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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.""
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.
"Microsoft Silverlight. How many pieces of flair are YOU coding?"
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.
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.
If you build websites for a living, you're going to be homeless pretty soon. I don't know many customers who would agree to throw away 60% of their audience just because their web developer is tired of working harder to make it work for everyone.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
We're not bitching idly. We're all working three times as hard as we would have to without IE messing everything up.
While I agree that Firefox has its many flaws (it still fails to render ACID properly, for instance, and still doesn't support a lot of the newer, more interesting CSS selectors and attributes), I have to disagree.
Developing for Firefox is an experience of wishing I could use such-and-such CSS attribute, or wishing it didn't automatically slip padding in such-and-such location. It's quirky. It's definitely NOT buggy the way that IE is, though. IE's layout and rendering are so attrocious that they break things that look just fine in other browsers--something that happens only very rarely in Firefox.
As for javascript, it's like a whole different universe. Firefox has a great, if sluggish, javascript interpreter. It gives me access to a debugging console, too, that is far more functional than that in IE. In addition, I can install extensions like Firebug that make the experience almost as easy as profiling code in an application. Meanwhile, IE provides me with no means whatsoever to inspect how it is operating, no way to determine what the problem is if something goes wrong. This is unbelievably frustrating when I make my living writing web *applications*, not just web sites.
The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem; it cannot be said that it improves anything. It raises the bar for frustration tolerance among web developers but that's pretty much it. The only original idea that has come to HTML from Microsoft, sadly, has been the marquee tag, and I'm actually not really sure that it's still supported in IE.
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!
"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."
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
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.
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