[jonathan lall]

Finally, some very minor improvements to the IE code that will actually make a huge difference. It's time for a little commentary on these changes and what they mean to us website makers. First of all, let's note that these are all common sense changes, which might be why MOS (Mozilla, Opera, and Safari) browser users already take them for granted. I would say good job to the IE team for making these much-needed tweaks, but truthfully, this didn't take a long time or effort to implement. Tony Chor of IE project fame said himself that the vast majority of energy is going into the Longhorn IE, which we'll be waiting on for a while (although there are still going to be minor updates to the current iteration). By the way, how much do you want to bet they could have done this for the IE on Win NT and even 98/Me systems? Funny that it's only offered for XP users.

"If you don't have XP yet," whispered a little voice. "You should really buy it to take advantage of these cool new features."

Pfft.

Originally Posted by JohnBoucher

- Downloadable Files: The file download ability can only be initiated by a user click. Pages that say "your download will begin in 10 seconds" and have an ad before launching the file will now fail.

While this is a terrible practice on webdesigners' parts in the first place, it's not an unsafe one unless the user is silly enough to hit OK for any dialogue that pops up. Which is their fault.

Moreover, I bet I could defeat this claim of theirs, unless they are actually saying that download prompts can only ever be initiated by a user click. If they only defeated the Javascript countdown method used for many of these "in 10 seconds" downloads for example, I could do the very same thing server side with a few timed header changes, in much the same way the Woburn Robotics Online splash page redirects to the main page server side four seconds after it loads (unless you've been to it already, as it cookies you the first and only time you visit it).

If this is as "good" as they say it is (that is to say it defeats all attempts to download except for user clicks), then typing in the Address Bar the URI of a file with a .zip extension will not bring up a download dialogue and will confuse users even more. Since I can induce something similar to this with PHP on my website, it might be interesting to see what happens. Somebody try it out, so we can all know!

Originally Posted by JohnBoucher

- Popup Windows: These may now only be initiated by a user action, not automatically, and only one popup will be created based on that user action... so a popup cannot spawn a popup, even if the original was spawned by a click.

Ah, stealing back Mozilla users looks to be the plan here; the only problem is that they won't go back. IE is of course the last browser manufacturer to put this feature in. Even AOL, which owns Netscape kept that element of the Mozilla code in their 7.x series, and they also had commerce to gain from popups. It looks like someone up high in Microsoft finally gave the okay, probably because everyone that uses IE now has the popup-blocking Google Toolbar anyway. Hey, curious isn't it that Microsoft wants to steal back market share from Google with their revamped search engine. Could it be that they are making it less neccessary for users to get the Google Toolbar? Nah, couldn't be...

Originally Posted by JohnBoucher

- MS Java Virtual Machine: This is no longer distributed. You should direct your users to java.sun.com.

The direct product of a few rather nasty lawsuits over Microsoft distributing their own substandard version of the Sun Java VM, which was in breach of contract; a lot of people won't be pleased, but in any case Java is terribly slow for web applications anyway, which makes it bad practice in the first place. Shame on you for using it. Luckily, I don't think this'll be a big deal for anyone anyway.

Originally Posted by JohnBoucher

- Browser Windows Alterations: You can no longer do a fullscreen window, it will only launch a maximized window. You can no longer move the statusbar, titlebar or toolbar off of the visible screen.

Finally. Giving Javascript this kind of control is idiocy and this feature is another thing that's meant to equal a Mozilla feature. It doesn't quite of course; Mozilla allows you to take back control of your browser's UI and not give Javascript any rights in that respect. This IE feature limits the worst of it, though, which is very welcome in my books.

Originally Posted by Elgin Clock

That I do not like [in reference to the killing of full screen]

Note that (AFAIK) F11 will still give you fullscreen mode, but this only means Javascript cannot open a window with no browser buttons or toolbars anymore. That may be a source of confusion.