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IE8 Breaking Microsoft's Web Standards Promise?
An anonymous reader points out a story in The Register by Opera Software CTO Hakon Lie which tells the story of how Microsoft's interoperability promise for IE8 seems to have been broken in less than six months. Quoting:
"In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default. Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise. This week, the promise was broken."
The article only says that INTRANET pages are not shown in standards-compliant mode by default.
1.) IE 8 is still in Beta. I'm sure most folks remember what that means. As in not quite feature complete yet?
2.) If people bothered to take a few minutes to read, you would see that it only impacts INTRANET sites, people do understand what that means correct?
I know a good portion of Slashdot just wants to flamethrower all that Microsoft does, but at least take the time to read.
PS: This post coming to you from IE 8 Beta2.
Domain
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Actually, you can browse and use Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) sites perfectly fine in Firefox - I do it every day without issue.
The dirty secret is buried deep down in the "Compatibility view" configuration panel, where the "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View" box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.
The article uses some dubious statistics to back up the sensationalist headline ("intranets account for about half of all page views on PCs"), but ignores the reality: many intranet systems use IE-specific extensions (normally because they were developed a while ago) and, unlike websites, don't often benefit from constant revision and attention from a development team. To me, viewing intranet pages in compatibility mode by default makes sense.
Amnesty International
The same way IE7, IE6, IE5 and I'm pretty sure lesser IEs did? IE has long allowed different security settings for intranet vs. internet pages.
As I hinted about above, the dynamics of Intranet and internet are very different.
Change on the Internet is very difficult because site developers must develop towards the most common denominator and this is rarely the cutting edge. Even if it's better for everyone to move towards the standards, there is a disincentive for anyone to move first.
An intranet is completely different. If a company finds there is an advantage to moving off of IE6/7 and on to IE8, well they just need some guy in IT to sign off on redeveloping any things that would be broken.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Have you tried using the IE Tab Extension?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Use this.
you had me at #!
...planet Earth is still revolving.
Anyone who thinks IE standards support has improved from IE7 to IE8 is sadly mistaken
Well it passes Acid2 now (as long as it's hosted at webstandards.org) and currently gets 21/100 on Acid3 (compared to 14/100 for IE7) so there must be some improvement in IE8.
Tasman had excellent CSS support for its time. In its later incarnations, it had good DOM support and even had support for some parts of CSS 3. Even Internet Explorer 8 won't support web standards as well as Tasman did years ago. For instance, Internet Explorer 8 still won't support DOM 2 Events. Tasman supported that specification five years ago.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The broken box model problem was where Internet Explorer 5.5 and below included padding in the width of content boxes when it should not. This brought about some of the earliest CSS hacks, for instance Tantek's box model hack, designed to feed Internet Explorer 5.5 and below one width, and other browsers another width.
Internet Explorer 6 introduced doctype switching, where pages using an up-to-date document type got a better rendering, and invalid pages got the Internet Explorer 5.5 rendering with all its associated bugs. Internet Explorer 6, in its better rendering mode, had the box model problem fixed. Unfortunately, there are legions of web developers who don't know what they are doing, and kept writing invalid code that kicked Internet Explorer 6 into its buggy backwards compatibility mode. And then complaining that widths weren't right.
When Microsoft was planning on releasing Internet Explorer 7, 5 years after they fixed the box model problem, they were still swamped by clueless web developers demanding that they fix the box model problem. Somehow it has passed into "common knowledge" that Internet Explorer 6 did not fix this bug. It's not true, you fallen for rumour and hearsay. Load up Internet Explorer 6, feed it a valid, HTML 4.01 Strict document, and test it for yourself. They fixed it in 2001, seven years ago - it's time to stop complaining about that particular bug.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Loaded up IE8 and seemed to be working fine for a while, until I loaded up Netflix to watch an Instant View movie. Got the good ole Not Compatible screen that you get if you are trying to run anything other than IE6 or IE7 to view Netflix movies. Guess it was too good to be true after all. And yes, I tried setting the site to compatibility mode, and it still did not work.
Don't be ridiculous. Of course it's configurable by group setting. The default is a good one so that existing corpnets can upgrade without worries. And any IT department that's ready to make their corpnet standards-compliant will CERTAINLY know how to either (1) incorporate the DOCTYPE tag to force standards mode on each page, or (2) set group policy so that all machines in the company use standards mode by default instead.
for a cheap +5 informative
Adjective
glib (comparative glibber, superlative glibbest)
1. Having a ready flow of words but lacking accuracy or understanding; superficial; shallow.
2. Smooth or slippery.
Derived terms glibly & glibness
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IranAir Flight 655 never forget!