Vlad

Everybody is talking about it – the public beta for Internet Explorer 7. Here’s my 2 cents: not that a big deal. Microsoft has failed again to put the end user in the equation. Or the developers.

The installation file is 11,2 MB, more than double Firefox is. And wait till you run it. Here’s the good news: it appears IE7 is unable to install over itself. So if you had IE7 beta 1 (MSDN subscriber) you’ll need to uninstall it before installing beta 2. Quite a pain as it involves uninstalling and rebooting. So we’re back to IE 6. But then Microsoft decides it’s time for my IE 6 to be updated and starts downloading and installing updates. Which require another reboot.

Finally, I get to start the installation of the beta 2. First it extracts the file it needs. It does that straight in c:\ and not in TEMP. And in the end I have to reboot. That’s 3rd time. Will I get anything done today?

Did I mention IE7 is unable to install over itself. I can’t wait till the final release, then I’ll be able to reboot my machine a few more times again :p

So, three reboots down the road, a lot of warnings from Microsoft Antispyware (MS, they’re both your damn products, why can’t they just get along?) and it started. First it needs to ask me some questions about fishing and stuff which it repeats just as soon as I say “No thanks!”. And then it crashes – some internal problem with frames. Arghhhhh!!!!!

Second time is luckier, it manages to start and not crash. Yet! So what’s changed? Not much from the beta 1. A bit of polishing on the GUI. Supposedly better feeds handling though i still haven’t completly understood how it handles them and why is everybody so keen about MS supporting feed parsing. Instead of relying on MS, an open source, standards based library could be put together for everyone to use.

But then again, that wouldn’t suit programmers who think all you need is a mouse and MS wizards to create great software. Anyway, so far IE7b2 doesn’t suit me, I’ll stick to Firefox for browsing. Get Firefox!

Check out Sony-Ericsson’s Developers Section! Among the highlights:

• Sony Ericsson SDK for Java ME
• Themes Creator
• Eclipse Device Explorer Plugin

Tom’sNetworking hosts and article on how to build your own bluetooth rifle. It seems that it will allow you to eavesdrop on people from quite a distance. Still, dunno how much that helps…

You wouldn’t expect me to get serious on this, would you?

Here’s how the Russian Finance magazine sees the relationship between Euro and US Dollar.

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