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We've all been thinking safari is the new ie6 for a while now.
http://www.murga-linux.com/pup...
http://blog.millermedeiros.com...
http://quirksmode.org/html5/in...
http://caniuse.com/#cats=HTML5

Wow you seriously don't have any idea what you are talking about. Most of the web application development world had abandoned MSIE around 2001,

Abandoned IE? IE dominated from the late 90s to the mid 00s. No amount of revisionism will dispute this fact. It's not like I work(ed) for Microsoft or enjoyed supporting IE6 later in its life, it's just a fact it was immensely popular for multiple reasons. This was the infamous era of applets and ActiveX, static webpages, single user computers, Sub7, Melissa and peak AOL. Web application development was IE centric, especially in the form of intranet sites, which were responsible for it being around an unnaturally long time. This isn't about ideology, it's simple business, you target what your customers run and at the time that was IE(6).

Version numbers weren't important, features were: you could build a new-skool web site using Phoenix and then hack it to look less-than-shitty in MSIE (does that sound familiar? It's still the process most of follow today).

The person who replied named Firefox specifically, not Phoenix, nor Firebird. You're moving the goal posts. Compared to the popular browsers at the time few people would've been using it prior to 2004 because it simply didn't exist as such. Regarding the claim about the process "most" follow today, (anecdote? are you the arbiter of the world wide designer/developer leauge?) , it's focused around Chrome and if they're half way competent Firefox. Why? Because laziness isn't new or unique to this industry. Just to be clear, how do you determine laziness? There are things called vendor prefixes which enable non-standard vendor specific CSS. Lazy folk will just use the popular ones which typically mean webkit specific. Things have improved as support for HTML5 and CSS3 increases. I'd love for ISPs to release the metrics for the User Agent strings for a more objective list of browsers/devices instead of relying on sites people visit. Google.com might be a worthy runner up, but here's a wiki page citing several stat sites in the browser wars.

The Wikipedia article on Firefox doesn't cover all that, so your apparently insightful research simply isn't.

For the record this is just a topic which I've firsthand experience with and calling it research cheapens the term and I'm not involved with the articles I referenced in any way. I just did some admittedly quick searches for supporting citations where possible, honestly, what is/was difficult is finding information on Netscape and IE JavaScript performance. There is a reason why Netscape users jumped ship and it took writing something from scratch to succeed. Your post contains no links, for those who aren't familiar with the details of the situation the more information available the better. My post isn't gospel and citing wikipedia doesn't grant one authority, it's simply convenient. Lots of sites have disappeared over the last ~15 years to boot. What would really help is finding a side by side comparison of the features supported by each browser (including Netscape!) I often search for things on my own, and I don't think I'm alone in this practice and I encourage anyone to do the same when educating themselves.

As an aside, revisionism is rampant. Look at Windows XP being lauded as light on resources, which at the time it was considered a busted pig compared to Windows 2k and 98 on this very site.

In typical MS fashion it didn't get good until 3 versions later, IE4, before getting proprietary vendor lockin with that piece of shit IE6.

If IE6 was such a piece of shit, as you put it, that implies that the other browsers at the time were much worse than that. You've inadvertently made a profound statement about the browser landscape of the day. IE6 rightfully earned infamy in its unnaturally long life even more repugnant is rampant revisionism. IE introduced a feature that is the foundation of today's web, some of you might be aware of the XMLHttpRequest object, for the non-developers it's like the force now, all around us. JavaScript support and performance, CSS support. Unfortunately this period had to occur, and it will occur again once these lessons are forgotten; Without the stranglehold IE6 eventually obtained, and more importantly stagnated the web with, the choices we have today wouldn't exist.

Their stupidity of not being able to down-grade IE or simultaneously install different versions so web developers could test ALL the various versions, forcing people to rely on hacks like SandBoxie, was absolutely retarded.

As much as it pains me to say Microsoft wasn't unique in this regard, as an aside, try installing multiple versions of Safari. Even the easy mode package managers don't support multiple versions of browsers out of the box (not to say it's difficult). Internet Explorer 6 released in 2001 following the launch of Windows XP. For those unfamiliar with their history, Web Development of that era revolved around IE and Netscape. With IE being the Chrome of its day (as in "works here, onward!") since the browser market was 90%+ IE and IE6 was supported on Windows 98, NT, and 2k. Low usage for potential targets results in a chicken and the egg problem. Low single digits just aren't a priority for many shops, see Opera.

Sandboxie came out in 2004ish and has its uses, especially on 32bit machines. However, for web development involving IE it's much easier to use MultiIE which has been around since 2006. IETester is worth another mention. Not to mention there are alternatives due to the ever growing number of devices and variants released year after year, requiring a different approach such as farms that show screenshots from targeted browsers. Regarding the hassle of Sandboxie, limiting yourself to one tool is pretty silly.

This is a little off topic. Since this criticism is being framed as a Microsoft issue you might be shocked to discover how apps and to a lesser extent websites, are developed and tested in 2015 on devices manufactured and supported by multiple vendors. This process requires physical devices, in many cases multiple to support the popular OS versions on them (there are other OS, but they're less than 8%). Think it's a hack to wrangle Sandboxes or multiple installations, try wrangling devices that let you only upgrade! But what about device simulators, one might ask? Oh yes, they do exist and they're improving but there isn't a substitute for deploying and testing on device. IE variants are a dwindling piece of the very large fragmentation pie.

Microsoft writing the browser from scratch, is too little, too late.

Too late for whom? W

And Microsoft never quite wanted to go along with how retarded the WC3 box model was.

FTFY. See: http://quirksmode.org/css/user-interface/boxsizing.html

If you like Java and can’t get yourself to like JavaScript, you program Dart.
If you like Ruby and can’t get yourself to like JavaScript, you program CoffeeScript.
If you like JavaScript, you program JavaScript.

source

First off do not tell 90% of corps who standardize on IE 6, 7, and 8 to go hell! Google docs is absolutely useless. Not even IE 8 which is the defecto standard for every single Intranet app in existence. I could see dropping IE 6 (that itself will cost business). Corps must use IE only as it is the only one with group policy, active directory, mass deployment, and a slow release cycle. Before the IE haters mod me down, ask yourselves why aren't you writing extensions to Firefox and Chrome for these features?

Defecto standard? Ain't that the truth. IE9 and lower are now legacy. IE7 is declining in use and is increasingly not worth supporting for many companies. Facebook dropped support for it in 2011. As of November Google dropped support for IE8. Supporting IE8 does have its merits but its now 2 versions behind the current offering, not to mention the partial CSS 2.1 support.

Also GoogleDocs is a glorified wordpad in functionality but with sharing. ...Office 365 has more features, integrates with the MS ecosystem, and supports older versions of IE where upgrading is out of the question and would cost more than savings with free Google Docs.

The internet is just a glorified PC experience with sharing. Microsoft missed the bus once before.

Google needs to:

So they can be just like MS? How is MS strategy working now: their browsers are behind the curve in many respects. Behind the curve is becoming Microsoft's strong suit in many areas. This is valid criticism, not to discount their innovation in other areas (Kinect, Metro, C# etc.)

Support ancient versions of IE.

Why not just have them use a LTS version of Firefox since it supports AD? IE for the shit apps, FF for everything else. If you want legacy software support, you pay for it like everyone else, and looks like the price is increasing. With IE its a pity these proprietary browsers have such shite standards support, maybe if these companies didn't paint themselves into a corner with brittle applications, developed most likely by the lowest bidder (it's low cost for a reason), they'd not be in the boat they're in now. I think it's time to change the mantra 'Nobody was fired for picking a Microsoft solution' since its the managers who are ultimately responsible for these shit sandwich mission critical systems with no exit strategy which have the company by the balls. If you are incompetent enough to be unable to upgrade the views to a system, you're doing it wrong. If it's a boondoggle then have the heads of those responsible, otherwise you will not encourage change, nothing is a motivator like self preservation.

Ancient software is typically bad idea. Old browsers need to go away for one simple reason: they're security nightmares.

With $500,000 worth of ancient apps that browser is not going away!

Support is dwindling. Vacuum tubes still exist after all...

XP users are stuck at IE 8 not to mention IE 8 is targeted for WIndows 7 users as well as it is the universal browser that works with both operating systems.

XP users are overdue for an upgrade, they're 3 versions behind now. I'd say Firefox is arguably the universal desktop browser since it runs on most platforms. A good lesson out of the last decade is standards, screw the 'one true platform.'

You can argue technical facts until you are blue in the face. If it is a cost it wont get adopted PERIOD! It works fine, it is what the PHB bet his reputation on that he feels you are ruining on these apps, workers hate change, it is not sox or

First off do not tell 90% of corps who standardize on IE 6, 7, and 8 to go hell! Google docs is absolutely useless. Not even IE 8 which is the defecto standard for every single Intranet app in existence. I could see dropping IE 6 (that itself will cost business). Corps must use IE only as it is the only one with group policy, active directory, mass deployment, and a slow release cycle. Before the IE haters mod me down, ask yourselves why aren't you writing extensions to Firefox and Chrome for these features?

Defecto standard? Ain't that the truth. IE9 and lower are now legacy. IE7 is declining in use and is increasingly not worth supporting for many companies. Facebook dropped support for it in 2011. As of November Google dropped support for IE8. Supporting IE8 does have its merits but its now 2 versions behind the current offering, not to mention the partial CSS 2.1 support.

Also GoogleDocs is a glorified wordpad in functionality but with sharing. ...Office 365 has more features, integrates with the MS ecosystem, and supports older versions of IE where upgrading is out of the question and would cost more than savings with free Google Docs.

The internet is just a glorified PC experience with sharing. Microsoft missed the bus once before.

Google needs to:

So they can be just like MS? How is MS strategy working now: their browsers are behind the curve in many respects. Behind the curve is becoming Microsoft's strong suit in many areas. This is valid criticism, not to discount their innovation in other areas (Kinect, Metro, C# etc.)

Support ancient versions of IE.

Why not just have them use a LTS version of Firefox since it supports AD? IE for the shit apps, FF for everything else. If you want legacy software support, you pay for it like everyone else, and looks like the price is increasing. With IE its a pity these proprietary browsers have such shite standards support, maybe if these companies didn't paint themselves into a corner with brittle applications, developed most likely by the lowest bidder (it's low cost for a reason), they'd not be in the boat they're in now. I think it's time to change the mantra 'Nobody was fired for picking a Microsoft solution' since its the managers who are ultimately responsible for these shit sandwich mission critical systems with no exit strategy which have the company by the balls. If you are incompetent enough to be unable to upgrade the views to a system, you're doing it wrong. If it's a boondoggle then have the heads of those responsible, otherwise you will not encourage change, nothing is a motivator like self preservation.

Ancient software is typically bad idea. Old browsers need to go away for one simple reason: they're security nightmares.

With $500,000 worth of ancient apps that browser is not going away!

Support is dwindling. Vacuum tubes still exist after all...

XP users are stuck at IE 8 not to mention IE 8 is targeted for WIndows 7 users as well as it is the universal browser that works with both operating systems.

XP users are overdue for an upgrade, they're 3 versions behind now. I'd say Firefox is arguably the universal desktop browser since it runs on most platforms. A good lesson out of the last decade is standards, screw the 'one true platform.'

IIRC, your standard message pump in Windows won't send mouse events to your window if you don't have focus. Which means they had to do something extra to make it happen.

LOL wut?

yes they did have to do something extra to make it happen, that's how web browsers work. they just chose a lazy way of implementing the functionality. possibly using a window handler thread which saves the mouse coordinates in a global var. this global var being available to the javascript thread which just spawned a timer to check mouse coordinates. in this situation, the likely culprit is in the window handler thread not handling focus correctly. read: this can happen in any os and with any browser.

i bet there are a bunch of third party "security" tools that are using this bug (er feature) and thus microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place. it's not a SERIOUS bug, but it was just being used by the good guys first before the bad guys figured nefarious things to do. think of it this way.. wordperfect uses an undocumented feature (or exploits a bug). 3 years later that same undocumented feature can also cause a program to gain system level privileges. do you fix the bug and get sued by wordperfect for not documenting your calls (seriously) or not fix the bug and worry about everyone calling you an insecure (yet massively used) code house.

you win some, you lose some in the software industry

It's been a long time since anybody could legitimately blame Microsoft for standards compliance in IE.

I'm not sure how you're able to say that with a straight face. I'm pretty sure you don't do any form of web development otherwise you'd be aware of the coddling IE requires to achieve what many other browsers do "out of the box".

In no particular order here are some things that are encountered in the real world, and not "edge cases":
IE9 border radius + gradient hack.
Having to use a filter (directx!) to achieve effects like other browsers.
Up until IE10 limited or no support of CSS transitions and animations. Browser comparison
SVG animations.
Missing CSS3 selectors. If you really want to delve into things IE8, which is arguably the most popular IE version out there, is a worse offender than IE9.

It's been a long time since anybody could legitimately blame Microsoft for standards compliance in IE.

I'm not sure how you're able to say that with a straight face. I'm pretty sure you don't do any form of web development otherwise you'd be aware of the coddling IE requires to achieve what many other browsers do "out of the box".

In no particular order here are some things that are encountered in the real world, and not "edge cases":
IE9 border radius + gradient hack.
Having to use a filter (directx!) to achieve effects like other browsers.
Up until IE10 limited or no support of CSS transitions and animations. Browser comparison
SVG animations.
Missing CSS3 selectors. If you really want to delve into things IE8, which is arguably the most popular IE version out there, is a worse offender than IE9.

You're not a professional. Actual professionals (>95% of people who say they are, aren't) use the actual specifications from the W3C, WhatWG (yeah, unfortunately), and the Mozilla Developer Network. (Or whoever designed the specific API/language.)

Yeah, right. Who cares whether it works, so long as it's consistent with the spec?

I'm not defending w3schools – I also avoid them like the plague. But sites like quirksmode.org which offer browser compatibility tables and documentation of known bugs are invaluable.

That's pretty much what PPK made of the comments, and there are few people that understand mobile browsers better than him. http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/09/facebooks_html5.html

You mean like this?

User Agent strings aren't the only way of identifying browsers. Generally these days, you do UA strings and object detection. Basically the latter is running JavaScript with a whole bunch of if statements to see if certain objects are defined. document.all is an IE only thing, and window.performance only exists in IE9 for instance. window.opera only exists in Opera (duh).

With WebKit browsers (Chrome, Safari), you can detect to see if they have Canvas and WebGL support. With IE, you can even use conditional comments.

If you have a UA string claiming to be Firefox 2 but it responds to document.getElementsByClassName, you know something is lying to you. ;-)

To see how this sort of thing works, take a peek at http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html

two full independent implementations

Which ones would that be? According to quirksmode no mainstream browser has 100% CSS 2.1 support. According to the W3C test suite results, the most complete implementation is Mozilla Gecko with 99.84% coverage and 97.07% tests passed.

The iPhone/iPad/ios devices can still not do CSS2 (1998) position: fixed correctly, much to the annoyance of web developers

The iPhone/iPad/ios devices can still not do CSS2 (1998) position: fixed correctly, much to the annoyance of web developers

Interestingly, IE 9 seems to be following the rules for CSS and ES5, perhaps better than the other browsers. I'm cautiously optimistic.

Detecting which mouse button was pressed would be the obvious case here. The problem is that the W3C mouse button definitions, while "standard", are retarded. Microsoft implemented a system (I dunno whether they did it before or after the W3C spec was approved) that makes a hell of a lot more sense.

See this page for a bit of commentary: http://www.quirksmode.org/js/events_properties.html#button

There happens to be enough agreement that you can correctly detect the right button, but detecting the left button or middle button is a huge pain. (If you get the event at all, and it's *not* the right button, you can generally assume it's the left button... so.)

Note to IE bashers: most places where IE deviates from the standards, the IE implementation makes a hell of a lot more sense. There are entire JavaScript applications I can't deploy on anything but IE because of the standards' lack of a property like ReadyState.

Finding out whether the user has clicked the left or middle mouse button.

Any Custom Web App built by our company for either ourselves or our clients is 100% designed for IE.

So do you just turn down any client that A. is a Mac shop, B. is a Linux shop, or C. wants a web application that can be used by the client's customers, 47 percent of which use something other than IE?

But so long as it doesn't dramaticly alter the display or functionality of the code we write, I think it'd be A-OK.

The same X-UA-Compatible header that tells IE 8 whether to use IE 7 or IE 8 mode also tells Chrome Frame whether to turn itself on. Do all your testing in Google Chrome with an occasional spot-check in Firefox, and just require IE users to use Chrome Frame.

css3-transform is not proprietary. Nor is css3-images, which describes gradient properties. The reason that these properties are implemented using the -webkit- prefix is because these standards have not reached candidate recommendation status and are still subject to change. A vendor prefix doesn’t mean “proprietary”—it means “experimental”. Once the standard reaches final recommendation status, which can only occur once two independent implementations have been created, then the vendor prefixes will be dropped.

For what it’s worth, there are a good number of people within the development community that are not happy with vendor prefixes, but it is the best option that currently exists to ensure that incompatible implementations do not use the same property name.

Didn't look at the site, but an easy way to trigger IE specific stuff (by version) is conditional comments.

I tested the desktop script ( http://www.quirksmode.org/m/tests/scrollayer2.html ) on google chrome and firefox, and it's weird. Say I hold down and drag and then _stop_, even if the mouse pointer is complete stationary when I release the mouse button, the stuff still moves. If I leave the mouse stationary and just press and release the mouse button it jumps...

Does the actual problem he's complaining about show up when you use a touchscreen or when you use a mouse?

My initial impression is it's when you use a mouse since he says "I added the mousedown event to touchdown, mousemove to touchmove, and mouseup to touchup. Try it in a normal desktop browser. You'll find that, although the script works, the interaction just doesn't make sense. The mouse events aren't quite the same as the touch events, even though they're pretty similar.".

But other than the glitch I mentioned, I see no problems when using the mouse to move stuff about.

What am I missing?

... as the different touch-enabled browsers treat touches a little bit differently:

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/02/do_we_need_touc.html#more

The hard part of CSS was keeping track of, in exactly which manner, IE6 fucked it up.
Now that the holy Google has given us all permission to drop IE6, into flaming animated .gif after-life for bad browsers, CSS just got a whole lot easier.

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html

Sorry, as a programming languages researcher this is a pet peeve of mine.

I feel your pain. I'm a Python fan and I'm always quick to remind people that Python is in fact strongly typed, but not statically.

However, in this case, I wonder why you picked the nit, because Javascript is in fact weakly typed.

"1234" * 1 is a legal expression, which evaluates to 1234. That's pretty weak if you ask me.

steveha

Same reason why newspapers and magazines print in columns. Unfortunately, proper columns still aren't a part of the CSS specification, meaning that it'll be several years before we see them in the wild on the web.

A draft specification has languished within the w3c for 8 or so years. Firefox and webkit both offer their own proprietary implementations that should be vaguely compatible with the draft specification.

IE doesn't offer support for anything of this sort. (In fact, Microsoft's own documentation offers a surprisingly handy reference to the many bits of CSS that IE chooses to ignore)

Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. The test over at Quirksmode shows the various versions of WebKit to be very different, even between mobile and desktop Safari.

I don't think the GSM Pre has been released yet, so there may be no Pre over in the UK. That may be why it wasn't tested.

This is an important debate, but Neil McAllister's article suffers from a number of problems. For example, it references the recently popular Webkit Comparison Table along with Peter-Paul Koch's claim that there is no “WebKit on Mobile”. The article didn't point out that some people like Alex Russel have dug deeper and have found that the facts don't support PPK's conclusions as strongly as one might think. Yes, if you include lots of older devices, there's quite a divergence in Webkit deployments, but what PPK and Neil McAllister don't say is that compatibility is much better on devices that ship recent versions, it's especially good for core features, and it's improving all the time.

McAllister also implies that the mobile Web is in trouble because "On my BlackBerry, JavaScript performance is abysmal". Using that argument, I can prove that Windows will never be successful, because I could in the early days show you PC's that ran it with abysmal performance. The potential of technologies like Javascript needs to be evaluated using the best implementation you can find; that shows what's possible. He does go on to say: "And even when a handset vendor does improve JavaScript performance, as Apple did with iPhone OS 3.0, it's a relative increase." Aren't they all? "You're still dealing with a poky handheld processor (and in Apple's case, one that developers speculate is too feeble for Flash or Java)." Uh, so now the reason that the HTML and Javascript will fail is that ARM processors are too slow to run Java? What's the connection I'm missing? The fact is, that there are some pretty good AJAX sites for mobile, so we know the ARM processors are good enough to run that Javascript. Try, for example, going to http://www.gmail.com using Safari on your iPhone. Not a usable experience? Even works offline using HTML 5 local storage (not Gears). Also, even if Javascript performance were somehow related to Java performance, I bet the Android folks would like to hear that Java doesn't run right on ARM processors, since the entire upper level infrastructure of Android, including user applications, is built on just that combination (as optimized using the Dalvik VM).

Unfortunately, articles like this can do real damage. Many people who are not expert in these things are struggling to figure out which mobile application development models are going to be workable. I happen to believe that the Mobile Web will, like the desktop embodiment of the Web, grow as disruptive technologies tend to: from something that's a bit shaky at first to the model that dominates? Why? Because unlike Mr. McAllister, I believe that the underlying processors and system technologies are capable of running it, and the value of a model that is fully cross-platform, can support zero install operation (you might want to install a mapping application to find a restaurant, but you almost surely don't want to install the restaurant's application to read menus or get discount coupons), can also scale to support installable applications (Widgets) and offline operation, is compelling. Furthermore, as has been the case for years, the Web has the unique value of allowing you to link to the over 1 trillion Web pages, without jumping out from some proprietary application container to a Web browser. Whether I'm right about the likely success of the mobile Web or not, this whole question deserves a much more careful analysis than McAllister's article provides. Unfortunately, there will be many people who read it and jump to the conclusion that the mobile Web is failing. A shame.

I really don't understand this. Just about every iPhone user on the web loves to shout to the heavens about how fantastic the browser is. What makes it so great? Technically it's the most capable browser on a mobile device, but not by very much. Take a look at this http://www.quirksmode.org/webkit.html . Iris browser and Bolt browser both fare very well, but nobody ever talks about them like they do with Safari. I tried Opera Mini 5 the other day and I was extremely impressed. It basically gave me web pages like my desktop does. Still, it gets no love. I have one of the newest blackberries, and its browser gets me by just fine. I make it tell web pages that it's a firefox browser, and I get full versions of pages like I would at a PC. I use it at least a half a dozen times a day, and have no real complaints about it (except maybe the lack of tabbed browsing but that's not a big deal for me). Yet every iPhone user loves to get smug about how they have Safari. Every time I've asked someone for clarification, they either ignore me or they say something to the effect of "oh you wouldn't understand, you don't use an iPhone". So I figure I'll try my luck and ask again.

What makes the iPhone's browser that noteworthy? Is it that great in other ways? Or is this just the users being vocal again?

It mostly works. It's possible, but not likely, that IE's version of getElementsByClassName does something differently than Firefox's version, but the odds are if they implemented it at all, it's correct.

There are lots of places where a check like this won't help you at all, though. For example, try to figure out which mouse button is pressed when an event occurs-- IE and Firefox/DOM use different methods: http://www.quirksmode.org/js/events_properties.html#button

Now here comes the place where I get modded down for trolling: the IE way of doing things frequently, in fact almost always, makes a hell of a lot more sense than the W3C way. Examples:

1) The existence of "document.readyState" allows a Javascript to know if the document is ready for DOM manipulation even if the Javascript was injected into the page after the ONLOAD event already fired (for example, a Javascript which can either be included in the page or as a bookmarklet.) There's no way to do this using the standards.

2) The IE property name "innerText" makes a hell of a lot more sense than "textContent", since "innerHTML" is already in the standards. "innerHTML" should match "innerText", or "textContent" should match "HTMLContent". The standards make no sense here. Given, IE should implement "textContent" (and in fact I think IE8 does), but FF should also implement "innerText".

3) The above-mentioned mouse button handling code. In Firefox and other standards compliant browsers, there's no way to tell if two buttons were pressed simultaneously. Additionally, there's no (reliable) way for the browser to communicate that no button was pressed at all when the event occurred. The standards on this are retarded.

4) The way IE handles events makes it possible to include static event handlers (i.e. event handlers hard-coded into the HTML) and still receive an event object. As far as I can work out, there's no standards-compliant way to do this.

Don't start celebrating prematurely. There's a good article on Quirksmode about why IE6 will continue to live on corporate intranets.

Well, considering that many widely used browsers don't even implement many of CSS 2.1 features correctly (or at all)[1], that might be just a daydream.

[1] http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html

Here's the details on which browsers support what parts of the new features of HTML5 thus far: http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/html5.html.

According to quirksmode, it appears that Safari 4.0 has the most complete support, followed by FF 3.5b and IE8. Chrome and Opera do not appear to, at least as far as supporting the new features is concerned.

We repeat the same lessons every generation, don't we?

We have our own terrible business languages, our own non-relational databases*, our own stupid development fads, our own overwrought RPC protocol, our own profoundly ignorant ways to "disable" things for the user, our own wasteful incompatibilities, our own locked-down propretiary platforms, and the same casual disregard for proper security.

This industry has no sense of its own history. Instead of benefiting from the innumerable hours past programmers spent solving universal problems, we ignore and reject their work, and with only a few exceptions, we spend countless hours solving solved problems.

By the time we work through the mess, another generation of programmers will have rejected our work, and will be well on the way to repeating the cycle. It's depressing as hell.

(Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever written a post that offended so many software developers simultaneously.)

* RDBMs systems didn't come first; people started using them over navigational databases for good reasons that still apply today.

...and it will continue to fall until IE can get its act together. Browsers have evolved far past where they just need to render pretty CSS pages properly.

IE 8's Javascript may be faster, but it's still broken. When coupled with its garbage-quality garbage collector, this just means modern sites that use things like jQuery and Prototype crash sooner. IE has had trouble with their garbage for years now: JScript Memory Leaks, QuirksBlog: IE 7 and Javascript

Now this may all seem trivial to those who visit traditional sites and regularly restart their IE, but sites such as BattleCell can cause memory starvation issues within 30 minutes or less on IE.

Some people are initially surprised when we tell them to use any browser other than IE. Though, after a few months, their own conclusions of what this all means creates an effort barrier that Microsoft must overcome in order to bring people back...

As for doing something a little original like having the screen laid out with a fixed height and adding columns as the content increases ... yea, right!

I'm not sure if I completely understand what you're describing but they do have this planned: http://www.quirksmode.org/css/multicolumn.html

I think it might be because you're misreading it, having followed PPK (author of QM) for many years I'd be shocked if he had it wrong, he's very thorough!

On that page ( http://quirksmode.org/css/contents.html ) in the "CSS 2.1 Declarations" section under table columns you'll note that all the WebKit based browsers have "incomplete" - ie quirksmode says that WebKit is incomplete for CSS2.1.

What's your reference from the other side, what are the WebKit guys saying isn't finished, does this confirm or contradict?

I found http://webkit.org/projects/css/index.html which says:

Finish CSS2.1 Support
        Most of CSS2.1 has been implemented in WebKit, but a few holes remain. The new white-space values pre-wrap and pre-line are not yet supported. Some of these features have been implemented in the current KHTML tree, and a merge may be possible for some of these features.

However testing those features using Konq3 and Saf4beta2 I find them to work fine. Perhaps WebKit haven't updated this? Particularly one notes that pre-wrap and pre-line are part of ACID3 which the WebKit team claim to have passed with nightly builds of the WebKit engine ( http://webkit.org/blog/280/full-pass-of-acid-3/ ).

IE8 will have full CSS 2.1 compliance? I'll believe it when I see it.

Instead of simply making assertions it's much more informative to compare CSS support by function, as in the following chart:

CSS contents and browser compatibility

From this it appears that IE8 DOES have improved CSS 2.1 support from previous versions, although it's still lacking in certain areas. The web's problem child has almost caught up to the rest of the class. Sadly, IE8's CSS 3 support is still far behind the curve :(

But the reality is that, until they can be driven to under 50% of the browser market share, they pretty much get to set the standard.

They, Microsoft, get to set the lowest common denominator, the truth is though that most designers will be using progressive enhancement meaning that Saf, FF, Op, Konq are getting a nicer overall look with slicker running features whilst MSIE is getting either a "degraded" view or a separately developed page (I'm considering MS targetted CSS to be separately developed).

Basically, as a web designer since 1996-ish (and commercially for the last 5 years or so) I consider that MSIE has been holding things back all along. Less so now, but they're still not leading the way.

As for CSS3. If MS had included some basics, like rounded corners and columns, then we could have started making some headway with a less hacked together internet. Moz and Webkit have these things already waiting for the spec to be finished.

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/multicolumn.html

I shall soon follow suite with a little browser sniffing...

The 1990's called, they want their deprecated web programming techniques back.

Go back and repeat Web Programming 101 and edumacate yo ignorant ass.

You should learn about display: inline-block;.

Peter Paul Koch's excellent quirksmode.org

also nice: http://www.quirksmode.org/

I'm looking forward to being able to use box-sizing, now that it's supported in some variation by the latest versions of the major browsers. By the way, you can force a block element to contain its floats with the overflow property, which has its downsides but may be good enough for your needs.

I'm looking forward to being able to use box-sizing, now that it's supported in some variation by the latest versions of the major browsers. By the way, you can force a block element to contain its floats with the overflow property, which has its downsides but may be good enough for your needs.

A good website (depending on target audience, of course) shouldn't depend on mouseover, as it shouldn't depend on color, but it can use these features to make the information more accessible.

I think you've hit on a more interesting point -- the iPhone's popularity will force us to reconsider interactions with the web. Our desire to attract iPhone users (and the following next-gen mobile internet users) will have us changing the interaction model.

See Peter-Paul Koch's blog on the iPhone's browser at quirksmode for more in that direction.

Item one: "Something as simple as modifying a WordPress blog".. What? Since when is that in the category "simple"? If you do web-stuff, you need CSS, if you do Linux kernel programming you need C. It has nothing to do with simple.

Item two: Quirksmode .. and in the end, one site to rule them all. Screw books.

Web designers often design around functionality, not browser versions. It's not uncommon for Javascript to check if a function exists before using it.

True, JavaScript programs should use "object detection" when possible to sniff the presence of DOM objects and methods rather than make assumptions based on User-agent strings. But in some cases, a method is present in multiple implementations albeit with different behaviors, such as the way different browsers handle mouse positions in events: relative to the screen, the document, or the visible portion of the document. How should a JavaScript program sniff for that?