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.""

Comments

Re:Enough already

[MightyMartian]

Instead of wasting our time with crazy back-patting uselessness, will Microsoft please just admit defeat and close up development of IE and hand it over to people who care about the Web and handle it properly? I have wasted too many hours developing sites to work in IE7 that work without further modification in every other browser.

You must be some sort of Communist.

in other news ...

[thhamm]

... Users and Web Developers Vent Over IE6 too and any version before that.

CSS support

[gihan_ripper]

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.

Re:CSS support

[MightyMartian]

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.

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.

Re:CSS support

[TheMCP]

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)

Speaking as the author of a compatibility library, I resent being called "insane".

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.

Re:CSS support

[MightyMartian]

Point 1: You're an immoral Microsoft shill. Redmond sends pathetic worms like you out into forums like Slashdot, hoping that somehow they'll convince the development community that they aren't the worst thing that has happened to standards.

Point 2: You've got me confused with another poster.

Point 3: You're an immoral Microsoft shill.

Re:CSS support

[techno-vampire]

Speaking as the author of a compatibility library, I resent being called "insane".

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.

Re:CSS support

[Bert64]

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.

Re:Enough already

[Smidge204]

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=

IE8 announced.. (of course with no details)

[ivar]

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!

Re:IE8 announced.. (of course with no details)

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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.

Wouldn't it be nice....

[witekr]

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.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice....

[PaulusMagnus]

I'm a web developer by profession, and I must say IE6 and 7 are a frustrating pair of browsers to develop for. Agreed. I've found that it's easier to design to Firefox and then test every browser thereafter and IE6 is always last because it's the worst. IE7 is much improved but it's only better because it caught up, it didn't advance the web development cause.

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.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice....

[billDCat]

I don't think that the mods who marked this as flamebait have done web development. The parent is right, all of the browsers have issues of one sort or another, some more, some less. If you don't believe me, try working with JavaScript access to nested object and embed tags in a way that's both standards compliant and works with modern browsers. This is just one example, there are many more.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice....

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think Microsoft should leave the browser business, as competition is healthy

This has my vote for the most ironic thing ever said on Slashdot.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice....

[ShieldW0lf]

Personally, I find it's such a pain in the ass to go into IE and un-lock-it-down enough that it's actually a functional web browser again so I can test with it, when I'm doing internal facing stuff half the time I'm in a rush and don't even bother to test with IE. And I've found, it doesn't really matter. I don't know too many professionals these days that don't use Firefox, and it's close enough that you can use it to get work done even if it does look a little uglier in IE from time to time.

If you're not trying to do slick marketing, you can always just dismiss IEs little quirks and let it become known among the public as the ugly but functional browser that comes with Windows before you stick FF onto it, just as they do with the default Media Player.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice....

[nick_davison]

Agreed. I've found that it's easier to design to Firefox and then test every browser thereafter and IE6 is always last because it's the worst. From experience, Internet Explorer has a relatively finite set of issues that you really have to worry about (Position Is Everything keeps a list of anything major and they've capped out at 20).

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.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice....

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

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!

Re:Wouldn't it be nice....

[cheater512]

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*

Re:Wouldn't it be nice....

[eulernet]

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.

Using IE7 sucks...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Using IE7 sucks...

[matria]

Well, that last sentence blew this comment up... Firefox most certainly does come with a spellchecker. http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/11/firefox-2-spelling-dictionary-hacks.html

Re:Using IE7 sucks...

[Kent Recal]

[...] or blur the page, so that you can't actually see anything at all... for a time.

Oh yea, that has been reported many times. But actually it's not IE blurring the screen, it's your own tears!
Stop using windows and the problem will go away.

Re:Using IE7 sucks...

[Spy Hunter]

how is having an unsigned/self-signed certificate WORSE than having NO certificate?

It's a false sense of security, leading users to do stupid things. People tend to believe that encryption is a brick wall that will protect them against anything, and it's almost true when you do both encryption and authentication, like SSL. Trouble is, on a LAN such as a public WiFi network, doing man-in-the-middle is almost as easy as sniffing, so defending against one but not the other is hardly an improvement, and outweighed by the damage done by false user expectations. Encryption without authentication is just wrongheaded.

if (document.all)

[SavvyPlayer]

{ // IE Workaround that we hope we don't have to go back and change the day IE8 ships... ....
}

Kinda funny

[TheSkyIsPurple]

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.

Another problem...

[yakumo.unr]

...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.

Re:Trash IE all you want but..

[Anonymous Coward]

A little competition never hurts...the customers.

Yeah, more browser plugins and flashing shit never hurt anybody.

Re:Trash IE all you want but..

[mugnyte]

"Microsoft Silverlight. How many pieces of flair are YOU coding?"

building up controversy?

[marcello_dl]

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.

Re:Enough already

[nevali]

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.

The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that we as web developers let them get away with it. The "just make it work" attitude of PHBs is a false economy. The correct way to deal with IE is like this:

Customer: Your web site doesn't work in Microsoft Internet Explorer
Response: The site is standards compliant. Please contact your browser
          vendor with support issues relating to their software.

That wasn't hard was it? I'm all for accessible sites that work in everything from lynx to Fx3 but my days of working my butt off to cover Microsoft's failures and incompetence are over.

Re:The problem

[longacre]

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.

Organise a no-IE protest day!

[trawg]

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.

Re:Organise a no-IE protest day!

[RAMMS EIN]

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.

The same moral level as spammers.

[weston]

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.

Re:The same moral level as spammers.

[Tumbleweed]

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?

Re:The same moral level as spammers.

[radixvir]

FYI, they removed one version of the star hack. The more useful property version still exists. #thing { width: 20px; *width: 30px; _width: 40px; } /* * for ie 6&7, _ for ie 6 only */

Parent has a halfway decent point

[mstahl]

Frankly, we have a long ways to go and this idle bitching isn't helping.

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.

Re:Parent has a halfway decent point

[Osty]

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.

This is absolutely not true. IE has had debugger hooks since forever (at least IE4, which is the earliest IE that mattered). You simply need an external debugger in order to use them. Visual Studio works great, but you can use one of the free Express versions like Visual Web Developer Express, or you can use the archaic Microsoft Script Debugger. Enabling debugging does require poking around in the Tools -> Options Advanced tab to flip the counter-intuitively named "Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer)" to off (yes, the checkbox is a negative, so when it's checked debugging is disabled and when it's unchecked debugging is enabled). Once you've done that, you can attach your debugger to the iexplore.exe process or you can use the new debugger-related options in the "View" menu to attach, break, etc (may have to restart IE for those menu options to show up), or you can just wait for something to break and present with you a "do you want to debug?" prompt.

While hooking a debugger to IE is not quite as simple as it is in Firefox (install Firebug, you're done), it does allow you to work in a familiar interface (assuming you're familiar with Visual Studio, of course) and is sufficiently powerful. Couple that with the IE Developer Toolbar for DOM inspection and Fiddler for session inspection and you have all of the tools you need to debug even the largest of web applications. When you're done, don't forget to Drip for memory leaks.

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.

Not directly to HTML, but Microsoft was responsible for creating XMLHTTP, the precursor to XMLHttpRequest, without which the whole "web2.0" "AJAXy" stuff wouldn't exist. I believe XMLHttpRequest is now a w3c standard, which never would've happened if not for XMLHTTP (and yes, IE7 finally does support a native XMLHttpRequest object so you don't have to have branches for XHR vs. XMLHTTP if you don't care about supporting IE6). Similarly, there would be no SVG if it weren't for VML (not to be confused with VRML). Saying that marquee is the best Microsoft's ever been able to contribute to the web is very, very shortsighted.

Re:Parent has a halfway decent point

[Chysn]

> The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem

        No, the really sad thing is that it doesn't just merely take up space; it has a massive footprint in the web ecosystem.

        My five-year-old son broke my heart the other day. I helped him get online and started up Firefox. And he said, "I want to use Internet Explorer. It's better than Firefox." Why does he think this? It sure as hell isn't because I'm a bad parent; it's because a lot of websites for kids have areas that only work for IE. When you try to use Firefox, you're told that you need to "upgrade" to Internet Explorer. That's the damn word they use--"upgrade."

        Okay, so how do you explain to a Kindergartener that Firefox is better even though he can't see Blues Clues or whatever? Probably the same way you explain it to an adult who can't use Firefox to watch movies on Netflix.

Re:Parent has a halfway decent point

[Osty]

Wait, are you telling me I need to get a Windows computer just so I can install a Microsoft product to help me work around another Microsoft's products bugs?!?!?

No, I'm saying that if you're going to actively modify your code such that it runs on IE (either by your own choice or by mandate from management), you're going to have to have a Windows computer in order to run IE (WINE aside, there is no difference between running a VM like VMWare or Parallels and running a separate Windows machine). If you're going to test for IE, you need to be aware of the tools available for developing and testing in IE. Claiming that IE sucks because it doesn't have Firebug is ignorant.

Obviously the ideal situation is for things to Just Work(tm), whether you're dealing with IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, or whatever other browser you're testing with. In practice, you'll have to debug your code on each of those browsers, and when you're doing so you need to know how to do it rather than just throwing up your hands in disgust and writing off the browser because you can't figure it out.

Re:Parent has a halfway decent point

[Tom]

When you try to use Firefox, you're told that you need to "upgrade" to Internet Explorer. That's the damn word they use--"upgrade." I've been using that for years on my site (see below) - only the other way around. It works, I've got 70%+ Firefox users, many who switched because of my game and aren't looking back.

Re:Parent has a halfway decent point

[mrjb]

As for javascript, it's like a whole different universe. Firefox has a great, if sluggish, javascript interpreter.

Sluggish as it is, by my measurements is around 5 times as fast as the one of IE7.

On a side note, I'm very surprised that setting the innerHTML of a table row doesn't work on IE- it will give an Unknown runtime error (very informative). I ended up writing a javascript setTRinnerHTML function that does what is really the job of the browser: interpret HTML, converting it to DOM and building up the table row like that. I guess MS couldn't have spent a day extra development time to let the browser behave as expected. A completely uninformative error message was easier to implement, I suppose.

Re:Parent has a halfway decent point

[hansamurai]

While I agree that Firefox has its many flaws (it still fails to render ACID properly You may be interested in knowing that Firefox 3 (alpha public build) passes the Acid2 test. I checked it out for myself when I first downloaded the browser and here's some other random site detailing it.

http://ajaxian.com/archives/firefox-30-passes-acid-2-css-test

Re:Oh well then

[rgravina]

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.

Re:Just plain incompetent

[domatic]

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.

Inherent problem

[Apreche]

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.

Re:Enough already

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

Re:DK - large turd in a small bowl

[grcumb]

Somehow I don't think telling your clients to move away from the platform they're standardized on is generally going to go over well.

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.

All the browsers have issues... CCs?

[SirJorgelOfBorgel]

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

Re:Go to Secunia.com

[oatworm]

To quote Secunia:

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.

Removal of star-html bug is a good thing

[vdboor]

What's even worse is that MS removed the * hack from IE6 that people were using to 'rebuild' IE6 to be more standards-compliant.

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:

#header:after { /* Standard compliant browsers supporting CSS 2 */
content: ".";
display: block;
clear: both;
visibility: hidden;
height: 0;
}

* html #header { height: 1px; } /* IE 6 */
*+html #header { min-height: 0; } /* IE 7 */

Yes, and note the *+html selector. :-)

Warning: IE7Pro site hacked

[giafly]

Parent suggests downloading something called IE7Pro. Its site may have been hacked, so please take care.

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... extract from FAQ Page

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... extract from About Page