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."

Comments

There's a saying..

[eebra82]

When things sound too good to be true, they usually are..

Re:There's a saying..

[jmpeax]

Actually, the summary is misleading. Only intranet pages are not rendered in standards mode by default, presumably to encourage enterprise customers to upgrade (most I know of use IE6 at the moment). From TFA:

The dirty secret is buried deep down in the "Compatibility view" configuration panel, where the "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View" box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.

The article uses some dubious statistics to back up the sensationalist headline ("intranets account for about half of all page views on PCs"), but ignores the reality: many intranet systems use IE-specific extensions (normally because they were developed a while ago) and, unlike websites, don't often benefit from constant revision and attention from a development team. To me, viewing intranet pages in compatibility mode by default makes sense.

Re:There's a saying..

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

Anyone who thinks IE standards support has improved from IE7 to IE8 is sadly mistaken

Well it passes Acid2 now (as long as it's hosted at webstandards.org) and currently gets 21/100 on Acid3 (compared to 14/100 for IE7) so there must be some improvement in IE8.

Re:There's a saying..

[dotancohen]

You must be new here. Seriously. Go read the Hans Reiser post. People are often modded up for preachy, glib, and obvious. If all three it's almost a sure thing.

I really cannot believe that glib is a word, I had to look it up. My English is not perfect, but it's rare that I mix up Gnome dependency libraries and real words.

Probably the corporate customers

[Coopjust]

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.

Re:Probably the corporate customers

[hattig]

I agree that it makes sense for the intranet pages to be viewed in Compatibility Mode.

However showing a broken page icon next to standards-compliant web pages is another issue altogether. Clearly the broken page icon should apply to pages that aren't standards compliant!

INTRANET only

[tankrshr77]

The article only says that INTRANET pages are not shown in standards-compliant mode by default.

Re:INTRANET only

[Samantha Wright]

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.

Alarmist article. Boring.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Misleading summary.... it's INTRANET ONLY

[aengblom]

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!

Re:Misleading summary.... it's INTRANET ONLY

[aengblom]

The same way IE7, IE6, IE5 and I'm pretty sure lesser IEs did? IE has long allowed different security settings for intranet vs. internet pages.

As I hinted about above, the dynamics of Intranet and internet are very different.

Change on the Internet is very difficult because site developers must develop towards the most common denominator and this is rarely the cutting edge. Even if it's better for everyone to move towards the standards, there is a disincentive for anyone to move first.

An intranet is completely different. If a company finds there is an advantage to moving off of IE6/7 and on to IE8, well they just need some guy in IT to sign off on redeveloping any things that would be broken.

I wonder if people can read...

[MSFanBoi2]

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.

Don't see it as a broken page icon

[John Hasler]

See it as a broken browser icon.

Re:Why should this surprise anyone?

[Bogtha]

They haven't truly improved standards support since IE 5.5

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.

Re:or it could be...

[jregel]

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.