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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.""
... 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?
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.
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.
It's better than IE6, that much is true.
It's still very much broken, though. It doesn't have as many major issues as IE6, but it still has its own pile of quirks (some old, quite a few new) that you end up working around in most sites of a reasonable complexity that you build, and it still doesn't support lots of things that every other browser of more than 1% marketshare has had forever.
In other words: IE7 sucks. IE6 sucks significantly more, but IE7 still sucks.
For some reason, I resisted the idea that Microsoft's browser incompatibilities were malevolent and intentional.
The kicker for me, though, was seeing people implement Javascript layers that addressed the inconsistencies. In their spare time. For free. It completely demolished the idea that any kind of technical difficulty was in the way. It's been almost four years since Dean Edwards released the IE7 js layer and since then, Microsoft hasn't even managed to roll that much support into their product.
Personally, I put whoever's in charge of Microsoft's IE product development team on the same moral level as spammers. Much in the same way spammers end up wasting your time and gumming a fantastic common resource, Microsoft's product wastes the time of thousands of web devs and holds the web back.
I honestly don't think that anyone's gone far enough in expressing the level of contempt they've earned.
Tweet, tweet.
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.
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.