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

Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

Before anyone starts bitching about how much IE sucks and how it's lack of standards is nothing but a burden on anyone, understand that this is a decent move by Microsoft in the right direction.
I know, I know, it's almost too little, too late, but it's better than nothing and as long as this trend continues, 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.

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."

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Unforunately, it's not that simple. Previous versions of IE were broken enough that standards-compliant HTML and CSS would not render properly. So if you wanted the majority of people to be able to actually use your site, you /had/ to be aware of - and often code around - IE stupidity, for all but the simplest of applications.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Snover]

Uh. min-width is in IE7. I'm surprised you don't know that if you're testing "primary in Internet Explorer".

Not to be high and mighty, but you really really really should develop against a standards-compliant browser *first*, which means any one of Konqueror, Safari, Opera, or Firefox, and then hack IE once you're all done using conditional comments. Since all the browser vendors other than Microsoft do a good job of adhering to standards at this point, by testing against one of those browsers you can pretty well guarantee you will be functioning in the rest of them. It makes much more sense than to test on the outlier (IE) and then try to fiddle with it until it works in everything else.

I'm quite confident that none of my sites will need to be updated for IE8 as long as Microsoft are doing their jobs, because the sites are written to conform to standards and only use conditional comments with special CSS for browsers <= IE7. That means that when IE8 rolls around, it will get served the same standards-compliant code as everything else and (for once) will not break on it.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[jmusits]

Browser specific stylesheets.

If people were using these instead of horrible CSS hacks to make their pages work within IE then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Unfortunately too many people are still using CSS hacks to make their pages render properly.

By using browser specific stylesheets, assuming that IE8 is actually standards compliant like FF, then IE6 and IE7 can continue to load their stylesheets to fix their problems and IE8 will only load the non-specific stylesheet as FF does and then all will be good.

Since you place the browser specific stylesheet after the generic one the styles in defined in the browser specific stylesheets override the ones in the generic stylesheet, while the ones only defined in the generic one cascade down. This is the beauty of Cascading Style Sheets.

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:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Snover]

I strongly disagree. Unless you want to end up having to do like this article suggests and make a bunch of changes every time a new browser comes out (and maybe you do -- I bet it's good for business), it makes much more sense to test against something that you know adheres to defined standards and then doing minor fixups for IE at the end.

If you're writing and testing against IE, and you write a line of CSS that doesn't do what you expect and change it to make it work, but the reason it wasn't working isn't because you wrote it wrong but because IE calculates some dimensions incorrectly (read: hasLayout), then when you get around to testing it in everything else (and by "everything else" I mean "Firefox", since this is what the IE-first crowd seems to think means "everything else") it's broken. Now compound this issue 20 times, because there are 20 distinct things in the CSS that cause IE to fuck up. Maybe there are also some combinations of things that trigger a bug. So now, instead of writing hacks to work around IE's brokenness, you are writing hacks and sending different code conditionally to "work around" the browsers that are rendering it properly. Suddenly, when IE8 comes around and fixes the bugs you're relying on in IE, you've got a broken Web site again. It's just a bad idea, and getting things working across all the other browsers, frankly, takes a mere fraction of the time it does to get things touched up properly for IE.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[ptlis]

The user-agent string is not a reliable indicator of which user-agent is being used (as counter-intuitive as this seems), a much better methodology (that several other people have already mentioned) is to use IE conditional comments to serve additional stylesheets to specific versions of Internet Explorer after the main stylesheet to override only the specific rules required to get that version of internet explorer to display the content as expected.

This has several advantages:

• the ability to have different rules to handle bugs in specific versions of IE.
• if future versions are released then they'll ignore the stylesheets targeted at older versions (so if IE8 is as good as it's been made out to be your documents should render correctly without any additional work)...
• and if there are still some some small bugs then IE8 can itself get a stylesheet designed to fix just these.
• unlike methods that rely on the UA string, it is guaranteed only to be applied by the browser you specify (because browsers other than IE see the conditional comments as just plain old HTML comments (relying on the UA string would mean that UAs pretending to be IE would not be incorrectly served the IE hack filled stylesheet)

This is the methodology I prefer to follow with the sites that I develop, and after the experiences I had testing compatibility and fixing various layout problems that remained in IE7 I can say that it definitely pays off. Personally I'm hoping that IE8 will be close enough that I can finally dump IE conditional comments entirely once the older versions have disappeared and relegate it to the pile of no-longer relevant skills alongside the ability to generate pixel perfect layouts using tables & invisible spacer gifs and the ability to consistently beat almost anyone at Perfect Dark multiplayer.

Let's Bash Microsoft!

[h4rm0ny]

So basically, Microsoft, listened to their customers, went with the better default mode (and it is better that they do this), and the Slashdot article ends with "But it makes more work for administrators - boo!"

*sigh

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Macthorpe]

I would have summarised like this:

- IE7 not standards compliant
- Slashdot posts article complaining
- IE8 standards compliant but not by default
- Slashdot posts article complaining
- IE8 standards compliant by default
- Slashdot... posts article complaining

I can only echo your sighing...

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

I think the complaint isn't so much that they're implementing a proper standards mode, more the fact that it has taken so long for them to do this.

People kept getting peeved off expecting Microsoft to start implementing some proper standard support (something which was expected of them in IE7) and then getting annoyed when they do a half hearted attempt at it.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[FooAtWFU]

That's only because Slashdot has both Complainers and Non-Complainers on any given topic, and the Complainers are the ones who enjoy posting most. So they do.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only echo your sighing... Get a room guys!

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[pete-classic]

I'm not defending the summary, but it is worth remembering that Microsoft actively undermined web standards for the last decade or so. It is laudable that they are finally getting on board with the program, but the reason these sites need to be re-worked is that Microsoft intentionally archived and maintained browser dominance with their own "take" on how web standards should work.

I don't see any reason they shouldn't shoulder the blame for the cleanup costs.

-Peter

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[dal20402]

retards that still use IE6

Not everyone who uses IE6 does so by choice. The admins at my last workplace refuse to upgrade, install an alternate browser, or allow users to install an alternate browser.

From a user perspective, the best thing about Microsoft's decision in IE8 is that it will force IT admins to phase out IE6 as sites increasingly stop working with IE6.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[thue]

The web developers will have 6 months to insert

<eta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

on their pages. Nothing else is needed to ensure their pages will continue working in the new IE. If they can't be bothered to do that then I don't care if their pages break...

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[jalefkowit]

If moving to IE8 is going to "break" your site, it's already "broken" for anybody who views it in any browser other than IE. That's about 20% of the browsing population (and more every day).

If I was a corporation and my web development team had been shipping a site that flat didn't work for 1/5 of my customers, I'd have fired them long before this.

Lazy dumbasses

[Daimanta]

"that, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

Well, if you don't code to standards, that's what you get. I don't feel sorry for them.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[pezpunk]

just to play devil's advocate here, you're suggesting a designer should code to standards, and let the page be broken for 80% of his visitors? i don't think many designers would keep that job very long.

"it's better than nothing"

[TW Atwater]

That pretty well sums up the entire Microsoft experience.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Kjella]

That pretty well sums up the entire Microsoft experience. For those trying to mix Microsoft and non-Microsoft software, or that haven't paid the latest upgrade fees. Once you go a little past e-mail and word and into corporate software though like Sharepoint and Microsoft CRM, I'd say it's the norm rather than the exception. Try going with IBM or CA or SAP or IFS and you'll find they all tend to work much better with their own products than trying to piece together a best of breed. Make no mistake, Microsoft is out to make you an all Microsoft shop which can be fairly pleasant but expensive. The other option is to find alternative software for all of it, they rise and fall together. Some are quite good and the rest dragged along, so despite the best efforts by many there hasn't been that much falling...

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Anonymous Coward]

Just design for actual standards and leave idiot IE users high and dry..

From the actual transcript from Brian's Performance Review:

Boss: Well Brian, I see that since you took over the web site that complaints about our website have gone up 80 fold and we've lost more than half our customers. What do you make of this?
Brian: They're all idiots.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[memojuez]

You're absolutely right. American Businesses are more worried about reaching the most people, if non IE users, like myself, can't render their page correctly, I am insignificant consequence to mass marketing to them.

It's a shame that it took a European company like Opera Software to force European Regulators to stop the Microsoft's take over of the Web.

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.

Unfortunately???

[VMaN]

This is anything BUT unfortunate.. Once agreed upon standards are the norm everyone will benefit, and it'll save a ton of work in the long run.

yay for MS on this call

Pity the poor administrators

[sfritsche]

"That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

The only "unfortunate" thing about the need to retool web sites is that it could have been avoided by coding to the standards in the first place.

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 .. :)

Microsoft is losing their competitive advantage

[FranTaylor]

One of their big stated reasons for buying into their infrastructure is that they offer a stable platform for developers so they don't have to keep doing more work every time Microsoft upgrades.

This reason is rapidly falling by the boards. First it was Visual Basic, which has changed so many times that there is no hope of old code running. Then it was the Windows API, where many things that developers did, originally with Microsoft's blessing, now cause security warning dialog boxes in Vista. Now it's their interpretation of HTML, which they convinced many web developers to follow instead of the standard.

Every time a developer codes to a Microsoft "standard", they had better be prepared to make extensive modifications at the drop of a hat.

Hopefully Microsoft's customers are catching on to this trend.

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[FishWithAHammer]

add a disclaimer at the bottom, "If your user agent has MSIE in it, then this page was served as text/html. Maybe you should stop using MSIE if you are, or change your user agent if you aren't." Or...you can make it work for them and stop bitching.

Nobody really cares what work you have to do in order to make a site work for them. Your whining doesn't serve the purpose you want it to.

Sad, but true.