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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."

9 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. 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
  2. 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 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
  3. 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....

  4. 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
  5. 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.

  6. 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.
  7. 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.