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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.""
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?
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!
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!
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.
{ // IE Workaround that we hope we don't have to go back and change the day IE8 ships... ....
}
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 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.
A little competition never hurts...the customers.
Yeah, more browser plugins and flashing shit never hurt anybody.
"Microsoft Silverlight. How many pieces of flair are YOU coding?"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
But dk made that statement because he/she was fed up with the wasted time and effort they have to go through to develop for Internet Explorer. Believe me, I understand dk's fustration. IE can add tens of hours to front-end website development. I've implemented *very* complex designs (basically, the designer gave me a big Photoshop image and said "code this!") which required almost no tweaking for Firefox, Safari and Opera (in fact I didn't even target Opera, but it worked flawlessly) but required tens of hours of extra work to get working correctly in IE (often a change which fixed IE would break the others, so conditional CSS was needed. etc). Actualy "tens of hours" is a bit of an understatement, it was more like a full-time week for a site that took a month. Someone has to pay for this - either you absorb the cost, or the client pays for it. Either way, Microsoft's incompetence (or unwillingness) to develop a standards compliant browser probably costs the industry MILLIONS per year.
If you haven't expereinced deveoping for IE count yourself lucky. Designers will often complain loudly if some element is a few pixels too far to the left, or if there is a one-pixel gap between a border and image etc. etc. etc. If we only had to develop for standards compliant browsers, this wouldn't be such a problem. But with IE, it's sometimes almost impossible to fix those layout problems in such a way that it works on both standard compiant browsers, the current version of IE AND the previous version of IE. And if you think that these problems are not important, designers see this very differently! And of course they should - just as a good programmer strives for bug free software that performs well and is easy to maintain, designers strive for designs which are attractive, usable and meet the communication goals of the client.
*This* is why dk doesn't want to go near any of Microsoft's other products or services. If you've had a similar experience with Google, then you would he justified in s/Microsoft/Google. Otherwise, your post makes absolutely no sense.
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?"
I think of Microsoft devs as neither incompetent or malevolent. Their executives and anybody above middle management may be another matter. What they mainly are is indifferent to anything except MS products. If standards ARE leveraged, it's just a way to get things quickly working. I doubt most of them either know or care about how MS is holding back web development. The only important thing is getting the current project out the door and the specs for that come from higher up. The higher ups on the other hand use phrases like "de-commoditize protocols" and "knife the baby" so malevolent is a fair description of how they operate.
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!
Make no mistake: Microsoft have a deliberate strategy of disrupting the standardisation process, and everything they do that requires any amount of interoperability is designed with this strategy in mind.
Maybe you're too young to remember, but incompatibility was Microsoft's explicit strategy from the early days of Internet Explorer. Oh, they dressed it up in pretty language, but never forget that 'Embrace and Extend' was a phrase invented by Microsoft in the late 1990s in order to justify their subversion of Web standards. I remember attending the 1999 World Wide Web conference in Toronto where the MS kiosk was happily emblazoned with that very phrase in two foot tall letters.
'Embrace and Extend' has been Microsoft's strategy with regards to any standard they couldn't coopt or dominate from the start. They've done it with HTML, with DHCP, with Kerberos and no doubt with numerous other standards as well.
It's also true that Microsoft produces poor to mediocre software almost all the time, but that's a separate issue. Let me put it this way, I wouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but in this case we are seeing malice and incompetence.
Heh, you just got yourself a new .sig. 8^)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
"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."
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
PLEASE NOTE: The statistics provided should NOT be used to compare the overall security of products against one another. It is IMPORTANT to understand what the below comments mean when using the statistics, especially when using the statistics to compare the vulnerability aspects of different products.
Secunia advisories often cover multiple vulnerabilities. Consequently, the number of advisories issued for a product does not always reflect the number of security issues that have been disclosed. For instance, in 2006 Secunia issued more than 5,000 advisories covering more than 9,000 vulnerabilities. This is counted AFTER removing duplicates generated by Linux distributions, issues in beta software, and what Secunia considers non-issues and fake issues that our competitors and other security vendors often write about.
It should also be noted that some operating systems (e.g. certain Linux distributions) bundle together a large number of software packages, and are therefore affected by vulnerabilities, which do not affect other operating systems (e.g. Microsoft Windows) that don't bundle together a similar amount of software packages.
Additionally, the number of Unpatched vulnerabilities for a product may be affected by the fact that certain products (product bundles) consist mostly or solely of third party software (such as Linux distributions). Secunia tracks the number of issues fixed by the product vendor and not the issues reported in the third party software; this affects the statistics looking at Unpatched issues A direct and fair comparison of Unpatched issues for e.g. Microsoft Windows and Linux distributions is therefore NOT possible using the aggregated Secunia statistics. Such a comparison can only be made by tracking the upstream third party software included in Linux distributions and combining this with Linux distributions' own patches before comparing this with the aggregated statistics for Microsoft Windows operating systems. Translation: You can't compare Secunia's Linux vulnerability counts with Secunia's Windows vulnerability counts. Secunia itself says so.
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.
> 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.
...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.
To expand on this (for those reading at this deep of a level), the whole monetization of browsers is what helped push IE to be the most popular browser (given, Netscape really messed up with 4.x).
Back in the old days, browsers were pretty much non-free. There was NCSA Mosaic for a while until it was discontinued, but progress moved very fast. Netscape was the most popular replacement, and often had cool innovations that Mosaic didn't. After all, Netscape had full-time developers working on the product. As a result, it cost to use if you weren't an educational institution.
Now, Netscape was making decent money from both their browser and their web server (Netscape Enterprise Server, now Sun Java System Web Server). Companies were buying licenses for their employees, and things were going well. Microsoft rightfully saw this as a threat to their desktop monopoly, and acted.
Microsoft didn't have much time to get a competitor browser out because of the lead Netscape had on them. Microsoft thus turned to Spyglass, a company that had licensed Mosaic for commercial purposes. Under an agreement, Microsoft would pay a certain percentage of sales of their new browser to Spyglass in return for having a commercial license for the code behind Spyglass Mosaic. Thus, Internet Explorer was born. Go look at the about screen in any version of IE, even 7.0. You'll still see the Spyglass reference.
Microsoft had some tricks up its sleeve, however. The first was that Spyglass wouldn't ever see much in the way of payment. As they had agreed to a percentage of sales, their license revenue depended on Microsoft selling the browser. I guess since Netscape was selling their product, Spyglass didn't have reason to doubt Microsoft wouldn't sell their product. However, Microsoft didn't sell IE. Instead, they gave it for free to anyone who wanted it (at least with 2.0, I think 1.0 shipped only with NT 4.0). Thus, Spyglass basically gave away a huge codebase for free. Also, with Microsoft giving away IE, Netscape couldn't really sell their browser anymore. To enhance the hurt, Microsoft made sure that all the popular platforms were covered. There was even an IE for UNIX (released in 1998). Once Netscape was dying, that port was discontinued (around 2001 with the 5.0 line).
Of course, price wasn't the only reason Netscape failed. As I mentioned above, Netscape 4 was awfully buggy with some really strange bugs, where IE was more polished and worked better overall. Part of that was likely the browser wars extending extensions to HTML (embed vs object as an example) at the very least. Also, Netscape did lose a lot of their lead because of the mess of code. It really wasn't until IE 4 where you could say that Internet Explorer was honestly a better browser.
Still, had Microsoft actually charged for their browser, things could be quite different today.
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
Silverlight is not just a competitor to Flash, it's yet another attempt to kill the web as a competitor to desktop apps - really it's a competitor to DHTML. I'm unhappy they've released it cross platform, because it'll be supported well everywhere at first (enough to kill the competition), and then deprecated, and then dropped, like IE, Mac Office, Java and countless other techs. Hell, they even left IE to fester on their own platform for several years with no updates, just to slow the inevitable appearance of interactive web apps. Amazingly, people like yourself are actually falling for it once again. It's as open as it needs to be to gain traction, no more.
Thankfully nowadays more and more people won't touch anything from Microsoft, because of their past behaviour and their corporate ethos; as a collective entity, they're sociopaths.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
> but as far as I can see IE7 is reasonably standards compliant, probably around the Firefox 1 mark for most things
Actually IE 7 is better only in CSS 3 basic properties when compared to Firefox 1 (Firefox 2 outbeats IE 7 on that too). For everything else, including the total score for CSS 3, Firefox 1 beats IE 7:
http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary?IE7=on&FX1=on&FX2=on&uas=CUSTOM
Here are some highlights:
Tech IE 7 Firefox 1
HTML / XHTML 73% 90%
CSS 2.1 56% 88%
CSS 3 changes 13% 14%
DOM 51% 79%
ECMAScript 99% 100%
I could have added Firefox 2 there too, but that would have made IE 7 look ever more bad. And just wait when IE 3 comes out. The version whichs rendering engine they have been working on since Firefox 1.5 was released. IE 7 is marginally better than IE 6, but even very old browsers still beat it.
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.
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 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;
Yes... I agree... ... you're not developing for standards if you neglect the de-facto standards (as bad as that situation may be).
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
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.
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.