NotesA couple of interesting things happened in the world of Web browser usage during October. The more significant one is that Internet Explorer's share of global browser usage dropped below 50 percent for the first time in more than a decade. Less significant, but also notable, is that Chrome for the first time overtook Firefox here at Ars, making it the technologist's browser of choice.Unfurl
Notes"I see no reason why Chrome won't rise to above 20% in the short term. This means, of course, that the market share of Firefox and Internet Explorer will continue to drop. But as I noted some time back, this really isn't a huge problem for Firefox - although it is for Microsoft. The reason is quite simple: Firefox was never aiming at world domination, it was fighting to create an open Web where no browser held such a dominant position that it could ignore open standards and impose de facto ones instead. We pretty much have that now, with Internet Explorer increasingly standards-compliant - and proud of it, amazingly."Unfurl
Notes"The problem is that no one quite knows what to look for when dealing with Internet Explorer’s plugins. Plugins in IE are ActiveX-based, so there’s no single API for them all—each has its own method of returning, for example, version information. What this basically means is that while Firefox and other browsers are putting all of their plugin information in one handy place, Internet Explorer is jealously guarding its plugin-related secrets. It’s like the Dick Cheney of browsers. And we are, um, the Information Security Oversight Office in that analogy.
Er… let’s just jump right in with some working detection cod"Unfurl
Notes"In this screencast I’ll show you how to set up a virtual machine for Internet Explorer 7 on OSX in about 15 minutes without spending a penny."Unfurl
Notes"These days we are inundated with bloated web browsers that overcomplicate our lives. However, there is one eminent exception: IE6. It has been around since 2001 and is still one of the most powerful and versatile browsers available."Unfurl
Notes"Microsoft is trying to put together a patch, but in the meantime computer users have been advised to update their security settings or switch to unaffected browsers such as Firefox or Opera. ... The flaw in IE allows criminals to gain control of computers that have visited a website infected with malicious code designed to exploit it. While restricting web surfing to trusted sites should reduce the risk of infection, the malicious code can be injected into any website. Users do not have to click or download anything to become infected, merely visiting an infected website is sufficient."Unfurl
Notes"In IE, the redefinition of really() is interpreted and used even though it is inside a block of code that is not executed. Wonder of wonders..."FeedUnfurl
Notes"Just now the IE team announced that it's reversing its policy on the default behaviour of IE8, which shows that it has been paying close attention to the discussion of its versioning proposal. I admit that I hadn't expected this reversal, but I welcome iFeedUnfurl
Notes"it stands to reason, if Microsoft is bending over backwards to keep its bread-and-butter corporate customers happy, that the IE team would suddenly get backwards-compatibility fever."FeedUnfurl
Notes"It might actually be quite an effective way of dramatically increasing the costs of entering or competing in the browser market. (This is what we call "anti-competitive", or "evil".)"FeedUnfurl
Notes"Apparently if you try to remove/destroy/trash a FORM dom node in IE6, it won’t delete it, instead creating a bizarre orphaned node stuck sucking up memory until the browser window is refreshed."Unfurl
Notes"This document describes the enhanced support for the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specification provided by Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later."Unfurl
Notes"One of the differences between Internet Explorer and standards compliant Web browsers that cause a lot of trouble for CSS beginners is the CSS box model."Unfurl
NotesIs it just me, or does this look like a GUI widget test demo? 3 different styles of buttons, in various colors, in seemingly random arrangement. Tabs squished in between other semi-related buttons. This is improvement?Unfurl
Notes"Javascript closures can be a powerful programming technique. Unfortunately in Internet Explorer they are a common source of memory leaks. Therefore I propose a method to create closures that don't leak memory."Unfurl
Notes"You know that one browser that has only a vague association with modern web standards? Yeah, Internet Explorer. Wouldn't it be great if it supported stuff like translucent PNGs?"Unfurl
Notes"Internet Explorer does not support Base64 encoding of images so we will take advantage of PHP’s built-in base64_decode function. We will simply pass the Base64 data back to a PHP module which will then decode the data and return the appropriate image."Unfurl
Notes"No mention of Firefox. Or Opera. Or Safari. Or Mozilla. Or OmniWeb. Or any non-Microsoft products at all. It's as if they have been erased from history."Unfurl
The end of an era: Internet Explorer drops below 50% of Web usage
universal-ie6-css - Project Hosting on Google Code
Conditional stylesheets vs CSS hacks? Answer: Neither! — Paul Irish - Javascript, front-end web development, and hackery
Microsoft Internet Explorer users told to switch browsers over 'zero-day' flaw | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Ned Batchelder: Internet explorer mystery #1376
QuirksBlog: IE team changes its mind on IE8 default behaviour
The B-List: Legacy.