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Windows Guru Calls For IE7 Boycott
Anonymous Cowherd writes "Paul Thurrott, a journalist that usually writes about all things Windows related (and sometimes about Apple affairs too), made a call in a recent article to boycott Internet Explorer, due to Microsoft's approach (continued in IE7) of not supporting web standards: 'My advice here is simple: Boycott Internet Explorer. It is a cancer on the Web, and must be stopped. IE is insecure and is not standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable for both end users and Web content creators... You can turn the tide by demanding better from Microsoft and using a better alternative Web browser. I recommend and use Mozilla Firefox, but Apple Safari (Mac only) and Opera 8 are both worth considering as well.'"
I doubt a boycott of this sort would have much impact. Anyone who cares already uses something other than IE. Your average user will just say "Why bother? I've never had a problem." That's what I did.
Why do my serious comments get modded "funny"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... unforunately Microsoft won't give a damn about you and your ideas.
Boycott a product that hasn't even shipped yet? We have no idea how secure/insecure it is, or how standards compliant IE7 is going to be. Just stop blustering already.
You're right, but firefox is working on it, Microsoft announced that they won't even try to pass the Acid Test. Neither one may be able to meet the standards yet, but at least the Mozilla group is working on it. Which would you rather use, the group that tries, or the group that knowingly blows it off.
Apple says that safari has already passed in their test builds, and Opera is said to be "very close". Rather than the market telling the users what they want, perhaps by boycotting IE the users can tell the market what they want.
There is a term...
Too Little Too Late.
Yes the next version SHOULD be better then the last one. But it is not what we want. Why Can't we follow the CSS Specs 100%, We can excuse free software for not because it is free and you get what you paid for but for a company like Microsoft who has a lot of resources and cash it should be head over heals better then anything out there. And it is not even close.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
and if it is IE7 (or hey, ANY version of IE) refuse to render the page and pop up a link to Mozilla or Firefox and tell the user that his current browser is broken and a plague on the web, and that he should follow the given link and download a REAL broswer if he (or she) wants to see your content.
Oh yea, that is a great idea to do on our ecommerce server. "Oh, you wanted to spend $2500 with us? Fsck you, your web browser isn't L33t enough". Some how I don't think the boss is gonna appreciate me doing that.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we can, and we will add the critical most-requested features from the standards as well.
....But as few of them as we can.
Come on. Give me a break. It sounds to me like it will take a long time for the browser to be up to the standards. Is IE7 just a rewrite of IE6? If so, would it be faster to start from scratch if you wanted to make the browser compliant with all of the standards?
In the web platform team that I lead, our top priority is (and will likely always be) security - not just mechanical "fix buffer overruns" type stuff, but innovative stuff like the anti-phishing work and low-rights IE.
I'm also supprised that MS doesn't have a team that only works on security and leaves bugs and standards to a different team, considering how many updates we all get that are just for IE's security.
Then again, what the hell do I know? I don't write browsers. What does someone who does think of this?
Vol~
Yeah, that's exactly what will keep people coming back to your site. "Hi, thanks for visiting! This has nothing to do with my content, but you're not using the browser I think you should, so YOU'RE A MORON. Now on with the show..."
It's not your job as a Web developer to nag your audience or stuff your own preferences down their throats. It's your job to connect with them, to give them whatever the site offers in the most useful way. Unless your site is about Web browsers, it's outside your authority to lecture them about it, and in the likeliest case you'll simply convince people that Firefox users are pushy assholes and make them more resistant to switching.
ESCAPE POD - The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine
Been boycotting it since 2002
:-)
n00b
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
You know how sometimes you go to a website with firefox for example and it says that you are using an old version of netscape and need to upgrade? Why not do the same with IE7 on your site? Detect IE7, BAM, sorry your crappy browser is insecure comeback with a real browser. Here are some... links to mozilla, opera, 'etc. "but we cant do that" you say, "we'll lose customers"... right, well block out firefox, opera, and the other browsers that's probably something like 15% of the web and growing rapidly. IE7 will be on vista only and given as an update for XP users... I doubt IE7 will have more then 15% marketshare anytime soon.
That's not "fine," because FireFox still doesn't do it right, either. The Gecko developers working on it, but it's not there yet. Supposedly KHTML and Opera are both very near to fixing it - going so far as to have pre-release versions working correctly already.
Paul's probably upset because not only is Acid2 broken in current versions of IE, but one of the IE developers has stated that it will *not* be fixed when IE7 goes final.
± 29 dB
Slashdot isn't a multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporation with a stranglehold monopoly on the desktop operating system market.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Chris Wilson blogged about IE7's current and future expectations for (not) passing the Acid2 browser test:
2 .aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/44524
Its noted that IE7 Beta1 doesn't do much for improved web standards support, IE7 Beta2 will fix some bugs and at no point will IE7 pass the Acid test.
Insulting customers isn't good business.
Your idea is akin to having someone stand by the pumps of a gas station you run, telling every body that they should buy a hybrid civic.
Most will be annoyed, and a select few who know a bit about cars will just peg you for a dipshit. Neither will likely return.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It seems that a series of tests that exercise various features and allow for a score to be generated would be more more ideal. This is similar to how one would develop unit tests for business objects in a professional development environment. Saying that "[browser X] passes 90% of the CSS unit tests" would be much more descripting then saying "[browser X] fails the acid test".
No, I will not work for your startup
> Have your webpages check to see what browser the client is using, and
> if it is IE7 (or hey, ANY version of IE) refuse to render the page and
> pop up a link to Mozilla....
No, that would just piss people off. But how about this:
Use a standards compliant feature that looks better on a proper browser but is readable on IE. The readable part is critical. Then put a little disclaimer or a "Problems with this page?" button that leads to text on the order of "This page uses standard CSS/DOM/BlahBlah. The current version of IE has some issues with it. If you are using IE we recommend either waiting for the next service release or installing one of the following browsers, all free downloads and known to be standards compliant. But rest assured that while some of our pages may render slightly wrong, we are testing our pages to ensure that the actual content remains readable while Microsoft addresses this issue."
Perhaps even have screen captures of the page rendered on several browsers, a fragment of code that breaks on IE alongside a link to or a snippet of text from the standard. But stick that level of detail on a link to avoid confusing the normals.
The correct tone is to make the IE users feel like that this is a Microsoft problem (which it is) that the site is aware of it and trying to mitigate the disruption to their browsing experience, that a solution is offered and that the site feels their pain. But to also subtly make them feel like second class web citizens for using a legacy browser. Perhaps even find a way to work that word in somewhere. All the big companies abuse that word to disparage anything that is a) more than a year old and b) not on THEIR technology roadmap. Lets turn it back on em.
The trick here is that Microsoft has no plans to actually fix their bugs, but if a couple of medium to high profile sites pulled this stunt they WOULD fix them. Because the last thing they want IE users to realize is that they are using the crappiest browser on the Internet. When they do fix the bug, wash rinse and repeat with another feature developers would really like to be able to use.
Democrat delenda est
It's the CORPORATE desktop. Microsoft does NOT want to break that.
And they have users locked DEEP into Exchange, Outlook, and Outlook Web Access (OWA). They have also had corporate users develop custom ActiveX controls, yadda yadda.
OWA looks GREAT on IE on Windows. It looks EXACTLY like Outlook 2003, and behaves almost exactly like IE. Which is amazing for a browser! What really sucks, is that it's totally proprietary, which means it works in nothing else, but IT departments STANDARDIZE on it, which means their users are all using it. They are hopelessly dependent on it. And they cannot use Macs (because Safari, Firefox, Opera, and IE 5 for Mac all render it like crap), and they cannot use alternative browsers on a PC. If Microsoft "fixed" IE, they would offend their corporate customers, who are exactly the people they're trying to get billions out of when Vista/IE 7 ship, and that WILL NOT HAPPEN.
Believe me, I get the "fix your browser because NONE of our corporate IT apps work on it!" like every week. And saying "hey, not our fault" doesn't matter to these people. It means they cannot use their apps, or run key business components, on our platform, and there's not much we can do about it to fix things. And it sucks. Microsoft knows this, of course.
Email them and comlain. You use the site, hey even your job involves you using the site. You have a perfectly vaild reason to complain. If nobody tells them ( Micro$oft sure wont ) they are too dumb to work it out them self and they will never change it.
Lima India November Uniform X-ray
You know, it's sad when all your "real worlding" makes you loose any hope that the world you live in has *something* in it besides dollars.
Even if it is unrealistic, it's nice to at least think about it. It's not "decent" to ban idealistic thoughts, and it's not decent to insult those who post them either.
High-schoolers have a lot that no amount of this real world we live in will give you.
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?