IE7 Compatibility a Developer Nightmare

yavori writes "Internet Explorer 7 has kicked in at last on all MS Windows OS running PCs because of the fact M$ decided to force it's users to migrate through update. In fact this has started a IE7 Web Developers Nightmare. The article actually explains that most of the small company B2C sites may just fall from grace because of IE7 incompatibility. One of the coolest thing IE7 is unable to do is actually processing form data when clicked on an INPUT field of TYPE IMG... which is pretty uncool for those using entire payment processes with such INPUT fields."

Comments

Vague FUD

[telbij]

I'm gonna grant the author a free pass on the writing since it's obvious English is not his first language. But the rest of the article seems to be vague hand-wavy FUD and anecdotal complaints. To take two of the more cohesive statements:

IE7 was supposed to comply more with the standards what in fact isn't true.

The truth is that standards were not the first priority of IE7 (they are an evil mega-corporation after all), but they did do an awful lot of work on them. Just take a look at the list of CSS improvements over at the IEBlog. They acknowledge that there's a lot more work to do, but it's clear from this that they've solved a lot of headaches for CSS developers.

And the MOST killer thing was the DISability of IE to submit data through "input type img" which actually was the whole sites data...

I'm assuming the author means forms won't submit with an <input type="image"> tag. Without even testing it, I can't believe for one second this is true. This is a major backbone of HTML going back to at least HTML 2, and used in millions of websites. If this were broken it would have been fixed during beta. Microsoft may not care that much about web standards but they do care about backwards compatibility, and a lot of their decision making process has centered around not breaking things that worked in IE6.

It's likely IE7 is going to be a headache for web developers, but this article doesn't do anything to support that argument. As a web developer IE7 hasn't really taken any of my time. So far it's been more reliable than IE6, and I look forward to the day when IE7 is the standard and IE6 is an afterthought for picky clients.

unprofessional

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty unprofessional to use the "M$" moniker in a submission. But whatever. Also it probably should not say that people were forced since they have to agree to the install and don't need to do it at all. But whatever. Typical biased press you get here from some of the folks. Many folks can be more balanced but lately we hear from a lot of "slashtards".

Re:Microsoft does suck

[Professor_UNIX]

Its as if there's a whole new generation of people at Microsoft who don't give a shit.

But that's exactly what needed to be done! The "backwards compatibility" crap is why web sites still need special hacks to display their pages differently to IE 5 and IE 6 clients than modern browsers that actually follow the standards. These platforms were broken from the get-go but people coded their sites to embrace the broken functionality while many times ignoring the standards-compliant browsers!

Maybe make your pages simpler?

[Xugumad]

Okay, firstly, I'd be bloody amazed if the pages in question validate. The guy goesn't give any link to the site, though, so I can't tell.

Secondly... if you're using lots of client side Javascript to make a site work, you're asking for trouble. Google can do this, because they have massive dev and QA teams. If you don't have the manpower to do enough testing (for example, in the beta period) and fix problems, maybe you should make your site simpler.

Every single web application I work on, worked perfectly in IE 7. Even, yes, the ones that use Javascript. This is achieved by:

• Validating all pages. Okay, they're dynamically generated, so it's possible an error will slip past testing, but this really helps.
• Testing under multiple browsers. The dev team works with Firefox and Safari, and does a QA pass under IE after any major revisions.
• Minimising use of Javascript. If Javascript doesn't provide a significant obvious benefit to the user interface, it doesn't get used.

Brick And Mortar

[nick_davison]

Our brick and mortar business went through exactly the same thing. Henry bloody Ford and his evil empire released their latest and greatest product on consumers and it really screwed us businesses that had hitching posts and stables.

One of the worst things about "Model T" was that it belched out carbon monoxide. Seriously! Compare this to a horse where the worst you have to worry about is methane! For brick and mortar store owners who didn't want to pay once again to upgrade from barns for their customers, this caused all kinds of ventilation issues. People could actually die from this stuff!

Some people say that keeping up with the times is part of the cost of doing business. But where will it end?!

I've had the exact opposite experience

[nhavar]

We have a webapp that was built for our call centers. It started out in IE 4 and then later we did some updates for IE5. IE6 came out and there were a few JavaScript things to fix-up (nothing huge) but by then we had ditched almost all of the non-standard code and moved from table layout to pure CSS layout. When IE7 came out we didn't need to make a single change to the JavaScript, CSS, or HTML. All 200+ pages just work.

Everyone was worried that because of our choices and how heavily we rely on CSS and JavaScript that we would be in for a nightmare. Luckily, not so. However, two of the products we purchased for time tracking and for defect reporting both DIE because they have user agent checks built into their javascript. When they run into the unknown IE7 string they just chirp back a warning message and don't even try to load up. How many times do web developers need to be told "browser detection is bad use object/feature detection" before they'll get it.

I don't think that I've had any problem with any of the normal sites that I use when using IE7 over the last couple of months (banking, news, mail, social). I get the feeling that the author of this article just doesn't know what he's talking about.

Re:Just in case it *is* broken

[ari_j]

Exactly. From what I've heard from my friends and family in the web business (including my sister, whose work recently won awards for degrading nicely), the main thing IE7 does is increases compatibility and conformance. From the sound of it (without reading the article, of course), this story is a bitchfest that probably stems from the IE workarounds that were poorly done falling apart under IE7, or something similar. In other words, it's partly the fault of the developers who are bitching and partly the fault of previous versions of IE, but probably not IE7's fault in any meaningful way.

Re:Mod up!!

[TheRaven64]

tosh. If it wasn't for M$, we'd be posting this using our time-sharing allocation on one of the 6 IBM computers the world would be using. What makes you think that? By the time the IBM PC and MS-DOS were release there were a large number of 8-bit computer systems, and home computing was a rapidly growing market. The Apple II was very successful, and the BBC Micro in the UK was starting to gain significant inroads (it was about the only computer you would see in most schools in the '80s). Some of the 8-bit machines ran Microsoft BASIC, but many others didn't.

Without Microsoft / IBM, we would have had Apple, Acorn, Commodore and many others competing for the desktop market. All of these got GUIs as standard before any Microsoft platform. In addition, I suspect that the lack of a single strong player would have encouraged the widespread adoption of open standards much earlier; how else would you with your Mac be able to work with your customer and his Amiga?

offtopic, but funny

[Original Replica]

including my sister, whose work recently won awards for degrading nicely.

Does she know you're telling people this?