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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 article only says that INTRANET pages are not shown in standards-compliant mode by default.
I think I'm going to put a "Download Firefox" button on every website I make from here on out. Assholes.
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
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.
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
...another reason for me to stay with Firefox! sometimes i feel tempted to switch to IE8, but i heard it's not easy to get it to run on Ubuntu. >:)
Do not trust this signature.
When has Microsoft ever created a true web standards compliant browser?
Show me, and I'll retire to the jungles in the Amazon.
slashdot rocks
Note that you can't run a strict Standards mode intranet and use compatibility mode for the Internet. Hm... What's that about? Does Microsoft perhaps sell some non-standards compliant intranet services?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
See it as a broken browser icon.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why is this even considered news worthy enough to report. This goes on all through the picture, to quote my wife.
UNIX is truth, the Console is life. Use Evolution to send e-mail and not virii.
Microsoft is in my "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me" category. I don't believe much of what MS says. No more that I believe most politicians. Doing so in either case just leads to frustration and disappointment.
You misspelled "based pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking hypenosys".
It's correctly spelled "based pr ?!firm?! scriptdead mindphuking hypenosys".
I wouldn't say that personally. I don't think that the security issue is a morality problem so much as they apparently don't employ people that are going to say that something doesn't work.
I'm not sure what other explanation there could be. MS hires some of the best experts in the world and yet has an OS which really, really doesn't reflect the talent. It's almost as if the CEO is demanding the design be a specific way without keeping current on technology.
You can suggest immorality or conspiracy, but realistically most of the things which cause Linux, Mac, *BSD, etc., trouble cost them money as well.
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.
Yes, in the name of unconditionally appeasing standards preachers everywhere, let's push a browser that could render a huge number of especially smaller businesses crippled due to their internal web apps being left broken from a usability perspective.
"Intranet" translates to "enterprise network" in the real world. Enterprise web applications are pretty much all written for IE compatibility. Taking this away by default would be pointless and downright ridiculous. Leaving it in, but letting you flick a switch once your apps are standards compliant, where exactly is the basis for outrage in that?
Take that back! MSIE is excellent for downloading Firefox.
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.
So let me see if I get this right...
Internet Explorer has three rendering modes: normal (IE6), standards (IE7) and super-standards (IE8).
Depending on the DOCTYPE, either "normal (IE6)" or "super-standards (IE8)" will appear.
For pages that appear in "super-standards" mode, they may appear broken if the page was built for IE6/7 and has an improper DOCTYPE. They put a button next to the link that someone can click to shift into the legacy rendering mode that looks like a broken page because most users are going to look for an obvious icon.
I'm not seeing the problem here.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
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 #!
already so finely tuned to the intricacies of IE6 that reworking them would cost too much
NOBODY SAW THAT COMING!
you had me at #!
Check if the site is on a routeable IP (or on a local subnet). Another is if its hostname is in the public DNS. Etc.
you had me at #!
Use this.
you had me at #!
At this rate, the shareholders will sue.
Can you [deep] link to SharePoint content by URL?
What functionality is missing when you use a browser other than IE?
you had me at #!
...planet Earth is still revolving.
Lets (that is us. The public) be honest.
They have always done that. Always!
MS is not to be trusted on anything (unless, of course, they come out with a statement saying: We are making an OS that will kill you and then rape your corpse. Then we would get ads featuring Seinfeld showing you the lighter side of having your corpse raped...) and we know this. They have done it consistently over the years.
The broken promises. The corruption. The underhanded dealings. The lies. The theft. The monopoly practices. Jeeze...
Honestly. Lets get a show of hands: Who of you, (yes even you; 7-digit-UID MS Fan Boi.) are surprised?
-RG.
What are we? Children? I cannot believe anyone can be adult, hear the word promise, and consider giving it any seriousness. Microsoft or anyone should never promise anyone anything. Just my advice.
Beyond that, IE 8 is still beta so I'd wait to see the final result. I know I will not be using it much because I am on Linux 90% of the time. It better be slipstreamable though.
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.
Sure, please define "broken". How is a browser supposed to know that the designer intended to position a div 100 pixels above where it's actually rendered?
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.
The original decision was wrong.
Which would you prefer (and no you don't have a time machine)? A browser that, by default, works with all existing web sites or one that, by default, doesn't?
In any case a standard is a nonsense without a standard implementation and there isn't one for "web standards".
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Of course, it's interesting to note that Hakon Lie has a vested interest in preserving quirks, because his company Opera has built its business on emulating IE (so called "IE5 bug-compatible") in mobile browsers.
So naturally, Opera would be opposed to any move by Microsoft to curb the chaos and make web pages easier to render. They couch this in terms of backward compatibility, and in fact Hakon Lie and other Opera employees event went so far as to found a new standards body to push their own agenda, and started with similarly threatened browser vendors as members. (Contrast this with the W3C, which invites both vendors and users of a technology to hammer out a standard that serves both ends of that economic stick.)
So, why support a Microsoft decision that seems so harshly standards supporting, as Joelonsoftware points out? Perhaps because a harsh position is unworkable, and perversely leads to delays in adoption of IE7 and IE8 with their new features and new implementations, thus leaving more time for Opera to milk the IE5 bug-compatible business, while they build up their new standards.
Oh, and it seems like the "backwards compatible" mantra has been dropped a bit, with all the hoopla over dropping "apparently unused" attributes such as "rel" from HTML5.
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
Given the choice, I'd rather just have to put up an FAQ page explaining how to "fix" IE8 (and point to that link when necessary) than to do what I've had to do up to this point: Build a page that's standards compliant, then look at it in IE and figure out how to work around the broken parts. So this will mean less work for me as a web developer, thankfully - for in-house stuff anyway (which is most of what I do).
Of course this is predicated on IE8's standards support being quite good - I'll believe that when I see it. Seriously, people were telling me how good IE7 was going to be prior to it's launch; so for now I'm from Missouri.
#DeleteChrome
If one 'widely praised' about face was good, two are better.
Have gnu, will travel.
....And, yes, I am a cynic.
I do not expect ANY promise, made by ANYONE, to be adhered to, until it actually happens.
Honestly, I am pleasantly surprised to find out how much easier my life has become since I made that admission/realization to myself.
No, he's right. You don't honestly believe that it is impossible for Microsoft to deliver the best browser by the end of the year, do you? Any rendering bug in IE8 exists for one reason only: Microsoft doesn't want IE to adhere to a foreign standard. They want it to be just good enough to not lose their stranglehold on the web.
IE8 is years behind other browsers, but since some of the more prominent rendering bugs have been fixed, it is already hailed as a worthy opponent to Firefox/Safari/Opera. Microsoft has done a lot to win back users and developers. A browser without a script debugger or DOM inspector just wasn't viable anymore. But those additions should not obscure the fact that the rendering compliance is still appalling.
Why is this modded Troll? It's true, by forcing webdev's to make pages intentionally broken, they force other users to get IE to view the pages correctly.
And currently the only way to get IE is with a copy of Windows.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
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.
Yes!
Is there a i-developed-a-website-that-had-to-support-IE support group?
Considering the author is the CTO of Opera, i.e. one of the competitors in the browser market, you have to take whatever he says about IE, or Firefox or Safari for that matter, with a grain of salt.
It's a very dark ride.
If it were an alpha release then that's fine. But...
You seem to think that MS follows the 'traditional' method of development phase naming schemes: alpha means still adding features, beta is bug fixes only, etc. But that's obviously not the case with MS or (most?) other major software vendors, and hasn't been for YEARS. MS (and others) still add features even in very late beta, if not 'release candidate' phase. Hell, what MS and others usually *release* is what most of us older computer folk would have considered *beta* back in the day.
As far as IE8, just remember: IE ain't done till CSS won't run.
Prove me wrong, MS. I'll hold my breath; I look great in blue.
In addition to that, administrators can add sites/domains to the Intranet 'zone'.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
And perhaps if faced with large costs as a result of poor decisions in the past, companies might be inclined not to repeat the same stupid mistakes again.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Microsoft could have dealt fairly with this in a hundred ways. The essence of fairness here would have been to present this to the user as a conscious choice to be made.
For example, during installation, or at first start, the browser could query the intranet in some well-defined way to determine whether the intranet administrators wanted "compatibility view" for intranet pages. Then it could ask the user: "Your company, Amalgamated Widgets, recommends "compatibility view" mode when you are accessing intranet web pages. Accept this recommendation? [x] Yes [ ] No."
You can think of dozens of variations on this.
What Microsoft chose to do instead was to make the choice that best serves Microsoft's interest, rather than the best interests of its corporate customers (let alone the end-users), without telling the user that it is making this choice. And carefully finding the golden mean: making it a preference, thus deflecting criticism, but cagily burying the preference where 99% of users will not know that a choice has been made for them, or even that a choice exists.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
And one should also remember that this is *only* the default for INTRANET pages and not INTERNET pages.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And perhaps if faced with large costs as a result of poor decisions in the past, companies might be inclined not to repeat the same stupid mistakes again.
No, they just won't upgrade to IE8.
It's sort of hard to convince people to upgrade to a product that punishes them with 'large costs' for their 'stupid mistakes' to make sure they don't repeat them.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I think we need to extend Godwin's Law to include child molesters...
We must not forget that IE8 is still in beta. Maybe this is just a ploy fo MS to force webadmins to get their stuff sorted before IE8 with different compatability modes is released. That said, its a big step forward from 7 - much much faster
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.
..in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
Requiem for the American Dream
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."
They will have to sooner or later...
Old versions will cease to be supported, and wont run on newer iterations of windows... Those stuck on IE6/7 are a captive market, there is nowhere else for them to go so microsoft can treat them however they please. If the only upgrade path is punishingly expensive then they simply have to pay those costs.
Running an old IE will become even more of a liability than it is now, no patches, and once people stop kludging sites to work with it then it will fail to render sites properly.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
So IE8 will use bug mode on intranets, and standards mode on the internet. Can someone explain to me how the hell IE will know the difference between www.example.com and myIntranet.example.com ???
I don't recall seeing an intranet meta tag in my html books... so I don't get how IE will know if something is an intranet site or an internet site.
Which makes me wonder if it will simply think everything is an intranet.
Can anyone confirm which way IE8 actually does it?
Will it be be possible to trick IE8 into thinking it's not Intranet, without having to modify the HTML?
This was predicted back in March by Joel Spolsky, but looks like they've got a good compromise going if it applies only to the Intranet. Don't know as release time comes, whether they will stick to it.
Load up Internet Explorer 6, feed it a valid, HTML 4.01 Strict document, and test it for yourself.
What about a valid, HTML 4.01 Transitional document? HTML 4.01 Strict does not have the value attribute of the li element. This means that it doesn't support ordered lists with any value other than starting at 1 and increasing by 1, except in those (non-existent) user agents that support CSS counters.
IE8? You mean to tell me there are people out there who still haven't switched to Firefox?!?!?! Those savages!
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
And this sort of behaviour would come as a surprise why exactly? I'd have been more surprised if M$ had kept their "promise".
It doesn't matter, if this wasn't checked by default all corporate rollouts of IE would check it anyway, because companies don't care if their intranets are compliant or not. If an employee calls up the help desk and says "hey, I can't fill out my timecard in Firefox" the help desk will just say "use internet explorer", and what's the employee going to do, boycott it?
So long as *external* sites aren't in compatibility mode by default, that's enough, because that's a default that's got a chance of sticking.
Oh yeah I've seen that bullshit.
To give a car analogy its like bringing my car to fill up with "gas", and having the attendant bitch at me for my choice of manufacturer.
Gas station attendants and web designers are low level positions. If they start giving me lip then I either get them fired, or go somewhere else.
For the record I use Opera. (Because I want a _secure_ browser).
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Look, I hate MS as much as the next guy but IE 8 is beta software. Who knows what the final release will be? Let's not count our eggs before they hatch, so to speak.
One thing I always wondered when I developed websites was why all these browsers didn't have an abstraction layer that would let my site define a certain rendering engine to use. That way no matter who was using what browser that at least if it had that functionality It could fall back to the way I intended for it to look like. I know the W3C never got back with me probably because it would "render" them useless. The only way for standards to be followed is to have them worded like many laws are written. Said dog jumps x feet over fence clearing by y feet at z speed. You get the idea.
After giving up after a few months of trying to tie together various hacks to get my client's sites to halfway resemble what they are supposed to look like with supposed web standards browsers I concluded that the internet should just be tossed into the trash, and start over.
I know I get sick of waiting for some big corp to get off of their collective ass and implement a new feature. Wouldn't it be nice if just an individual could release a new engine after a few days? Just a thought. Anyways back to my implementing a new dynamic wireless network to give a small town free networking. Soap box off
DrkWatr
Qorona
As a web developer, all I care about is that the browser will work in strict mode if I tell it to do so. I noticed quite early on that if a DOCTYPE was missing the system identifier, IE would revert to quirks mode. This isn't a big deal for people like me who actually study the guidelines and use a proper DOCTYPE, but to people who tend to copypasta code from a quick Google search, they will continue to write bad code without even realizing that the browser isn't in strict mode after all. You can't force people to research, but you can still beat them over the head with rendering problems if they just piecemeal their projects together. Maybe it'll encourage the company to get a proper web developer instead of asking the clueless secretary to perform updates.
The DOCTYPE has still not made its way into old, lousy HTML tutorials, so using its presence as a way to determine strict mode would be a good idea. If IE still has exceptions for malformed DOCTYPEs and is too eager to uses quirks mode, then these rendering issues will go on forever.
To me, having strict mode on by default sounds like a major corporate headache, and I don't blame Microsoft for second guessing their promise. But, they should tighten the rules for when quirks mode is selected.
Let's hope the developer mode in IE8 final is more vocal about standards compliance issues, too. Even Firefox is loath to complain about issues unless you have an extension like Web Developer installed. Giving errors to normal people is of course a bad idea, but it shouldn't be so hard or require so much 3rd-party software for developers to get the information they need.
Yes - that's about any web developer forum/newsgroup.
Does it really matter? I'll bet my graphics card 99% of everyone on here use firefox anyway!
Bert64 wrote:
Although Internet Explorer (IE) is still the dominant browser, it's not the only one. Rather than staying with an old version of IE (or the current version), users do have the option of switching to the current version of Firefox. I doubt it would very expensive for users to switch over.
http://www.frontmotion.com/FMFirefoxCE/index.htm
Have fun.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
This is news?
Its time to stop designing code for specific browsers, *PERIOD*. Stop testing versions and brands of software, and instead identify the format and type of your data, so that the user's software can decide how to handle it.
You're talking about a chicken and egg scenario. Corporate users make up a monstrous number of IE users, and if an IE upgrade breaks their intranets, they won't upgrade (they won't switch to FF or Opera either). They'll stay with the same old buggy version. That means Intranet software vendors won't upgrade their software, becuase their customers are all still using the old version of IE that won't render standards mode. That means nobody ever upgrades.
The only rational way to make this happen is to use compatibility modes, so people can upgrade to a browser capable of using standards, then software vendors can implement standards because their customers will have browsers capable of using them.
How do you not get this?
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I don't quite get the question. But my understand is that you'll be able to explicitly set the IE render mode through a HTTP header, which can easily be set in your web server.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
If you are specifically asking for a particular bug to be fixed when it was fixed years ago, that's just being stupid and thinking you are cool for joining in the hate without actually knowing what you are talking about. The existence of other bugs doesn't change that.
Yes, there is, but it seems you are rather more keen on ranting about Internet Explorer's shortcomings than actually participating in the discussion. Nothing beyond this point relates to my comment at all, it's just #include <stdierant> .
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Yes I do think that, and so should anybody else with the remotest grasp of software engineering. You can't just add manpower and expect an improvement in development speed. It doesn't matter what resources Microsoft has at their disposal, they can't dispose of that principle.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Even NASA can't do better than 6 defects/KLOC, and the consequences for failure are a hell of a lot higher for them than they are for Microsoft. One of the few universal truths in software engineering is that bugs happen. Every browser has bugs. They aren't evidence of a conspiracy.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha