Remember that WinINet bug I blogged about last month? Microsoft’s David Pow left a comment stating that it’s fixed, and the fix should be included in the final IE7 release, and most likely in Vista RC1 as well. This bug was causing a lot of problems for FeedDemon customers, so I’ll be very glad to see it fixed.
Now, given that the bug is an obscure one, it might seem strange that it affected so many FeedDemon customers. Here’s why: the bug was triggered after connecting to a web server that uses chunked encoding and the server abruptly closes the connection. Turns out that Eric Meyer’s server was doing this for a while, and one of his feeds is included in FeedDemon’s default subscriptions (in the “Web Authoring” category). So the bug affected FeedDemon customers who stuck with the default subscriptions – in other words, a lot of people. Eric’s server is now acting correctly, so problem reports related to this bug have pretty much dried up.
Well, I’m… glad?… that my server problems helped uncover and correct a problem. Yeah, that’s it. I’m glad.
So what if I don’t want to upgrade to their next crap ? (talking about IE7 here, vista could also apply in some way)
@Marsup: Because you can’t continue to support old versions forever. If it was a critical bug it should be back ported but not things such as this WinINet bug. Microsoft are a business and fixing it in old versions of Windows does not make business [financial] sense. It is the same way I would not really expect Nick to fix a [small] bug in FeedDemon 1.x now that 2.x is out of the door however if a major security problems was found I would expect some kind of fix (even if it is a free upgrade to FD 2).
Consider me dense.
My OS is XP/sp2 and I don’t believe I will upgrade. To be sure, I will use IE7. I don’t understand how this bug will be ‘fixed’ for my purposes without my ugrading my OS.
Am I missing something here?
GJ, you’ll get this WinInet fix, and many more, on XP SP2 when you install the final version of IE7 for XP. Ditto for server folks running Win2K3. Don’t need to upgrade the OS just to get the fix.
I’m glad, too, Eric!
@Morgan : come on, it should have been fixed years ago, why can’t they fix it without a major upgrade like that. You’re asking to upgrade something that I only use through applications forcing it (feeddemon is one of them) !? If I could completely remove it I would, but modularity is not what MS does the best, far from it. Anyway, if anyone can tell me how connection handling is linked to a browser, I’d be glad to hear it, cause to me it’s a completely different layer.
As far as I can tell the IE release wasn’t just a browser, it was kinda like a service pack with the browser attached.
As much as we’d prefer them to release IE with a separate required update to the core windows OS, it’d just cause headaches for people who download IE direct off the website. I prefer it this way, myself.
WinInet does way more than just handling socket connections. I can’t speak for everything that gets installed with IE7 (ask EricLaw), but I can say that the IE 7 team wanted to natively support international domain names, and more secure URL handling, so we have to include a new WinInet (and probably URLMON) with IE7 on XP. There are some Vista-specific things in IE7, like low-rights IE support, but XP SP2 users get most of IE7’s goodness without an OS upgrade.
Upgrading IE IS an OS upgrade ! It has been so tightly embedded in windows for years that I don’t expect MS to change anything to that (even if they wanted to, I’m sure they wouldn’t be able to anyway…). Wininet is a library right ? So now you’re telling me I need to install applications for the library to work ? I’m probably not as skilled as you as far as programming is concerned, but I know that it’s not the way libraries should work.
I think it’s more of a testing problem then anything else, wininet is too heavily used by the shell and other applications running on windows to not go through a major testing cycle before we update it with new features like we did for IE7 and Windows Vista. Small targetted bug fixes are less risky to do. If you have something specific in mind bounce over to http://connect.microsoft.com/wndp and leave us a suggestion.