Veerle's blog

Microsoft released a new Beta preview release of IE 7 at MIX06 a few weeks ago and said that it is feature complete and that no stuff will be added anymore. For me this was the perfect opportunity to test how my blog renders with this new version. For those who have no intension to read further I can say the browser is doing very well and there was only 1 minor issue but more on that later. There are still some bugs left but to me it is surprising that Microsoft is actually listening to us now and that alone is a very welcome change. The IE team has also set up an Internet Explorer Feedback site and issues reported during the IE 7 Beta 2 will be looked at. They will do their best to fix issues reported. So that’s why I wrote this article.

Remember the Eolas patent an ongoing court struggle between Microsoft and the University of California? After two years Microsoft is now changing the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX controls like for example the Flash plugin and Java applets. In 2003 the changes proposed were pretty disruptive since you needed to click an OK on a alert window every time a flash movie was loading.

Here is just a short announcement that you, Internet Explorer users, can now scale the text of my blog. Well, since I reckon your patience has been tested long enough, I thought I owe you one.

Not sure but it could be that my stubbornness of using px for my fonts in the CSS stylesheet had a bit of influence to a lot of I.E. users that decided to switch to a smarter browser :-) These stats are not really surprising to me (anymore), but maybe to the 32% I.E. users reading my blog (from the past 2 months, on an avarge of 40 to 42 thousand unique visitors).

Needless to say that the nature of this site is the main reason why I.E. is losing such a big share of the cake.

Anyway I hope this is an improvement and that I made some of you happy.

Yes it is no joke! Today at RSA, Bill Gates announced that there will be a new version of Internet Explorer before the much hyped Longhorn. It has taken all kinds of security leaks and bad press to move Microsoft of their big corporate ass.

Longhorn on a diet

There’s much going on in the computer industry these days, for example on Friday Microsoft said it would cut back one of the major features that would make Longhorn a revolution “WinFS”. WinFS promised to be a smart file storage system that would make searching a whole lot easier then when using separate search programs. Apple will have a similar feature called “Spotlight“ ready in Tiger in the first half of 2005. In the coming days we will also know if there will be cut-backs in “Avalon” Microsoft’s equivalent of Apple’s Quartz rendering engine. With all those axes they plan on getting it out the door in late 2006. In other words “Longhorn” sounds awfully like the good old Copland days. Copland was a much hyped Apple system that was never released.