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Users and Web Developers Vent Over IE7
Spinlock_1977 writes "ComputerWorld is running a story about developers frustration with IE 7, and Microsoft's upcoming plans (or lack thereof) for it. From the article, "But the most pointed comment came from someone labeled only as dk. You all continue to underestimate the dramatic spillover effect this poor developer experience has had and will continue to have on your other products and services. Let me drive this point home. I am a front-end programmer and a co-founder of a start-up. I can tell you categorically that my team won't download and play with Silverlight ... won't build a Live widget ... won't consider any Microsoft search or ad products in the future.""
That was a very pointed poignant comment.
Ignore them at your peril.
You must be some sort of Communist.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... Users and Web Developers Vent Over IE6 too and any version before that.
Finally IE7 supports transparent PNGs, but CSS support is still poor at best. Here's a table that lists support of various CSS styles on a per-browser basis. IE doesn't look good.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
It just proves it's old news.
Nope, just an AC that copy-pasted a paragraph from the article that far too many mods are not going to read and waste their points thinking he's being original and intelligent.
Nothing to see here, move along...
=Smidge=
Seemingly to combat the hate, Dean Hachamovitch (GM for IE) has posted on the IE blog an announcement for IE8. The big news ? that IE8 will be called... Internet Explorer 8 !!! huzzah!
This just in - multiple frameworks available that provide the balance that you need between cross-browser/cross-platform compatability and feature set. And what do you know, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in that space too, so you're not forced into using any particular one.
To the web developers reading this: Wouldn't it be nice to be able to write totally standards-compliant markup and code and not have to taint it with all the hacks that are practically a necessity these days? It almost seems like an impossible dream (unless your website design is dead simple).
I'm a web developer by profession, and I must say IE6 and 7 are a frustrating pair of browsers to develop for.
I use the Web Developer toolbar extension for Firefox, which conveniently lets me know if my webpages are following standards and if there are any errors on the page. It's a bit depressing when you've developed a perfectly standards-compliant page, and then are forced to break standards, create Javascript warnings etc just so the page renders properly on the IE browsers.
I don't think Microsoft should leave the browser business, as competition is healthy.. but they have polluted the market with these strange browsers, forcing web developers to have to deal with these issues. It will be a triumphant day for us web developers when we can stick to standards and not have to degrade/hack-up our code in order for the majority of the public to be able to view it as it was intended.
Free electronic music for you!
Full Tilt
The above is actually true, BTW. Replace Google with whatever you want. If "dk" can stick it to Microsoft, then so can I.
Random people posting on teh internets, for great justice.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I have yet to develop for IE7 (indeed, most of the time I just try and make sure my websites look alright in the various Linux based browsers I have around, including Lynx fo course). But I've had to use it a lot in the last couple of weeks.
I hate it. There are little things, such as having to tab twice to get from the address bar to the search bar (in Firefox it is only once...), re-arranging all of the buttons (the back and forward buttons are too far away now, the refresh and stop buttons are too small and in an inconvinient place etc.), lack of spell checker (as you can probably tell from my nasty spelling in this post) and other simple UI issuse like those.
As well, often I've noticed that it will freeze the rendering of a page for no apparent reason, or blur the page, so that you can't actually see anything at all... for a time.
This is not to mention the inability to save a page by right clicking it (useful when Javascript hides the menu bar), the persistent attempt at getting me to save pages in "WebArchive" format (MHT), no matter how many times I select something else, and various other things.
Another thing! It refuses to let me go directly to a secure website that has been signed by itself (and not be a 'signing authority')! Again, no matter how many times I go to the website it throws up the same stupid page, we reccomend that you don't go to this website... BUT I HAVE TO TO DO X (check email, whatever).
In short, I've noticed few good things about IE7 as a user (the addition of tabs and the search bar are the only two things), and many bad things.
As a developer, I shall continue to ignore IE unless I happen across a copy of the browser while I'm actually thinking about developing.
Insert generic IE hatred/criticsm here.
{ // IE Workaround that we hope we don't have to go back and change the day IE8 ships... ....
}
Does that include the puerile dollar signs and the "ha ha" bit, or should those be ignored?
After all, the troll made a valid point until he linked to a shock site or whatever it is.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I have a friend who is unfortunately a very big Microsoft fan. He has a Zune, an Xbox 360, Vista, and anything Microsoft possible. After IE7 comes out, we are hanging out and he asks: "Hey, I just got the new internet explorer, and I don't really like it that much, what do use?" He's used Firefox ever since.
The last couple sites I built were heavy with more DOM shuffling than I like, and lots of AJAXy goodness.
I developed them in Firefox, tested them with Safari, and didn't give IE a thought.
IE7: All functionality worked fine, with one or two very minor formatting differences. (which I'm not going to do anything about)
IE6: Completely and unusably horked. Fortunately I don't have to care.
Thank goodness for internal only sites.
Is it difficult to keep the sockpuppets straight, or do you just forget?
Oh wait, the other account is in karma hell, so you can only post twice a day with it. I guess that explains it.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
No I have to call bullshit on that.
IE7 Might not be the best browser out there, but it is leaps and bounds better then IE6. I think the real disappointment here is that they aren't going to develop it any further and fix the bugs. There is room enough for IE7, and if they fixed their crap I wouldn't have a problem using it.
...is with a 6 year development gap a huge number of casual users have forgotten what it is to upgrade/install a web browser, or simply never known, and don't see it as something they ever need to think about.
Unless you know enough to disable automatic updates on Win XP, you already have IE7 installed, thanks to Microsoft's roll-out of IE7, sneaking it in the normal update. I had to disable auto-update to prevent IE7 install which would have sunk me. I have touchy web-apps which would not run in IE7 so I had to hold off. A lot of people, unknowingly were given IE7 and probably wouldn't have clue number 1 how to roll back to IE6.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I thought web devs were thoroughly used to IE having its quirks. You think IE fought netscape, opera, and firefox only to comply in the end with somebody else's standards? LOL.
Websites and simple web apps must first be compatible, so the problem is not IE7 more than IE6.
Complex apps might benefit by targeting only "standard browsers" like Firefox and Opera, if you have to use a complex app you're literate enough to install a second browser, and the dev effort to reach compatibility takes resources away and prevents good but not cross platform stuff to be used. I'm not talking only about svg and xform, but little things which make a huge difference when you're behind a web app for hours: IIRC on IE6 you couldn't pick the correct entry in a long drop down menu by typing the first few letters when it's focused.
So this outburst of noise might just make the scheduled revamp of IE7 a "MS listen to us" propaganda stunt.
Does IE7 have a revamp? Well, FF3 is round the corner and opera is fast.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
It's better than IE6, that much is true.
It's still very much broken, though. It doesn't have as many major issues as IE6, but it still has its own pile of quirks (some old, quite a few new) that you end up working around in most sites of a reasonable complexity that you build, and it still doesn't support lots of things that every other browser of more than 1% marketshare has had forever.
In other words: IE7 sucks. IE6 sucks significantly more, but IE7 still sucks.
Having spent several hours today tracking down a CSS interaction between style="vertical-align: middle" and dir="rtl", (works in Mozilla, fails in IE7, fails miserably in IE6), I am in total agreement with your sentiments.
Seriously, there is a way to fix this mess. Get everybody to use Firefox (Ok, Opera and Safari are good too).
There is some holiday involving gift giving coming up. Perhaps somebody would like a nice shiny fiery CD from the Mozilla store?
At the w3schools, the top browser is Firefox at 36%. OK, OK it is a techie site not a general site. And yes, if you add IE5, IE6 and IE7 it comes to 57% beating Firefox. But still, for the first time, in Sep 2007, the column for Firefox becomes the king of the hill. Since IE6 is going down, till IE7 overtakes Firefox, it will keep the number 1 spot for sometime to come.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Unfortunately, DK is irrelevant. Most of the premium content on the web, which makes up for 90% of what average Joe's access is designed/run by large corporations. These corporations know not to isolate a large market share, therefore, those sites that don't work with IE only kill themselves, because the main services work fine with Joe's PC, so he sees the others as inferior.
customer: "We standardise on the MS platform, what can you offer us?"
DK: "No i swore off it on some random blog, can't go back on my word now!"
customer: "Good day to you sir"
I feel sorry for this guy's staff if he thinks he should be the one driving what customers want, not the other way around.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
You know what I was thinking would be cool?
A day organised where all web developers can band together and intentionally not make their sites work for IE, just for one day.
I can't think of anything that would be a more effective protest. A single day where every IE user couldn't access a significant number of sites might make Microsoft sit up and take notice.
Thats what I tend to do. I produce web pages which are as generically compatible as possible (meaning I have to give up on a lot of nice features sometimes), usually checking them in Firefox, Safari, Opera etc, then if necessary I tweak them to ensure they aren't completely broken under IE. As long as they are readable under IE thats good enough. I really could care less what MS does with IE, its a sub-par product being developed in a haphazard and irresponsible manner for the sole purpose of supporting Microsoft's monopoly further. I don't think anyone seriously in the know uses IE if they have 2 points of IQ to rub together, the security problems alone should be enough to steer most people away from it. Of all my friends and relations I can only think of one who uses IE on a daily basis, the rest use Firefox.
If we all ignore IE, and continue to support the standards that other browsers are working to support, Microsoft will eventually have to develop their browser to support those same standards. Its percentage has been steadily dropping, and I think that each new version will continue that trend.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
For some reason, I resisted the idea that Microsoft's browser incompatibilities were malevolent and intentional.
The kicker for me, though, was seeing people implement Javascript layers that addressed the inconsistencies. In their spare time. For free. It completely demolished the idea that any kind of technical difficulty was in the way. It's been almost four years since Dean Edwards released the IE7 js layer and since then, Microsoft hasn't even managed to roll that much support into their product.
Personally, I put whoever's in charge of Microsoft's IE product development team on the same moral level as spammers. Much in the same way spammers end up wasting your time and gumming a fantastic common resource, Microsoft's product wastes the time of thousands of web devs and holds the web back.
I honestly don't think that anyone's gone far enough in expressing the level of contempt they've earned.
Tweet, tweet.
alright, mow that astroturf...
We're not bitching idly. We're all working three times as hard as we would have to without IE messing everything up.
While I agree that Firefox has its many flaws (it still fails to render ACID properly, for instance, and still doesn't support a lot of the newer, more interesting CSS selectors and attributes), I have to disagree.
Developing for Firefox is an experience of wishing I could use such-and-such CSS attribute, or wishing it didn't automatically slip padding in such-and-such location. It's quirky. It's definitely NOT buggy the way that IE is, though. IE's layout and rendering are so attrocious that they break things that look just fine in other browsers--something that happens only very rarely in Firefox.
As for javascript, it's like a whole different universe. Firefox has a great, if sluggish, javascript interpreter. It gives me access to a debugging console, too, that is far more functional than that in IE. In addition, I can install extensions like Firebug that make the experience almost as easy as profiling code in an application. Meanwhile, IE provides me with no means whatsoever to inspect how it is operating, no way to determine what the problem is if something goes wrong. This is unbelievably frustrating when I make my living writing web *applications*, not just web sites.
The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem; it cannot be said that it improves anything. It raises the bar for frustration tolerance among web developers but that's pretty much it. The only original idea that has come to HTML from Microsoft, sadly, has been the marquee tag, and I'm actually not really sure that it's still supported in IE.
As I said, this is a good first step for Microsoft, and a good first step for moving the web into an environment where we can have development again(as opposed to the years of semi stagnantion and work arounds we've had since IE 6.
It is however, not anywhere near enough, and Microsoft has as of yet not shown any real indication that it's changing its ways and treating it's web browser division as a serious part of business.
Part of it of course is that while up to date browsers are vitally important for all sorts of future developments, they're hard to monetize, and they tend to lessen the strength of Microsofts major product.
It's fucking awesome.
.NET Framework 3.5, XBAP link will open a sandboxed instance of a full-blown app. This means you don't have to fake it in HTML anymore.
It's sort of like HTML for true apps, except:
1. You have a "real" programming language backing it, you can do whatever you want with it, even processor heavy computations. It's FAST.
2. All HTML niggles are fixed. You don't have to dig around in Google to figure out how to lay out a piece of UI. It's just obvious.
3. You can deploy your apps as *.xbap pages. As simple as that. If the user has
4. Modern UI things that were a giant pain in the ass now don't require much coding aptitude - you can focus on the guts instead. Reflections, halos and transparency out the wazoo.
All of the above assumes you only want things to run on Windows, however. But the new crop of Microsoft dev technologies (updated ASP.NET AJAX, WPF, WCF) and Visual Studio 2008 are really good. Add to this a blockbuster release of SQL Server, an OS and a web server with fewer vulnerabilities than Linux counterparts (Windows 2003 and IIS 6), and you begin to see a worrisome picture. Worrisome to the open source community, that is.
In a perfect world, we'd stop complaining about how Microsoft are forcing developers to jump through their proprietary hoops in order to render what would otherwise be standards compliant pages. Instead we would continue developing pages that are completely standards compliant, until the public perception of IE was "Oh that browser that makes pages look like crap... what's that Firefox thing you've been telling me about?"
No, MS developers are just plain incompetent. Malevolence gives them far too much credit. To be malevolent, they would actually have to understand, plan and execute - while they cannot actually do any of those, as proven yet again by the Vista death march project.
Do not underestimate fools. Better ones are born all the time and Microsoft is hiring.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You mean we should cheer Microsoft on while they crush yet ANOTHER product? I mean, we already had Windows Desktop Search rammed down our throats to kill Google Desktop Search. Nice thing about that update is that WUS won't let you remove it and it slid by unless you had a fairly hidden checkbox unchecked.
But more to the point, how is Adobe going to give us monopoly lock-in over Flash? PDF is an ISO standard now. Flash has a GPL implementation now. Silverlight? Microsoft will use it to hurt Adobe, then turn to screwing over customers. Yeah, it'll get Linux support... the same way Macs got Microsoft Office "support" (i.e. left to rot on the vine the second the threat to Microsoft's monopoly is neutralized).
No offense, but even if I were to believe that Adobe had some kind of terrible plans for locking us in, they simply don't have the ability to screw people over that Microsoft does. I don't trust Microsoft at all and I don't see anything in their entire corporate history that makes me doubt that decision.
But perhaps you can fill me in? Just what terrible things is Adobe doing or planning to do that make you root for Microsoft? Yes, competition is good. But this isn't "competition", this is Microsoft working to gain monopoly control over yet another market by leveraging their other products. When their only goal in "competing" is to eliminate competition, well, it's just not the sort of thing I'm going to cheer for.
It's Javascript support is still somewhat funky too although I admit you see more cross-broweser support issues with Javascript in other browsers too. CSS in Firefox, Safari, and Opera is usually really close on the first try while Javascript can have unexpected errors across them still. Still, IE is still the worse offender and that combined with the pain of getting CSS to work with it is annoying. I make my code work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera then bother with IE7 and finally bother with IE6 last if at all. I still fight with IE7 on a daily basis to work around weird or broken behavior.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Hi Twatter.
I bet if you go back into "ancient" history, like 1995, you will find similar statemts for every major release from MS
Might even be amusing to collect such comments, as an illustration of the famous saying that those who ignore history are condemmed to repeat it
In any event, this sort of thing Hasn't seemed to hurt MS
firefox coulda woulda shoulda been the ie killer: i personally have turned, what 20 people onto ff, and routinely used to write letters to the contact us/webmaster link at websites, complaining of poor ff compatibility
No more - all that money from google, they pay their ceo more then they spend on RnD, F*ck fire fox and Mozilla, I won't do a damm thing for em anymore
Had a "bug" yesterday in IE (which threw no errors) and finally found this on w3c schools as the official example of how to add a select option. I wonder if they were trying to be funny in subtle way.
// standards compliant // IE only
<script type="text/javascript">
function insertOption()
{
var y=document.createElement('option');
y.text='Kiwi'
var x=document.getElementById("mySelect");
try
{
x.add(y,null);
}
catch(ex)
{
x.add(y);
}
}
</script>
Excellent question.
Am I the only one (besides you) who thinks that a web interface for almost any sort of application completely sucks?
The X guys have had right concept for, what, 20, maybe 25 years now. X may have its flaws, but it's a far cry from pounding in screws with a hammer that is web 2.0.
Can we get an X Server in a browser plug-in and stop the madness?
No matter what the do with IE7, the problem is many people still use IE6. I'm seeing about half of IE users on 6, and half on 7. This means that no matter what Microsoft does to IE7, we still have to develop for multiple platforms because people are still using 6.
The other problem is this. I'm a web developer. In order to make my job easier I use many software tools. Most of those tools, like the web developer toolbar and Firebug, are Firefox extensions. No version of IE really has any tool that can equal Firebug. I was considering moving away from Firefox because of its instability and poor memory usage, but I am so dependent on the extensions that I can not leave.
The result of this is that I will always develop for Firefox where the handy developer tools are. Then after I am done, I will tweak and hack until it works under IE. Really, Microsoft created this horrible situation, and now there's almost no way out. Honestly, they should just get rid of IE and have Firefox be the default browser for everybody. That's about all they can do at this point.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
What the fuck do you know about "reasonable discussion"?
"Khrushchev might not be the least evil world leader out there, but he's leaps and bounds better than Stalin. Deaths in the gulag are way down, and far fewer people are being abducted and tortured by the KGB than were by the NKVD."
I feel sorry for you if I or my employer somehow end up as your customer. I'm pretty brutal about the "nobody ever fired the guy who chose $dominant_vendor" BS.
Do you really hate twitter so much that will say a GNAA troll "made a valid point"? You need to get a life outside of Slashdot.
I'll see your point and raise you one.
If we agree they are not "merely malevolent", maybe they are "incompetently malevolent"?
They are different adjectives, so they CAN be combined:
Malevolent: Implementing grand plans against usability/standards, etc. Except:
They then thrash around like bad movie villains and can't figure out WHICH malevolent trick to try!
"Let's make IE6 non-standard."
"Let's make IE7 differently non-standard."
"Let's make an incomplete format and pretend it's a standard."
"Let's promote the upgrade."
"Let's support the broken legacy lest someone defect to a standard."
"Let's retire older versions."
"Let's resurrect older versions when the new ones don't sell."
Add your own further ones.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It is inconvenient, agreed. But then again, truth often is.
You don't actually argue that "There are almost no reasons, apart from ideological ones, to move away from MS products," you just assume it and beg the question. Often there are many good, cost-effective reasons to switch. If I can develop my product more cheaply for an alternate platform, then my product can be sold at a lower price; if the cost of the product is large compared to the cost of switching users from IE to Firefox, for example, that would be an excellent reason. If my product is more stable than my competitors, but is on an alternate platform, once again there are quite a few situations where it would be smart to switch. If I offer other "benefits", (whatever those may be in a real business world), they will switch.
You seem to live in some kind of alternate reality where all products are equal in all cases, where all salesmen are equally talented, where the cost of development is the same for all products on all platforms, where all developer pools have equal talent and cost, where all infrastructure is the same, and so on ad nauseum, where the only distinguishing feature in the world is "ideology". That's trivially untrue.
Unless you're little parenthetical comment is a strawman: the choice is to completely abandon all MS products completely, or to be a completely MS environment. And that's just plain weak. You don't have to drop Windows to go to Firefox, you don't have to drop Windows desktops to go to Solaris servers, you don't have to drop Windows servers to go to python; if you want to, you can run KDE on OSX (if that made sense in some situation). To lock yourself into one vendor under some mythical idea of support costs is just plain stupid. It's like claiming that you have lower support costs if all your housing contractors restricted themselves to hammers - "I know how to replace a hammer, but a saw is a completely different tool".
But the one reason I will absolutely NOT use FF is that when I press ctrl-N, I want a brand new window. I have tabs turned off in IE. I don't care to use tabs. I ant a new window to open up with all the history and current page from the page I am opening it from. Where is that!
Define "works". If you're fine with the slow rendering, broken DOM, memory leaks, etc, then so be it. The thing is, people like you shouldn't have the right complain when pages don't display properly, if you can't be bothered with upgrading.
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
As a web development professional (and long before that a software development professional) I can feel the pain of most people who are complaining here. I must say I do not feel the same about IE7 as a lot of others here feel though. Sure it isn't perfect, but I hardly spend time fixing things for IE7. For IE6, that is another story though. Now I must admit I have written my own build system that automates a lot of tasks for me, and it also includes creating IE-compatible CSS files for a lot of common CSS hacks (read: the ones I use) that can be included with a conditional comment. This saves me quite some time. But still, for the design I am handed, if you would take the FF2 front-end development time as 100%, I'd add 35% for IE6, 5% for IE7, 5% for Opera and 5% for Safari. Development is obviously done in FF as this has the best developers tools.
To be honest, I've run into so many quirks in all 4 major browsers alike (IE/FF/Opera/Safari) that I'd almost say I hate them all. As someone on IRC said a few days ago: I hate IE 1 MS, and I hate all the others several milliMS, but I don't love any of them.
IE7 still has issues with PNG's (just use AIL as in IE6, it works better, it's actually faster, and you have to do that for IE6 anyway), you can't use fading effects on text because of the cleartype issues and developers tools are just not nearly as good as their FF counterparts.
In the other hand, I've been playing with FF3 (and posting bug reports like crazy) and it breaks. It really really breaks. FF3b may pass the ACID2 test, but that's about all it passes. It has broken pretty much all the complicated sites I've tried in it. Sure it's a beta, and a lot of issues will be resolved, I just wouldn't be surprised if FF3 final still breaks a lot.
Opera, yeah, let's talk about Opera. The latest Opera is worse than FF3b. 9.2 is totally bugridden. It seems that every bug I run into, I upgrade to a newer Opera (every month or two) and it's fixed. Sure this says a lot for how hard the Opera guys are working and fixing things, but it's till bad. Opera 9.5b? I'm surprised to find it in that quirksmode comparison. According to that page it does lots of things it doesn't actually do - or only does half. Again, 9.5 breaks, and it breaks bad. They even had the nerve to 'fix' the mousewheel to now use - and + indices as the other browsers do. That's a good thing, if it weren't for the fact that pretty much all mousewheel JS depends on Opera doing it the other way around. Should we talk about all the redraw bugs Opera suffers from? Seriously it's amazing how may artefacts you see on screen that disappear by minimizing/maximizing (and other such operations that force the window to completely redraw). These are not really HTML/CSS rendering errors, it's just redraw code where corners have been cut that shouldn't have been. Sure it's fast, but if this is the price you pay....
Safari? Oh yeah Safari. It's bitchingly fast. Too bad the rest of the interface is slow as a dog. Really, who came up with the 'sliding' message box animation? Yeah there's an error, oh, hey, let me just wait 7 seconds on a really stupid animation that's not even anti aliased just so I can click OK. Webkit good. Safari interface bad. And it has LOTS of quirks as well (and I'm talking about v3 here, not v2, that's a horror of biblical proportions by itself).
Just saying. IE7 isn't 'the doggs bollocks', but neither are the other browsers. And with the betas of FF3 and Opera 9.5 I'm almost scared for the future, it doesn't look well so far, but at least there's hope in those departments.
Which brings me to my real point. Conditional comments. Sure, they may be bad practise, and yeah, they bloat. In the meantime, in the REAL WORLD, things need to be fixed. I can't sell to a client that we can't do something correctly cross-browser or it takes XXXX more hours because of quirk A in browser B that simply cannot be fixed without a bunch of javascript that does the SAME THING as a conditional comment would, but EVEN LESS mainta
And see for yourself.
> Yeah, more browser plugins and flashing shit never hurt anybody.
Tell that to that monkey everyone was punching!
I feel your pain. I'm a dinosaur, but even I've figured out that Firefox and Opera (it runs on my PDA) are the way to go. I keep IE around for when I occasionally do an on-line virus scan (they usually use ActiveX) or when a web page gives me problems (very rare). Sooner or later I'll take a look at Safari, just because it's there.
I simply cannot understand why people don't do what I've done as a matter of course. I'm no genius, so it isn't that friggin' hard. My Aunt, who's 80, asked me to install "that Fox thing you use" about a year ago. As soon as she caught on to the "tabs" idea, she went nuts.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The world does your QA, test cases, regression tests. For free. In detail. With examples of how it should look.
And you still can't get it right.
But you can make VS.NET, ASP.NET, silverlight, SQL server, and advanced algos for DRM that update immediately when they are cracked.
Conclusion: this is intentional.
> customer: "We standardise on the MS platform, what can you offer us?"
If somebody has some great web-based application, that is just what I need, I'm not going to turn it down just because I would have to download a free browser.
You can still standardize on the MS platform if you use firefox. Ever hear of adobe, intuit, symantec, macafe, or autodesk? Those companies have products that are used by thousands (millions?) of shops that standardize on the MS platform. Just because you use windows doesn't mean you have to use microsoft exclusively.
I have worked in several shops that have windows on every desktop, but lots of people put firefox on their desktop also. It is very common.
Though IE7 is still a mess, it would save developers thousands of wasted development hours if a sufficient enough number of people switched from IE6 to it.
A big part of this low conversion rate is the "genuine advantage" testing Microsoft now requires in order to download and install IE7. So in trying to force low-income people to purchase Windows they are costing developers millions of dollars in wasted development hours each year.
Quite frankly, IE6 is a major bottleneck in web development. It is retarding the development of web technologies.
exactly like Microsoft is doing? I'm old enough to remember MS before they were the 800-pound gorilla, but they always had the attitude...
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
</generic IE hatred/criticism>
Fixed that for you.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
...IF Yahoo News Video would work in it. Tried nearly everything I've Googled, still no video on Yahoo News. Works fine in Firefox, seems Firefox has its head on straight.
"A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
You assume mods promote groupthink for being "original and intelligent".
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Install EXPLORER DESTROYER and protest immediately.
interesting
There is simply too much glass..
Developers do drive end-user environments.
Case in point: SAP. Deployed in many, many corporations across the world. Uses the IE HTML ActiveX control.
And, in the version that's widely deployed, doesn't work with IE7. (I believe the latest version does work with IE7)
So there's no IE7 rollout in many corporations, simply because SAP doesn't work with it. If J. Random User wants to install IE7, that's fine: if their PC isn't locked down, they can. They won't be able to submit a business expense report with SAP, though.
Peter
Well they had to.. The abuse of IE 6 bugs in the star-html selectors is so heavy that pages would break each time the IE 7 team fixed a bug. Standard-compliant web pages are filled with hacks like these:
* html ... { height: 1%; }
Do you really want that to be rendered at 1% in IE 7? That's what your code really states, and it's what IE 7 will render because they fixed the expanding box problem. That bug is abused heavily to enforce containment for the floats in IE 6, since IE 6 magically enlarges the box if is too small.
I haven't had any real problems when the star-html parser bug was removed. IE 7 renders almost everything like Firefox because Microsoft fixed most of the bugs. There is one thing that I did have problems with, which is missing support for :after. This is typically used to enforce containment for standard-compliant browsers.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to work arround that problem. A min-height of 0 will also trigger "hasLayout", and cause the box to contain all floats. So a nice way to clear floats without structural markup becomes:
Yes, and note the *+html selector. :-)
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
And what in the hell do i care?
A noone found a fund to found a start-up, and inform all of us that he is not going to use Microsoft product.
What this has to do with me?
Seriously, it is an irresponsible decision to not use someone product just because you say that is a "devil" company. Have you evaluated and you rejected them? From the post it seems that not.
After all, it still has the major part of the market that it seems you are involved.
I like IE 7 and it's new functionality is nice, but I still want to have the old layout of IE6. I really don't understand that a company with 90 some percent of the market would make such a large layout change without having the ability to go back to the old style. I don't thing anyone way really complaining out IE6's layout, it's sort of the tried and true. I noticed more people (like myself) wanting more functionality like themes, plugins, tabs, safer surf experience, but not a new redesigned layout I'm sure that IE8 will have a better theme support. oh well Firefox works
IE v Firefox. Windows v Linux. Blu-Ray v HD DVD. When is /. gonna stop raising the same old arguments over and over again? Haven't we got anything better to do with our time?
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
I have stopped coding for IE about a year ago. I write only standard markup now, and the browser can display it however it chooses. I found that I was coding for four hours to get the layout that I want, then adding another eight hours of aggravation to make it work in IE6. In wine/browsercam. Because IE doesn't even run on my platform of choice.
I came to the conclusion that if developers stop coding specifically for IE's bugs, then end users will see it for the crap that it is and switch. Call me a dreamer (but I'm not the only one), but as I code for a hobby, I can afford to take the risk. Those who insist upon using a broken browser can see a broken webpage. At the bottom of each page I display a "this site does not support IE" message with an explanation and an [paid] link to Firefox. I make about $10 a month from that link, so I'm not in it for the money. But that means that I've educated an average of 10 people a month. That is more satisfying than the money.
For an example, take a look at http://what-is-what.com/ (disclaimer: my site). Note that IE7 displays it just fine, but in IE6 it is almost unusable. That's fine with me. The browser wars are back, but this time it's not BrowserX vs. BroswerY. It's Internet Explorer vs. W3C standard code.
And no, I'm not some linux/firefox fanboi gone extremist. Quite the opposite: I'm not coding for _any_ browser. Just standards-compliant code and let the browsers do with it as they please.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Exactly. Having been involved in a high end Ajax application once we found out that even though we had awesome code, the issues with deployment were so bad that the whole site had to be scrapped and rewritten in more generic html plus a little bit of Ajax. The issues of browser performance, roundtrip delays, dom issues, css issues, bwwggh I hate them.
Having never programmed Flash, I just have this question: since Flash is pretty much everywhere, wouldn't just programming your site in Flash be a better option? Can you really build a functional site in Flash (as opposed to useless eyecandy)? Flash is a virtual machine isn't it? Could one build a "compiler" to convert ones favorite language to Flash virtual machine code?
If Java applets were quick loading (instead of taking ages to start up) would we use java applets for web apps?
Just some random thoughts.
Smidge204: Moderation +3; 60% Insightful; 20% Offtopic; 20% Informative
game kid: Moderation +1; 100% Insightful
=Smidge=
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Isn't it rather a good idea to have double standards for browser? Means more work for developers which surely can't be a bad thing Ask your client do you want to support IE or Mozilla or both? IE = £ FF = £ IE+FF = ££ Simple innit?
Actually, tabs can be disabled in Firefox. Just install TabMix Plus.
Ignore this signature. By order.
The choices on that CSS styles comparisson seem deeply unfair. There are lots of questionable choices, for example it slates browsers for not including a non-standard Mozilla only atrribute that isn't part of the specification. They seem to be carefully chosen, test of random or the most common attributes would be fair but it seems the author picked them himself with no reasoning given. I've yet to come across Opera based CSS issues (only major problem is Opera hates curly quote marks and seems to have a limited selection of standard fonts) but there are some major Mozilla ones that aren't represented there. Lack of support for negative z-indexes is one that had to cause me to do some extensive recoding of a site recently
I can almost guarantee you that WPF is going to go the same path as ActiveX did, i.e. It will be used by companies that are Windows only internally on intranets, it will get used by a tiny minority of general windows web developers, the rest will almost certainly avoid it like the plague for the very obvious reason that their sites would lose customers if they were only usable by Windows users with .Net version x.x only. And all those who do NOT code for .Net on the backend (and, believe it or not, that is most of them) will most likely have no benefit in developing for .Net on the frontend then.
Eventually Microsoft will give up and, in say 8 years, come up with the next idea which, too, will go down that same path. Ad infinitum.
I can just surf the wave created by my own supplier Jeebus, you really are one stupid bastard. After all the years of Micorosoft's "partners" getting fucked over after they are no longer useful to Microsoft, I would have thought that just about everyone knows better. You know why, dumbass, WinCE is not the most used OS on Smartphones and Symbian is? 1. Because WinCE's a buggy, slow OS with a terrible UI ans 2. The majors companies in the mobile phone arena had seen what Micorosoft did to all their "partners" in the past - use them until they were no longer useful and then break the partnership and fuck the partner over. They did this starting with IBM, the did it to Sun, with Netscape and they tried to do to Linux in general via SCO.
So what will you do when MS steals or breaks your business? You locked yourself into a so called de facto standard, in your own words, and then you'll be fucked when they're no longer useful.
What blows my mind is the continual high use of IE6, as evidenced by many web browser stats.
The only people who would be forced into using IE6 would be Win2K and earlier users (who make up, at most, some 10 % to 15 % of the market), WinXP users who are still on dial-up and therefore on SP1 or so,internal company installs where IE6 is mandated due to site compatibility, and pirated WinXP. IE7 has been an mandatory install for some time now on WinXP, but obviously not on pirated WinXP.
I would love to know what real precentage of WinXP users are using pirated WinXP. If it really is as high as 30% (or higher, since many cracks exist for IE7 and Vista already), I think MS is heading for some real problems.
Another kick in the face for developers is that to test a web page properly you need to test in all browers and Microsoft makes it a pain in the ass to run both browsers on the same machine. You are better off leaving IE6 on your machine and testing your pages in Firefox since the majority of pages will render similiarly in IE7 and Firefox.
Without IE, web developers would be twice as productive so half the current web developers could lose their job. Think about that and burn a candle for Microsoft.
You claim to be in a typical web development environment... but how about testing your products on what your users are actually using. Look at your web logs and see what browsers/OS your visitors using. I'm not sure that there is much value in developing the coolest web site ever (tm) that is only accessible to the elite that share your typical set up. Web developers... stop whining and make your web sites work in the real world. This includes testing (what a shock) on a wide variety of browsers, monitors (not everyone has that dual 30-inch setup like you do) and OS. I believe that would be part of what your employer would be paying you for.
I see what you did there...
From a web developers perspective, IE is simply a POS. It takes longer to port AJAX-based features to IE than it does to iteratively develop and test them in Firefox. FF proved great tools (Firebug, Web developer toolbar) to speed the process and has logical JS behavior. Who knows what kind of crack they deal out to their developers at M$. You can't even get an accurate line number from IE for an exception, you need to fill your code with logging and/or alerts to find the source of an error. Even then, it just points out the location. The error message is too vague to mean anything. Scripts don't load as expected, you cannot do the kind of dynamic loading that you can implement in FF. ... IE causes pain... IE causes pain... (*nermaljcat rocks back and forth in the fetal position)
I use virtual machines to run IE for testing. This gives me a double win - not only do I get to run multiple browsers, I can keep the VM sandboxed (no shared host drives) and restore the VM to a checkpoint before every run. It's a pity this isn't really practical for most end users since the state of their installed browser actually matters (bookmarks, browser history, plugins, and for some people persistent cookies and certificates they need would all be lost), but it's great for testing.
I shoulda learned to play them drums
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It isn't because of marketing-- it's because of exclusionary deals with PC manufacturers back in the day when MS-DOS was the dominant "OS", and DR-DOS was its only competitor.
Microsoft has used exclusionary licensing deals with the distribution channel companies to ensure they are the only OS sold on PCs. That stranglehold has worked effectively, to the point where, when competition has arisen and MS is legally barred from such tactics, OEMs are still hesitant about crossing Microsoft. This is slowly changing (SEE Dell & HP for examples), but it's still dangerous for OEMs to cross Microsoft.
MS has known from the beginning that controlling the distribution chain is the key to maintaining a monopoly, not marketing. It's all about leaving the customer no choice whatsoever, which suits the customer fine-- choices mean they might make the wrong one. That's why there are so many fanbois out there, whether XBox vs. PS3 (they both suck), GNU/Linux vs MS-Windows vs Mac (they all three suck), etc.
Really, the computing world right now is a shit buffet. Every choice is a bad one.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Aye, and there's the rub. This has happened so many times that it can no longer be adequately explained by stupidity. There is a *definite and undeniable* pattern of abuse that points to one primary explanation: malice.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Oh yes, the joy of IE conditional comments... now I have to scatter my hacks across 2 or 3 ie specific stylesheets AND I even get the benefit of letting my CSS hacks spill into my other markup. This is not a proper solution... this is a worse hack than what we were doing before.
Internet Explorer is trash. Always has been, and from the looks of how they are acting now - always will be.
IE6 has serious CSS issues that increases the amount of work required for Javascript logic.
.class1.class2 { ... stuff to do only when an element has both classes ... }
For instance, it's extremely flexible to assign multiple classes to an element to affect layout. Using Javascript to manipulate the various classes assigned to an element makes the Javascript logic easy to implement and easy to understand, and makes the CSS pretty simple, too. Selectors can look like:
Unfortunately, IE6 CSS selectors are seriously broken. IE6 selects *all* elements with class2, *not just* elements with both class1 and class2. This makes the Javascript much more convoluted, and less-obvious to write, as you have to do things like "class1_class2", and constantly manage your combined classes.
It sucks, it makes *much* more work, and it's harder to debug.
This is just one example of how it's not just a matter of carefully coding your CSS to work around IE6 layout issues. The repercussions are pretty extensive, from the DOM to the Javascript.
In the end, IE6 *is* hard to code for.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
in-page searching is still super sucky in IE & I can't imagine why that is, in this day & age. It seems to me like it regressed, actually - I thought that at least before you could keep hitting "F3" to "find next" but tried it yesterday & unbelievable it doesn't do it.
As far as in-page searching is concerned Firefox got that one right ages ago, IMO.
Because IE6 is completely rotten in block level construction and is hell to write front end code for. Check out End 6! for more info. Sure, IE6 works, but technically, Netscape 4 does as well...
I can't take credit for this, but I read a wonderful snippet somewhere that coined a different phrase, about people who don't know their burro from their burrow...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I used to work at a big multinational corporation, and the intranet was set up to be IE-only -- and would obnoxiously remind any non-IE user of this fact whenever we logged in, showing only the warning and locking us out of anything else. However, a quick change to the user agent string in Firefox (google for it) to identify us instead as IE users allowed us to bypass the dumbshit "warning" and access about 98% of the intranet's functionality (all we were excluded from was some of the more nitpicky Sharepoint pages, and "View Page in IE Tab" worked just fine for those).
It might be worth a try for your kid's sites too. :)
HTH,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
IE6 was faster but crashed a lot. IE 7 is an all around pig. Stick to Fire Fox
Paul E. Bahre
I still yelling my first phrase:
"And what in the hell do i care?"
I still believe that he has taken the wrong way. He is risking to loose the most possible clients.
You refuse microsoft's product again without evaluating them.-
About the standard compliace of the explorer, you forgot that it is a piece of software that his development cycle started when the standard about the web was still draft or on their early days. After all, it has to work around with all of the web developers who dont follow the standards and just want a browser to show their site as they think that should be shown.
And even mozilla doesn't fully comlpies with the standards, and every believes the opposite doesn't know the basics.
Why i dont here anyone yelling about the "non-standard" implemantion of the tcp-ip, or the sql language in the MSSQL, or the HTTP protocol on the IIS, or i dont know what else. You find the answer to my previous phrase...
ps. I believe that i havent to mention that i m software engineer too. That isn't change anything about my post.