Security Pipeline obtained access to the first widespread beta of Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) during the holidays. Microsoft has said that this beta represents a subset of what will be released when this software is finalized sometime during the first half of 2004. CRN tested the new software on a couple of test machines, and found it to be very reliable during a couple of days use.
First Look At Windows XP Service Pack 2
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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The usual bunch of questions by a lone web developer:
a) Support for PNG alpha blending?
b) Support for position:fixed?
I’ve read several articles by guys claiming to have tested SP2, mentioning IE updates, but none seem to have tested whether or not they’ve made any improvements to the rendering engine of Internet Explorer.
Anyone knowing anything?
I don’t believe that they’ve made any changes to the rendering engine. The next changes are scheduled for longhorn…nothing until then.
Face it.
IE is DEAD as a doorknob.
The product will stagnate for the next 10 years, Microsoft is done innovating features in IE there is no more money in it for them.
All the competition is dead, long live the monopoly.
The competition is not dead, Opera and Mozilla Firebird are very much alive and have popup-blocking and multi-tabed browsing which IE does not have.
hey, dont laugh, 2 days of uptime is considered excellent for windows.
You made an assumption that the ‘puters were on 24 hrs/day for 2 days, didn’t you?
Onto a more serious note. Personally, if I were to run WinXP (or any flavor of Windows), I would wait for the masses to test the water before jumping in. As for Automatic Update, I wouldn’t trust Microsoft patches at this point, taken into the considerations for their history of patches, which had the tendency to break than to mend.
I consider 2 days uptime in XP2k to be nothing. 10 days is good, 25 days is excellent. I had a friend who had that much uptime with win2k a couple of years ago.
You need to set your standards higher.
Woah, 25 whole days? :O
I think the poster was making fun because most unices can have uptimes of over 200 days. And of course, more industrial OSs can go for years.
I don’t understand why tabbed browsing is such a “big deal”, as there is the task bar (on Windows). Plus, on a dual monitor setup, it doesn’t offer any advantage.
I have been using SP2 every day since MS released the beta. I am using the new firewall and popup blocker. I have had no problems with it.
I’m using XP SP2 since i’ve got the e-mail from Microsoft on december 18. My machine is allways ON, running Outlook 2003 and SETI and other stuff. I’ve never had any problem before SP2 and I still have no problem now. I had much more problems with software NOT written by Microsoft in the last couple of years.
I find it very funny to read about MS basher all suprise that XP/Win2k/Win2k3 can have very long uptime. Stop laughing and start building good computer and installing good, signed drivers. This should solve your problems.
Talk all you want, it’s a free world. But please, get real. Linux is good, Linux is not the answer to everybody and Microsoft is making HUGE progress. At least someone is making money to pay for their developers. Think about this when you think about free beer.
…Microsoft is done innovating features…
Of course, because if you take a look at Microsoft’s (product) history, they never since their existence innovated anything, except Microsoft Basic.
Every other product was either copied from a competitor or the competitor was simply bought.
Tabbed browsing is great! Any pop-ups(if your not blocking them) will be clearly seperate from your main browsing experience. As will other application. And you can have two or more main windows open, each with several tabs open, allowing a more organized seperation of the web. Also I find tabs are better located than the taskbar, making them more ‘in focus’ and faster/easier to switch between.
It’s true. I’ve had a machine running Windows 98 for six months without a shutdown. It was used every day for email, web browsing, and handling employee hours and wages. It was finally shut down to be replaced with a better machine.
Windows XP is far better, both in performance and stability. 2 days uptime is a joke, and one month uptime is still nothing impressive.
The important thing is that most home users don’t really care about uptime. They aren’t running servers, they’re checking email and playing games. If they NEED it to stay up for 200 days, it can. I’m sure of that.
” I had much more problems with software NOT written by Microsoft in the last couple of years.”
I understand and agree with some of your points, but I am also regularly being told that XP must close out this or that Third Party application and ask would I like to send an error message to Microsoft. Though Microsoft would like to simply blame this on the Third Parties, it’s their problem as well. If I can’t run my apps on Windows, then it doesn’t do me any good. It makes me wonder if maybe Microsoft isn’t be forthright enough with developers.
I hear people boasting 3-4month uptimes but patching your system requires a reboot. Does this mean you guys dont patch?
I’ve only had a brief experience with tabbed browsing. While I never really found it necessary for my browsing needs, I’m sure that Microsoft will add it eventually just as they added popup blocking. Of course, popup blocking was more important, and got the priority.
I hear people boasting 3-4month uptimes but patching your system requires a reboot. Does this mean you guys dont patch?
I think what they mean is that they are not FORCED to reboot because of a system crash/lockup.
Anyway, when you’re running a desktop OS, how much uptime do you need until your satisfied? 6 months? 3 years? A decade? If you need to reboot in order to install a patch, it’s not like this is a catastrophic event … just go take a piss and it’s done when you get back.
I swear to God … these people who are so obsessed with uptime probably sit in front of their machines with a tube of KY just staring at their uptime statistics while whacking off fiercly everytime they hour counter is increased by one value.
Seriously, get a life.
While it is true that sometimes there is a patch every month, there are some months with no patches. I don’t use XP, but the wife does. NEVER locks up, never. I built the machine from parts and used only approved drivers. Solid as a rock.
I’m a BSD freak, but most of the MS bashing that goes on here is pure bunk. They’re no better and no worse than any other programming outfit. And while they have problems with buffer overruns (as EVERYONE does who use C and C++ as the primary language), they are listening to the customers and trying to improve things.
I have my MS complaints, but the stability of their new OS versions isn’t one of them. Now, if you want to talk about Java and J++ and J#, that’s a whole different story…
Competition is not dead my friend it is very much alive. I can’t speak for Opera but with Mozilla I don’t see how Microsoft can compete. Sure they gave away IE to gain market share to sell their OS but Mozilla is also given away for free and work awhole lot better then IE when it comes to speed ( which is on par with IE6 ), secuirty, features, and portablilty. Every nickel that Microsoft drops into IE is wasted because Mozilla is a open and free project that only depends on the love of it’s coders and those who contribute for it because they love it. IE depends on earnings and quarterly profits, etc…which means that Microsoft cannot compete.
First off all having more then one window open or cluttering up my taskbar is annoying as hell. I rather have multi-tabbed pages in ONE window with one application in my taskbar. Tabb browsing just makes more sense if you do not like a cluttered desktop. It’s easier to use then going down back to the taskbar to open up another window which may or may not be the one you wanted. With browsers that support tab browsing the names on each tab usually help out in sorting what tab leads to which site, etc…. Also I like how in Mozilla each tab opens in the order that you have clicked on the link too. So if I click on yahoo and then yahoo.news, I get yahoo as my first tab and yahoo.news as my second. This makes moving through pages easier and more sequential. If you are a hot-key’s addict then Mozilla is great because you can move from tab to tab, side to side with Ctrl-Page up or down in Windows, Linux and OS-X. Overall I wouldn’t not want to go back to a non-tabbed browser IMHO because I would get very annoyed quickly at windows opening up all over the place and the clutter would get on my nerves.
Tabb browsing just makes more sense if you do not like a cluttered desktop.
Well, the row of tabs in the browser takes up about as much vertical space as the Windows Taskbar, so the presence of the tabs does cause some clutter as well; for any given window size, there is more viewable space in IE. Also, I have gotten into the habit of just dragging each new IE window on top of the others to line them up (or hitting F11 which makes clutter a moot point).
It’s easier to use then going down back to the taskbar…
So move your taskbar to the top!
…to open up another window which may or may not be the one you wanted. With browsers that support tab browsing the names on each tab usually help out in sorting what tab leads to which site, etc.
Each Taskbar button is clearly labeled. Open an IE window and look at your Taskbar. The IE button in my Taskbar reads OSAlert.com at this very moment, and if I hold the mouse there for a second I can see the value of the TITLE tag. I just opened another IE window and the button in the Taskbar reads Slashdot. So what’s the problem?
Also I like how in Mozilla each tab opens in the order that you have clicked on the link too. So if I click on yahoo and then yahoo.news, I get yahoo as my first tab and yahoo.news as my second. This makes moving through pages easier and more sequential. If you are a hot-key’s addict then Mozilla is great because you can move from tab to tab, side to side with Ctrl-Page up or down in Windows, Linux and OS-X.
Ctrl-Tab isn’t that hard.
Overall I wouldn’t not want to go back to a non-tabbed browser IMHO because I would get very annoyed quickly at windows opening up all over the place and the clutter would get on my nerves.
Drag each new window on top of the rest and there’s no clutter at all.
“I can’t speak for Opera but with Mozilla I don’t see how Microsoft can compete.”
So long as IE is still widely used, isn’t that competition enough?
“Mozilla is also given away for free and work awhole lot better then IE when it comes to speed ( which is on par with IE6 ), secuirty, features, and portablilty.”
It isn’t better when it comes to speed. It doesn’t load faster, and it doesn’t load webpages faster. They’re about equal in that area.
As for security, have you found one exploit in the new IE that could possibly affect me? Because I haven’t been affected by anything in the past, and the newer versions are supposedly more secure.
Features… It’s really just the tabbed browsing that I hear about. I personally don’t like it because like the other guy said, they reduce the viewable area for the website. I’m really picky about that. But other than the tabs, what other useful feature does it offer?
I don’t understand why tabbed browsing is such a “big deal”,
pr0n?
Is a six paragraph response trying to convince someone why non-tabbed browsing “rules” a real good use of your time?
the trick to keep a windows up is not to use any anti-virus software as well as software firewall at all and put a windows machine behind a hardware firewall.
That way, you don’t really need to apply those windows patches.
Additionally, login as a regular user, not some account with administrative privilege – the non-root equivalent in the unix world.
windows xp has “group similar taskbar buttons”, it is more useful with dozens of IE widnows open than those tabs in mozilla and opera
the trick to keep a windows up is not to use any anti-virus software as well as software firewall at all and put a windows machine behind a hardware firewall.
That way, you don’t really need to apply those windows patches.
I don’t know about that. As long as you’ve got the ability to run ActiveX controls, you’ve got security issues even with a hardware firewall from hell, not to mention malware, which will affect the stability of Windows whether it can actually reach the Internet or not. Plus you’ve got vunderabilities like the one where someone could use a fake URL in IE, which has nothing to do with firewalls. And how is a firewall going to protect you against a virus that does nasty things to your machine?
on my IE, activeX is not allowed to do scripting and for most sites, scripting is not allowed at all. This way, flash, real audio, widnows media will play but activex can’t do dirty things.
in real world situations, IE would crash by dirty scripts and activex and mozilla/opera will crash because no scripts are targeting them – pretty boring, huh
windows xp has “group similar taskbar buttons”, it is more useful with dozens of IE widnows open than those tabs in mozilla and opera
KDE has this too, and I still much prefer tabs.
the trill of using IE is that you know you could be “killed” yet you survived after wave and waves of attacks
KDE has this too, and I still much prefer tabs.
KDE is a bloated DE yet without assurance that copy and paste will work among apps runing under its control
Reformat the hard drive and install Mandrake 9.2 walla
you have stable scalable system
Don’t you just love these kind of Linux guys? Every solution to every Windows problem is ‘reformat the hard drive and install Linux. And just like when I see a screaming kid in a restaraunt, sometimes I’d like nothing better than to take a big stick and beat the snot out of them.
Not everything in this world resolves around Linux, you twit. And certain not Mandrake, a distro that’s probably even more unstable than WinXP.
This is like Anti-Virus software, it generates more troubles then what it solves.
wine, win4lin, AA fonts, xfce – all these half-baked linux/oss “solutions” have been available since win95 beta over a decade ago with much more elegant results.
Have you lot used xen.bat and XenTweak_XP.
Go to x9000.net you will make XP stable by disabling
some of the services that you dont need. Its a good
tool for home use and if you read in readme files I
sure its ok for work use.
Its certanly quicker that formating and installing
a Linux distro. But install Linux may save you time in
long run.
Rebooting only takes 60 seconds so home users should
not find this a problem. Your server may not like it
so much as the DB is not up to speed for 1/2 an hour.
(But hwo gose to work at 12am on new years day ?)
And defrag only takes 10 minuts
(Remember 95/98 2-4 hours)
Also in the forums you lot should tell us how you make
Windows so stable and buying a new PC is not righ when
Linux, dos and Beos run fine.
“I don’t understand why tabbed browsing is such a “big deal”, as there is the task bar (on Windows). Plus, on a dual monitor setup, it doesn’t offer any advantage.”
I’d like to disagree – I’m currently typing this into a tabbed Epiphany window, on my second monitor, while I have some code open on the other monitor. When developing (websites) I’ll usually have my editor full screened on the main monitor, and a tabbed browser open with tabs for the site, the API docs, and any other docs I need open.
“I’m a BSD freak, but most of the MS bashing that goes on here is pure bunk. They’re no better and no worse than any other programming outfit.”
Much of it is bunk, but let’s face it, MS has put out shoddy software and terrible engineering botches like the Registry.
As for MS being “no better and no worse than any other programming outfit,” I’m not so sure. Two examples:
* In the Windows 3.1 betas, a routine ran that checking whether Windows 3.1 was running on MS-DOS rather than DR-DOS–which almost any company in MS’s position would have done. However, rather than put up a scary message warning that Win3.1 is being installed on a non-MS-blessed version of DOS, like other companies would have, MS did something sneakier–put up a cryptic error message that made it appear as if DR-DOS itself might be at fault. See Andrew Schulman’s article at http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=1030/ddj9309d/ (free subscription required) and his response to Microsoft’s attempt to explain itself at http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=1023/ddj9401o/ (again, free subscription required, and you have to scroll down to the part that says “Andrew responds:” to see the response.)
* Microsoft, in response to Apple’ “Switch” ads, puts up an ad about someone switching from the Mac to the PC. So far, pretty normal. What isn’t so normal is that this “switcher” was a paid Microsoft PR rep. The photo that was supposedly of the switcher was actually a stock photo. (See http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,55785,00.html ).
Like 6 months ago, all the articles i read about SP2 said RDC would be enhanced to allow you to logon remotely without booting someone physically connected. This would be usful on its own, but it was being pushed because of the (then) new Smart displays. Is this still going to be included now that Smart Displays are no more?
I know a lot of people (myself included) who were looking forward to this feature.
“IE is dead”…what about MSN 8 ( soon to be MSN 9 )…its the most innovative Browser on any platform; of course, it also points to fee based services.
>i read about SP2 said RDC would be enhanced to allow you to logon remotely without booting someone physically connected. This would be usful on its own,
One more time.:)
Mike, you should get Win2003 Server, it has that feature from the day one: up to 2 remote users plus one local simultaneously.
My Russian friends dump XP Pro in favor of Win2003 Server: same hardware requirements, more functionality for those who want it, less functionality (i.e., more security) for those who perform ‘default installation’, same great price (often less than $5 US) at least in Russia for Russians.
Too bad I can’t do the same until I’m back home…
This must be yet another security company paid to shill for Microsoft. They think IT will like automatic updates? No they won’t. Windows updates have been tested better over the last 18 motnhs? No they haven’t. As usual Microsoft makes its security issues the users problem instead of their own.
Yeah, then I guess Microsoft always issuing patches before the exploits are found elsewhere is not an improvement? Or more thorougly testing their patches?
Just because you hate Microsoft does not mean they are not improving.
I’d just like to say that although you Internet Explorer users have come up with reasons to not use tab browsing because you think your built in Windows solutions are so much better are you not meerly coming up with excuses for current IE users not to try tab browsing. It’s not as if us tab browsing users are going to suddenly go back to what we consider inferior browsing methods. Personally I find tab browsing an incredibly useful feature and have always found Windows XPs grouping of windows on the taskbar an incredibly awkward way of swapping between browsing windows. This is not to say others may like this feature. Can’t you guys just admit that for some people tab browsing could be very useful. I have accepted your opinion why not accept ours.
When will M$ invent multiple virtual desktop?
They did…kinda… not really invent, but they did IMPLEMENT it.
It’s in powertoysXP. MSVMM or something.
http://www.filemirrors.com/search.src?type=begins&file=powertoysetu…
it’s under a MB (like 0.94MB)
Microsoft pulled these powertoys becuase TweakUI (also included) allowed Windows XP Home to do things only XP Pro Was supposed to do… with a simple Registry Edit.
//standsolid//
Power Toys are still available to Windows XP users from Microsoft Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp
Ignore ‘Pro’- they work on XP Home too.
You need to install Virtual Desktop Manager.
After installation, right click on TaskBar, get to Toolbars and enable Desktop Manager toolbar.
Have fun.
Commenting post:
By Anonymous (IP: —.dsl.irvnca.pacbell.net) – Posted on 2003-12-31 21:57:01
Yes. Multipage browsing is great feature. And Opera has many many other features that make web browsing faster and easier. I didn’t believed that, but i’ve tried Opera. And i am currently using ONLY Opera. Sorry. Not Only. Some pages (msdn for example) requires IE…
Summary:
Try Opera NOW. Get addicted.
This Os is a joke, (Like all of MS software) after they spend, how many years developing it? 10 since Windows 3.1
My best uptime in corporate mode 27 days:) Windows XP Pro
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