Feature Pack 1 adds support for Bluetooth 2.1 to Vista, as well as a Unified Pairing user interface and updates to Windows Connect Now. Get it here.
Download Windows Live for Windows Mobile
Microsoft has released a free download of the Windows Live for Windows Mobile 6 software that comes pre-loaded on some (but not all) Windows Mobile 6 phones. Pick up the download and get Push Hotmail, synchronized Live Contacts, a Live Search bar for the Home screen and one-click photo uploading to Live Spaces.
Microsoft Fastest To Deploy Patches
A Symantec report on malware discovered in the second half of last year shows that Microsoft was the fastest to respond to discovered software vulnerabilities. On average, Microsoft deployed patches within six days, compared to Apple, which took an average of 79 days, as well as faster than HP, Red Hat or Sun. There’s a lot detail in the article about the type of security vulnerabilities (most are caused by ActiveX), and let’s see how fast you can spot the Rent reference.
Turn Webslices into Vista Sidebar Gadgets
Webslices is a new feature in Internet Explorer 8, which allows you to add specifically selected portions of webpages to the menubar of IE, and have them automatically push updates to you. Sean Lyndersay has taken the Webslice out of the browser, and has designed a Vista Sidebar Gadget that lets you add any Webslice to your desktop. It works well, and Webslices as Gadgets are actually more useful than they are in the browser.
By the by, I learned that the reason the Facebook Webslice doesn’t work is that it needs to be installed while you are running IE as an administrator. That’s really a broken feature, and needs to be fixed for final IE8 release, or developers need to design their Webslices to not work that way.
Free Ford Sync and April Fools Xbox Live Downloads
Two Ford Sync picture packs and a Ford Sync-related dashboard theme have been released free on Xbox Live in the U.S. These are kid-themed, so get ‘em for your kid (or yourself, if you’re cute enough). There are also some April Fools-related pics, available for a limited time.
Secret Confessions Vista Sidebar Gadget This Gadget lets you leave confessions anonymously for random others to read and to read confessions from other users. It has the annoying “feature” of reading the confession out loud with Vista’s text-to-speech system, and no way to turn it off, and the confessions thus far are mostly homophobic or racist, but it’s a great idea that could become something.
Microsoft launched the first beta of Internet Explorer 8 today at MIX. IE8 comes with a lot of web standards improvements and some good efforts to make sure pages look the same in IE as they do in other browsers. IE8 has a new mode that adheres closely to web standards, and if a site refuses to load because it expects IE7, you can click a button to make the site think you are running that browser.
There are some new features in IE8. “Activities” are data providers that you can use to get information related to the page you are currently reading. They’re sort of like a combination of RSS feeds and toolbars. You can use them to submit sites to Digg and StumbleUpon, blog about the current page, share on Facebook, send an email, translate a web page and more, all without installing a bunch of browser add-ins. Anyone can develop Activities, and if the page you are currently on offers one, an auto-discovery button will light up.
Another new feature is WebSlices. With this feature, users can choose a part of any webpage and subscribe to it, sort of like an RSS feed, and view that part of the page with automatic regular updating. You can add a Slice of the weather, friend status updates on Facebook, headlines from a news site, or anything you choose or a web developer offers to you.
IE8 has some improvements, like the three layout modes, CSS 2.1 compliance, fixed cross-browser inconsistencies, improved namespace support, performance improvements, and built-in developer tools.
IE7 will not install on pre-release versions of Vista Service Pack 1 and debug versions of Vista, Vista SP1 and Server 2008.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 will add a new page to the home page set. This page will be automatically removed from the home page set two weeks after you install Internet Explorer Beta 1. You can remove this additional home page from your home page set at any time. Uninstalling Internet Explorer Beta 1 earlier than its automatic removal will not remove the additional home page. In that case, you can remove the home page manually.
This is hilarious: The new Activities for Hotmail and Spaces won’t run on IE8 in IE8 mode. You must click the button to have IE8 pretend to be IE7, even though the feature the Activities are for is IE8 only. That’s weird coding. Apparently there are a lot of problems with Activities in IE8 mode.
Pages will always print in IE7 mode, even after being viewed in IE8 mode.
Links to portions of a webpage (using # anchors) may not work in IE8 mode.
IE8 is not compatible with a lot of accessibility software.
Some add-ons don’t work with IE8, or even crash the browser, including Skype, the Google and Yahoo Toolbars, RealPlayer 11 and QuickTime Player.
The maximum number of simultaneous connections has been increased, and will be automatically increased if you are on a broadband connection.
As noted above, users who installed Vista Service Pack 1 can’t install IE8. You’ll need to uninstall SP1, or install the final release version of SP1, to get IE8. If someone wants to show me how to get SP1 so I can uninstall the pre-release and get IE8, I’d love the help.
Microsoft has caved to pressure, and in the long run, the entire internet will be better for it. MS has announced that Internet Explorer 8, the next version of its popular web browser, will make its IE8 standards mode the default.
IE8 will have three web page rendering modes: Quirks Mode, which contains all the old IE weirdness and bugs deliberately included to avoid breaking web pages; Standards Mode, which debuted in IE7 and more closely conforms to some web standards, but not nearly enough; and an IE8 so-called “super Standards” Mode, which conformed so well to web standards that it passed the notoriously difficult Acid2 rendering test.
Originally, Microsoft planned to make IE7, previously an opt-in mode for web developers, the new default, and make IE8 mode an opt-in, but developers and users complained. Even though Microsoft’s plan of taking things slowly and giving the web time to adjust was sound, the web community wanted to move faster and get the hell out of this era of inconsistent browser support, and as a result, IE8 mode will be the default mode when IE8 ships.
Lazy web developers can still opt backwards to IE7 or Quirks Modes, but they might be too lazy to do that, too. When IE8 and Firefox 3 start gobbling up the last generation’s market share, we’ll start to see a web that works the way it is supposed to, whether it wants to or not. Expect more websites to start running properly in Opera, Safari and other alternative browsers, as developers become more predictable and consistent.
The IEblog is talking about how websites can prepare for Internet Explorer 8, early betas of which should be becoming more common as this year goes by. They laid out the User-Agent string for the new browser, which will be a simple:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)
Unlike the IE7 beta, the IE8 beta versions will not have a special beta tag (the letter “b”) in the User-Agent, so that beta versions will work with websites the same as the final release. Also, the beta will ship with a new ability to “pretend” they are IE7, returning the IE7 User-Agent string just by clicking an option in the menu.
Opera Software, makers of the greatest browser in the world, the Opera browser, have filed a complaint to the European Commission against Microsoft for antitrust violations. Opera claims that Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows is stifling competition, and that IE’s noncompliance with established internet standards makes it impossible for other, standards-based browsers, to work with the same websites IE does.
On the one hand, I love Opera. There’s no browser like it on the market, no browser that is as stable or as powerful as theirs. On the other hand…
This issue was settled years ago.
Firefox is competing just fine, so competition isn’t a problem.
Opera filed this in Europe, which has a hostile, biased court system against Microsoft and other successful companies. I mean, look at France, which actually made it illegal for Amazon to offer free shipping. The European Commission seemingly renders decisions by looking at which company has more money and ruling against them.
That said, it is ridiculous that Opera is the most standards-compliant browser out there, yet new websites have trouble running on it, because they are developed for IE and Firefox, and not for the internet itself. However, removing Internet Explorer from Windows doesn’t increase choice, it decreases it, especially since it’s real hard to download an alternative web browser when you don’t have a browser in the first place.
I propose two usable solutions:
First, have Windows offer you all the browsers on the market, with each browser getting a listing in Windows Setup. IE can be on the computer by default, but you’ll get the option to download any other browser when setting up your computer. Each browser gets a few sentences to say how great they are, but they have to also list their market share numbers, to be fair.
Second, force major internet companies to develop for all browsers, not just IE and Firefox. Start with Google, which is probably breaking the law with half of its Web 2.0 apps. See, Google has an incestuous financial and manpower arrangement with Firefox, and is thus biased towards a browser duopoly. As a result, a lot of its more advanced apps ship with support for only IE and Firefox, and don’t work in Opera.
Worse, Google actually has its apps sometimes block Opera when they launch, even when they work in Opera! Considering Google’s relationship with Firefox, that might be illegal, and at the very least, a large company like Google should be developing for the entire internet. Force Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to make all their web properties work in all browsers, and you’ll be promoting competition. That’s my advice.
A few things you can download to make Windows Mobile a little better:
Web Viewer is a free add-on for Pocket Internet Explorer that adds tabbed browsing and changes around the UI to make it better (something sorely needed on that way dated browser). It also remembers closed tabs so you can get them back, as well as typed URLS, plus it has full screen viewing and source code viewing.
SPB’s Pocket Plus isn’t free, but it adds a lot of cool stuff for just $30 (with a money-back guarantee). You get tabbed browsing, fast search in IE, ZIP support, file encryption, storage card formatting, and file properties info. What’s really cool, though, is that it adds kinetic scrolling so you can scroll up and down just by flicking your fingers, and you can do it in the web browser as well as on lists (like the contact list, emails and stuff like that).
Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP has been released with some minor updates, and missing one major thing: A Windows Genuine Advantage Check. Microsoft has removed the anti-piracy tool, so that users running non-Genuine versions of Windows can still install IE7.
Microsoft decided that it was more important for pirates to have the heightened security of IE7 than to discourage pirates by sticking them with the old software. Many of Microsoft’s software updates require a WGA check so that pirates can’t use them, but the threat of botnets of zombie computers infected because of an insecure IE6 was so serious, Microsoft removed the piracy check. Good for them, and good for everyone, since IE7 is a pretty good upgrade.
Microsoft has settled its patent dispute with Eolas, ending eight years of litigation. The dispute was over the patent that makes Eolas such a successful patent troll, one for invoking external applications in a web browser, one that Eolas won once over Microsoft with a $521 million judgement that was never fulfilled.
Microsoft altered Internet Explorer to avoid Eolas’ patent (which is why you have to click to activate an ActiveX) control, plus Microsoft may have found a way to beat Eolas back in May of this year. According to Wikipedia, Microsoft was awarded a patent with almost the same wording as Eolas’, prompting the Patent Office to open arguments that Microsoft owned Eolas’ patent.
The circumstances of the case almost guarantee Microsoft paid less to settle this than the $521 million 2003 judgement. I would not be surprised if Eolas, eager to avoid losing its big patent, settled for considerably less. Microsoft will only say it paid $60-72 a share, but no one knows how many shares exist.
Microsoft has launched a new website, Tafiti.com, that delivers Windows Live Search in a Silverlight interface. Tafiti, swahili for “do research” or “to search”, is more of an expirement, showing the cool applications and UI that are possible with Silverlight, but it is fully functional, with Live Search, including web search, books search, blog search, news search, and image search. It appears that you have to uninstall the Silverlight 1.1 alpha and re-install the 1.0 Release Candidate to make it run (that’s not getting annoying).
You can drag searches over to the areas on the right side, then, share them with others or your other PCs (or Macs). Each search stacks on a card above the last one. Tafiti uses some pretty cool animation, only possible with Silverlight. There’s a really cool carousel that rotates among search types. The news search uses a very cool newspaper style view.
There’s also this cool tree view, that shows items from the search on a rotating tree. It’s good for a screensaver, and can be clicked to run full screen.
Check out Tafiti, it’s pretty cool, and it goes to show you what Silverlight is capable of. Five guys built this, so the possibilities are more than there for small teams to do cool things.
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
Apparently, these six words can crash Internet Explorer 6 (and possibly 7):
Microsoft’s HD Photo Format To Be Standardized As JPEG XR
First it was Windows Media Photo, then HD Photo. Now, Microsoft’s high powered image format is set to become an industry standard, literally the next JPEG, as the Joint Photographic Expert’s Group is working to to make it so under the new name, JPEG XR (eXtended Range). JPEG XR will become the next generation image format, available under an open license to everyone, allowing for a a ton more color information to be saved by the camera. It should prove a great alternative to camera RAW by actually being a standard (RAW is different from every camera manufacturer, sometimes every model).
Microsoft Blames The Family For Xbox Fire That Killed Baby
Microsoft issued its first response to a lawsuit that blames it in the death in fire of a baby. The family of the child is suing Microsoft, claiming that the power supply of the original Xbox overheated, sparked the wiring and started the fire at the house in Warsas, Illinois. Despite the fact that Microsoft recalled all Xbox 360 power adapters due to fire concerns, they are fighting, and said in their statement:
The losses “were the result of an open, obvious, and apparent condition which was known to and recognized by the plaintiff and/or others who, nevertheless, knowingly, willingly, intentionally, and voluntarily exposed themselves to said danger and assumed the risk of incident, injuries, losses, and damages,” Microsoft charges.
Considering the number of families misusing power strips, I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft has enough evidence to support its side. Still, considering the obvious fire problems the power supply had, as well as the fact that the family is just seeking damages in excess of $50,000, maybe it’d be easier to just pay them off?
Massachusetts Relents, Accepts Open XML
Massachusetts has backed off from its plans to become an OpenDocument-only user, accepting both ODF and Microsoft Office’s Open XML as acceptable file formats. The state had been moving its IT towards what it called standards, and did not consider Office, despite being the best-selling and most widespread file format, a standard, but Microsoft’s moves to get Open XML standardized have satisfied them, finally. Part of the push to keep using Office came from disability groups, which require Office’s disability features.
It was all well and good for Mass. to try and push standards in order to make government documents more accessible, but they got sidetracked with the ODF vs. Office thing early on as it turned into a political statement. It stopped being about accessibility and started being about hurting the “evil corporation”, Microsoft, and that’s a stupid way to run a business or a government. If someone wants to use ODF, use it if it is superior or if your constituents support it, not to make a statement and use a format no one else is using.
What’s strange is that it was originally linked via Microsoft’s link referral site, go.microsoft.com, meaning someone at Microsoft set up a permanent redirect to the video from Microsoft’s own website. According to The Register, they also linked to this:
Internet Explorer Named Most Influential Product
A CompTIA survey of IT professionals has named Microsoft’s Internet Explorer the most influential technology product of the last 25 years. Not only did Microsoft take the top spot, it won or tied all of the top four spots, with Microsoft Word in second, Windows 95 third, and Excel fourth (tied with Apple’s iPod). IE, Word and Excel certainly aren’t as sexy as a tiny music player, but their impact on the industry is undeniable, and this survey reflects that.
The Hotfix says that they have been told to expect the first beta of Internet Explorer 8 to ship around the same time the beta of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 does, sometime near the end of the year, or a little after SP1 ships. The IE8 beta will be released both for Windows XP and Windows Vista, although there will be differences between the versions.
Apple released Safari for Windows a week ago, and it looks like they maybe should have waited a little longer.
Let us count the ways:
Compiler benchmarked Safari against Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox2, and the results didn’t look great for the Apple browser. Safari wound up in last place opening a message in Gmail, last place logging into Gmail, and two seconds slower than Firefox in Google Calendar.
If you didn’t like Safari’s blurry fonts, you’ll hate when it spits out gobbledygook because you have different language settings than English. Take a look at the messed up screenshot Amit Agarwal took, and fixing the damn thing isn’t fun or sometimes easy.
Apple put out a press release, proclaiming 1 million downloads in the first two days. Considering the millions following the WWDC, the AP coverage, the blog posts, news articles in every publication on the planet, one million could be a little low. I’m shocked Apple would brag about downloads so soon, when there may not be a lot of pickup in the weeks and months to come. Typically, these sort of things get a ton of downloads in the first day or two, then taper off unless they are a hit. Nothing we’ve heard indicates Safari is taking off with users, so maybe Apple should have curbed its enthusiasm. Claim 1 million in two days, and if you can’t claim 8 million in a month, you’ve wasted everyone’s time. Does anything indicate that will actually happen?
Completely missed in all the talk at Mix about Silverlight, Microsoft’s amazing development platform for rich applications, is the news that Silverlight is coming to the excellent Opera browser. Opera, which I use and love, is known for having some of the best web standards support of any browser and amazing features not available in any other browser, would be an amazing platform for running Silverlight applications, and the release would guarantee Silverlight compatibility on the top four browsers (IE/Firefox/Opera/Safari) and top operating systems (Windows Vista/XP/2003/2000 and Mac OS X Tiger/Leopard), covering probably over 90% of the market.
Note that I mentioned Windows 2000. Silverlight doesn’t support it right now, but it will, just like it is going to support Opera. I can’t wait to be able to run Silverlight in Opera, since it would eliminate many reasons for loading up IE. With IE8 moving towards web standards, and websites having to follow it there, all sites will eventually run as intended on Opera, and that’s great for everybody, even those on other browsers.
IE7 Pro is an amazing add-on for Internet Explorer 7 (and IE6) that lets you change all sorts of crazy stuff in IE. What can you change?
Double-click to close tabs
Open new tabs from address bar
Crash recovery to save all open tabs if the browser dies on you
Move IE menu bar above address bar, like it used to be
Get rid of search bar
Ad blocking (Flash, rich media, ones that fly around the screen, pop-ups/unders
Drag and drop to open links, search, save photos
Mouse gestures
Save web page as image
Greasemonkey user script-like functionality
And that’s just a partial list! Check it out at IE7Pro.com and wonder how you ever lived without it. Now, if I could move the tab bar to the side of the browser like in Opera, I might even consider switching browsers.
The anticipated Internet Explorer session at Mix 07, while not containing a preview of IE8, did contain a good amount of details about the direction IE is heading, and some of what you can expect when IE8 hits next year.
The most interesting info centers on web standards. According to Mary Jo Foley’s report of the session, IE8 will encourage web designers to create websites that adhere to web standards, and allow them to opt-in to a standards mode if they meet that criteria. Microsoft doesn’t want to be accused of breaking web pages anymore, by no longer supporting problems from older versions of IE, so if more pages are standards-based, the responsibility for breaking web pages rests with developers, not IE.
Wilson said to expect Microsoft to be investing across layout, object model and Ajax development fronts in IE 8.0. Specificially, Wilson said Microsoft is investing in making IE 8.0 more compliant with CSS 2.1 layout standards. Microsoft also is working to make the IE 8.0 object model more interoperable with that used by other browsers, and is looking to provide more client-side application programming interfaces (APIs) to support local storage for mash-ups, Wilson said.
Good for them. If IE is standards compliant, and all other browsers hopefully will be as well, then browsers can compete on interface and features, not how they render pages, and pages can be expected to work the same way everywhere.
Lifehacker has a hugely helpful Registry fix that allows Internet Explorer 7 to have unlimited simultaneous downloads. See, IE7 only allows you to download two files at once, and makes you sit around like a dope waiting for one to finish before it allows you another. By changing this Registry key, you can increase that amount to unlimited, letting you download as you damn well please.
The Registry key is located at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings, you need to create a new 32-bit DWORD called MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server, set the value to 3, then create another DWORD called MaxConnectionsPerServer and again set it to 3. That’s it. Enjoy!
