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CSS Support IE 7.0's Weakest Link

Posted by timothy on from the can't-squash-superiors dept.

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."

20 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. Dupe support slashdot's weakest link by m50d · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Dupe support slashdot's weakest link by ari_j · · Score: 4, Funny

      Not exactly, although I thought the same thing at first. The old headline is CSS Support Could Be IE7's Weakest Link. Here, we have left out the "Could Be" and changed it to "IE 7.0," so it's entirely different, and therefore it's not a dupe.

  2. Duplicate, you moron editors by jleq · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Duplicate, you moron editors by Degrees · · Score: 4, Interesting
      This one was published by Timothy, the weekend editor, where the first was published by Zonk, a weekday editor.

      It does seem reasonable that weekend editors like Timothy should, at the beginning of each day, review at least the headlines of the previous three day's articles, before hitting the accept button.

      Failing that, maybe someone should whip up a "check for duplicates" perl script for Timothy, and attach it to the Accept button on his edit submissions page. >:-)

      --
      "The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
  3. Confirmation by Chris+Kamel · · Score: 5, Funny

    Do we call this a dupe or a confirmation ?

    --
    The following statement is true
    The preceding statement is false
  4. Don't count on it by Ckwop · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

      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.

    1. Re:Don't count on it by kars · · Score: 5, Funny

      The public perception of the IE's security has declined.

      You mean it's improved, right?

      --
      Take life easy: one bit at a time.
    2. Re:Don't count on it by say · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
    3. Re:Don't count on it by masklinn · · Score: 5, Informative
      every page I visit seems to increases the Working Set by a couple of megs of ram.
      It doesn't just "seem to", your impression is right, it does. There's been a nice bug for quite a few years (3? 4?) in the engine which causes the browser to not release most of the memory it consumes, and just use more and more.
      It's very clear on some machines, less on others, it's worse when you use tabbed browsing a lot (the memory leak happens when you close a tab, the memory it used isn't always released)

      The good thing is that this bug has been fixed in Mozilla 1.8 (the one that'll never get released, you know...)
      The slightly less good one is that the fix will only land in Firefox when said firefox'll fuse with Gecko 1.8 (the current trunk), and thats Firefox 1.1

      Summary: there is a memory leak bug in Firefox tabs, it's been known for years, it blows and can cause sever instabilities on some computers, it's completely random (aka you can be lucky and run FF np with 64Mb RAM, and you can be unlucky and have it hog 500Mb every time you use it) and worsens if you keep the same browser window (not tab, window) for extended periods of time. That bug still exists in Firefox 1.0.1 and will still be in 1.0.2, it'll be fixed in Firefox 1.1 which is supposed to be released in 2-3 months.

      Recommandation: if you happen to get hit by the "CrappySlowMemoryHogFirefox" and can't bear it, don't switch back to MSIE, use Opera instead, it runs fine, is fast, has a quite low memory foot print and a quite good support of HTML and CSS.

      Additional Informations: one of the great strengths of Firefox is the XUL extensions system, but it's also (obviously) it's biggest weakness: some extensions can have memory leaks on their own or cause slowness or crashs. One of the most well know "unstable" extension is "Tabbrowser Extension", which is arguably the best Tabbed Browsing extension feature wise, but is also the most bloated and dangerous one (and one of the worst and most random Firefox extensions, even the author himself says so).
      If your firefox is unstable/slow and you use TBE, uninstall it or create a new "clean" profile before dissing FF...

      Oh, BTW, about the extensions, do pay visits to websites like The Extensions Mirror, one can get true wonders and squeeze the best out of Firefox with the good extensions plugged in
      --
      "The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
  5. The Average User by glamslam · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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....

  6. Its CSS support is so weak.. by FidelCatsro · · Score: 5, Funny

    ..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
  7. With all due respect to Firefox and standards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. If you're MS, why support standards? by bigtallmofo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  9. Actually... by Rylz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  10. Re:well duh by EtherAlchemist · · Score: 4, Funny


    microsoft doesnt conform to any standards

    Why conform to existing standards when you can make your own?

    --
    R(k)
  11. W3C CSS by soloport · · Score: 4, Funny

    No, this is the w3c-css supprted version of the story. The previous one supported only IE.

  12. MS doesn't care by lawpoop · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
    -- Pablo Picasso
  13. Firefox a major player? by Lysol · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "..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.

  14. Re:well duh by flacco · · Score: 4, Informative
    Why conform to existing standards when you can make your own?

    to not be a douchebag?

    --
    pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
  15. MS would have to break IE backwards-compatibility by starvingartist12 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.