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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."
When things sound too good to be true, they usually are..
Full Tilt
I'd imagine that there are a lot of intranet apps that are coded to work around a lot of IE only quirks, and would require a lot of effort to update.
MSes volume license customers probably asked MS to make IE7 mode the default. And when money talks, companies listen.
Sounds like the same old backward compatibility for corporate intranets, sharepoint, etc.
And the GUI shown that controls this can be changed with a single click of a checkbox.
Sounds good enough for me, though I suspect nothing MS does will be good enough.
P.S. Opera is my default browser, and I have used it since they made it free, but their CTO's claim
is mostly all wet.
The dirty secret is buried deep down in the ÂCompatibility view configuration panel, where the ÂDisplay intranet sites in Compatibility View box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.
So they use standards compliant mode by default over the internet, but not for internal sites that are probably aimed at the specific browsers supported by the company's IT department. Sounds reasonable to me. Anyone have a problem with this?
MS is "breaking" that promise only for intranet pages and, honestly, intranet pages are a very different. If you think corporations are going to be updating all these internal applications when all they have to do is switch on compatibility mode, well you've got another thing coming.
And, if intranet pages stop working I'd wager a whole lot of users and corporations would just turn on compatibility mode for EVERYTHING and be done with it. One could argue even more people will use the regular IE8 mode if this is left as default.
Wait, I don't know what I was thinking. M$ IS EVIL LIAR!
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
What really peeves me is that our staff, part of a medium-size nonprofit, continually switch browsers to support our IE-only "Intranet" (thanks, MOSS!) and their favored method of browsing, through Firefox. The time we lose in training on this transition - and troubleshooting this transition - is unreasonable. It surprises me further that corporations would continue to push non-compliant products despite recent pushes for increasing computing efficiency in the workplace... Of course, MS is a business - but wouldn't their money be BETTER earned increasing my efficiency (making me more likely to purchase their products) than requiring me to take more time to accomplish everything? --Dave
Presumably because internal corporate apps are going to be a dozen years old and already so finely tuned to the intricacies of IE6 that reworking them would cost too much—and so companies wouldn't upgrade to IE8. I think The Register is being a little unfair in this case, although their comment about the icon (which takes up too much space and uses language so loaded ("discrimination") that it verges on being connotatively wrong) is much easier to appreciate. Perhaps the CTO of Opera is not the ideal person to expect to deliver an unbiased commentary.
I guess this all reflects the same woe preventing any standard's adoption: is it cheaper for the corporate sector to go with it or go against it? In the case of Intranet apps, I suspect the answer is a resounding "no," and it would most likely just be seen as breaking compatibility for an abstract reason.
I bet that, with enough poking and shit from the community, however, the MS guys could be convinced to have it default to compatibility mode for intranet sites only on Business versions of Vista.
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Only Microsoft would come up with an icon to imply that standards are bad.
I will not be surprised if standards mode is even removed completely by the time it leaves beta. They're just easing people into the idea of not using standards mode by starting on intranet pages at the moment.
Does it really surprise very many people that Microsoft is acting in the same way it ALWAYS HAS in the past?
Come on, man! Metaphorically, it is about the same as expecting a long-time multiple-repeat-offense child molester to behave from now on, based on her claim that she has "Seen the light," and has been "Healed! Praise the Lord!"
Yeah, right.
For a number of years now, whenever I hear another claim from Microsoft, my response has been "I will believe it when I see it."
And sadly, the fact is that I haven't been seeing it.
Only intranet pages are not rendered in standards mode by default,
Because SharePoint (and other denizens of the MS ghetto) does not, and never will, comply with relevant open standards.
(Should we be thankful they still use TCP? Or should we pray for the ultimate ghettoisation - let them isolate themselves behind their own proprietary walls.)
you had me at #!
n/t
you had me at #!
This is a ridiculous thing to say. Internet Explorer 6 was the first Windows version that had doctype switching, which enabled them to ditch the 5.5 engine as "quirks mode" and do things like fix the box model, add real auto margins, etc. Internet Explorer 7 included additional selector support, min/max-* support and fixed positioning. Internet Explorer 8 includes further selectors, the selectors API, CSS tables, generated content, DOM Storage, data URIs, and more.
I'm a web developer. I'll be holding a grudge against Microsoft for years to come. But even I can recognise that there has been actual progress. You don't have to invent reasons to criticise them, their actions are appalling enough without having to resort to making things up.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
This is inaccurate FUD. InTRAnet sites are internal corporate sites. That still means that any inTERnet site accessed from the corporate internet connection will still be displayed in standards-compliant mode. However, any COMPANY HOSTED site will not. Anyone saying that this qualifies for breaking a promise is really fishing for something.
Public opinion of Microsoft is a strange thing. When viruses and worms live in the holes and cracks of the Windows platform, people blame the writers of said malware exclusively and hold Microsoft blameless, or worse, paint them as the victim of being so successful.
What world do you live in ? Microsoft consistently get the blame for just about everything that goes wrong with computers in general, even when it's not even remotely their fault.
Microsoft is the enabler in most of these situations and the public needs to be reminded of that fact until it is generally accepted and understood.
By far the most common "enabler" in all computer-security-related incidents is the user.
Well, grasshopper, when you get a real job (not at McDonalds') you might find that your corporate masters have set up this elaborate internal information system that does, like really important things. And further, you might find that it was coded a number of years ago and the coders used, let's guess, Internet Explorer 6. The evil company spent lots of time and money getting it to work Just Right. They don't feel like upgrading it just year. That's "in the budget".
You, Mr. New Employee, are using this exact same code to get your work done and hence your pay check. The real world does, and likely will continue to use various incarnations of IE.
That's why you care.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I live in a much bigger world that hasn't heard of the RIAA or MPAA before, the world where most people think "PC" means Windows, the world where Linux doesn't quite exist yet.
Yes. That would be the world where everyone blames Windows (and Microsoft) whenever something goes wrong on their computer.
Is your heard buried in the sand or buried in your world?
Apparently yours is, if you think anyone except Microsoft gets the blame whenever, say, someone's game crashes, or a dodgy video card BSODs their machine.
Microsoft knows the base-line of users it is dealing with. It spends millions knowing the user and user interfaces and the like. It is the same Microsoft that has STILL not taken out the "run on insert" autorun.inf nonsense from many machines.
This is changed in Vista.
It is the same Microsoft that thought it was a good idea to put ActiveX on the Wild-Wild-Web and expect everyone to place nice.
In 1996. Got something a little more up to date ?
The same Microsoft that makes a file executable by all users simply by having a ADE, ADP, BAS, BAT, CHM, CMD, COM, CPL, CRT, DLL, DO*, EXE, HLP, HTA, INF, INS, ISP, JS, JSE, LNK, MDB, MDE, MSC, MSI, MSP, MST, OCX, PCD, PIF, POT, PPT, REG, SCR, SCT, SHB, SHS, SYS, URL, VB, VBE, VBS, WSC, WSF, WSH or XL* (probably not a complete list) extension on the file name.
You do understand that those files aren't actually "executed", right (well, except for the ones that are actually executables like .exe) ? That the shell just passes them off to whatever program is registered to handle them ?
You know, just like every other remotely user-friendly GUI shell does ?
The same Microsoft who thinks they can set up a stable server on an OS platform designed from the ground up for running user games and applications without consideration of security.
Your understanding of Windows's development is severely deficient.
Microsoft could easily have done what Apple did -- rewrite a new OS and build a compatibility layer for old apps, but they didn't [...]
Yes, they did. They just did it half a decade earlier (like Apple tried, but failed, to do).
[...] and every time they threaten to do that (as in the case of the next version of Windows after Vista) but they back off on it just as they back off on all other challenging improvements to the OS they have promised. In the end, they just repackage everything they made before and sell it to users once again.
There is no need to "rewrite" Windows NT. It is *at least* as technically capable as its peers.
Yes. Microsoft IS in fact the primary enabler. They could have fixed many of the problems I identified more than 10 years ago because they knew of those problems even back then.
The fact remains that the vast, vast majority of security problems on Windows (or, indeed, on any platform) are due to end users and third party software, outside of Microsoft's control. The only way in which Microsoft is an "enabler" is by being in the position of providing the most widely-used platform.
IE7 also was the first IE to support full PNG alpha transparency. IE6 only did it in a half-assed hackathon way that was completely useless.
The problem with IE8 is not that it's not standard compliant enough (or that it's not out yet, for that matter). This is the trend MS must follow to stay relevant. The problem is that there are still the unwashed masses of IE6 users on Windows versions earlier than XP that have to be catered for. Displaying a message like "IE6 users go to hell or update" is not going to be acceptable until IE6 has less than 10% market share.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Might want to read the article - no promises broken at all. This is for the intranet, not the internet. This is one place where the choice to do so by default (it can be changed easily by sys admins via group policy) is both logical and correct.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Netflix
There is a known compatibility issue between Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Netflix. Users of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 cannot view On Demand movies by using Netflix. Microsoft and Netflix are working together to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. This release note will be updated as soon as this issue is resolved.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949787
The CTO of Opera is the guy that proposed the concept of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I think he's one of the ideal people to expect to deliver an unbiased commentary. http://www.w3.org/People/howcome/
Who knows? Maybe you're too young to remember, but there was indeed a problem with Word 97 saving to Word 95 format. This caused a great deal of resentment in that either an entire organization and its partners had to stay on Office 95 or all upgrade to Office 97 together. A mixed environment was not simple. The only workaround at the time was to save a Word 97 document in RTF so that the earlier version could read it, albeit with a loss of functionality. The frustration was coupled with the fact that all Word documents had the extension ".doc", which meant that you could not tell which version of Word a particular document was written with short of trying to open it.
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