Just what has Microsoft been doing for IE 7?

Jeff Reifman writes "Last week, Windows columnist Paul Thurrott ripped into Microsoft for ignoring CSS standards with its upcoming Internet Explorer 7.0. "Microsoft has set back Web development by an immeasurable amount of time. My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators." With the redesign of my own site last month, I discovered just how non-compliant IE is with basic CSS: IE 52% vs. Firefox 93%. Is Microsoft purely incompetent and tone-deaf to customers — or simply counting on IE's non-compliance remaining a de-facto standard?"

Comments

I vote de-facto standard

[edflyerssn007]

I believe that they are just hoping that IE remains the standard as it will come pre-installed with Vista and will be going out on automatic update, so the vast majority of windows users are going to move over to IE7 with-in a year or two.

-Ed

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[NoScreenNamesLeft]

I believe that little strategy won't work now that IE won't be embedded into the OS. People will either be moving to Macs, or using Opera or Firefox depending on what suits their needs.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Fred Porry]

I totally agree- for users like my mother that use their computers about 3hours a week IE may be enough- I mean, what do you expect Microsoft to do? Publish Vista without browser? Develop another, a new Microsoft browser after all these years of customer-pain? They didnt change anything about this pain-in-the-*ss-browser, why should they start now?

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Silas is back]

I hope you are right, since "the folk" is just too lazy (or call it dumb) to download a better browser.

I'm glad the IE-bashing gets popular even amongst Win-supporters, we Mac- and Linux-users have been alone on that trip for too long.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[eln]

How about publishing Windows without a browser and allowing OEMs to choose what browser to bundle? Most people are going to be getting Vista bundled with their machines anyway, your average person doesn't upgrade their OS unless they're upgrading their computer anymore.

While some OEMs may choose to bundle IE7 anyway, I think that if Microsoft is barred from any reprisals, most OEMs are sick enough of Microsoft's pressure tactics over the years that they may choose to bundle something else, with the most obvious winner probably being Firefox (since it's the only other browser most people would have heard of).

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Deathbane27]

Bundling IE doesn't prevent OEMs from doing their customers a favor by installing Firefox and making it the default browser. There's no good reason not to bundle it.

Plus, I'd rather be able to download and install Firefox on a newly-built computer using IE, than have to download it from another computer and copy it across the network or burn it onto a CD. And what if I don't have access to another computer when build time arrives?

Not having a browser installed = pain in the ass to get one installed = bad idea.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[fm6]

"Hoping" is the wrong word. They know that they're guaranteed 85% of the user base, and don't see any reason they should care about any standards except their own.

And before somebody says, "OK, IE is the de-facto standard, we can all just code our pages to use it." Ask yourself this: when you write code in C++ or Java or Perl, do you blindly guess what might work? No, you look up the language features and APIs that are documented to do what you need done, and you use them. But when it comes to coding web pages there is no documentation. Yeah, there's the Microsoft documentation, but it's badly written, and it reflects an implementation that nobody outside of Microsoft really understands, and that could change at any time.

Standard compliance is important. Not to make your web pages work on everybody's browser. But to make them work at all.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[gihan_ripper]

Ah, this comment makes me feel old. Unbundling IE from Windows was the main issue in the United States v. Microsoft court case (1998-2000). Bundling IE had essentially knocked Netscape off the browser throne and Microsoft were being investigated for anti-competitive behaviour.

Microsoft argued (successfully) that IE is an integral part of Windows, hence cannot be unbundled. To an extent, they are correct and it wouldn't be a trivial a trivial matter for an OEM to remove IE and still retain a working system. For instance, one serious problem is that IE is required to access the Windows Update site.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[tux_fairy]

Why can't US govenment, and any other government pass a bill into senate that it is illegal to distribute the browser that is not fully CSS2 compliant? It's no different than having specs on car safety and emission rules.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[AJWM]

Microsoft argued (successfully) that IE is an integral part of Windows

What part of losing the case do you consider successful? I suppose "successful" in the sense that they managed to avoid being slapped with perjury charges for faking the video that showed Windows running "worse" after IE was removed. Or successful in the sense that the penalties were reduced to the equivalent of a slap on the wrist.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[diskis]

Windows comes with a command line ftp-client. Only thing missing is a batch file downloading an alternative browser, and putting an icon on the desktop for it.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[tarmithius]

I think our government has some more pressing issues to deal with than making a browser standards compliant.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Bundling IE doesn't prevent OEMs from doing their customers a favor by installing Firefox and making it the default browser. There's no good reason not to bundle it.

The following are incentives not to bundle Firefox:

• It costs money and effort to add another browser and keep it up to date.
• It increases support costs to support multiple browsers and IE can't really be removed.
• Not working with IE only Websites increases support costs.
• Kickbacks from IE toolbar spyware would no longer provide extra money.
• Installing Firefox as default may anger MS, who has them by the short hairs with differential pricing of Windows.

Plus, I'd rather be able to download and install Firefox on a newly-built computer using IE, than have to download it from another computer and copy it across the network or burn it onto a CD.

To be in technical compliance with the law, MS would have allow OEMs to place Firefox or another browser on the install disk. Even if they don't OEMs can include an install disk for the browser. You can use the old version of the browser to download a newer copy of whatever you want.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[westlake]

I believe that they are just hoping that IE remains the standard as it will come pre-installed with Vista and will be going out on automatic update, so the vast majority of windows users are going to move over to IE7 with-in a year or two.

The w3schools stats show no growth for the alternative browsers in 2006.

While the IE7 beta has a slight edge on Opera and is growing at the rate of 1% every two months. Browser Statistics Month by Month

You can argue the details, but it is not so easy to ignore the trend lines.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[DarkOx]

There is a perfectly good reason not to bundle it. Firefox great as it is, does not come with support. That means if a user has trouble the OEM would have to support it, that costs money they would much rather M$ spend.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[laughing rabbit]

Then, they should get busy!

The government hasn't dealt with any issues in years.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[gordgekko]

Bundling IE had essentially knocked Netscape off the browser throne

Good to know Netscape's incredibly crappy software had nothing to do with it. Thanks for the history lesson but disatisfaction with Netscape also played a not inconsiderable role.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Yes, because M$ staffs a free tollfree IE hotline to support this stuff. *lmao*

There may or may not be good reasons to OEM firefox onto the machines, but this isn't one of them.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Breakfast Pants]

People who visit w3 schools are interested in things like making sure their sites work as many browsers as possible, including ie7. Their browser statistics tell very little about the general population.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[DJGreg]

When buying a system from Dell, etc. Dell provides the support, NOT Microsoft.

That is the whole reason why an OEM copy of Windows costs less than the full retail version, it comes without support from Microsoft. It is intended to be supported by the OEM that puts it on the machine.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Adam9]

Considering the support costs that go into identifying and removing spyware, Firefox may be a less costly alternative.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Ucklak]

I am really unaware of any 'support' issues that Firefox has. Notepad works and works well. Wordpad works almost as good. Firefox works way better than IE and I've never had an issue with notepad or Firefox.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Ask yourself this: when you write code in C++ or Java or Perl, do you blindly guess what might work? No, you look up the language features and APIs that are documented to do what you need done, and you use them.

And then you discover that no compiler on the planet actually meets the C++ standard and silly little things don't work on someone's current compiler, Java is frequently a write-once, debug-everywhere platform, and many Perl modules in CPAN aren't nearly as platform-agnostic as they claimed.

If you want things to work, de facto standards you can actually test against are worth more than theoretical, formal specifications any day. But of course, both are merely a means to an end, and useful exactly as far as they help you to achieve your objective at the time.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[alc6379]

Why can't US govenment, and any other government pass a bill into senate that it is illegal to distribute the browser that is not fully CSS2 compliant? It's no different than having specs on car safety and emission rules.

Perhaps because it's a FREAKING WEB BROWSER?

Car safety and emissions rules are intended to make driving safer, or reduce pollution. What, other than making a web developer's job easier, would requiring a browser by law to support CSS2 achieve? Further, what happens when CSS2 becomes obsolete, but by law we're still required to support it?

I don't know about you, but laws are pretty darn hard to repeal where I'm from, even if the laws are stupid or irrelevant. Let's keep the government out of web standards, please.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[fm6]

No, no compiler actually meets the C++ standard, at least not completely. But, unlike IE and CSS, they make a decent effort. Just think about what life would be like if there were no basic rules in writing a C++ program. When you claim that defacto standards are worth more than formal specifications, you're ignoring how much of programming comes from specifications. You don't know them, because you've never read them — they're just something you take for granted. Imagine what would happen if compiler writers didn't read the spec before implemnting a for loop, or decided to get creative with the way output strings are formatted.

Rules are necessary for any game. The fact that you can't get 100% compliance is beside the point.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[westlake]

most OEMs are sick enough of Microsoft's pressure tactics over the years that they may choose to bundle something else

In the U.S. Walmart has all but abandoned its efforts to make OEM Linux mass-market.
Windows is easy to place and easy to sell on-line and in big box retail. You can cry all the way to the bank. But you will not change the default install.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

When you claim that defacto standards are worth more than formal specifications, you're ignoring how much of programming comes from specifications. You don't know them, because you've never read them -- they're just something you take for granted.

On the contrary; on my bookshelf sits a copy of the ISO C++ standard, amongst other things, and I last referred to it on Friday.

Imagine what would happen if compiler writers didn't read the spec before implemnting a for loop, or decided to get creative with the way output strings are formatted.

An unfortunate example, given the chaos created by Microsoft's decision to use a different scoping rule for variables declared in for loops in Visual C++ 6 to just about everyone else on the planet. To be fair, VC++ 6 predates the C++ standard, though only just. This one still causes headaches even today, though.

More seriously, and speaking as a guy who's currently reviewing the office coding standards in light of our need to build portably on something like a dozen different platforms that are each being upgraded as an ongoing process, there are countless places where even today, nearly a decade after the standard was published, compilers get stupid little things wrong. You don't notice them most of the time, because most platforms get most things right, but they are there, and many of them are really quite trivial and silly limitations.

As a consequence, the only way we can be confident that our code builds and runs properly on all the different platforms is to do it: each night we make those builds with each compiler, and we regularly run our automated test suite on all of them, and examine any differences between the results on different platforms. Given that we're writing math-heavy code, unfortunately there tend to be quite a lot of those differences, even though our code is theoretically standard-compliant.

I would love for everyone to implement the C++ standard perfectly, so that such checking would be a formality. However, until they do (and I doubt they ever will for a standard as bloated as C++'s), I'll trust the results I see from actually compiling and testing with each platform over the theoretical results every time.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[qurk]

I don't know about you man. I've downloaded Mozilla or Firefox at least a dozen times on Windows machines, without IE. You realize that ftp is included in Windows? Holy cow, what the heck is wrong with little text based browser like w3m or links? Why do we need a buggy insecure piece of crap? Are people so insecure that they need to ally themselves with a company like Microsoft and defend their piece of crap software when it's totally not necessary, in fact detrimental to the life of their computer?

Not having a browser installed = pain in the ass to get one installed = bad idea.

HOLY COW!! Do you really need linux users to explain to you how to use your own magnificent OS which you shelled out mega bucks for but don't even know about "ftp"?

Sorry not trying to make it personal and it's not a big deal...I don't blame you, it's a lot easier to just fire up the default browser and use it to download Firefox. It just seems sortof like playing Russian Roulette when that default browser is Internet Explorer!!

Bundling IE doesn't prevent OEMs from doing their customers a favor by installing Firefox and making it the default browser. There's no good reason not to bundle it.

Ah, actually there is a good reason not to bundle it. It's a piece of crap!! :) With other browsers with a much better track record, actually should state that with other browsers existing that do not have a track record of destroying people's computers, I think that's good enough of a reason to not bundle it. Heck you wouldn't hear about government web sites being hax0red because of some stupid glaring IE security hole if it wasn't bundled, unless the maintainer actually chose to download it and install it...which could probably construed as an act of state sabotage or something!!

Sorry for coming across as a jerk! :) I just orded DirectTV today and one of their web pages has this huge "We coded this paege for Internet Explorder" thing going on. Their feedback form was totally weak, it only showed half the line, and there was no submit button. Doesn't say a lot for the html coders who made the decision to try to alienate this customer for whatever reason. Fortunately don't need Internet Explorder to watch NFL!! :)

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[westlake]

People who visit w3 schools are interested in things like making sure their sites work as many browsers as possible, including ie7. Their browser statistics tell very little about the general population.

How often did you hear this argument last year, when the trend lines for Firefox were looking very, very good?

It was the trend lines that interested me here, But alternative sources do not paint a brighter picture; Usage share of web browsers, Browser News Stats

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[tacocat]

Probably the same part of losing that was identified following the case as:

• State of Michigan has a law wherein they cannot do business with convicted felons. They changed the law.
• After the Republicans won the election everything regarding Microsoft become very quiet and although the DA didn't actually quit the legal process, I don't believe they have moved in the last 6 years. And given the money Microsoft has been able to inject into the Hill, I doubt they ever will

Face it. Our government has absolutely no balls whatsoever.

And since there were the last of the People's defense against this kind of crap why should Microsoft do anything but what they want to? You simply cannot find any reason that holds any value to any business why.

You can find many moral and ethical reasons. But you won't find any business reasons. Even the discussion about cost of spyware removal and such doesn't matter. People who use Microsoft have grown so accustomed to this that if you gave them a hardened linux or BSD installation they wouldn't use it because it doesn't have all the system tray goodies telling them it's OK.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[eonlabs]

That would require we get Vista.
Microsoft can't shut the world out. They may be massive, but the
only reason most people use windows machines is the fact that a lot
of the software that exists today is written for them.

Once you have such a huge body of software, it's hard to change.

Secondly, most users of IE don't know that there are such things as
standards for web page design.

As long as it looks pretty, which is mostly thanks to flash, the way
it's passed down the pipe doesn't matter.

That's the crowd that needs to be convinced that IE not meeting standards
is why the internet IS NOT as great as it could be.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[aichpvee]

I tried notepad once but couldn't figure out how to switch from insert mode to normal mode. When I called microsoft support the moron I got kept insisting he didn't know what I was talking about!

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Millenniumman]

The "People's defense"? What about "the people"? If a lot of people voted with their wallet and did not buy Windows, or PCs with it, instead using *nix or OS X, Microsoft would have to fix some of its problems. But people don't because they are apathetic, so why should we delegate powers to some entity to attack Microsoft in an unfair manner, when we are unwilling to do so in a fair way?

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[R3d M3rcury]

Yeah. Like people burning flags.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[fm6]

Look, I'm not saying that a programmer ever codes strictly to a written specification. But that spec provides the basis for the work. Dealing with implementation issues has to come later.

Let's stop quibbling about exactly how good C++ implementations are, and get back to the point I was trying to make. When you design an application, whether it's in C++ or HTML, you need a coherent framework on which to build. You can get that from the big percentage of C++ (or Java, despite your sneering at that platform) that works according to spec. You can also get it if you only have to support browsers that do a reasonably decent job of implementing the HTML and CSS specs. You cannot get it if you have to navigate the murky world of whimsically implemented standards, undocumented proprietary features, and weird spyware-loving plugins that is IE 6.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[WK1]

"Bundling IE doesn't prevent OEMs from doing their customers a favor by installing Firefox and making it the default browser." No, but the agreement between Microsoft and any given OEM requires that other browsers not be included.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Al Dimond]

I know what you mean. I looked down at my keyboard and saw a dusty button that said "insert", but it just put me in Replace mode, which makes no sense at all!

Eventually I got so fed up I erased the whole OS and installed Plan 9, but their editors are even more trippy...

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[xenobyte]

...so the vast majority of windows users are going to move over to IE7 with-in a year or two.

Only those using XP (or Vista)... IE7 will not be availiable to people running W2K or older Windows versions, and W2K still holds a huge share of the users (50%+) so I expect these people to switch to Firefox or Opera instead of paying $$$ for an upgrade of the so-called OS in order to use tabs or a more standards compliant browser, now that Microsoft has decided to give them the finger instead of a new browser.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Onymous Coward]

You might just ftp it.

Regular folk would have a problem, though.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Aladrin]

You obviously haven't met many users. EVERYTHING needs a support channel when you let just anyone use it. Simple things like 'it won't let me go to a site' become nightmares for the lower 30% or so of users. They just cannot deal with the way computers work.

These are the same people that call Dell to complain their foot pedal doesn't work or their coffee holder broke. Most computer users could never conceive of having such an issue.

And even if firefox was perfect and read their minds, they'd invent issues that need support.

On the other hand, I think it's MUCH easier for Dell to support Firefox than IE. Some of its bugs and glitches are truly horrendous. In IE 5, it was possible to mess up your security settings so badly that you had to have an expert technician work for quite some time to fix it (and pull files from another computer to do it) or format the system. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to get Firefox into that state. ;)

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[TimTheFoolMan]

"...with-in a year or two."

This presumes Vista will be done by then... right?

Tim

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[heybo]

IE is part of the OS. You can't take it out. Yes I know a stupid idea and the reason for all the security problems. The best cure I have found for Windoze problems is Fedora.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Look, I'm not saying that a programmer ever codes strictly to a written specification. But that spec provides the basis for the work. Dealing with implementation issues has to come later.

I understand that, and I'm not disagreeing with you.

I just don't see how the current state of play with IE is any different. Most of the time, HTML and basic CSS stuff does work. There are some places where it doesn't, and things like the box model problem are well-known and well-documented in the web development community. Clearly it is possible to design and implement web sites effectively in this environment, because we have a few million of them to prove it.

This isn't to say life wouldn't be better all round if IE did follow the same W3C specifications as other browsers, of course, and I hope IE7 will catch up on some of the more recent CSS developments that have taken place since IE6 came out. But even if and when that happens, developers will still test their pages against mainstream browsers first, and worry about formal specs and such afterwards.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[fm6]

I just don't see how the current state of play with IE is any different. Most of the time, HTML and basic CSS stuff does work.

I simply don't agree, at least with respect to CSS. (HTML is another discussion.) You can point to a large set of basic CSS that IE implements, but there are so many bugs and deviations from the spec that they're difficult to use at best. For example, suppose you want some text to be smaller than the surrounding text. CSS provides a simply way to specify that: font-size: smaller. But that's not implemented in IE! You have to give a percentage. God know why not — it's not exactly rocket science. One has to conclude that the IE team only implements as much CSS as they absolutely have to, and (given how much of their CSS implementation is buggy) even that they don't test carefully.

What I found really discouraging was a Microsoft statement that appeared on Slashdot some months back, to the effect that they hoped to respond to all the devlopers who were requesting CSS "features". That's all CSS is to them, a set of features. Not having these features makes IE less powerful, but doesn't impair any basic functionality. That's the attitude that's got to change.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah ... they have been doing this for decades - C++ comes to mind - still not compliant 10 years after the standard came out. Sooner or later people will wake up to what the great genius BG has actually cost the world economy with this crap!

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[tarmithius]

I do not think burning a flag constitutes a pressing issue, while I respect our national flag as much as the next guy I just do not think that this falls under that category. Possibly the war in Iraq, maybe our energy prices. Those are a few of the biggest ones in my mind.

There are plenty of others that our government here in the US should concentrate on. Yet we have our congressional leaders voting for a pay raise for themselves, but nixing a minimum wage increase, I think they should try to live on minimum wage for a year to see how the other half lives.

IE developers use Firefox themselves

[theGeekDude]

Well, the IE developers use Firefox themselves anyway, so didnt bother putting in full support for CSS. After all it wont make any changes to their 'default' browsing experience....

Re:IE developers use Firefox themselves

[WaZiX]

I use Firefox to design websites and imagine a web with a multitude of CSS and PNG transparency... Then of course comes the time when I open it in IE 6... And I start hating making webpages again. Thank you Microsoft, really.

Re:IE developers use Firefox themselves

[loquacious d]

The "IE7" Javascript library by Web guru Dean Edwards has helped me a lot with the IE6 blues.

It allows IE6 to render transparent PNGs (using ActiveX[?] hooks built-in to IE that allow it to render 8-bit transparency, but is mysteriously not enabled for PNGs by default) and programmatically alters the DOM and parsed CSS to enable complex subselectors and a smattering of CSS2/3 selectors as well (including fixed background positioning!). It adds ~20K to pages using it, but it's a one-time cost as IE caches Javascript.

It's not a magic bullet, and sometimes causes issues itself, but definitely worth a look. Cause no one likes hacking their carefully-constructed divs back to tables, just to support a broken POS browser. (I also enjoy the irony that third-party Javscript hackers seem to be able to make more progress with IE's CSS compatibility than the actual IE team.)

Re:IE developers use Firefox themselves

[HaydnH]

Using AlphaImageLoader is a lot easier than the javascript message, for example:

background: 0;
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImag eLoader (src='./images/someImg.png', sizing Method='scale');

The Percentages

[neonprimetime]

CSS 2.1 standard support:
IE 6: 52%
IE 7: 54%
Firefox 1.5: 93%
Opera 8.5: 93%
Opera 9: 96%

Ok, so I agree that the numbers seem to be good estimates, about right. But how on earth do they actually come up with these percentages? Is is a simple cumulative count of all css tags and attributes that work vs. don't work? Or do some have more weight than others? Seriously, they seem like fabricated numbers ... just like the /. article earlier today about how wide the universe is.

Re:The Percentages

[Reverend528]

These numbers are based on web developer usage.

52% use IE 6
54% use IE 7
93% use firefox 1.5
93% use opera 8.5
96% use opera 9

As a result, most web sites (96%) look good in opera 9, making it the most compliant browser. Unfortunately, the other 292% of web sites look pretty bad in it.

Re:The Percentages

[RonnyJ]

Here's the link that goes over all the figures: http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_summary.p hp?uas=IE6-IE7-FX1_5-OP8-OP9

Re:The Percentages

[neonprimetime]

Thank you for your link. I found another link from your link which answers my question from above.

Re:The Percentages

[the jerk store]

78% of all statistics are made up on the spot

Re:The Percentages

[neonprimetime]

91.42% of all /. postings are not worth replying to

Re:The Percentages

[Anonymous Coward]

Telling Figures Indeed! But what do they mean to you? What do they mean to me? What do they mean to the man in the street?

Re:The Percentages

[rapidweather]

That's funny. Unfortunately it reminded me of a boss who could not add the percentages to total 100 when he wanted to come up with a "reasons why customers don't buy from us anymore" and wanted to use an outsized percent to represent those sales lost by employees that just didn't give a hoot. (I cleaned up that, "hoot" wasn't the word.) His breakdown came up to something like 104%, and probably would have gone higher but he was in a rush to put that up on the wall as a put-down to the employees. I came along, and added up the numbers, got a big laugh when it came up 104%. To get even, the boss had the thing re-done, framed with glass (so we could not change it), and hung in the lobby so all the customers could see it. Only place in town where the customers get to see a framed put-down aimed at the employees that are there to serve them.

Re:The Percentages

[Kristoffer Lunden]

Happily, your post was! :)

Re:The Percentages

[man_of_mr_e]

I think he'd be better off validating his site before spouting off about others being non-conforming. 400+ errors, and that's not even CSS yet, since the CSS validator won't eve look at it if the XHTML isn't valid.

Re:The Percentages

[blitz77]

And 43.75% of Slashdot posts are made up =)

Re:The Percentages

[xenobyte]

And 67.32% of all statistics are made up... ;)

Boycott

[kevin_conaway]

Boycott I.E.? How are people supposed to do that? Just code to the standards and screw the users?

Most users don't care about your ideology or standards. Some of them aren't even aware that there are other browsers, much less why they would want one. If your site doesn't work, they'll just move on to one that does, not complain to Microsoft that xyz.com doesn't render properly.

Re:Boycott

[GigsVT]

Just code to the standards and screw the users?

Yes.

Maybe you weren't around then, but it didn't bother people one bit to put "Best viewed in Netscape" or "Best viewer in IE" on their site.

"Best viewed in any W3C compliant browser" is even less burdonsome for end users, and is not some incomprehensible thing, it has tons of precedent.

I've never had a user have any serious problems with the sites I design, once I explain to them that it's their browser that is broken, not the site.

Re:Boycott

[LWATCDR]

Sad but true.
I would vote for people recommending FireFox or Opera on every website. Maybe adding functionality for standards compliant browser that IE lacks.
The main thing is NO IE ONLY WEBSITES.
Don't make them and don't use them.
Yes sites need to support IE but they better support browsers that support standards just as well if not better.

Re:Boycott

[chrismcdirty]

Perhaps supporters of W3C standards should start sending out installers in email to our non-tech friends/family under the pretense that if they don't blindly run the executable and pass it along to all of their friends, bad things will surely happen to them.

Re:Boycott

[kevin_conaway]

Maybe you weren't around then, but it didn't bother people one bit to put "Best viewed in Netscape" or "Best viewer in IE" on their site.

You're referring to the golden era known as HTML 3.2?

"Best viewed in any W3C compliant browser"

Thats the problem, none of the browsers fully implement any of the standards. Some are just better than others.

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

> Boycott I.E.? How are people supposed to do that? Just code to the standards and screw the users?

There are plenty of ways to crash IE with malformed HTML. I seem to recall that a number of them haven't been fixed yet, and even if they have been, not everyone is using the latest version.

No better way to convince someone that IE is broken than to break it right in front of them...

Re:Boycott

[bigbigbison]

Is it a boycott when you don't have the option to use IE as is the case for users of anything but Windows??

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

Oooh, yes. And lets bring back "best viewed in 800x600" and those magnificent gif animations too.

Re:Boycott

[aztektum]

Way to cave in. Everyone I know that uses a computer has switched to FF (family, friends and a lot of coworkers, since they use Firefox interally). Effectively boycotting. It's having some ideals of your own that you live up to that matters more than the rest of the world following your lead. And not all of those ideals have to be Earth shattering.

Like I say, I'm not out the change *the* world, just out to make *my* world work for me.

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, that's not half bad. Look how successful some of the phishing scams/trojan scams are. Just a link saying something along the lines of "On -random date- the internet is going to be very badly broken, and emails are going to start costing money. The only way to prevent it is to use Firefox -linky- and Thunderbird -linky-. Upgrade now before you are left out of the Internet!" or some such tripe. If it works for the bad guys, why not the good guys? (Other than the immorality)

Re:Boycott

[DragonWriter]

Boycott I.E.? How are people supposed to do that?

By not using IE. Its not that hard; I have IE on both of my PCs at home, but the only thing I ever use it for is accessing Windows Update. (If I had another IE-only site I had to access—I've encountered a few in the past though they seem to be getting rarer at least for things I need—I'd use it for them, too.)

Just code to the standards and screw the users?

Ah, I see the problem. You think that "people" is an alias for "web developers".

Re:Boycott

[crossmr]

Actually yes. Code your page the way you want and provide a link to the browser that displays it properly like Firefox. If enough websites do that, you'll see a shift.

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

That is because of Micro$hit and their god-damned tactics to force others to use other Micro$hit products. If you build a website in Frontpage, others must use Micro$hit Internet Exploder to view it properly. M$ also ties everyone into office as their formats don't render worth a shit on anything else. Micro$hit and any other closed sourced bullshit company needs to be outlawed in every fucking country. If it's closed source, they can find ways to monopolize not only the whole god damned software industry, but every other god damned industry as well.

Re:Boycott

[debiansid]

Just code to the standards and screw the users?

It's not necessarily that way. It's entirely possible to code to the standards and still whip out a page that looks good on both IE and Firefox (and KHTML, Opera, etc.). It just requires developers to work a wee bit harder. you're paid by the hour anyway aren't you?

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

Until it's a site they really need or want to use, Google and Yahoo for example, i think have enough power to make people use a different browser. It's going to take the big internet players to boycott IE 7, they're going to have to have the balls to do it, which I doubt they do.

Re:Boycott

[implowry]

Just code to the standards and screw the users?

Yes, code to the standards, but I disagree on screwing them.

I have been forced to upgrade technology to be able to view a modern web sites I don't see why anyone else should be different. I started using Netscape 3 and when Netscape 4 came out with its support for frames, I was forced to upgrade to see the content. The same thing happens everytime a new Flash player comes out, I upgrade. Security flaws, I upgrade.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't think that expecting people to have a browser that supports modern web sites and standards is too much to ask. In the end the users get a better web experience and I can't fathom who would think that improving the user experience is 'screwing them'.

Re:Boycott

[mashmorgan]

"Screw the users"...

Yes thats a good Idea.. Fuck it I'm fed up .. gonna put up a warning in red big time Best viewed without IE

Fuck it that will swing 200 users on the LAN ;-) .. why not .. I'm fed up of this IE shite ,big big time.... Like a turd that is dragging behind my ass.. it a big Internet Explorer shit and no matter how much I wipe my ass its still there... Need to make it crusty, get a knife and cut it Off...

Re:Boycott

[Rinzai]

I don't know if you're aware of this, but the HTML validator at W3 doesn't even work right.

If The Man can't even make his stuff work, why would you expect anyone else to?

Standards can be used as a means to stifle innovation. I shouldn't have to point out examples.

No matter what, slavish adherence to standards created by The Man (and let's face it, W3 is just another instance of The Man) makes you, well, a slave to The Man.

Power to the people, brother!

Re:Boycott

[MWelchUK]

If your site doesn't work, they'll just move on to one that does, not complain to Microsoft that xyz.com doesn't render properly.

Actually, in my experience they will complain to those around them that the Internet thinggy is broken and this other one (firefox) still works.

Re:Boycott

[fm6]

I've actually run across one or two web sites that detected I was using IE, and told me to go away. But you're right, that's not a viable strategy.

Re:Boycott

[ewl1217]

Thats the problem, none of the browsers fully implement any of the standards. Some are just better than others.

While that may be true, at least the makers of all "alternative browsers" (anything but IE) try to make their browsers standards-compliant. Internet Explorer's "standards support" is just a joke, and even the biggest M$ fanboy knows it.

Re:Boycott

[the_duke_of_hazzard]

BOC Customer: "Why does my site not work in the new version of IE?" Me: "Well, Mr Big, I'm afraid Microsoft does not conform to the CSS standard, so we're boycotting them." Customer: "What the fuck are you talking about? Make my site work or you're fired." EOC

Re:Boycott

[Anitra]

If your site doesn't work, they'll just move on to one that does, not complain to Microsoft that xyz.com doesn't render properly.

If you're lucky, they'll complain to someone at your company that the site doesn't work...

As a web developer, I can't afford to ignore IE. It is what 95% of my clients use to review their sites. "But it works in every other browser!" won't encourage them to keep their business with us.

As a website visitor, though, I use Firefox and Safari. And I complain to the webmaster@blah of any site I that tries to force me to use IE.

Re:Boycott

[DarkOx]

Its true that it did not bother people back then, but hey in 1995-7 and to a less extent into 98 with the "dynamic 4s" I think the average level of computer skills on the internet, even the web, was much higher then today. In fact I really don't know to many people who bothered with the internet prior to 1998 that were not for the most part tech savy. The few that did just thought they were going to the "weird part of AOL". Getting on the internet at that time required users at least understand that they required four things and that these things were separate and interchangeble, some computer platform, a browser, an isp, and some type of modem or ISDN thingy. They maybe knew no more then that or how any of that stuff worked but at least understood the highlevel function of each. If you told people then to go get some other browser they would have been able to recongnize one when they happed upon it, today there are plenty of people who think that IE is the internet.

Re:Boycott

[dave562]

There are plenty of ways to crash IE with malformed HTML.

What's with this argument?

How about... There are many ways to break a car by putting sugar in the gastank. There are plenty of ways to rip a groin muscle by not stretching properly. There are plenty of....

Of course things won't work if you purposefully do them incorrectly.

No better way to convince someone that IE is broken than to break it right in front of them...

There's no better way to look like someone who can't code than by generating code that doesn't work right.

Re:Boycott

[DarkOx]

True to an extent, and if we were talking about an interface or something I'd be with you. I mean your right cars don't all need pedals in the same place, not that I know what I would do differnt but.

Communications though and WEB is a communications are different in that their are multiple parties participating and thefore there must be some agreement on signaling(in other words a standard) otherwise we can't talk. If I decide to go off and invent my own language rules we could not have this discussion very well, It would be:

ture silly it

Re:Boycott

[ncc74656]

By not using IE. Its not that hard; I have IE on both of my PCs at home, but the only thing I ever use it for is accessing Windows Update.

...and you don't even need IE for that anymore:

http://windowsupdate.62nds.com/

It works with Firefox to find what updates you need, then downloads them (from Microsoft's servers) and installs them.

Re:Boycott

[ryanduff]

Exactly. There are scripts like won't let IE users look at your website and tells them to go download Firefox if they want to look at it.

The other thing that bugs me is the IE only sites. I'm taking classes online and the courseware is so heavy on ActiveX it is IE only. Its to the point that its IE 6+ only so I can't even get it to load in the unsupported IE5 client for my Mac. My work around currently is a Winblows XP VM running on my server in the basement. I remote desktop into it and do my work on that machine. It annoys the crap out of me that I have to resort to this. Safari won't work and it still doesn't work in Firefox with UserAgent switcher set to IE.

The downside to making sites non-IE is that alot of businesses still rely on IE and for proxy support reasons won't switch to Firefox or anything else. I have fought various times for this, yet it's still on our banned software list. Yes, thats right, if you have firefox.exe or any dll files it kills it and logs the machine and user.

Most corporations don't understand that firefox is more secure than IE, and they see more patches come out for Firefox. The lack of patch management also doesn't help from their standpoint, despite the fact FF patches itself. I have tried to beat it into their heads over and over, with various reports that the abundance of bugs is because the community is open. They also get fixed faster. IE keeps half the bugs hidden and don't even fix some of them. How secure is that?

Re:Boycott

[LWATCDR]

That is why I said that sites HAVE to support IE. Frankly the rapid increase in Mac Laptops should do wonders for standards. Soon no one will want an IE only site. Frankly no one should have ever wanted an IE only site but for too many people Widows=Computer.

Re:Boycott

[ChrisZermatt]

...um, what's a browser???

Re:Boycott

[NearlyHeadless]

Thats the problem, none of the browsers fully implement any of the standards. Some are just better than others.

Hmmm, 8 years since CSS2 came out and not a single browser implements all of it. Until this year, no browser even got 90%. Perhaps there is something wrong with the standard and the standards process.

Just a thought.

HTML did not come about by having a committee sit for months in a room and then hand down graven tablets to be implemented. The actual implementors talked about it on a mailing list. Different features were proposed, discussed, implemented, discussed again, etc. The standards guys met afterwards to try to figure out what the standard was. Messy, maybe, but it worked. Implementation intermixed with specification. Free (open-source) reference implementations. That's how TCP/IP came about, too. We all use TCP/IP instead of the "standard" network protocols. (For those too young to know, the ISO was developing the real networking standards (OSI) for many, many years. TCP/IP was a protocol barely used outside academia before 1994. It wasn't included at all in Windows for Workgroups, it was not in the default Novell installation, etc.) Why are you guys not berating Thunderbird for its non-compliance with the e-mail standard (X.400)?

The best thing about standards is we have so many to chose from.

Re:Boycott

[sjames]

Boycott I.E.? How are people supposed to do that? Just code to the standards and screw the users?

What we need is a filk song titled 'Only a total moron would use IE'. Then, rather than boycotting IE, companies (or at least their ticked off web designers who just wasted 6 hours making a fully compliant site look half decent on IE) can use one of the bazillions of IE exploits to have the song play when the user browses to the competition's site. If anyone catches on, blame Chinese hackers.

Re:Boycott

[budgenator]

sorry but to the average windoser, if it crashes the computer ( as in anything remotely related to the hardware or software) it's not the "computer" that's wrong but your site; and if you've crashed their 'puter any fix you suggest is forever tainted with suspicion.

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many ways to break a car by putting sugar in the gastank.

Sugar in the gas tank doesn't hurt a car. That's an urban legend.

Re:Boycott

[Digit Machine]

A long time ago many sites wouldn't let you on if you were using the aol browser

Re:Boycott

[crossmr]

Yup, but you could insert code that would say "You're using an unsupported browser, get one here!".
No need to gimp it though, let them see the problems that exist under the other browser.

Re:Boycott

[Viol8]

>Of course things won't work if you purposefully do them incorrectly.

Theres a world of difference between not working correctly and crashing. Any program that crashes when its input its slightly malformed was written by and/or tested by lazy idiots.

Re:Boycott

[GigsVT]

And lets bring back "best viewed in 800x600"

What do you mean "bring back"? Half the "blogs" I got to are a tiny column down the center of the screen. Even major sites like CNN are apparently designed for 1024 or something, because there's a large white bar on the right side.

Shocking!

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon, give them a break..Microsquash has always followed "standards"...their own.

De-facto standard not difficult for them

[SirTicksAlot]

It will not be MS that will make it the de-facto standard, but the people that code websites. Most commercial websites "code for IE" only and therefore force it's customer base to have IE wether they want it or not. The only workaround is to not use that company's service. But then again the people that actually use these services may not have a say as to which services they use because these services are mandated by the companies they work for.

Hopefully this will change soon.

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them

[Tokin84]

Hopefully places will stop coding for IE since they dropped Mac support. While the Mac user is not the biggest user, it is a percentage, and coding to IE will certainly remove their ability to use the site. Just stick to open standards... is it really that hard?

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them

[jb.hl.com]

Most commercial websites "code for IE" only and therefore force it's customer base to have IE wether they want it or not.

I've not seen a page that's done this in years. Companies these days are far more aware of the use of non-IE browsers.

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them

[Penguin Follower]

Then you obviously have never worked in the automotive business, as I have. I'll speak about Toyota, since that is where I'm most knowledgable. Toyota dealerships have to access a website called Toyota Dealer Daily to order parts, put in warranty claims, and other things. This site uses so much proprietary IE javascript that Firefox can't even load the login page (and you have to login to do ANYTHING on Dealer Daily). I worked at a dealer where we had Toyota, Chevy, Dodge, Kia, and Hyundai, and all of those sites stipulated that you must use IE to access the site, but I worked in the Toyota end of the dealership, so I can only vouch for Toyota's IE only site.

Let me introduce you to one more IE commercial site. This company has an asset managment, patch management, online backup, etc... service that is hosted by them, and you access everything through a web interface. I'm quite familiar with it, as the company that I work for partners with them more than I like (nothing I can do about it). It doesn't work in any other browser than IE. Others need not even apply. :(

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them

[plague3106]

That's because its easier to support just one browser, when your site is limited in who views it (that is, its not really public). Why should a corperate intranet or extranet put any effort into supporting anything else? Seriously? Why should Toyota dealers be able to use anything they want?

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them

[berzerke]

Let me introduce you to one more IE commercial site....

ADP is another IE only site (to actually do anything). I had one client looking at them for a time clock program. BUT, it was IE only. They asked me about it. I told them it would be a great idea to give everyone easy access to IE again (they use Firefox and Mozilla). It would keep me busy cleaning up the malware, and they would have fun with pop-ups all the time. Oh, and you might want to have a few extra workstations on hand for when I have to wipe and re-install to minimize downtime. $$$ for me!!! (I'm part time hourly).

They wound up telling ADP to shove it and I set up PHP timeclock which they've been using happily for several months now. Even recommended it to another sister company.

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you obviously have never worked in the automotive business

Or the Financial and Commercial Insurance industry. www.advisen.com (Insurance) and www.fxall.com (Foriegn Exchange trading) is packed full of IE only java script for those who have to use their services.

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them

[thelem]

Microsoft have never released Windows Internet Explorer for the Mac. They released a completely seperate browser and just gave it the same name. At the time, IE for Mac was actually quite good and standards compliant.

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them

[Senzei]

Just stick to open standards... is it really that hard?

In a word, yes. Try some google searches on the subject if you are really interested. Getting the same document to look reasonably similar in IE and everything else becomes much more difficult as your page gets more complicated. Although there are slight standards issues with the other browsers, combined they do not even come close to the pain in the ass that IE is.

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them

[Blakey Rat]

I figure if gaming sites can pull it off (see www.worldofwarcraft.com or www.bungie.com) it can't be THAT hard to do for other sites. Both of those sites use tons of advanced features, have gobs of precisely-positioned graphics and DHTML, and work in any browser I've thrown at them. (At least IE, Firefox, and Safari.) If, for instance, some big bank can't hire web developers at least as good as a VIDEO GAME company, that's just pathetic.

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them

[level_headed_midwest]

Mac users are a drop in the bucket (about 3%) compared to all people who don't use IE (~15%.) Hell, there are at least as many Linux machines on the Net as Macs (according to w3c schools.) Macintoshes are not the center of the universe and on the tip of everybody's mind, so MS dropping IE support for Macs won't cause one iota of change in what web site designers think. But I do agree with the open standards bit as I am in the "doesn't use IE group" too.

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them

[Senzei]

The problem there is that you are implicitly assuming that both sites are developed in the same way. My guess is that most banking websites are part of a package deal for the entire banking infrastructure, and are put together by systems programmers or someone else who does not specialize in web design. It generally is somewhere between hard and impossible to get a given website to look correct in all browsers when you are an expert in the field, someone less experienced trying to use a widget library to help them get the job done will end up with platform issues. Until very recently (if at all) the website has not really been the public face for banks. It has always been so for game companies, which makes it a little more important to them to get things right.

That said, I agree that it sucks and should be fixed. Yes, it is hard to do it right, but sometimes it takes a hard man to make a tender chicken.

Don't ask

[Bloke down the pub]

Don't ask what Microsoft can do for IE7; ask what IE7 can do for Microsoft.

200...5 article?

[cpct0]

Unless they are mistaken, this is a 2K5 article. And it talks about the beta 1 release, I got beta 3.

Now on the topic of better CSS, I think IE7b3 is better than what is advertised in that article. It's still far from perfect though.

Re:200...5 article?

[Anonymous Coward]

2K5? You mean you couldn't be arsed to type that extra 0?

Re:200...5 article?

[the_bard17]

Anonymous Coward? You mean you couldn't be arsed to log in? ;op

Re:200...5 article?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let him know on his blog.

What is their motivation?

[Tim_sama]

Ok, Microsoft doesn't get any money from IE, as far as I can tell. They spend lots of money and time doing something that doesn't make a profit for them, when they could just leave the creation of free web browsers to the Open Source community. Why do they do this? This is a serious question.

Is it to build/maintain brand strength?
Is it just to screw people like the Netscape guys?
Is it to increase page hits on msn.com (because IE comes with that as the default homepage), so they can charge more for advertising there?
Is it because they really have nothing better to do with their money?
As far as I can tell, Microsoft makes decisions based on what they think will make them the most money, and that alone. In that light, IE is an anomaly. It just doesn't fit.

Re:What is their motivation?

[Snarfangel]

Their motivation is to prevent people from doing things that don't benefit Microsoft. Having an office suite or an OS integrated with a browser only helps Microsoft if they are the ones providing it. If people actually have a choice -- say, if their word processor was a slick web application rather than a CD "licensed" from MS -- it hurts their bottom line.

Re:What is their motivation?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can tell, Microsoft makes decisions based on what they think will make them the most money, and that alone. In that light, IE is an anomaly. It just doesn't fit.

Then you must acquit!

/ The Wookie Antitrust defense

Re:What is their motivation?

[westlake]

Microsoft doesn't get any money from IE, as far as I can tell. They spend lots of money and time doing something that doesn't make a profit for them, when they could just leave the creation of free web browsers to the Open Source community. Why do they do this? This is a serious question.

The web browser has become a standard part of any OS distribution. It tends to take on the look and feel of the OS experience as a whole. This is generally considered a plus by the non-technical end-users. who are Microsoft's core market.

Re:What is their motivation?

[zogger]

Lockin, monopoly action, chronic serial greedsters. Top to bottom and sideways, their goal has always been total control. Having the default browser is part of that, browsers are an incredible part of most people's computing experiences and as such are a critical component of the "lock in stack". IE is very important for that lockin. They need people to stay brainwashed, they need them to honestly believe that IE means "the internet" and that "windows" equals "computer".

    They aren't content making a really good living, nope, and never have been either, they have to make a *killing* in perpetutity. Anything less than that is failure in their eyes. Remember, from their point of view, and paraphrased from one of their goons recent tirades(about google and desktop search actually), if anyone else is eating, they must have taken the food off of MS' plate. That's their mindset and their obvious business model. And they will do anything to keep it that way.

  They make enron shenanigans look like a lemonade stand stick up.

for the first several years of their existence I didn't think that, I just thought "another computer company", but since then, all that has come out has convinced me, it has been obvious that is where they are at, total greed, their way or the highway, and etc. Can't put the damn fork down and push away from the plate for two seconds. As to IE being free, not really, it's part of their OS,and that OS costs money.

Re:What is their motivation?

[miro f]

Actually, Microsoft DO make money off their web broswer. The same way Mozilla makes money off firefox while giving it away for free. Advertising.

Almost every install of Internet Explorer is set with msn as the home page. This means people are more likely to use MSN, meaning they get ad revenue when people click on the ads. This is of course paid for by us, the end user, when we buy the advertised product.

So IE is not free, and they make plenty of money off it.

Google is your friend (maybe)

[Jetson]

When Google announced that they were going to start offering an alternative search for blind people that rates sites based on how well they comply to the W3C usability standards, I really thought they might follow up with a search engine that rates the results according to general standards compliance. I'd love to see "works in any browser" sites on the first page and "IE-only" sites on page 10.... Suddenly all of those commercial sites would have an incentive to make their sites work instead of just making them flash-y.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[jeblucas]

...instead of just making them flash-y

You mean, instead of using the <blink> tag. Nothing gets attention like a <blink> tag. Hotcha.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[Kennego]

A great idea, but think about the kind of people that would use an additional search engine like that... I bet they don't use IE unless they're forced to, already.

For this to work, google needs to incorporate this into their main search engine, so that websites MUST be standards compliant or probably never make it to the first page of results. I don't think google would do this, unfortunately, must it'd be cool if they did. And if they can make one for the blind, they can surely make one for overall standards compliance.

But really, this is still a great idea, and it'd still help with whatever percentage (somewhere around 20% or something?) of users that don't use IE. That still may be enough to get website makers to start doing the right thing.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[doodlebumm]

If both Google and Yahoo did this, there would be massive web development work going on, and there would be a number of advertisers on both sites that would start to pull there advertising dollars away. I think that it would be very good to just mark sites initially and notify all their advertisers that they are "going to start to lower the search position of any non-compliant site as of *some-date-here*". This would strengthen their position to be able to do it, and not piss of their paying customers.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[parawing742]

Oh no no no. Google has to remain neutral in all of this because we can't have them dictating web standards either. Imagine if Google decided to add their own "standards" to the list that would make pages rank higher. Then Google would be the new web standards overlord.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "their" advertising dollars, not "there" advertising dollars. Go and take Starting English course.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[budgenator]

All they would need to do is start a rumor that if two sites otherwise rank equal, then the tie breaker goes to the most standards complient, then watch the Search Engine Optimizer go crazy to meet the standards!

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[zippthorne]

flash vs. the blink tag. c'mon, tell me you're not nostalgic for the days of the blink tag.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[Anonymous Coward]

All they would need to do is start a rumor that if two sites otherwise rank equal, then the tie breaker goes to the most standards complient, then watch the Search Engine Optimizer go crazy to meet the standards!

Now that's my kind of evil genius.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[ChronosWS]

What is the business case for Google/Yahoo to do this?

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[afd8856]

I think Google already does this. Broken XHTML lowers the page rank, from what I heard.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[Jetson]

Now that's my kind of evil genius.

Don't you mean "that's my kind of DO NO EVIL genius"?

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[Jetson]

What is the business case for Google/Yahoo to do this?

The business case is the same as providing search results optimized for blind people - it's all about improving the search experience in an effort to attract surfers away from the competition. They are going down the same path with their anti-malware tagging of sites.

Non-IE surfers probably represent a much larger demographic than blind users.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[rkd2110]

Paying costumers pay for context ads not for search results. Their ads will not be affected by this in any way.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[ChronosWS]

So they will intentionally reduce the revenue of their advertisers? Sounds a bit daft to me. Is this what you would do if you were running a business? Understand - no one likes malware, and advertisers don't want to be associated with it because it can color them by association. But style sheets and browser compliance? That's a tough one to make an argument for. Too arcane for most people, including advertisers.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[Jetson]

Think of it this way, then - Google knows what browser you are using (or at least what your browser is reporting in the User-Agent header), so if they offer you results that won't work for your browser then *everyone* loses - you get lousy results, they lose relevance (compared to a competitor that excludes IE-only sites) and their advertisers waste money on paid placements that you won't be able to render properly and are therefore unlikely to lead to a sale.

Re:Google is your friend (maybe)

[ChronosWS]

Why should Google do this? If the advertisers don't like the way a site renders and feel it will not lead to a sale, then they should simply not advertise there. Having Google make that decision for them is unnecessary. Further, it might lead Google to decide it has the right to make other such decisions which we may not agree with. I'd rather not give them that green light.

The purpose of a search engine is to return relevant search results, not just search results which Google, in its not so infinite wisdom, believes will render properly. Consider what happens if someone wrote a plugin for IE that fixed some of the browsing issues, or Google made a mistake and flagged a version of certain browsers as not showing pages properly when it actually does. At that point, Google is actually assuming more than they should about the browser. User Agent strings as an indication of compability suffer from the same flaws as using OS version numbers to determine the capabilities of the system. And we know where that got us.

The proper arbitrator of what is and is not correct is going to be the end user, who will select the product most appropriate to their needs. Second guessing them only leads to sorrow.

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"

[Futurepower(R)]

"Is Microsoft purely incompetent and tone-deaf to customers - or simply counting on IE's non-compliance remaining a de-facto standard?"

Microsoft's business model is heavily dependent, not on actually giving customers what they want, but on tricks like "embrace, extend, extinguish". Microsoft will make more money if everyone follows Microsoft's non-standard way of doing things, because then everyone will need Microsoft software to see web sites.

If it weren't for the fact that it is temporarily possible to trick users who have little technical knowledge, Microsoft might be only barely profitable.

--
Will the violence of the U.S. government will end the 3,000 years of violence in the Middle East, or increase it?

Re:"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"

[jvervloet]

Microsoft's business model is heavily dependent, not on actually giving customers what they want, but on tricks like "embrace, extend, extinguish". Microsoft will make more money if everyone follows Microsoft's non-standard way of doing things, because then everyone will need Microsoft software to see web sites.

Maybe Microsoft does not fix the CSS bugs in IE for another reason as well. I think a lot of websites perform a browser check, and in case of MSIE, buggy html/css is generated to produce a correct output. (This is at least the case in many of my own websites.) If all CSS-bugs were fixed in IE7, all those websites would render incorrectly in IE7 only, which might make users switch browsers more easily.

Article from 2005

[Anonymous Coward]

The article cited was posted on August 02, 2005. IE7 has released 3 betas in the year since then, and although certainly not perfect, the CSS support has gotten substantially better.

Re:Article from 2005

[Dark_MadMax666]

I have it installed . -ACID2 test still looks same old screwed IE6 way . It is really better than IE6 ( it has tabs!) but not by much

Why don't boycott Vista all together

[guruevi]

Really, they made a good step in the direction with W2K and later with XP it was nice for end users and W2K3 is bearable but wtf are they doing with Vista. There is nothing exasperatingly new (like usage of the NT kernel in W2K) or a breakthrough in GUI (as with the speed of the GUI in XP) or a sysadmin-friendly environment (as in W2K3). In fact, nothing has really changed, a little GUI painted on but that's it.

IE7 still not W3C compliant or anywhere near there, still giant loopholes in the OS. Still using NTFS instead of the promised WinFS.

I was really (as an MS hater) looking forward to maybe a change within Microsoft since WGates left (and we all know a lot of work goes before the actual announcement) and Vista coming out and having promising features announced, but I can't see anything of that in their new OS.

As for a change, Stevie is announcing stuff at some convention and I am astounded. I mean, I didn't know they could do a lot more improvements in 10.4, but look at the Leopard Sneak Preview and a versioning file system and all kinds of other neat stuff... and that's right after a devving freeze in Vista which was supposed to copy some neat features out of OS X 10.3, maybe even 10.4, heck they could even copy stuff out of KDE for all I care, it still look better.

Microsoft (Gates or Ballmer, whoever has the power): I am very disappointed in you guys. I work in a mixed environment (Linux, Windows, Mac) and I have heard things in that my company (which has a bigass license with you) moving to Mac's for some non-critical users (that only need Office and to surf the intranet). If Apple pulls it off and actually builds in Win32 support in their OS, you are going to become just another SCO within a few years.

Re:Why don't boycott Vista all together

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in regards to a versioning file system, I assume you know that Windows XP and Windows 2003 already have this, it's called Volume Shadow Copy (look it up). It will also be activated by default in Vista.

Re:Why don't boycott Vista all together

[mazzarin]

a) To say that Vista has no changes except a nice little GUI is EXTREMELY ignorant

b) Try actually using it. You'll find there are a crapload of changes, some good, some bad. If you are an administrator deploying Vista (someday) onto a corporate network, you will be pleasantly surprised.

c) No browser is fully 'W3C compliant'

d) Do tell - what 'giant loopholes' are there in Vista? Have you already coded several rootkits to account for these? Oh you're talking about the Symantec article about the new networking stack where they quietly mention that MS has been fixing the things they have warned about with every public release. Oh ok.

e) WinFS is(was) just a journaling layer on top of NTFS. NTFS was ALWAYS meant to be there.

f) 'Time Machine' is already in Vista, people have already started talking about security and privacy implications of the versioning system which is in Vista.

The funny thing about the Apple dev conference earlier today... You can tell what is, and isn't in XP/2k3/Vista/Office already.... everything that wasn't somewhat in XP or Vista or Office they are like START COPYING REDMOND. Everything that they were just doing their own take on, they just quietly mention their features and move on. The more you know.

Re:Why don't boycott Vista all together

[Anonymous Coward]

e) WinFS is(was) just a journaling layer on top of NTFS. NTFS was ALWAYS meant to be there.

NTFS has always had journaling (well, partial journaling, depending on the definition). WinFS was supposed to be a metadata database layer on top of that. What exactly it would have been useful for wasn't entirely clear, which is probably why it was dropped.

What are they doing for IE7?

[Red Flayer]

I'd rather know what they would do for a Klondike Bar.

Hopefully nothing like what is said here. Warning: there there be crappiness.

Paul Thurrott?

[R.Mo_Robert]

In the linked article, he describes CSS as "an HTML-like technology that Web developers use to create Web sites." That's really a stretch, especially on a site like Windows IT Pro. (Couldn't he have said, for example, that it's used to style pages?) But I digress.

In any case, he can complain about IE being stuck in the 90's all he wants--I get as frustrated with it as the next Web developer--but has anyone looked at his site (or Windows IT Pro, for that matter, except I doubt he has much control over that one)? It's a mess of tables, inline Javascript and CSS, and it doesn't even have a DOCTYPE. And he's complaining about standards? IE's buggy rendering and the compatibility mode in Firefox and other browsers is probably the only thing holding that site together.

The article reads like just another attempt to bash Microsoft. It's even a bit hypocritical (see my last paragraph)...

Re:Paul Thurrott?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello windows fan boy, attack the messenger and not the message, eh? Usual crap from you types.

Re:Paul Thurrott?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello Linux/OSX/other miniscule OS fan boy, who cares about a 'Web Standard" that is only followed by a small rabid group of anti-MS users.

Re:Paul Thurrott?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello, Mr. Conclusion-Jumper-To-er, calm down. I'm not a Windows fanboy. My primary machine is an iMac, I'm a Web developer, and, as I mentioned, I'm not a fan of IE. (I really shouldn't have to qualify my posts like that just so people don't think I'm taking sides, but, what can I say, it's Slashdot.) I'm basically saying that there's just something wrong with Paul's argument.

Re:Paul Thurrott?

[_Sprocket_]

who cares about a 'Web Standard" that is only followed by a small rabid group of anti-MS users.

Some may remember back to the days of networks that followed defacto standards established by singular corporate interests. These networks had names like GEnie, CompuServe, and AOL.

Me thinks this article is a wee bit old...

[MSFanBoi2]

Sure it was posted recently, but the article itself only mentioned IE 7.0 Beta1, which was superceeded by both IE 7.0 Beta 2 and now Beta 3...

Auto-boycot

[soloport]

Simple way to boycot:
if IE --> Download Firefox Link
else --> Welcome visitor!

Re:Auto-boycot

[envelope]

Apparently Newscloud tried that, and it just made a lot of people mad.

Re:Auto-boycot

[Anonymous Coward]

And this proves that newscloud caters to mostly idiots.

Re:Auto-boycot

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no - we don't know that. I believe he used the phrase "a lot of." Therefore the proper statement would be, "And this proves that Newscloud caters to a lot of idiots."

Re:Auto-boycot

[infolib]

Oh yeah, and it will work just as well as all these sites giving me 5 years old error messages that my Konqueror should be upgraded to Netscape or IE 4.0 or higher. If you don't care about IE, just leave it to wallow in its own coding errors.

Re:Auto-boycot

[AlHunt]

> Simple way to boycot:
> if IE -->Downad Firefox Link
> else --> Welcome visitor!

Brilliant. Send X% of your users away just because YOU don't like their choice of browser. When I'm over in Windows and I run into one of these sites, I just go elsewhere to find what I want. I don't have Firefox in Win and don't care to install it. If that means someone doesn't want me to visit their site, screw'em.

Al Hunt

Re:Auto-boycot

[Ucklak]

It's really no different then the hordes of people that stuck with Netscape 4.x for quite a while.
IE is just the latest crappiest browser that isn't up to today's standards and developers hate spending the time to 'tweak' or downgrade.

Re:Auto-boycot

[mad_minstrel]

Here's a better way:
If not IE -> serve site normally
else -> remove CSS (thus eliminating CSS problems in IE) and include out-of-date browser notice

This would give plenty of incentive to change browsers while not locking out the lazy users.

Re:Auto-boycot

[wealthychef]

I agree, I hate web designers who cannot figure a way to make HTML work, so they require me to use a different browser. It sounds like sweet revenge until you realize you're only hurting your customers and visitors.

Re:Auto-boycot

[bunratty]

Your CSS should degrade fairly gracefully anyway, so just use any CSS features you want and serve the CSS to IE. Then put up a note visible only to IE users explaining why IE doesn't show the page well and a screenshot of how your site looks in a better browser. That will be even more convincing than not serving the CSS to IE, because users can actually see that IE can't handle modern CSS.

Re:Auto-boycot

[westlake]

That will be even more convincing than not serving the CSS to IE, because users can actually see that IE can't handle modern CSS.

They will be long gone before they even look at your picture. There's always another site just one click away that renders well in IE.

Re:Auto-boycot

[tacocat]

You have to say something at some time and if you have enough people doing it...

Re:Auto-boycot

[Joe U]

That's because it's a blitheringly stupid idea.

1. Don't block your target audience.
2. Don't force them to do something they don't want to.
3. Don't try to fragment the web, it won't work anyway.

If they want to use a broken browser, have a popup window say 'your browser is broken, use firefox', and that's it, end of story.

Your end users DO NOT CARE about your personal crusade to rid the Internet of poorly designed browsers. Really, they don't.

Re:Auto-boycot

[Ruff_ilb]

"If they want to use a broken browser, have a popup window say 'your browser is broken, use firefox', and that's it, end of story."

Uh, they do. Except they're EVEN MORE unobtrusive about it.

I was curious, so I decided to check it all out in IE myself. The page opened fine, just with a SMALL header at the top:

"Please consider upgrading your Web browser
Internet Explorer doesn't properly support CSS standards (IE 52% vs. Firefox 93%). If you visit our site with Firefox or Safari, it works perfectly. NewsCloud recommends you upgrade to Mozilla's open source Firefox browser for a better experience with our Web site."

What's wrong with that?

Re:Auto-boycot

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

If they want to use a broken browser, have a popup window say 'your browser is broken, use firefox', and that's it, end of story.

And advertising Firefox in popups... that's soooo much better.

Re:Auto-boycot

[sdnoob]

Simple way to boycot:
if IE --> Download Firefox Link
else --> Welcome visitor!

this is pretty much what i do...

a simple ie conditional (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/ov erview/ccomment_ovw.asp if you don't happen to know what they are) that loads up a small firefox banner (resized by 1px to get around dimension-based ad blockers) if the visitor is using ie. nice and simple. no lectures, no scolding.. i do enough of that face-to-face when friends get infested with spyware and/or viruses (.. due in part to their using ie).

Re:Auto-boycot

[Crayon Kid]

Denying people access altogether is not such a bright idea. A banner somewhere on the page should do just as well.

But in case you want to be more evil, how about using the same tactics microsoft.com used against Opera? Make the site look b0rked for IE and also have that banner in their face so they know what's wrong.

The beautiful part is, you don't even have to do anything purposely malicious to accomplish this. Simply use CSS that should be in IE and isn't. "Does this site look bad? You must be using that pathetic excuse of a browser that is IE. Go get a decent one."

Re:Auto-boycot

[ArwynH]

That will be even more convincing than not serving the CSS to IE, because users can actually see that IE can't handle modern CSS. They will be long gone before they even look at your picture. There's always another site just one click away that renders well in IE.

Actually no, they won't. Most users who see a well phrased warning message about browser incompatability will want a browser that works. You see, they won't see it as a developer trying to convince them to change browsers, they will just think IE is broken (which just happens to be true). Remember, these are the same people who paniced due to the "no bootsector found" error when they booted thier computer with a floppy in the drive.

Re:Auto-boycot

[ThePhilips]

Wrong, since your advise has link to browser favored by you. In other words, it's not anymore about "browser supporting standard" but "standard browser we do support".

Link to http://browsehappy.com/browsers/ IMHO would be better. The site was established long ago and lists proper alternatives to IE for all platforms. It's bit too much into security and wasn't updated recently, yet it is a great starting point.

Re:Auto-boycot

[Bert64]

You can always use the first-child: display:none element of CSS, which IE will completely ignore and display anyway...
See www.ev6.net for an example (even ie7 still displays it, tho it gets the rest of the page right unlike earlier versions, interestingly mac ie works fine)

Re:Auto-boycot

[master_p]

Another simple way:

if IE --> download Firefox in user's computer; install firefox behind the scenes; make Firefox the default browser; replace all shortcuts of IE with Firefox.
else --> welcome visitor.

The next time the user opens IE, she will run Firefox.

Re:Auto-boycot

[AlHunt]

> You have to say something at some time and if you have enough people doing it...

I guess it depends on why you run a website. For a commercial site to turn traffic away is self defeating and silly. If hobby webmasters want to be pigheaded about their choice of browser, I suppose the world is no worse off.

At the very most, if you feel you "have to say something", put a note at the top of your index page "Optimized for Firefox, The Standards Compliant Browser - users of other browsers may experience difficulties", provide a link to firefox and let it go at that. I guarantee, if I'm looking for a piece of information, I don't want to stop, download a whole new piece of software, install, configure and figure it out before I can get what I need and get back to what was important to ME, the user.

Al Hunt

Re:Auto-boycot

[Kessler]

4. Don't tell user's you are not as capable as all the other sites on the "interweb"

When every other site they visit comes up just fine in IE, telling people that yours can't comes off as bitchy and/or incompetent. Keep in mind that most people have no idea how nice sites could look if they didn't have to dumb themselves down for broken browsers. Users don't care how *you* want your site to look. They consider it your job to do whatever you have to so *they* can view it.

Firefox advocacy is all well and good, but I suspect it would be more useful to give 'em a banner with a "tell Microsoft to fix IE" button that lets them sign a petition. Every thousand signatures or so, fire off a copy to Redmond. The only way IE will get fixed is if MS hears users (not developers) say they care.

Re:Auto-boycot

[AdamWeeden]

You're missing a big point. People who are still using IE don't want to decide what new browser to use. IE "works fine" for most of them, so if you say "Hey your browser isn't what it could be, why don't you try another?" They, typically, don't want to have to pick it out. You're the one that tld them it could be better, so they will WANT to know what you recommend.

Re:Auto-boycot

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the petition could read, "I switched from IE to Firefox."

I'm not optimistic that Microsoft would care if the users said they cared. They would be more upset if they met those words by switching off of IE though, otherwise they're still using IE which is all they want.

Re:Auto-boycot

[AdamWeeden]

Yes that's a GREAT idea. Take the malware approach! People have NO right to keep using IE if they want!

Re:Auto-boycot

[Anonymous Coward]

"if you were using firefox, you wouldnt be seeing this annoying ad"

Re:Auto-boycot

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF, someone posts one comment about information that is at the very top of TFA and gets marked informative?

Good job, mods. -1, Overrated. Lucky I don't have mod points today.

Re:Auto-boycot

[SyncNine]

This just furthers Microsoft's point of keeping IE's non-compliance as a de-facto standard.

What you just said, in simpler terms is:

Microsoft's browser can't render CSS properly.
Don't complain about it or try to get it to change.
Don't try and get your userbase to upgrade.
Work around it, instead.


So, I write standards compliant code. You're telling me to break my code JUST so it looks good on some toolsack's browser who hasn't updated since IE5.5!? Further proof people should have to take an exam to be allowed on the internet.

PS - Spend the five minutes and get a *REAL* browser! http://www.opera.com/ or http://www.mozilla.com./ I have absolutely no pity for idiots who complain about how this site and that site don't look right on their browser and how they'll browse somewhere else. Tell you what, if you're too lazy to upgrade to a real browser, I don't *want* you to view my website. GTF on.

Karma be damned, people like you who can't spend 30 seconds to make sure their computer is actually running properly shouldn't be able to use them.

Re:Auto-boycot

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with that?
Um, nothing, except originally they banned all IE users.

Re:Auto-boycot

[AlHunt]

> PS - Spend the five minutes and get a *REAL* browser! http://www.opera.com/ or
> http://www.mozilla.com./

Gee, thanks. I'd have never found either of those without your help (as I sit here with both firefox and konqueror running in my linux desktop).

> I have absolutely no pity for idiots who complain about how this site and that site don't
> look right on their browser and how they'll browse somewhere else.

Nobody wants your pity. But if you were running an e-commerce site, I bet you'd want to drive traffic *to* your site, instead of *away*, which was the whole point of my initial respose.

> Tell you what, if you're too lazy to upgrade to a real browser, I don't *want* you to view my
> website. GTF on.

Honestly, that's not a problem for me. For *your* sake, however, I hope you're not the guy selling the next thing I'm shopping for online while I'm in my XP desktop. Because if you've barred the door to me (as the parent suggested), I will GTF on and line someone else's pocket.

I'll bet if you were one of the websites I spend money on, you'd want me to be able to view your site.

> Karma be damned, people like you who can't spend 30 seconds to make sure their computer is
> actually running properly shouldn't be able to use them.

Honestly, you really should get off the "anti-anything-MS" bandwagon and think for yourself. I can spend all the time I want installing software. In fact, I spent plenty of time re-partitioning my laptop to dual boot XP and Linux and then installing and configuring Linux.

The point was - "why drive traffic AWAY from your site, when the whole point of HAVING a site is to drive traffic TO the damn thing". I'll repeat, if you have a hobby site of some kind and you want to close the door to everyone who doesn't agree with your software choices, then the world is no worse off. If you have a business site and you close the door to anyone who doesn't have your favorite brand installed, then the world is *still* no worse off - but your business is certainly suffering for your personal prejusice.

However, if you're a business, or a businessman, then you understand that money doesn't know what browser you're using, it doesn't know if you're MS-aphobic, MS-aholic or somewhere in between. What you *do* know is that your goal is to get Mr. Customer's money from his pocket and into yours. You will not accomplish that goal if you bar them from the store.

I mean, really ... all I said was, rather than bar the door, put a note at the top, bottom, or somewhere "optimized for brand X browser" and provide a link - why all the venom?

Al

Re:Auto-boycot

[AlHunt]

> If they want to use a broken browser, have a popup window say 'your browser is broken, use firefox', and
> that's it, end of story.

> Your end users DO NOT CARE about your personal crusade to rid the Internet of poorly designed browsers.
> Really, they don't.

Well said. I'm just going to go stand over there in the Amen Corner now.

Al

Re:Auto-boycot

[Anonymous Coward]

This just furthers Microsoft's point of keeping IE's non-compliance as a de-facto standard.

IE has 85% of the browser market - doesn't this make IE the standard? Why keep swimming against the tide? Code for IE and let all those firefox weenies upgrade to IE.

WTF?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Ok, Microsoft doesn't get any money from IE, as far as I can tell.

Okay, just WTF?

Do you believe that you really get a FREE toy with your box of cereal? That you get free gifts if you pump gas at station X?

Offcourse not, anyone who is not a complete slave to advertising knows that these free items are paid for by you!

Same with IE. It comes with the OS wich you paid for. IE could only be free if you could somehow still use it without having paid for the OS wich it needs to run on. Since you can't (the old mac version of IE is an oddity) it can't be said to be free anymore then say windows notepad is, dos, or windows media player.

MS sells not an OS as such but a desktop, sorta like what you get when you use linux/gnu/(kde/gnome/whatever). This means they have to include basic tools. In the same way that a car dealer usually throws in a set of tires and even a tank of gas, for free!

Believing IE to be free really is a truly stupid mistake to make wich shows that you lack any true understanding of how the world works. It reminds me of especially young people who get taken in by mobile phone plans that offer free this and free that and thinking they are getting everything for free. Yeah right, offcourse not.

Just check how free IE is anyday. Call MS, say you aren't running any legal version of their OS and want your free copy in a usable form. Good luck.

Whenever I think consumer watchdogs want to create to much of a nanny state to protect retards from getting themselves killed someone like you comes along and shows just why we need so many fucking laws on truth in advertising. Yeah it makes the world more boring but sadly some people just can't see through the bullshit and we are not allowed to lock them up anymore.

Re:WTF?

[Tim_sama]

Whenever I think consumer watchdogs want to create to much of a nanny state to protect retards from getting themselves killed someone like you comes along and shows just why we need so many fucking laws on truth in advertising. Yeah it makes the world more boring but sadly some people just can't see through the bullshit and we are not allowed to lock them up anymore.

What the hell is your problem? I ask an honest question, and you jump on me like I'm one of those people who wants the government to babysit me. The truth of the matter is, if they released IE6 with Vista instead of putting all this effort into IE7, the same people who were going to buy Vista already would still buy it. The majority of people don't know the difference, and anyone who does know the difference is just going to download Firefox or Opera anyway, so in actuality, creating a new version of IE shouldn't really affect sales at all.

Therefore, if creating a new version doesn't actually make them any more money than they would already, that means that if they didn't bother making new versions of IE, they would reduce their expenses while maintaining the same price point, which would give them a larger net profit (which seems to be the only thing Microsoft cares about). It's basic economics.

Mmmkay?

Re:WTF?

[Tweekster]

No one is buying Vista.

People are buying a new computer. It makes no difference to the masses that vista is on it.

Re:WTF?

[Tim_sama]

No one is buying Vista.

People are buying a new computer. It makes no difference to the masses that vista is on it.

If this is true, and you buy IE7 by buying Vista, it follows logically that:

No one is buying IE7.

People are buying a new computer. It makes no difference to the masses that IE7 is on it.

Taking that to be true, why spend money on making IE7, when you could just use IE6 instead? It will get you the same results and costs approximately 0% as much in development costs.

Re:WTF?

[Phraghg]

Believing IE to be free really is a truly stupid mistake to make wich shows that you lack any true understanding of how the world works. It reminds me of especially young people who get taken in by mobile phone plans that offer free this and free that and thinking they are getting everything for free. Yeah right, offcourse not.

But wait! Isn't this what opensource software is all about? Last time I checked the Firefox I'm using is a free toy! Obviously I'm a young person who lacks any true understanding of how the world works because obviously something as good as Firefox can't be free.

Persistently nag users until they switch

[Anonymous Coward]

I vote for webmasters to insert code at every page that displays a dialog box, saying "WARNING: Internet Explorer is wholly inadequate for a proper Web browsing experience. Please use either the Opera or Firefox browser before proceeding further." Then if the user ignores this three times in a row, he gets Lastmeasured.

Re:Persistently nag users until they switch

[westlake]

I vote for webmasters to insert code at every page that displays a dialog box, saying "WARNING: Internet Explorer is wholly inadequate for a proper Web browsing experience. Please use either the Opera or Firefox browser before proceeding further."

Your client's competitor's are never more than one click away.
You do whatever is necessary to reach and hold his target audience or you find employment elsewhere.

Re:Persistently nag users until they switch

[coofercat]

Agreed, but it'll work on your blog or other "don't care about the money" sites you may control. Between suitably militant /. users alone, that's got to be a fairly large number of sites. Working on the theory that it takes five goes to get a message across, an IE user's probably going to get it eventually.

Just my 2 pence, and I'm sure not about to change the world :-(

Re:Persistently nag users until they switch

[sasdrtx]

Just put an ActiveX control on your page to download, install, and softlink iexplore.exe to Firefox.

ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[kthejoker]

Seriously, they're complaining about the Acid2? The most irrelevant web standards test ever devised?

Seriously!?

IE7 fixes the Holly Hack, the box model, PNGs, the pixel jog, the double margin float, child selectors, position:fixed, the XMLHttpRequest object, XML degradation, the phantom box, percentage vs. auto, the PEEKABOO bug (Oh My God - line-height bug, too!), EMACScript degradation ...

IE7 is waaaaaaaaaaaaay closer to Firefox and Opera than IE6. And because they have a new product, they're going to work harder on CSS2.1 for the next year while they claw their way back into their 90+% market share.

I could honestly care less about ACID2 compliance, and the people who do are impractical pedants. ESPECIALLY when IE6 fails so many more basic standards tests than ACID2, all of which IE7 is fixing.

It is like complaining that you passed calculus without knowing how to use a slide rule. Ridiculous.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[John Fulmer]

Fixing long-standing bugs =! Standards compliance.

jf

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[tashanna]

Ummm... How do you use a slide rule? There's no buttons and I can't figure out where to put in the batteries. My Mathematica teacher referred to them and several people laughed, but I didn't get the joke.

- Tash
Hybrids

P.S.: Behold, thy name is sarcasm.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[Bogtha]

IE7 fixes the Holly Hack, the box model, PNGs, the pixel jog, the double margin float,

All of these are bugfixes, not additional support for CSS.

child selectors, position:fixed,

Yes, these are improvements to CSS support.

the XMLHttpRequest object,

This is only part of draft specifications at this stage.

XML degradation

This is a workaround for proprietary behaviour that gives false positives in Internet Explorer 6. Doctype switching isn't part of any specification, it's intentional misrendering. Not to mention the fact that it wouldn't even be a problem if Internet Explorer supported XHTML in the first place.

the phantom box, percentage vs. auto, the PEEKABOO bug (Oh My God - line-height bug, too!),

More bugfixes, not additional support.

EMACScript degradation ...

What are you referring to? They haven't made any changes to their JScript engine, which is their implementation of ECMAScript.

All in all, I see a lot of bugfixes, but hardly anything in the way of adding missing support for parts of CSS. Sure, they added selectors, but they missed out tables and generated content, which are huge parts of the specification. Sure, they added a workaround for people using faux XHTML, but they didn't actually add XHTML support. And I don't know what you mean by "ECMAScript degradation", but they still have a non-standard event model instead of the DOM event model.

IE7 is waaaaaaaaaaaaay closer to Firefox and Opera than IE6.

Come off it. Bugfixes are not a great leap in functionality. Sure, it's great that we finally have them, but to characterise this as closing the gap between the browsers in any meaningful way is exaggeration beyond belief.

I could honestly care less about ACID2 compliance, and the people who do are impractical pedants.

Er, some of the things that Acid2 tests for are things you are describing as fixed in Internet Explorer 7, so obviously some of the things in Acid2 are important to you.

And, wearing my impractical pedant hat, I have to point out that you are saying that people who care about Acid2 less than you are impractical pedants, which makes no sense.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[iangoldby]

Unfortunately:

Recently the Microsoft blog told us that some of our CSS hacks will stop working in IE7, a fact we detailed in our first IE7 article. While this is generally good news, it is a bit disturbing that the Holly hack in particular will cease to function while many of the layout problems it is meant to fix will still be there, and will still need fixing.

-- from Position is Everything, the authors of the Holly Hack.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[Dracos]

First of all, a correction to the article itself. IE hasn't set back web development, it has held back web development, since IE6 was released

The ACID2 test may seem irrelevant based on its content (the smiley face), but it is actually a very intense yet concise test of CSS2 box model and selectors support. IE7 fails ACID2, so your claim that IE7 fixes box model support is false.

MS has only taken the occasion of IE7 to fix the specific issues that developers have been shouting the loudest about for more than half a decade, most of which you list. Unfortunately, from what I've seen, they have added more hacks to the clunky rendering engine from IE5 (or earlier), instead of developing a new rendering core from scratch. IE7 will still not have the level of support for web standards that other browsers have had for years.

MS has specifically stated that IE7 will not support the application/xml+xhtml mime type. This is a simple thing that most people overlook the importance of. The so-called "Web 2.0" cannot be fully realized without it.

Excluding Netscape 4.x, IE has the worst support for W3C standards of any mainstream GUI browser. IE7 will only make marginal improvements. The lastest verbal vomit from Redmond regarding compliance improvements basically says, "wait for IE8 and 9". I've seen nothing about IE7 and CSS3, of which all other modern GUI browsers now implement some subset.

So, what has MS been doing with IE7? Much ado about almost nothing. IE7 seems to have the same incremental standards support that Firefox 2 will have; the main goal of both of these seems to be user interface, privacy, and security improvements. In 2 years, we'll see how Firefox 3, Opera 10, Safari, and IE7.1 compare.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[Excors]

Acid2? The most irrelevant web standards test ever devised?

It's "irrelevant" only for IE7, because IE6 was so far behind that Microsoft still hasn't been able to catch up. For browsers that are already quite good at CSS, and web developers who are targeting those browsers, it helps to provide a valuable step up in standards compliance.

The Acid2 test is using real specified features that have some value to web developers, else they wouldn't even be in the CSS spec. It's certainly not the best test case to help the people who are trying to implement the features, because everything is mixed together and each feature is tested only a couple of times - but it provides the general public with a visible way to follow a significant part of the browsers' increasing standards compliance, which motivates the browser developers to fix their standards-compliance issues.

We should be happy that Microsoft is fixing IE6 bugs, and that they are starting with the most widespread and problematic ones instead of worrying about a single high-visibility test that is worthless if the more basic parts of CSS are not well supported. That's what they should be doing given their situation, and the IE developers should be thanked for the progress they've been making in that area. But it doesn't change the fact that IE7 has a worse implementation of standards than other major browsers, nor the idea that IE is holding back progress on the web.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Seriously, they're complaining about the Acid2? The most irrelevant web standards test ever devised?

Acid2 is a bunch of random CSS and other standards tests to see if certain often broken parts of the standard actually work right. It is a reasonable torture test, but certainly nothing IE is ready to try for. It is like entering a Yugo in a monster truck contest.

IE7 is waaaaaaaaaaaaay closer to Firefox and Opera than IE6.

Well, for my own personal test the standards compliant markup I maintain looks pretty much the same in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konquerer, and every other non-IE browser I could find. In IE 6, it shows none of the formatting. In IE 7 it shows none of the formatting. Thus, they both fall into the same category for me, broken MS crap that with all their money and developers can't manage what several commercial companies and several community projects managed years ago.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[nine-times]

It is like complaining that you passed calculus without knowing how to use a slide rule. Ridiculous.

Not to be pedantic, but isn't it more like complaining that someone passed calculous when they have shown an inability to pass a calculus test?

ACID2 is not the end-all and be-all of web standards compliance, but it does give an indication of how well a browser is rendering certain kinds of CSS with reference to the W3C standards. It was devised on feedback from web developers to be a collection of common rendering inconsistencies between the major browsers. It's not completely meaningless.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[Bogtha]

Unfortunately, from what I've seen, they have added more hacks to the clunky rendering engine from IE5 (or earlier), instead of developing a new rendering core from scratch.

Backwards compatibility with all the crappy proprietary behaviours of older versions of Internet Explorer is pretty important to Microsoft, which is why they are still using their older rendering engine instead of replacing it with something better. They can't make big changes because they are afraid they'll break things.

Internet Explorer 8 is where you're likely to see a change like this. From what they've been saying, I think it's likely that they'll not add a further doctype switch, but implement a new rendering engine for XHTML only. Everybody using text/html will be stuck with Internet Explorer 7-level support for CSS, and everybody using application/xhtml+xml will get the new rendering engine. This has the added advantage of zero regressions - so Microsoft won't have to worry about backwards bug-for-bug compatibility.

Unfortunately, to do this, they actually need to implement XHTML...

MS has specifically stated that IE7 will not support the application/xml+xhtml mime type. This is a simple thing that most people overlook the importance of.

No, it's not. I know it looks quite similar when you are writing it, but supporting XHTML isn't just a case of adding "application/xhtml+xml" to the list of media types that get chucked through the HTML rendering engine. Apart from the obvious fatal-error-on-malformed-documents behaviour, there are changes to the DOM, changes to CSS, changes to page structure, and so on. For instance, the following code means different things in HTML and XHTML:

<table><tr><td>...</td></tr></table>

In HTML, this code creates four elements. In XHTML, it creates three elements.

There's all kinds of subtle ways in which XHTML differs from HTML, and if Microsoft don't get it right, it's going to cause a whole load of problems further down the line. XHTML is a golden opportunity to leave cruft like doctype switching and stupid CSS bugs behind once and for all, and if Internet Explorer 7 includes premature broken support for XHTML, it will be a squandered opportunity, and it will cause all kinds of problems further down the line.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[Handlarn]

IE7 is waaaaaaaaaaaaay closer to Firefox and Opera than IE6. And because they have a new product, they're going to work harder on CSS2.1 for the next year while they claw their way back into their 90+% market share.

I could honestly care less about ACID2 compliance, and the people who do are impractical pedants. ESPECIALLY when IE6 fails so many more basic standards tests than ACID2, all of which IE7 is fixing.

So basically, what you're saying is it's ridiculous to complain about Microsoft's inability to make a decent browser despite them being a corporation of hundreds of times the size and financial means of Opera Software or Mozilla, just because they fixed bugs that they probably should have fixed a long time ago already.

The point isn't that it fails the Acid2 test (that I have never heard of until today), but that it fails to follow the standards which the Acid2 test apparantly was deviced to test.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[chrisbtoo]

EMACScript degradation ...

What are you referring to? They haven't made any changes to their JScript engine, which is their implementation of ECMAScript.

Read it again - he's talking about EMACScript. They've re-written IE7 in LISP and now, like the rest of Vista, it runs under EMACS. That's why the hardware requirements are so huge.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[Dracos]

Yes, essentially IE7 is going to make the developer's job harder (another version of IE to support), while IE8+ will simultaneously make the job harder (yet more versions of IE to support) and simpler (the newest version causes less mental breakdowns).

Backwards compatibility is a philosophy that will very quickly bite MS in the ass (within the browser space, as well as with Vista in general). IE is their mess, it is MS' responsibility to clean it up. I would sooner whack them with a mop, if they handed me one, than help them clean up their mess. I have no sympathy for Microsoft.

And yes, I understand that XHTML support is not as simple as my original comment may have implied. My point about the mime type is that the Specs say that XHTML must be served with this mime type. IE has always (and will continue to) choke on content served with this mime type. Implementing correct box, float, DOM, and event models are entirely separate, yet related, issues.

Regarding your table snippet: yes, XHTML would create 3 elements. But there are 4 nodes present: table, tr, td, and the text node '...' contained by the td.

I think we can agree that the opportunity you speak of has indeed been squandered. It remains to be seen what kind of usage share IE7 will get... I expect it to ramp up much slower than IE6 did, considering IE7 will only be available on XPSP2 (no 100% penetration there), and Vista (which is its own liability). Also, IE6 had no publicly visible competition when it was released, unlike now (Firefox, especially).

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Specs say that XHTML must be served with this mime type

Nope. See http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#media . XHTML documents may be served as text/html unless you are adding stuff from other namespaces (etcetera). Live with it.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[labratuk]

I could honestly care less about ACID2 compliance...

Care less than what about ACID2 compliance?

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[I'm Don Giovanni]

But all of those fixes are far more important than ACID2, and the notion promoted by this thread, that IE7 is basically no better than IE6, is disinformation, pure and simple.

And besides those fixes, IE7's CSS support is much improved over IE6's. Those of you that are truly interested in how IE7 has improved on IE6's CSS support (as the submitter of this article *purports* to by asking what the IE7 team has been doing), watch this channel 9 video IE7 - CSS Support?.

No, it doesn't pass ACID2 yet, but it blows IE6's CSS support away.

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[zxsqkty]

Backwards compatibility with all the crappy proprietary behaviours of older versions of Internet Explorer is pretty important to Microsoft, which is why they are still using their older rendering engine instead of replacing it with something better. They can't make big changes because they are afraid they'll break things.

Fuck off, this is FUD, pure and simple. The fact remains that web authors _right_now_ need to create hacks to an otherwise standard html document to get it to display correctly in IE6. Due to half arsed standard suport in IE7, authors will be forced to invent yet more IE specific hacks. Backwards compatibility is not one of MS goals, and it never has been (witness the Office formats through the years).

Imagine that IE7 came out with 100% support for w3c specifications - the worst that would happen is that websites written to the standards would display as intended in IE7, and sites written to accomodate IE<7 would need rewriting to follow the standards. Who loses?

Internet Explorer 8 is where you're likely to see a change like this. From what they've been saying, I think it's likely that they'll not add a further doctype switch, but implement a new rendering engine for XHTML only. Everybody using text/html will be stuck with Internet Explorer 7-level support for CSS, and everybody using application/xhtml+xml will get the new rendering engine. This has the added advantage of zero regressions - so Microsoft won't have to worry about backwards bug-for-bug compatibility. Unfortunately, to do this, they actually need to implement XHTML...

But this is 100% speculation on your part, unless you happen to be privy to the plans of the IE dev team. In other words, vapourware. If every other browser maker on the planet can do this NOW, why the fuck can't MS?..

MS has specifically stated that IE7 will not support the application/xml+xhtml mime type. This is a simple thing that most people overlook the importance of.

No, it's not. I know it looks quite similar when you are writing it, but supporting XHTML isn't just a case of adding "application/xhtml+xml" to the list of media types that get chucked through the HTML rendering engine. Apart from the obvious fatal-error-on-malformed-documents behaviour, there are changes to the DOM, changes to CSS, changes to page structure, and so on.

xhtml code sent as "application xhtml+xml" should be interpreted as xml, using the xml parser (well, according to the doctype - 1.0=xml+html, 1.1=xml). Only a fool would try to parse xml with an html parser. Oh, wait...

There's all kinds of subtle ways in which XHTML differs from HTML, and if Microsoft don't get it right, it's going to cause a whole load of problems further down the line. XHTML is a golden opportunity to leave cruft like doctype switching and stupid CSS bugs behind once and for all, and if Internet Explorer 7 includes premature broken support for XHTML, it will be a squandered opportunity, and it will cause all kinds of problems further down the line.

They've had _years_ since the release of IE6 to get this right. There is _no_ excuse for not "getting it right" now. Especially when the standards have been widely published since well before the release of IE6. Suffice to say they deliberately ignored their "golden opportunity".

Fuckers...

I meant to add this to my other post.

[Penguin Follower]

I meant to add this to my post above, but here:

If you go here you will notice they disable the login box if you visit that page using anything but IE. That page is the login for the "Everdream Control Center", which is where you manage everything. Service requests/help desk, remote control clients, asset management, etc.

Mod parent up

[AstrumPreliator]

The article is from a year ago. I know MS bashing around here is "cool" and all but come on. If we're going to complain about IE7 then at least complain about the current version.

OK, I wasn't paying attention...

[Penguin Follower]

Don't you hate when you reply to the wrong post :/

YEAR OLD

[Anonymous Coward]

HELLO. EARTH TO SLASHDOT.

The article was written on, wait for it: August 02, 2005. Its over a year old. Its entirely out of date. IE 7 is on Beta 3 now, not Beta 1, and Paul has blogged very favorably on the CSS support in the most recent build. Many comments so far have compared the CURRENT state of other browsers to the state of an initial IE browser a YEAR ago. PLEASE update the submission.

The way to fix the problem

[ManoSinistra]

The way to fix the problem with IE is not to tell M$ developers to "get with it" because frankly, I don't believe they ever will. What you need to do is to start suggesting alternate browsers to people who don't know the difference between "the big blue E" and another browser. Let's be honest, probably no well-informed person would actually decide that IE is the best browser option out there. Groups such as spreadfirefox.com are doing an excellent job telling the masses that they need a new deal.

This article is a year old

[epohs]

Am I taking crazy pills, or is this article not over 1 year old? [ August 02, 2005 ]

Re:This article is a year old

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it sure looks like that, which means that most of this discussion is a waste of time. IE7 has undergone major changes in the last year

Re:This article is a year old

[wbtotb]

Thank you. I am so glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that.

Rhetorical questions & /.

[penguinstorm]

> "Is Microsoft purely incompetent and tone-deaf to customers -- or simply counting on IE's non-compliance remaining a de-facto standard?"

I didn't think rhetorical questions had any place on a public discussion board.

Extra Speculation.

[crhylove]

I've switched over about 50 people to Firefox. The ramifications of this are significant. First: It's a real black eye for Microsoft for every user I've switched, not because they switched, but because of how much happier they are with Firefox, and how that makes them view MS overall. IE has gotten so bad that the majority of people I switched now view MS as a whole as inferior, and are looking for alternatives in other software realms as well. I haven't had the gall to switch anybody off of windows yet, but I've switched SEVERAL people quite happily from MS Office to OpenOffice, from WMV to BSplayer and MPC, and almost every outlook user is a happy thunderbird user now.

I've gotten a few people to switch from photoshop to the gimp as well, for the simple reason that it is free for any future upgrade.

Firefox deserves HUGE kudos for making an enormous mark in the mind share of the average computer user and representing FOSS. When I explain the benefits of FOSS and people get used to Firefox, overall they want as much open source as they can get from there on out.

I know because I'm one of them.

My prediction is that MS will loose customers for ALL of their products gradually because of the inroads Firefox has made into the web browser space. Open Source is the inevitable future for most software, and even grandmas and grandpas and kids are starting to get that idea.

Now if only we could some decent FOSS games.....

rhY

Re:Extra Speculation.

[norman619]

You had me until you mentioned the Gimp. (A very accurate name for the application BTW) Dude are you seriously trying to say Gimp is a good alternative to Adobe Photoshop? Shall I slap you around or later? I have been forced to use Gimp at work since it's free. I feel like someone chopped off both my legs and one arm when I use it. The free stuff is not always a good alternative. Sometimes if you really wnat to get your work done you have to bend over and take it.

Re:Extra Speculation.

[rekka]

I switched someone over to Firefox today. An 83 year old man with bad eyesight. Why? Well, because I was removing spyware from his machine and because I don't hate him.

Re:Extra Speculation.

[crhylove]

Your ability to adjust to a mildly different menu (and I'm not a huge fan of either menu, actually), you may be more comfortable with GimpShop, a gimp derivative.

http://www.gimpshop.net/

Enjoy!

rhY

PS Yes, I know it still doesn't have CMYK or whatever, so, you know....

For the best browser experience...

[IGnatius T Foobar]

...go to http://www.ie7.com

(Seriously. The best browser is there.)

Re:For the best browser experience...

[SurturZ]

For the best browser experience...
...go to http://www.ie7.com/

(Seriously. The best browser is there.)

I tried that link but it was all garbled. I'm using Internet Explorer 6.

The Answer

[rocketjam]

Is Microsoft purely incompetent and tone-deaf to customers -- or simply counting on IE's non-compliance remaining a de-facto standard?

Yes.

Which is faster??

[Anonymous Coward]

Under windows, I use firefox for most (> 80%) of my browsing, but when I compare rendering and user interface interraction ie always feel faster, and seems to consume less memory.

Re:Which is faster??

[Anonymous Coward]

I have noticed this with almost all GNU software running under windows... the best solution I have been able to come up with (and my GUI coding is not that hot so someone could possibly correct me) is that the GNU software loads everything up and THEN display's it.

In my experience IE may seem to load faster, but if you watch it, first the little window opens up, and then the menu bar is populated... etc. (note that this isn't as noticable on high performance systems, but I'm a cheap bastard) Firefox (or Opera, or Mozilla) seem to block on a blank screen and then BAM it is all there.

My $0.02

How can I boycott IE7 when it won't run?

[WillAffleckUW]

99 percent of our desktops are Linux, and every time we try to download the package, it refuses to run.

omg

[trimCoder]

Microsoft wants to make money??? no way... bs.. what is the world coming too.. And how are they going to do this? By making IE7 work on more websites than its competitors. Face the cold hard facts, websites are built by developers for IE first and foremost. Most internet users use IE so for developers, all other browsers should be a lesser goal. Thus we have the internet which is mainly written for IE.. Non tech customers use IE for this reason, because more sites work on IE. Microsoft does not give a dam about standards and compliance made by other people and why should they. They care about making a browser that works for there customers.. the end user.

best idea yet

[zogger]

Really! If Google did that it would be most excellent! It is logical, fair, practical and do-able, and it does follow the precedent they just set themselves.

Just to let you guys know

[Anonymous Coward]

That article that was posted was a year ago. That's right August 2005. This is August 2006 and IE 7 is about to go to RTM. On August 2005 Beta 1 just had came out. Honestly, I would not pay any attention to something that is radically out of date.

Woof woof

[davmoo]

Whether you all like it or not (and note that I use Firefox myself), Microsoft Internet Explod...um...Explorer is the proverbial tail that wags the dog. In the minds of the great majority of computer users, Microsoft *sets* the standard, not breaks it, and you will not convince them otherwise. You can whine and moan all you want, but I got 5 bucks that says when IE7 rolls out, we start seeing a new round of sites that work *only* in IE7, and when you complain the response will be words to the effect of "get a real browser like everyone else uses".

Microsoft fights while everyone whimpers

[zymano]

You fight back.

The internet cosortium should fight back. But they won't. Because they're soft.

Make sites only available to browsers that aren't IE.

Microsoft fans can give their excuses.

Re:Microsoft fights while everyone whimpers

[Anonymous Coward]

Make sites only available to browsers that aren't IE.

Wacko, that will only drive users away, just as do many sites that _require_ IE.

I only keep IE around for sites that are very important to me, but that support only IE, like my HMO.

Extra goodies

[6031769]

You are right, of course. The best strategy, IMHO, and the one which I most frequently advocate is to give the non-IE user some extra goodies. In much the same way that some sites will use Javascript to add a few bells and whistles, but still provide a usable service for non-Javascript browsers, you can code sites which are perfectly usable in IE, but have a couple of added bonuses which the non-IE users can take advantage of. Even if it's simply faster downloads because the same styling requires less markup, that's still a benefit to the end user.

seriously?

[rp]

No, not seriously at all.

Personally I stopped reading at this point:


Wilson's post raises some serious questions about IE 7.0, not the least of which is this: If IE 7.0 Beta 1 doesn't include the fixes that most Web developers need, why did Microsoft release IE 7.0 Beta 1 only to a small group of Web developers and other testers, not to the general public as originally promised?


Let's see: if beta 1 does lack a lot of fixes that most Web developers need, restricting the beta to a small group of testers has a major benefit: it allows the MSIE authors to still make these fixes before web developers at large will start the effort of creating MSIE 7.0 compliant websites. If this isn't obvious, you are either too stupid or too malignant to be a software reviewer. In other words, we're wasting our time, as usual.

*Yawn*

Old news, half-retracted

[Kelson]

It's funny... this is the second place I've seen today where someone linked to that idealog article and seemed to think that Thurrott's "Boycott IE" post was new. I seem to recall something similar happening a few months ago, where someone posted a link to some article that had been posted a year and a week earlier, and people reacted as if it were only a week old.

Seriously, how hard is it to look at the date and notice the year is different?

It's worth noting that Thurrott backed off somewhat on his "boycott" stance just two days later, saying:

If you simply must use IE for some reason, you would be crazy not to upgrade to IE 7 when it comes out.

Hardly praise for the beast, but not the full-on condemnation of the original article.

Re:Old news, half-retracted

[cpct0]

> Seriously, how hard is it to look at the date and notice the year is different?

I believe people have not looked at the date because it's still of actuality. Heh! 2 big puns to MS anyways:

- I ran a few CSS 2 tests on W3C site... the 10 I took all came back as negatives in IE7. First bash and pun for IE7. Kudos guys for perfect standardization! I know I might've been unlucky, though. I took them randomly. But it's still better than it was before, especially in CSS1.

- It's funny how IE7 have been in the works for 1 friggin year. It's been so long people can take a year old article and it's still "news" and no one ever complains... uh and it's still beta... and it's still not CSS compliant... Smells almost like a Google GMail Ever-Beta, or a (used to be) Mirabilis ICQ Ever-Beta. It's not like history repeating because the history is not even made yet. Once it will get out, we'll see for the next IE how it goes.

And the funny thing is, if they are to roll out that IE7 with the Vista of theirs, they need to put their act together, so I am quite sure CSS will remain broken for the forseable future, hence the core of P.T. article is still valid IMHO.

What can I say other than a big "LOL" and a very sarcastic thumbs up to Microsoft.

Dupe ... this is not from last week

[Yankovic]

The posting from Paul Thurott was not last week. It was a year ago. This article is a dupe.. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/02/185 3256

I'd bet that Paul has a better understanding of IE7 now. Not that IE7 is at 100% CSS 2.1, but with CSS folks such as Molly Holzschlag (http://www.molly.com/2006/03/01/microsoft-ie7-pro gress-sneak-preview-of-mix06-release/) and Malarkey http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/mix06_v iva_las_vegas.html backing it, maybe that piece is a bit out of date?

What do they usually do with IE

[DarkOx]

I imagine M$ has been doing exactly what they have been doing with IE ever since 4.0. Internet Explorer is not a web browser, it is a large collection of libraries M$ develops to aid in UI development for their other products such as windows and Office. The sooner you stop looking at IE as a browser and instead as a toolkit the product starts to make some sense. The last time IE was a web browser was like maybe 1997-98 ever since win98 IE has been a toolkit with an HTML library.

Old News...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Paul Thurrott article was written last week... a year ago. CSS and IE7 is nothing new. IE will fix some parts, but certainly not all. It seems that the IE team is focusing on first of all fixing what customers see as wrong (security) rather than what developers see as wrong (standards compliance). Given the two, I'd pick security too.

What we need is a Gecko ActiveX control

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

I would love to see an automatically self-updating Gecko ActiveX control. Any IE user who visits my sites (or dozens of other sites that mandate it), would simply have to click "Yes" once (ever), and then the user would be using the newest version of Gecko to render the pages automatically.

IE could be effectively marginalized that way.

Re:What we need is a Gecko ActiveX control

[Joe U]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who had this idea.

So, how do we get it to work? Who trusts ActiveX nowadays?

How about convincing Adobe to add it to Flash, they'll throw anything in there.

Seriously, how about Google, a nice add-on to their toolbar. Google toolbar, with browser-in-browser support.

Re:What we need is a Gecko ActiveX control

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

So, how do we get it to work? Who trusts ActiveX nowadays?

It works because of who we're targeting. Browser-savvy users already have a non-MSIE browser installed, so we don't have to worry about them. We're targeting the clueless users who are dumb enough to trust ActiveX.

Also, it makes a good business case. If you're a web developer, you tell your customer something like: "We can add native support to MSIE to your site, but because MSIE doesn't follow the standards, it will cost an extra 10-20% to do so. If you prefer, we can use this ActiveX control, so MSIE users will just have to click "Yes" once, like this. See? Oh, and lots of other sites are already using this control, so people might not even have to click anything."

Re:What we need is a Gecko ActiveX control

[WK1]

"I'm glad I'm not the only one who had this idea."

I had this idea before. It is a good one. In short, an ActiveX control that fixes IE. I don't know how plausible it is tho.

"Who trusts ActiveX nowadays?"

Pay attention! Everybody clicks "Yes!" Except smart people, who are a small minority. Smart people are irrelevant anyway. We're talking about IE users.

Re:What we need is a Gecko ActiveX control

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm

Re:What we need is a Gecko ActiveX control

[forrest]

Replying to un-hide the anonymous parent comment ... but a more relevant link is here:

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm

... just what the doctor ordered.

Microsoft aren't incompetent

[lateral]

If there was a clamor from customers, and Microsoft thought they would lose money or leverage, then they would be more standards compliant. But there is no clamor. The voices we hear asking for standards compliance are from technologists, web developers and industry press because those are the people who bear the greatest burdens due to lack of compliance. These people do not represent the majority of IE7's end users and MS knows it.

What most people want is to read their email, store their photos, and shop and bank securely on-line. They can already do this. The benefits of standards compliance are real but they are invisible to most end users and will remain so unfortunately.

L.

Do we all know what year it is?

[thejeffer]

It's 2006. Not 2005. Paul's article was not written a week ago, it was written a YEAR ago. Since then, the IE7 team has done a lot of work to improve their compliance with standards. It's not going to change the fact that I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole, but that's because I just love Firefox way too much to ever use anything else.

Let's be fair here and not criticize IE7 based on a year-old article that's talking about beta 1. If you've got gripes with beta 3's problems (which it does indeed have), then by all means, gripe away.

Funny - The Thurrott Article Came Out Last August

[reifman]

And Microsoft apparently jumped right on it ... not.

How to defeat IE

[onlyjoking]

The crucial argument against IE is its terrible CSS support but it's very difficult to get this across to ordinary users. Here's my suggestion. Create your site with as many features as possible which fail in IE but render perfectly in Firefox, Safari etc. Next insert Javascript or CSS IE browser detection into your home page which inserts into the IE rendered page something along these lines:

This site will display better in a browser which supports web standards. Here's an example to show you the difference.

The example is a link to a screenshot of the home page rendered in Firefox and a link to the Firefox download page should also be added. This way we don't lock out IE users but make IE's shortcomings as obvious as possible thus dispelling the pernicious M$-cultivated illusion that sites with IE workarounds are the standard. For this to work it needs to be a standard response developed by the web standards project so that it becomes familiar when users see it on different sites. The only way to defeat M$ is to play them at their own game.

Re:How to defeat IE

[Anonymous Coward]

I took this very approach when developing a department website at my school.

The result:

1. IE users got pissed, they felt they were being descriminated against, have no clue on how to install FireFox, and are not interested in doing so. Department got some nasty emails. Which lead to...
2. ...my boss getting pissed, he said IE was the standard since most people use it. Said that was the definition of standard. I couldn't convince him otherwise.
3. I was forced to hack the site to work exactly the same as with IE or scale down on the features, I had to do a little of both

Most people don't understand web standards and don't honestly care. They believe I'm simply biased and developing specifically for the FireFox platform because I'm a big hippy.

It's all very depressing.

Re:How to defeat IE

[onlyjoking]

Yes, I appreciate you can't go down this route with organisational websites. I was wondering if this approach might work for more high profile personal websites or where the developer owns the website. This approach needs to filter down slowly, with corporates being the last to get the message I suppose.

Insert Headache Ascii Here

[Phraghg]

Seriously, standards mean little or nothing. All I know is, clients don't care if the site they paid for is compliant or not. They just care that it looks good, and works right. Which implies that I only care that it looks good and works right.
Believe it or not, but I still get people complaining when things don't work right for Mac I.E. 4.0X. And the sad thing is one of the people who requested Mac I.E. 4.0X compliance was running OSX on a PowerMac G5. I tried to get him to switch to Safari, but alas it was to no avail.
When you can't get a Mac user running OSX to switch to something other than Internet Explorer, you have a problem. But more importantly it tells you something about the desktop/consumer market and why open source software hasn't really been that successful. Firefox is argubly the most successful open source software, but even it has limited marketshare.
The problem doesn't exist with Microsoft, the problem exists between the computer and keyboard.

Re:Insert Headache Ascii Here

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem exists between the computer and keyboard

the desk?

I believe you mean, "between the chair and keyboard" ?

Re:Insert Headache Ascii Here

[starrsoft]

The problem doesn't exist with Microsoft, the problem exists between the computer and keyboard.

The keyboard cord is the problem?

Re:Insert Headache Ascii Here

[the pickle]

The best part about those complainants on OS X is that IE 4 doesn't even *run* on OS X, and never has (unless that guy is trying to run IE 4 in Classic, which must be unbelievably painful to watch).

I'd say you can safely ignore anyone running IE on a Mac. Seriously, the last major update for IE on the Mac was in 2002. If you can't be arsed to update even once in four years (to a FREE piece of software, no less!), then you probably can't be arsed to buy my product/service that I'm advertising on my site, so I don't want you for a customer anyway.

Then again, I'm a crusty developer type with the luxury of not giving half a crap about whether I'm breaking a site for IE users. I've been known to break sites for IE users intentionally, in fact, which is something the Web could really use a lot more of.

p

Re:Insert Headache Ascii Here

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh* you're a short sighted one aren't you? standards are a way of *garunteeing* that a site will *always* look good and work right if browsers adhere to these standards. they are a way of making absolutely certain, without a doubt that a page will always look good no matter what browser it is seen in. not only are standards one way of making sure pages look good, they are probably the single best way of doing this.

Re:Insert Headache Ascii Here

[miro f]

Seriously, standards mean little or nothing.

try saying that after you've just spent hours hacking a website so that it will render properly on internet explorer. When there are 5 or 6 different choices for web browsers, standards are critical

Re:Insert Headache Ascii Here

[Phraghg]

Well, shit. When web browsers don't conform to standards, they aren't standards are they? I do have to spend hours hacking websites so they render correctly on numerous versions of IE, Firefox, Opera 8->9, and Konquerer. When I mean nothing I mean that standards are useless in real application because as far as I know, no browser (not even Opera) is completely 100% standards compliant. And getting around browser compliancy usually further amplifies problems across other browsers which makes standards even more irrelevant in actual application.

Re:Insert Headache Ascii Here

[miro f]

actually, when no web browser conforms to the standard, it shows exactly how important the standards are ;) (I think we're using different definitions of "meaningful")

besides, you'll find that in *most* cases creating a website to the standards will make every browser apart from IE work fine. That is, when you code to the commonly implemented standards

Microsoft should buy Opera (this is NOT a troll!)

[sydbarrett74]

Now before anyone mods me as a troll or flamebait, hear me out. I hope that, with Billy Boy out of the daily picture, people like Ray Ozzie will realise what a steaming pile of donkey shit IE is and cut its losses. Opera is the only widely-used browser to pass the ACID2 tests fully (not even Firefox can perform tha feat), and it keeps adding nifty features IE can only dream of. Some of you may say this whole thing reduces competition, but remember, there's still Firefox, and dozens of other browsers.

CSS is old

[Drakin020]

If your still using CSS just drown yourself. With what you can do with XML, ASP it compleatly CRUSHES CSS. To you mr. Paul Thurrott..I say STFU

Article is a Year Old! Are Claims Still Accurate?

[xdc]

Is the article by Paul Thurrott still accurate? It is not from last week -- it is a year old! Perhaps Microsoft has made IE7 more standards-compliant since then.

IE7 CSS Job Interview

[Temujin_12]

I interviewed for a IE7 CSS job at Microsoft about four months ago. Coming from a web development background, I was curious as to how they would present their goals/problems with meeting CSS standards. I was well aware of the "code it to standard, view in IE, and cry" web development cycle.

One of the team leads (sorry don't know how high up of a team lead he was) actually said that often when people say IE is rendering something incorrectly it is actually IE that is doing it correctly while all of the other browsers are rendering it incorrectly. I could tell he was looking at how I would respond to that statement. I just sat there and didn't move. While in some cases that may be true, I knew that was an arrogant lie, and was just enough for me to stop caring about the interview. Needless to say, I didn't get the job. Fortunately, I had already interviewed for another job, which I've since been hired at, which is much better.

Two points here:
1- With team leads holding that kind of attitude (and touting it during interviews), no wonder IE is the quagmire it is. They're more used to making standards, not adhering to them.
2- Yes, recent college CS grads can find a job! I actually had 2 1/2 offers after only 4 interviews. Just develop your skill set (more than what they teach you in class) and learn how to communicate in *English* not just C, C++, Perl, etc.

Re:IE7 CSS Job Interview

[finnif]

said that often when people say IE is rendering something incorrectly it is actually IE that is doing it correctly while all of the other browsers are rendering it incorrectly. I could tell he was looking at how I would respond to that statement. I just sat there and didn't move.... Needless to say, I didn't get the job.

Right. A candidate who doesn't inquire as to why I felt that way would not get my vote for a job either. As an interviewer, I don't want arrogant candidates as much as you wouldn't want arrogant interviewers. Asking what results showed that would have actually displayed interest in the problem, but your sitting there like a lump of coal just proved you were another OSS fanboy out of college who doesn't understand what it takes to develop software in a corporate environment.

No matter what you believe about IE's standards, it's a lot harder to steer a corporation with hundreds of millions of paying users. I'm sure everyone there would love to change it on a dime. Guess what -- it ain't that easy.

Re:IE7 CSS Job Interview

[ChronosWS]

You may also have fubared a golden opportunity to work at MS on the CSS team and address the very issues you complain about. While you can glorify the Firefox and Opera teams all you want, if you really wanted to improve the lot of most web users, you would do well to be in that position at MS with the ability to influence that development work.

Just as a suggestion from someone who still remembers what it was like to get into a new job out of college, idealism in development is useful for guiding how you do your work, but not so useful for selecting a place to work or even necessarily which work you do. I felt and thought a lot of the same things you expressed in your post above (and I worked for MS right out of college) but over the years I have found it's MUCH more useful to weave your principles into your code and attitude than it is to wear them on your sleeve.

All have problems

[infosec_spaz]

All browsers have issues...evidence that by the latest rounds of FireFox vulnerabilities. I DO use Firefox at home, but at work I *HAVE* to use IE. I work in Security and provide the latest vulnerability research on M$ products, and let me tell you, they are comparable in that areana. It boils down to what you like, and what you want your experience to be, I want my viewing pleasure to be through FireFox.

EMACScript?

[lennier]

I knew it was only a matter of time.

three words

[Anonymous Coward]

backwards-broken-compatible

Microsoft knows people won't change.

[kinglink]

First off let's be honest here with a few facts.

1. If Microsoft's browser worked as well or better than Firefox does, most of us wouldn't take Microsoft back.
2. If Microsoft browser crashed once a day people still wouldn't change away from it until someone physically did it for them.
3. IE is hard coded into XP and has it's own form of compliance that some people still have to accept at times. Especially if they wish to do business with Microsoft

Well number 1 Microsoft doesn't care about because really, that group is lost forever.

Number 2 Microsoft doesn't care about because they really can't do anything wrong for that group. They don't want to learn firefox no matter how easy it is. Avast is a great option for them but even there they have to learn it.

Number 3 is their bonus. There's documents that you have to load special extensions in Firefox just to read correctly. At my work they suggest IE for the Work wiki. (yes we have a wiki for our projects, it works well) The reason is not because they like IE. They basically demand Firefox outside of the intranet, but because IE allows you to hardcode image locations and that makes it easier to code. Not a big problem for me personally.

The fact though is IE doesn't have to comply to standards to become used. They already are, and they will remain the majority for years to come because they are the tool of convence. Firefox will continue to make inroads but I don't believe they can wrestle it away from the house wives who only go online to look at pictures of their kids because there's nothing Firefox can offer them over what IE already offers. Sure there's tons of need tools Firefox has, but for those users Firefox install time outways the usefulness of it and that's the EXACT reason why IE7 is still as bad as the neighborhood whore.

Re:Microsoft knows people won't change.

[2fuf]

so it's "us" (1) against the "people" (2) now...

XAML

[Anonymous Coward]

well about the time Microsoft IE 7 comes out I plan on moving all of my web app development to XAML. How well does firefox and the others render that?

Re:XAML

[pascalc]

XAML is a copy of XUL (with the difference that XUL has been working reliably for years of course), on which Firefox is built on.

So you are telling us that once IE7 is out, which is a big improvement in standards compliance, you will make sure that your applications are 100% IE-only ? That's stupid if you want my opinion.

IE's most egregious offense

[phiber_phreak]

Does anyone know if IE7 will fix the absolute worst behavior in IE -- closing TCP connections with RST rather than FIN?

This bad behavior:

--exists in IE6 and earlier

--violates RFC 793 sections 3.4 and 3.5

--ties up LOTS of memory in zillions of stateful devices (firewalls, VPN gateways, L4 and L7 load balancers, and on and on)

--does not belong to the MS TCP/IP stack, since other applications (eg, telnet) close connections properly

I haven't played with IE7 yet. Someone please tell me MS has finally addressed this abomination.

Compliance costs money

[wardk]

hell, it would cost real $$ to add true compatibility to IE. hell, someone would have to work the harder code. it's much easier to change the colors, mac-ify the icons, modify the file that has the version number embedded and recompile.

keeping IE 7 at minimum usability is protecting the Microsoft shareholder from needless expense.

besides, they are just getting an handle on the old bug list. changing IE would just open up a big ol' can'o'new bugs. they're just not going there. sorry.

Dude, that article is a year old - 2005

[Anonymous Coward]

Please try to read the whole date.

Is CSS too hard?

[jaweekes]

I don't mean to start a flame war or be modded down into the 9th level of Hell, but why has no browser achieved 100% compliance with CSS? If it is this hard to comply with, maybe the spec is not realistic?

Re:Is CSS too hard?

[dvice_null]

Yes it is actually pretty hard. Perhaps not really hard, but it requires a lot of work as there are so many possible combinations and styles you need to worry about. But on the other hand, all the browsers are improving.

Re:Is CSS too hard?

[bunratty]

Partly it's because IE has such poor CSS support. That means web developers don't use the advanced features that IE doesn't support because their customers want the site to look good in IE. The lack of advanced CSS on websites means companies that develop web browsers have little incentive to support all the advanced features. Why support features that no one uses anyway? This is what the Acid2 test is about -- it actually uses some of the more advanced CSS and gives the companies an incentive to add those features to their browsers.

Re:Is CSS too hard?

[jaweekes]

But it's not just IE. Firefox fails Acid2 too. :-(

Re:Is CSS too hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your information is out of date. At this point IE is the only major browser to not pass ACID2 in either a production (eg Safari) or development (eg Firefox) version. See this for details.

Re:Is CSS too hard?

[BZ]

Just as a note, a lot of the problems Gecko (Firefox) has with CSS2.1 compliance are things that simply got changed from CSS2 (and were implementing per CSS2 in Gecko several years back). So it's not just that implementing the spec is hard (it is), it's also that the spec keeps mutating.

Why hasn't anyone noticed this is dated *2005*?

[TaoPhoenix]

"Jeff Reifman writes -- ' Last week, Windows columnist Paul Thurrott ripped into Microsoft for ignoring CSS standards with its upcoming Internet Explorer 7.0. ... Many of these bugs aren't fixed in the currently available IE 7.0 Beta 1 release, Wilson noted. ' "

Why isn't anyone else complaining that all the dates are from 2005, and that IE7 is up to Beta 3 which Paul said had tons of improvements?

Paul is growing up

[nsayer]

I'm rather impressed. I had always dismissed Thurrot as either a troll or a fanboi before, but I give him some credit for at least partially removing the MSimplant from his neck.

CSS be damned - how about a working cache?

[Anonymous Coward]

The IE "check for newer pages automatically" cache setting is broken and must be fixed if it is to be at all useful as a web browser. Try explainaing to the average user how to set IE to check for newer versions of a page/file on every visit.

I'm sure many of us have been subject to this "gotcha" one too many times.

IE's CSS compliance or lack therof pales in comparison to this issue.

microsoft is a cancer on IT that must be stopped

[Anonymous Coward]

As I've been saying for years. Sadly, stopping a cancer is more easily said than done.

HTML and committees

[metamatic]

HTML did not come about by having a committee sit for months in a room and then hand down graven tablets to be implemented.

No, it came about from taking an existing standard which a committee had sat for months in a room and defined, and handed down graven tablets describing—and then specializing it for online hypertext use and removing a lot of unnecessary functionality.

Specifically, the committee was ISO JTC1 SC34, and the standard was ISO 8879 or SGML. That's where DTDs came from, and that's why the HTML specifications still refer to ISO 8879 today.

Netscape had a good try at screwing up the ability to treat HTML as SGML, but we're on the way to fixing that as XML is a subset of SGML and XHTML is XML.

So HTML is a spectacularly poor example of rapid de-facto standard setting, being built on 20 years of committee-based standards making.

Re:HTML and committees

[NearlyHeadless]

No, it came about from taking an existing standard which a committee had sat for months in a room and defined, and handed down graven tablets describing--and then specializing it for online hypertext use and removing a lot of unnecessary functionality.

Specifically, the committee was ISO JTC1 SC34, and the standard was ISO 8879 or SGML. That's where DTDs came from, and that's why the HTML specifications still refer to ISO 8879 today.

Not really. HTML was designed to be in the same style as SGML (and many other markup languages), but it wasn't really SGML, none of the implementations used SGML technology and the DTDs came after the implementations. Furthermore, SGML was a standardization effort that followed more than a decade of implementations of markup langauages, most notably IBM's GML.

Netscape had a good try at screwing up the ability to treat HTML as SGML, but we're on the way to fixing that as XML is a subset of SGML and XHTML is XML.

And hardly anybody uses XHTML because it provides no advantage over HTML.

People do use XML as a tagged-data language, but not that much as a markup language.

Re:HTML and committees

[ThePhilips]

And hardly anybody uses XHTML because it provides no advantage over HTML.

I advise you to check what you browser renders. Most of the CMS check what visiting browser is and generate XHTML if supported. (E.g. mozilla.org is mostly XHTML, http://browsehappy.com/, etc)

XHTML is XML-compliant and can be rendered by browsers faster. That is main advantage of XHTML. For real life HTML, it's next to impossible to verify validity. XHTML solves that problem allowing browsers to skip many checks and thus render pages considerably faster.

Re:HTML and committees

[metamatic]

Not really. HTML was designed to be in the same style as SGML (and many other markup languages), but it wasn't really SGML, none of the implementations used SGML technology and the DTDs came after the implementations.

Wrong. Tim Berners-Lee's first code used SGML software; check out the section headed "FORMAT CONVERSION FROM SGML".

IE 7 is Great!

[bunratty]

I've been using IE 7 for a while now and I think it's great.
Hint: before replying or modding, click on the link!

UN Resolution

[emjoi_gently]

Maybe we need a UN Resolution issued that Demands that Microsoft comply with the W3 standard, immediately cease production of Browsers of Mass Destruction, and open its sourcecode to UN Code Inspectors.

Last year, not last week

[jazir1979]

This article is over a year old, the poster got it totally wrong. Does anybody have any info on whether the comments are still relevant in the latest IE7? I have no reason to expect that they aren't, but just checking.

Re:Last year, not last week

[zhenya00]

Petty details can't get in the way of a /. b!tch session.

Re:Last year, not last week

[GeeBee]

Where are my mod points when I need them to mod you up?

I noticed that too and searched before I redundantly posted that little fact about the article being a year old. The article made no sense in the current context and was discussing things that were old. Then I looked at the date.

Trying IE7 created problems for me because it breaks some IE dependent sites. I use Firefox for everything that doesn't require IE.

Needs A Two-Pronged Approach

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Notify the courts administering Microsoft's monopoly conviction of Microsoft's behavior w.r.t. browsers and standards. Request that they break up, no, that they shatter Microsoft into no less than 100 smaller companies, giving each 1/100th of the capital of the combined firm. Request that the courts ban Microsoft from releasing Vista or IE7, and that the product be dead-ended (killed).
   
2. Start installing FireFox or better, Opera, everywhere.
   

Great link!

[Radical Moderate]

That rocks!

Return to HTML 3.2 and No Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

Web designers just keep getting the shaft from Microsoft. But the way they act you'd think they were all gay and wanted the big M-rod again. They just can't give up their IE.

I've given up and gone over completely to HTML 3.2 and no Javascript and, for the first time, known true freedom, albeit within a limited world.

Everything in HTML 3.2 works as documented. All browsers can handle it. Crawlers can crawl my pages. The WWW is faster and my pages shorter so refreshes are quick, especially in a good browser like Opera. I don't have to worry about AJAX cracks, ActiveX, or Java bugs. I'm not wasting time on cross-browser hacks anymore, I can concentrate on working applications or pages. Life is good.

Re:De-facto standard not difficult for them - hah!

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for one of the first tier suppliers of hyundai/kia. In order to do anything meaningful work with them IE is a must. Their inter-company website is full of "Download and run some badly coded heavyweight activex code sxxt(usually ranges from 2meg to 13meg zipped, frequently updated(and must be downloaded every time it updates) at their whim, REQUIRES ADMIN PREVILEGES TO INSTALL & RUN, recently "minor version updated - no additional functionality added" to run on windows 2000 and above only)"stuff. IE is just a framework delivering and displaying them. So no win9x, no LUA, no firefox, no linux, period. Some functionality is understandable(like CATIA drawings viewer) others is just a form.

The date on the link

[Anonymous Coward]

August 2, 2005

Re:Microsoft should buy Opera (this is NOT a troll

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

That would be great if Microsoft wanted standards compliance. They don't. Windows has gone very far by riding completely on proprietary formats and software. By making sure that competitors can't touch them. Do you really think IE7 will be different?

Get the real info on IE7's CSS support

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Those looking for an answer to the posed question, "Just what has Microsfot been doing for IE7?" regarding CSS, watch this channel 9 video IE7: CSS Support?.

What's changed?

[twitter]

Nothing much has changed, has it? Just yesterday, they were still going to flunk the Acid test. That's the core of this article. If much had changed, I'd expect this guy to have updated the page. M$'s excuse, "we can't change cause that would break compatibility," is as inflexible as it is dishonest. Killing simple protocols has been a stated goal since the 1998 Halloween Papers were acknowledged. They did it wrong, justified that wrongness and have continued along with it.

Performance is not the goal, domination is.

Re:What's changed?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=88413&cid=7656 803
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=77588&cid=6896 690
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Re:What's changed?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to that same article, none of the browsers pass the ACID2 test.

"Lie said Opera was "very close" to passing Acid2. Apple Computer has already said that its Safari browser passes the test in preliminary builds. The Mozilla Foundation said it was committed to "full support" of Acid2 in its Firefox browser but did not say when it expected to pass the test."

They might get what they wish for.

[twitter]

... when IE7 rolls out, we start seeing a new round of sites that work *only* in IE7, and when you complain the response will be words to the effect of "get a real browser like everyone else uses".

That reads like a M$ fantasy and it's unlikely to happen. Very few commercial sites are now IE only and most of the best are now sanely written to standards instead of browsers. M$ has yet to finish pushing their last browser onto a majority of their users, so you'd be insane to code anything a specific version and expect it to work for even half of your customers. When those customers complain to anyone other than M$, the answer is :

• [internal thought] oh shit, there goes our sale.
• [out loud] We'll be happy to take your order by phone, do you have a credit card with you?
• [on paper] Fix that fucking site, it's costing us money!"

If they were to get the "get a real browser" answer from anyone, they would probably join the hoards of people defying M$'s lock in by downloading Firefox or installing a whole free OS. As Mozilla and free software adoption pass 20%, IE sites and even IIS served sites will sink like lead turds.

Re:They might get what they wish for.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=88413&cid=7656 803
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Re:They might get what they wish for.

[ChronosWS]

Notwithstanding the few people touched by the Slashdot crowd, a mass exodus of people to Firefox or any other free browser seems unlikely, simply because MS has a better distribution channel. Our goals as developers is to figure out how to deal with multiple inconsistent browsers as efficiently as possible, and let the market do as it will to determine who the 'winner' of the new browser wars is. But like it or not, I bet you can guess who has the most market share at the end of the day, and wishing it otherwise is just an exercise in frustration.

Re:They might get what they wish for.

[jb.hl.com]

If they were to get the "get a real browser" answer from anyone, they would probably join the hoards of people defying M$'s lock in by downloading Firefox or installing a whole free OS. As Mozilla and free software adoption pass 20%, IE sites and even IIS served sites will sink like lead turds.

Firefox, perhaps, but what normal person would replace their entire operating system because of single websites? And what does IIS have to do with anything?

IE 7

[maxrate]

If you don't like IE 5/6/7 just use Firefox and move along - why waste your time reading or writing about something you don't like?

Re:IE 7

[glowworm]

why waste your time reading or writing about something you don't like

Because many of the complaints are from web page designers and developers. These people have to deal with not only making their multi-million dollar clients pages look good, they need to make them look good in other browsers apart from IE. Opera, Safari, Konquerer, Firefox and the others, on operating systems apart from Windows... namely OS X and Linux.

While I am sure they could code their page to suit an audience using just Windows and IE we could then end up with the internet looking like it did in 1998, to wit, underlined text of varying point sizes, blink and marquee.

It is only if all the players in the browser market work towards a defined standard that developers work will be moved from coding browser hacks to actually improving what's out there for the audiences to see and appreciate.

It's not winging that they hate using the browser personally (even if they do), it's complaining that they need to do everything twice. A very real complaint.

Re:IE 7

[perrygeo]

Well lets say you're a web developer. It doesn't matter what browser YOU have, it matters what browser your users have. And the majority still use IE.

You can create a site with standard compliant HTML/CSS that works on every other browser in the world. Then you open up IE and the site is broken. You will have to spend countless hours hacking the code to get around IE bugs. In the worst cases, you will have to create entirely seperate IE-only pages and redirect users based on their browser.

I don't know of any formal estimate but I would wager that hundreds of thousands of hours are spent each year trying to tweak web pages in non-standard ways to work in IE. Hows that for a waste of time!

Re:IE 7

[maxrate]

Good point - I agree, but in the end if IE is that much of a problem, why not just put up a little message that says "Don't use IE". If majority of people don't realize there is a problem, they'll just keep using it - when M$ sees that there are a ton of sites suggesting the use of something else, maybe that will get their attention! Good idea? Bad idea? I guess it's a perspective thing really.

Peace

what about the others that are not 100%

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know MS is not going to be complient. Thats a given.

But why are the others not even 100%? Can't they get in standard? What is wrong with them?

Don't tell me that since MS is so far behind that these others can just skate with out having to make 100%. Just cause the kid who never went to class didn't get a good score doesn't mean that the others don't have to worry about being 100%.

I am just a regular user of a web browser. I don't really care. I just want to be able to see my porn.

A lot of people seem to think that MS is forcing people to stay with IE but that is not the case. People have a choice. It is easy to find and download Firefox. All my friends know about this even my friends who are the least technical.

Are you all concerned that as a web designer you will have to do extra work? As a user I don't realy care how much work you do. I just want to be able to see my porn.

Is there really a good way to get someone else to conform to standards that they don't believe in? Perhaps there are great examples of conformity in the past that you can use to get them to be 100%. Like that one experiment where the people got into the elevator and faced a different direction then the new guy getting on the elevator was used to. Maybe that could work. So everyone remember when you get into an elevator with someone from MS face to the rear of the elevator. That will make them write a better web browser. Perhaps there are even better ways to make people conform. Conformity is good! Individuality is bad! Don't stand out. Conform Conform Conform! I personaly will be happen when every ISP, Web browser, word processor annd OS act and look exactly the same. It will be a dreamy day I tell you.

I went to that newscloud site mentioned. I looked at it in both firefox and IE. To be honest they both looked not so good to me. No porn didn't help.

Again, most web browser users don't care. Its like english, I am sure you stuffy old english teach wanted you to speak a different way but in reality there is a lot of slang out there and I am ok with that.

We know Microsoft will never be close so please try to get those other ones in standard too.

Thanks
Someguy

Check a calendar

[jakertberry]

I'm not backing Firefox or IE7, but did anyone else notice that Paul is talking about beta 1 of IE7? Furthermore, did you notice that it's dated last week of LAST YEAR? Something might have changed in that small segment of time.. Just my two cents...

Fixing IE7 could mean breaking IE6 sites

[perrygeo]

If MS really tried to make IE7 standards compliant (or closer to other imperfect browsers), they might break compatibilty with IE6 sites.

Has anyone found a site that works/renders perfectly in IE6 that doesn't in IE7? My guess is no...

Maybe it will take a nuke boycott.

[Anonymous Coward]

A simple squid server with a fix of MS only VB scripts and CSS standard features. IE MS only pages past this point will no longer render in IE.

Why would Microsoft do that?

[WK1]

"How about publishing Windows without a browser and allowing OEMs to choose what browser to bundle?" How would that help maintain Microsoft's monopoly? "... I think that if Microsoft is barred from any reprisals ..." Why would Microsoft tell their politicians to do that?

Keeping Compliant

[HaMMeReD3]

I find that keeping compliant with you xhtml code helps with standardizing the layout a lot.

My css on the other hand has quite a few things that only work in non-ie browsers. When I design I do not leave out effects IE can't render, I just leave a firefox logo and hope people will switch. At least IE7 properly supports :hover effects in css, which is very important in ajax/web applications. The current hacks for IE to make :hover work only work well when you have a static dom, when you load new content that might use the :hover it doesnt work.

I'd like to see full support for CSS2.0 selectors in IE7, and I would hope to see some css3 spec type stuff like rounded borders and multiple columns. I doubt microsoft will pull through, and IE7 will probably hold back web development just like IE6 has for years. The problem microsoft faces is that they need to support all there past crap in there browsers, such as frontpage generated sites and such, if the browser was strictly compliant it could actually cause some level of disorder with how non-compliant they've been in the past.

Passively boycot

[oglueck]

My site does not actively boycot IE in terms of redirecting people to Firefox or locking them out. But my site just gives the user a worse user experience. The code is just standards compliant and looks as intended on all popular browsers except IE. On IE the page would actually be unusable, but I have included a conditional CSS to compensate the most annoying stuff. Still the page doesn't render as nice as in other browsers.

Remember the Netscape times? When the web evolved and Netscape didn't, it's market share dropped, because it wasn't able to render many pages correctly. Guess what will happen when IE doesn't render many pages correctly any more.

Boycott not necessary

[WK1]

Boycotting IE is like boycotting glass chewing, or boycotting smashing your toe in a door. It is redundant.

Re:Auto-boycot harder way

[SolitaryMan]

Simple way to boycot:
if IE --> Download Firefox Link
else --> Welcome visitor!

Seriously, I think that this can be done, but another (harder, but more effective) way: develop a page that is damn cool, but way cooler if you look at it with FF, without restricting usability to IE users. Just don't forget to notify them, that you page is cooler in FF.

It would be nice even to organize some web site, where everyone can share "FF only fancy tricks" with others.

FTP? You must be joking.

[Deathbane27]

FTP? Yes, I know about it. Sorry, but I don't know the address of a server with Firefox downloads off the top of my head. ftp.mozilla.org comes to mind (only because I've downloaded Firefox before), but it wants a login. I'm assuming Anonymous/Anonymous might work, but Joe Sixpack is going to see that, give up, and install IE off an AOL disc, making the situation even worse. :)

You can't use an FTP client to search for a server hosting Firefox downloads. I haven't had need to use the Windows FTP client in so long it would probably take 30+ minutes to remember the commands and locate the file even if I DID know the server address. Eventually, I could probably do it.

But we're not talking about me. We're talking about the potential customers of OEMs that would consider not bundling any web browser with the computers they sell. I wouldn't want to be said customer or tech support for that OEM. Even if the customers knew how to use the command prompt, even if they know how to use the Windows ftp client, how would they know where to connect or where to find out where to connect?

Meanwhile, anyone who knows they want Firefox can figure out how to use a web browser well enough to find a search engine and eventually get to the download page.

I'll say it again: Not having a browser installed = pain in the ass to get one installed even if you know what you're doing = bad idea.

Now, what the hell was with all this shit?

Are people so insecure that they need to ally themselves with a company like Microsoft and defend their piece of crap software when it's totally not necessary, in fact detrimental to the life of their computer? ... HOLY COW!! Do you really need linux users to explain to you how to use your own magnificent OS which you shelled out mega bucks for but don't even know about "ftp"?

How either of those thoughts could have entered anyone's mind from reading my post is beyond me. Who cares what browser they bundle? w3m or links would be great, assuming they're easy enough to use for Joe Sixpack to find his way to something better.

Sorry not trying to make it personal ... Sorry for coming across as a jerk! :)

I call bullshit. :)

Average Joe

[treak007]

Microsoft knows that no matter how many people use Firefox and Opera, there will always be the average Joes out there that will use IE simply because it's already installed. Also, what does Microsoft really have to lose in this battle. IE costs no money, people get it with Windows no matter what, so I don't see why Microsoft cares whether people really use it or not.

What's taking so long

[arizonagroovejet]

The other question I find myself asking along with what have they been doing, is why is it taking so long? They announced IE7 in what, Feb 05? Firefox 2 is going to be out before IE 7 is. They're making a lot of noise over a very long time and at the end of it all will produce something that's still inferior to the competition.

IE is standard enough

[IDontLinkMondays]

Well, I know this will start a flame, but here's the simple fact. For everything I've tried doing when making web pages, no matter how complex, IE did just fine and so did FireFox and Opera. With the exception of one ecmascript function that I had to write to compensate for XML HTTP in IE 6, there is no special circumstance code.

The entire application is written using EcmaScript and DOM, no HTML/XML/whatever. It's based on a framework similar to Qt in design but written for the EcmaScript. Therefore class constructors had to be 2-stage instead of 1-stage since EcmaScript is a prototype langauge and I wanted Object Oriented.

The application is very fast and is written in the style of a desktop application. This means that instead of using a poorly written AJAX style that depends heavily on server communication and intervention, the browser handles the majority of the work load. When tested on a mini-itx 700mhz Via CPU, results were admirable for all browsers tested, not just Opera.

Whenever server communication occured, the user was informed of it using a progress bar and status display to ensure the user wasn't lost wondering why the page was loading and loading when everything else was so snappy.

So what kind of stuff was on the page? There were popup dialogs, there were tabbed controls, there were multiple field input panes, there was file upload support for adding images to databases, etc.. There was even in one case code that dynamically generated Base64 encoded image data to simulate drawing (sadly this is one feature missing in IE 6)

Now the item that made this all possible... IE is the standard, I couldn't find a single circumstance where I needed to write any special code for any browser (except XML HTTP request) because both FireFox and Opera implemented more than enough of the IE standard that, so long as I used the MSDN library as a DOM reference, everything went well.

The only real drawback and I tested this with and without my framework, using simple HTML and CSS is that IE, FireFox, and Opera all interpret the absolute positioning coordinate systems just slightly differently regarding div borders, margins, and padding. Also, IE's lack of full support for float properties was mildly frustrating, but since neither Opera or FireFox could interpret the standard the same way anyway, I had to write an absolute position layout engine anyway.

So what I'm really trying to say is that if you can't work around the problems, then you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, hire a real programmer to handle programming tasks, if not, then just author for IE and ignore the rest.

And if you're one of those people that are bound to be offended by what I said, then you really have no business in computers anyway. Written standards are typically worth little more than the toilet paper they're printed on. Defacto standards are what make the world go round. As long as Microsoft Internet Explorer is the defacto standard, that's what you have to work with and if you don't like it, then leave.

Oh... btw, after only 5 more minutes development, my system worked just fine on WebKit/Konquerer. Writing this stuff is easy, but like any other form of development you have to at least try to apply some intelligent reasoning to your code.

One last note, to most people security is a non-issue. And as "proof" of this, when asked, more than 90% of all the security paranoid people I know have either :
- Provided their credit card to an operator at a call center in ('fill in your favorite call center outsourcing country here') over the phone
- Handed their credit card to a disgruntled minimum wage employee at a gas station while stepping out to fill their gas tank
- Used an ATM/Minibank/Cash Machine in a random location that either didn't specify the bank name or had a bank name they have never heard of printed on the side
- Ordered something online from a vendor even if the page wasn't marked secure

Well...

[gd2shoe]

It is if you want it to be! Why aren't you using windows? Would you be using IE if you had the ability on your OS? I thought not...

Not quite...

[jtcedinburgh]

"You see, they won't see it as a developer trying to convince them to change browsers, they will just think IE is broken (which just happens to be true)."

Not quite - they'll see it as a website that is broken. I mean, c'mon, from the perspective of your average uninformed user, if a web page doesn't work when countless others appear to work, you'd assume the site is broken.

We, of course, know better. But there's more of THEM than US...

John

Re:Not quite...

[ArwynH]

"You see, they won't see it as a developer trying to convince them to change browsers, they will just think IE is broken (which just happens to be true)."

Not quite - they'll see it as a website that is broken. I mean, c'mon, from the perspective of your average uninformed user, if a web page doesn't work when countless others appear to work, you'd assume the site is broken.

If all they see is a broken site, then yes, I'd agree that that is what they'd think, but if there is a message informing them it's the browsers fault, they'd probably believe it.

Ofcourse this all depends on the message. Something like "We don't support IE, use Firefox!" will make them think the site is broken, but on the other hand "You seem to be using an outdated browser and this site may not be displayed properly because of that. We suggest upgrading to a modern browser(links) to take full advantage of this site." would indicate it's the browser's fault for the site display problems.

Re:Not quite...

[James_Duncan8181]

"but on the other hand "You seem to be using an outdated browser and this site may not be displayed properly because of that. We suggest upgrading to a modern browser(links) to take full advantage of this site." would indicate it's the browser's fault for the site display problems."

Your sentiments are great, but I think we could recommend an even newer browser then that...

Re:Not quite...

[FictionPimp]

Hell these are the same users that believe ads on webpages that say their computer is out of date and install spyware.

Re:Not quite...

[ArwynH]

Just to clarify, by "Modern browser" I did not mean IE7... by the time that beast comes out I doubt you will be able to call it modern.

Re:Not quite...

[James_Duncan8181]

That was a Links joke...the text browser?

Re:Not quite...

[ArwynH]

*blink* doh! I meant 'insert links here', not the browser. I forgot of the existance of a browser under that name even though I think I had an instance of it open at the time. Time to get my head examined... >_>

What about the important 'Standards'?

[Anonymous Coward]

But will it support the flash tag?

Just some links

[nova20]

Why you should dump IE

Also...

According to Microsoft...

For those who can't be bothered to RTF...

[Ctrl-Alt-Del]

...note that the date of Paul Thurott's article is August 2, 2005; to be fair, the Idealog article mentioned this as an update. One would hope that MS had come a little way in the past year with IE7, but from the analysis of CSS-compliance referred to in the Idealog article, which is much more up-to-date, it's not easy to be convinced of this. Very very disappointing that the company which delivered the original technology behind AJAX e'er so many years ago can't get a standard which has been around as long and is as important as CSS2 right, if that's the case. Personally, I don't think that five years of little progress in the IE browser market is a bad thing. It has allowed a) companies to more or less catch up to the same position with regards to what they develop for, and b) it has allowed outfits such as Mozilla to catch up to them from the lamentable position that they were in when Netscape 4 deservedly bit the big one. Much as geeks love The Next Big Thing, some developers would like the programming target to stop moving, just once in a while, please?

What this needs is a Firefox extension

[AmiMoJo]

How about an extension that checks how standards compliant a page is, and if it`s particularly bad offers to automatically email webmaster@site with a little note about it. It could also detect common rendering errors or hacks.

Loosely implementing a standard hurts the standard

[aclidiere]

Loosely implementing (allowing mistakes in) a standard hurts the standard.

CSS and HTML are hurt by the fact that browsers are so buggy, especially Internet Explorer.

Allowing syntax errors in HTML makes it much harder to detect nasty layout bugs.

When debugging difficult layout bugs, at some point you will need to understand the corrections that IE's HTML parser implicitely makes. That's crazy.

The situation is the same with compilers. Sloppy or absent compiler error messages allow introduction of very nasty bugs in your code.

Boycott IE7

[The Interfacer]

Have you ever tried to use Firefox exclusively? Lots of web pages don't allow Firefox to download items that will download in IE. The web pages sometimes even tell you that you must use IE to download stuff. This is where MS is creating the problems that only they can solve. Just like when folks download videos - in my opinion, MPEG is the best format for Internet videos and always has been. Problem is, when web site designers use some form of MS video garbage it almost never works in Firefox. Also, if Quiketime or REAL is used for video, Firefox often doesn't know what to do with the videos. It seems like another attempt by MS and Billie to monopolize something else - when will they learn? All that money and no brains is very dangerous!

A small question

[Anonymous Coward]

So twitter, even not accounting for the fact that this whole thing is a huge troll because Thurrot's article is a year old, and the fact that you along with all your slashbot friends managed to - as always - end up looking like assholes... two days ago you were "Laughing out loud at the apologist". Do you suddenly agree with what Thurrot has to say? I must say that's impressive.

No

[Blu-Ray]

opensource or free software is not about being free (as in beer).

think "free speech"

oh yeh and ususally you can get it (code/binary) for free (as in beer) too!

Eheheheheh

[nnn0]

Micro$haft is based on theft and greed, and only morons would use their crap software anyway.

Windows Authentication

[bigsquare]

Only reason I use IE is that it automatically does Windows Challenge/Response for intranet applications. You have to set network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris with the names of all the servers hosting your apps in Firefox - try getting all your users to do that.

How can you boycott IE

[Anonymous Coward]

I know its not possible outright, as in terms of reality you have to support the users/customers even if they are ignorant/stubborn etc.
However im sure there are other ways for developers, such as making sites better in CSS compliant browsers. Thus indirectly cajoling the users away from IE.
To be honest im astounded as to the way M$ are going about this whole compliants thing with IE7. All reasoning points to it being in M$'s own interests to sort it out. Especially after they are so far behind as is. These big org's never cease to amaze me.
As if devlopment isnt complex and challenging enough as it is *sigh*

Re:Auto-boycot harder way

[Mister Whirly]

Everyone knows that more users will switch browsers if forced to by elitist geeks who condescend to them. I mean, your "average internet user" is highly technical, and will understand their jargon-laden explanations without a problem.

Actually showing them that visually one browser can be a better experience than another is just ludicrous...