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MS Urging Developers To Prep For IE 7
Mike Savior writes "Eweek has a story stating that Microsoft is telling web site developers to prepare their sites for IE 7. From the article: 'One area that Microsoft has clearly articulated as being one in which developers can start work now to prepare for IE 7 involves the UA (user agent) string. First discussed in the company's Weblog in April, the code change prompted a reminder on Wednesday to developers, telling them that Microsoft continues to run across Web sites that are not expecting Version 7 of the browser, and urging them to test their UA strings. '"
I'm not a web developer, but shouldn't sites use the user-agent string as a minimum value to check for? For instance, design a site that works with version 5+ of a browser, rather than *only* version 5 (or 6 or 7).
TFA says it all:
"I don't use IE at all, but I'll test on it because I have to," said Web designer Donna Donohue...."We code to standards to be compliant with Firefox, and then hack for IE."
So if MS is standards compliant with IE7, there should be nothing to worry about. Of course we all know that that is NOT going to happen. IE7 might be standards based, but expect sweet and fattening IE7 only extentions in HTML pages that will break other browsers rendering.
I suppose this is why MS is calling for developers to pay attention to the new IE UA. IE7 might be rendering in a totally different way to IE5/6 and so will need to be treated differently to other browsers. In other words, MS wouldn't need to bother to mention this if IE7 was standards compliant. I'm smelling a hoard of compatability problems in the near future dragging us all back to the dark ages similar to the following.
However, Champeon added that he builds sites from the ground up to work in any Web browser, by following the set of principles known as "progressive enhancement."
Uhhhgghh!! I've met "progressive enhancement" once before. You've never seen such ugly, malformed, duplicitous code. Non standards compliant web site code that tries to be cross-browser is most of the reason I decided not to get into web development.
May the Maths Be with you!
typically the looking for user agent string is used by wanna-be or poser web designers who's knowlege of HTML DHTML and Javascript does not exceed frontpage and cut and paste from a scripts site.
Yes, many BIG company websites are designed and maintained by posers who act like they know what a website is and does but in reality know absolutely nothing.
This is typical in the web developer world. they want someone who can make pretty graphicsand do not give a shit about good scripting, good html markup, and good design.
the IE only designer is dead center of that poser world.
we make fun of them at work, like installing Firefox on the CTO's laptop and getting him really liking it, so the next presentation of the new company website bombs on his laptop and he will chew their asses up one side and down the other.
Man I love it.
if you design websites and do not test and make sure it works on at LEAST 3 different broswers then you are a no talent hack wannabe poser anklebiter and sheryl in accounting can out design you.
Let's see, IE7, SQL Server, Longhorn, new versin of .NET, etc -- we developers have a lot to prepare for.
It's a wonder we can get any work done. Looks like we'll just spend all of our time getting ready for 27 new versions of Microsoft products.
HP To Lay Off 15,000 Workers
This just makes no sense. A website that is properly designed should not have to get ready for any version of a web browser, since it should already support most browsers on the maket, including, but not limited to: Safari, Firefox, Netscape, Opera, IE and Konquerer. Sounds like MS is encouraging the development of shody sites, which are IE centric, which is VERY bad.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Validate with the World Wide Web Consortium . If the site breaks on IE7... put a disclaimer on the main page, telling your viewers whose fault it is, and that there are other, better, standards-compliant browsers out there!
Circumcision is child abuse.
I think that if a major PC buyer - read government, decided not to let systems with non compliant browsers be marketed in the country, M$ would listen to some extent. However, for this approach to succeed, many governments must do the same...not just one. The EU could do this. So could Russia and China. Is it time to lobby these governments on this just like was done on the software patent issue? But again, as an individual, I want more...ie...to be able to completely remove all traces of IE on my PC and let any browser specific component be handled by a browser of my choice. What about that?
Our website was built by a "website design bureau". We told them it had to be standard, so it would work on Mozilla as well.
:hover on list items?
What they produced was an absolute mess. CSS boxes were built to IE handling, and rendered incorrectly on Mozilla, which they consistently referred to as "Mozarella". They believed all problems seen on Mozilla were Mozilla bugs, and they added browser detection and workarounds.
Of course it still failed on Opera and Konqueror.
They used an awful piece of Javascript to make dropdown menus.
When they were done, maintenance was handed over to me and I gradually changed all their work to make a standards-conformant site that still rendered the same way. It was a lot of work, starting from the dire state it was in.
But finally, it renders OK and the menus work on most browsers without using javascript.
Exceptions:
- CSS menu only works in IE by including csshover.htc (conditional inclusion using <!--[if IE]...). maybe IE7 will support
- IE4 and below don't quite cut it, fallback to javascript code using serverside UA string detect. these are dying anyway, probably I will remove this support when IE7 appears.
- bug 234788 in GECKO means the menu disappears when mouse moves over scrollable text area. this bug has been fixed in GECKO but Mozilla and Firefox keep releasing new versions based on the broken GECKO for over a year.... We want Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla 1.8!!!
What I learnt: use a website design bureau only to make a site design. Don't allow them anywhere near HTML coding. They just use successive approximation towards the "browsers they test with", and try to impress managers with "browser utilisation percentages" instead of standards compliance.
From TFA:
Currently IE's user-agent string defines itself as a browser compatible with "Mozilla/4.0". I wouldn't doubt that line means they're changing to some new format (directly specifying it's MSIE rather than saying it's compatible with an old browser, just like Opera). That then could be what broke so many websites into not recognizing it as IE.
But as the article is too vague on this aspect, we can't really be sure.
Microsoft should be urging developers to follow standards, so long as people adhere to accepted guidlines such as those laid out by w3c consortium people *will* be prepping themselves for IE7. That is of course unless Microsoft are planning to ignore them and produce another browser that has a crapped out implementation of the DOM with added non-standard extensions.
...
Nearly *all* the web developers I know that are worth their weight curse regularly at the bag of bile that is IE. Firefox is just a better browser , plain and simple. Just what does IE offer (that is not a proprietary IE only extension) that is going to change things for the better?
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
If it makes you feel any better, I write fairly DOM/CSS/Javascript heavy web apps, and test on IE5.5 and Firefox 1.0.
It's not hard, and I don't do *any* UA detection*. The key is picking the right standards subsections, and implementing the missing stuff yourself. IE has been "good enough" since version 5.5, assuming your layout won't get broken due to text in a DIV being "off" by a few pixels, etc. Remember, users come for content, anyhow!
Incidentally, most of my stuff works on IE4.0, but it's pretty damned ugly.
* UA detection is used to pop up an alert box bitching about the browser version and recommending firefox. Does not otherwise impact site. Non-JS users get bitched at via NOSCRIPT tags.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I don't think most people who use the UA for validation do so in an attempt to foil those want to get around it. It's more of a support issue. If the site was designed to run in IEx and you're running Lynx they're just letting you know up front that it may not work properly.
To your second coment. Probably because fewer people will complain (or at least have reason to complain) if MS provides a warning. Sure there will be people like you and I who feel it's obvious and unnecessary, but there are more people who aren't like us than are.
Not true; I use it on my personal website to display a "public service announcement" urging the user to switch to the far more secure Firefox if it detects that they're using IE of any flavour. ;-)
(The message is hidden by default if they're using anything else)
A few weeks into the project, I get my hands on a copy of his experimental beta site. I try to load it up in firefox, and nothing. Nada. The flash he spent so much time on that comprised almost all of our site wouldn't load - it was a broken link. Worked fine in IE, so it wasn't that the file was missing. I didn't have time to look at it anymore, so I told him about the error and let him stew on it for a bit (he tried to blame it on the version of the flash plugin I was running). A few days later, I check again. Still the same problem. I talk to him about it, and he says he'll work on it. He spends 8 freaking hours on it, then tells me that "firefox can't support transparancies, so the site won't work in firefox ever".
This doesn't sound right to me, AT ALL. So I check his html code. Well, there it is. In his EMBED tag, he ref's 2 different file names - one exists, the other doesn't. IE picks one, firefox seems to have picked the other. I'm honestly surprised that it even loads. I fix his mistake, save the file, and load it up in firefox. The site looks like ass (and as I later found out, is mostly running stolen copyrighted code and code from tutorials he read, but that's a story for another time), but it works. Time taken: litterally, without exaggeration, less than 5 minutes. Probably less time than it took to come up with that lame-assed excuse about why he couldn't do it. To this day, I'm still too scared to check the site against the w3c standards.
Offtopic, I know, but I just had to rant (he's lodged a complaint over non-payment of wages against us recently, so I'm kinda cheesed off). Sorry, all.
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.
What I learnt: use a website design bureau only to make a site design. Don't allow them anywhere near HTML coding.
Actually, I had the absolute opposite results when I had a website design bureau design our site. They did the design great, the HTML was standards compliant and they actually tested all pages on IE, Mozilla, FireFox, Safari and Konqueror, even in multiple languages and OSes, and were open and admitted where things would have rough edges with the older browsers, and how they worked around to make sure it worked, just not worked beautifully. It was a very pleasant experience.
Then our in-house web-app coding team butchered the HTML to pieces, re-coded parts of it that looked fine in IE6 and crap on everything else. The final HTML code that the web app spat out did not resemble anything like what was originally made. It was terrible.
To make things worse, the web app coders told their manager that the HTML coders were to blame for the problems, and the manager didn't bother to check the facts when he blamed the web design bureau. The designers were (rightfully) pissed off, and basically told us we were not welcome back as customers again.
So... YMMV on either side of the story.
CSS 2.1 has ben officially finalized a while ago... ignorance is bliss...
I never really got it, why does the IE UA have Mozilla_4.0 in it?
Sig: I stole this sig.
Thanks for the reply, but I think my reasoning was a little more thought out than you give credit for...
I find that extremely unlikely. Adoption of new operating systems from Microsoft has been slowing dramatically since Win2K. Even today, as Microsoft starts blatantly shutting off support to force people to upgrade, a very significant proportion of their customer base are not running WinXP.
Longhorn may be the most hyped MS operating system since the last one, but they've cut most of the potentially great stuff out of it already; see Slashdot discussions passim. There's not much of a compelling driver for upgrades, which means the only way it's getting out there in serious volumes is via new PCs.
A common business plan replaces PCs every three years, with plenty of places using older machines and software, and not many upgrading more frequently. That means for IE7 to reach the same penetration as IE6, even without other factors, would take the best part of three years. And this is assuming that everyone buying a new PC gets Longhorn, which isn't necessarily going to be the case for many reasons, and that no-one switches to a different browser in the meantime, which also isn't necessarily the case.
Microsoft just don't get those three years. If they're lucky, they get a month or two, by which time if there are serious incompatibility flaws, every magazine, on-line review site, CIO journal and tech news forum is going to be carrying the fact that IE7 breaks web sites and the damage really starts, crippling further spread of IE7.
Well, if it "just works", there will be no need for developers to do anything special to support it, will there?
But if it was going to "just work", Microsoft wouldn't need to spend a fortune trying to get everyone to check their sites and fix the breakage early. They're worried it won't "just work", which is pretty telling.
I admire your optimism. Gecko-based browsers have around 10% market share today, depending on who you ask, yet we're only just now seeing some key web sites (particularly those dealing with financial matters) upgrading in the face of customer pressure and bad PR. I very much doubt the kind of site naive enough to be IE6-only until recently is going to be IE7-ready the moment Microsoft releases it, if IE7-ready doesn't mean "works like IE6".
I'm not sure either part of that claim is true. A lot of cheapo shops and schoolkids pretending to be businessmen are IE only, but most of the pros I know (of which there are quite a few, given I work in a big tech centre) are more than familiar w
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