In addition to reliability one thing I want in Longhorn is a quality Web browser.
I am coming round to the view that Internet Explorer needs to be quietly put to one side and something more reliable and more secure written to replace it in Longhorn.
Some people experience lock ups with IE. I haven't, as far as I recall, suffered from that problem. But FTP via IE works but seemingly only when the wind is in a favourable direction. I have gone back to using Cute FTP because IE on Windows XP simply wasn't reliable. So I guess I am echoing Longhorn Wish List - 1 there. Poor reliability is something I would like to be in the past.
IE is just odd sometimes. IE has, without any intervention from me, suddenly decided that I should be given "Smaller" text. But I want "Medium". If IE was the only application affected by this new idiosyncracy it wouldn't be so bad but, if I have this right, changing text size in IE (in this case the change is by IE rather than me) also changes text size in the Office 2003 Help windows and other IE-based windows. So flakiness in one application affects several others. One of the distinctly negative aspects of tightly integrated software.
IE has also, without warning, decided that I don't want to see the status bar. Well IE is wrong. I find the status bar useful but IE seems determined not to display it without me opening the status bar explicitly on every IE window! Hm.
I guess that some IE security patch has decided to overwrite some setting I had chosen so long ago that I have forgotten that I did it.
The topic of endless security patches brings me to my main concern about IE. Is it secure?
Don't laugh. It's a serious question.
IE has been patched so often that it must be mostly patches now. Except perhaps for that little X in the top right corner of its window. I think I saw that way back in an early version of IE. Maybe it is even original.
Seriously, Windows Longhorn needs a better, more secure browser than IE.
My next point may seem silly. I think it is silly that I have to make it. I want a browser that is designed to be used on a network. I suspect that the implications of network use were inadequately thought out when IE was thrown together.
I want a browser in Longhorn that isn't cross-linked to all sorts of other programs. I don't want to fix the Help window for InfoPath 2003 by going to fiddle with a setting in IE. Cross-linking of that type just contributes gratuitously to poor user experience.
And poor user experience won't help Microsoft in the "Big Software War".
Posted by Andrew Watt at October 8, 2003 11:02 AMPerhaps you accidently held down the control key and scrolled the mouse wheel?
Posted by: RichB at October 9, 2003 09:04 AMI'll do you one better for an IE story. I have two accounts: a development account that runs as admin and a normal user account I use for the day to day. Well, during one lenghy compile I thought I'd browse for something that caught my eye a couple of days prior. I thought I'd be clever and use the "run as" feature to run IE as my normal user account so I could access my history and favorites. Everything went fine, until I found that my favorites were completely gone. Logging into may normal user account I find that the registry settings that make the "Favorites" folder magic have been wiped away. I restored them, and ran IE. It wiped them again. I still have no favorites. As a programmer, I can sort of forgive bugs in software; everyone's human. But how in holy hippos did this bug even happen? You'd really have to try, I think.
Posted by: BrianPe at October 10, 2003 06:29 AMSo this probably isn't feature that your average Joe would want but I think developer's would really like it. And as we all know, getting and keeping developers on your platform is very important. So my wish is for a much improved Console interface. In fact, I'd rename cmd.exe (Command Prompt) to something like Command Console or Command Shell. Anyway, I think a number of the developer utilities like sed/grep/awk, etc should just come with the Longhorn shell. I would love to see a shell scripting engine that provided for mulitple languages (a C# shell would be way cool). WSH doesn't quite cut it because I can't execute the from the command prompt. Also, why is it that Win9x understands cd ... or cd .... and Windows NT never did? Doskey is very nice but why does it use F8 for command search? Why not just use UpArrow and DownArrow for both command search (something is alread typed at the command prompt) and scroll through the command history. Also, file/dir name autocomplete should be set to tab by default IMO. I have used KornShell a lot in the past and in general I think it is more powerful than the NT batch language however I have always hated trying to pick apart strings or compare numbers. One last thing, why don't Command Prompt windows properly theme under XP? They look a bit cheesy. OK enough rambling for now.
Posted by: Keith Hill at October 10, 2003 09:40 PMHere's one item that I think really deserves some attention: proper support for existing web standards!
IE's support for CSS2 is horribly buggy and incomplete, and it has absolutely NO support for XHTML 1.1 when served with MIME-type "application/xhtml+xml", much less MathML and SVG. For me, these shortcomings are dealbreakers, as it means that I can't expect to be able to communicate serious mathematics on the web without resorting to GIFs galore.
If the next edition of IE fails to come up to speed in its' support for W3C standards, it'll be absolutely worthless to me, just as ASP.NET is nearly worthless to me in its' current, tag-soup-spitting incarnation. Microsofties out there, are you listening?
Posted by: Abiola Lapite at October 12, 2003 12:05 AMThe "smaller" text is an issue with Outlook, where its font settings for mail display both override and *change* the settings of IE.
There's a solution (changing the setting within an obscure dialog in Outlook) described in MS KBA #242984
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;242984
Note that although the article only mentions older versions, the bug seems to still be present in fresh installs of fully-up-to-date versions (IE6, WinXP, Outlook 2003) since that's how I ran into it recently. In fact, googling for a solution led me here... it was a few results later that I found the solution, but I just thought I'd pass on the message.
Posted by: Wes at December 16, 2003 05:53 AM