Microsoft Offers Phone Support For IE 7

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is running a short piece detailing Microsoft's newest step in testing Internet Explorer 7, which just went into Beta 2 yesterday. They're now offering free phone support to U.S., German, and Japanese users who try out the trial software." From the article: "'We believe that IE 7, even at this beta stage, is a significant improvement and we want as many people as possible to try it and use it,' said the browser development team in a post on its blog. 'IE 7 is feature complete and has been through significant compatibility and reliability testing. People (especially technology enthusiasts) will have a good experience with it,' continued the post. Microsoft said the new version addresses some problems affecting banking and news sites. It is also designed to be more secure than the current version, with built-in protection against malicious software and online phishing scams."

ActiveX?

[Anonymous Coward]

built-in protection against malicious software and online phishing scams.

So are they doing away with ActiveX?

Seems to me...

[danpsmith]

...that Microsoft is playing catch up these days. It's well aware of the fact that it's lost the confidence of the true "tech-oriented" people and now it hopes to win them back.

What they don't understand is that their business model needs changing. No longer is software that's outdated the moment you release it that has security holes in it left and right that don't have patches going to be tolerated.

We have an open source browser with wide spread web support. I don't care if you have the tabs or not, I'm not going back to find out that you had invested not enough time yet again into security and watching as my box fills with adware.

Let's not forget who is really to blame in this adware thing, and it's MS... Ceasing use of IE has kept my PC free of adware for going on two years now. Don't think I'm going back cuz you made it prettier or add features we already had elsewhere.

I am hoping

[endrue]

that we don't start bashing MS for this. Give them credit for beta testing and making sure that the product works and also for providing support to the end-users that try it. This seems like a interesting move on their part and a good effort to make sure that the code they will eventually release is stable. I use many beta products every day and they do not provide me phone support. If gmail craps the bed then I am SOL.

I can image that we will see a lot of people here at /. trashing this for one reason or another. Just don't bash them later for not testing their code.

- Andrew

Obvious criticisms

[erroneus]

Asside from obvious criticisms, I think this is an interesting move on Microsoft's part. I remember when the browser wars started. I chose the wrong side. I was excited by Windows95. I was excited that it included TCP/IP and a web browser. I didn't know or really even care about compatibility or specs or any of that stuff. I was a relatively new and unwashed user and I loved Microsoft for all the things in Win95.

With IE7, they seem to be attempting to bring some of that newness back, or maybe it's just my own perspective. In any case, I'm not a new or unwashed user any longer and I have real concerns over vulnerabilities and other annoyances. Will ActiveX remain as the most exploitable part of MSIE and any OS that uses it? Will CSS remain 'broken?' (I shouldn't say broken since that word implies accident and gives the impression that it's unintentional. CSS is incompatible and is intentional sabotage on Microsoft's part against the world of compatibility. In spite of all standards agreed upon, Microsoft in all its power and glory is unwilling to be compatible with the rest of the world.)

Re:Acid 2 & install problems.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Until recently, when installing Firefox on a Windows computer, you had to do the uninstall old version / install new version thing to avoid duplicate - and "dead" - entries in the list of installed software.

Depends what you mean by recently.

this blog [blogspot.com] says the issue you're complaining about was fixed over a year ago

Broken rendering

[zenmojodaddy]

I'm not a web professional, but I've been given the job of designing a small website for my employers, and IE's crappy CSS support has caused me a world of hurt.I was going to ask whether anything has been done about fixing it, but an earlier post regarding the Acid 2 test has pretty much answered that. (It's a wish list? Well, yeah, but if Konqueror and Safari can grant those wishes, why not IE?)

I suppose the most we can hope for with IE7 is that it stays broken in the same ways as previous versions, so we don't have to learn a whole new raft of ugly hacks just to a get a page to look presentable.

Re:US, German and Japanese only?

[GIL_Dude]

It's fairly simple, really - it's about resources. Getting all of the multi-language "stuff" done generally comes later in the project, so they have to start with just a small set. Japanese is considered (by MSFT) as representative of language types that use pictographs style glyphs, German has some of the longest words on screen and tests your software well for things like size of text fields, labels, button text, etc., and of course English is known by so many people (as a first, second, or third language) - plus the MS "dogfooders" all need it in English...

Re:Acid 2 & install problems.

[courtarro]

This is just flamebait. First, the Acid2 is overemphasized when comparing browsers. It's good when a browser passes it, as it does suggest a higher quality of attention to standards, but it tests many things that aren't as important. In addition to testing standard CSS capabilites, it also reveals problems with error correction, from developer mistakes such as mismatched tags or syntax errors. It's good to focus on that eventually, but supporting correctly-coded, standards-compliant CSS is much more important. Hopefully FF will pass Acid2 soon, but I'm not losing any sleep over it as long FF does most of CSS properly. While Firefox and IE still have weaknesses concerning valid CSS, the FF list is much shorter.

Second, I usually get better speed out of IE6 than I do from my fully extension-loaded Firefox. That's easily explained though: it does less work. It cheats on speed by rendering pages incorrectly, cheats on memory usage by sharing much of its code with the OS, and has way less features than I get from extensioned FF. However, even a brand new install of FF already does more than IE and performs almost as well, even despite IE's aforementioned "cheating".

Think of IE as a "lite" browser and it makes sense - less features* with slightly more speed.

Last, "Firefox doesn't like ColdFusion" can easily be reversed to mean "ColdFusion doesn't like Firefox". Assuming you're correct in that they have some incompatibilities (no experience, myself), I'm betting CF was developed specifically for IE and does things contrary to standards, and FF can't figure out what it wants.

*features like security, HTML rendering quality, CSS capabilities, customizability, etc.