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from the the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same dept.
While both Betteridge's Law and common sense say, "No," Zack Whittaker at ZDNet takes a closer look:
An analysis of the last five-months' worth of monthly software updates shows that Edge had 25 vulnerabilities shared with versions of Internet Explorer, which had a total of 100 vulnerabilities.
Earlier this month on its scheduled Patch Tuesday update offering, Microsoft released MS15-124, a cumulative update for Internet Explorer, and MS15-125, a near-identical patch for Edge. Of the 15 flaws patched in Internet Explorer, 11 of those were also patched in Edge.
According to a Microsoft blog post earlier this year, the software giant's newest browser, an exclusive for Windows 10, is said to have been designed to "defend users from increasingly sophisticated and prevalent attacks."
In doing that, Edge scrapped older, insecure, or flawed plugins or frameworks, like ActiveX or Browser Helper Objects. That already helped to cut a number of possible drive-by attacks traditionally used by attackers. EdgeHTML, which powers Edge's rendering engine, is a fork of Trident, which still powers Internet Explorer.
[...] Older versions of Internet Explorer will be retired by mid-January, giving millions of users about a month to upgrade to Internet Explorer 11, or to Edge on Windows 10.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @09:34PM
Fonts...? FONTS!?!?!? You will display in whatever font my terminal is set to use, you insensitive clod!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @12:55AM
NO on that! UI's running/working differently on different platforms is a huge dev, testing, and maintenance headache and cost. WYSIWYG is a good thing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 17 2015, @01:30AM
Actually - you WILL use the fonts that I've installed on my system. I really don't give the smallest damn how the author of the page intended the fonts to be rendered. I've blocked all the internet fonts, because I'm on a very slow DSL, and it just pisses me off that my bandwidth is wasted downloading a different font for every page load. It wouldn't be so bad, but the fonts aren't cached (that I can tell) so they aren't reused. Each and every page load requires a font to be downloaded.
And, why? Pages render quite well without the constant downloading.
That's a large part of the reason that advertising sites are blocked at the router - without ads, my page loads in 15 - 30 seconds. With all the ads, it might take two minutes to load the same page. And, the ads are served up first, of course - I can't read the content while the ads load in the backgroud.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @02:38AM
That can "DSL"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:18PM
What I meant is that the fonts would be hard-wired into the hypothetical "vector browser". There would be no down-loading fonts once the browser is installed. True, there may be a DOM-based emulator as an option, but heavy users of the vector browser would probably want to download it.
And, I don't want to outright prevent custom fonts, but doing so may risk cross-platform compatibility. The vector browser would mostly target work-oriented "serious" applications and not brochure-ware applications. (The existing browsers can have that market.) Thus, if you want something low-maintenance and want WYSIWYG testing, you use the built-in fonts.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:19AM
It's an interesting comment you make. The original intention of HTML was to not have to worry about things like WYSIWYG. It's only by adding all the other extra stuff that has turned it into WYSIWYG.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:36PM
I've decided that's an impossible, overly idealistic goal. WYSIWYG allows everyone to see the same thing and not have surprises on different platforms. Customers and bosses want to review and approve a given layout and have that vetted layout be what end-users actually see. They don't want to approve one thing and have it look different on a different device that tries to shuffle everything.
Maybe an ideal markup/style language with heavily-skilled and experienced UI coders could make decent "auto-flow" cross-platform UI's, but that's too high a hurdle. You are not going to get enough real UI coding experts out there to do it right.
Note that splitting presentation and content is not being ruled out here, it's just NOT THE CLIENT (browser) combining the two. A server-based formatting engine can do whatever it wants, even customize it by device type (if the device wants to send preference info to server). The clients gets simple X/Y/Z coordinates and doesn't have to worry about re-flowing objects. (Z is depth or layering, such as one panel covering another, not for 3D perspective.)
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday December 17 2015, @07:40PM
Except that WYSIWYG doesn't work either and does have surprises. Some people with poor eye sight require larger fonts and that alone means everyone won't see the same thing. Then there are those who are fully blind. Again, the website is a different experience for them.
As for me, it drives me nuts when I put two web browsers side by side on my big monitor (1920 x 1080 resolution) because I want to compare two different pages on the same screen and because I'm using tree style tabs [mozilla.org] on the sides, I now don't have enough space on my browsers to read everything. It's a pain to switch the settings around or not see them side by side.
My opinion has been and continues to be to give control back to the user. I'm not an expert in front end design so I'm probably oversimplifying this, but my gut tells me that too much control has been taken from the user. Fixing it so everyone has the exact same experience seems like the wrong way to do it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @11:04PM
Re: "Some people with poor eye sight require larger fonts..."
It's vector-based, not pixel-based. Thus, it can be scaled up and down as needed without pixelation artifacts, similar to the Control-Plus and Control-Minus keys in a web browser. Nor does the idea preclude accessibility tags and attributes in the markup.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Kawumpa on Thursday December 17 2015, @09:28AM
That's only because far too many, if not most, web designers and publishers focus more on the presentation of the content than on the content itself. In many cases the presentation is the content. The annoying thing is, that most users or consumers of content seem to agree. They actually do want prettier sites and perceive modern web design as useful.
Web design has in many cases reached a point where large parts of the web have become almost unusable for me. I am mostly online to communicate and to search for and retrieve information. Many sites make this really difficult by emphasizing graphics, fonts and very weird navigation concepts. Take for example the average business card style website with a large (sometimes banner style) photo on top (have a look at some random WordPress themes). On my devices (desktops and laptops) I often only see this photo and maybe some form of navitgation (if I am lucky) but no actual content. I have to scroll to confirm that I am where I want to be, especially if this design is followed throughout the whole page. What's the point?
And who still thinks that every page has to be an application? The site's navigation is hidden behind tons of javascript to display "super cool" overlays and mouse hover menus. Moving the mouse across the screen will reformat the page several times and flicker for no reason whatsoever. It doesn't make reaching and reading the content any easier than static menus and navigation (unless the design is the content). And one has to love additional content that is loaded while scrolling down instead of loading the complete page. Disabling the browser in page search functionality is genius, especially where the site does not have a decent search engine.
There are cases where extensive use of graphics and javascript enhances the user experience but that is rarely the case when looking for text based information. The return of some sanity would be nice.
P.S.: And we haven't even talked on the uselessness of advertising... :)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:59PM
For the discussion, I'll discuss 3 categories of applications:
1. Brochure-ware: public-facing sites or applications that want to present a pretty or fashionable style for marketing reasons.
2. Business-oriented (CRUD) applications that want to look professional and up-to-date, but a bit less concerned about fashion.
3. Internal specialized CRUD applications that don't care that much about aesthetics or fashion.
For #1 and some of #2, decision makers are probably going to focus on fashion and aesthetics and there's not much one can do about that. Humans are superficial apes who like to follow bright shiny trendy things.
But for #3 (and some of #2), a coordinate-based client with WYSIWYG layouts could make life a lot easier for devs such that sacrificing fashion-chasing could become acceptable once the productivity boost is seen. As much as orgs are fad-chasers, they are also cheapskates, especially smaller orgs. If a client UI standard saves them money, they will sacrifice visual trendiness.
The current browser standards makes #3 apps a royal pain in the ass. There are frameworks to simplify UI stuff, but one has to get to know the framework first to use it timely and well. And flaky layout issues still pop up.