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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.
...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.
Use this.
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
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
Have you tried using the IE Tab Extension?
No, I haven't. When it's available for Ubuntu let me know.
What's that you say? I should install Windows so that I can have IE so that I can view broken webpages? Or better yet, install a compatibility layer so that I can install the two-versions outdated IE6 against that software's EULA (I have no Windows license, remember) so that I can view broken webpages?
IE Tab is for people who want a woman with their current girlfriends clothes, yet with their old girlfriend's diseases.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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
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.