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

[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.

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

[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.)

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.

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.

Don't ask

[Bloke down the pub]

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

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?

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.

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)

[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.

"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?

This article is a year old

[epohs]

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

For the best browser experience...

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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

(Seriously. The best browser is there.)

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.

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.

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.

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.