Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
IE 8 beta 2 coming in August
Bill Gates gave his last talk, appropriately, to developers at TechEd. No matter what you think of the guy, he is an icon that helped create the software industry. Without him and Steve Jobs, who do we have? :)
In his speach he talked about Internet Explorer, and how IE 8 will have an update in a couple of months:
Gates also highlighted Microsoft’s flagship Web technology, the Internet Explorer (IE) browser, which has been an asset and a curse for the company over the years. While it allowed Microsoft to secure its dominant position in Web-browsing technology, it also triggered Microsoft’s U.S. antitrust woes, something that haunts the company to this day. IE also has taken a hit in the past several years as Mozilla Firefox, an open-source browser, has gained a loyal following, forcing Microsoft to step up development and make its own product more innovative.
Gates revealed that beta 2 of the next version of IE, IE 8, will be available in August. He also stumped for what has been his pet interest during his years at Microsoft — natural human-interface technology that allows people to interact with computers in ways similar to how they interact with each other. Last week, Microsoft revealed that the next version of Windows, Windows 7, will include touchscreen technology, a fact he mentioned in his talked.
I have a funny feeling that we are going to see some really cool things to come out of IE 8. A few surprises.
A nice surprise would be a mandatory update for all Windows systems so we don’t have to worry about more than one IE browser :)
Like a working DOM? That seems like a damn cool thing to me.
Microsoft isn’t really known for throwing in new features during the beta phase.
I will print out this page and eat it if a “really cool surprise” is included in IE 8 beta 2.
“No matter what you might think [Bill Gates]?”
I think very highly of him. He does excellent interviews and is quite witty, not to mention smart.
I think IE8 is more of a ‘catch-up’ browser than an innovative one. They are years behind the rest of the web-browsing fleet and just need to prove to the world they aren’t obsolete (which they are).
But I agree, Bill Gates is a very smart guy and I have alot of respect for him.
I to respect Bill a lot, though after testing the last IE8 BETA on the Gaia samples, I must confess that if that was the “standard browser” showing “smiling faces” then IE8 will be nothing else than a _flopping_ and utterly FAILED Silverlight launching campaign…!
Also if they do not straighten up their standard support it effectively means that not one Ajax/DHTML library in the world would be _ABLE_ to support them, even if they tried which effectively means RIP for IE…
I expect the “really cool surprise” to be on par with the IE4 Easter Egg. (Can’t believe I can remember that!)
tj111 can you please tell me just _one_ “innovation” of firefox?
from standards point of Rob Sayre of Mozilla says acid3 is worthless and afaik firefox 3 will not be acid3 compliant. why none of those standards-junkies including ppl here not commenting on that at all!
@Fujifilm
Because Mozilla could rip out 99% of their standard compliance and still be miles ahead of Microsoft. When we’re coming with releases and we’re testing Gaia FireFox, Safari and Opera mostly works right away. IE we can spend weeks on fixing…
@polterguy
my point is not about what you’re saying. we all know MS does _not_ comply with standards. the point is people criticize only MS. they should do this to all others.
my other point is they blame MS about innovation but others are no different at all.