CSS Support IE 7.0's Weakest Link

dilbertspace writes "Anyone who has ever developed a website knows that cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility is a nightmare, mainly due to Microsoft's willful non-compliance with the CSS2 standard. As this eWeek article points out, it seems Microsoft will continue their poor support for CSS2 even in the IE 7.0 release. This may have worked when IE was the only game in town, but now that Firefox is a serious player, it won't help them keep market share as they think it will."

Comments

Don't count on it

[Ckwop]

This may have worked when IE was the only game in town, but now that Firefox is a serious player, it won't help them keep market share as they think it will.

Don't count on it, sunshine. The reason IE is losing market share to Firefox is two fold.

1. The public perception of the IE's security has declined.
2. It's missing a lot of nice features such as: tabbed browsing, international domain names and a bunch of other stuff.

3. 1. These are things that matter to the end user. If I'm joe-sixpack I don't give a damn about CSS 2.0 compliance. Hell, I probably don't even know what CSS 2.0 is. The only person who actually cares are the people making the web-sites, and those people are us and in terms of market share we typically sit at the one-percent noise level. To Microsoft, IE not being compatible with other browsers is a good thing. It means people have to design to their feature set and not to the offical standards it simply means we can't ignore their platform.

      So what can Firefox do to take out IE once and for all? It's actually rather simple. Do the thing that IE would never do. Implement something as powerful as Windows Forms (or it's Linux equivelent). It's the thing Microsoft fears the most - that Javascript will evolve into something powerful enough to be able to right a Microsoft Office clone in. As soon as this happens, then we suddenly have a platform independant version of office and that means we don't have to run Windows anymore. In short, they can kiss Goodbye to their market share.

      I'm not saying anything new here. Joel Spolsky has talked about this at great length in a very interesting article that i'm having trouble finding. We all know this day will come it's just a question as to how long Microsoft can stall the process. This CSS 2.0 issue is a single battle in the war Microsoft is waging to prevent their demise.

      Simon.

Re:Don't count on it

[Danathar]

Firefox already does this. It's called XUL.

The amazon browser is a good example. Too bad there arent very many other examples out there...

http://www.faser.net/mab/remote.cfm

Re:Don't count on it

[Coryoth]

OpenOffice will never be equivalent to MS Office and so long as OO doesn't have a support option, it never will.

OpenOffice does have a support option. It's just that when you buy it with support included it is called StarOffice instead.

The ONLY people to claim OO will overtake MS Office are those that can do their own support and those that don't use many of MS Office's features.

Managing to have perfect MS Office document compatibility is something that may never happen as they're aiming at a moving target that MS can deliberately break if they so choose. The feature race, however, is probably in OpenOffice's favour in the long run. MS is ahead for now, but OpenOffice has been improving and adding features much faster than MS Office has been. Unless MS manages to kick themselves into gear OpenOffice being moe feature complete than MS Office is an inevitability - it's only a matter of time.

Jedidiah.

Re:Don't count on it

[say]

Firefox growth is declining

Well, I would say that is natural. If the market share continued to grow like it did the first month after 1.0 (33% per month), it would cross the 100% barrier in a year (actually, it would wind up at 124% market share). So I guess the growth has to decline. In absolute numbers, and in terms of market share, Firefox continues to grow. The delta of that growth is smaller, though.

Re:Don't count on it

[bunratty]

Yes, Firefox growth is declining somewhat. If you graph the four numbers given for Firefox's usage share against the four dates, the last three data points lie very nearly along a line, and the first data point lies clearly below that line. That shows that the growth from Dec. 3, 2004 to Feb. 18, 2005 was nearly linear and approximately 0.65 points of usage share per month. The growth from Nov. 5, 2004 to Dec. 3, 2004 was faster, but that's probably because that period includes the first few weeks after Firefox 1.0 was released.

If the linear growth rate holds for 7 months after the last data point, that would mean Firefox usage share will reach 10% in September 2005. If Firefox's growth continues to slow, that goal will be reached later. Firefox's growth would have to slow dramatically for Firefox never to reach the 10% goal. I doubt Firefox's usage will drop or level off soon, as your post implies.

Re:Don't count on it

[jp10558]

You might not, but Imagine if the rest of the world decided that the latin alphabet ought to be banned on the web because of some (hypothetical)phishing attack, so you had to learn to type URLs in crillic or Chinese... It's rather ethnocentric, and untenable for a world wide service

The Average User

[glamslam]

With close to 90% share of the market and a LARGE unsophisticated userbase (who will not change browsers when the one installed works on EVERY website that joe-nascar ever uses), I don't think Microsoft will be losing any sleep over this.

Sad but true....

Re:The Average User

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

Microsoft is not interested in IE itself (no profit there). But they are interested in deploying their proprietary network-based technologies. If IE (and with it said proprietary technologies) deployment stays at below some figure, let's say 90%, third party developers might use standard and/or open web technologies instead of those proprietary ones, even though that might mean less bells and whistles.

This is why Mozilla and other browser manufacturers matter. This is why Microsoft is developing IE again. Do you think they'd have changed their plans about this if they weren't losing sleep?

With all due respect to Firefox and standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when was Competitor B, which holds 6% of the market, considered a "serious player" capable of holding sway over Competitor A, which holds 89% of the market.

Though we might wish it were so, it's time for a reality check.

Re:With all due respect to Firefox and standards

[evn]

If I lost 5% of my market to an "overnight" upstart with a fraction of my mind share, resources, and and distribution network - I'd consider them a pretty major player. I'd be even more concerned if that competitor had a "technically superior" but cheaper product that seems to get nothing but great press. If my product was a platform for building other products on top of, and my developers were clamoring for the features in my competitors product--features I had no plans to match--I'd be crapping my pants trying to squash them before things got any worse.

If I didn't then next year I might be wondering where another 10% of my market went, and three years from now you could be wondering how incompetent I would have had to be in order to make my product as irrelevant as Netscape.

Obviously I'm not sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar software empire, but it's not too unreasonable to think Microsoft is paying careful attention to Firefox: it's the only serious competition Internet Explorer has had in nearly half a decade.

Re:With all due respect to Firefox and standards

[Anonymous Coward]

You also have to take into account that the people more likely to spend money online tend to be more technologically knowledgeable, and therefore more likely to run firefox. I wouldn't be surprised if the e-commerce sites are seeing firefox usage in excess of 15 percent, which is more or less the sweet points at which nobody ignores you any longer (as was demonstrated when IE reached that point in the browser war of the last century).

If you're MS, why support standards?

[bigtallmofo]

In Microsoft's short-term thinking, they're less likely to support standards. Despite losing market share, their browser is still the defacto standard on the Internet.

Supporting standards only makes other browsers a viable alternative. How many people use Firefox but have to continue to use IE at work because of sites that only work in IE?

Actually...

[Rylz]

Actually, this may help MS more than you would think. Sites will continue to be written for a non-standards-compliant browser, which makes them less likely to render correctly in the browsers that do follow standards. If enough pages render incorrectly when somebody is trying out Firefox or some other standards compliant browser, they'll give up and go back to IE.

Freedom to innovate? Not!

[gstoddart]

So, Microsoft is exercising their 'freedom to innovate' a crappy non-compliant browser. Way to go boys.

Is there any standard that Microsoft has adhered to and not broken? It seems they're always ignoring or redefining standards.

I hope we're finally getting to the point where they'll keep losing market share by not supporting this stuff; because they've got the worst case of instututional Not Invented Here syndrome I've ever seen.

Re:firefox is a pretty serious player

[diegocgteleline.es]

6% is quite amazing considering its short life time.

Re:M$ cares ...

[Bobdoer]

Think again! Most people at MS are paid a given salary, and as such, are not able to claim overtime.

MS doesn't care

[lawpoop]

The only thing that can get MS to change their browser is website developers. If they design CSS2 compliant websites that break IE, MS will fix it.

Bet let's get real: MS still controls over 90% of the browser market. Web developers will develop sites that function more or less identically in IE, FF, NS, etc. CSS will not break MS' monopoly on web browsers.

it is to laugh

[Anonymous Coward]

This may have worked when IE was the only game in town, but now that Firefox is a serious player, it won't help them keep market share as they think it will."

Sorry, me and millions upon millions of other people still arent going to switch.

Firefox a major player?

[Lysol]

"..when IE was the only game in town, but now that Firefox is a serious player..."

Uh, so don't get me wrong, I loathe IE like the next guy, but how does - at best - 6% of the browser market already make Firefox a major player?? Apple's got around, what, 2%-3% of the desktop market, yet no one's calling them a major player.

Frankly, we should be blaming all those web 'developers' for their lazy and frankly, filthy, coding. I've worked in quite a few places and only those on the outside or real passionate web programmers care much about anything non-IE.

This will become more and more of an issue in the coming months and years as people start catching on to more of the Google halo effect: the DHTML/xmlrpc sorta 'fat' web client app. Customers and company higher-uppers are going to start saying more and more "why can't we do that like Google Suggest or Google Maps?". Be prepared.

I just have to also say it really pisses me off, as a enterprise developer, that I have to deal with a market like this. I mean, we have standards for a reason. And the fact that you IE only guys out there take quiet joy in your coding lazyness is beyond me.
Take a little more pride in your work and look at the bigger picture! Regardless of what Micro$oft may think, the world should not revolve around IE! Hopefully some day, for real, Firefox will change this.

Re:Firefox a major player?

[yagu]

Regardless of what Micro$oft may think, the world should not revolve around IE! Hopefully some day, for real, Firefox will change this.

And we could/should take some responsibility also.... If we encounter an IE-exclusive web site, we should write, ALWAYS!, at least, and take customer "action" if possible. When my bank switched to an on-line banking system that would work only with IE (it HAD worked with Netscape previously), I wrote my letter, and withdrew $20,000.... probably not a lot or a big scare for a bank, but if more people would demand more open web sites or refuse to do business with these sites maybe we'd see more results too.

I DO agree with parent though, there is some hope with the Google effect, and managers taking the "Why can't we do that" approach.

Re:Am I the only one sick of "DUPE" comments

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey /. Please provide me with a "dupe" filter so I don't have to wade through all of the dupe-pissing-posts.

No.

The Slashdot motto is "if you don't like it fuck off."

... CmdrTaco

Why does M$ care?

[uodeltasig]

This is a question I wanted to ask on the other post so I'm kinda glad it's a duplication...

Besides firefox default for searching on google, how much actual revenue is lost for M$ with alternative browsers? I'm not looking for a figure I just don't quite understand why it would be worth it to have a full-team of developers and testers working on this over the next year/two?

Are they afraid of it just being that much easy to switch to Mac or Linux? MSN search revenues? What outweighs the cost of development and embarrassment of more security problems?

Re:Why does M$ care?

[TobascoKid]

Are they afraid of it just being that much easy to switch to Mac or Linux? MSN search revenues? What outweighs the cost of development and embarrassment of more security problems?

That's pretty much the only reason for the existence of IE. MS only started on IE when people started to notice that with things like HTML the OS would become irrelevent and that non internet based 'Information Services' (like the original MSN) were doomed.

If it wasn't for that fear of the OS becomming irrelevent then there would be no point in MS spending so much money on something that they can never make any money (at least directly) from. It's why IE development stopped dead untill they had competition again - with nothing to fear then why spend money developing it? IE is nothing more than a necessary evil for MS.

Right...

[SCVirus]

Yeah i'm sure the lack of css2 support in IE7 is really what joe user is going to switch to firefox because of.

Re:Why extend something that 99% of the time is bl

[VoidWraith]

For every good use of the .gif, there are a thousand "home pages" with animations that hurt your eyes. For every good use of flash there are a thousand blinking red and yellow banners. For every good use of any simple system related to web design, there are thousands of bad ones. Its not a problem with CSS, its not a problem with Flash, its not a problem with .GIF. Its a problem with lazy people and bad web designers.

Re:Someone should call them on this

[Anonymous Coward]

This is totally stupid

"The first big site to do it would lose some amount of visitors "

Would lose 80% + visitors overnight my friend, and would soon be unable to pay the bills.

Let slashdot throw the first stone in this battle

Re:IE is dead

[pl1ght]

Wrong. Using Firefox means "im an idiot" because you dont know how to pay attention to spyware. Even now there are more flaws announced weekly for firefox/mozilla than there are for IE. Its a balance. It will go back and forth. Whoever is popular will be plauged.

So do what I do...

[The Real Nem]

I have lots of friends that are computer illiterate. Their computers usually get bogged down with viruses and spyware and I'm often obliged to help them fix their problems.

Every time I do this I install Firefox, set it up with my favourite extensions, then show them how to use it (basically how the tabs work and where their download go). I haven't had a single person complain about it, in fact they all rave about how much better it is and often suggest it to their friends.

Just telling people about Firefox is no way to get them to convert, demonstrating its power is.

Re:Duplicate, you moron editors

[js3]

so what you're saying is slashdot editors don't read slashdot. Hell, I rarely post but I do take a glance at slashdot once a day and I can spot dupes.

Re:well duh

[TractorBarry]

Of course it confoms to a standard... it's own.

That's the true beauty of standards - there are so many to choose from :)