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genzy · #2 (**permalink**) 04-07-2007, 11:29 PM

Your guide to Microsoft's next browser
http://internetexplorer8.net/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...ox_3_plans.php

Quote:

Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation - Browsers Heading Apart Again
Written by Richard MacManus / January 11, 2007

Mozilla has published a wiki page detailing its plans for the next version of Firefox, codenamed "Gran Paradiso". The target release date is sometime in the third quarter this year and it hopes to release a major version of Firefox every year. While Firefox is still aiming for a broad mainstream audience, Mozilla recognizes that its strengths for normal users are its extensions and customization. It notes on the wiki that "Microsoft will continue to establish deeper ties from IE7/Vista to live.com & MSN" and even that other "web service providers" may introduce their own browsers (Yahoo? Amazon?). So Firefox is aiming to be the best general Web browser - e.g. it wants to be faster for AJAX apps.

Among the mandatory requirements listed for FF3 are improving the add-on experience, providing "an extensible bookmarks back-end platform", adding more support for web services "to act as content handlers" - all of which show that Firefox wants to be an independent information broker rather than a simple HTML renderer in its next version. Microformats will be a key part of this too - and this is currently listed as a "highly desirable" feature for FF3. Also good to see extensible identity management listed there. All of this encourages best-of-breed apps to flourish, which is an excellent direction for Mozilla to take with Firefox. It probably also plays into Google's hands, as they have a number of best of breed web apps - and are acquiring them at a great rate too (YouTube, JotSpot, Writely, etc).

Also in the works is Microsoft's IE8. According to ActiveWin.com, a Microsoft official at CES told them that work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product "within 18-24 months". IE8 will apparently "compete even more directly with Firefox". Looking ahead, it's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers.

So if anything, I'd hazard a guess and say that IE8 will head back into ProprietaryLand - leaving Firefox to become more of a vehicle for independent web services, particularly those from Google. While IE7 and Firefox 2 were more alike than different (feature-wise they're practically identical!), with IE8 and FF3 we will likely see the two biggest browsers head off into different directions.

http://www.css3.info/ie7-browser-share-and-ie8-hints/

Quote:

IE7 browser share and IE8 hints
May 3rd, 2007 by Peter Gasston

Apologies to all for the delay between posts, the site authors are busy with jobs, family and holidays. We’ll have some new content very shortly. In the meantime, here’s a quick browser update.

Based on my own statistics - and these are not, of course, meant to be in any way representative - April saw a pretty decent leap for IE7; its share of the market rose to 21.1%, up from 18.6% the month before. Even more encouraging, IE6 fell to 46.5% after its shock rise to 50.6% last month.

Firefox’s share continues on a slow decline since I began my figures; from a high of 16.9% in November, it falls to 14.8% in the latest figures.

Microsoft were noticeably guarded with details of changes in future versions of IE at their recent MIX event, although hints were dropped that we’d see improvements to CSS, RSS, and AJAX, and that Microformats could be on their way.

In an effort to tie this post to the theme of this blog, let me ask a question: what three CSS3 features would you most like to see in IE8?

Update: Maybe I should reword the question: With the presumption that all outstanding CSS2 bugs are removed, and all remaining CSS2 declarations implemented, what CSS3 features would you most like to see in IE8?

http://ajaxian.com/archives/ie-8-opt...rds-compliance

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Monday, May 7th, 2007
IE 8: Opt-in for standards compliance

Category: IEView the technorati tag: IE, ArticlesView the technorati tag: Articles

We have talked about the big debate on backwards compatibility vs. fixing things.

Chris Wilson chatted to a large crowd at MIX about the future of IE, in which he talked a little about IE 8:

However, Wilson did tell attendees that Microsoft is planning to require Web site authors to “opt-in” to standards mode when developing IE 8.0 sites.

“Five years ago, no one in the top 200 Web sites was using standards,” Wilson said. “Today it is half of the top 200 Web pages.”

Wilson acknowledged that he wasn’t sure exactly what form this kind of opt-in would take. But asking authors to opt in will “give us freedom to do some great things,” he said. By giving Microsoft permission to make IE 8.0 more standards-complaint, authors will take responsibility for breaking pages.

Wilson said to expect Microsoft to be investing across layout, object model and Ajax development fronts in IE 8.0. Specificially, Wilson said Microsoft is investing in making IE 8.0 more compliant with CSS 2.1 layout standards. Microsoft also is working to make the IE 8.0 object model more interoperable with that used by other browsers, and is looking to provide more client-side application programming interfaces (APIs) to support local storage for mash-ups, Wilson said.

Microsoft is planning to make tweaks to IE that will allow developers to more easily add extensions to its browser, Wilson said. He said Microsoft acknowledged that extensions are powerful but potentially “scary.”

Some are asking about DOCTYPE switching.