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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.""
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!
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.
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.
What's even worse is that MS removed the * hack from IE6 that people were using to 'rebuild' IE6 to be more standards-compliant. Talk about a slap in the face! Yeesh.
I've not checked to see how Dean's IE7 js thing works with the real IE7 - does it still work?
So, I have a compatibility library. Yes, it adds another layer... but that layer *works*, and I don't have to rewrite the code every time I want to know where the scrollbar is or how big a div is. And it's fast enough for anything I've needed to do with it, which has included making calls to it every 100 milliseconds in some instances. And because I have my compatibility library, I can do things in minutes that take other people hours or days or weeks... if they can do them at all.
I've been doing extensive Dynamic HTML work since 1999, so I have to deal frequently with the various browsers' implementations of Javascript and the DOM. And yes, IE sucks. Bad. But you know what? All browsers suck, bad. I have constant problems with Firefox too, and with Safari. Do I have more of them with IE? Yup. If I had a nickel for every time IE made me swear, I could buy Microsoft. But that doesn't make Firefox or Webkit good. They're just less bad.
And, let me point out one case in which IE is the winner, in the hope of embarrassing Firefox (and Webkit?) into doing something useful to me... IE is the only browser with a built in API for replacing the scripting language. You want to replace Javascript with, say, Ruby? IE has the API, you can write a plugin and do it. Firefox doesn't: to write a plugin for it you'd have to extensively muck about in Firefox's internals.
That's because this hypothetical client doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, if you'll pardon my French. What software the client is using doesn't mean jack squat if you're building a public website. What's important is what the rest of the world is using today, and what they will be using 12 months from today.
Standards compliance is not ideology. It's the practical application of the very principle that the Internet depends on: We have to be able to talk to one another using known protocols. Anything that subverts that principle should be treated as damage and routed around, to coin a phrase.
If a potential client doesn't care about turning 20% or more of their potential customer base away simply because they don't want to support software from more than one manufacturer, then I don't want to work for them, because they're going to be equally stupid about other decisions, too.
If you're talking about an Intranet application, then your point is moot. It has no bearing whatsoever on the the Internet, which is what's being discussed here. If I meet a potential client that wants a Microsoft-centric intranet application, then I'll politely decline the work and send them on to someone who actually likes that kind of thing. There's enough work to go around.
This argument has been rearing its ugly head since the mid-1990s. Do a Google search for 'standards compliant' in comp.infosystems.www.html.authoring and you'll find endless, tedious debate there. Frankly, I find it boring. I made the decision not to work with Microsoft anything on the web back in 1998, and it hasn't hurt a bit. I've never lacked for work, and I find I spend so much less time dealing with bugs and incompatibilities that I can actually focus on polishing and improving things instead of busting a nut against Microsoft's latest crap-du-jour.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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