IE7 Has Tabs

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Thomas O'Connor — Mon, 16 May 2005 08:51:14 GMT

Stop gloating about how you've caught up with five years ago and begin addressing the bigger issues, i.e.: CSS and XHTML.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Arthur — Mon, 16 May 2005 08:59:56 GMT

I like tabs, but I also like being able to customize their functionality easily. Firefox allows customizations through extensions and advanced preference settings in about:config. Several Firefox extensions allow this such as miniT for draggable tabs, and FLST for last focused tab. I also like being able to force all popups into a new tab. I realize that basic tab functionality must be in place first, but please include additional customization of tabs in an extra advanced panel or with published registry settings. thanks.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Robin — Mon, 16 May 2005 09:06:52 GMT

Although Thomes' wording is a bit off ;-) he has a point: Way don't you concentrate on the things that can't be done with extensions?

And in this context: Tabbing makes no point if the website can override it. Will "one window browsing" be possibe? Can you stop websites from opening new windows or tabs (thus ignoring target attributes which open in new windows)?

I really hope you won't be going the opposite direction and create something against web standards like target="_tab" and so take away power from the users...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chloe — Mon, 16 May 2005 09:20:52 GMT

A request.

Please let me turn off tabbed browsing, but in such a way that I can still middleclick/Ctrlclick to open pages in a *background* window.

The 'open in background' is important, taking up my screen for no good reason when I have something far more usable than the 'tab bar' in my taskbar is not.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Plop — Mon, 16 May 2005 09:25:37 GMT

Well... Adding features like what we found in Firefox just because you realized you've taken the wrong path is one thing. But what about the web standards ???

Adding PNG alpha transparancy, tabs and other things is great, but if IE7 doesn't correctly support web standards I'm pretty sure people around me will never use it.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dean Harding — Mon, 16 May 2005 09:43:17 GMT

Man, there's no pleasing some people. People can't seem to request tabs enough when asked "what features do you miss from IE", but when they are actually told that tabs will be there, they say "we don't care about tabs, what about standards?!"

Sure, I want to hear about standards support as well, but that's not what this post is about! This post is about tabs support in IE, and I think it's great!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

manovich — Mon, 16 May 2005 09:50:28 GMT

I like InstantSource, very useful for developing.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Klaus H. Probst — Mon, 16 May 2005 09:47:48 GMT

That's great. Let me turn it off though =)

BTW, I can't wait for the Slashbots to descend on this one. I'm sure they'll claim Firefox invented tabbed browsing (as if) and make funny farting sounds while they tell you that "M$ is TEH SUxx0rz".

But anyway, keep up the good work. One question that I haven't seen addressed yet, and if you can comment on it - are you guys redoing the "Favorites" thing at all? That's the one "feature" of IE I've always disliked. I can see the benefits of managing bookmarks as individual files but it kills me that I can't create a shortcut to a page whose title has characters that can't be used in the file system. And don't even get me started on the favorites dialog =)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dave — Mon, 16 May 2005 09:57:57 GMT

So did you post this tabs announcement to divert attention away from the recently found security holes: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/15/139208&tid=113&tid=218 ;)

As for tabs in other aspects of the Windows UI, you mention the shell - why not make that tabbed too - effectively the shell and IE are interchangeable currently so make both support tabs. Also make ctrl-N (and ctrl-T for tabs) work in Explorer (the file manager) as well as in IE.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

GenuineKrusty — Mon, 16 May 2005 09:59:46 GMT

Yep. I think it'd be great to include tabs in the next version. It'd make life easier for those who usually have several IE windows opened at the same time!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jesper — Mon, 16 May 2005 10:05:58 GMT

What I'm hearing is two camps - one wanting to hear about stuff like tabs and one wanting to hear about stuff like CSS support. It's easy to please both - just post more regularly to this weblog to a better spread of subjects. The current rate and spread is a good effort, and the technical entries have got a good depth, but decidedly it also brings out "post more about x, no, post more about y" wars in the comments, and even comments like my own. QED. :)

Tabs are great. I hope IE7 as a whole means you'll be catching up to the UI innovations that has been adopted by most browsers, save for Lynx, in the past four years - tabs, fast access to RSS (noone is asking you to build in an aggregator, by the way, an RSS button will do) and an (optional) download manager with resume and concurrent downloads.

Extensibility is important, and not killing your own add-in market is important, but so's the value of providing some features "out of the box". Microsoft's attitude reeks a little of "let's not step on anyone's toes" - a good cause in itself, but also stifling *actual* progress. To take the analogy a little bit further, are you sure you've made the best dang URL bar you can make? What if someone wants to make a better one? Eep. Better make it an optional add-in so that customers can navigate to the third party of their choice using their non-existant URL bar to grab one... ;)

Firefox is the only (correct me if I'm wrong (Mozilla Suite is missing the RSS/Live Bookmarks functionality)) browser that ship with the features I mentioned above, but still allow for extensibility - both replacement and extension of existing UI elements. Let's see IE7 being the second.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Brent Silby — Mon, 16 May 2005 10:16:19 GMT

People will always complain. Personally I think you guys are doing a great job. You have addressed one of the issues and have now put tabs in the browser. That's what many people wanted.

I think it is important to give the user a way to switch tabs off if they want.

Keep up the good work.

IE7 Has Tabs

Neil's Smaller World — Mon, 16 May 2005 10:15:15 GMT

Internet Explorer 7 will have tabbed browsing. A future version of the MSN Search Toolbar will bring tabs to IE6....

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Overdo — Mon, 16 May 2005 10:26:09 GMT

Thanks for the information Dean.

A shame that you decide to confirm that IE7 will have tabs on the day that the MSN Toolbar releases without them.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Mark Heath — Mon, 16 May 2005 10:24:18 GMT

I'm hoping that the tabs can be opened with middle-click like in FireFox or Avant Browser.
I also like the find facilities these browsers provide.

I would also like to see better support for increasing the text size (which only works on some pages at the moment in IE) or a zoom feature that enlarged graphics too.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Brandon Paddock — Mon, 16 May 2005 10:34:20 GMT

At the risk of feeding the Mac Zealotry - I think Safari has at least one good idea that you guys should pick up on.

When you have a feature like Tabbed Browsing, and you're afraid that implementing it might confuse new users... Do what Safari does. Make it off by default. Make it an option that advanced users specifically have to turn on.

Power users, by their very nature, don't need a helping hand finding new features. Just give them/us those features, when they're this important. Having the *option* to enable tabs, enable middle-clicking of links, and so on... isn't going to confuse my mom. She's never going to see those options any way.

As for my favorite "add-in"... well, that would have to be Maxthon :)

I'm looking forward to IE7 even though I probably won't use it... at least not directly. I'm very excited about all the new features Maxthon should inherit from IE7, though :)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Pritam Pal — Mon, 16 May 2005 10:30:51 GMT

Looking for beta.

IE7 et onglets : c'est officiel !

Jean-Marc, XP Geek ! — Mon, 16 May 2005 10:47:36 GMT

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Vilius — Mon, 16 May 2005 11:06:39 GMT

I personally don't like tabbed browsing idea, but I'm happy that IE would have them, and more users would be happy about it. So please make it _very_ configurable and possible to turn off.

Keep up good work.

P.S. shame on Firefox kids for bashing Microsoft again! They seem never understand that you guys are just lucky geeks just like them.

Official: IE 7 has Tabs

STEFANO DEMILIANI WeBlog — Mon, 16 May 2005 11:12:48 GMT

re: IE7 Has Tabs

minghong — Mon, 16 May 2005 11:22:52 GMT

It is meaningless to have tab if the support of standards are still that crappy. e.g. when will IE accept application/xhtml+xml?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

kL — Mon, 16 May 2005 11:16:34 GMT

I love tabs in Opera 8 - you can drag them anywhere to bookmark page, make it a panel, email link, etc.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

probedb — Mon, 16 May 2005 11:16:52 GMT

Definitely good news and keep up the good work :)

One point, slightly off-topic. If you do allow middle-button clicking for opening tabs a la Firefox, can you talk to the developers of your Intellimouse software that completely overrides this functionality when it's installed with no way to get it back, it takes the middle-button from you.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Prashant Pathak — Mon, 16 May 2005 11:21:41 GMT

"We want feedback on how it works with add-ins that you run (or have written), with the sites that you visit, and with the line of business applications, accessibility tools, management and development tools that you run"

As someone has already mentioned. You should not allow websites to control the way tabs work. I already get annoyed enough with websites opening pages in new windows without asking me. There's a handy extension for Firefox which adds a "Open in this window" entry in the context menu. Giving the user ultimate control will lead to a more enjoyable (for power users) and less confusing (for casual users) experience.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jim — Mon, 16 May 2005 11:37:30 GMT

> Man, there's no pleasing some people. People can't seem to request tabs enough when asked "what features do you miss from IE", but when they are actually told that tabs will be there, they say "we don't care about tabs, what about standards?!"

You know there isn't some hive mind that is responsible for all the comments here.

The people that actually use (or would like to use) Internet Explorer ask for things like tabbed browsing.

The people that make the websites that these people use and are quite happy using other browsers couldn't care less about end-user features but care immensely about whether or not the next version of Internet Explorer will have the major deficiencies that 6.0 does.

These are two distinct groups of people, and Microsoft are attempting to please them both. That doesn't mean when they post something that appeals to just one group, that the other group magically disappear or are any less impatient.

Myself, I'd like to know whether they are implementing *any* new CSS 2 properties or selectors. So far, all we know is that a couple of bugfixes have gone in for properties they already support.

> I'm hoping that the tabs can be opened with middle-click like in FireFox or Avant Browser.

Agreed. The fact that the middle button didn't open in a new window was always a show stopper for me back when I used Windows - there's no way I'd use a browser that didn't work that way.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dmitry Kuchin — Mon, 16 May 2005 12:04:06 GMT

The feature I need except tabs - remember last opened pages when I close my browser or it crashes, and I open it again. I mean, reopen them automatically. I will stay with Maxthon until this feature will be implemented in IE7 (or in add-in to IE7), since I'm using it all the time.

I bookmark del giorno #9

Lorenzo Barbieri @ UGIblogs! — Mon, 16 May 2005 12:08:06 GMT

IE7: finalmente tabbed browsing

Claudio Brotto — Mon, 16 May 2005 12:15:00 GMT

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Splash! — Mon, 16 May 2005 12:13:46 GMT

"One point, slightly off-topic. If you do allow middle-button clicking for opening tabs a la Firefox, can you talk to the developers of your Intellimouse software that completely overrides this functionality when it's installed with no way to get it back, it takes the middle-button from you."
-You can get around it, just set the middle-click button to "middle button", rather than "intelliscroll" or whatever they call it.

And back on topic: I'm glad to hear of tab support. But I have one request... please please PLEASE make it so I can reorder them. For example:

Site 1 | Site 3 | Site 2 | Site 4

I'd love to be able to drag the Site 2 tab (for example) into the slot between site 1 and site 3 tabs. I like to have my sites in a useable order for me, and with firefox, sometimes it gets all mixed up and you cant reorder them.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Ian — Mon, 16 May 2005 12:37:02 GMT

Aside from the general standards improvements, a Javascript/VBScript console would be nice.

Also, the ability to turn off or add placeholders for "dynamic" content like Flash animations or embedded movies.

IE 7 has tabs

Joteke's Blog — Mon, 16 May 2005 12:30:24 GMT

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Bob — Mon, 16 May 2005 12:41:32 GMT

Good news, but only if you do it properly.The benefit that Firefox, Opera, etc has is that they're independent of the operating system and therefore users don't have as high expectations for them meeting platform look and feel (although I do think Firefox does a good job of this).

But as Microsoft is the OS vendor it's important that a consistency is maintained between all Microsoft apps. In short this means:

1) Tabs available within all Microsoft apps where tabbing makes sense. This includes all 'explorer' windows including My Computer, Network Neighbourhood (aka My Network Places), Control Panel, etc. So in theory you could have a tabbar like follows:
Web site | Control Panel | C:\My Documents | Web site 2
Switching between the tabs would also alter the toolbar as necessary.

As for tabs within media player, I'm not sure on that. Get someone to run up a prototype and see if it makes sense.

2) Additional levels of OS integration for the tabs would be nice. For example the taskbar grouping facility in XP could be reworked so it's based on tabs. e.g. each taskbar entry will represent a top level window, clicking on thetaskbar entry would switch to that window or holding the button down would bring up a list of tabs in that window. Pressing the middle button (often the wheel) could make the list appear immediately.

This feature could be extended to all the Microsoft apps that support tabs (revive the idea for tabs in MS Word too?). The api for this should be open so that other tabbed interfaces can use it if they want to.

3) Don't make the same mistake as Netscape 8 and break every user interface rule in the book.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Patrick Schriner — Mon, 16 May 2005 12:42:32 GMT

Nice to have IE7 in the crowd of tabbed browsers.

It must be a hard decision as it might break a lot of corporate applications that are based on the assumption that everything opens in its own window. Like: How do I show a user that a new tab opened when he clicked on xyz? Maxthon is a bit lacking in that area.

The same applies to a lot of other features as well. The Opera CEO quite stressed the point that they wouldn´t ever consider building a real adblocker into Opera, as that where not really (although on first sight a lot of people think so) in the buyers best interest. I guess that all "heavy" decisions are even harder for the IE team, as it is definitly the most locked down browser (thinking of: window resizing, right button etc.)

As someone else mentioned you could be really innovative in the "Favorites" area. They are pretty useless in all browsers, missing key features like asigning one Bookmark to several categories & the like.

Any progress in IE7 is good for all :D

A question about extentions

Anonymous — Mon, 16 May 2005 12:39:56 GMT

I am wondering why Firefox, although
1. it is less popular than IE,
2. is open source which means that many of its extentions will be written for free and thus provides less commercial insentive,
3. has only very recently been released and
4. uses a different and unfamiliar to many programming model of building extentions,
has many more free extentions than IE. Not only that but its extentions can easily be found on its web site and are hosted there. They are solid to many users and are extremely valuable fulfilling users needs.
On the other hand, IE with
1. years of popularity behind it,
2. with so many companies supporting its platform for their applications,
3. with insentive to companies to write addins for money,
4. with its more familiar to Windows programmers of extensibility model and
5. with its integration with the os,
does not have any or at least does not have the number and quality of extentions as Firefox. And not only that but IE exetentions are scattered around the web, not promoted by MS and ignored by users. Tabs were available in IE through extentions but who knew about it. Whilst Firefox extentions are much more popular.
Why? What went wrong with the IE extensibility model.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

LG — Mon, 16 May 2005 13:03:42 GMT

These new features are all fine and nice, but please make them optional and OFF by default.

Remember: _ All these new features are security hazards _

Non-geeky people have enough to contend with without the mess that tabbed browsing will add.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Igor — Mon, 16 May 2005 13:14:37 GMT

Hi Guys,
one of the most required feature here is the HTTP Proxy credential cache: it's very useful have a place where I can specify my UserName and Password for the current Proxy...instead of asking (and bothering) for the "always the same" password.
Am I forgotting some IE6 feature about ?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

anonymouse — Mon, 16 May 2005 13:39:55 GMT

When opening a new window, where will it open? As a new IE Window with its own placeholder in the taskbar? As a new tab? Can I specify? If it opens in a new tab, does the focus switch to the new tab?

Tabs are okay. I'm not sure they are the solution to effective window management though - if a user has lots of [browser] windows open, then this just translates into having lots of tabs open... which can be just as difficult to sort through.

IE7 will have tabs.

Blog-Fu — Mon, 16 May 2005 13:59:27 GMT

Well, it&#8217;s official. IE 7 will have tabs. I have problems browsing without tabs, so this is most welcome news. But I was left with a somewhat mistrusting feeling after reading the whole article. The tabbed browsing experience in the...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Pankaj — Mon, 16 May 2005 14:03:54 GMT

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways... ;-)
Thats our relationship with IE.

But seriously guys - keep up the good work and make sure to *think* your ideas through before you go about implementing them. We don't want revolutionary features the day of release and spectacular patches the next day.

I more or less agree with Bob's ideas above.
But all in all the least I expect from IE7 is:
-> Perfect Web standards compliance.
-> Proprietary features built on the side as an *additional* feature
-> UI changes even if it is minimal should be sensibly touched up, don't just mess with it just for the heck of it. IE is certainly one of the cleanest and elegant UI around - work on the idea.
-> A good download manager - at the least should support basic resume/pause - thats all we are asking.

It will only be then will I consider IE7 to be truly 7. Otherwise you guys might as well release 6.xx version and make your peace with it! :-)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Espen Antonsen — Mon, 16 May 2005 14:07:30 GMT

"I really hope you won't be going the opposite direction and create something against web standards like target="_tab" and so take away power from the users..."

I think that would be a great idea. I develop a web-application and our users would work much more effectively with tabs. The problem is that we want main application windows to open as their own tabs - but pop-up's such as a search window or a form for adding an item has to have their own windows.

It would be great for web developers to specify where the window shall open. We have built a custom browser based on IE that uses alt + right click on links to open in new tabs while normal pop-up's open in their own windows.

Espen Antonsen
http://www.24SevenOffice.com - web-based invoice/crm/accounting

IE7 will have tabs, bitter comments about how Microsoft invented them

Interesting Drug — Mon, 16 May 2005 14:09:13 GMT

IEBlog : IE7 Has Tabs...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Aidan Walsh — Mon, 16 May 2005 14:24:31 GMT

"I really hope you won't be going the opposite direction and create something against web standards like target="_tab" and so take away power from the users..."

"I think that would be a great idea."

I don't. They seem to have been making strides to make IE7 more standards compliant than IE6 currently is, there is no point taking that many steps forward if they're only going to take steps back at a slight slant.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chris Beach — Mon, 16 May 2005 14:34:36 GMT

Fully customizable tabs would be an good, but not essential (close on dbl click would be a must though!)

I've gotta disagree with Espen about the 'target="_tab"' though, its a terrible idea, it makes far to many assumptions about the end users system.

Slighly OT as it's probly more an OS thing:
One thing that needs to make sure is that any new tabs are by default loaded in the background, nothing, *ever* should interupt the user's current task. Nothing's worse than typing something and be interupted by your own OS.

IE7 to have tabbed browsing

TechBlog — Mon, 16 May 2005 14:33:44 GMT

The IEBlog at Microsoft says Internet Explorer will include tabbed browsing. That's good news -- for those who like tabbed browsing, in which you open new browser pages in a tab instead of a new window. Firefox and other browsers...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Espen Antonsen — Mon, 16 May 2005 14:38:54 GMT

"I've gotta disagree with Espen about the 'target="_tab"' though, its a terrible idea, it makes far to many assumptions about the end users system. "

Ok, let me rephrase what I want. I actually can agree with 'target="tab"' not being a very good idea. I want the user to be able to specify when the link shall go in a new tab. That will solve my problem. This is my situation:

1. Application open in new window.

2. Pop-up window's shall open in new windows.

3. User shall be able to 'alt + right-click' (or some other way) to open a link in the menu to a new tab. This way I can have the various menu modules in their own tab's.

We have a very broad range of modules in our application and power users get a very cluttered taskbar when they have several modules open simultaneously. I want a solution to that (tabs) but at the same time use normal pop-up windows. I am aware of that we have special needs as this is a web-application and thus behave quite differently to normal web sites.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

jon reeve — Mon, 16 May 2005 14:55:23 GMT

Let's have the tabs, and all that stuff. Great. Copy the flashy stuff from Firefox by all means. But don't forget the stuff that's important for web developers this time! If we can guarantee that div positioning works the way the spec says it should, and you don't try to introduce incompatible rubbish into the DOM, you might gain enough points with developers that we stop telling people to download Firefox for the best experience.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Thomas O'Connor — Mon, 16 May 2005 15:06:37 GMT

To the one who stated that IE is "popular":

IE isn't popular. Whilst it is the most used, it doesn't make it the most popular. Why? Because people use it without knowing what it really is or that there are alternatives. They use it because in a way Microsoft has set up a monopoly on browsing with IE in their OS by integrating IE into it.

In fact, IE could be called the least popular, as those that actually know what it is and what the alternatives are, actually dislike it, and many intensively dislike it.

FX and OP on the other hand are popular, as the majority of people who use them know what they are, know the alternatives, and like their features in comparison to others.

Having a monopoly doesn't mean you have popularity.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

sajee — Mon, 16 May 2005 15:08:53 GMT

Besides true CSS and XHTML compliance, here are some features I would love to see in IE that are already in Firefox.

1. Make it easy to open tabs in the background, via Ctrl-Click or some other dead simple mechanism.

2. Emulate the way FF provides page Find capability. Miguel sums it up nicely here in the Brilliant Ideas section: http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2005/May-07.html

3. Make it easy to increase/decrease fonts w/o having to go thru the menus. FF uses Ctrl+ and Ctrl-. That works well.

4. Make it easy to bookmark groups of pages.

5. Make it easy to block ads based on IP or hostname. I don't want to fiddle w/ my hosts file. Would be great if IE can localize this.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jim Mathies — Mon, 16 May 2005 15:09:06 GMT

I'm curious how BHO's will interact with tabs. Will IE spawn seperate BHO instances for each tab or treat each tab as if it were a seperate frame, sending all IWebBrowser2 events for all tabs to a single BHO instance?

Jim

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jim Mathies — Mon, 16 May 2005 15:14:50 GMT

Another question - how will the IE 7 changes effect the browser experience within explorer windows? I'm assuming explorer will remain unchanged but possibly not?

Jim

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Bob Vollowitz — Mon, 16 May 2005 15:15:50 GMT

You need to look at your browser marketing strategy. You are trying to bridge both advanced users and average users, and it will no longer work. Don't stay behind the curve and introduce a one-size-fits-all solution. If you do this, you are only playing catch up and not leading the way. Most of all, you won't have a feature advantage over Firefox. This strategy shows a lack of good marketing thought.

I suggest you introduce a browser that has two modes: regular and advanced. If you run it in advanced mode, it would look a lot like Maxthon with all options easily available. In regular mode, it would be much as it is now with the ability to turn tabs on or off. In this way, you will serve the best interests of all of your market.

Maxthon is now much better than Firefox in terms of options, configurability, usage. It has gone through 4 years of development and solved many bugs. Why don't you just buy it and restructure the menus to be consistent with other MS products? Why recreate the wheel? Maxthon currently has over 25 million downloads and you'll have a ready market for your new product.

Your approach to the market in many areas needs significant work. Call me if you want some help...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Pankaj — Mon, 16 May 2005 15:22:46 GMT

BTW,
When is IE7 Beta scheduled to roll out?? How far are we from it? Pardon me for a novice-like question but Summer is a too broad generalisation for me - living in a tropical country as it is, its peak summer here!!

Please do give me a time frame...

Microsoft Plays Catch-Up

dougpetch.com — Mon, 16 May 2005 15:30:30 GMT

Evidently, news that Internet Explorer is steadily losing market share to Firefox has been noted in Redmond. Witness this post from IEBlog, Microsoft's Internet Explorer blog. The first line sums it up - Yes, IE7 has tabs.And just why did it take them so long to catch up to yesterday, you ask? Some people have asked why we didn’t put tabs in IE sooner. Initially, we had some concerns around complexity and consistency… will it confuse users more than it benefits them? Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don’t have tabs? I think we made the wrong decision here initially, and we’re making the right one now. I’d like to ask you to post a comment with your favorite or most critical IE add-ins… we want to make sure IE7 works great with them.I'll freely admit that tabs were probably the most important reason that I originally switched to Firefox. Now that I've come to appreciate Firefox in full, though, I don't know that this move on the part of Microsoft will cause me to go back to Explorer. But then again.... (Thanks, Dave)...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

bb — Mon, 16 May 2005 15:24:24 GMT

As long as you're looking at Maxthon, PLEASE include the ability to save currently opened tabs as a GROUP, so that you can reopen all of them at once.

GROUP functionality is key, as is the "mouse drag" navigation. Oh, and the ability to drag and drop on-screen text so that it opens a new tab (URLs especially).

Hell, that other person is right... just buy Maxthon. It's already near-perfect.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Randy Charles Morin — Mon, 16 May 2005 15:46:07 GMT

Do you really think that 95% of IE users care about tabs. Unfortunately, the techno geeks are turning IE into another Firebird.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Robin Lambell — Mon, 16 May 2005 15:55:10 GMT

Ok, you've finally introduced a feature alot of other browsers *cough* firefox have already. what are you expecting? A medal?

And as people have said before, we've had the news about transparent PNGs, now news about tabs, but what about CSS support? Or are you going to keep quiet about that one and let us find out the bad news when the beta release arrives? Because if you're keeping so quiet about it, either it's because it's so amazingly perfect you want to blow everyones minds at some given date or it's a complete disappointment and even you know it.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dominic — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:06:06 GMT

*cough* mouse gestures please *cough*

Not that IE 7 will stop me from using Opera 8, I sincerely believe opera to be, at least at present, the better browser. However, when using IE for those sites which Microsoft has engineered not to work with Opera (i cant be bothered with userjs spoofing), i keep trying to use mouse gestures in IE, and find them not working! Keep up the good work though!

"IE7 will not support Win98"

Tihiy — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:08:32 GMT

:(((

Whatever...

riddle — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:02:55 GMT

Yeah, yeah.. Great, kind and loving Microsoft. Tabs of course are part of windows api.. but idea how to use it, especially in browser isn't yours.

I read this blog quite often. I usually don't whine nor flame. To tell the truth, it's my first comment. I wished you good luck in making IE7 standards-compilant. CSS2.1, PNG ... you know what I'm talking about.

But this is the first time you're getting on my nerves. I use other browser, it's not the point to tell its name. Yes, it has tabs. Yours didn't, and doesn't. Maxthon isn't Microsoft product. Tabs isn't Microsoft idea. It's idea of better graphical user interface, and you haven't invited it. Move back to beginning of windows and compare it with Mac. Everyone know about things you stole from Netscape, from Aqua...

And now.. you're making browsing the web better. Yes, in fact tabbed browsing is that kind of improvement. But - BUT - B U T, don't boast about how caring you are to Windows Users. Other person would say "cut the bull****", but I just demand from you truth.

I know what MS has done wrong in IE, but I don't care now. IE7 is about to be released. Some things may work better. I'm not interested if you steal some tweaks or features from Mozilla / Opera ... it's all about the Web.

But please... don't brag.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

ena — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:38:06 GMT

I love the idea and I love what you did to MSN Messenger 7.0, good job guys!

Final Version of MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search Released

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:43:52 GMT

Arghhhh!!!

the world's most beloved polish-american — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:37:30 GMT

Ok. I'm not a software engineer. I'm not a usability expert. But if ever these was a more bullshit filtered email entry from an IT/developer person, this one has got to be it. It is all about "tabs" finally appearing...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Greg — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:39:25 GMT

One good way to prevent tabs from interfering with beginner users is to hide any tab-UI when only one tab is open. This way advanced users who want to have tabe can have them but any beginner who doesn't know about them won't have a more complex browsing experience.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP] — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:50:02 GMT

While I love Maxthon, the problem with it is that there is too much of a performance hit in having all of those web browser hosts in one process (much more than if I opened the same number of IE instances as there are tabs).

Is IE7 going to address that fact? How will the MSHTML model change to accomidate this?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Shawn McCollum — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:44:06 GMT

The two most important add-ins that I use are the Google and Yahoo toolbars.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Mark — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:45:19 GMT

The add-in that keeps me using IE today is Copernic Agent which I use on a daily basis for searching. I use Opera for general web browsing because I prefer tabbed browsing in general. Unfortunatly, none of the 3rd party IE tab controls/browsers (Maxthon, etc.) support Copernic Agent.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

David — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:59:26 GMT

Glad IE will have tabbed browsing. Here's a few requests I have:

1-ability to turn tabbing on or off

2-functionality found in the FF "Tabbrowser Extensions" by Shimoda Hiroshi, available at http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/tbe

3-functionality found in Opera 8 tabbing

I have no idea which IE add-ons would be pertinent, I don't use IE except for Windows Updates.

As far as Microsoft's concerns re: complexity and consistency, please don't underrate your customers--if they don't know how to use it, they'll figure it out. There is always someone who will find a feature confusing, no matter what, so please don't always design to the (very) lowest common denominator. As the world becomes more technically conscious and competent, your concerns should diminish.

And as far as a "Windows experience" is concerned, that is IMHO one of Microsoft's biggest misconceptions of how regular people use their OS. My folks, my siblings, my friends, don't have any problem at all differentiating between IE, Win Media Player, Windows, etc. I think Microsoft is the only entity on the planet that actually believes in a universal, global computing experience via its Windows OS. Far as I can tell, geeks don't want it (they feel controlled by such) and regular people don't need it (i.e., computing is not a big enough part of their lives for them to care about an overarching "experience"-they've got a real life to live).

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing what IE7 will be.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

CJ — Mon, 16 May 2005 17:01:04 GMT

"Some people have asked why we didn’t put tabs in IE sooner."

Because Firefox didn't exist?

Sorry for the cheap shot, but the incorporation of tabs seems like a secondary "me too!" feature that should take a back seat to full CSS implementation.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Gregory Wild-Smith — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:54:46 GMT

One thing that is really needed as far as I'm concerned is a decent JavaScript debugger. The FireFox JavaScript console is brilliant for this, and if IE could do this as well then the differences in JS support/implementation between the two would be much easier to bug-stomp.

If it were up to me I'd also change "favourites" to "bookmarks" it was the original common term, and I don't know anyone that calls then favourites. It was a classic early example of the MS Owning the Web fighting from the browser war days and converting it back would be a nice gesture :)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Nicholas Shanks — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:55:01 GMT

I would like to make the strong recommendation that IE, by default, *does not* allow lax websites to display, and that there be a preference to enable tag-soup mode. Sure every end user will turn it on pretty promptly, but the fact that it's not the default will force all those legions of shitty web developers to code to the standards if they want their site 'to work in IE'. It would be one of the best things a browser in WinIE's position could do for the health of the internet. The downside? the initial shock developers get when they realise their site is a smelly pile of turd might not look good if they direct that at you. It's still good for the health of the we though, please consider.

Tabs no IE7

Von Freud — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:55:47 GMT

Uau, o IE7 vai ter tabs. Que bom....

re: IE7 Has Tabs

IEuser — Mon, 16 May 2005 17:13:48 GMT

Tabs: Over-rated hype that will confuse Joe and Mary average IE user. Tabs should Not be the default; if you have that capability it ought to be as an option in "tools" or "settings" etc.

The opera/moz freaks also constantly fret about IE not opening a new window full-sized; when in fact the way IE does it is wonderful - a great visual cue that that a new window Was opened. (eg shift+click) Please don't change that.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

mike — Mon, 16 May 2005 17:17:49 GMT

Why are people worrying about turning tabs off? You dont have to use them if you don't want to. Just dont hit ctrl-t (assuming that will open a new tab) or click "open a link in new tab", or select new tab from the file menu. It is very easy. the IE team should worry about standards (esp XHTML and CSS) than worrying about giving users and option to turn tabs off - just dont use them.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Andre — Mon, 16 May 2005 17:32:39 GMT

I don't think Tabs are useful in Microsoft Word anymore, there are too many and the user (myself) makes so many mistakes clicking on the wrong one or is just confused that I can't find the right one.

One Row of tabs is nice, but when it reachs 3 rows, it has gone toooo far. I like the Options feature in MSN Messenger 7, it makes it easier to navigate and I hope they apply this concept in the next version of Word.

Another place more tabs would be useful is Taskbar properties in Windows.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

firefox — Mon, 16 May 2005 17:36:14 GMT

IE is only implementing tabs because they see how popular they are in firefox and opera. Microsoft is once again taking someonee else's idea and profiting from it. I read this weblog not so much as a "this is the future of tech" but as "this is funny".

Internet Explorer 7 has tabs

LUX.ET.UMBRA — Mon, 16 May 2005 17:42:23 GMT

Great. Way to join the rest of the information age by bringing tabs. Microsoft's Internet Explorer team has finally implemented something that has been around since the early 90s in applications. What's more is that other web browsers have had...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

former IE user — Mon, 16 May 2005 17:43:01 GMT

4 years to late...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Rich D — Mon, 16 May 2005 17:43:42 GMT

I couldn't disagree more with Klaus. I am currently using Firefox and the one thing I hate about it is bookmarks. The favorites folder works so much better for me (it's so much better for keeping synchronized across machines, for example). The fact that it can be edited through the filesystem makes the UI a bit of a non-issue. I also like the term favourites (although you'll guess that I prefer it with a 'u'). And I like tabs and don't care about standards. This is all.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

nbw — Mon, 16 May 2005 17:52:16 GMT

Well, okay - IE7 has tabs. Yay! What's next? Transfers Manager? The IE platform is soooo extensible.

So was the Fiat 126p, you know. It had four wheels, two doors, an engine and a steering wheel. It was able to run forward and backwards too. It had everything! Aside comfort, space and such - but you could change the colour, have radio in it and some people did even racing versions of it. Reminds you of something?

It was succesful mostly because it was (relatively) cheap and (relatively) available in the times when there was nothing more.
And there we have our browser IE 126MS. It was also cheap and had something - ability to view pages the normal way when everybody lacked this feature.

But here we are. Year 2005. The IE is still "cheap". But Firefox is also, and if you don't mind the banner - Opera too.
Now we'll have Tabs in IE. Great, but Firefox/Opera have them also. PNG support? Guess...

So, what will bring the masses to the IE7? The name? Doubtful, as it is connected with all the flaws and bugs. The features? Rather not, as currently it seems that IE7 is not going to have something unique. The rendering engine? What rendering engine? We haven't heard a word about it... And I guess we won't hear anything special about it.

I can try to believe You that IE is an extensible platform with glamourous future and lots of potential. But let's get real - it's doubtful. Why? Because IE/MS does not have time to do what Mozilla/Opera did - rewrite the engine from scratch.

Nonetheless - I wish You and Your browser the best and still hope that IE can catch up with the rest of the world. Especially in the standards field.

IE 7 to have tabs: official

Alex Barnett blog — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:02:36 GMT

From IE Blog:

"The tabbed browsing experience in the upcoming IE7 beta is pretty basic. Expect additional...

Ad and Image Blocking

Mon, 16 May 2005 18:05:55 GMT

Tabs are cool but I love the ability FireFox gives me to block images by server source (e.g. doubleclick.com). This allows me to focus on what is important (i.e. info versus Ads) and improves page rendering time.

I doubt is IE will have it because of the threat it would pose to MSN but it would very much be the right thing for the consumer.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Eric Wallace — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:07:29 GMT

RE: "Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player..."

Not that confusing... The OS and common apps like the Office Suite has had tab-style interface elements for a while. And Windows Media Player seems to have something like tabs--"Now Playing", "Library", etc.; sure, you can only have one at a time, but it's the same UI.

What can be confusing to users is the change process... For example, the way XP suddenly decided to group multiple windows from the same application (Word, IE) in the taskbar. I still have yet to see a non-geek user figure out that how that taskbar-grouping works. But the company I'm at now has only had XP for a year or so... I figure in another year they'll get the hang of it, or use other workarounds (like the nice ALT-TAB PowerToy we gave 'em). Similarly, I expect the change in IE might cause some confusion at first--but for those that use IE day-in and day-out, they'll catch on even quicker, 'cause they'll have to.

~ewall

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Brian Clifton — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:07:39 GMT

I'm a software engineer by trade and I'm really excited to hear the news about tabbed browsing. As it stands now, I don't use IE. It's not because IE is horrible, I want to use it. But it doesn't support tabs and I'm really used to that.

Someone mentioned making tabs off by default and having the user have to turn them on (like Safari on macintosh does). I think that's a great idea, and regular non-advanced users won't notice a change in the product.

I can't wait to check out IE 7! Good luck with the work. Just remember that IE is used even more than your Visual Studio, Office, and other products. People use it everyday all the time and right now, IE 6 is kind of embarrassing. Spend time and make it the best and I will be a user again! Make it as great as visual studio is for programming

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dean J. — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:17:31 GMT

"Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don’t have tabs?"

You must be referring to the beginner user when you say they'd get confused over tabs, certainly not anyone else.

So why did Windows Media Player 9 have a menu bar hiding feature? If anything could confuse beginners, wouldn't that do it? Could it be that WMP was trying to keep up with the media player rave going on in the industry? Seems to me like WMP keeps up with the industry, but IE is overlooked. We all know the real deal here: developers and techies complain about IE, not the mass general public. IE vs. WMP: it boils down to a matter of priority rather than being worried about confusion or backwards compatibility. MS has proven that if they *want* to do something, they can and will do it...period.

The next version of Internet Explorer will have tabbed browsing

kottke.org remaindered links — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:21:56 GMT

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/05/16/417732.aspx...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Xepol — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:17:55 GMT

As long as I can turn the stupid tabs off. I hate tabs... I hated tabs when I was paid to create a browser skin that hosted the IE OCX that did tabs back in 98.

Personally, I prefer the seperate windows, so be sure to make it OPTIONAL.

As for any other addons, except for improving the css standards, everything else can be done with activex, so why would I want it hard coded into a serverely bloated browser? Don't get me wrong, I like IE, and I use it as my prefered browser, but last time I downloaded it, it was a 25MB download vs FireFox's 3mb.

Yes, there is more that just the browser in the 25mb, there is an email app, but I note that firefox's email app isn't 22mb... Might be time to trim the fat??

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dave — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:30:04 GMT

@Rich D

>I couldn't disagree more with Klaus. I am currently
> using Firefox and the one thing I hate about it is
> bookmarks. The favorites folder works so much better
> for me (it's so much better for keeping synchronized
> across machines, for example).

I find keeping the bookmarks in a single HTML file making it easier to keep synchronised across machines.

> The fact that it can be edited through the
> filesystem makes the UI a bit of a non-issue. I also
> like the term favourites (although you'll guess that
> I prefer it with a 'u').
Calling them bookmarks means that us British don't have to cringe at US 'English' in the menu bar. If MS make an en-gb localised IE like there is Firefox then you can call them Favourites...

Actually the reason I prefer the term bookmarks is because that's always been the traditional term since I began browsing the web with early releases of Netscape. Also just because I bookmark it doesn't mean it's a favourite site I might just have to visit it for work, etc ;)

> And I like tabs and don't care about standards. This is all.

You might think you don't care about standards but what if:
1) You get one of these mobile phones with a built in browser and your page doesn't display properly
2) A virus completely hoses IE and you can't view the site you want to in another browser as it's badly coded.
3) You decide to switch to Linux or Mac OS X and the site only works in IE

re: IE7 Has Tabs--NEED TO REORDER THEM

BobGa — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:27:31 GMT

"I'm glad to hear of tab support. But I have one request... please please PLEASE make it so I can reorder them."

Absolutely, this is the essential detail that makes tabs usable by putting sites in easily-findable locations. Just drag a tab to reorder it among the other tabs. Please!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Bruce Morgan [MSFT] — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:36:50 GMT

"I love tabs"
"I hate tabs"
"Put them in, but turn them off by default"
"Put them in, default them on, but let people turn them off".

See why we went back on forth on implementing tabs in IE?

Anyway, IE7 has tabs. You don't have to go someplace to turn them on, they just work via Ctrl+click, or Ctrl+T, etc. Your finger memory will work just fine.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Firefox maniac — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:41:35 GMT

What about security? IE may make cosmetic improvements but Firefox beats it by leaps and bounds, even in security. Additionally, I see your webpage has RSS and Atom feeds, of which only Firefox could take advantage as tehy are already built in. I used to use IE but it destroyed my computer and I had to buy a new one, too muh spyware, malware, trojans and the like. Since I've started using Firefox, not one Spyware, Malware or Trojan has gotten into my computer. In addition, since I started using Firefox, my temp files are no longer taking up space in hidden folders since it downloads everything to my desktop and I can clear the cache, history and everything else with one click.

Everyone else who wants to try Firefox, please visit http://www.mozilla.org/

I am not asking you to switch completely, just give Firefox a try and then see which browser you like best.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

IE fanatic — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:45:25 GMT

Firefox is way better than IE. You've had years to bring out these features, not to mention improve the security of your browser and you didn't do it. Now Firefox has done it and your scrambling to catch up!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

cillit bang — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:39:32 GMT

"browser experiences"

Twat.

IE7 Has Tabbed Browsing

hacked.brain — Mon, 16 May 2005 19:02:28 GMT

Internet Explorer to Get Tabs

Bayosphere — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:56:24 GMT

Yes, <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/05/16/417732.aspx">it's true</a>.
Better late -- incredibly late -- than never, I suppose.

IE 7 has Tabs

NSLog(); — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:57:06 GMT

IE 7 may be getting tabs, but in the words of one person: Stop gloating about how you've caught up with five years ago and begin addressing the bigger issues, i.e.: CSS and XHTML. Heh heh heh. Does anyone care...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Preston — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:59:12 GMT

Avant (http://www.avantbrowser.com/) does a great job of adding tabbed browsing functionality to IE. I'd love to see every one of its features incorporated.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

bellois — Mon, 16 May 2005 19:14:55 GMT

oh, oh, oh, you're funny.

re: IE7 Has Tabs... Who Cares?

James Wimmer — Mon, 16 May 2005 19:17:07 GMT

I think it is great that IE7 will have tabs, but there are honestly more important issues at hand for IE7. Like what Thomas O'Connor said in the first comment, there are bigger issues, such as CSS and XHTML.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jim — Mon, 16 May 2005 19:20:38 GMT

Bruce,

> See why we went back on forth on implementing tabs in IE?

I don't see anybody insisting that they default to on. It seems to me that implementing tabs and defaulting them to off would keep everybody happy. So why the back and forth?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

David Regal — Mon, 16 May 2005 19:20:48 GMT

What about CSS?! What's happening on that front? Will IE7 pass the Acid2 test? http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/

This would help people more than tabs... tabs are overrated anyway ;)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Vilius — Mon, 16 May 2005 19:50:03 GMT

> Firefox is making very rapid gains. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

You should read header and footer of this page. It says: "Why so high Firefox figures? W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user.
"

Also: "You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading. Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site." and "First get your facts; then you can distort them at your leisure."

This means that this page only shows that more and more web developers are using Firefox and if you look closer - less NN7 and Opera. Nothing more.

For example on my site (500000 unique visits a month) I have 95% usage of IE5/6 and only 3% of Firefox. It's TV channel site where comes people of different types, proffesions, etc. Even my site is _more_ accurate than w3c statistics in global scale.

I don't say that Firefox usage is not increasing, it IS increasing. But not as rapid as everybody says. It is overbloat. I even experienced 0.5% Firefox's drop current month.

And I don't want to flame more.

Cheers.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

webMonkey — Mon, 16 May 2005 19:50:05 GMT

What is the new ActiveX command to spawn new tabs?

E.g. I want to create 100 new tabs, and auto-load websites (spyware, BHO's, etc.) in them for the user?

(just kidding of course)... please tell me that you have DISABLED ANY POSSIBLE ACCESS to this?

Thanks.

Oh, so when are you adding support for GreaseMonkey? (or similar)

Everything has tabs

Nathan Kitchen — Mon, 16 May 2005 19:57:35 GMT

Great to hear that you'll be including tabbed browsing. For one thing it will tidy up the taskbar. Grouping taskbar items was an ace idea in XP, but sometimes it's still difficult to find the window with th website you want. Tabbed browsing is far more intuitive.

I also think that tabs in Windows Explorer are a great idea. The only problem I see is drag n drop: you'd have to make tabs open when hovered over with a file.

As with all new functionality tho, I'd like to see it turned OFF by default. But don't then go and bury the way of turning it on again (no registry editing). That would be silly.

Media Player already has tabs, but they don't do the same thing as Firefox/IE. They're used more ike a menu, and I think you're right, it would REALLY confuse people if they were changed to navigate media content. I can't see any potential benefits - think you made the right decision.

May your success be proportional to your efforts.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jon B — Mon, 16 May 2005 19:53:54 GMT

Hey, tabs are great, other browsers already do them well so lets hope you can get it right and not try to rock the boat too much. I remember when I first got firefox back in the old 0.X days - I never liked tabs, I found them messy and kept closing the window and losign all my pages - however they improved the functionality a little and I got used to it and now I love having an empty task bar when I have loads of windows open.

In regards to standards, yes you need to improve support, but make sure that any support you don't add you also don't break current hacks for - that would be a big mistake and infuriate so many people. Your task isn't an easy one, but everything that is wanted in IE7 and and all the info you require is available online, there have been so many posts and hacks and workarounds and stuff posted over the years that it is clear what you need to achieve, anything less will meet with muted response.

Development of IE is slow, Opera and Firefox has much faster development cycles and so new features and fixes happen faster - they also listen to what developers and users want. Yes IE holds the biggest market share, and yes corporations wont be changing that quickly, however IE is losing so much of the public's faith and it is slowly losing it's market share too - to turn this around you need to make the changes people want, and that includes developers, you need to show that you listen to what they want as opposed to going off with your own proprietry filters and extensions that almost nobody ever uses. Finally you need to do all this and fast and continue to do it.

I hope IE7 will feature some auto updater that will help keep IE patched with security fixes and standarsd support on a regular basis - windows update is ok, but it is often so over looked - the update functions of the Flash player is a much better model - it keeps the current installed Flash userbase quite high for the most recent version - the fact that many people and companies are still running IE5 is a testament to windows update failing to do what it is supposed - with the internet changing as fast as it does there needs to be a quicker way to stay safe and uptodate.

My hopes are with you and the IE team - if you can't fix everything just make sure you don't break anything.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jeff — Mon, 16 May 2005 20:02:32 GMT

The parallel between IBM of yester-year and Microsoft of today is fasinating. Only a simple feature such as tabbed browsing could have taken 5 years and a beta version to see if it works or not. For them to play catch-up is one thing but why this has taken so long is utterly amazing. Perhaps to help sell another OS upgrade?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Lelia Katherine Thomas — Mon, 16 May 2005 20:04:04 GMT

I think it's great that IE7 is going to have tabs. It will gives users who only venture onto the web via the default settings of things an even more functional workspace.

Sadly, though, I do have to agree with a lot of the comments here. Tabbed browsing is wonderful, and it should be an addition, but...big whoop. As you pointed out, there are already third party bits to do that, and other browsers, such as Mozilla and Opera, cornered that part of the market quite some time ago.

I think if Microsoft and IE want to "take back the web" (as the Firefox campaign puts forth), it better be innovative, not spit out the same features of its competitors. So you've got tabs--have you got room for user-created extensions, CSS/XHTML standard recognition, RSS/Live Bookmark features, ad blocking (popup, banner, and flash), keyboard shortcuts, skinnable interfaces, etcetera? Even those things, however, have been out for quite some time with other browsers.

Congrats on catching up with the others. This isn't going to give IE it's portion of the web back, though, and it really shouldn't. Sorry, but that's the truth.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

John — Mon, 16 May 2005 19:58:59 GMT

Yes, standards are great. Making a product that is standards-based is necessary. Are people going to totally move away from IE? Not any time soon. Think of company X. They have a team of developers that code for IE. All their code is tested and only works in IE. They aren't going to change. They probably couldn't code their way out of the box model, nor even know what it is. There are tens of thousands of developers like this that HAVE to have IE.

IE is a good browser. Is Firefox better? Hard to say. They both have their highs-and-lows. What I'm really looking forward to is Netscape 8. Yes, if you haven't heard, they are supposed to have a "button" that allows you to switch from rendering the page in IE, or rendering it in Mozilla. How cool is that? With something like that, you get the best of BOTH worlds, in one product! Now, I hope this is still going to happen because it's a really cool idea. Anyone know of the status on this?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Josh — Mon, 16 May 2005 20:20:42 GMT

Would love to see you take a look at what is making Firefox compelling rather than looking at IE addin's. Since that is infact the current competitioin.

I think as a browser firefox is ok, but the add-in they have make it really good. thing like adblock and the one to remove elements from a page to print...this in my mind is the sort of thigns that IE 7.0 needs to incorporate to become really great in the consumer space again.

Sure dev's want CSS and all the other half done or butchered standards...but the consumers don't care about those......

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Bob — Mon, 16 May 2005 20:19:03 GMT

When MS abandoned the multi document interface in favor of single document interface everywhere it was a huge mistake. Then they ended up adding support for the grouping of similar windows on the task bar because of the resulting overflow of open windows... yea that made for a better user experience.

They need to change Office back to MDI (with tabs this time) also.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

John — Mon, 16 May 2005 20:19:08 GMT

...and that's the problem. Consumers SHOULD care! Without standards, you get stuff like everyone's password being 123456. You get the SSID for your WAP as LinkSys so EVERYONE knows it. You have to have standards and compliance and accountability. The code has to be right, in the software that renders it, and the markup that displays it.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Nelson — Mon, 16 May 2005 20:28:54 GMT

Great news on the tabs for IE7! I would like to see a lot of the tab functionality that is seen in Maxthon. Things like locking a tab, where the tab opens (to the right or left), auto refreshing the tab every so many seconds, etc... I think all of these are important features to the tabs. As for plug-ins, I hope that IE7 will have its own "plug-in" bar where things like Flashget, AI-Roboform, etc... will appear and all work well with your next new version. Keep up the good work!

Nelson

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Charles Martin — Mon, 16 May 2005 20:25:42 GMT

One of the issues I've noticed with tabbed browsing that you'll want to be sure is handled properly is the updating of the status bar text. I've seen in Firefox situations where one web page was updating the Status Bar for the browser, but I was on a different tab. Needless to say, the messages appearing were rather disorienting until I realized what was happening. I'm sure you're quite aware of how it should be corrected, but I just wanted to make sure that the implementation of tabs did not cause "bleedover" from other web applications.

basic tabs for ie beta

Asa Dotzler on firefox, cats, mars, and more — Mon, 16 May 2005 20:29:52 GMT

Well, it's finally confirmed ... and then hedged quite well :-) IE 7 beta will have a very basic tabbed browsing feature with more tab features to come after beta. (I suspect that this announcement could be "translated" to "we decided late in the game that we needed tabs and they're nowhere near done so don't flame us when you see them.") Why didn't they do tabs sooner in IE? Well, according to Dean, they thought about it (when? before IE 6 shipped, like in 2000? somehow I doubt that) but decided not to because it would be inconsistent with other Windows apps like WMP. As if there was any real consistency across those apps today. Ha! I think a more likely story is that someone at Microsoft woke up and realized that having grown accustomed to such a "sticky" feature, those users who have upgraded to Firefox were unlikely to ever go back to IE. See, I've got this sneaking suspicion that Microsoft doesn't care half as much about its users as they do about preserving their monopoly. I may be completely wrong here, but if you scrutinize their actions first assuming that they're "trying to make life better for IE users," and then you scrutinize their actions assuming they're just "trying to stem the bleeding and hold on to their monopoly," I think the end result will be that you come around to my conclusion. Does this mean that the IE 7 user won't benefit? No, not at all. Just because their motivation is evil, doesn't mean that the resulting software will suck. But I do think that all software bears the mark of the motivation behind its creation. With Firefox, I think our motives shows quite clearly. People understand that we're working to make the web better for them. That comes across clearly in the empowerment that our browser offers to the user. With the upcoming IE release, I think the features will reflect quite well the motives and this will be clear to anyone who thinks about it. Oh, and if you're one of the hundreds of millions of Windows users who didn't move to XP and you want tabs, Dean, over at the IE Blob says you can go download some third-party, IE-based browser. I've got a better idea. How about abandoning the vendor who abandoned you and moving over to a superior browser....

re: IE7 Has Tabs

JB — Mon, 16 May 2005 20:44:03 GMT

IE is a great browser, and hope to see that version 7 will be a really great step forward. Tabs are great, but there are also a lot of other things that were good to get done: first, of course, would be a better support for W3C recommendation - really, CSS & XHTML are not the strongest sides of IE. A better bookmarks management would also very useful, it would be absolutely great if you could syncronize them, may be using Exchange, huh?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

John — Mon, 16 May 2005 20:44:16 GMT

Why do you bother to do a blog when you get idiots like the other respondants who just want to bitch about Microsoft? wouldn't it be great to take away EVERYTHING that microsoft has enabled them to do and see how well they get on? Hmmm i wonder what would happen if the slime who write virii et all to attack Microsoft products would do that for linux products and junk like Firefox. Oh wait, it's the same people who code for those who are doing this!!! silly old bear!!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jeff — Mon, 16 May 2005 21:15:48 GMT

Don't user a lot of IE add-ins or Toolbars, but for developers, please keep the Accessability Toolbar working.

http://www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/index.html

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Shawn B. — Mon, 16 May 2005 21:36:00 GMT

Will we have the ability to choose to use tabs or not use tabs? Personally, I don't like them as much but sometimes they are useful. What's more useful is the ability (like in Firefox) to choose whether to use tabs or no.

Thanks,
Shawn

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Craig — Mon, 16 May 2005 21:43:45 GMT

"wouldn't it be great to take away EVERYTHING that microsoft has enabled them to do and see how well they get on?"

Actually, a lot of people do just fine without any Microsoft produts. Shocking, I know.

"virii"

It's "viruses".

"Oh wait, it's the same people who code for those who are doing this!!! silly old bear!!"

So, every person who codes for Linux is nothing more than a dirty lousy virus writer. I see.

Next version of Internet Explorer will have tabs

Lifehacker — Mon, 16 May 2005 21:44:12 GMT

A developer on the forthcoming version 7 of Microsoft Internet Explorer confirms the browser will have tabs (a la Firefox/Safari/Opera). No word on when IE7 will be released, but hopefully in addition to tabs it will also support CSS, XHTML...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Ben — Mon, 16 May 2005 21:51:48 GMT

Your comment about tabs in the shell brings up a suggestion - put tabs in the Explorer/shell interface! I'd love that.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Fuzztrek — Mon, 16 May 2005 21:52:19 GMT

"See why we went back on forth on implementing tabs in IE? "

It's really not that hard. All you have to is: put them in; disable them by default; let all users know how to turn them on during your marketing campaign; make sure they are fully customizable (right down to hotkeys/key bindings); and finally, make sure the UI is intuitive.

In other words, implement them, but do it properly.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dan — Mon, 16 May 2005 21:47:29 GMT

Stop copying Firefox. Screw IE and get a real Browser.

http://www.getfirefox.com

re: IE7 Has Tabs

sl8 — Mon, 16 May 2005 21:58:43 GMT

Interesting comments from Asa at the Mozilla foundation: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/008152.html

re: IE7 Has Tabs

pucko — Mon, 16 May 2005 22:34:22 GMT

Man. It really must suck working on a product that makes so many people's lives a misery.

IE7 has tabs

MasterMaq's Blog — Mon, 16 May 2005 22:58:41 GMT

Well it's about time:

Yes, IE7 has tabs. Some people have asked why we didn&rsquo;t put tabs in IE...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

lmh — Mon, 16 May 2005 23:04:03 GMT

It would be nice if Mr. Bill could direct the company to use more of it's billions of dollars to make IE a 21st century browser. We web developers want CSS to work and not have to resort to strange code hacks to make something look right. All users want IE to be secure. All IE is good for in my opinion is Windows/Office Update. Tabs are nice, but fix the bugs first.

Tabs? Why not the cache?

R.B. — Mon, 16 May 2005 23:06:56 GMT

Well, tabs are OK but not a deal breaker for me. I'm just Joe User. If only IE could manage it's cache better. Like many millions of users out there I have an older computer with dial-up access. Pressing the Back or Forward button in a browser should be a fairly quick operation, but it's far faster on Firefox than on Explorer. I think cache management is to blame. With a new version of XP coming out for older machines, why not optimize the cache?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Sanne — Mon, 16 May 2005 23:16:29 GMT

Please please please use strict webstandards in IE7. Far more important than tab browsing. And please secure any overriding. So no target="_tab" please! Regards

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Sanne — Mon, 16 May 2005 23:19:45 GMT

Maybe another good idea, a volume slider for inline music on webpages! How often you get irritated by flash or mediaplayer embed sounds while you are already playing something in the background. A slider pure for IE and related to that would be great, than I turn that to 10% :)

IE7はタブ付き

OPC Diary — Mon, 16 May 2005 23:20:11 GMT

IEBlog : IE7 Has Tabs 一応これで確定ですかね。IE7はタブ...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chris — Mon, 16 May 2005 23:31:28 GMT

I'd love to see SVG, JPEG2000, and JPIP implemented natively in IE7. As far as I know, these formats are all finalized and standardized.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Joe Van Dyk — Mon, 16 May 2005 23:39:45 GMT

For the love of God, PLEASE properly support the vast majority of CSS. And alpha png transparency would be great.

Doing so would save me so many hours of work.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Stomaphagus — Mon, 16 May 2005 23:41:39 GMT

Guys, I didn't pick up on the "bragging" that everyone is so worked up about. He says, pretty clearly,

"I think we made the wrong decision here initially, and we’re making the right one now."

This whole spat is like a car manufacturer deciding to offer key fobs that feature lock/unlock and alarm functions when everyone else does already. Bad that they didn't offer it, good now that they do.

It was inevitable that IE would eventually offer tabs from the factory. This is a total nonissue.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Anonymous — Mon, 16 May 2005 23:55:37 GMT

Congratulations to the Internet Explorer team! WOW!!! This is amazing! In only FIVE years you hard working folks have managed to implement first transparent PNG support and now "basic" tabbed browsing!!! This is so great, I'm about to wet my pants.

"The main goal for tabs in our beta release is to make sure our implementation delivers on compatibility and security."

I am so overjoyed to hear how concerned you fine engineers are about tabbed browsing "compatibility." Thankfully you're not wasting time on CSS and standards "compatibility," I mean, what for when you have such an important, monumental, almost revolutionary feature such as tab support to work on. Not mention that I think we all fully understand how much work it must be to ensure "compatibility" for tabs, since there are literally hundreds of sites with which tabs won't work if you don't make "compatibility" a high priority, right?

"Some people have asked why we didn’t put tabs in IE sooner."

I'd say that's probably because you wonderful fellows have been working so hard these past five years at "refining" your tab implementation and ensuring "compatibility." I mean, such advanced features take a lot of time and effort. You fine folks have surely also opened a "Tab Engineering Lab" headed by five corporate managers, 75 engineers, 10 usability experts, and generated 25,000 pages of paperwork and reports on the topic. I mean, what else would you have been doing for the past five years?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Marcel — Mon, 16 May 2005 23:51:16 GMT

I hope this tabbing nonsense can be turned off, for me the taskbar works great.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Mike Gale — Tue, 17 May 2005 00:12:04 GMT

Great.

I expect alpha on PNG to make a huge difference to the potential quality and power of web pages. That was great news too.

I'm hoping to see announcements about SVG, and layout fixed.

Then it's time innovation got going again in this Web. Keep it up.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

mike u nyc718 — Tue, 17 May 2005 00:12:20 GMT

Jeez, Great news Dean! and its way too late for those people realized almost 15% or more re using FireFox comes with a tabs in the last 5 or so years.

Better release that IE 7 now or better!

How about some Jpeg2000 and SVG support too?

El_Matarife — Tue, 17 May 2005 00:15:27 GMT

This could make a lot of difference for people. It'd save a lot of bandwidth and give web-devs a lot more tools. Believe me, winning more share for Win2K3/IIS6/Sql2000 or Yukon vs the Linux/Apache/MySql/Php crowd would be a lot easier if the web development community had a vavorable impression of IE 7's commitment to making life way easier for them. I heard an anecdote from a guy who was trying to start a project adapting bittorrent for a distributed web serving platform or something similar and when he announced it on the BT mailing list Bram Cohen himself announced that "Microsoft tools suck get the hell out of my mailing list". You can't win marketshare from people who actively hate you.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Xero — Tue, 17 May 2005 00:27:56 GMT

Waaah. Enough of people whinning about tabbing. First they whine that IE isn't tabbed, then they whine that IE is stealing firefox's ideas, then they whine that it's too little too late. Cry me a river.

Tabbing is hardly an invention of firefox. Applications by both Microsoft and other companies have been tabbed for ages. Where was everyone clamouring about firefox and opera stealing tabbing from microsoft word 98? If it means a better user experience for me they can embrace and extend whatever the hell they want as far as i'm concerned.

Best guess is IE will improve CSS, but it will be one of those options thats off by default, that people will have to manually set to "strict standards compliance". Personally I wouldn't care, but they can't just drop everyone who writes shitty html, because supporting them is how Microsoft became a market leader.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

morgan — Tue, 17 May 2005 00:50:00 GMT

I consider Maxthon my main browser...can't stand firefox or opera. So, I'm delighted to hear that IE7 will have tabs....and about RSS? I hope IE7 will also include the ability to display RSS as does Maxthon...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Crazy — Tue, 17 May 2005 00:50:33 GMT

I am looking forward to IE7 and all the various improvments that you are makng and the new features. I hope your tab browsing will once it is finalized presents one of the best tab browser interface.
At present I use IE6, FireFox, Maxthon every day. I think I like the tab interface of maxthon over Firefox, and while the FireFox lovers will disagree, Firefox is not supperior to IE.
I can't remember the last time IE crashed on me, but firefox crashed three times yesterday alone, and it has security issues just like all other browsers, the diference more people try to exploit IE because it has bigger marketshare. FireFox's "increased security" has nothing to do with its code and vulnerbilities, but with its small marketshare...

I have a strong feeling once IE7 is out it will become my main browser, and for day to day use maybe the only browser I use

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Anonymous — Tue, 17 May 2005 01:20:39 GMT

"FireFox's "increased security" has nothing to do with its code and vulnerbilities, but with its small marketshare... "

Do you work for Microsoft? Because anyone with half a brain knows how patently absurd the above statement is. Do some research. Internet Explorer's vulnerabilities and Firefox's excellent security have everything to do with the care taken (or lack thereof) in the development process, not "market share."

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Bruce Morgan [MSFT] — Tue, 17 May 2005 01:38:21 GMT

A few responses:

Several of you asked about target="_tab" and the like. Tabbing is not exposed to script; there will be no such thing in IE7. Links that target a new top level browser window will automatically get turned into new tabs.

Tabs are on by default. In Beta 2, we'll have more fine grained user control. The Beta 1 release is all about compatibility, primarily with 3rd party toolbars and other extensions. Hence Dean's request for feedback about popular extensions and toolbars that you'd like us to test against.

Tabs were considered for implementation at several times in the past, most recently with IE for XPSP2. It was decided that XPSP2 was an entirely security focused release and the only end-user features that would be added would be security related, such as Manage Add-ons. Those are some of the decisions that I believe Dean is referring to above.

BTW, the browser that first implemented something that was recognizably "tabbed browsing" (not MDI, but tabs) was Netcaptor back in 97 or so.

The CSS and webstandards comments are, well, off the topic of this post. They've been heard. Not every post here requires them to be repeated.

Avant

Shaun Coetzee — Tue, 17 May 2005 02:18:37 GMT

I'd just like to say that I've been using Avant (http://www.avantbrowser.com/), and its tabs are near PERFECT. Avant is basically what IE should have been all along... If I was MS I'd buy Avant and incorporate it into IE. The major thing IE needs is yes the whole standards thing and better security.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

dan — Tue, 17 May 2005 02:18:47 GMT

Small thing - I'd like to see the hotkey of ctrl + L hilight the text in the location bar, rather than pop up the "Open" box.

Tab control

Maurits — Tue, 17 May 2005 02:20:24 GMT

Will drag-and-drop tab re-ordering be one of the "finer-grained user control" features to which you allude? What about the ability to bookmark a set of tabs? Or open the contents of a Favorite folder, each in its own tab?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Alexander De Large — Tue, 17 May 2005 02:20:28 GMT

Imagine this headline; "IE7 Has Standards". Now that would REALLY be something to boast about. I will never again develop for two browsers; in our team, its accept a statndards compliant browser as the target for your job or get another set of developers. You need to address this and you know it. Its not as if you dont have the resources or the talent to pull it off, so we can only conclude that you are ignoring the tens of thousands of calls for standards compliance as sheer vandalism...what else to call it? By these deliberate actions you make peoples lives miserable, bog down developers in needless mind numbing time wasting efffort to span browsers...you know all of this but continue in your stubborn refusal to fix your stuff. That is pure evil.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

underscore — Tue, 17 May 2005 02:20:50 GMT

Now that decent, robust and standard compliant browsers are two a penny, and are being being updated frequently, all I feel about the news about IE is, quite frankly, a disillusioned "so what?"

I used to be a 'hardcore' IE fan. But now I haven't run IE for almost 9 months. I'm not a OSS junkie. I don't own or use a Mac either. And, I do like some of the things that Microsoft are doing. I just don't feel this particular effort is worth it.

I guess I just of just see IE7 as just another hotfix that will be automatically installed, use up disk space, but never used intentionally.

I do follow this blog though, just out of curiosity. Just in case, one day there might be something really innovative going on that I may just stop to gawp at, and persuade me to double-click that blue icon, just once. For this to happen Microsoft needs to stop playing wait-and-catch-up.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chris R — Tue, 17 May 2005 02:50:17 GMT

I love tabs. I use Firefox and I can't imagine living without them.

But i think MS need to create something better than tabs in the browser. We already have tabs on the taskbar. Having 2 sets of tabs that work differently makes no usability sense. I think the taskbar should be improved/enhanced to accomodate tabs in any program.

I can understand why MS have been reluctant to included tabs, but I think they should have come up with a better solution in the mean time.

Maybe a multi layered taskbar, where each layer only contains the tabs for a single application. Maybe each layer could move independantly of each other and could be moved vertically on the desktop?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

mjk — Tue, 17 May 2005 03:00:34 GMT

Great

But please let me turn it off? You know, the same way you allow us to turn off the "image toolbar" in IE6 with a meta tag.

All these extra browser widgets sometimes renders more sophisticated web interfaces even less usable... those of us who work hard to develop clean interfaces don't need more clutter! :)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Aesdyn — Tue, 17 May 2005 03:13:04 GMT

I think tags are awsome.

But how bout the ability to create an attribute on a link that is recoginized by capable tab-based browsers.

<a href="www.google.com" TabName="Search">
Google Search</a>

<a href="http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&gl=us" TabName="News Search">

These tabs could be horizontal from top to bottom on either the left side of the page frame or the right.

Anyway, good job!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

mjk — Tue, 17 May 2005 03:15:08 GMT

Oh yeah

And I'm so sick of everyone whining about standards this and CSS that, who's browser better than yours and all the other incessant nitpicking browser banter that I've been hearing during my short 10 years on the web.

The guy's writing about tabs. Don't care about tabs? Then move on - plenty more to see on the internet.

Thanks for playing! Game over

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Aesdyn — Tue, 17 May 2005 03:15:26 GMT

Oh nevermind. I just read that this kind of feature will not be added.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

MySky — Tue, 17 May 2005 03:27:41 GMT

Opera is a wonderful suite of Internet applications that suits my needs marvelously.

I will take it over Firefox and Maxthon, most certainly.

Firefox and Maxthon are both nice browsers, but I like the integration of mail, browsing, chat, newsfeeds, and newsgroups with a common interface and common mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts for everything that Opera gives me.

And Opera does it in a very small download.

I don't know how they do it, but quality and quantity (in terms of features and the ability to integrate them) lean heavily in favor of Opera for me.

IE7 will remain just a browser more than likely. That is not that interesting to me.

Maxthon and Firefox do the basics of browsing just fine without IE7.

Opera just takes browsing to another level altogether with its suite.

IE7 ... good luck!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

timecop — Tue, 17 May 2005 04:01:00 GMT

NO NO NO NO.
NO TABS.
NO.
PLEASE.

AND IF YOU DO ADD THEM, MAKE THEM ONE OF THOSE "REQUIRES RESTART TO ENABLE" OPTIONS.

YEARS OF CONSISTENT USER INTERFACE RESEARCH DOWN THE OPENSORES TOILET, YOU"RE LETTING LIKE 10 WHINERS WHO USE TABS RUIN YOUR PRODUCT FOR EVERYONE?...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Ben Yahuda — Tue, 17 May 2005 04:57:39 GMT

I agree with your noting that it may have been a mistake for taking so long to add tabs to IE. Maxthon and others may have helped keep some users but many others like myself have had trouble with Maxthon.
There are several million people who have switched to other browsers completely. Largely due to the perception that they are 'safer' using another browser. But also because tabbed browsing is just flat out a no brainer.Millions of people actually will pay as much as $35 US for a browser like Opera. They do this even though they have a free, perfectly functional browser as part of their OS.
I am one of those. The ONLY time I will use IE is if I know that I will be using microsoft.com/whatever. I bought Opera 7.0 a long time ago and never looked back. When I do use IE today it feels clumsy and I don't like it at all.
And I like Microsoft. What chance do you think there is of luring back the masses who don't like Microsoft.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Ben — Tue, 17 May 2005 05:03:01 GMT

Apple comes out with a two-button mouse and now IE has tabs. What is the world coming too!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jon — Tue, 17 May 2005 05:14:40 GMT

I've tried Firefox, Avant, Opera, CrazyBrowser and others with tabs and I just don't like tabs. They're not some groundbreaking usability advancement like many people seem to think. They're merely an alternative to multiple windows and taskbar entries that many prefer, but others (like myself) don't; in other words, they're just a usability preference.

Tabs are not the end-all. For one thing, how do you show two tabs on the screen at the same time (ex. you're comparing specs on motherboards side-by-side)? How do you resize what one tab is displaying without changing it for all of the other tabs? As far as I know, both are limitations of tabs that multiple windows have allowed since the inception of browsers.

I have no problem with IE incorporating tabs. If lots of people prefer to use tabs, then they should be available; I just won't use them, myself. I *can* think of a few instances in which tabs might be better than multiple windows. One of those might be Tablet PCs and other highly-portable computers. Tapping the stylus on the tab would be a lot easier than using the start bar, which might not even be visible if you're browsing fullscreen. So, I think that tabs should be available in IE. I'd like the option of using them when I want them, but I probably won't use them the vast majority of the time.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jed — Tue, 17 May 2005 05:18:18 GMT

Thats good to hear, and about time.

While others are saying "Keep up the good work", I have yet to see a version or beta of IE with these features. Regardless I bet you all are doing good work, but I'd rather see something that actually works.

This blog seems to be more of a marketing machine than anything else (why not blog about the recent IE security bugs?), etc.

I just hope IE7 beta lives up to all your hype. If it does, recognition of hard/good work will be due, and I'll be the first to give it.

Again, I'm not bashing, I just hate being poked at, then end up being let down.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

IIDIAnonymous — Tue, 17 May 2005 05:48:38 GMT

How about fixing the following issues that are well known and documented among anyone doing serious DHTML/JavaScript development in IE:
1) Full CSS support
2) JavaScript memory leak issues such as the well known "closure" leaks, and the circular (DHTML<->JavaScript) reference leaks
3) Better error messages from JavaScript (instead of the dreaded "object does not support this property" error) to make the life of DHTML/JavaScript developers easier

Internet Explorer 7 Has Tabs

Pagevie.ws — Tue, 17 May 2005 06:30:25 GMT

The IEBlog has details about why they did what they did!

"Yes, IE7 has tabs.

In general, I think tabs are a great idea. I liked them a lot in Office dialogs and in Excel in the early 90's....

re: IE7 Has Tabs

seaan — Tue, 17 May 2005 06:49:28 GMT

I've used tabs with both Opera and Firefox. Here are the features I'd like to see (I'm omitting some of the features that got numerous requests in other posts - like reoderable tabs).

1) I agree with a previous poster, the ability to open tabs in the background is perhaps the single most important feature.

1a) Ideally a power-user could control which actions use the current window, and which open a new window or tab (ala Firefox extensions TBE or Tab Mix). I've changed these features several times as I've gotten used to them (now pretty much everything opens in a background tab (external app, history, search results, favorite, button bar, etc.); except for normal links in the current window).

2) Option that saves and restores the tab sessions (transparently on startup). I most often use tabs when reading news sites, and often don't get to real all of the tabs before I need to shut-down.

3) Minor request is to have buttons that save all current tabs in a favoites folder; as well as the opposite - open all entries in a favorites folder into new tabs.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Naoki — Tue, 17 May 2005 06:59:08 GMT

Tab is convenient.
I-BUY-MACmini-.-Get-Safarl-But-Tab-Width-Not-Change. Setting? Do-Not-Know.
|Internet Explorer | :-) But
|IE | :-( Uselessness....

IE7はタブブラウザ

Zawajaのblog 燃焼系～♪(謎) — Tue, 17 May 2005 07:07:38 GMT

ITmediaによると、IE7はタブブラウザに――IEのBlogで公表とのこと...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

MoD — Tue, 17 May 2005 07:24:02 GMT

Look, I will make it easy for you. go and download the firefox source code, change the logos and put that out...It will be a quicker than you trying to re-invent the wheel as usally.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Phil — Tue, 17 May 2005 07:31:46 GMT

Glad to hear you're joining the tabbed browser fold, I've been enjoying them here in Opera for a number of years. Will we see anywhere near the extra functionality offered with Opera's tabs (which are far superior to Firefox's, even with the TabBrowser extension)?

More importantly though, I'm still waiting to hear that you are going to going to make a push to support the variety of web standards (such as CSS, XHTML, and SVG) that have been essentially left to rot through the life of IE6.

"For one thing, how do you show two tabs on the screen at the same time (ex. you're comparing specs on motherboards side-by-side)? How do you resize what one tab is displaying without changing it for all of the other tabs? As far as I know, both are limitations of tabs that multiple windows have allowed since the inception of browsers."

This can be readily accomplished using Opera's Tile view and, if needed, their Fit-to-Window feature which will go and restructure the page so that you don't need any messy horizontal scrolling to view the contents.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Yukari — Tue, 17 May 2005 07:43:19 GMT

Hi.I write from Japan.

umm....New IE will have tabs...
Is it optional?

Because, I hate "tab browser"...
I hate tab because it narrows the screen.
In IE6 used now, it is a size with the smallest "file menu" and "button" and "address bar" and a row.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Yukari — Tue, 17 May 2005 07:58:41 GMT

First of all, please tidy the recognition of the charset with the META tag...:)
Because IE read with ISO or Unidode and other wrong charset even if this tag---META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS"---was
written.

And, I want you to stop erasing "Offline" from the file menu of IE and erasing "Address bar" that started by having clicked the file of PC. It is inconvenient.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Praveen — Tue, 17 May 2005 08:44:10 GMT

Tabs are necessary to get back users who have shifted loyalties to firefox et al only because of this.
IE7 must also have an RSS reader incorporated in the browser like firefox.Or some feature to add live bookmarks easily as in firefox. ITS a must!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Wilson — Tue, 17 May 2005 09:18:22 GMT

Apart Maxthon, I think you should also look into another third party browser, Avant browser. I am using it now instead of IE. The tab browsing is truely a great experience.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

AndyO — Tue, 17 May 2005 10:20:54 GMT

I think this discussion is missing the point. For every (more or less) useful feature MS fits into IE, they add support an usefulness to a platform they don't fully control, namely the web. Thats what's causing the foot-dragging.

That, and the catering to everybody but the enduser. Avertisers, addon-sellers ect.

Internet Explorer 7 will pick up the tabs

Bleeding Edge — Tue, 17 May 2005 10:30:52 GMT

As it so often does, Qantas kindly arranged a delay - this time only 28 minutes - in the flight back from Sydney, so we may be feeling even more uncharitable than usual. On the subject of which we should...

Internet Explorer 7 will pick up the tabs

Bleeding Edge — Tue, 17 May 2005 10:40:30 GMT

IE7 has tabs

Ray Taylor — Tue, 17 May 2005 10:40:32 GMT

re: IE7 Has Tabs

xentar — Tue, 17 May 2005 11:29:19 GMT

Thats great news (not unexpected :), i am looking forward to this one, i just hope the implementation will be similar to Maxthon or Opera rather than the way Firefox works with tabs. Ctr+n should (IMHO) open new tab as a page requested by another app should open in already existing instance of ie in new tab instead of opening new window.

Anyway, if it wont work, i guessMaxthon will run on IE7 so i am not worried too much.

as for the purists - the news about betetr support of standardas was already mentioned but truly - what user is interested in is ease of use, great look and thats about it. Do you think the casual Joe checks for page validity or cares about alpha channels? Nope, casual Joe even doesnt know what validity or alpha channels are. Sounds crude to all the web designers and programmers, so sorry.

Thanks for the news once again, Dean.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

mtp — Tue, 17 May 2005 11:35:33 GMT

simply try to fix the vulnerabilities! and about "Initially, we had some concerns around complexity and consistency… will it confuse users more than it benefits them?" .. well microsoft didn't think about that when you added "group similar taskbar buttons" to xp ...
i'm really looking forward to reactos ...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

sudeki — Tue, 17 May 2005 11:43:32 GMT

Avant is a great front end for IE.Much preffered than maxthon.Nice popup blocker. I use FF most of the time though especially when i try to browse some popup heavy websites.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

sudeki — Tue, 17 May 2005 11:41:11 GMT

Avant is a great front end for IE.Much preffered than maxthon.Nice popup blocker. I use FF most of the time though especially when i try to browse some popup heavy websites.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

hAl — Tue, 17 May 2005 12:14:38 GMT

As long as i can switch them of I do not mind.
Tabs suck big time if you have a lot of open sessions as they become unreadable anyways or just take too much room away from your browserview. I'll just accept the limitations of the grouped IE icons on the taskbar is less efficient than tabs but less intrusive on the browsing as well.

I think there is a big need for a quality Adblocker add-inn for IE. Don't think there is one yet. With any luck IE7 will support addinns making possible things like Adblocking. Hopefully someone will write one during the beta period so it can be launched almost at the same time as IE7 itself.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dylan — Tue, 17 May 2005 12:38:38 GMT

What are we actually celebrating here? That a new version of IE (that probably would never have built if not for pressure in the browser market) includes features that its competitors offer and that users enjoy? Doesn't take much market research to figure out that tabs are a good idea.

Ye, sure its nice that IE7 has tabs. But shouldn't that be a given? By 'ooh-ing' and 'aah-ing' over tab support, we are effectively saying "Microsoft's stubborness to update IE6 is so overwhelming that I just can't believe they'd include tabs!". Celebrating tab support is celebrating mediocrity.

I know there is a general sense that users are never happy. That when you say "tabs are in", then people just start moaning about something else. This is partly true, but not necessarily unjustified. Users EXPECT tabs, and they EXPECT standards-compliance.

I'm sure we are all glad that tabs are in, but tabs are, in my opinion, a quick win. The issue of web-standards compatibility is a far more fundamental issue. Due to IE's proprietory adoption of the W3C standards, the entire web industry is made inefficient by developers having to apply css hacks (if they know what they are doing) or resorting to table-based markups (if they don't) to get a site to render properly across browsers.

One attitude would be: "well, IE has 90% of the market, so just build for IE". I think we'd all agree that is a ridiculous attitude to have.

IE7's strict compliance with web standards would do far more for it's reputation than tabbed browsing. True, most users don't even know what web standards are, and probably don't care, but in terms of having a positive effect on the web industry itself, compliance is in my mind the most important feature of IE7. And this benefit to developers will undoubted filter down to the end user.

People aren't moaning about standards compliance per se, they are merely expressing concern over whether this issue is important to Microsoft; indeed, whether its a priority in the IE7 project.

The question, expressed as ingratitude, is this: Does Microsoft care about standards?

Tabbed Browsing im nächsten IE dabei

Karsten Samaschke: Los jetzt! — Tue, 17 May 2005 12:56:32 GMT

Microsoft hat eingestanden, dass der Verzicht auf das Tabbed Browsing in aktuell

Tabbed Browsing im nächsten IE dabei

Karsten Samaschke: Los jetzt! — Tue, 17 May 2005 12:51:10 GMT

Microsoft hat eingestanden, dass der Verzicht auf das Tabbed Browsing in aktuell

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Aidan Walsh — Tue, 17 May 2005 13:21:03 GMT

"IF YOU DO ADD THEM, MAKE THEM ONE OF THOSE "REQUIRES RESTART TO ENABLE" OPTIONS."

Wow...

Anyhoo, to every one who has critisied the tabs idea, claiming that the task bar works just as well, I think of it in terms of scope. The taskbar should only show tabs of a system scope (different programs\instances of programs), whereas an application shows what it is handeling. To put all that on one bar, as has been the case the majority of the time up until now, is clunky IMHO.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jcl — Tue, 17 May 2005 13:34:14 GMT

Heh, yeah, right, get Microsoft to make the best available browser ever, get them to make it opensource... and what will you get? Probably the Mozilla Foundation sueing them for antitrust and earning millions of dollars in exchange :-)

If Microsoft does the best browser, they lose, if they don't make it, they lose, if they get people to use it because of cool features (like 100% supporting standards, for example), they lose.

No matter what they do, they lose... I wonder why they still bother with making IE7 :-)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dylan — Tue, 17 May 2005 14:19:08 GMT

In reply to Jcl:

"Heh, yeah, right, get Microsoft to make the best available browser ever, get them to make it opensource... and what will you get? Probably the Mozilla Foundation sueing them for antitrust and earning millions of dollars in exchange :-)"

- Why get them to make it opensource? You can't sue for antitrust over opensource software ... that's kinda the point. If you are being facetious, then your entire comment is based on a joke, making it ... a joke.

"If Microsoft does the best browser, they lose"

- Why?

"if they don't make it, they lose"

- That's true.

"if they get people to use it because of cool features (like 100% supporting standards, for example), they lose."

- WHY!?

Please explain what you mean?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Stefan — Tue, 17 May 2005 14:14:21 GMT

I'd like to see that when i open a link that directs to open a new window i can option to have all new windows open in new tabs instead. I would like to see "permatabs" of bookmarks. Set several pages as homepages so when i open IE7 I have my news, weather, sports, and search pages all open in different tabs right away.

Microsoft Rewrites the History of Tabbed Browsing

Joe Grossberg — Tue, 17 May 2005 14:16:12 GMT

It looks like IE7 will have tabbed browsing: Yes, IE7 has tabs ... I liked them a lot in Office...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Tired Of Hacking Sites For IE — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:00:27 GMT

most critical IE add-ins:

Full CSS2.1 support. Not just "improved". SVG support without plugins.

None of these are add-ins to web-developers but they seem to be to you so I think they fit into this category.

- A very tired web developer.

Eindelijk

Jazper.nl — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:01:23 GMT

IE7 Will Have Tabbed Browsing loconet writes that early yesterday morning, "Dean Hachamovitch, IE product unit manager, confirmed that IE7, like Opera and Firefox first did years ago, will have tabbed browsing as one of its new features.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Nachiket Vartak — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:03:15 GMT

Does this blog contain people ranting? Or does Microsoft/IEBlog actually reply and discuss. There is no point to a blog if the discussions are not being heard.

Anyhow, the fact that IE7 has tabs, won't change the fact that its bloatware and basically has a myriad of things going wrong for it. Additional features in basically bad software hardly would do me any good.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Steve — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:11:10 GMT

Ignore them. Unless IE abandons Microsoft, goes open source and donates it's code to the Mozilla foundation proclaiming it's superiority, they're (the slashdot zealots) won't be happy.

Fortunately, if development continues, Netscape...I mean Firefox will be dead in a couple years. :)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Viktor Krammer — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:12:24 GMT

As the developer of Quero Toolbar I am very interested in how tabbed browsing will affect my web browser extension. For my search toolbar it is important to maintain state information (e.g. hightlighted words etc.) for every web page the user is currently viewing. To achive this in a tabbed browsing environment I would wish to have the possibility to programmatically access the opened tabs in the web browser. To maintain the state information it would also be very helpful to get further notified (1) when a new tab is created (2) when a tab is closed and (3) when the user activates an existing tab (e.g. clicking on the tab). I am thinking of an extension of the DWebBrowserEvents interface.

BTW I have found several bugs in the latest release of IE. Please can you tell me where to report them? Is there a way to get early beta releases of IE7 or to participate in the beta program of IE7?

Thanks

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Kamran Ali — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:06:57 GMT

Tabs or not Tabs, as a Web Developer I would give anything so IE adheres to Web Standards

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jcl — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:21:58 GMT

To Dylan:

"- Why get them to make it opensource? You can't sue for antitrust over opensource software ... that's kinda the point. If you are being facetious, then your entire comment is based on a joke, making it ... a joke. "

Of course you can sue antitrust over opensource, who says you can't? You can sue them for including it in Windows (even if it's opensource). Opensource -does not mean- free, and -does not mean- it can't come with a commercial operating system.

I was kinda making a joke, yes, but not all that much... what I mean is... no matter what they do, they'll get blamed for "something" by the community... it has always happened with Microsoft, and won't be different this time.

What I really meant was: -even if they did the best browser-, then they'd lose, because Mozilla (or any other browser maker, for the matter) would sue them for antitrust, for including Explorer in Windows... while Mozilla FireFox keeps gaining market share against IE nowadays (we'll see what happens with IE7 but I don't see that stopping) nobody seems to really care that IE is included in Windows anymore, while THAT precisaley has costed Microsoft millions of dollars in trials against other browser-developers in the past. I'm pretty sure if FireFox had the (say) 50% of the market share, and then IE7 came up and FireFox went down to 5%, someone would sue Microsoft for -anything- so just to stop that, -OR- get some big moneys while they are at it.

That's the way it has worked in the past, and that's the way it'll keep working.

I was indeed making a joke, but a joke with a point.

It's sad, but it's true.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Anonymous Developer — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:22:03 GMT

The discussion around TABS is misdirection. I know of no one who wants tabs but is HOLDING OUT because they don't want IE toolbars or FireFox. I believe Tabbed browsing is an example of Microsoft doing the wrong thing for media fanfare, with the headline being something about 'catching up'.

Tabs aren't the issue - standards are. Please follow the W3 recomendations for the DTDs you support. I won't repeat the laundry list of things people want (which BTW is NOT 100% of W3 specs, just enough so we don't have to write workaround hacks for legacy v6 browsers).

I understand standards support is more work for less media milage, compared to "security" and "tabs". I know some of you guys genuinely want to fix bugs in your CSS model. I suspect also that some in management don't want CSS to advance, so that Avalon will be seem like such an improvement over HTML when websites start using it. Am I being too cynical?

This is where open source excels... even the good guys in Microsoft just can't decide to "fix" something - even if to match the specs - without management approval. It's taken you guys YEARS to arrive at this, and only because the shareholders are asking management what their "FireFox strategy" is...

Still wish IE 7 the best...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

LarryOsterman — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:33:05 GMT

Bruce,
Why not delete every CSS and transparent PNG off-topic post? It'd clean up the comments a boatload...

Treat them like comment spam.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Oh Yeah — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:38:06 GMT

Yeah, let's start off with the post above me.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Twzop — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:46:36 GMT

For all of the bad-mouthing that the Microsoft managers gave firefox, sounds an awful lot like they are taking some pages from it to help develop IE7, just like Microsoft has taken pages from Apple and IBM and renamed the features or technology and then packaged it to look like they (Microsoft) came up with it. (i.e. DOS, the GUI, the web browser, tabbed browsing, shall I continue?)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

robr — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:42:59 GMT

I must admit that I dislike tabbed browsing. I am a firm believer in the Windows taskbar and having all of my open windows one click away. One of the main reasons for this opinion is that I haven't spent enough time in a tabbed browsing environment to get used to it. What I would love to see in IE 7 is the ability to mount the tab bar at the bottom (just like in Excel) as well as at the top (like in Firefox). I associate the bottom of my screen with changing windows and viewing what i have open. Having to look in two different areas of the screen is sorta counter-intuitive to me, and is contradictory to the intended "Windows Experience". Just a thought!

How will tabs be in effect?

Janez D. — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:58:14 GMT

My question: how will you make people be aware of the tabs? My coworkers are using Firefox browsers for some time and have not gained knowledge of the power of tabs. How will you do so in IE? I think you wont be able to and only 2-5% of people will be using tabs unless you plan to force tabbed browsing by default - please dont.
So, how? Do you really think (dumb) IE users will know to use it or even know it exists? After all, it is just another huge update they'll have to do.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

robotslag — Tue, 17 May 2005 16:14:28 GMT

'browser experiences'??? cough cough. Wow, I just had a great browser experience.

IE7 with tabs

personal.fuyuko.net — Tue, 17 May 2005 16:15:02 GMT

Next Internet Explorer, IE7, has tabs......

re: IE7 Has Tabs

zelben — Tue, 17 May 2005 16:10:48 GMT

M$ is TEH SUxx0rz

sorry had to say it. hey did anyone notice that th 'toolbar' he is referencing for adding tabbed browsin support costs $14.95 -- and it's not even a joke!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Deren Smith — Tue, 17 May 2005 16:13:00 GMT

I think adding tab support to IE7 is great, but you need to make sure that this feature is very customizable. For example I've becomed accustomed to the exact way Firefox uses tabbed browsing, and I'm sure the same goes for other users with other browsers. I guess what I'm trying to say is that IE7 needs to have options where you can basically make the tabbed browsing clone that of other browsers.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Randy Peterman — Tue, 17 May 2005 16:56:57 GMT

I would like to see better garbage handling in IE. Right now my web based app gets bogged down after some time or after heavy usage simply because the garbage collection never gets called until I minimize the window. If the window sits idle for longer than X minutes it would be nice if it would call garbage collection. Of course I know that's a wee tricky, but an improvement here would be incredible.

I am glad you're working on IE 7, even if others are grumpy and whine like 2 year olds.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

xper — Tue, 17 May 2005 16:54:22 GMT

Can't wait on beta. Some comments on this post <a href="http://www.msfn.org/comments.php?shownews=13129">here</a>.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

David Sargent — Tue, 17 May 2005 17:01:26 GMT

One of the main reasons I switched to firefox (besides tabs and the really cool extensions) was it's ability to infinitly resize text. I have bad eyes and this reature is hugely imprtant to me. My eyes are so bad that I need this for every site, just the ones that spec specific font sizes. In these cases IE won't resize at all without going to the options and accesabitly and telling it to ignore font sizes, unfortunatly, this horibbly breaks the layout of most sites. Idealy, we should be able to Ctrl+scroll wheel zoom and have fonts and images all get bigger and or smaller. This would be very cool (ie opera, though I've never liked opera).

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Bruce Morgan [MSFT] — Tue, 17 May 2005 17:09:31 GMT

Larry, we only delete comments per the "rules for comments on the IEBlog" (link in left pane). Offtopic isn't one of them. Only using offensive language, an extremely abusive tone, misrepresentation (people have claimed to be me, for instance), and personal attacks get comments deleted.

Even with that (IMHO liberal) policy, people have complained about the heavy handy of oppression and censorship.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Anthony — Tue, 17 May 2005 17:10:50 GMT

I am not a fan of tabbed browsers; I prefer to have a seperate window for each webpage I am viewing. What I would like to see is a way to open a link in a new window in the background, as others have mentioned, and better taskbar management (off topic). I would also like to see features that prevent browser add-in and toolbar changes (even for applications I am installing such as AIM).

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jim — Tue, 17 May 2005 17:20:15 GMT

Larry,

> Why not delete every CSS and transparent PNG off-topic post? It'd clean up the comments a boatload...

If they answered the questions, the comments wouldn't get made in the first place. There are loads of people for whom CSS compliance would make a big difference to their jobs, and we keep getting fobbed off with contentless posts like "IE and Standards" or just plain ignored. Things started to look up when they posted about PNG and peekaboo, but then the information dried up again.

CSS support is a *huge* unanswered question, and the Internet Explorer developers might be able to ignore the elephant in the room, but that doesn't mean everybody else can.

次期IE-IE7はタブブラウザに

Makologg??? — Tue, 17 May 2005 17:30:15 GMT

IEblogによると次期IEはタブブラウザになるとのこと。ベータ版ではごく基本的...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

ethan — Tue, 17 May 2005 17:51:38 GMT

"I’d like to ask you to post a comment with your favorite or most critical IE add-ins… we want to make sure IE7 works great with them."

I use the following for web development:
<a href="http://www.blunck.info/iehttpheaders.html">ieHTTPHeaders</a>
<a href="http://www.thundermain.com/ToggleBorders.html">Toggle Borders</a>
<a href="http://www.thundermain.com/FullSource.html">Full Source</a> (primarily for XSLT transformations

Also, I'd really like to be able to identify WHEN i'm authenticated to a server as well as as WHOM. An indicator in the status bar would be sufficient. Perhaps something akin to the padlock on secure sites.

Thanks for the opportunity to provide input!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

randomidiot — Tue, 17 May 2005 17:52:41 GMT

I've got the impression MS wants do things "right" now. If you're planning to do so, why not implement the gecko or khtml engine? ;-P

I cant await IE7: "The Imperium Strikes Back" ...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

The same tired web developer as above. — Tue, 17 May 2005 18:07:22 GMT

The comments about css etc aren't off-topic. The post asked for comments with favourite/critical add-ins. Seeing as css2 support etc. hasn't been deemed important enough to be included in the list of things implemented (only "improved" according to a prior blog) then it's important to mention yet again. No good web developer worth his salt still thinks IE has good support.

Where all these IE fans come from saying "don't listen to the zealots" I have no idea. I've been developing websites and webapps for years and there was a time when IE had better support. Now is definitely not that time and it's holding back webdevelopment as a whole.

Where is the transparency, and no, Avalon this doesn't concern you

Ryan Dawson on Longhorn — Tue, 17 May 2005 18:11:49 GMT

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Interesting discussion going on in the comments, although Brian Shapiro ends with:...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Maugrim — Tue, 17 May 2005 18:31:12 GMT

Quote: Man, there's no pleasing some people. People can't seem to request tabs enough when asked "what features do you miss from IE", but when they are actually told that tabs will be there, they say "we don't care about tabs, what about standards?!"

Look on the side of we tab converts - we take the feature for granted since we all use Opera/Mozilla/Firefox (for those pesky standards that some consider nitpicking). For IE7 to add them is not something for us to get excited over - we've been using tabs for years.

It's a simple catchup - not a massive improvement since it barely matches what already exists!

Web standards are a huge concern, because any time I write HTML or CSS, my primary concern is whether it will work in IE or not. I cannot write webpages without issues until IE matches the standards - simple as that.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Earl T — Tue, 17 May 2005 18:34:18 GMT

I'm sure you've heard (and will continue to hear) this comment a lot, but the only new 'addition' to IE7 that will REALLY matter is full CSS 2.1 support.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Eric — Tue, 17 May 2005 18:39:20 GMT

My BIGGEST gripe about IE is that I like to have a lot of pages open at once (>30 sometimes), and when I get about 32 or 36 pages open with IE (including VS documentation windows), all hell breaks loose. I think it has something to do with the threading of IE, and I don't think tabbed browsing is going to fix this! Once I hit the threshold when I open a new instance of IE, that instance locks up, doesn't load a page, and refuses to respond to anything UNTIL I close a different IE window. I've seen this on multiple PCs for many years.

With FireFox, I have never experienced anything like this.

I think MS has a lot of ground to make up with IE7, as I develop .NET software (Web and Desktop) on Windows, I only use Windows, I've been a big Windows guy for years, but I use FireFox. I drink the MS Kool-Aid quite regularly, but I am so glad I made the switch about a year ago, and if I could figure out how to get Visual Studio to debug my Web apps using FireFox, I would (haven't really tried though).

SO, if IE is chasing people like me away, I think MS has problems...

IE Manager discusses version 7

bennellibrothers.com — Tue, 17 May 2005 18:52:25 GMT

On his blog, the product manager for Internet Explorer, discusses the upcoming release of version 7.0 of the browser and that it will have the feature of tabbed browsing....something found on many other browsers as well as plugins for IE,...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Bernie — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:04:11 GMT

IE7 needs to support W3C web standards. CSS, XHTML, PNG, SVG would be a good start. I find, as a web developer, myself writing code which works on all modern browsers except IE--so I have to either dumb down or pollute my code! What a waste of time!

Please please PLEASE support the existing standards like Safari, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror etc etc do. If unpaid volunteers can do it, what's to stop the most profitable corporation on the planet?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chuck Curry — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:05:28 GMT

I think it is great that IE is finally going to have tabs, but maybe you also make the browser skinnable, like Maxthon.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chris — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:20:58 GMT

I'm a huge Firefox advocate. I've been using Mozilla as my main browser since version 0.8 and the milestones on and off since May 1999. I started using Firefox when it was still called Phoenix.

Having said that, I'd like to commend the IE7 team. This blog and the upcoming features in IE7 are a great thing. Full standards support would be awesome too!

WOW IE7 Has Tabs

Markus — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:21:20 GMT

Stop tinkering around with copying technologies of other software. The only thing I demand from Microsoft is the final support of web standards. Microsoft always boasts with their so called 'studies' that they are much cheaper than Unix/Linux, but have you ever thought about the costs, your IE causes?
You always have to rewrite some parts of CSS on your websites, because IE's CSS support is very poor, and when you calculate this wasted extra hours, it is a lot of money.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

A.A. — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:24:06 GMT

Please make FTP in IE7 non-blocking.
IE6 locks for 30 seconds when trying to open non-existing FTP site with "Use folder view for FTP locations" enabled.

How to reproduce:
Enable "Use folder view for FTP locations".
Type ftp://1.2.3.4/ in address bar.
IE6 is unusable for 30 seconds.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

JD — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:33:53 GMT

As a professional web developer its easy to imagine how important a new IE release is. For too long IE has been a throrn in our backside stiffling our creativity through its lack of mainstream technology support. With tabs you are closing the gap with technology developed what? 4 or 5 years ago. Not exactly brag worthy. If you don't plan on supporting XHTML fully or CSS2 and the upcomming CSS3 then don't even bother. Working with the W3C web standards is the best way to gain cross platform capability. Microsoft IE is no longer paving the way for technology but is an annoyance to any developer that would like to take advantage of the most cutting edge functionality.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Pat — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:34:59 GMT

I'd like to see the tabs be set to auto-refresh. So when I open IE anything I had on a tab is automatically refreshed. Also, I would like to be able to set a refresh time on the tabs, so they automatically refresh every 5 min, instead of hitting the refresh button on all the pages.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Anonymous Coward — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:38:40 GMT

Can we have tabs on the console window (cmd.exe) as well? It's an "expert tool" anyway, so I don't think it would confuse users.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

HugeIronJoe — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:40:10 GMT

You guys are all deprived. Get a *nix box and play with KDE and you'll find the best UI concievable. The only problem is that nothing works perfectly. Why doesn't MS just take it all and make it work?
Didn't Windows 1.0 not allow overlapping windows because you guys thought it would be confusing? Inivate for once. Or at least make a reliable copy of Konquorer.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Keith Williams — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:52:07 GMT

Asking to be able to turn off tabbed browsing is redundant - if you don't use it, it's off. Let's say you open a new tab by right-click->'Open in new tab' - if you never use this option, you never use tabs.

Then you make a setting whereby you can have either middle-click or control+click open a page in either a new window or new tab, whichever you prefer.

Personally, if IE7 supports 24-bit PNG, Position:fixed and the :hover pseudo-element for all elements, I'll be content.

Tabbed Browsing im nächsten IE dabei

Karsten Samaschke: Los jetzt! — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:56:11 GMT

Microsoft hat eingestanden, dass der Verzicht auf das Tabbed Browsing in aktuell

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Meteger — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:57:38 GMT

lol
why don't you just include firefox in windows? xD

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Farid — Tue, 17 May 2005 19:52:07 GMT

Good news. I've waited long enough.

Its the one feature I've missed most sorely in IE - a few more of these critical ones and I'll be back to IE.

And thanks to your post, I downloaded and installed the Microgarden Tabs toolbar - fantastic work ! Not as much control as I have with Forefox + Tabbar Preferences addin, but works pretty well. For me, it at least makes IE usable again. I can't bear to use IE since I got used to tabs in Firefox. (any other such toolbars aronud, anyone?)

Favorite add-ins: Googlebar is the only one I really use at present on IE - and I guess that will be one of the first to be tested - so I think I'm safe on this one !

But look aronud at the firefox extensions - if you could somehow tap into that kind of add-on developer enthusiasm - and provide a good unified place to download them - you'll get a lot of good stuff. On firefox, I use
Tab Clicking Options, Foxytunes, SwitchProxy, PDF Download, and Googlebar - would love to see all of these converted to work with IE also.

-FA

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Acecool — Tue, 17 May 2005 20:21:25 GMT

I 'hate' tabbed browsing...

I just dont like it, I hope there will be a way to disable it - otherwise I will be switching to another browser, or making an IE 6 clone - haha..

re: IE7 Has Tabs

anonymous coward — Tue, 17 May 2005 20:28:14 GMT

Whoo-pee. Tabs. Now how about saving us web developers hundreds of hours in lost productivity by making IE standards compliant?

And oh yeah, for those MS royalists that are saying we're a selfish bunch because we're stabbing MS for their non-standard compliance and not praising their "innovation" in tabbed browsing, let's make this clear: we asked for tabbed browsing *and* standards compliancy *and* a couple other features.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Eric — Tue, 17 May 2005 20:45:38 GMT

I just want to provide some redundant feedback (hopefully solidifying the opinions and feedback of other users).

Features *from Firefox* that I want in IE7:
1.) intuitive and reliable tabbed browsing
2.) text-search/find feature that resides outside of the content with hot-keys to move to next/prev search result (ctrl-g,ctrl-shift-g)
3.) adblocking like adblock provides (works and works well with wildcards while sp2's adblocking doesn't)
4.) Ability to standardize text size/font. If I want to view all my web pages in Tahoma size 10 I should be able to. If I want to *gasp* change the background color to black and the font color to white for all web pages, I should be able to.
5.) A clean, intuitive UI get rid of those horrid configuration tabs inside of IE. Add expand collapse functionality (ala Firefox) to make this more manageable and less overwhelming. Provide a one-click solution to clearing cache and old internet files (ala Firefox).
6.) One thing that's cool about Maxathon is that you can open 2 windows simultaneously (tabs can be opened as sub-windows inside of the IE frame). That's a nifty feature for price/feature comparisons while shopping or what-have-you.

Just some thoughts.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

norro — Tue, 17 May 2005 20:53:27 GMT

Hi, i like tabs, but more than tabs I like the Firefox. Regards, norro

Zoom

Anonymous coward — Tue, 17 May 2005 20:49:44 GMT

[quote]I’d like to ask you to post a comment with your favorite or most critical IE add-ins[/quote]

I agree that opera zoom is nice feature. And Opera feeds are nice too. Built in Ad-Blocker is also good. Firefox find feature is good. It doesn't hide the content with a big dialog. Also, you could invent find-all so next item is green and all items are yellow so you can quickly scroll to see how much matches the find string. Also, allow regular expressions in find. Just pick the best features of all browsers and implement them for IE. Especially future things including XUL, if you don't support it, people will be forced to download the ActiveX plugin which gives the same functionality. Also, please remove ActiveX.

[quote]Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don’t have tabs?[/quote]

I am not confused. Excel has tabbed browsing for a long time. But please implement tabs in the windows experience shell so we can clean it up from clutter.

Thanks!

Keep the tabs.. give us CSS2

Doug Melvin — Tue, 17 May 2005 21:17:32 GMT

I am a web designer and programmer.
I love CSS, and DHTML, as such this leads to a serious dislike for IE due to incomplete and incinsistant implementation of CSS, DHTML, and JavaScript.

Keep the tabs.. I can download a plugin for that.

You keep calling it the "IE Platform" well.. So far your platform has not held up it's end of the bargain.

To REiterate: The only thing that I want from IE7 it a complete and consistant implementation of the standards as set aside by the WW3.

Thank You

Keep the tabs.. give us CSS2

Doug Melvin — Tue, 17 May 2005 21:25:29 GMT

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Manish — Tue, 17 May 2005 21:35:39 GMT

Favorite IE add-ins: Maxthon's mouse gestures. Right-draft left and right to navigate, left+right click to close tab, drag link to open in new tab.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

manish — Tue, 17 May 2005 21:43:29 GMT

Sorry, that should read 'right-drag.'

re: IE7 Has Tabs

dekket — Tue, 17 May 2005 22:10:01 GMT

I think its great that MS is finally starting to produce some noticable work to their browser, but as a webdeveloper I couldn't care less about tabs. Instead of me needing a javascript to change the websites' actions as soon as IE hits it, I would like it to "just work" - like all other browsers. So W3C standards is a demand from my part - otherwise its a useless upgrade/update in my book.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Mick — Tue, 17 May 2005 22:11:13 GMT

God. You guys are so lame.
I know that I would have been sooooooo confused by tabs.
Thanks for thinking for me.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Henning Krause [MVP] — Tue, 17 May 2005 22:13:08 GMT

Please let the user be able to turn this tab-crap off...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

IEuser2 — Tue, 17 May 2005 22:21:06 GMT

<offTopic>
Here's an IE 6 oddity I've noticed for years on many PCs and Windows species - Me, 2000, etc. IE 6 does not always navigate correctly to a named target on another page, ie: a href="something.html#target" . Seems to be a 50/50 proposition depending on complexity of page - IE often misses target; Mozilla, Firefox get it right all the time. I suspect its a timing problem where IE attempts to put #target at top of window before page is fully rendered including all javascript, Microsoft filters etc.
</offTopic>

re: IE7 Has Tabs

My name is — Tue, 17 May 2005 22:25:37 GMT

Several third parties, like Maxthon, have built browser experiences with tabs on top of the IE platform.

So you really are instructed to use the word "experience" whenever it would be even remotely applicable.

IE7 to have tabbed browsing...

One day at a time — Tue, 17 May 2005 22:28:06 GMT

Internet Explorer 7 aura des onglets

Jean-Luc Raymond — Tue, 17 May 2005 22:54:51 GMT

Internet Explorer 7 aura des onglets

Jean-Luc Raymond — Tue, 17 May 2005 22:55:08 GMT

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Mm — Tue, 17 May 2005 23:26:32 GMT

Microsoft listen to customers needs? People were asking for tabs for a long time. It took Mozilla to come along and wake up the "innovative" Microsoft giant...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

anon — Wed, 18 May 2005 00:39:32 GMT

I find these posts rather funny, most of you proclaim mozilla this, mozilla that, opera had all these things in before mozilla, but who gives a stuff, it is how these browsers uses them to their full potential that matters, and so far only Opera has been able to do that, so here's hoping that IE also does

I wish you had of put tabs on word, it would of made it so much more tidy when you are working on different word files, perhaps you could suggest it as a feature for office 2006.

Finally, i hope that this beta will have a new look, and not the same old tired IE look, something that looks like a step up from the past ones, something that stands out.

What can I say, I'm nto a web developer, don't care much for what they want, just a simple user that enjoys his browsers, and likes to get full use and pleausre from using them

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Daniel Kaplun — Wed, 18 May 2005 02:22:46 GMT

I believe IE7 is getting its ideas from Firefox. As a staunch Firefox supporter, you can't change my opinion about IE, and yes, it has a basis. It's great that IE is implementing Mozilla's features, but Firefox will always lead the way in security, as I have found out first-hand. No matter how many patches IE puts out, Firefox will have the upper hand so long as IE is more popular, and when Firefox will become more popular, which it will, it will have plenty of time to edit its software as Mozilla is completely focused on web browsing and IE is too deeply rooted into Windows to disallow hackers to, well, hack. This is my educated opinion on this matter, and please don't flame because there is enough anger in this world.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

zoogies — Wed, 18 May 2005 02:45:48 GMT

When I abandoned MSIE for Phoenix 0.5 a couple of years ago, two of the primary reasons I did so was for the lack of popup ads and the tab feature. I didn't consider IE a secondary browser at first, and only began to when I noticed that I was never using it anymore.

So tabs are a huge usability plus, it would help MSIE become much more user-friendly, and increases incentive to use MSIE much greater than security fixes or standards compliance would - the average user, who by and large favors IE more than the rising technical community, isn't concerned nearly as much about either of those.

However, at the same time, I think it's of paramount importance to work on standrads compliance. To the standards community, Microsoft's reason for not implementing full CSS2 support - that it's unproven, or something along these lines, please correct me - is no more than an excuse. Look around. CSS2 is everywhere. It's ubiquitous. Microsoft NEEDS to follow the standards and rewrite their rendering engine.

As a side note - what is with all the antagonism towards Firefox users? You say things like "The Firefox kids forget that we're lucky geeks too," and even by saying that, you fail to acknowledge the reciprocal. I for one, did not jump on the bandwagon, as I found it before there was a bandwagon. Initially reluctant to use it more regularly than IE, I put both of them to use over a few weeks' time, and in the end, couldn't go on using MSIE. Remember WHY Firefox became popular in the first place - and if you resent the FF community so much, why are you taking ideas from them? Give respect as it's due, as they ought to likewise...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Richard — Wed, 18 May 2005 02:57:08 GMT

I have to admit that I haven't read every single reply to this post because 100's of posts bashing microsoft or off topic bore me. I did however read a few posts that suggested having the functionality to turn tabs off or even having them off by default only to be turned on by expert users.

Haven't you people heard of intergrating something into the browser experience? If you click a link that is defined target="_blank" it opens in a new window. If you right click a link you can choose open in new window or open in a new tab. Not only is this the most logical way to handle tabs but it is also what anyone who has ever used a tabbed browser is used to.

Microsoft can't wow the market with tabbed browsing. This one is a no brainer. It's just a matter of offering what many other browsers already offer (and have been for a long time). If you introduce tabs that function in a dfferent way you will simply alienate the market.

And to actually answer the question: I don't use browser add ins. I like default behaviour and things to work out of the box. If there is an add in that is deemed so important please include it in the out of the box version.

ps. can't wait to get a look at IE7

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Finn — Wed, 18 May 2005 03:05:54 GMT

With all the web developers here... here's a suggestion for you all. Why don't we start a site where we could log hours wasted by IE's poor standards support? The counter on the front of that should scare the living crap out of anybody who regularly contracts out to web developers.

I'm pretty sure it's into the billions of man hours by now. You have to wonder how much IE has cost businesses internationally in spending on debugging and redesigning websites because of weird annoying issues like the box model mis-interpretation, the 2px bug, missing support for useful CSS features etc etc.

The only issue would be keeping all the Slashdotters from wandering through and logging fictional hours. But it'd certainly be facinating to get a study done by somebody reputable.

IE7 tabs

pics and titbits — Wed, 18 May 2005 03:25:36 GMT

Microsoft is finally adding basic tabs into IE7, catching up with other more advance browsers. However, the tabs would be basic for fear of "user confusion". (via slashdot)...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

YeEp! — Wed, 18 May 2005 03:33:54 GMT

Tabs...groovy. Hey I hope IE7 improves. Cross platform web design is so frustrating because of past IE versions. I'll be glad when I no longer have to accomdate IE because of this or that.

I also resent sites like musicchoice.com which only support windows and IE6. This type of thing is so against the spirit of the internet and MS is right in the middle of the mess.

I stopped using IE last year because of all the bugs it had, In addition to protesting MS and IE's attempt to screw up the web with proprietary junk like .asp etc.

Give us a better reason to keep using IE other than MS-only websites.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Zee Man — Wed, 18 May 2005 04:46:24 GMT

trying to catch up to F i r e f o x ?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

mjk — Wed, 18 May 2005 04:53:41 GMT

REALITY CHECK...

Most large corporations (where the majority of web browsing occurs, as an alternative to enjoying an otherwise productive workday) are standardized on INTERNET EXPLORER.

This will probably not change anytime in the near future. I can't see any of the Fortune 1000 firms launching a full-scale rollout of FireFox anytime soon (HA! Imagine that)

Microsoft Internet Explorer is the big player. It is what it is. If you don't like it, stop developing. And if you really think that Microsoft will change for YOU, then keep dreaming (and pass me that stuff you're smoking, too.)

Fellow web dorks! This has been a public service announcement.

*This poster DOES NOT work for microsoft
*This poster DOES hate crybaby web developers

re: IE7 Has Tabs

anonymous — Wed, 18 May 2005 05:16:08 GMT

"I can't see any of the Fortune 1000 firms launching a full-scale rollout of FireFox anytime soon (HA! Imagine that)."

IBM? Maybe?

"Microsoft Internet Explorer is the big player. It is what it is. If you don't like it, stop developing. And if you really think that Microsoft will change for YOU, then keep dreaming (and pass me that stuff you're smoking, too.)"

They are. That's why this blog exists. If it didn't change for us, we wouldn't get tabs. And don't give me that "my way or the highway" crap. No, we won't stop developing, just develop for something else (I dunno, maybe a browser that begins with Fire and ends in Fox?)

"*This poster DOES hate crybaby web developers"
What a shame. Since they control what you see on the web, you better sit down, shut up, and listen to them or they just won't do it and code sites exclusively for FF. And that would be a pity wouldn't it.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

dc2keeper — Wed, 18 May 2005 05:16:11 GMT

I worry about many bugs from conflict between like ActiveX tech and Tab tech.
This thought is my engineer side.

Tab browsing is very exciting, I love it.
My user side think so.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

LarryOsterman — Wed, 18 May 2005 05:40:48 GMT

Jim, they HAVE answered the transparent PNG question: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/26/412263.aspx

And they've answered the CSS issues question: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/22/410963.aspx

They may not have answered with the level of detail you want, but they HAVE answered. And they CAN'T answer some of them: For instance "implement standards", or "full CSS support". That's a meaningless question. It really is. The IE team has actually commented on that a couple of times - sometimes the standards are ambiguous, other times they're contradictory.

I spent enough time working on IMAP to understand their pain - and I only had to write a server (server's are WAY easier than clients). In the IMAP case, even now, 5 years after the current draft standard was submitted, there are STILL ambiguities that are being discovered in the protocol. And IMAP is one of the best designed internet protocols around - HTML isn't NEARLY as well documented as IMAP is (which makes sense - IMAP's scope is far smaller than HTMLs scope).

Every time the IE team posts about ANYTHING, one of the first half a dozen replies is something like "Quit wasting your time telling about this new feature, spend your time working on <my feature>".

I appreciate Bruce's desire to keep to the strict comment policy, it's just that I personally find the OT posts distracting from the conversation - there are many good points being made by the posters above, but their points are drowned out in "No, I don't care about that, give me MY feature" posts.

But I know where he's coming from, I've only ever censored something like 8 comments out of the almost four thousand on my blog.

Favourite add-in for IE

Nick — Wed, 18 May 2005 06:18:08 GMT

I second the request to keep the Accessibility Toolbar working:

http://www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/index.html

regards,
Nick

re: favorite or most critical add-ins

Anonymous Coward — Wed, 18 May 2005 06:22:54 GMT

You asked for "favorite or most critical IE add-ins" well, I've got a "remove" rather than add.

When a file finishes downloading IE, it copies from temp to the final localation. As this happens, a window pops up with a "Cancel" button .. This may seem harmless .. but I really don't appreciate it grabbing focus when I'm busy typing a document .. More than a few times I press space (having just typed a word) and the file copy cancels and all the time spent downloading is wasted. I would really appreciate it if this type of focus grabbing is eliminated in IE 7.
For more info see this slashdot thread:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149746&cid=12553661

Hope you read this comment..

re: IE7 Has Tabs

aeberhar — Wed, 18 May 2005 06:43:29 GMT

IE7 has tabs? Well good, now that we've got the trivialities out of the way perhaps we can return to talking about some of the things a major IE version increment should (IMHO) really include like passing Acid2.

If you're interested in adding features that web application developers (read: power DHTML developers) would use, consider XPath support in the DOM. SelectSingleNode and SelectNodes would be killer!

If you're interested in another feature for pure browser users, consider emulating FireFox's "Find-As-You-Type." I mention this for two reasons: (1) I've seen references in this blog to maintaining consistency between IE and windows as a whole, which, let's be honest, will shortly include some variant of the MSN search toolbar/desktop search which, it just so happens, rolls a very nice "Find-As-You-Type" effect, and (2) that find dialog is slow and cumbersome to use, particularly for "Find Again" operations, and really it's just so...1982.

Thanks for listening.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jim — Wed, 18 May 2005 07:32:26 GMT

> Jim, they HAVE answered the transparent PNG question:

Yes, I know that and I referenced it in my comment. Did you miss that bit?

> They may not have answered with the level of detail you want, but they HAVE answered.

A vague answer is no answer at all. They say they've fixed two bugs. That says nothing whatsoever about expanding CSS support. Handwaving about how they are committed says nothing at all.

> And they CAN'T answer some of them: For instance "implement standards", or "full CSS support". That's a meaningless question. It really is.

So what about the specific questions, like "will you support display: table" and "will you support CSS 2.1 selectors"? Those are simply being ignored.

> Every time the IE team posts about ANYTHING, one of the first half a dozen replies is something like "Quit wasting your time telling about this new feature, spend your time working on <my feature>".

Don't you think that it's significant that a hell of a lot of them are all saying the same thing?

> I appreciate Bruce's desire to keep to the strict comment policy, it's just that I personally find the OT posts distracting from the conversation

You know, I'd much rather talk about new features too. It's much nicer being positive than negative. But until we get some real answers to important questions that affect the whole web, the conversations about new features are going to continually get derailed and swamped in negativity.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Ya'akov Yehudi — Wed, 18 May 2005 08:32:18 GMT

Tabs will be welcome - after security concerns, the lack of tabs has been one of the main reasons I restrict my use of IE.

I note that there are tabs in Excel, and in MSN Messenger. The former being useful, and the latter not.

Attention to consistency is certainly important, and I'm sure many people would love to see this also in connection with web standards. Could MS PLEASE adhere to industry standards for web page design?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Masklinn — Wed, 18 May 2005 08:33:47 GMT

> This will probably not change anytime in the near future. I can't see any of the Fortune 1000 firms launching a full-scale rollout of FireFox anytime soon (HA! Imagine that)

Been there, done that: http://news.com.com/IBM+backs+Firefox+in-house/2100-7344_3-5704750.html?tag=nefd.top

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Otto Wyss — Wed, 18 May 2005 08:58:09 GMT

Does this message impose that Microsoft follows at least partial the guidelines as outlined in wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/guidelines/basics.html#multiple)?

O. Wyss

--
Development of frame buffer drivers: http://linux-fbdev.sf.net
Sample code snippets for wxWidgets: http://wxcode.sf.net
How to build well-designed applications: http://wyoguide.sf.net
Desktop with a consistent look and feel: http://wyodesktop.sf.net

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Lomaxx — Wed, 18 May 2005 09:40:55 GMT

You know what would be better than tabs.... tabbed tabs :) So you would have say 3 top level tabs open, one if for your news sites, one for your google searches and one for say your favourite blogs... then what you can do is save these groups of tabs so that when u get up in the morning you just click one tab and a multitude of tabs opens underneath. U'd probably want to look at limiting the tabs to say 3 levels, with max 5 per level, but you get the picture....

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Anon — Wed, 18 May 2005 11:05:08 GMT

Tabs are good, finally M$ have caught up. Now actually get a standards safe browser as well, make it customisable and they might stop losing market share slowly but surely to firefox.

Tabs how to

Aux — Wed, 18 May 2005 11:31:44 GMT

I have a little suggestion. Make it possible to disable tabbed browsing for those who don't want it. And make it possible to use them in Windows Explorer - that will be really nice! And if You want to make tabs reaaly comfortable for users, then look into Opera browser - their implementation is the best available today!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

ruffles — Wed, 18 May 2005 12:44:45 GMT

Tabs are a good idea, but with a option to turn them off. Middle-click for new tab or double-click for close tab are also great, but some people would also like thet as an option. So this way we'll get a browser with zillion of options (that's what I like :D...), but for many users just switching their computers at work they will be useless; they just wan't simple out-of-the-box browser that works everytime and they don't have patience nor time to play with options or extensions for Firefox. (Un)lucky for them ;) they won't also have the time to switch to other browsers...

As for add-ons for IE - I've tried most, and personally think that Maxthon is the best of them since it's: free, has a lot of features I need, like double-click to close tab, download control and so on, but extensions are better way since a lot of people with great ideas can add - almost on demand - some functionality to the browser (like Adblock - positively the best extension that happened to Firefox)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Felipe — Wed, 18 May 2005 14:15:10 GMT

It's too late for IE to add this tab's feature. Other whell known open source program has done it way before. Firefox, the next revolution of Internet. And what about extensions?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Matthew Johnson — Wed, 18 May 2005 14:31:42 GMT

I think that IE is going to be missing out in a very big way if it doesn't support GreaseMonkey scripts. I think they are going to be a must have feature for many users that will switch to FireFox if IE dosn't support it.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Bruno — Wed, 18 May 2005 15:08:09 GMT

Well, in first let me say that it was a bad way to fight Firefox.
It's for sure that Firefox is better then IE, and you guys to try fight that are creating a copy of Mozilla idea...well good luck for you, but me and other billions of users will for sure remain on Firefox...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Tim Dawson — Wed, 18 May 2005 16:16:41 GMT

Good lord, I've never seen so much whining in one blog post. I feel sorry for whoever had to go through reading them at MS, trying to pick up useful feedback.

Anyway, something confuses me about some of the comments left by "professional web developers" who are hurting because IE6 isn't as standards-compliant at <insert favourite alternative>. Surely as professional web developers you recognise that you need to support downlevel browsers too, so your websites will still support IE 5 and 6 anyway. In this business, if your website breaks on browsers one or two generations old, you're losing thousands of potential viewers.

"I Innovated Before You Innovated!"

Hacking for Christ — Wed, 18 May 2005 16:32:14 GMT

Asa blogged about the new Reporter tool, and got comments like "Another feature nicked from Opera. Sigh." Can we call it a day on such pointless posturing? Opera had some cool features first, we had other cool features first, and the same for Safari, Konqueror and IE. I don't care who invented it; if it's useful to the userbase of your browser, you should be able to include it. User interfaces haven't been copyrightable since Apple vs. Microsoft, and I would hope no-one in the browser market would stoop so low as to sue another browser manufacturer for software patent infringement. Copying someone else is a sign of respect, not weakness - it means they got it right, and you want to acknowledge that. In related news......

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Justin Wignall — Wed, 18 May 2005 16:56:47 GMT

Google toolbar is now an absolute necessity for me in IE after having got used to direct access to a search box from the toolbar in FF. I find when using other peoples computers who don't have a search toolbar or FF I'm annoyed at having to visit google by typing the web address in. Substiture MSN Search for google here by all means, just need DIRECT ACCESS TO A SEARCH ENGINE.

Thanks.

This just in...

Bleepblog - The UK Tech Blog — Wed, 18 May 2005 18:13:32 GMT

New news: IE7 will have tabbed browsing. Old news: Firefox already has tabs. (And has done since the Lucia release of the old Pheonix browser on October 14, 2002. Yes, 2002.)...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

joe — Wed, 18 May 2005 19:10:23 GMT

I have several things I would like to see added to IE 7.0.

1. Disable Destructive Active X permanently

2. Add better Popup Blocking

3. Add more Privacy and Security

4. Include Google Search on the toolbar

5. Include Smart Keywords

6. Add Live Bookmarks

7. Hassle-Free Downloading

8. Make it Simple and intuitive with Bookmarks, History, Full Screen, Text Zooming to make pages with small text easier to read, etc.

9. Allow customized toolbars, themes, and an adaptive search feature so I can search infinite search engines.

10. Make the setup easy and under 5MB

11. Include a standard set of developer tools with a powerful JavaScript and CSS error/warning console, and an optional Document Inspector that gives detailed insight about our pages.

12. Include built in automatic update notification for criticle updates.

13. Buy out Firefox and merge their team with the folks from the former Giant AntiSpyware Co.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Brett — Wed, 18 May 2005 19:50:22 GMT

Tabs are nice and all, but frankly, if IE is not standards compliant I will continue to use a browser that already has tabs, like FireFox.

I think what people want in a browser can be summed up in three words... "Be like FireFox".

It seems like there is rift within Microsoft. The teams working on .NET appear to be "seeing the light" in regards to web standards. The IE team on the other hand is still living in the dark ages.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

A very tired web developer — Wed, 18 May 2005 20:04:53 GMT

> Anyway, something confuses me about some of the comments left by "professional web developers" who are hurting because IE6 isn't as standards-compliant at <insert favourite alternative>. Surely as professional web developers you recognise that you need to support downlevel browsers too, so your websites will still support IE 5 and 6 anyway. In this business, if your website breaks on browsers one or two generations old, you're losing thousands of potential viewers.

Yes we do, and we have done for years. If things don't start changing now it's yet another generation of browsers we'll have to hack for. Considering the security nightmare that IE6 has been people will hopefully be quick to upgrade to a new version, so that might lessen the pain a little, but it has to change now or we'll just start doing what people did with other browsers when they sucked and start giving the option of an interface with a very basic style and an interface for good browsers. At some stage we can stop having to worry about legacy pain in the **** browsers like IE5 and IE6 and move onto the next generation of browsers and start doing website development rather than website hacking...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Udolpho — Wed, 18 May 2005 20:10:23 GMT

A very tiresome web developer wrote:

"Considering the security nightmare that IE6 has been"

Yeah, unlike the security nightmare that Firefox has been.

For every useful comment to these articles there are about 20 written apparently by the same disgruntled geek who thinks that doing a web site for his dad's company makes him a developer. You probably don't realize this, but you ticks are awfully boring. You should all be modded down -40 on insightfulness.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

A very tired (some say tiresome) web developer — Wed, 18 May 2005 20:27:39 GMT

I looked back again last night but the blog was broken so I couldn't see, nor reply, to the comments. next smart comment please?

>Yeah, unlike the security nightmare that Firefox has been.

Really? You're trying to compare the two? Go on so and do a decent comparison... You haven't a leg to stand on and you know it.

For what it's worth I've been developing websites for about 7 years now in everything from static html to flash and j2ee apps. And the fact that you made the previous comment really shows you have no idea what you're talking about. Spend some time at security focus please.

Even looking at your blog in the adventures of Udolpho you claim that "Note: Netscape, Mozilla, and their derivatives do not support the text justification CSS properties that these pages use."

That's funny, they seme to be working perfectly fine for me, which is more than can be said for css based dropdown menus in IE, without son of suckerfish drop down menus.

Would you like a screenshot of the non-existant problem? Come back when you've got an up to date view of web development.

http://www.udolpho.com/weblog/?id=00712&title=Why-you-should-never-listen-to-geeks--and-in-fact-should-despise-them

let me guess? Shown up by "geeks" in work and has been resentful since?

Really, if you're going to try personal attacks atleast make sure you've got some chance of not coming out on the bottom.

A) I don't look like the geek you show in the photo
B) I don't have a blog in which I rant.

I will reply to reasonable arguement but I won't reply to what seems like a personal attack.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Graham Varney — Wed, 18 May 2005 20:32:32 GMT

There are some EXTENSIONS available to Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4 that you MUST HAVE in IE7.

* InFormEnter 0.2.6 - Helper for form filling in semi-automatic mode.

>>>>I HAVE *NEVER* SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS<<< It beats using 'Typeitin' where FOCUS can be an issue..

* The DOWNLOAD MANAGER ***MUST*** have RESUME download for dial-up that get cut-off. Otherwise it's useless. Have to still use another download manager.

*You need a CLOSE TAB 'X' on each tab to quickly close the selected tab - not just a close all button..

Firefox up till 2 was great.. now sometimes it does not start 1st time where you click on it and you have to close it with 'Task Manager' - and sometimes clicking on an offline downloaded web page brings the browser up empty with controls frozen..

Still waiting for IE7.. Cannot go anywhere with 6 without getting HIT with ever Malware imaginable !!!

NB. Spelling here was checked with 'Spell Check Anywhere' press Alt + F10.. NOT in WinXP, Maybe 'Longhorn' ?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Thomas Stephen — Wed, 18 May 2005 21:14:23 GMT

IE being integrated with Windows Explorer.
Will Windows Explorer too get the tabs ?

"Open folder in new Tab"

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Ernest — Wed, 18 May 2005 21:10:32 GMT

I like tabs.

With reference to some already existing MS option dialogs with multilevel tabs (tabs above tabs).

Please! don't, Don't, DON'T do some kind of dynamique moving about of the tabs whenever the user clicks on them. Do allow a user to move them about, if he so wishes (this I would love), just don't do it magically for him.

Ah, and while you're doing such good work, could you please do something about increasing IE standard compliance (please)

cheers,

Ernest.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Udolpho — Wed, 18 May 2005 23:02:41 GMT

A Flash developer. If I had known, I would have written in shorter sentences.

IE7 Has Tabs

.:: Tommy'S Studio - Online Playground ::. — Wed, 18 May 2005 23:03:13 GMT

Yes, IE7 has tabs. In general, I think tabs are a great idea. I liked them a lot in Office dialogs and in Excel in the early 90's. (I used to work on Office, and I admit we almost added...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

TremorX — Wed, 18 May 2005 23:51:18 GMT

I hate tabs, please tell me it's something you can turn off easily.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Maurits — Thu, 19 May 2005 00:53:55 GMT

Hey, all you people who hate tabs...
Have you TRIED them? Don't make me break out my copy of Green Eggs and Ham...

;)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chris — Thu, 19 May 2005 03:50:39 GMT

I think that Tabbed Browsing is a good addition for IE however like others have said it must be done right.

Others have talked about how new windows will open, I say give the power to the people.

Let the user choose how IE will handle the _blank placeholder. Choose to allow new window or open in new tab.

Also one thing that really annoys me about the current IE is that most of the settings are really hidden from the user. OPEN IT UP! Let the user take control of their browser seems it IS their browser. Let them choose:

1) To tab or not to tab
2) Block Popups
3) Use ActiveX

I know the last one is already configurable but you get my drift :P

The other thing that really 'rubs be the wrong way' is how easy it is for applications to install toolbars that usually have spyware components within them. STOP THEM FROM INSTALLING! Even Yahoo and MSN tools gets to me haha

The other thing is by the end of the day users have MSN, Yahoo and anything else blocking popups!! Gets damn annoying chasing down what is block what.

A side note on standards also, STOP MESSING WITH THEM! if the ALT tag is used for something based on standards dont make it do another. CSS is the big concern for me, I want to look at my site in IE and see that its the same in Firefox. I know this is not just IE issue but do your bit to help. FOLLOW THE STANDARDS!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

shane — Thu, 19 May 2005 05:18:54 GMT

What will IE7 do as far as referers are concerned? With maxthon, if you middle-click open link in a new tab, the referer is blanked out, Im not sure about Firefox. I hope that this isn't the case with IE7 and opening tabs. Many people open search results into new tabs and their search query is lost, losing a lot of useful and helpful information to web publishers. Some web sites even require the referer to function correctly, although this could be seen as bad site design.

http://www.myplugins.info/

re: IE7 Has Tabs

A tired web developer — Thu, 19 May 2005 08:18:26 GMT

Well done Udolpho, another attempt at a personal attack. I said in my time in the industry I've done some work in flash, not "I'm just a flash developer", which, in itself, is a nasty attitude to have because in some cases flash may actually be the best tool for the job. Although using the best tool for the job is obviously not something you've ever worried about. On another branch from the obvious tree, if I was only worried about flash development I wouldn't be having these problems.

Of course you've got the blinkers on, so you see what you want to see and avoid the real issues and points that I made. Fine by me.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jauhari — Thu, 19 May 2005 11:09:07 GMT

When IE will be released?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Hannes — Thu, 19 May 2005 11:14:07 GMT

Everything is said: You forbear from implementing a usefull feature as tabs into your browser for years that is a kind of standard with all other browsers, just because of the possibility that some not that internet and computer affiliated folks could get confused!? That shows why Microsoft is not competitive at all these days.

IE, tabs and FTP

Chris H — Thu, 19 May 2005 11:51:53 GMT

Just out of interest, will IE's FTP capabilities still work with the new tab system?

Also, slightly off-topic, but are there any plans to update / extend the current FTP usages in IE?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Ronan — Thu, 19 May 2005 13:48:37 GMT

I like Mozilla Firefox....

re: IE7 Has Tabs

MasterOfTheHat — Thu, 19 May 2005 17:04:21 GMT

A couple of things mentioned in a forum I am a member of:
1. Tabbed browsing
2. GOOD CSS support
3. 'Find' function similar to FF's
4. App that consolidates downloads into one window (okay, yes, something similar to what FF has...)
5. RSS aggregator
6. written in managed code
7. syntax colored source display (as opposed to Notepad)

Oh, and is IE7 going to be a rewrite or just a patch on IE6?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jim — Thu, 19 May 2005 17:51:01 GMT

MasterOfTheHat, you do realise that Firefox has six of the seven items you list don't you? In fact Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror and pretty much any alternative to Internet Explorer has most of the items on the list.

I'd be interested to know what's keeping people on Internet Explorer if they want so many features that are freely available elsewhere.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Bram — Thu, 19 May 2005 17:53:43 GMT

I personally thing IE sucks way to much

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Todd Meyers — Thu, 19 May 2005 18:27:27 GMT

More than anything else, I want to have an IE feature similar to the "Remember previous folder windows at logon" option in the XP shell.

I've got a couple of VB scripts I wrote that will save/restore all open IE windows so that if I reboot, I am right back where I was before. I'd love to see that kind of convenience make its way natively into IE.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

say no to Tabs — Thu, 19 May 2005 18:28:37 GMT

Tabs are great, but Diet Cokes would be better...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

task — Thu, 19 May 2005 21:25:29 GMT

Will the tab support be clunky like in Firefox where you have to click a button to open a new tab or will they be more on a level of responsiveness with Opera where you can just click on the tab bar with the middle to create new ones?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chad Smith — Thu, 19 May 2005 23:57:59 GMT

I don't use tabs because I've invested (albeit quietly and stealthily ;)) in the efficient use of alt+tab task switching, using a tabbed browser actually slows me down (or introduces some other key combination which I have to use as well... which I don't want)

Example: I'm a developer, I often have 1-2 resource websites open, my development environment and the page I'm working on, 4 windows, all of somewhat equal importance, one key combo, the speed and ease at which I could switch between these is drastically reduced with a tabbed browser.

Please make sure this is either addressed, or tabs are optional.

People use tabs mostly because they SEEM a good idea in my opinion, I don't personally see how they 'help' at all :r

Alt-Tab for tabs

Maurits — Fri, 20 May 2005 01:07:32 GMT

@Chad Smith:
Tabs are a form of MDI (better, I think.) As such the standard Ctrl-Tab document-switching sequence should be expected to cycle between tabs in a single browser instance.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

doomie — Fri, 20 May 2005 01:51:28 GMT

Oh so IE7 has tab that's so cool!

Since the beginning of this blog you didn't posted a single real innovation that will came with IE7! Do you know that yours concurents already have tabs, full png support, truelly customisables ui (not by adding lames 3rd patchs!), well integrated plugins support, live bookmarks, SVG, WAY better HTML support (i'm really talking about the old good HTML 3 and 4), WAY WAY better XHTML support (even with XML prolog that your actual browser doesn't handle at all), great CSS 2.x support (and even some of CSS3 features), custom user CSS, better support for accessibility, solid ECMAscript integration, and much much more!

That's not your poor tabs, png transparency and 4 bugfixes for CSS positionement that will make your browser so K W E L !

Wake-up 1 minute, you are just patching this dino to try to make it LOOK like an evolution of IE but it's too late. The concurence is way too innovative and advanced for you to catch em. That's what happened when you think you are #1 and quit your office for 5 years to build video game consoles!

The best news would be you totally quit patching your dead browser and remove it from the OS so peoples can install a GOOD replacement and finnaly have a great surfing experience with the browser of choice : FireFox, Opera, K-Meleon, Konckeror (if it's finnaly ported to Win32)...

It's too late for you

Internet Explorer Add-Ins

UnexpectedBill — Fri, 20 May 2005 17:28:19 GMT

You had asked for people to make a post with comments about their favorite IE add-ins...

It took me a while to think of any add-ins I'd like to see working with IE7 because I don't extend the browser with third party add-ins since reliability of the browser is absolutely required on my systems. However, I do use the Web Accessories for Internet Explorer 5 (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/previous/webaccess/default.mspx)
quite often with IE6 SP1. I realize these are unsupported "powertoys" but the functionality they provide is very nice to have. I hope that these will continue to work or that updated versions will be offered for use with IE7.

I'm also hoping that all of you IE7 developers will be providing Windows 2000 support as well.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Kai — Fri, 20 May 2005 17:36:49 GMT

>> Stop gloating about how you've caught up with five years ago and begin addressing the bigger issues, i.e.: CSS and XHTML.

^ What he said. :p

re: IE7 Has Tabs

ant — Fri, 20 May 2005 20:01:04 GMT

>> Will the tab support be clunky like in Firefox where you have to click a button to open a new tab or will they be more on a level of responsiveness with Opera where you can just click on the tab bar with the middle to create new ones?

Is double-left-clicking it (the way Firefox does) so hard to do? What about all the people with 2-button mice?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Scotty — Fri, 20 May 2005 20:36:14 GMT

I really hate how you people think that we are all stupid, and tabbed browsing would just confuse us. I would think that it would make surfing the internet alot easier than having to open several windows. Microsoft is way behind the times with their software.

I really hope you wont water this feature down. How about giving the users what WE want instead of doing what YOU want.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chris Haas — Fri, 20 May 2005 21:47:52 GMT

Do what Safari did if you're worried about the end users - have them there but off by default.

i e is better than firefox and hopefully the new version is way better than firefox

ROB — Fri, 20 May 2005 23:37:23 GMT

I HOPE THIS NEW VERSION OF INTERNET EXPLORER IS WAY BETTER THAN Mozilla Firefox because firefox say there so much better than internet explorer

re: IE7 Has Tabs

blackstone — Fri, 20 May 2005 23:51:47 GMT

You SAY your browser is at the core of windows, and that's why you cannot remove it. Let's say I believe you (I don't). Then keep it small and simple, make it standards compliant (and I'm not talking microsoft monopolist standards, I'm talking TRUE standards like CSS2, XHTML, PNG, JPEG2000 and so on), and only let it do whatever system specific functions it needs to do, and let the users choose on whether they want to install the rest of a bloated 25-30 MB slow, archaic, outdated, insecure browser, interface and all, with an over patched 10 year old engine in order to browse the web, or a brand-new, slick and secure, fast, 3 MB browser. I've seen the arogance you've treated us, your user, the one you say "you care about", starting from the time you decided to continue using the web-like file explorer and active desktop in win 98 after everybody hated it in IE4 for 95 service pack, up until today, when, after being asked over and over again about standard you starting saying "don't bugger us, it's not the place to ask, we'll tell you IF we'll do it".
My answer : No, I do not want tabs. No, a browser ment only for system specific duties does not need more compulsory user gadgets that will only be useless bloatware eating up hard disk space for non-users. No, I don't want "seamless integration" and **** like that. I only want things to work. And to work well... Probably IE7 will be yet again a bloated piece of software, the same as IE6, the same as Windows, the same as that blunder of .NET, one of the worst things you've made. But hey, I do not use IE. I don't even use windows on a regular basis... So why should I care?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Alex — Sat, 21 May 2005 00:29:20 GMT

For God's sake, please make these tabs behave like VS.NET's, or add an ability to turn them off.

Thanks.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

notafanboy — Sat, 21 May 2005 01:15:59 GMT

I, for one, welcome our new IE 7 overlords.

Actually, I say great to tabs! Staying on topic (oooh wait?! was THIS the CSS thread?!), I'd like to talk more about the tabs in IE7 -

What are they inspired from? We know that Opera is the original tabbed browser, and they've come a long way.

For the people who say "base it on Firefox's" --- you don't even know what you're missing (or talking about). The MultiZilla extension has incredible tab ability, and is the best of the bunch.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

anonymous — Sat, 21 May 2005 08:21:54 GMT

I have to say I read a lot of P.R. from Microsoft, and so far they seem VERY excited to present features that are available for the first time in Internet Explorer that have been available for years. Same goes for Longhorn's hype, boasting Mac OS X features. You know, it's great to get people excited with your "Better Tomorrow" buzzlanaguage, but at the moment your compeitors are producing and you are not--and the Mozilla organization is non-profit! Yet somehow the richest organization in computing is nearly stagnant under its own weight, too burdened to efficiently use the money-muscle it's built.

The one thing Microsoft has impressed me with in the last several years is the Xbox. And the Xbox is not innovative, it's progressive. It just seems innovative because it's Microsoft's first console. I just read an article about the Xbox's successor, which, if it holds true to hype, DOES look innovative. However, the same article takes note that the Xbox team was deliberately set apart from the rest of Microsoft as a sort of "minicompany" that, though Microsoft by name (and fiscal power), has its own brain and an extremely long leash. So I cannot righthly credit the whole company for the success of a team designed to function in an un-Microsoftlike way.

But I digress. It's great to tell us your plans, but it's a LOT better to SHOW us your plans in action. Don't just talk about products, SHOW them to us. And don't present features that competitors have had for years as if they are some glorious new advance that only Microsoft could have brought us. Tabbed browsing has been around since the year the internet exploded, 1994. It became popular in 2003, because the original innovator otherwise did poorly. Mozilla's popularity brought tabs to the spotlight, and since 2003 they have become a standard. Don't try to excite us with IE7 tabs; they are to be expected as a *given*, not as Microsoft's going the extra mile for our sake. If a nonprofit organization can popularize tabs such that they are taken as standard, why should we be excited about them? The question is not, "What browsers support tabs?" It is, "Oh my god, are there actually still browsers that DON'T support tabs?!" Currently the answer is IE, and fixing this is not going to excite me; it's going to bring you up to the standard, although I will still be skeptical of your sluggishness in getting there. Do NOT call catching up "innovation." Show us something we've never seen before--that's innovation.

I partly sympathize with the security issues and I partly blame MS for things like ActiveX. Hackers and malicious internet users will always learn the holes in the most popular browser because it offers them the greatest amount of targets. That said, MS should have seen some security holes before they were exploited.

That's my two cents. Do the following, and I will give IE a second look--but it will take excellent performance in these things to win me back from Firefox:

* Support for HTML and XHTML.
* Full support for CSS 1 and 2, and if you really want to impress me, CSS 3.
* Full native PNG alpha support.
* Support for SVG.
* Less proprietary, more forward-looking for the web's sake. The web belongs to everyone. Trying to take it over will harm MS more than help. Instead, help the greater web advance, and you will earn respect (and customers).

For the sake of the entire web, I wish you the best and hope IE 7 is a solidly good product. The web needs healthy competition in order to keep advancing. (Somehow I do not find it a coincidence that IE 7 talk started after Firefox lost its uncertainties and promised only to grow, not shrink. But this is good, because it's starting a revolution at MS so they will make a better product to compete. I just hope competition remains on the product level and not on bullying business tactics.)

Microsoft is an immensely huge animal, and some parts of it are not the same as others. "Let not the right hand know what the left is doing..." Microsoft has hundreds of hands all doing different things. I think, collapsing under its own weight, it is its own worst enemy.

Oh well. I hope the web continues to march forward. Work hard on IE7.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

zzz — Sat, 21 May 2005 14:20:05 GMT

I'll say it again cause no one else does..

Tabs and standards (of the obsolete variety) are not relevant!

Usability+security is more important. I mean that I must be able to go to any page, have a good experience from usability standpoint while being secure. So even if the webmaster of the page is maximum-hostile and the code would try to push all sort of crap through, the browser experience shall be as smooth as viewing Microsoft.com. Of course this is bound to break a few hundred standards but if the experience is better with other browsers, you can bet no one cares about the tabs and standards.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Deluxe — Sat, 21 May 2005 15:16:19 GMT

Don't listen to all these nerdy fanboys, you'er doing a great job, and I'm looking forward to IE7. Thomas, you can make a point without being a rude obnoxious prick. It's quite simple.

Cheers,

re: IE7 Has Tabs

ant — Sat, 21 May 2005 18:41:33 GMT

>> Don't listen to all these nerdy fanboys, you'er doing a great job, and I'm looking forward to IE7. Thomas, you can make a point without being a rude obnoxious prick. It's quite simple.

Yeah, ignore them, abuse them and spit in their face. After all these are only the people who are running the internet. MS can easily ignore them, can't they?
Bzzt. Wrong. 58 million people think otherwise.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Sean — Sat, 21 May 2005 19:52:26 GMT

If every time you post something about a "new" feature for IE7 and people come out in droves to talk about usability and web standards, you know what features are the most important to us. Work on those please.

If IE7 creates even more workarounds for us when designing and producing web solutions, you'll see a backlash that will be very intense, even compared to the current trends. If the browser gets it right though, I'll be more than happy to give it a shot.

Tabs? A good solution since it helps with the windows clutter. Who cares who made them first, just make them good.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

neverpanic — Sat, 21 May 2005 22:42:29 GMT

Tabs are nice... but there are bigger issues than tabs.

Consider implementing XHTML and CSS (the right way!) and don't make such lacks like the IE 6 24bit PNG thing (ever tried to load a PNG with alpha in IE6?). Another point should be security... IE until XP SP2 was an open door without firewall (I mean, it didn't even have a PopUp-Blocker! btw, blocking layer ads in ie7 would be a nice feature)

These are the important things.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

me — Sat, 21 May 2005 22:45:41 GMT

what about mouse gestures like AIO gestures plugin in Firefox?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Juan Manuel — Sat, 21 May 2005 23:13:36 GMT

I think the new feature of tabs in IE7 are because many people love tabs, and they are going to Opera or Firefox.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Anas Hashmi — Sun, 22 May 2005 04:25:08 GMT

Tabbed browsing is great. More features are great. If they do not have keyboard shortcuts, I really wont care to use them.

IE is simple. It can have many add-ons but i am not downloading everyone of them.

Give me the essentials and give me a more enjoyable time with internet. I like things not to be within the click of a mouse, but within the stroke of a keyboard (like GMAIL).

Also, YOU REALLY NEED MACRO SUPPORT.

Quoi d'neuf chez les geeks ?

astuces-win.com | Le blog — Sun, 22 May 2005 23:18:31 GMT

Apple vient donc de sortir une mise--jour pour Tiger, c'est--dire un passage quasi-oblig la version 10.4.1 de Mac OS. Celle-ci corrige des problmes pour les rseaux sans-fil Airport (on ne dit plus Wifi mais ASFI pour Accs Sans Fil Internet......

re: IE7 Has Tabs

hypatech — Mon, 23 May 2005 04:42:11 GMT

Hi I know you guys at microsoft think ie is perfect but its nowhere near it. I think you should become a open source browser because more and more people are like the idea.Also you shouls fix the problem with downloading files. Also you should make ie 7 a multi media browser amke media a part of it. But the biggest thing is make it customizing it or else mozilaa firefox 2.0 is going to leave ie 7 in the dust.

Nice try

Wizard — Mon, 23 May 2005 10:59:26 GMT

With or without tabs, with or without CSS and XHTML support, it will still be most unsecure browser on the planet because MS will simply ever drop out ActiveX support. ActiveX solely is responsible for the most part of all security holes in MSIE.

It WOULD be great if MS supports the web standards, because all of us web developers would have much less trouble. However, that would not convince me to switch back, because i'm simply sick and tired of reinstalling windows and cleaning spyware for the last several years just because of using IE (although i was using all kinds of antivirus/antispyware/firewall softvare, spyware always gets into your OS somehow through that damn ActiveX). Since i moved to Firefox, no trouble AT ALL even WITHOUT any antivirus/antispyware softvware for almost a year now (not a single spyare!) and this is what makes a REAL difference. Tabs are not so important for IE because people who like tabs have abandoned IE already and will probably never come back. Nor should they.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Patrick Schriner — Mon, 23 May 2005 19:19:22 GMT

To all the guys that think that there is no tabbed browser from MS:

The Microsoft .NET SDK´s Help Browser *is* a browser based on the IE engine with tabs. It´s been around for what, 4 years??

That is before FF (i think?)(but years after Opera) :-)

Firefox...

Lancelotz — Tue, 24 May 2005 00:31:11 GMT

I think that even with tabbed browsing and stuff, Mozilla Firefox will still be faster, safer, and better.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Carlos — Tue, 24 May 2005 04:56:00 GMT

The lack of tabs (with background loading) has been one of the major incoveniences in IE usability, in my opinion. "History", on the other hand, is a USELESS thing! Please, make it simple and more efficient. I don't need new stuff, but things that work better and are more organized so that I can be more productive. Please, also don't ask us to spend little fortunes. We can't. We want it as FREE as possible! Keep an eye on your competitors as they are doing a better job with much less resources than you and in many cases for free (maybe smaller groups of very good programmers are more valuable than expensive dumb guys in administrative staff just looking for money for every breath we take).
If you don't adapt, you risk facing a bad time like IBM that do expensive and stupid things for other stupid enterprises that throw away their money with them. Everybody knows that MS have done a great job in many aspects but please don't become another IBM and make IE7 one of the flagship of you success again. PS: Please, don't force us into new and akward user interfaces just to be different.

"Netcaptor -- the original tabbed browser" is a marketing myth

raiph — Tue, 24 May 2005 06:43:53 GMT

Bruce Morgan [MSFT] said:

> BTW, the browser that first implemented something that was recognizably "tabbed browsing" (not MDI, but tabs) was Netcaptor back in 97 or so.

I suspect that that is misleading. I recall using BookLink InternetWorks in 1994. Its UI was very recognizably "tabbed browsing" (not MDI, but tabs).

NetCaptor's author states that "Booklink/GNN/NetShark, in its various incarnations, was not a "tabbed browser" as we now know them. In GNN (and I have several copies floating around), tabs represented the navigation stack of a user's browsing session. To go back or forward, you switched to the different tabs which represented other locations in your session history. Tabs were not in any way independent, you could not right-click "open in new window/tab"."

I don't have a binary or screenshots to refute Adam's description, but I sure do have my memory. I think the GNN browser he refers to must be a limited version of the product I used.

raiph

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jim — Tue, 24 May 2005 08:38:44 GMT

Netshark is available here:

http://browsers.evolt.org/?netshark/

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Mojo — Wed, 25 May 2005 00:31:03 GMT

Thank God.. Now I can finally stop using FireFox....

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Mike — Wed, 25 May 2005 05:12:02 GMT

> Thank God.. Now I can finally stop
? using FireFox....
> Mojo

I stopped using it the 2nd time I tried it. First time, it took 12 seconds to load. The pages I visited all shifted right and left all over the place before settling down.

Sometimes there's a scroll-bar, sometimes there isnt (these are pages that NEED a scroll-bar).

Second time, same exact stuff happened, but after I installed the latest version (1.0.4). Its now uninstalled until they correct their problems.

There's nothing special about that browser. Microsoft isnt perfect - show me someone who is. Great work guys, since the early 80's I've relied on you and you've always been there!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Thomas Skaflem — Wed, 25 May 2005 09:40:09 GMT

Where the **** is the webstandards ? I think this is the most important wtih a browser. Windows without IE and use of Firefox or Opera as the standar browser is the thing :)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

David Naylor — Wed, 25 May 2005 10:56:24 GMT

"Great work guys, since the early 80's I've relied on you and you've always been there!"

Heh. At least the IE team hasn't always been there. (Remember 2001 to late 2004?)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

James van der Hoven — Wed, 25 May 2005 16:55:43 GMT

Yes! The ability to save tabs so that you can open them up at a later stage would be perfect! Especially as I come in first thing in the morning and open a couple of news sites to read the news.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

DaveP — Wed, 25 May 2005 20:30:49 GMT

There is an XML parse error in your rss feed for his blog.

You guys should look into it.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

DaveP — Wed, 25 May 2005 20:33:18 GMT

There is an XML parse error in your rss feed for his blog.

You guys should look into it.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

ant — Wed, 25 May 2005 21:11:32 GMT

> I stopped using it the 2nd time I tried it. First time, it took 12 seconds to load. The pages I visited all shifted right and left all over the place before settling down.
> Sometimes there's a scroll-bar, sometimes there isnt (these are pages that NEED a scroll-bar).
> Second time, same exact stuff happened, but after I installed the latest version (1.0.4). Its now uninstalled until they correct their problems.

Do the websites that you complain about not working in Firefox use W3C standards (http://validator.w3.org) or a mangled MSHTML mess of spaghetti code that obviously wasn't designed for anything other than IE(4,5,6)?
You see the problem is not with Firefox, it's with ignorant webmasters and users who don't care about the internet.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

heeppan — Wed, 25 May 2005 22:15:55 GMT

good

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dirk — Thu, 26 May 2005 03:15:31 GMT

I use the Maxthon browser because it has tabs, and the tab groups feature is a real time saver; I suggest that these features be added to the next IE.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

samuel — Thu, 26 May 2005 05:23:13 GMT

In addition to tabs, you should consider extending the use of web page thumbnails similar to the way you thumbnail search results in IE, you should should be able to thumbnail n number of favorites. So instead of seeing a link in favorites you could instead see the page. Also add it to the right click menu on the link of a web page. You could right click on a link and see the page in a pop-up without leaving the page or simply right click the link and thumbnail the page it hyperlinks to.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chrissy — Thu, 26 May 2005 06:48:00 GMT

I really love Avant Browser (http://www.avantbrowser.com). It's tabbing is more desirable than Maxathon's, in my opinion. I also love being able to close many windows or all except one.

Almost everyone who uses it instantly switches from IE. (Though its just an IE frontend so our pages still render nicely)

I also wish it was easier to program add-ons for IE. I haven't read up much about IE7 but I really hope that you consider letting end-users extend it like they can extend Firefox. I'm a bit jealous that we currently cannot.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

rrsarge — Thu, 26 May 2005 20:00:01 GMT

FireFox has left the station and IE is playing catch-up...

IE7 with tabs

personal.fuyuko.info — Thu, 26 May 2005 20:10:52 GMT

Next Internet Explorer, IE7, has tabs...finally. I've been staying away from IE and using Firefox. Tab was one of the main reasons for it...and security issues etc...but some sites just work right unless I use IE. Who knows, I might...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Steve Lavoie — Thu, 26 May 2005 22:13:13 GMT

After reading some sort of post about the favorites menu it reminded me of one of the MOST annoying features of IE...the "Links" folder can only be removed by registry hacking...don't make it some sort of system folder.

As for the tabs, there should be a setting somewhere that allows you to specify how many tabs can be open before opening a new instance of IE. Also, you could have it set to only open tabs from the same site.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Brian Morgan — Fri, 27 May 2005 04:47:58 GMT

When is this browser coming out?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Stuart — Fri, 27 May 2005 14:30:47 GMT

One of the nice features of tabs in Firefox is the ability to bookmark the open tabs in a Bookmarks folder and then open all the bookmarked pages in separate tabs at a later point.

Aside from tabbed browsing, the feature I use most is the keyboard navigation. You can navigate through text/links quite quickly and consistently using the keyboard.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Steve — Fri, 27 May 2005 14:59:32 GMT

> Thank God.. Now I can finally stop using >FireFox....
>
>Mojo

Err did someone force you to use it? I think not.

Frankly if all they can thing of to promote IE7 is tabs then frankly I'm not impressed.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

JediXAngel — Sat, 28 May 2005 02:50:01 GMT

Tabs are JUST what I wanted for the next Internet Explorer!

I didn't like IE6's lack of tab browsing.

Where can I download the Beta?

IE7 IIS7

Nathan Mercer's blog — Sat, 28 May 2005 16:59:49 GMT

Last week Tony on the IEBlog announced (or confirmed depending on your POV) that IE7 would have tabs...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Rob — Sun, 29 May 2005 07:27:09 GMT

IE7 should support the Scorch Plugin and Musicnotes Viewer Plugin

re: IE7 Has Tabs

DotNetDev — Sun, 29 May 2005 15:18:39 GMT

The most useful program Microsoft has ever developed, Microsoft OneNote, has the best tabs implementation I've ever seen. That's something Microsoft should strive for with IE - the hierarchical levels of tabbed folders, for high bandwidth users, would blow away Tab support in Opera or Firefox.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chris — Mon, 30 May 2005 06:25:47 GMT

All my thanks goes out to the team for creating tabs into IE7, people need to realize that all of you are not perfect and I believe the team is trying to make a browser that fits web standards and is comfortable to use. Untill they learn to perfect the safest browser, I think that we should congraulate them for all their work instead of critizing what they have accomplished

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chris Sanders — Mon, 30 May 2005 06:28:48 GMT

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dennis Mac — Tue, 31 May 2005 00:10:02 GMT

I think that IE7's tabbed browsing feature is good, but I think that Microsoft should add this feature to IE6 which is compatible with all versions of Windows; they could do all of this just by making a service pack.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Jamie — Tue, 31 May 2005 13:14:21 GMT

Nice one. I'm a Firefox user by default but if IE gets tabs it will only make me happy, so I can use the same features when I'm using other PCs. :-D It'll be nice if Ctl+T opens a new tab, just like Firefox and Konqueror! Would MS be so brave?! :-P

Cheers,

Jamie.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Steve Wagner — Tue, 31 May 2005 19:59:09 GMT

I am wondering about the comment that "...other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don’t have tabs". The version of Media Player I use has tabs (Library, Rip, Burn, Sync, Guide). Also, is not the task bar -- to a certain extent -- a tab control?

Personally I feel that the addition of tabs is a requirement, all too many browser offer it now to *not* offer it. When performing research is a extremely helpful to not *leave* the current application.

One point I would to suggest, and has been implemented by an extension for Firefox, is the ability to save a 'session' (the currently opened tab set). This is an excellent feature that lends itself nicely to the aforementioned subject of performing research to which one may have to return.

Steve

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Phin — Tue, 31 May 2005 21:00:04 GMT

Yeah, I remember a site, http://www.multibrowser.com had split and tab browsers almost 10 years ago! Way before firefox or IE 7!

Either way, I hope IE 7 will allow users to clear history on the first try!

Besides that Microsoft rocks!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

John — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 01:09:09 GMT

While you are in there adding Tabs you might also take on some of the other 'Maxthon' features too..... Such as "Groups" for favorites.. or at the very least the ability to "Open All" favorites that are in a folder in the favorites list..... as well as the ability to "Add URL Here" to a folder in the favorites list.

thanks for reading

re: IE7 Has Tabs

skitzoe — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 03:55:08 GMT

i uno...only problem that net explorer gives me is the spyware...no matter wut spyware always tends 2 get connected w/ my net explorer..wish their was a way 2 remove "search now" program..or sometin..thnx

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Chris Warwick — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 13:53:56 GMT

Great! Really looking forward to this feature - this is probably the main reason I've been using other browsers in addition to IE.

One request (and something that's conspicuously absent from Mozilla) - PLEASE can we save collections of tabs so they can be restored at a later time? I often find it very useful to have a collection of pages relating to a single subject open in one browser window and would often like to save the collection and come back to it (without having to add all the pages to my favorites).

Thanks!
Chris

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Michele Costabile — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 14:57:05 GMT

One neat little thing. Tabs should be movable.
When I search in Firefox I open Google and open all possibly good answers, then sort them out, then I would like to reorder the good ones and store the open pages I have in the bookmarks or elsewhere (will .lnk files be multidimensional?).
Sometimes I have two browsers open and would like to move tabs from here to there, because one browser is for something (say mail accounts), the other for searching, the third for reference, who knows. Titles should be easy to change for this use.
An extension of "what's" related would be powerful if it took in account all open tabs (what am I missing in my collection of pages?)

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Tony Kavadias — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 09:28:35 GMT

You said:

"Some people have asked why we didn’t put tabs in IE sooner. ... Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don’t have tabs? I think we made the wrong decision here initially, and we’re making the right one now."

Well, if you were thinking about that before, then how come Windows applications (including Windows Explorer and Microsoft Office) feature tabbed dialog boxes?! Consistency didn't play a part there, obviously.

And what about Visual Studio? Microsoft Excel? They also have tabs!

I think consistency is not the basis of the decision not to include tabs in Internet Explorer windows. It's got to be something else, in my opinion!

--
-- tonza

IDN IDN IDN

Matt — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 16:00:19 GMT

It's good to see that IE 7.0 will finally be offering some of the core features of the other competing browsers.

One of the hot feature that has to be implemented on the upcoming IE is the IDN support. Currently our computers are running INAV Plug-in from VeriSign.

Please don't forget to implement this extremely important feature. In this blog we only see support for PNG, CSS, Tabs and whatever. IDN is much more important than those secondary features. IDN should be your first priority in your to-do list.

Thanks for listening

IE and XFORMS

Chris — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 16:54:38 GMT

How about IE 7 getting into XFORMS if they did that then they would be one of the first which isn't often for microsoft in the browser market....

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Sir D — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 20:49:13 GMT

I think tabbing is a great idea. But it shouldn't be your first proirity. You need to focus more on Web standards. Making things display correctly, which IE does poorly next to other browsers like Firefox and Opera. After you get that down, tabs will put you one step closer to being once again the best Web Browser on Earth.

<-)-{Sir D

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Viking054 — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 08:52:21 GMT

Agreed. If IE wants to do something about it's reputation (which is not good) then it needs to at least meet the W3C standards.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Daniel Hough — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 23:45:11 GMT

Agreed with that. While firefox may not display everything correctly, neither does IE, and it has been around longer. For example, a website I made at www.canine-behaviour.com shows up the PNG images which are used as the menu to have transparent backgrounds, like how I saved them, in Firefox. But in IE, they have grey backgrounds. Why is this? Doesn't look right. I don't know if its my coding or if I saved them wrong, but Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Firefox agree that those images have transparent backgrounds so I'm guessing it has something to do with IE. Still, tabbed browsing sounds great nonetheless, but I won't be using IE unless problems like this are fixed.

display properties and Internet options

R K — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 20:39:56 GMT

What ever you do is fine with me, I have been happy with your product so far. I would like to suggest that you make display properties and internet options password protected due to there capability to cause adverse system responses, for example: changing screen resolutions, security levels, Java, etc.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Frank — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:31:11 GMT

Avant browser has had tabs on their browser for I dunno how long - plus it remembers the sites you went to even if you close the browser using the "X" button - it will even allow you to decide which pages you would like to reopen and based on what you check - it'll open those pages for you - I stopped using IE because I had a problem with their 'Open in a new window feature' which would actually end up closing the current window after opening a new one - (aside from a few other bugs here and there) I have been using Avant for years now and have to say that it has already ran circles around IE - so to have them basically take an idea that was already thought up and then simply integrate it into their own browser is really no big deal to me considering they're acting like it's something new.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Yaseen Hamed — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 12:48:33 GMT

Finally! IE will be showing dynamic features of browsing like Netscape/FireFox. I think Tabs should already been addad long time ago when IE6 Released!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Dean M. — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 01:56:47 GMT

I installed Maxthon just for the tabs feature. Tabs work really well for me as I sometimes have 6-7 different web sites open at a time. It was to hard to find which window I needed without tabs. I downloaded and installed Netscape 8 just for the tabs, but was unhappy with several features, namely clearing search histories. Netscape was uninstalled as soon as I found Maxthon. The only complaint I have with Explorer 6 is it's pretty bland to look at.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Stevo — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 03:19:50 GMT

As long as you can still ALT-TAB between windows and SHIFT-CLICK to open a page in a new tab.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

STAT — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 17:08:30 GMT

I just hope tabs will be optional...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

YahooMan — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 19:06:39 GMT

Hi. I need the Yahoo tooboar to work. Although using mainly Maxthon for Tabs (and resource conservation) I often have to switch back to IE for the Toobar. It is indispensible when working at many different computers. I'm sure the Yahoo guys will figure it out sooner or later on IE7 I just hope you guys don't play politics and make it difficult for them...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

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re: IE7 Has Tabs

R.D.J — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 07:23:40 GMT

Microsoft, will you please come out with Microsoft Linux? I like Linux much better than Windows. It is faster, more stable, and better overall. I think that Microsoft would save billions per year if they built a new Windows based on the open source linux and the security issues would be less. Mozilla and fireFox make IE look bad, very bad. i recommend that you scap IE and switch to FireFox/Mozilla. the sooner Microsoft admits defeat and embraces open source, the better MS's chance of survival. Http://www.saxtalk.com runs on Linux, and it is fast, secure, and stable.

Microsoft has done a good job on a few things. The Xbox 360 looks nicem and the original Xbox runs very well on Linux. Msnbc.com is a great news site, and renders well on my linux computer using mozilla. I have been very happy for the last two years. All of my home computers are Microsoft-free and my computer has not crashed once since i switched to fedora core 3. I wish that all Microsoft users could experience this stability by microsoft offering MS Linux. thank you! Take care!

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 07:51:38 GMT

Ok, who let the linux freak on this thread. linux has its place, unix has its place, microsoft has its place. dribbling crap like that about linux and open source like a good little linux drone serves no body any good. get a life and a brain. live in the real world for just a few minutes.

now that thats aside...

tabs are a great idea that as stated is a mistake that ie should have corrected a long time ago. least it is being corrected now. me i personally hate having 15 million one character tabs at the bottom of the screen for every ie window that opens (ok so i opne alot of browser windows im allowed :)....using xp with the grouping thing just annoys me as well as it doesnt work properly with alt-tab or make it easy to see whats what.

opera with tabs is the way to go. admittidly ie is free but more work needs to be done as well to get rid of this "everything is a new window" philosophy. operas download manager is a fantastic tool...all downloads to a single control window. the simple + and - for zooming pages etc and a bucket of other features are what makes the competition stand way above ie. com'on guys if you really wanna make ie the winner of the crowd you need to do what every other company in the world does and learn from your competitors and your mistakes...ie hasnt changed one bit in like 3 years..its still the same barely functional single page tool....why is opera and mozilla there and successful, because they offer something microsoft doesnt. being a monopoly or default installed app because people are too stupid to find out about new things only lasts so long.

while im ranting...off topic...can you please fix windows explorer...it has to be the most usless product known to man. even the old file manager had better functionality with the simple drag and drop between two sides. again look at third party products out there like total commander etc. again they exist because they do the job where as windows explorer is just a hideous people of crap. and please no one tell me to copy or cut and scroll up to pase somewhere else or open multiple copies...that is NOT a solution to the problem. it consistantly takes 10 times as long to do anything in explorer than it does in something like total commander (note, nice having ago at the poor guy that writes that product a while ago by claiming windows is a word you own...i know you have to defend your tm's and patents but windows is a word in the english language...if i change my first name to windows are you gonna sue me as well :P

keep trying microsoft...you might get there one day. just please do it before i have to buy a 160gig hdd to just install windows on :(

your os works reasonably well...your apps on it that come as defaults pretty much suck tho

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Matt Lewellyn — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 09:05:53 GMT

Well, since it seems that no one else has bothered to list which add-ins they'd like you to test, I'll be the first. :)

Honestly, about the only one I ever use nowadays (that I can think of off-hand) is the a9 toolbar. I think I've disabled just about every other BHO that I've been using, so if a9 "just works", I'll be happy in that regard. :)

Oh, and I hate to flog a long-deceased horse, but my only requests for the tabbed interface are:

1) Allow the tabs to be re-ordered at will. (Opera does this, and Firefox is purported to, but I have never seen it work properly.)

2) Automatically save my browsing sessions. If IE crashes, then the next time I launch it, I should get all of the windows I had open, plus any and all tabs in those windows. (Again, Opera does this, and Firefox only does it [with an extension, and unreliably] for one window.)

Note that everyone is saying things like "OMG, you're stealing all of Firefox, why not just give up IE and us Firefox instead?!?!", but its extensions are half-baked. Sure, IE is well-despised, but its features tend to work as the box says (for better or for worse). Now is a great time to show the Firefox fanboys that you won't back down because you really DO know what you're doing.

I'm looking forward to a browser market where all of the competitors are fully featured. You have the power to make that happen.

Keep up the good work!

--Matt

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Glenn — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 18:01:10 GMT

Some requests:
-make tabs closable with a double click of the tab.
-make opening a new tab default to either foreground or background depending on selection in options menu
-minimize the size of tabs to fit the text, don't make the tabs all one size
-create tab groupings, this is sort of like Favourites. Clicking a group opens all the tabs in that group, no selecting an option to open all, they just all open
- give users option to display tabs on two or more lines rather than scrolling arrows at the end
-don't include a symbol with the tab unless user selects it in the options menu, they just take up room and if there is information that needs to be represented by the symbol, include that in the drop down menu for that tab
-make sure that Accessibility issues are developed and tested for the tabs
-give users the option of opening new tabs from everything you can think of and let them choose which ones they want to open in new tabs
-give users the option to have new tabs open the right or left of existing tab they are on
-don't leave out customization, let users pick colours, fonts, etc for active and inactive tabs

...and finally give us a browser that visually impresses us. If you have to model the visual design after XP that's fine, but give us a skinning option and let your most creative artist put together some themes that make us say, "Wow, that is beautiful!"
Thanks for the opportunity to give you some feedback on this.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Kevin — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 00:09:04 GMT

have the side bar, like the Netscape Browser (including the MSN Messenger/Windows Messenger). Build in Hotmail and MSN, too and improve the search engine to compete against Google or Yahoo.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Kevin — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 00:10:23 GMT

have the side bar, like the Netscape Browser (including the MSN Messenger/Windows Messenger). Build in Hotmail and MSN, too and improve the search engine to compete against Google or Yahoo.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

harry — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 05:49:55 GMT

u can have a look at Avant Browser which uses IE with a array of features (tabbed browsing is one of them)..

Learning from Microsoft IE

Andrew's Blog — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 06:14:34 GMT

Yesteray I read that Microsoft finally was introducing tabbed browsing for IE. It was by way of the MSN Toolbar, but still it was a momentous moment for Microsoft. Of course, The IE weblog mentioned that IE7 will have tabbed...

re: IE7 Has Tabs

SharkBait — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 05:54:17 GMT

I love Tab'd Browsing. IE would be more useful if it had them without needing something like SlimBrowser (its quirky)

I use firefox, but when I am doing web desiging my main issue is if eveythign looked closer the same with CSS and XHTML :)

Ahh well.... I guess I still have to load Firefox, IE, and other browsers to make sure things look similar.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

wanderson — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 11:23:34 GMT

não estou entendendo bulufas do que está escrito nesta merda. está porra de pagina desgraçada apareceu na hora que eu tava tentendo instalar a porcaria do icq no meu PC então eu dei de cara numa buceta de msg em ingrez depois cai aki nesta merda fudida

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Paul V — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 13:47:11 GMT

Please don't make the tabs work exactly like Firefox. I would like them to be movable so I can have them down the bottom.
And please, please don't hide functions like firfox in a sill about.config file??? real peaple use the internet as well not just geeky Firefox fans.
I like the way I can move and resize my menu/address bar etc. in many ways - like dragging it to a different position. FF can;t do that.
Have the option of no tabs as well.

Also although this isn't about tabs - ctrl enter adds http....com can there also be a customisable one where say, alt enter adds http...com.au (for australian sites or whatever you configure). Not everyone lives in the US.
That would be one up on firefox :) wouldn't it?

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Craig — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 19:46:12 GMT

I hate the way you can't admit that you're adding tabs because Firefox has them (and everyone thinks it's a better browser too, but you can't admit that either).

Swallow your pride! Sometimes other people have better ideas than you, and sometimes they have them first.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Willie Wilson — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 01:50:57 GMT

I am sorry that what I am about to post is off topic, but I fear that no one else has mentioned it (I am too tired to search all of the comments in this entry to find out).

Please, remove VBScript support in Internet Explorer. I am not an Internet Explorer user, and never will be, so I do not care about Tabs, or any other "eyecandy" Microsoft plans on adding to their new product. All I care about is that VBScript support in Internet Explorer is removed; this is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, and is enabled by default, which is the dumbest thing I have ever seen.

I am sorry if I sound impatient, but VBScript should be removed from this and all future releases of Internet Explorer, as well as ActiveX. This will break many websites around the world, but it won't harm any sites that actually contain content.

Best regards,
Willie Wilson <webmaster@codernet.net>

re: IE7 Has Tabs

TheMuuj — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 02:39:58 GMT

Willie:

VBScript itself does not make Internet Explorer unsecure. VBScript does not have access to anything that Javascript doesn't. I belive that you can even install ActivePerl and use Perl to script HTML.

So it is not the language, but which COM objects are exposed to client scripts that cause security problems. With the exception of By-Ref arguments, VBScript doesn't really have access to any COM features that Javascript doesn't.

Now I agree that supporting VBScript is problematic because it might encourage developers to write programs for IE and not other browsers, but I've only seen this happen in Intranet websites. Besides, removing VBScript now would be a huge breaking change, and Microsoft has mde their stance clear on breaking changes, even when it might be for the good of the entire Internet community (with the exception of flagrant security holes).

Now, if the IE team wanted to move from Javascript and VBScript to JScript.NET and VB.NET, I might not have a problem, since this could provide better security sandboxing. (Plus, I'd be able to screw around with C# code in a web page, even if I'd never dare use it on the Internet). But moving the scripting languages to .NET won't happen in version 7, and I suspect there would need to be some more changes in .NET to make this sort of thing work well.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Murphy — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 02:49:10 GMT

tabs for internet explorer are really stupid i don't a very good reason to put on tabs in a browser.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Willie Wilson — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 03:08:14 GMT

Hello TheMuuj,

I think I understand where you are coming from. While I can agree that VBScript does not render Internet Explorer entirely insecure, I have to say that the inclusion of supporting this third-party language makes it really difficult for us that use third-party browsers (and even third-party Operating Systems) to view web pages without eventually running onto a page that cannot be rendered due to this "Internet Explorer only" feature. I LOVE programs that like to be original and have their own "special" features, but in a web browser, you just don't mess with standards. It is the wrong thing to do, and is frowend upon by many.

I would not be concerned so much about VBScript inclusion if Internet Explorer would render pages that follow standards correctly. I often end up ignoring the fact that my pages do not look right in Internet Explorer; it is not worth my time OR my effort to attempt to write a page that works well in a browser that doesn't follow standards, is it?

We should call Internet Explorer Internet Qwerkplorer (because it acts like it uses Quriks mode ALWAYS.)

By the way, did anyone else besides me find the "Security Alert" notice given in Firefox on this page funny? I really know how secure my data is with Microsoft now. Thank you for the reassurance. :-)

Best regards,
Willie Wilson <webmaster@codernet.net>

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Gustavo Holloway — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 03:27:35 GMT

I really don't understand why everyone likes Tabs. Windows Already provide this functionality! Why to have a second One? Just to not be able to alt+Tab? Please let me turn it off on IE7.

re: IE7 Has Tabs

TheMuuj — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 04:15:31 GMT

Willie, you're preaching to the choir. Or singing to the preacher.

I've been very vocal about IE and standards support. I'm not by any means Anti-Microsoft, but IE has become the bane of my existance.

To be fair, I don't think that the standards says that a browser needs to support any scripting language in particular. In general, however, using anything other than Java/J/ECMAScript is a bad idea. That's a shame since there are many scripting languages I'd rather be using (and VBScript is *NOT* one of them).

re: IE7 Has Tabs

Ed — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 20:06:54 GMT

Tabs are fine. I use them in my better browser. Why not just concentrate of fixing broken things first? Such as security, CSS and all those other things that you probably know all too well about.

IE7 is Exciting

.NET Hobbyist Programmer — Sun, 14 Aug 2005 19:14:34 GMT

IE7 is Exciting

.NET Hobbyist Programmer — Sun, 14 Aug 2005 20:42:17 GMT

target="_newtab"

bootlog.cl | loading life. — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 01:26:02 GMT

Hace un rato fui a comprar mi entrada para el concierto de Pearl Jam. Y en el camino se me ocurrió esto. Ahora que los genios de Microsoft han decidido copiar los tabs para su próxima versión del Internet...