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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."
From the full story @ MicrosoftWatch:
McLaws, who runs the Longhornblogs network, said a lot of "extra time and resources" had to be expended to make the site render the same way on all Web browsers.
Now this shows how M$ responsibly cares indeed about having people employed. Hmm, they probably think overtime.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
It's deja vu all over again. You'd think that when it's not just the same story but the same headline...
I am trolling
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/17/152925 8&tid=126&tid=95&tid=113
Pay more attention to your own fucking site.
Do we call this a dupe or a confirmation ?
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
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.
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.
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....
..That the story had to be posted twice
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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.
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?
I'm a big tall mofo.
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.
Sometimes you've gotta roll the hard six.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
microsoft doesnt conform to any standards
Why conform to existing standards when you can make your own?
R(k)
What is the real agenda behind these rumors? Normally elusive, unnamed "Microsoft Partners" assure us that in the next release every feature will be fixed, every security hole patched, and every wish list fulfilled. Rarely do the rumor mongers say "It's true, they're only going to make a half-assed effort on this."
Is this CSS 2 people trying to pressure Microsoft into releasing a CSS 2 compliant browser? That's unlikely. Traditionally their focus is spreading rumors that they've seen a beta version of the next big release and that it has "perfect" CSS 2 compliance. Therefore, people will want to be ready to transition to CSS 2 compliance now since its arrival is inevitable.
Is this Microsoft trying to sabotage acceptance of CSS level 2? Possible, but they rarely do this by saying one of their own products is a dog. They fund studies and research and industry pundits to rail against the problems with whatever feature they don't want to implement.
So I'm a bit at a loss of who is left that would actively be trying to diss CSS 2 and also diss Microsoft's development process? Any rumor mongers want to start a rumor?
No, this is the w3c-css supprted version of the story. The previous one supported only IE.
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.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
"..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.
to not be a douchebag?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Doesn't MS own the patent for CSS, and if so, how does its patent factor in?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
If Microsoft fixes their CSS support in Internet Explorer 7, every single little CSS IE hack used around the world will break.
The problem is that all these years, Web developers have had to resort to these little IE-specific hacks to compensate for years of neglect on Microsoft's part. Sure Microsoft can add more security or tabbed browsing... but CSS? It'd be too risky on Microsoft's part to send out a new IE that *breaks* exisiting websites. (Although to be honest, they done it before - twice - IE:mac and later, IE for Windows. But this time they can't rely on DOCTYPE Switching anymore.)
Microsoft's mantra of backwards compatibility would be at odds with releasing a fully CSS 2.0 compliant IE browser.
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.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
This is true for some CSS, but they could possibly improve other things. IE for instance thinks that there's some mysterious element that surrounds the HTML tag so, you can pass styles to IE by using * HTML {}, while other browsers will ignore it. If they fix both the quirks that the hacks are fixing, and the method of passing the hacks to IE, it would be no harm no foul. It's just that they'd have to make sure they got everything right. So that the new IE doesn't end up ignoring a hack it needs...
Like it matters. This is after all slashdot, and no-one reads the fscking articles :)
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.