Slashdot Mirror
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.""
... Users and Web Developers Vent Over IE6 too and any version before that.
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=
And never will. Microsoft doesn't want to produce a standards-compliant browser. It doesn't want to produce a standards-compliant anything. It is only interested in furthering its monopoly by lock-in. I'm sure the IE7 team is under strict orders never ever ever to produce anything that comes close to being able to run nontrivial CSS, Javascript or anything else "out of the box". It wants developers to abandon competing browsers and push their customers to use IE. That was the strategy behind the mutiliation of Java, the pushing of possibly the most ludicrously insecure plugin system every known in the computing world (better known as ActiveX), and that's its purpose in making sure that IE, no matter the iteration, doesn't play well with CSS.
Now maybe the odd developer will be like the one guy in this article, and vow not to work with MS technologies, but the majority will either go through the countless extra hours of work basically writing two versions of a good chunk of their web apps or going to compatibility libraries (which is insane considering we're dealing usually with interpreted languages at both ends of the connection, so adding yet another layer seems nuts) or will push IE simply because they don't have the time or energy to take the punishment that Microsoft is doling out for being evil and communistic enough not to work strictly with Microsoft's software.
Of course, the irony of this is that when they push out IE8 (whenever the hell that is), Microsoft will bugger those developers again by changing functionality, making sure pages don't display correctly, that objects don't function quite like they did before, and ultimately force developers to in fact support three browsers; IE current, IE last version and everything else. Microsoft's so horrific that it doesn't even attempt to honor its own ad hoc standards.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...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.
However, I don't honestly believe it's in Microsoft's interests to make a better IE. If IE8 arrived tomorrow with better standards support and better performance, wouldn't we all be able to make use of those "web 2.0" (yuk!) sites. We'd then be able to support a much richer user experience online and in less time. However, this would just give the community developers a way of delivering software that would compete with Office.
Microsoft chose to lessen its support for HTML-based email because it wanted it to render more accurately in Word. Microsoft decided that so much email went through Outlook/Exchange that it was better to use Word as a rendering engine rather than IE. Why on Earth would Microsoft deliver a browser that allowed rich applications to be delivered across the Internet, essentially creating competition for them?
Microsoft will keep delaying IE updates for years to come, always trailing behind the standards-based browsers but they know that as long as the majority of enterprises and businesses keep rolling out Office and sticking with the Microsoft stack, they can delay the inevitable for a long time. It's a very similar tactic that every monopolistic computer company has used and every time it's failed.
In the meantime, I'll carry on promoting Firefox and others so that eventually IE becomes the NS4 of the browser world and I can stop dealing with a minority product.
A little competition never hurts...the customers.
Yeah, more browser plugins and flashing shit never hurt anybody.
Because, ya know, FireFox follows the standards completely...
Yes, it's more standards compliant, but that doesn't make it the golden child. Every browser has a long way to go, and we really need to SERIOUSLY push all these companies to follow them. DOMs need to be checked into, as well. Try writing rich javascript experiences for all the browsers with one code base. It's doable, but a huge, huge, HUGE pain in the ass.
Frankly, we have a long ways to go and this idle bitching isn't helping.
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.
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.
If you build websites for a living, you're going to be homeless pretty soon. I don't know many customers who would agree to throw away 60% of their audience just because their web developer is tired of working harder to make it work for everyone.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
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.
I'm just really really really surprised that marketing allowed that. More likely they didn't see it as its on a development blog. I mean, Microsoft's marketing is one of the worst parts of the company, or perhaps just the most difficult job trying to convince people to upgrade software that works as good if not better than a new version would. So they have to create all of these product distinctions and names to convince people to do things they wouldn't otherwise.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Figuring out which of 20 bugs is causing an issue is a relatively minor inconvenience if you see it as soon as it comes up. You know what you just changed so you know pretty much exactly where it must be coming from.
On the other hand, if you only find out about the issue when you've got a dozen nested elements in hundreds of lines of code and multiple CSS files, potentially with multiple bugs clashing in different ways, you're looking at hours spent tracking down a single issue.
Plus, fixing a single bug at a time really reinforces your realization there are only a small set of real issues (yes, I know people can point out thousands of minor quirks). Only fixing an issue when it has complex interactions makes each bug seem totally unique and yet another flaw. Thus your perception of the number of bugs increases.
I develop primarily in Firefox (Firebug is a godsend for helping me figure out the things that I was an idiot with). However, every time I finish a small block of code, I quickly load it up in IE (IE Tab for Firebug makes this even quicker but loses you the (admittedly small) benefit of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar).
By regularly checking in with IE, it's exceptionally rare that any of IE's bugs takes more than a couple of minutes to fix. My experience is that it's nowhere near as painful as many others seem to find it.
Similarly, because I see each bug on its own, they quickly fall in to a small set of unique issues rather than seeming like each one is yet another issue. As a result, not only do I not find it as painful, I also don't see it as being as bug riddled - just flawed with 20 or so big ones.
It may be that your perception of IE's bugs is, in part, because you develop for Firefox first and then only check IE at the end, dramatically increasing the pain you experience with each issue. You may find that, if you swap to regular itterative testing, your perception of how buggy IE is and how painful it is decreases dramatically.
I'd really make the suggestion you try checking IE regularly throughout development, fixing issues as they arise, rather than just at the end. You may find your experience is transformed.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying IE doesn't have bugs. It has a whole bunch of really annoying ones (about 20). What I am saying is that you can avoid the issue and have them make life hell or you can approach things differently and discover that, whilst an issue, it's nothing that can't easily and relatively painlessly be overcome.
From my Web development experience, IE is the only real problem. Sure other browsers have quirks, but they all follow standards well enough that if you code to standards 99.99% of the time the result is just fine. I think I've had a Safari specific bug once and a Firefox specific bug twice when my code was actually in compliance with the standards. On the other hand, I have a problem with IE almost every time I programatically create a page.
Frankly, we have a long ways to go and this idle bitching isn't helping.What isn't helping is one company who is breaking the law and breaking standards for profit. What also isn't helping is apologists who try to point out how other browsers have problems too, when realistically the problem is orders of magnitude smaller, and different in nature because none of those other browsers are bundled with an OS that monopolizes the market.
The message from the developer community and from the techie community in general should not be muddled with minor points. It should be crystal clear. IE is the single largest problem with the Web. It is illegal and it is hurting society and technological progress and it needs to be fixed yesterday!
I think you misunderstood the OP. You aren't insane for having written what appears to be a very good compatibility library and the OP didn't say you were. What's insane (to the OP) is the fact that you needed to write it in the first place.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
How about, instead of deliberately locking out IE users (and accidentally locking out some non-IE users due to faulty browser detection), we just made our web pages standards compliant, with all the glory we can muster, and let browsers with faulty implementations lock themselves out?
Bring out the translucent PNGs, the padding, the XML and XHTML declarations and the DOM access. And don't forget to let your pages degrade gracefully; use images and JavaScript only to enhance. We don't want to lock out text browsers, spiders, or users with disabilities. We don't actually want to lock out anyone. We just don't want to be bogged down by IE anymore. We want to make great web sites. If your browser fails to render them, because it fails to comply to standards...well, you can always use a browser that does implement the standards. They're freely available for every platform.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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
The number of major bugs is irrelevant.
Whats relevant is how easy they are to fix and how common they are.
The answers to that? Bloody hard to fix and you need to do it for virtually every single page you make.
More than one person has been driven insane by the bugs. *eye twitches*
You are wrong.
http://quirksmode.org/bugreports/index.html reports 122 rendering bugs for IE5/IE6 and 88 for IE7.
Mozilla has 52 in comparison.
Even when you encounter a small bug (and I did discover some !), it's really unbearable, since the browser cannot be patched, and also you cannot report a bug to the IE team.
I would like a say in what i purchase myself, but proprietary products seek to take those choices away from me. If i want to use product X i also have to use products Y and Z because X stores it's data in proprietary formats.
You get no accountability with purchased software, haven't you read the license agreement?
If microsoft decide to drop ie, not update it, change it in a fundamental way that breaks your apps - what comeback do you have? IE7 is significantly different to 6 that it breaks some apps, but you still have to support 6 as well because customers running win2k or earlier can't run 7, while customers running vista can't run 6.
Firefox won't fundamentally change things as they are working to a defined spec, and if you want to move away from firefox there are other standards compliant alternatives (webkit/safari, opera etc), or you can maintain firefox yourself if it's worth it.
While it is beneficial to be supplied with the same thing for a long time, this is what standards achieve, but you get the added benefit that the suppliers have to compete for your custom, you can push down the prices and make demands. Consider, who is your hardware supplier? How long have you used the same hardware supplier? And how is today's hardware compared to what was available 10 years ago?
Is there any reason why you couldn't switch to a different supplier if they offered you a better deal than your current supplier? What hardware supplier do your customers use? Do you try and lock your customers in to a single supplier?
Wouldn't it be good to have the same flexibility over obtaining software as hardware? Companies competing to make better products available at lower cost, and an exit strategy for you if your supplier takes a direction you don't like.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!