IEs 4 Linux News

I started IEs4Linux two years ago as a completely free and open source program, entirely developed on my free time. But, today, I can spend more time on IEs4Linux, to improve our program and implement new features (lot’s of things, macosx/freebsd/solaris compatibility, ie7, Java, more plugins and other cool ideas).

That’s why I’m asking you to financially support this work. I love open source. I love to use good products without having to pay for it too. But when I see some program that is valuable to my work, that helps me making money, I think it’s a good idea to support this project.

Reasons to support open projects: Because open source is cool? Yes. To thanks for a great tool? Yes. To help a small project created by one single developer? Yes. To help the project evolve because this will help my work and my earnings? Yes!!

So, that’s what I’m asking you: if IEs4Linux helps your work, saves your time (time is money, remember?) and increase your earnings, support this project. The simpler way is to make any small donation via PayPal. But you can also signup for DreamHost using our promo code, or signup for Google Adsense using our banner.

Anyway, if you can, support this project. See our “Contribute” page.

IEs4Linux intention is to help WebDesigners like me to easily migrate to Linux (of course you can use IE to anything else :-)). WebDesigners still needs IE to work, because we need to test our Sites.

IEs4Linux grows a lot every day, since 2005, what is a great thing. But it was never my intention to fully work on this tool, so I still develop IEs4Linux on my free time. Lately, I’m spending a lot of time on it, to help users, to improve the program, to research about better solutions (IE7 is coming soon). So, your support is very welcome!

Thanks! Sérgio Lopes – IEs4Linux Creator, Developer, Maintainer etc 😀

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And, of course, a very very special thanks for people that support this project not with money, but with work. Testers, translators, forum visitors and people that wrote about it all over the Internet. Thanks!

Here is 2.5 Beta 5 with exciting new features. Help me testing this and post here your comments 🙂 I asked you about advanced options in our installer, and you changed my mind 😛 I just changed our previous installer a little bit, hope you like it. I fully updated our gtk installer; I will do kommander advanced options on beta6. Help me testing this new GUI.
Full changelog:

• New: IE Window title now shows IE version
• New: IE7 is now an option on GUI (using gtk)
  
• New: add icons to menu (uses XdgUtils)
• Improved: Inserting icons in Desktop uses XdgUtils too
• New: You can specify a preferred GUI using –gui gtk|kommander
• New: uninstaller (run: ./ies4linux –uninstall)
• Improved: –help is cleaner; there is also –full-help now
• Bug fix: No more Windows Update page when starting IE
• Bug fix: pygtk interface and non-utf8 locales (anyone can confirm?)
• Bug fix: temp files now created only at ~/.ies4linux
• Minor improvements and bug fixes

Some things:

• This new installer has a few more strings that have to be translated. So, don’t expect a translated gui. I will update our translation system as soon as possible.
• I will design Kommander advanced GUI after I get your impressions about the gtk one.
• I need to know if pygtk issue with encoding is gone when using other locales.

Thanks to translators: Gu Lei, Mihail Milushev, Sami Saada, Risiyanto Budi, AT, Edo, Eloi Granado, Xosé Manuel Carreira, Arturs Bebris and Radek Dvořák.

Quick update: Many people reported problems with tempfile, so here is the fix with mktemp. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks to everybody that commented about it. Download IEs4Linux beta 4 now.

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Hi everybody! Here is IEs4Linux beta 3 IEs4Linux 2.5 beta 4, with some improvements. And I changed how you run ies4linux again – that’s why we call these releases ‘beta’, don’t we? 🙂

Well, I think having two executables is too complicate (2.5beta1 introduced ./installer, remember?). Well, now we have only ./ies4linux again, much more simpler. Execute it and it will show you an user interface. Want command-line installer? Run ./ies4linux –no-gui (so, you still can embed IEs4Linux wherever you want, or run it really automatically). KISS.

2.5 Beta3 changelog:

• Only one executable again
• Riched patch back again (this fix the annoying blank popup bug – Hebrew users, see if this fix your problems)
• Fixed (finally) ActiveX security issue
• Download function improved to get broken downloads
• Portable getFileSize in bytes – thanks to Raven Morris
• It seems that black gifs are gone on IE7 (anyone can confirm?)
• Temporary files are obtained using tempfile mktemp/tempfile to avoid permission issues
• New debug mode when running ie executables

I was thinking a lot these days about IEs4Linux complexity… These day we have all that KISS thing, Getting Real, “Less is more”, the 80/20 percent principle and many more. So I was thinking: is IEs4Linux too complex? All that options on our installer… (who knows me since our 1.x release know how much I hate installers… ‘Next’ -> ‘Next’ -> ‘Finish’… bah!)

That’s my point: how many people use those advanced options? (changing default folder, download folder, wget flags??) And who knows how to configure WGET is an advanced user, right? So, he can use –wget-flags when running ies4linux and we can remove that option from our installer. The option will still be there, but not visible for everyone: we clean our user interface and advanced users are still happy.

So, the question is: should I remove advanced options from user interface and provide that options only as command-line options? (my answer today: Yes. But I want to hear you 🙂

By the way, this version still have the same UI, with all advanced options.

And I need your help with this technical question:How can we install icons on Gnome/Kde menu? (not only to Desktop) – many people want this

Special thanks to translators: Fabio, Jorge Miró, Taras Chuhay, Lahtis, Robo Design, Weirdo, Helge, Marco and けんけん.

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Happy new year for everybody! I promise big things for 2007 on IEs4Linux project, and also big things on other projects I’m working now related to IEs4Linux. Just wait 🙂