Keith Lord - Online Portfolio

It actually happened several months back, after years of trying to get my sites working properly in Internet Explorer 6 and below I finally reached the end of my patience.

So, Grey Skies at least will no longer be supporting Internet Explorer 6 and below.
(more…)

Håkon Wium Lie posted an open letter in which is revealed that Opera has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in its browser Internet Explorer.
(more…)

“PC users around the globe may find driver software is stopped from working by Vista if it detects unauthorised content access. Peter Guttman, a security engineering researcher at New Zealand’s university of Auckland, has written A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. He reckons Vista is trying to achieve the impossible by protecting access to premium content. Users will find their PCs’ compromised by the persistent and continuous content access checks carried out by Vista.”
…read more

• digg story

Soeren over at his blog has a few words to say about Peter Gutmann’s paper which should be considered when reading Gutmann’s paper.

WGA, or Windows Genuine Advantage, is indeed an anti-piracy component. However, that one is not tied to “system hardware components” at all, but only to your Internet connection. The author likely means WPA, or Windows Product Activation, which is indeed completely tied to your hardware.
- Soeren Says

Now I can understand the need for protection, but at the risk of crippling ones system is unwise. As more reports come out regarding Microsofts “security” the less likely I find myself considering an upgrade to Vista.

Now I admit I approached IE7 with a biased view on it. I like many others feel that Internet Explorer is a poor browser, and the constant jumping through hoops I need to do to get my sites displaying in IE properly has annoyed me so much that I don’t ever see myself seriously using another IE product for the rest of my days.

After reading this article I am a little paranoid when it comes to Microsoft’s installation set up, I know that some programs and applications like to force you into agreeing with a policy you hate just to see the software work.

As a result I was looking at this more from a web site designer than using it for every day browsing.

Anyway I installed it, rebooted, and opened the program. It crashed right off the bat, I was impressed, and by impressed I mean bemused.

I am most aware that it is beta and there are going to be some issues. I think it crashed pretty much every time I used it, I gave it 3 or 4 tries before uninstalling it on the last try.

First thing I checked when I opened the browser was my websites, I wanted to see if they worked in IE7 (given that my sites, aside from the current DJC build, are all valid XHTML and CSS, I don’t see why it shouldn’t) which they did.

As for the User Interface, I wasn’t impressed. I find that they tend to go for the looks over the usability which is a sign of a bad design in my opinion.
Even in the image above you can see one of the issues I kept having regarding the URL bar.

One item I did like is the apparent ability for new tabs to have a different homepage set up, something I think FireFox could use.

This isn’t a huge in depth look at IE as the consent crashing kind of stopped me from taking a good look, it is more a brief look or an initial thought of the browser.