Kevin Dente's Blog

The Blip in the Noise
The stagnation of IE

E&A post about the comatose state of IE's evolution at Microsoft. I've been thinking about posting on the very same topic - I see I'm not the only one feeling this way. This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly the problem with monopolies. Microsoft now dominates the browser market, and have little reason to innovate. I'm looking for an excuse to switch off of IE, but I haven't found it yet. I continue to evaluate Mozilla from time to time, but I still find it too piggy. And I still like IE's ability to run multiple instances of the browser process (maybe there's a way to do this in Moz but I haven't found it). Firebird has potential, as it seems design address the bloat factor of Mozilla. I'll be keeping an eye on it.

A completely revamped Favorites system (the file system/shortcut-based model SUCKS - Netscape had a better system in 1.0, for God's sake), popup killing, full support for the DOM APIs (including events), better developer tools in the browser (ala Mozilla) - these are the things I would kill for.

Oh yeah, and fixing that stupid bug that causes new browser windows to take an eternity to launch if you have multiple IE windows open. Geez, that bugs me.

Published Tuesday, May 27, 2003 12:21 PM by kevindente

Comments

# re: The stagnation of IE@ Tuesday, May 27, 2003 4:32 PM

Get MyIE2. The benefits of the IE render engine and the advantages of tabbed browsing, groups, and popup filters/add filters. Google will bring you to the site :)

Frans Bouma

# re: The stagnation of IE@ Tuesday, May 27, 2003 4:33 PM


http://www.crazybrowser.com/

duke

# re: The stagnation of IE@ Tuesday, May 27, 2003 6:26 PM

I looked at MyIE2 ages ago, and wasn't impressed. Looks like it's improved a bit since then - I'll have another look.

Never heard of CrazyBrowser. I'll have a look there too.

Kevin Dente

# re: The stagnation of IE@ Tuesday, June 17, 2003 10:24 PM

About mozilla, you can run multiple instances in linux, so I'm sure it's possible in windows as well. Just out of interest, what do you use this for? Espeically in windows, where it was my understanding that there was only ever one IE process running (as it is embedded into the OS in that strange and unholy marriage type situation).

As for pop up killing, I doubt you'll ever see it. That's something that sounds very "anti-commericial" and MS doesn't like to piss off companies. Personally that sort of thing has driven me to mozilla in windows, simply because I honestly can't stand surfing with IE. They have ugly UI bugs (forgetting state on the cookie verification dialog box for example) that drive people who are a bit paranoid about things like cookies crazy. Putting pop up blocking in there is just crazy talk!

Maybe try Mozilla Firebird, which is a lot lighter and snappier than mozilla itself, and a lot less piggish.

Arcterex

# re: The stagnation of IE@ Tuesday, December 30, 2003 7:42 PM

Arcterex said:

About mozilla, you can run multiple instances in linux, so I'm sure it's possible in windows as well. Just out of interest, what do you use this for?

I say:

If two people want to share a computer and they need to login into the same web site with different user IDs, for example. Sure, I understand why there aren't multiple instances, but most people don't and it looks terrible.

As for Mozilla being "piggish", huh? Have you tried it lately?

G

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