Microsoft Pushes Devs With Wider IE8 Beta

An anonymous reader recommends a story about the upcoming beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8. InternetNews expects that the standards-compliant default mode will push many developers to update their sites. We've previously discussed IE8's standards compliance and other features. Quoting: "Over the years of IE's dominance as the leading browser, designers regularly tweaked their sites to get the best possible accuracy in rendering pages in IE -- most recently, the current commercial release, IE7. Now those pages will need to be changed. Microsoft originally planned for IE8 to default to rendering similarly to IE7, while super standards mode would have been an option. The outcry from critics helped convince Microsoft officials to instead default to super standards. That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

Comments

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[jeiler]

Agreed. I will admit that I have remarkably little sympathy for those who have to reconfig their sites to standards, I have to admit that's the wrong attitude on my part. Most users don't care about some arbitrary "standard," even if it was designed for optimum functionality and safety: all they care about is "Does it look good."

demo of how MS sets a standard ..

[rs232]

"at least we might have a decent amount of cross-browser standards in a few years time, as opposed to none if Microsoft simply hadn't bothered"

Well , they could have bothered while they were about cloning Netscape and making running any other browser a jolting experience and preventing Netscale from sabotaging their protocol extensions. Or in english, making web pages not render correctly in other peoples browsers .. :)

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[cp.tar]

Yes, it is a very good move.

The question is, how much good will it do them?

My estimate is that the mere fact that they were willing to change their usual policy to that extent shows how much weaker their market position has become.
Most new sites, as far as I've noticed, are coded to standards. Most of the others are no longer "Best viewed under IE 6.0" either. Firefox holds about 25% of the global browser marketshare, and over 40% in certain European countries.
Microsoft did not switch to standards because of the goodness of their software-making hearts. They did it because there is no longer any other game in town.

Of course, that does not mean they will not try to subvert standards at some later date, when they have stopped bleeding users and maybe even regained some markertshare. But for now, standards are of utmost importance -- without them, they know they will continue bleeding users to other browsers.

It has to mean something when you have the OS monopoly, when you've used it to gain browser monopoly, and now you're still losing.
I welcome Microsoft's new strategy because it will not help only Microsoft, but also all the others. Unless, of course, people fail to update their sites and Microsoft remains the only browser capable of rendering them. But they are in a minority.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[try_anything]

Microsoft is out to make you an all Microsoft shop which can be fairly pleasant but expensive. Microsoft has educated an entire generation of developers and consultants who do nothing but push Microsoft technologies in mixed shops, where they are unwanted, technically and socially isolated, and not very useful.

But once you've installed an expensive Microsoft product that is a failure because most people hate it and only a few people use it, there's a cure: just replace a little bit more of your working infrastructure with Microsoft products, and suddenly the unused Microsoft products will become vital, useful parts of your business instead of embarrassing mistakes.

So the whole project tanked in the end? Well, you can't blame the Microsoft technologies. They're all "Best of Breed" products with all the right buzzwords and bullet points. Just think of how efficient and unstoppable you would be if you had just managed to convince your employees to use it. I guess you weren't ready to be a Best of Breed business.

This is the eternally recurring story of Microsoft developers, consultants, and "process experts" who just push Microsoft instead of actually doing their jobs.

Doing their jobs, by the way, means studying the businesses they work for, finding out what features would be beneficial and which would actually be used, and figuring out how the available technologies will fit into current practices and current infrastructure. Oh, and figuring out how software can help you simplify process. More often than not, behemoth kitchen sink software does not allow you to create a customized, lightweight process for a unique business.

Most Microsoft consultants who read that last sentence will say, "Ah, here's where it becomes obvious that this guy is on drugs/inexperienced/trolling." Because their Microsoft marketing brochures -- sorry, "educational publications for developers" -- tell them that the only way to create a customized, lightweight solution is to buy the BIGGEST and most featureful product available. You wouldn't want to adopt (or, gasp, develop!) a product and find out it's missing that one vital feature that's necessary to make it lightweight.

So, instead of doing their job, they compare products on a bullet-point basis, using Microsoft "educational" materials to guide them, and work towards a vision of the future in which the more processes and supporting software features people use, the more efficient they are. It's no accident that project plans for adopting Microsoft technologies usually involve adopting tons of practices and processes at the same time -- it helps justify the expense and complexity of the software, and it helps construct a utopian fantasy in which the business will run in perfect synchrony because of the awesome power of process, in defiance of human nature and in defiance of the finite number of hours in the day.