Posts Tagged ‘internet explorer’

IE9 on the far horizon

Posted on in Browsers, WWW.

Microsoft have announced that there will be an Internet Explorer 9 (not a big surprise) and have given an early indication as to what it may include.

Headline features – faster with better standards support (in both cases playing catch up with Gecko, WebKit, Opera, etc.) and hardware accelerated graphics and font rendering which is something new and will improve the speed and quality of rendering across all sites not just ones that add new code.

No word yet on a release schedule, my personal guess would be late 2010 or early 2011 but as it’s Microsoft that could be well off.

One thing that concerns me is that the uptake by consumers may be slow. IE7 was the first release in five years and also shipped as part of Vista and IE8 ships as part of Windows 8 so users buying new machines got them automatically. With no new operating system the take up of IE9 may be slower.

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When pop-up blockers go bad

Posted on in Browsers, Computers, Work.

We have an web application at work that’s used by thirty or so people, many of whom are non-technical. The application runs in the browser window and is a mixture of standard HTML forms and Java applets.

The most comment “it doesn’t work” message I get from users is caused when the application displays this message:

Unspecified error invoking method or accessing property “showWindow”

The pop-up blocker built into Internet Explorer seems not to like Java applets trying to launch new browser windows. It blocks these by default even though they are “requested” by the user via a click and not launched automatically by a sneaky script. I guess IE can’t or won’t work out what’s happened inside the applet before it calls out to create a new window.

Not once have the users noticed the yellow bar at the top of their browser window informing them that a pop-up has been blocked.

I can see the problem for browser producers – if you make the notification too prominent it becomes as annoying as the pop-up would have been; if you make it too subtle it goes unnoticed when the pop-up needs to be noticed.

Compounding the issue is that Internet Explorer seems to maintain three separate lists of trusted/permitted sites for privacy (i.e. cookies), security, and pop-ups. Would a master list of trusted sites with the ability to fine tune options on a site-by-site basis as an advanced option be easier to use? Or is the interface just leading me to the wrong conclusion? Oh well, maybe IE9 will streamline things.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the Google Toolbar’s pop-up blocker…

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