New Web BrowserS released

Published on 1 Feb 2006 at 3:02 am.
Filed under Web stuff.

Within the last few days, Mozilla officially released version 1.0 of SeaMonkey and Microsoft released a public preview of Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 Preview.

SeaMonkey is essentially an updated version of the old Mozilla Suite with a number of bugfixes and updates, including version 1.8 of the Gecko rendering engine (adding in better CSS support, and basic, native support for SVG). I cannot find any documentation confirming whether or not there are any differences between SeaMonkey’s Composure and Nvu.

Let me first start off by saying what the heck is a preview version of beta level software? Is that a beta version of a beta version? Why not wait until you’re done with what you want included in the beta before releasing it to the public? Are you aiming for a low number of beta releases, but don’t mind how many “preview” editions you put out?

IE 7 beta 2 preview’s release notes are horrible — only documenting changes from beta 1. Why can’t I find a list of things that are different from version 6? Would that be so hard to ask? I know that they have finally caught up with every other modern Web browser and finally added tabbed browsing (even if their version looks ugly), added RSS features, fixed their PNG support, and got rid of a lot of CSS bugs, but what bugs were fixed? From the release notes, they mentioned that they have dropped support for telnet (IE had telnet in it? what the heck), fixed the BASE element, radically reworked the SELECT element to no longer use the native Windows API, dropped support for SSL version 2 for version 3, disabled ActiveX, and disabled support for changing the Status bar text. All good changes in my opinion.

Looking at people’s feadback, there seems to be two main concerns. The first being users running legal versions of Windows are finding problems with Windows Genuine Advantage. Also, installing the beta release will overwrite IE 6. The Fark thread this release contains a workaround for this:

  1. Download the damn thing. DO NOT RUN IT.
  2. Rename the file extension from .exe to .rar and use an unarchiving utility like 7zip to extract it to a folder.
  3. Find shlwapi.dll in that folder. Delete it.
  4. Create a new textfile in that folder. Rename it to IEXPLORE.exe.local and click Yes to accept the changes.
  5. Double-click the iexplore.exe in that folder.
  6. Be remarkably underwhelmed.

While on the topic of Web browsers, I’d like to say that Moezilla scares the heck out of me. Software should not have an anime-girl counterpart …. I’m sure my friend Loun-Loun loves it though.

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