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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.
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.
See it as a broken browser icon.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
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 #!
Use this.
you had me at #!
Yes you can deep link - even to documents in Document Libraries (http://sitename/subsitename/libraryname/foldername/documentname.txt).
Basically the only thing I have found in several months of using MOSS 2007 with FireFox is that you can't drag and drop webparts around in 'edit page' mode - you have to move them through the webpart settings. Otherwise, everything seems to work fine.
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.
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
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.
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
If one 'widely praised' about face was good, two are better.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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
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.