Couple of days back Microsoft announced Super Preview for Internet Explorer . As a web quality analyst I personally welcome this move from Microsoft. I thought we can check the projects in different browsers with in this software. I downloaded it from Microsoft even though it is available only for trail version. It has 250 MB! I decided to test something. I have opened a site with authentication (we developers, always working with authenticated site because of search engines crawling. It is not a good idea to crawl a site before it developed?). But it never opens with a site with authentication. I think this software supposed to use for web testers and web developers. But it never meets its primary objective.
So, I decided to test with some other live sites. It opened in to two panes, one with internet explorer 6 and another with internet explorer 7. Okay, I could find some differences between two panes. Good. I could easily understand something. I tried to add another browser with add image icon. It is asking for image format! May be ISO image? I am not sure. Any way I couldn’t add another browser to this software. I googled it and found that current version will not support to add new browser!
I checked with my friend who is using windows 7. Immediately he said that it doesn’t have ie6 preview.
Here in this link (http://blogs.msdn.com/xweb/archive/2009/03/18/superpreview-for-internet-explorer.aspx) you can check how funny the developer described these things as ‘known issues’.
I could not understand, what is the primary objective with this software? (It is not supporting other browsers now, other than Internet explorer). For testing Internet explorer alone we can use IETester or vitrual os or we can use desktop sharing method. Why these people rush to release this software and without proper testing? (While installing this software our computer will crash for sometime! And there are many issues. They have agreed these problems in the Blog itself (http://blogs.msdn.com/xweb/archive/2009/03/18/superpreview-for-internet-explorer.aspx))
There are some other software are doing their job well. eg. IETester. In this software you can check ie6, ie7 and ie8! And it is free of cost. Also there are some online testing services are available like browsershots.com, crossbrowsertesting.com and a lot.
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Microsoft is still 2 years back in the internet. They think that IT is still in their hands when it was when windows xp was released 8 years back. And as developer, don’t support your blogs for IE. Give your visitors a reason to move to a good browser
Hi Sunil,
I am a Program Manager on the Expression Web team. Please allow me to answer some of your questions about our product, SuperPreview.
1. SuperPreview requires the latest version of the .NET framework. We included this in the download. This is why the download is 250MB, but the installation is only 36MB. In future releases, our installer will automatically download the .NET framework if it is neccessary, so our download size will be much smaller.
2. SuperPreview for Internet Explorer is beta software. This means that it is pre-release software for testing purposes only. You can find a list of our current known issues here:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/ReadMe.aspx?key=webpreview
When SuperPreview is officially released, we will have solutions for as many of these known issues as possible. We know that some of these problems may prevent you from using SuperPreview as you wish, and we are working as hard as we can to develop fixes for these known issues.
3. When web sites are designed, many designers start by making a composition, or an image of what the web site should look like. Many designers do this in Photoshop. Then, they hand the image off to a web designer and they implement the given design in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The image icon is so that you can open an image composition of a web page design, and compare the design to the implemented page.
4. “SuperPreview for Internet Explorer” is a special release of “SuperPreview”, just for Internet Explorer. This means that it only supports Internet Explorer, and not any other browsers. SuperPreview will be included in Expression Web 3 with support for Firefox and other browsers. “SuperPreview for Internet Explorer” will remain a free software for working with Internet Explorer.
5. “SuperPreview for Internet Explorer” is beta software, so it may not always be stable. Sometimes it may crash, or operate improperly. This is why it is still in beta form. We do apologize for any issues that you encounter. If you have the time, we would appreciate if you would report any bugs that you encounter by clicking on the Bug icon inside of SuperPreview.
Sunil – Thank you for taking the time to try SuperPreview. We appreciate the fact that you have taken the time to write this review of our software, and we take feedback from our customers very seriously. If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me at justin.harrison@microsoft.com. We are very serious about making a great product that embraces open standards for web designers. SuperPreview is a part of our efforts to do this.
Justin Harrison
Program Manager – Expression Web
Dear Remiz, I will not accept that Microsoft is 2 year back in Internet. Today Internet may not be so popular if not for Microsoft and Internet explorer. Microsoft has good interoperability between system side and web. It is what making the IE developers hard to keep up with standards and with fast growing latest browsers. And to be frank with you still IE owns more that 75% of internet browser share
and that is why we insist every programmer and HTML designer to keep testing the projects in various IE versions.
@Imthiaz I don’t think microsoft’s contribution to popularizing the PCs and Internet is a justification for their disregard for Standards. They didn’t invent the computer or internet. They certainly brought it to masses, but not for charity. They earned trillions of dollars. This is just one viewpoint. If you look at it the other way, if people didn’t have windows, many more people around the world would have tried to innovate and I think it would have taken computing and innovation far more ahead than we see today.
I agree with you Shuja bhai. Its really true , Microsoft have made people stop thinking new ways after its Windows , all started to waste time to make their effort making the things compatible with this. And more or less it made Microsoft strong in this industry otherwise only with the applications they created we would have still typing the document in Windows 98 Floppy and searching for the other system with the same OS to read that. They cant even make their OS backward compatible. Since we considering the people using IE we still lacking to break the technologies as we want it reach all.
Its long way to go Microsoft for now.
Good to read this in your blog Sunil.. keep it up bhai, i haven’t try SuperPreview yet, but i am now
Cheers
Iyad
Nice article and good thread
@Shuja May be you are right. Microsoft made bucks with their software. But Microsoft never stopped anyone from innovating new software or technology. If that was the case the internet will not be as better place as were now today. Only when there is something to deny there is a revolution.
Interesting read : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_Wars
@Sadiq Till Vista everyone loved windows. After the release of vista windows has gone real bad and they cannot make it up. I am using Linux for more than 10 years and I know how it was at GUI then and how is now. Only 2 years back I moved to Mac and so far I feel it is the best OS when it comes to stability. Cheers guys
@Imthi I am not against Windows as its the first OS I worked on till 6 months before
the point is the strategy of Microsoft. Its true they spending time in new technologies but is it for the betterment of the people or their pockets? They earning money from the people for their products still they give buggy products. If they wanted just money for that time they would have easily blocked pirated versions of windows but they dint thats becoz they wanted more share in the users market. If a product has more users obviously the other people will try target the product to sell their own product. This gave microsoft more partners instead of competitors. Thats a invisible stagnant level in technology. Unless we have a hand on other new technologies we wont realise the difficulties we face in the system we use. Becoz we got used to the old one. This made Microsoft success in Windows.
Wat people want now is quality , we can see many open source technologies have such quality. If they can , Y not Microsoft. Am sure they are not running a charity but just be reasonable for products and responsible for their customers. Its all now in the hands of Microsoft. surely not in us
@Sadiq I think you know them better
May be Microsoft should drop by and ask your suggestions and opinion how to run their company. LOL !!!!
Guys,
), you will understand how difficult it is to meet requirements and standards on a small scale. SO, imagine on the scale of Microsoft and billions of users world wide.
I know things seem very similar from the immediate, tight point of view. However if you have product development experience, hence developed a product which is used by many people (which I know for sure most of you here done already
I am not taking sides, but suggesting to take a breath before you judge and accuse others of not doing their job as it is the easiest thing in the world.
And can I ask why are we addressing this as an “IT” issue althought it is pure “WEB” ? I do believe that Microsoft still owns IT, but definitely not web. Numbers speak for themselves, no room for subjectivity.
Thats my 2 cents.
Cheers.
@ Imthi
I didn’t mean that Microsoft is crap
I am sure that Microsoft is the reason who I am now. I started using PC with MS and still working on MS. But when it comes to web, I really hate MS products and services. I never open IE to browse a website ( I use it only for testing) and if I am in an internet cafe, first thing I do is downloading a browser. And do you know why I have to download a browser to start using internet ? The MS OSs comes with a crap browser, which is %^$^$^$
And the market share is the question … Who can give a reason for visitors to have a good browser? Only developers can do it. Stop supporting IE for personal blogs and all. Because we cant say “No” to client.
Cheers
Add * { _display:none} to CSS
Microsoft or else, end users will still use IE as their default browser as long as they start with windows as an OS.. That was the case from the beginning and will remain for god knows when. But that doesn’t kill the fact that users are switching to other browsers after gaining confidence with the web.
In my simple end users opinion, I would use Firefox as my main browser because i can customize with a bunch of handy cool extensions. without knowing the difference between it and other browsers “remember i’m just a normal user”.
As for my professional opinion, IE sucks when it comes to security, compatibility and other technical matters, it’s getting better but way too slow!
On the same note on SuperPreview, you better check this cool tool from adobe “Adobe Meer Meer”, not out yet and i’m trying to get my hands on a copy
Cheers to all
http://ajaxian.com/archives/meer-meer
I appreciate the lively conversation here regarding Microsoft.
I cannot speak for other teams, but I can speak for my own team, Expression Web.
Our team recognizes that things are not as good as they could be for web designers right now. We support web standards, and the Expression Web team has a strong passion for building tools that enable web designers to create standards compliant web sites that function on all browsers (not just Internet Explorer), and with all technologies (not just ASP.NET).
We made SuperPreview to help make web designers lives easier – because even if Internet Explorer didn’t exist, there are still differences in how other browsers render, especially across platforms (Windows, Mac, and Mobile devices).
It is our hope that this tool makes things easier for web designers, regardless of what platform or technology is being used. We have many plans for SuperPreview, and while the release we recently made is only beta, we believe it is a step in the right direction. If SuperPreview does not meet your needs right now, please keep it in mind, as there are many changes coming that will make it a better tool than it is right now in it’s current beta form.
Microsoft has gone backward related to open web technologies. But they can come back well, the new technologies like this, web app gallery (http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/) etc shows this.
Today’s technology and standards will definitely go for masses tomorrow. Via Microsoft or the rest of us.
@ Justin,
Thanks for that Justin. Is this your personal response, or can we take that as an official response on behalf of Microsoft?
In both cases, thanks for being there and I am sure things will be much better once your kind takes over big old MS mama
Cheers.
Thanks a lot for this informative post Sunil Sir.
Really useful.
Hey Sunil, Great work. I have blogrolled you.
I will wait for your updates.
I think it is interesting that people used the fact that their are bugs in this release a reason to bash MS. “THIS IS A BETA RELEASE” what part of that did these people not understand. At least you get to see what they are doing and help find bugs they might have missed to make this stable when it is finally released. Wait till the final release before you start bashing MS for releasing buggy software. Funny how you get early access to this and people complain. Did Adobe release a Beta if Meer-Meer product for developers to play with and give feddback to the team? Doesn’t sound like it since most post about it people have posted they were still trying to get a copy of it. All you have on it is the new release and the screenshots in the links provided.
@S. Shawn Mehaffie,
Hi Shawn,
Thanks for your comment.
Every product should meet its minimum quality. In the sence it has to meet its primary objective. Dont they have a quality analyst for this product? Beta is a software life cycle which come after the alfa, which already passed some testing etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle). I already downloaded it and reviewed that. I am not relying any screeshot provided in the website.
Moreover I am waiting for the final release, b’ze I hope that it will help us very much.
Thanks
@S. Shawn Mehaffie, Hi Shawn,
Guess only us talking about the beta. May be you can watch this presentation made in the launch of Windows 98 . May be too old. But still its MS , same way of dealing with things
Have a nice day.
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, I rate this post for 4/5. Decent info, but I just have to go to that damn msn to find the missed bits. Thanks, anyway!
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nice post i think
You may want to take a look at this new browser screenshot service
Currently it only supports Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on Windows, but as it is being actively developed more features and additional browsers will be added in the future.
Free beta version can be downloaded from
thanks . let us kill ie6
Super preview authentication will work if we place authentication details in url –
eg :- http://username:password@local.development.com
@Imthiaz Rafiq, We always know Microsoft was a trend setter , but now they following the trail in the web. They are good at system side but far way beyond in the Web. We have seen its setting standards for the System applications but yet to make a mark in the Web other than IE , We want them to set a standard as they always do or else atleast follow the standards , infact even you want them to follow standards Have a nice day .
@Imthiaz Rafiq,
Microsoft did eventually make accessability to the internet popular with windows 95, HOWEVER they did not pioneer the browser and the associated technology that made the internet what it is today.
Outlook, Internet Explorer, Excel, Word are all derivatives of software that came along well before Microsoft got their dirty little hands in the market. Heck they thought network sharing should be done over Netbeui, and didn’t move to TCPIP until the pressure to support it came from an already expanding market provided by FTP Software, NetManage, Wall Data etc… Browser standards were already being set by NCSA and Netscape well before Microsofts involvement. If anything Microsoft tried to corner the market by providing a proprietary html standard and enforcing it on both the server and client os’s. I’m glad that they finally get it that they’ve made more problems than solutions and are finally moving in the right direction. Providing tools like this will go along way in the market to help provide web applications that don’t alienate users based on browser preference.