E-Musings Mon Immorata

Will Internet Explorer 7 Really Arrive Mid-2005? Some advance hype about the next version of Microsoft's browser, Opera 8 exceeds 1 million downloads 3 days after release but Opera CEO's Norway to US swim comes a cropper, IrfanView 3.97n make a great app even better It's official! Internet Explorer 7 will arrive in Summer 2005. Code named Rincon, it doesn't seem to offer and radically new features. But there's a high probability that tabbed browsing will finally be supported. As will PNG alpha channel support. And a more consistent CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) handling including possible support for all CSS2 elements. IE6 supports most CSS tags and a few CSS2 that appeared when the browser was launched about 24 months ago. It's also rumored that IE7 will improve its default security handling and support a reduced privileges model to lessen the impact of browser exploits. Much like the IE6 setup for Windows Server 2003.. However what's swirling is just rumors. No early betas. With the sole information (or misinformation) source being the IE7 Blog maintained by its Microsoft development team. Their parent has learnt to fight fire with fire. I remember how often the IE6 Beta was leaked by a multitude of web sites. Sadly, most has shut down their servers. Or have crumbled after battling Microsoft's legions of lawyers. The survivors meekly toe the 'Microsoft' line. Of course there's still hope. Perhaps P2P networks will make available the first early betas. If you believe that a standards-compliant web is the way forward, don't forget to check out the Web Standards Project (WaSP) Acid Test II. This offers a test page to check if your web browser passes or fails a defined group of standards.

IE6 was unable to render the test page. All I could see was a blank expanse of white. Firefox 1.0.3 did a little better. And managed to display a partial image. But the newly-released Opera 8 was the best and displayed almost the whole image but its engine too broke down! But in the real world there are a couple of really significant software releases. The first is the afore-mentioned Opera 8. The second is IrfanView 3.97 that despite the incremental version number is actually a significant update to an already superb graphics tool. I habitually use it for all image related work. And the images in this blog are grabbed, processed and optimized courtesy IrfanView. Which I find can often render more optimized images than expensive graphics suites! Opera 8 includes several security enhancements that resolve known vulnerabilities found in previous Opera versions. Its also a free upgrade for users who have purchased an Opera 7 license. The browser can now whitelist specific top-level domains from a frequently updated list. To be included your web site has to pass several security-related background checks. And its hope this approach will reduce URL spoofing instances (phishing).

The voice support module has been integrated into the main browser. But you still need to download the voice libraries separately. The new "fit to width" feature in the rendering engine does away with horizontal scrolling. It would be great if they could also permanently resolve vertical scrolling issues. Then you could view any web site independent of the screen resolution it was designed for. A feature that perfectly complements the small-screen rendering option so valuable to web developers reviewing how their sites will display on a tablet PC or WAP-phone browser. The menus have been consolidated into a four-tabbed interface, with the most common features available first. Of course the Advanced tab lets you tweak Opera 8 down to the last setting. The developers have also taken heed of Opera's continued issues with GMail and the browser now supports XmlHttpRequest. But I was still unable to open the GMail URL let alone access my mail! As with every Opera version update, the included M2 email client and news reader has been improved as well. The browser now also checks weekly for a new version. My just-installed Opera 8 is a bit confused. The first time I ran it insisted I was using an older Beta. Then when I ran the command manually, it reported I had the latest version! Read the complete Opera 8 changelog. Don't tarry. Download a copy as soon as you can. Opera 8 downloads crossed the one million mark less than four days after its release. On as of 23 April 0900 CET (Central European Time) they had crossed 1,050,000. Which forced Opera's CEO, Jon S von Tetzchner who'd boldly proclaimed at a company meeting that if Opera 8 reached magic 1 million four days (from release he'd swim from Norway to the USA. Luckily for Jon, less than a day into his epic journey, the support raft floundered: a great way to avoid actually swimming all the way! IrfanView 3.97 is a quick and simple freeware image viewer and editor. Besides supporting every major graphics formats. It offers drag-and-drop support, directory viewing, TWAIN support (for direct scanning), slide shows, batch conversion as well as advanced filters for color depth, crop, blur and sharpen. The new version pops-up "Browse Subfolders" dialog when the current folder end/begin is. The JPG Transformation dialog now offers Apply EXIF date/time to new file. Videos can be zoomed, and the utility also supports Adobe DNG files as well as FITS, PIC and WAL formats. Don't delay. Download a copy today. And with it the excellent IView Plugins pack that further extends the power of this highly recommended freeware. There's also an incremental Maxthon 1.2.4 that resolves a couple of critical bugs. However, the auto-update itself appears to be buggy with a companion zero-byte file that stall the download. I finally had to download a fresh copy and go through the rigmarole of uninstalling and re-installing! As also a new Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.50215.45 Beta 2. This 22 MB download requires that any existing installation of .Net Framework 2 Beta be uninstalled first. The .Net Framework 2 is backward compatible with Framework 1.1 and applications coded for the latter actually work faster. However don't attempt to develop or run programs developed for version 2 in version 1.x. Microsoft has also released x64 bit versions of Windows XP 64-bit (120-day evaluation copy; requires Internet activation) and Windows Server 2003 64-bit (180-day evaluation copy; requires Internet activation). Of course the only true 64-bit chips are the AMD 64-bit Opteron and Athlon 64. Intel plans their first release in late-April 2005. However there any true 64-bit applications available. Even Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005; the sole 64-bit capable Windows programming environment is still in beta. So both x64 Windows variants run 32-bit applications. That's all for this week. Sayonara for now! Click Here To Send Feedback