IE7 To Have Tabs
I’m probably the last one to blog about the announcement that Internet Explorer 7 will support tabs natively. The reason is that I don’t think it’s that big of an announcement. To me, it’s like saying, “IE7 will have a minimize button” or “IE7 will have a statusbar.” In my mind, this is the dinkiest little feature they could add that should have already been there.
I’m on the side of those who posted comments on this one: what about the standards support. Granted, I’m happy there will be tabs…finally…but that’s something that any hack programmer with Visual Basic could make for themselves. What we really needs is better standards support, period.
Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.
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6 Comments
Nicholas,
Do you know if IE7 fixes the Same Origin Policy security hole which is properly handled in FF?
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/components/same-origin.html
Les Szklanny on May 17th, 2005 at 4:17 pm
I'm not sure which same origin policy failure you're referring to. As far as I know, IE follows the same origin policy correctly.
Nicholas C. Zakas on May 17th, 2005 at 10:14 pm
Nicholas, hi!
See this document about the Same Origin Policy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_origin_policy
I quote: "It prevents document or script loaded from one origin from getting or setting properties of a document from a different origin."
I have an application where the content of one frame is loaded from Lotus Domino and the content of another frame comes from JBoss.
In this app, JavaScript originating from JBoss access properties originating from Domino.
This works fine in IE 6.0 because IE does not follow SOP, but fails in FF.
I did some more research… and the answer to my original question is Yes, MS will fix this security hole in IE7.
See this:
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1776290,00.asp
Here's the relevant quote: "no cross-domain scripting and/or scripting access;"
Les Szklanny on May 18th, 2005 at 1:28 am
Les – that's very interesting. I don't actually think that IE6 ignores SOP because I have run into issues regarding it before, but maybe this is a special case that they're fixing.
Nicholas C. Zakas on May 18th, 2005 at 10:27 am
Yeah, I like your comment here, as well as the very first one from the original post: "way to catch up to five years ago…"
Like many web developers, I've kept tabs on this issue for awhile now, and I have heard the point and counterpoints about what they're going to do, why they will do it, and when.
Aside from the backwards compatibility argument (which MS uses for everything), I don't see why a Microsoft built/branded chrome on top of a gecko rendering engine wouldn't solve alot of the problems for them. They obviously aren't doing this for IE7, nor has anyone indicated that this is even something they would consider. Can the Trident engine even accomodate many more updates to bring it in line with current standards, and still maintain the precious backwards compatibility that MS needs? PPK brought this up several months ago, but I haven't heard much discussion since.
tim from philly on May 19th, 2005 at 11:56 am
Microsoft need only issue one final press release and be done with it:
"Microsoft will continue to copy the most innovative and functional aspects of every application, everywhere. If you feel that a Microsoft application is missing something, simply wait for someone else to invent it and we'll be sure to duplicate it and take as much credit as possible for it. In the meantime, we will strive to ignore such critical issues as standards compliance and security with the hope that no one will notice because we're just so darn huge. Love 'n kisses, Bill"
Keith on May 23rd, 2005 at 11:23 am
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