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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.
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
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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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
And let us not forget that many Intranet sites are ancient,buggy,old crap. Hell,most of them I have run into are still using old ActiveX hacks! try getting THAT junk to render properly in any decent browser! The simple fact is MSFT HAS TO render Intranet sites the old way,since many of them ARE old and businesses are loath to update them.
Personally seeing how quick Firefox has been spreading I kind of doubt that by the time IE9 comes out anyone that isn't on a corporate Intranet will really care. And the reason why I haven't seen Firefox taking off in business is because the Mozilla Corp hasn't put out good Group policy controls that would allow admins to easily deploy and manage it. If someone at Mozilla would put out some really good Group Policy controls I doubt that even businesses would care about IE anymore. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Which begs the question, why hasn't Mozilla put more effort in making Firefox easy for enterprise users to deploy?
It strikes me as a large market they are not particularly interested in.