Microsoft.com Makes IE8 Incompatibility List

nickull writes "Microsoft is tracking incompatible Web sites for its upcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser and has posted a list that now contains about 2,400 names — including Microsoft.com. Apparently, even though Microsoft's IE8 team is doing the 'right' thing by finally making IE more standards-compliant, they are risking 'breaking the Web' because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE."

Comments

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[Anonymous Showered]

What if we could just define which rendering engine to use in pages, e.g. IE7 or IE8 in a meta tag...

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[should_be_linear]

or, perhaps, fixing those pages comes to mind...

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[nmb3000]

What if we could just define which rendering engine to use in pages, e.g. IE7 or IE8 in a meta tag...

Oh if we only could!

Watching the development of IE8, the teams is taking great pains to make sure that site authors and owners have an overall say about how their page is rendered with respect to new IE standards-compliance. You can use both a META tag as well as a HTTP header to tell IE8 to use either the new rendering engine (default) or to fall back to the IE7 standards. Companies can also specify compatibility options using GPOs which should help keep older intranet sites working.

I think it's a pretty good tradeoff between pushing for modern standards and not "breaking the web". Yes, it is largely IE's fault that there are so many non-conforming sites out there, but compatibility is important regardless, especially for "offline" sites which cannot be fixed easily or cheaply (CD help files, embedded web servers, etc). At least by having the new rendering mode the default it will encourage standards compliance (or at least IE's [admittedly improving] version of it.)

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[techno-vampire]

the IE7 standards

Isn't that a contradiction in terms? The whole problem with IE7 is, it's not standards compliant.

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[JamesRose]

Yeah, let me know how telling people to do hours of work for free goes for you....

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[duguk]

I was testing my *new* site in IE8 yesterday, I'm using the "

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[NotBornYesterday]

Bill Microsoft, of course.

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[BSDimwit]

Who says anything has to be done for free. Consider this Microsoft's contribution to the economic stimulus package.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Calling all kettles, Calling all kettles, Pot to Black do you read me? I Read you Pot - lets go paint the pans, they're starting to get wise.

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[itamihn]

Bill Microsoft, of course.

Bill Gates

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[fireman sam]

That all depends on who's standards IE7 is being compared to. IE7 is not standards compliant when compared to the w3 standard, but is VERY compliant when compared to the MS standard.

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[PitaBred]

IE7 doesn't measure up to w3c standards, but it's a de facto "standard" nontheless. People wrote lots of websites to deal with the way IE7 renders pages.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. I feel your pain, but you really just should not ever use those "if ie" flags. You can get things to work across multiple ie versions with out using them. Takes more time, but better in the long run.

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[Sir_Lewk]

Proprietary standards are not standards.

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[prandal]

You can.... X-UA-Compatible. 10 mins on Microsoft's IE blog would have told you that....

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[duguk]

I absolutely agree, for some nice looking drop down menus, however - it's impossible to avoid the "if ie" tag. I wish I didn't have to use them (and wish I didn't have to sacrifice decent code for looks and design).

As I mentioned originally though, this is for a drop down menu using ul/li and the hover psudeocode. I can't find any way to do this that works nicer, and avoids using javascript. The "if ie" tag I'm using is non-essential and the site still works without it. However, to make it looks best it's hard to avoid these.

At least its better than some of the old css tricks with invalid code - the "if ie" syntax is W3C valid code.

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[rrohbeck]

Looks like you just found a reliable way to detect IE8.

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[quickOnTheUptake]

compatibility is important regardless, especially for "offline" sites which cannot be fixed easily or cheaply (CD help files, embedded web servers, etc)

You can use both a META tag as well as a HTTP header to tell IE8 to use either the new rendering engine (default) or to fall back to the IE7 standards.

So requiring offline and non-updateable pages to tell IE8 to fall back to IE7 rendering helps backward compatibility how? They are already written, already offline, and presumably already don't have the metatag that they will need to be (im)properly rendered.

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[Hurricane78]

No it is not. You apparently never tried to program a real web application to work in that thing.

It contradicts its own rules, based on random things like race conditions between the first execution of JavaScript in an <IFRAME> and the end of page the rendering routine.
Been there, seen it, circumvented stuff like that in anything from 2 minutes to no less than two weeks of hard debugging.

In the matrix of IE, you only have to remember one thing: There is no standard.
Everything can change, and change back in the blink of an eye, for no reason at all.

I fear that to be a Trident developer, you must be a genius to understand that mess, and crazy to stand it, at the same time.

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[Tweenk]

So what should I use?? "if IE" comments are the cleanest solution for IE woes. Using them you can make your sites both standards compliant AND hack-free.

"Conditional comments" are perfect for linking to an additional style sheet that makes the site look decent in IE. They are the simplest and most reliable method of serving CSS/Javascript fixes, and they are W3C complaint (see this site: www.baltchem.eu - it uses those tags and is still valid XHTML 1.0 Strict).

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[Almost-Retired]

Yes, and if people had been making web pages W3C compliant in the first place 10 years ago, M$ would have been forced to come into compliance by their sheeple/customers.

Besides, I feel left out, my site didn't make their list. OTOH I used linux programs to build it.

Tuff titty M$, couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.

--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Peace, n.:
                In international affairs, a period of cheating between two
                periods of fighting.
                                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

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[duguk]

Not at all. IE8 seems to ignore the "

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[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you never tried to program a real sarcasm detector.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody knows that there is no Trident developers, it is all being done by an evil robot from the future, out to destroy the smart people of the internets.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh.

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[nmb3000]

So requiring offline and non-updateable pages to tell IE8 to fall back to IE7 rendering helps backward compatibility how?

As another poster said, part of the problem can be fixed by checking the DOCTYPE like IE7 does now. What I was referring to, however, was just that IE8 still has the ability to display using an IE7 rendering mode. Yes, the offline pages might be broken initially, but if the user clicks the IE7 compatibility button they should start working again. I probably should have been clearer that I was not referring to META tags or headers in that case.

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[sexconker]

Yes they are, you just don't like them.

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[commodoresloat]

This is exactly right. I don't know why but this company seems to be doing everything ass backwards and still getting away with it. I work at a very large organization, and a lot of Office documents get sent back and forth on email. Most people have not "upgraded" to the latest version of office (2007/8). The few who have send everything in the new xml format (docx etc), which is not compatible with older versions. This is annoying as hell when I have to explain that Word is incompatible with Word, or Excel is incompatible with Excel. Thankfully there are tools on the microsoft site that can convert these documents, but there is no reason people should have to jump through these hoops. Even worse, these programs have expiration dates -- just today I tried to open a docx document and was told the program had expired. I had to go to the MS website and download a minor point upgrade to the converter program (the link was hidden on a page that was mostly about Microsoft Messenger. Then I ran the program and it told me to quit Entourage, Word, and Excel - each of which had about 10 windows open - just so I could update this external application. Even as I'm typing this I just realized there is yet another minor point update on the website, so I'll need to upgrade to 1.0.2 now. What a nightmare.

Here's another example of this sort of nonsense -- if you own MS Office 2004 for OS X, it has been updated to 11.5.3. But you can't just update from version 10 to version 11.5.3 in one swoop. If you installed Office years ago and kept it up to date it's a minor nuisance but if you're installing Office 2004 on a new computer, you need to use AutoUpdate like 15 times to get it up to date, one point upgrade at a time. Seriously, who has time for this nonsense? And who thinks up this crap?

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[Anonymous Coward]

"IE7 doesn't measure up to w3c standards, but it's a de facto "standard" nontheless."

That is starting to be site dependent now. Here on /., for example, IE is a minority. And no doubt the same goes for other tech sites.

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[click2005]

Whats the point of an IE7 compatibility mode, if it ignores the IE7-specific markup?

Because when it works, it'll make IE8 as secure as it's least secure rendering engine. It wont matter how safe/secure the new rendering engine
is if you can tell the browser to use a less secure one. I guess MS really is doing their part to help security companies sell software.

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[Anonymous Coward]

by Almost-Retired (637760)

Wow, way to go twitter! I never knew you were that old!

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[Anthony_Cargile]

Yes they are, you just dislike them to the point where you want to run around screaming to the top of your lungs and hitting everything with your fists till they turn bloody, then you fall down and whimper yourself to sleep while murmuring "damn proprietary standards... I hate you!"

There, fixed that for you.

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[Anthony_Cargile]

Know what I use? It makes the code an absolute living breathing hell to read sometimes (unless you get creative with it), but just sniff the HTTP user-agent on the server-side, and serve up differing HTML based on it. It is an ancient trick indeed, but these days with all of the broken IE versions out in the wild mis-rendering my pages, it becomes more and more of a must, and certainly comes in handy. My favorite is to use PHP with it, since its fairly painless to sniff the user agent ($HTTP_USER_AGENT) and serve up some browser-dependent hacks to it (include(), etc.).

Bad practice? Technically not as bad as the CDATA or JavaScript-sniffing tactics, but still not the best despite the fact we're trying to fix a bad set of browsers anyways (and I don't mess with CSS quirks, I find it annoying). Just don't get too crazy with it, and you'll be fine. Sniffing every type of browser will just turn into a major headache, trust me I was there once during the original browser wars. *shudders*

Oh, and if the user doesn't mind changing the user agent for IE (this is common in FF, deal with it), then they won't mind a broken site, now will they?

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[repetty]

> IE7 doesn't measure up to w3c standards, but it's a de facto
> "standard" nontheless. People wrote lots of websites to deal
> with the way IE7 renders pages.

I hate it when people start taking about "de facto"... it's like we suddenly have a license to wrong and stupid and lazy.

Excise this from your mind, go forth, and make the world a better place.

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[tuxgeek]

I have a better idea
Let M$ build a browser that is W3C compliant.
Then all the webmasters out there can make their sites W3C compliant.

Now, see how easy that was?
Complying with standards, what a concept

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[KingMotley]

That would likely be because the site works like crap in IE.

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[Hal_Porter]

You can

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

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[malkir]

But, what would that do to all the noobsauces on IE6-7 who don't know what a better browser is? Bill Microsoft.

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[HartDev]

yeah...woot for Firefox and Opera! Everyone go to mozilla's website and buy stuff to support them, or just donate!

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[PitaBred]

Keeping repeating that the sky is blood red does not make it so. I never said it was right, I never said that it should be, I simply said that it was. I said "de facto" because it is simply the term that best describes the situation. It is slowly changing with the increase in usage of Firefox, Opera, Safari and so on, but the fact remains that MANY sites currently built are designed specifically for IE. Hell, I was just earlier today looking for an expansion pack for the "Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot" (great card game) and found that their online site doesn't render properly in anything but IE. If that's not "de facto", I don't know what is.

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[D'Sphitz]

I believe that's exactly what they're doing, you will be able to add a tag to your website to use a compatibility mode which is supposed to fix pages that don't work correctly in IE8.

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[molarmass192]

I know you're kidding, but, seriously, tough crap for people who chose to write their sites in non-standard compliant code. They screwed up by making a piss poor choice and they deserve to go down with the ship they hitched their trailers to. They can go back to their local community colleges to get some different certificate and leave the interwebs to people who know what it is they're doing.

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[perlchild]

I think we've just hit the source of the problem.

That ie7 rendered compliant sites incorrectly was the excuse. Lazy webdevs wanted it to work for ie7 and so broke it for everything else.

Microsoft wrote ie8, there is no reason for them not to be compatible with themselves... Except...

It keeps people using ie7, not 8.

People(noobs, sorry) upgrading would no longer see Microsoft as "better".

If microsoft.com had been "compliant" in the first place, instead of "patched as best as possible not to show bugs in other browsers where it causes us to lose mindshare", it would render fine in ie8.

There's also a lot of webdevs for whom "My browser, my web, my way" is a threatening notion, not the very reason there is an Internet "left" for us to use.

That micrsoft.com was not compliant was already true before ie8. Ie8 being compliant did not change that, it just made it more difficult to hide, especially for sufficiently strict values of compliant(braille web readers, cell phones, etc...)

Basicaly, anything for which "best viewed at a resolution of..." just means "you can't see all of the content, ever", is IMHO non-compliant. And let's not get to ajax(not that it's a bad idea, it's that it's bolted on).

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[eikonos]

they deserve to go down with the ship they hitched their trailers to

This takes the car analogy in a whole new direction... the aquacar.

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[Legrow]

Perhaps that's part of the compatibility... it now accurately ignores everything in tags, even if it's a legacy conditional comment. Sure, they may have been a great tool to make cross-browser compatibility a little easier, but if makes IE8 deviate from the spec, then maybe it isn't that important to the IE8 team.

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[ScottCooperDotNet]

So no one setup the GPOs to have Office 2007 save in "compatible mode" by default?

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[malkir]

hear hear!

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[warrigal]

It wasn't just that they built websites that catered for IE's shortcomings; you can arrive at one of these sites in your standards-compliant browser only to have the site further Microsoft's agenda by telling you that you can't view the site with your "incompatible" browser. You are told that you must use IE. Tough if you're running OSX or Linux.

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[Firehed]

Why not try changing your "if ie" to "if lte ie7" and stop confusing the hell out of the poor thing? Unless you've done some bizarre javascript (please tell me you're using one of the plethora of fully-cross-browser libraries!), this shouldn't really be an issue. At least not a significant one - it may not be pixel-perfect, but easily close enough. My brief testing in IE8 has it rendering stuff just as well as Firefox or Safari.

I realize that it's not always (read: almost never) an option with CSS, but it's far better if you can avoid browser-specific conditions by other means. For instance, you can check if a recent JS/DOM method exists (getElementsByClassName, for instance), use it if so, otherwise revert to your fallback/ugly/slow code. If/when the browser gets the method in question (not that it's at all likely, but what if MS patched some of the flaws in IE6/7?), your code will automatically use the better version without you having to touch it after the fact, and no browser sniffing.

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[arkane1234]

de jure standard, not de facto.

By no means is IE7 a standard in practice, only in theory.

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[Vahokif]

They're broken BECAUSE IE8 is standards-compliant. The sites were designed around IE6's buggy rendering.

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[matushorvath]

If they did it consciously, then I am sure they have two versions of the pages -- one standards compliant for compliant browsers and one for IE6. Now they only need to drop the IE6 version and think what to do with the free time they gained by not having to maintain it anymore.

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[matushorvath]

That would likely be because IE works like crap with this site.

There, fixed that for you.

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[JasterBobaMereel]

Which one : it's not compatible with IE6 or IE8 ?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates

Yeah, but not Me(linda)

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[Vahokif]

Exactly. I don't see what the fuss is about.

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[daveime]

Yes, it is largely IE's fault that there are so many non-conforming sites out there

Yes, because MS were responsible for both the whole mess and the whole mess, weren't they ? I remember there was NS4, which sucked balls at a time everyone was getting excited about DHTML, and MSIE4 which did a lot to resolve those problems.

Then along comes w3c, announces that THEY will be the standard bearer (heavily influenced by Mozilla, the makers of the netscape engine) ... but it was MS who "broke the web". Okay ...

(There goes my Excellent Karma) :-(

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[Anonymous Coward]

In case you can merge fixes for 7/8 to a single file, "if > MSIE6" will be sufficient solution.

I tried to make one web portal to render properly in M$IE8. It works in Opera/Firefox/M$IE6/M$IE7, but the eighth version from Billysoft is even buggier, than any previous, so that I gave up. When I scroll down and hit F5, M$IE8 completely screwes up the layout. When I scroll to the top and hit F5, M$IE8 displays it as intended. Note that M$IE8 needs twice as much CSS dirty rules than its sixth version to render what the other browsers do simply by following web standards.

The best thing we, the webdevelopers, can do is "if (MSIE) { puts("Caution: this website requires a *fully* standards-compliant browser! Continue on your risc."); /* exit(0); */ }" (someone please translate my code for the worlds most incompatible software from Billysoft ever made, called the Internet F**ker (in a meaning, like "to f**k something up).

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[daveime]

The whole <frames> mess and the whole <layer> mess !!

Damnit, why doesn't "Plain Old Text" respect my < and > ???

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[jonadab]

If you want to correct for the weird incompatibilities in the crusty broken legacy versions of IE, without screwing up compliant browsers, use alternate stylesheets. Every halfway-decent browser, including IE8, will recognize them as alternatives and pick between them, choosing the first one by default. Unfortunately, most browsers, including IE8, don't remember the user's choice between the alternatives for the site, so they go back to the default (first) one every time a page is loaded. Also the UI for picking a different alternative is usually not very good and often pretty well buried. Nonetheless, all decently standards-compliant browsers fundamentally understand that these are alternatives, and one of them should be used at a time.

IE6 and IE7 try to apply them *all*. Really.

So you create several alternate versions of your stylesheet for compliant browsers -- a default one, and then maybe a large print one, and one that uses a different color scheme (light-on dark instead of dark-on-light, or vice versa), whatever... and then you create one last "alternate" stylesheet, called something like "Legacy IE6/7 Style", and that's where you put all the non-standard corrections.

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[Anonymous Coward]

You are right. I did program a fake one.

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[Anonymous Coward]

There's also a lot of webdevs for whom "My browser, my web, my way" is a threatening notion

True. Also developers who still insist on "pixel perfect" rendering.

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[AliasMarlowe]

IE7 doesn't measure up to w3c standards, but it's a de facto "standard" nontheless.

You said it: it does not measure up to the authorized standard. It is a substandard, not a standard. MS has deliberately and purposefully attempted to avoid/ignore the w3c standards for years, and is only now starting to mend its ways.

Being ignorant seems to be the de facto "standard" in almost every field of knowledge (only specialists can claim not to be ignorant). Which would you advise - that we to conform to the de facto "standard" of ignorance, or attempt to reach the authorized standard of competence in that field?

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[duguk]

I'm not using *any* javascript for design, and I'll think you'll find the "if lte ie7" syntax is for CSS, not javascript. Try again!

Feel free to have a look - beta.frag.co.uk. Menu's are broken in IE8, but work in any other browser. The "if ie" syntax is just to fix flawed box model.

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[rootofevil]

or even just showed someone how to change the default from within office...

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[guruevi]

Just stick to the Strict DTD and all will be ok (for standards compliant browsers). If anyone complains tell them to use Firefox, Opera or Safari.

iframe tags are a Microsoft's invention and got pushed through by their monopoly. They are not in the Strict DTD's of either HTML or XHTML and make for giant security holes.

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[mcgrew]

A non standards-compliant web page isn't hard to write. If goobers would stop writing their web pages to impress people with their 133t sk1LLz (Yahoo news comes to mind) and make them clean and standards-compliant in the first place, there wouldn't be these issues.

If your site isn't compliant in the first place, you have no right to bitch about "working for free". If I screw up a project at work, I have to redo it. And if your site isn't compliant in the first place, you screwed up.

Suck it up and fix it. Next time, do it right.

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[Anonymous Coward]

lame.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you.

Let's stand back and look at Slashdot's belief system piece by piece.

You scream until hoarse about Microsoft's software bloat and update treadmill, frothing like a rabid dog over the AUDACITY of maintaining any backwards compatibility. Yet, if we direct the discussion at Firefox or Linux, suddenly it's OK to break APIs at will and pretend bloat is imaginary and tell everyone to get with the program on the latest unstable updates of everything.

It occurs to me that Microsoft and users who are happy with their old software/hardware really need to stick together, because all you brings to the table is constant loss and constant cost. We have to rewrite or abandon working software and replace working but unsupported hardware, all at great cost in time, money, freedom, etc. And now you're trying to push everyone to a STILL incomplete and vague web standard that Micrsoft hwas force to extend into a functional state.

Seriously, fuck you.

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[The Cisco Kid]

Unless you are co-authoring documents with other persons, exchanging word processor files in order to exchange information is just stupid. If its a quick note, tech them to just TYPE IT IN THE EMAIL CLIENT.

If its something formal, they should print it (either to real paper, or 'electronic' paper such as PDF)

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

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[mcgrew]

Yes, it is largely IE's fault that there are so many non-conforming sites out there

No, it's the fault of the webmasters who who didn't have the balls to stand up to Microsoft. If everyone would have written their pages to crash IE (did they ever fix that bug?) Microsoft would have been forced to stand down in their quest to BE the standards.

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[B1ackDragon]

Speaking of OSX Office.. After my in-law's office install choked this winter, I attempted to fix it by reinstalling Office. Turns out, you can't just "reinstall" office (or a recent update) on a mac. You have to fully remove the program and all its files, install fresh, and go through the 2 or 3 hour process of running AutoUpdate 15 times to get the point upgrades.

Sigh. I've installed neooffice alongside, and encouraged them to migrate to that when possible. So much for Microsoft's last decent product.

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[budgenator]

Except they are not Breaking the Web they all ready Broke the Web and are now trying to put it back together in dribbles and drabs. The Emperor has been running around naked for a long time and everybody except a few of us were pretending he was clothed; now everybody is complaining about a wardrobe change.

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[pizzach]

Yes, because MS were responsible for both the whole mess and the whole mess, weren't they ? I remember there was NS4, which sucked balls at a time everyone was getting excited about DHTML, and MSIE4 which did a lot to resolve those problems.

Yes...that is why many of the designs of current standards were based off of MS's designs in MSIE4. Most of the modifications that the w3c did to them for their specs were arbitrary. It would have been a shit load easier for MS to update their browser to work with the w3c standards than it would have been for Netscape. I have a hard time believing that Microsoft has no leeway in the W3C being one of the largest and affluent members on top of owning the most popular web browser.

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[oliderid]

They screwed up by making a piss poor choice and they deserve to go down with the ship they hitched their trailers to

Most companies I've work for have no clues about the meaning of W3C standard. The only thing they know is:

it works under IE and Firefox (and Safari)! Cool! So let's talk about the essential: the layout. So if it is FLASH or plain HTML they don't care usually...Except when you talk about search engines optimizations, there you get their attention....If they are public services they might consider WAI (for visually impaired surfers)

Their questions are comparable to: A dark blue wouldn't be more classy? Do you prefer Arial or Verdana? Maybe we should move the column two pixels to the right, what do you think?

And if you say:
Not possible, the IE opacity filter will mess with two overlapping PNG here.

their answer is: eh?

Welcome to the real communication department world :-)

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[smartr]

We're living in a non-standards compliant world, and it's not changing anytime soon. Sure it's great Microsoft might finally get on the bandwagon, but they've left behind a big pile of junk. Go tell a businessman that at least some 30% of the users won't see things right or that you'll have to cut back on features or spend some 500% extra time to get things to look good that are both standards compliant and compliant with that 30%... What determines the right way of doing things again? I hope it's not pragmatic.

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[default luser]

So it's not standards-compliant. Neither was Netscape. The only difference was: Netscape failed so badly that they never had to clean-up their standards-compliance. They just faded-away, and fueled the fire for the total restart with Mozilla (it took the Mozilla team YEARS to fix that code too).

The problem Microsoft had was they were too successful. Now that the web has matured, they find they have to clean-up and come into compliance, or risk losing more marketshare. I think their methods for this transistion are very thorough:

1. default standards-compliant browsing.
2. has a list of popular non-compliant sites, updated regularly.
3. sites can control IE8 rendering engine through META tags or HTML headers.
4. if the site you visit still doesn't work, the user can switch to "compatibility mode" with the touch of a button.

No, it's not perfect, and it won't happen overnight, but it's the last necessary painful step to complete web standardization.

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[Mista2]

maybe they should have made it possible to run IE7 and 8 at the same time. We were held back on ie6 at one client because of one partners website that broke in ie7. But the site was used extensively by our client. This also held up our so sp3 deployment as ie7 was part of this update. Now the client is smarter. All their critical systems are specified to work with at least firefox and ie so that if required only one out of the two browser platform might be held back next time.

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[Jerinaw]

I agree.

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[jbolden]

Yep you got it. There are stable products and there are unstable products. You want stability Z/OS and COBOL offer a great platform where all changes are discussed over the process of a decade.

No one ever said that would be the case with the internet in the mid to late 90's when these sites were created.

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[jbolden]

Actually a lot of sites went for IE6 compliance and didn't bother to make 2 versions. They didn't want to pay the extra 30% to have full standard compliance.

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[jbolden]

What determines the right way of doing things again?

W3C is who determines the right way of doing things. Pragmatism determines the quick and easy way of doing things. This isn't a complex question.

I got no problem telling businessmen they got to pay twice to build something they built wrong on purpose.

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[Anonymous Coward]

So what should I use?? "if IE" comments are the cleanest solution for IE woes. Using them you can make your sites both standards compliant AND hack-free.

Conditional comments are not standards-compliant. For starters, you're specifying semantics in comments.

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[jbolden]

How about don't use autoupdate and just download the update files on to your Apple Server and just deploy them one after another. Takes about a minute to wrap them this way.

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[jbolden]

At the time of NS4 there were a bunch of other browsers on the market like Konq. Had Microsoft worked with the other browsers timeline we could have had a standards body.

Re:Options

[mcgrew]

We're living in a non-standards compliant world

No we're not. Microsoft is about the only company to thumb their nose at standards.

When I buy a light bulb I expect it to fit in my lamp. When I buy laundry detergent I expect it to work in my washing machine. When I buy gasoline I expect the car to run on it.

We don't have leaded gasoline any more and detergent is liquid rather than powder these day and lamps are CFL rather than incandescant, but unleaded gasoline will work fine in a 1965 Ford, liquid detergent works with no problem in a 1955 washing machine, and CFLs will work in most light fixtures.

Even though standards change, it IS a standards-compliant world. For instance, there is the IEEE that sets electrical standards. The problem is some behemoths thinking they ARE the standard when they clearly aren't.

Everyone should have demanded that web browsers be W3C compliant. IE is like if Phillips made lamps that would only work with Phillips bulbs and told the IEEE to fuck off.

Re:Options

[commodoresloat]

Yes, of course you're right, about 90% of the time people should save to PDF, but have you ever worked at a large organization? People just don't do it. They're going to send you office documents no matter what (and of course there is still that 10% of the time where yes, you actually are working on the documents with other people). Either way, it should not be this much of a pain in the ass to exchange documents between different versions of the same damn program.

Re:Options

[PitaBred]

I'm not saying it's a good state of affairs. It was simply an observation of the inertia working against moving the web to proper standards.

Re:Options

[DrSkwid]

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fslashdot.org%2Farticle.pl%3Fsid%3D09%2F02%2F19%2F2056228

Errors found while checking this document as HTML 4.01 Strict!
Result: 88 Errors, 1 warning(s)
Address: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/19/2056228

Re:Options

[The Cisco Kid]

Ah yes, but of course MS wants to force everyone to pay to upgrade to the newest version. Thats part of the reason why people should be actively discouraged from using MSWord files to exchange information (barring them actually co-authoring a document and specifically agreeing on a specific version of a specific software to do so)

Re:Options

[dov_0]

or, perhaps, fixing those pages comes to mind...

I'm all for standards compliance. People too lazy to change from IE just get what they deserve.

Personally, I don't publish anything to the web which isn't standards compliant. I just add IE hacks on top... That's the hard part...

If all webdevs followed the standards, Microsoft would have to make IE standards compliant.

Re:Options

[fcparfait]

It seems they have added "X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7" to the HTTP header of the pages on microsoft.com. Why is microsoft.com on the Compatibility View list, then?

• Does it mean "X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7" was not there yet when the IE team generated the current version of the Compatibility View list?
• Does it mean they forgot to add "X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7" to some pages?
• There is a small difference between adding "X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7" and being listed on the Compatibility View list. Does it mean adding "X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7" was not enough to render microsoft.com correctly on IE 8?

Any ideas?

Fuck IE

[jollyreaper]

It can't even render simple fucking HTML properly. Simple little html table, written according to the guidelines. Looks spiff in Firefox, unholy mess in IE. The only way to make things line up properly in IE is to do illegal things that are correctly rendered as incompetent ass in Firefox.

Fuck IE and the modem it was downloaded on.

Re:Fuck IE

[Seakip18]

Any chance you can post a link to a screenshot of this? My day could use a good cheap laugh.

Re:Fuck IE

[jgtg32a]

IE does just fine with Vanilla HTML.

CSS on the other hand

Re:Fuck IE

[BorgAssimilator]

Playing devil's advocate here for a second:

What do you mean by "simple little html table"? I just tried making a really simple table and it looked pretty much the same... the default font was slightly different but that's to be expected, and doesn't prove incompatibility by itself.

Note: Sorry for responding to a flame, but I didn't have any mod points :-(

Re:Fuck IE

[hubert.lepicki]

Sorry, but which screenshot are you asking for? IE8 displaying elements not valid way, or that guy who posted original comment, doing activity with title of his post.

Re:Fuck IE

[Seakip18]

The SS of IE8 managing to fail at a basic task of rendering.

Re:Fuck IE

[MadMidnightBomber]

You are me in 1998, trying to get pages to render nicely in Mosaic, lynx and IE 3.0.

We hates it, we hates it forever.

Re:Fuck IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, well it seems to handle relative table widths a little differently but nothing as radical as you're suggesting.

I suspect this is a quirks mode thing, does it pass the w3c validator? What's your DOCTYPE (you *did* set one, right?)

Re:Fuck IE

[Phroggy]

IE8's CSS support is good enough to pass ACID2. If you're judging IE's craptacular CSS support on your experiences with IE6 and IE7, you need to forget all that and try the IE8 beta.

Having said that, I'm sure there's plenty of stuff that ACID2 doesn't cover, that other browsers handle fine, that's still horribly broken in IE8. But this is why the ACID tests exist - to help browser vendors identify where the problems are. I expect IE9 will pass ACID3.

IE8 isn't great, but Microsoft is finally on board, playing by our rules, working to make IE standards-compliant and competitive. They haven't arrived yet, but they've begun to try, and that's something.

Re:Fuck IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me be the first to say this:

They are a bunch of clueless wankers.

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

They are the ones that originally broke the web by not being standards compliant. lol

Re:LOL

[madprof]

I think you'll find it was Netscape who did that. They were kings of it.

Where's the story?

[AKAImBatman]

I don't get it. Why is everyone so surprised by this? Microsoft has been the biggest consumer of their own non-standard web technologies in both an effort to tie services to Windows and to convince other web developers to use their 'neato' technologies.

Has no one ever noticed that Microsoft.com had various effects, direct system access, and other features not found anywhere else on the web? Or that Windows Update only worked through Internet Explorer? Microsoft WANTS to be as non-standard as possible. And if you don't believe me, check out this wonderful document penned by none other than Bill Gates himself:

One thing we have got to change in our strategy -- allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Re:Where's the story?

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you don't believe me, check out this wonderful document penned by none other than Bill Gates himself:

One thing we have got to change in our strategy -- allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

HA! Caught them red handed! Oh wait thats from 10 years ago....

Re:Where's the story?

[techno-vampire]

Or that Windows Update only worked through Internet Explorer?

Well, what else do you expect? Windows Update works by taking advantage of a major security hole known as "ActiveX," and IE is the only browser that doesn't block it.

Re:Where's the story?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wait thats from 10 years ago....

So is Microsoft.com...

Re:Where's the story?

[AKAImBatman]

Well, what else do you expect?

Um... that was kind of my point. That IE-only compatibility on Microsoft.com is exactly what people should be expecting. But for some reason it's a huge surprise to people that Microsoft.com is incompatible with standards.

Shock and horror.

Re:Where's the story?

[spuke4000]

The real story is not that microsoft.com is on the list, it's all the other sites. Ostensibly this is a list of sites that are not standards compliant, which IE8 will treat in as non-standard so they display correctly. But if you check the list you'll find wikipedia.org, google.com, mozilla.com(!!). Are these sites really non-compliant? Or is IE8 just incompatible with them?

Re:Where's the story?

[jgtg32a]

More accurately IE is the only browser that can even use ActiveX

Re:Where's the story?

[AKAImBatman]

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm

Lord only knows why that even exists...

Re:Where's the story?

[Dionysus]

validating Google.com. Don't think google ever tried to be compliant.

Re:Where's the story?

[TBerben]

According to the W3C validator Mozilla.org passes with 1 warning, Wikipedia.org passes with flying colours but Google.com fails miserably with 65 errors.

Re:Where's the story?

[afidel]

Mozilla.com validates as xhtml 1.0 strict, as does wikipedia.org, msn.com, and live.com has 4 minor errors for XHTML 1.0 transitional. Those are the ones I found from validating the major sites of the first couple pages of the list.

Re:Where's the story?

[gazbo]

That is a truly shocking email. And if it were 10 years ago it may even be slightly relevant.

Re:Where's the story?

[Anonymous Coward]

They were at some point, if i remember correct.
But since they added in all the JavaScript fuctionality, things got "broken".

While i can forgive most of the errors in there, but this one in particular is pretty damn shocking in my eyes.
Line 3, Column 2223: an attribute value must be a literal unless it contains only name characters
...om/maps?hl=en&tab=wl" onclick=gbar.qs(this) class=gb1>Maps a href="http:
Really?! Yes, usually a ; would end that, but since a bracket with a space was found, that is taken as the end, but seriously, that's just crazy, it makes my brain cells scream.
In fact, all the attributes not being in quotes are pretty damn bad.

Surprised they haven't fixed that, kinda saddening seeing Google leave it like that.
It won't exactly add that much more to the download speed, their site is already tiny, 56k could handle it reasonably well.

Re:Where's the story?

[shutdown -p now]

Are these sites really non-compliant? Or is IE8 just incompatible with them?

My guess is that those sites currently use some IE-specific workaround-hacks (with browser detection or similar approach) that breaks in IE8. So they are okay in general, just not for IE.

Also, I've yet to see any web site under google.com that would be valid HTML. Their main search page certainly isn't - heck, it doesn't even have a DOCTYPE declaration.

Re:Where's the story?

[BitZtream]

Look, you can talk about bad security all you want, but the only difference between ActiveX and an xpcom plugin in firefox is that ActiveX would auto-install. Other than the fact that IE allows/allowed for auto installs, the two technologies are practically identical.

The problem is not ActiveX, its that IE would automatically install them. Then they made it prompt by default (it was always an option) before installing, but most users blindly click whatever they think will get them the free prize. Then they started with the unsigned warnings, but nothing was signed initially, so that was useless for a while, which again trained users to ignore it. Of course the fact that signed doesn't mean it wasn't signed by a bad guy, and since no own really does anything to the bad guys, they just make sure they are signed and go on.

I could list probably 20 things that could be changed that would have made ActiveX components not a threat, and none of those changes would actually involve changing an ActiveX component or the API in any way.

If you prevent IE from installing ActiveX components on its own you are functionally equivalent to Firefox. That doesn't mean that you can't be exploited via a bug in the browser which allows for an unauthorized install, nor does it protect you from installed components that have exploits which have not yet be found. Those problems effect Firefox as well.

Make a way for Firefox to have a page automatically install an extension and you've got the exact same problem.

Note: I pick on Firefox here because I've developed plugins for Firefox and IE. I do not use Opera, nor do I have any experience with Chrome plugins so I really can't comment as to how they may handle things differently.

Also I'm not saying you should use IE or that ActiveX is great. IE and ActiveX are crap for to many reasons to list here, but many of those same problems apply to the Firefox/XULRunner/XPCOM world as well, fortunately they just tend to be something you can fix in OSS software which takes away a lot of the validity of developers bitching about bad code, they should just fix it themselves :)

Re:Where's the story?

[pushing-robot]

I'd guess that somebody said "If we fudge this, this, and this we could shave off a couple kilobytes and all the browsers out there will still render it properly." When you consider the Google homepage gets something like infinity hits per day—it adds up.

Re:Where's the story?

[Anonymous Coward]

The list looks more like the top X of most popular websites. If you look at the Dutch sites in there it's an exact copy of the top 10.

including msn.nl :)

Re:Where's the story?

[MarkRose]

Say they saved 200 bytes per front page hit. Say it gets hit 50,000,000 times per day. That's already 10 TB of bandwidth. If they're paying 10 per GB, that's $1000/day saved.

Re:Where's the story?

[Blakey Rat]

Has no one ever noticed that Microsoft.com had various effects, direct system access, and other features not found anywhere else on the web?

Not really, no.

Or that Windows Update only worked through Internet Explorer?

Windows Update has been a freakin' Control Panel and Service in Windows for a decade now. Please update the rhetoric to the 21st century, thank you.

Yes, the web-based Windows Update still works. Yes, it requires IE. That's because IE is the only browser that ever implemented ActiveX. But the thing is, HTML was/is *designed* so that companies can extend it! (That's why HTML ignores tags it doesn't understand, for example.) ActiveX was fairly extended in the correct manner prescribed by HTML. Is it a good technology? No. Does it violate the HTML standards? Also no. Is there any technical reason Firefox can't implement ActiveX? No.

Re:Where's the story?

[toejam13]

Not even Slashdot is compliant. This article alone scores 49 errors.

W3 validation of this article

How can people complain about compliance when little of the web is in itself compliant?

Re:Where's the story?

[AKAImBatman]

And if it were 10 years ago it may even be slightly relevant.

If you consider for a moment that 10 years ago is the last time that Microsoft put any serious investment in developing either Microsoft.com or Internet Explorer itself, the email is very relevant. It explains the exact thought process that brought us that site.

Of course, we don't have legal discovery on Microsoft anymore so we can't get a hold of such juicy emails which I'm sure are still floating around. So instead we have to look at Microsoft's behavior and realize that they haven't changed one bit. IE8 embraces the parts that Microsoft feels are not a danger (e.g. CSS2), incompatibly extends the parts that Microsoft sees as a potential danger (e.g. HTML5), and extinguishes the parts that Microsoft doesn't want to ever see the light of day (e.g. DOM2 Events, SVG). Then it throws a nice veiner over the crap-fest to convince users that it's the best thing since sliced bread.

Thankfully, users aren't buying it.

Re:Where's the story?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess Windows Update is not a good example because it's a special application used to update your Windows system, not a website for "information".

microsoft.com, however, is their company's website providing information about their own products etc. So they're of different purpose and it should use standard. It's not surprising, but surely it'll take them some time to fix all those stuff.

Nevertheless, if this can make more people follow more closely to standard, it'll be a good thing. Though I suspect they'll have to provide and allow the use of backward compatability function in some way. Otherwise, it can be hard for some corporations to upgrade to use IE8 (or whichever OS will ship with IE8 by default) because of internal web application incompatability.

Re:Where's the story?

[hairyfeet]

Also just wanted to add that the US english version of Mozilla passes with flying colors and Slashdot gets a big fat flunk with 170 errors. But considering all the funky "web 2.0" stuff they've been messing with that really isn't surprising.

Re:Where's the story?

[setirw]

You're off by three orders of magnitude...

Re:Where's the story?

[Bill Dog]

While testing a socket helper class I was writing about a year and a half ago, I noticed that the Google homepage's entire direct content (i.e. excluding content like their logo, which the browser fetches in a separate request (and which will be cached for visits thereafter)) always arrived in a single TCP/IP packet. I assumed that this was on purpose, by the following reasoning:

• This bypasses the possibility of the rendering of a partially downloaded web page. A user who sees part of the page there but it's still not yet in a state where they can begin to use it will likely think it's due to slowness on that web site's end. (I.e. they'll be mad at Google.)
• In any delay in loading that first packet, even if on the web site end, because users don't see anything yet, they're likely to assume they're just experiencing a slow connection for some indeterminate reason, and assign blame to their ISP or the Internet in general.

So if all of Google's main page content still fits in the 1500 or so byte limit, then they prolly indeed are dropping characters here and there and violating standards, as long as it still renders properly, to maintain that snappy response we're used to when going to Google. In other words, I think Google's characteristically spartan home page was not only about the look, but the look and feel. Pretty smart.

Re:Where's the story?

[Flammon]

Why do you think that is?

Re:Where's the story?

[XDirtypunkX]

It really is pinching the bandwidth penny, isn't it?

Re:Where's the story?

[larry bagina]

For kicks I spot-checked every year of google's homepage at archive.org. Not one was compliant.

Re:Where's the story?

[larry bagina]

slashdot used to be much worse ( a couple rewrite ago, they made an attempt to fix the crap html in user posts). They used to be so bad they would sniff the validator and block it.

Re:Where's the story?

[nicodoggie]

And in addition to the parent's point, why should we care that Windows Update doesn't work on other browsers?

The main reason for using standard markup is so a page can be rendered by any browser on any platform.

Now, why would Linux users want to go to the Windows Update site anyway?

Re:Where's the story?

[tobiasly]

Look, you can talk about bad security all you want, but the only difference between ActiveX and an xpcom plugin in firefox is that ActiveX would auto-install. Other than the fact that IE allows/allowed for auto installs, the two technologies are practically identical.

The problem is not ActiveX, its that IE would automatically install them.

No, the problem is that Microsoft promoted ActiveX as a way for web developers to add extra functionality to their sites. Their goals were to compete with Java and lock users and web developers into IE and Windows. The auto-install bit is only a side effect of that, so that the user experience would be as seamless as possible, security be damned.

So now there are still lots of sites (especially on large intranets) that require ActiveX for some business-essential functionality. I guess Microsoft succeeded to some degree in that these companies can never move from IE.

By contrast, Mozilla never promoted XPCom extensions as something that should be added to a website. In fact by default you can no longer install an extension from anywhere besides the official Mozilla Add-Ons -- Mozilla intentionally makes it more difficult to do this.

So yes, from a technical perspective they both allow native code to be executed on the system but the point is that Microsoft wanted everyone to use ActiveX as widely as possible instead of reserving it only as a means of adding functionality to the browser itself.

Re:Where's the story?

[suggsjc]

I regularly check my site to make sure that is compliant. Even though I'm in a rapid development mode at the time, when I do find errors they get top priority to fix. Its a mindset that developers either embrace or ignore. Validation errors usually fall into two categories. First is just markup errors (ie. an input element not in a fieldset) the other it is not properly escaping user input. The first requires some conscious decisions about how you want to markup your site, the second is just improving your method of filtering user input. If you just stay on top of either of those scenarios on a regular basis they are both relatively easy to fix. My point is that having a non-validating site is either apathy, ignorance or laziness. I'd like to know which one of those aspects is the reason /. doesn't validate.

Re:Where's the story?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm

Lord only knows why that even exists...

cowboy neal knows?

Re:Where's the story?

[grcumb]

But the thing is, HTML was/is *designed* so that companies can extend it! (That's why HTML ignores tags it doesn't understand, for example.)

The extensibility you are referring to is for XHTML (the 'X' actually stands for eXtensible). That's an important distinction, because when a company extends XHTML, they do it using XML, which must be valid and well-formed.

I am nearly certain that microsoft.com is not being marked incompatible because of valid, well-formed XHTML extensions. I know for certain that google.com. is not.

With reference to ActiveX - the issue has always been security, not validity. Valid or not, ActiveX is a security hole you can drive a sandworm through.

HTH, HAND

Re:Where's the story?

[Firehed]

Ok, so pretend that ActiveX doesn't exist (as it shouldn't; it's not exactly widely used these days outside of very old intranet apps) - now what? Writing standards-compliant CSS isn't exactly difficult for a seasoned coder, and IE8 handles CSS nearly as well as Firefox and Safari. Not perfectly, mind you, but unless you're doing newer CSS3 stuff you probably won't see any severe issues. JS libraries do all of the heavy lifting in terms of cross-browser compatibility, and make development a hell of a lot faster and easier to boot.

While I can't be surprised that Microsoft.com of all sites is likely to have some compatibility issues, I'm pretty damn sure that Microsoft's web developers are cursing IE's lack of standards compliance just as much as the rest of the world.

Re:Where's the story?

[arkane1234]

I donno, myself and a lot of others always feel that having a non-web browser app is properly a touch better at updating your operating system as non-root/non-administrator... so maybe a windows app?

Re:Where's the story?

[JasterBobaMereel]

People can write any plugin they want for Firefox ... it does not mean they are wanted, useful, or needed ...

Re:Where's the story?

[daveime]

Thankfully, users aren't buying it.

Well they don't need to, it comes bundled free with their O/S.

Re:Where's the story?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any technical reason Firefox can't implement ActiveX?

Yes, because technically ActiveX sucks.

Re:Where's the story?

[jonadab]

> Is there any technical reason Firefox can't implement ActiveX? No.

You mean aside from the fact that ActiveX is inherently Win32-only, and Firefox is a cross-platform product?

(Of course, the real problem with ActiveX is that it's an inherently bad idea, one of the most egregiously irresponsible things Microsoft has ever done, from a security perspective. But that's why Firefox *shouldn't* implement it, and you asked for "can't", which is different.)

Re:Where's the story?

[msormune]

Well, to be fair, Microsoft needs their browser extensions and what not for Windows Update to work AT ALL. It's not like they add them just for fun and to piss people off.

And besides, I don't think it's even possible for Windows Update to run on multiple platforms, you know... Because it updates Windows.

.

Re:Where's the story?

[GuidedByVoices]

Or that Windows Update only worked through Internet Explorer?
While the "spiffy" ActiveX features will only work in Internet Explorer, one *can* download everything they need without using IE.
A companies update tool which only works in said companies software? My god, who'd ever expect such a thing. (Bear in mind, I too would rather windows update work in Opera, but their move isn't surprising in the least).

Re:Where's the story?

[Blakey Rat]

Old fashioned HTML is also extensible, you could define your own tags (like, for example, "BLINK"), and browsers that understood them would use them, and browsers that didn't would ignore them. Arguably, making it extensible was a bad idea (for reasons that should be obvious in retrospect), but that's how it was designed.

Re:Where's the story?

[MoogMan]

me@mymachine:~$ wget -O - google.com -q | wc -c
7140

Except the size of the Google home page is massively larger than a typical MTU size (1500 bytes).

Re:Where's the story?

[csartanis]

The google homepage html is about 6k, wireshark shows 3k transferred (gzipped) arriving in three packets. Your read call was likely buffering and you didn't realize it.

Re:Where's the story?

[owlstead]

I presume you are talking about the site now, because the plugin virtually does not exist anymore, as it only supports Firefox 1.5 and anything below that. That means it has no target audience. They should keep the site though, you'd be amazed how many times I've searched for a site that the owners thought they did not need anymore. E.g. it's an indicator to me that a plugin for FF3 does not seem to exist.

Maintaining the page should not cost too much, it's just some static HTML sitting somewhere in a rather harmless fashion.

Re:Where's the story?

[Phroggy]

Has no one ever noticed that Microsoft.com had various effects, direct system access, and other features not found anywhere else on the web? Or that Windows Update only worked through Internet Explorer?

I couldn't help but notice that you used the past tense here. Windows Update, for example, no longer runs inside of Internet Explorer. That e-mail from Gates was written a decade ago. Times have changed, and Microsoft is not the same company they were.

That doesn't mean they're not still evil, but come on, complain about the evil things they're doing NOW, not the evil things they did five years ago.

Re:Where's the story?

[jbolden]

I think ActiveX was great, at least as a proprietary solution. Particular in I.E. 4.5 when it was integrated with Active desktop and push technologies. You could do amazing things 10 years ago you still can't really do today. What it wasn't was secure.

NT had the security to handle this, but that wasn't turned on because they wanted to hide the differences from Win98 and not have two very different product lines. Further corporate IT wanted control.

Re:Where's the story?

[Harry Coin]

That doesn't mean they're not still evil, but come on, complain about the evil things they're doing NOW, not the evil things they did five years ago.

Unfortunately, we have to wait for the discovery phase of their next trial to get more recent internal emails. In the meantime, is there some reason to believe that their corporate culture has improved in Ballmer's sweaty hands?

Re:Where's the story?

[InverseParadox]

Now, why would Linux users want to go to the Windows Update site anyway?

Aside from "to download things which they will then install on Windows machines" or similar, why do you assume that non-IE browser means Linux?

I run Windows at work because it's what we have to use there, and I run Firefox for every site which doesn't rely on something IE-only. Having to switch over just for the one particular site is quite annoying.

(Having to switch over just because of detection which refuses to let me in because I'm not running IE, which happens all too frequently, is even more annoying. But that's a bit of a tangent.)

As for Windows Update being a Control Panel entry and a service:

* The service simply runs in the background to download and optionally install updates. It runs on its own time; you can't tell it "go out and get updates now", the only way to tell it "don't try to get updates now" is to disable it, and you can't configure it beyond the single radio-button Windows-Security-Center option.

* The Control Panel entry - at least the only one I see on the computer I'm using now - simply brings up the "configure the Automatic Updates service" dialog, with that single radio-button option I mentioned.

Neither of those gives you the detailed "list of all available&applicable updates" which can be gotten via the Windows Update Website, nor do they let you say "go out and get updates now" as the Website-based version does.

If there's a non-Website-based way to get that kind of functionality, I'd love to hear of it, but I don't know of any right now.

Re:Where's the story?

[Phroggy]

Unfortunately, we have to wait for the discovery phase of their next trial to get more recent internal emails. In the meantime, is there some reason to believe that their corporate culture has improved in Ballmer's sweaty hands?

Well, for starters, the IE team has been communicating with the web development community, they've been working with the Mozilla foundation (licensing Firefox's RSS logo for use in IE7, and helping to improve Firefox's support for Vista), they cleaned up IE's CSS handling enough to make it pass ACID2 (and added support for various other W3C standards), and they changed Windows Update so it no longer runs in IE. That's definitely non-evil behavior, and there appears to be a non-evil culture behind it.

However, Microsoft is a huge company and is rather famous for the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Just because there's a non-evil culture driving certain parts of the company doesn't mean the rest of the company has a non-evil culture as well. It's also possible that appearances are deceiving, and their good behavior really is stemming from an evil culture. I don't have any internal connections, so I don't know.

Google.com?!

[kramulous]

I'm no web developer but how can google.com be on that list as well? It is one of the simplest websites around. A text field, few links and a bit of javascript.

How the hell can a web browser, that let's face it, is probably going to be the dominant web browser, not render that.

No wonder the general population get pissed of with 'the computer's not working again'. These days I tell them that I don't know Windows. I'm going to have to start walking around with a Ubuntu live on USB.

Re:Google.com?!

[Anonymous Coward]

For starters, no !DOCTYPE.

Re:Google.com?!

[snowgirl]

I'm no web developer but how can google.com be on that list as well? It is one of the simplest websites around. A text field, few links and a bit of javascript.

The problem here is that Microsoft released a list of domains that are not properly supported, and the list contains one entry: "*.*"

Re:Google.com?!

[duguk]

...the list contains one entry: "*.*"

At least my intranet site will be ok then :o)

Re:Google.com?!

[ionix5891]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0

Re:Google.com?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well seeing as their simplest page, http://www.google.com/ is a mess of javascript and invalid html (http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F), it's not all that surprising. But they probably didn't mean the main page.

Re:Google.com?!

[leromarinvit]

Just look at the source. I guess they are optimizing for size - makes sense when you consider the enourmous number of page loads. Similarly, they use one-letter javascript variables and very short function names a lot.

Re:Google.com?!

[kramulous]

I find that absolutely stunning! Here we have a billion dollar company that prides itself on software and it cannot even get its core bread-and-butter gig correct.

It boggles my mind.

Re:Google.com?!

[psyclone]

True, they compress the html, css, and javascript output, but they do it with some "compression" software. However, that does not mean the said compression/html/css generating software can't generate W3C valid documents.

Re:Google.com?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Open google.com in lynx and say that again.

Re:Google.com?!

[Sleepy]

Searching data is Google's core business, nothing more.

I agree Google could do better on their homepage, but that's NOT the same as saying they're not getting this right.

In addition to working well with COMMON browsers, Google works pretty darn well with anything else you throw at it, from phone browsers to lynx to SMS messages.

Gmail -does- have a lot of effort put in it to be portable. Works great on my Nokia N8xx tablet. I'm happy.

On the other hand, many Microsoft.com pages render in Firefox with menu links being the SAME color as the background. :-/

Re:Google.com?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on where you look in google. If you go to their more technical pages you'll find that they adhere pretty well to solid HTML5 practices. It's only the front page that is optimized to hell and back. You'll note that google's front page doesn't have any pretty layout in the code; it's gone through some variant on the 'crunch' routines to remove excess whitespace and newlines. Their other pages are much prettier/easier to read.

I'm pretty sure that the main front page is done that way in order to absolutely minimize the amount of data that gets sent over the connection. They drop every option or implied tag/attribute, don't use quotes on attribute values, etc, because they know that pretty much all browsers can still render what is a fairly simple web page. However every byte they reduce the file size by probably saves them thousands of dollars (random statistic pulled from nowhere) a month in bandwidth.

Re:Google.com?!

[leromarinvit]

Okay, didn't think about gzip encoding, so I guess this puts this into some perspective.

Still, the doctype is a rather long string, and if they added all attributes which are required by the W3C spec but current browsers can do without, it would probably still add up. Not as much as without compression, but multiplied by hundreds of millions of page views per day, it probably still makes a difference.

Re:Google.com?!

[BosHaus]

I'd like you to find a major website that comes anywhere close to passing that test before passing judgment. I tried ars, slashdot, yahoo, anandtech, and some others. All fail.

Re:Google.com?!

[psyclone]

If it is raw bandwidth on the main page and even the search results page they are concerned about, Google could store their inline CSS and javascript externally. The browser and proxy cache savings would be more than enough to make up for adding the doctype and standards code.

Personally I don't think Google cares enough to make their documents W3C standards compliant. But as long as everyone's browser works on it, no end user will care. (Someone writing a rendering engine might be annoyed.)

Re:Google.com?!

[pgn674]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://slashdot.org

Re:Google.com?!

[kramulous]

Again, I'm not a web developer, but does that mean there is something 'wrong' with the standards?

Or, as I suspect, is it for a very good reason ... making all browsers able to view, optimisation technique, etc.

Dunno. I guess I'll stay out of what I don't know.

Re:Google.com?!

[setirw]

Again, I'm not a web developer, but does that mean there is something 'wrong' with the standards?

Although there's nothing "wrong" per se, the standards are excessively strict, and slight nonconformity will not cause rendering issues in any browser. For example, non-literal attribute values, while not technically standards compliant, is properly recognized by every HTML parser in existence. Arguably, such usage conforms to a "democratic standard," rendering the W3C's say irrelevant on this specific matter.

Furthermore, W3C's validation tool doesn't work very well. In Google's case, it's flagged bits of string literals (URLs in links, specifically) as invalid.

Re:Google.com?!

[Techman83]

On the other hand, many Microsoft.com pages render in Firefox with menu links being the SAME color as the background. :-/

Oh... I just thought that was normal...!

Re:Google.com?!

[brentonboy]

Actually, Google isn't as simple as you think. Example: view one of the images (on the results page, not the homepage). The Google logo or one of the arrows or something. They are all this same image: http://www.google.com/images/nav_logo4.png How do you think they get all those different images while only loading one image? The simplicity is simple, but there is tons of really complicated stuff going on on the Google front end.

Re:Google.com?!

[brentonboy]

For starters, no !DOCTYPE.

It does have a doctype: {!doctype html}

It may look unfamiliar to you because that's the HTML 5 doctype.

Re:Google.com?!

[cbhacking]

You're mistaken - it's not that IE8 can't render Google, it's that Google's code is sloppy and doesn't conform to any standard. For that matter, it doesn't even specify the standard that it should be compared against. Since it is missing required information, web browsers are forced to guess what defaults Google wanted them to use. This is what a browser's "quirks" mode is for (ironically enough often used to handle code aimed at IE) but these guesses are almost never 100% accurate.

In fact, IE8 renders Google.com identically, as best I can tell, to Firefox 3. Nonetheless, Google's code is invalid and therefore cannot, by definition, be fully compatible.

Re:Google.com?!

[Anonymous Coward]

These days I tell them that I don't know Windows. I'm going to have to start walking around with a Ubuntu live on USB.

I've been telling them that for 14 years (and it's true). It works wonderfully.

Re:Google.com?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I came across one just last week and could hardly believe it myself, because as you say, they nearly always fail. It's Acura's site, and it's actually pretty nice all round.

Re:Google.com?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the errors are pertaining to syntax, mostly HTML entities (ie, & not being used), tags with missing req'd attributes, and missing quotes in attributes.

This is only a guess, but I would think this is done to save bandwidth, especially considering the huge volume of requests that the page is always receiving. So, a few bytes here and a few bytes there sure add up.

Re:Google.com?!

[socsoc]

I love them, but building online properties in order to sell advertising is Google's core business, not searching data (unless you meant mining your data to target ads at you).

Re:Google.com?!

[thejynxed]

And hope to hell that your clients allow you to burn a dvd of it for them. Even in this day and age, most average OEM (talking desktop systems, mainly from HP/Compaq/Dell, and not Apple or Asus) systems still won't boot from a USB stick. USB Hard Disks, yes. USB thumb drives, no. This is intentional firmware crippling. The hardware can handle it, the OEMs however, payed the BIOS makers to disable the function in their custom firmware. They did this so that you'd have to pay for the high-end models to get this functionality, and let's face it, most run-of-the-mill clients don't buy the high-end.

Lovely eh?

(Example: Several MSI and Foxconn motherboards from Dell have this feature disabled, but if you buy the exact same board models as retail boards from say Newegg, the feature works. This is especially noticeable on the Dimension, Optiplex and Inspiron desktop lines.)

As far as telling them you don't know Windows? Good, more work for me :)

Re:Google.com?!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the term "doctype" doesn't appear anywhere within their page, at all. They may be serving up different HTML to different browsers, but I'm certainly not seeing it, nor is the W3C validator.

Re:Google.com?!

[learningtree]

Why focus only on google ?
Lets see how slashdot fares on this check !!
145 errors that make it much worse than google.

Re:Google.com?!

[Ciggy]

It has worked well.

Are you, by chance, referring to things like this:

(X) Line 3, Column 2106: general entity "tab" not defined and no default entity.

http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi" onclick=gbar.qs(this) class=gb1>

In this case, the "literal" string includes an ampersand (&) which is used as an "escape character" in html so that various characters can be inserted, eg a less than (<) symbol (via &lt;) which is normally an opening tag indicator. To include an ampersand the correct markup is "&amp;" and not "&",

It's the browers being "helpful" in parsing any unknown "escape" (the bit between the '&' and the ';', or if the ';' is missing) as literal text, ie ignoring it as an escape the first place.

Re:Google.com?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because other sites have incompetent web developers doesn't mean it's ok for Google to have them too.

Re:Google.com?!

[JasterBobaMereel]

The main Google page does all sorts of tricks to load quickly ... so of these are not standards compliant... but render correctly in all current browsers .... Google *will* make sure it renders in IE8 as well ...

Google is not an example of a bad website, it is an example of a site that will make sure it renders correctly (and as fast as possible) in all browsers

Re:Google.com?!

[mgiuca]

At least Google does things the Unix way. Their list of domains that are not properly supported is "/".

Re:Google.com?!

[jonadab]

> > ...the list contains one entry: "*.*"
> At least my intranet site will be ok then :o)

Will it? ISTR that, under DOS at least, the wildcard *.* matches all files whether they have an extension or not, because the * means "zero or more characters".

Re:Google.com?!

[Anonymous Coward]

under DOS at least

there's your problem...

Re:Google.com?!

[Hal_Porter]

That reminds me of this article on CSS sprites

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/css-sprites/

The idea is that you groupt a bunch of small images into one large one and use background-position to select the right one.

Re:Google.com?!

[maxume]

When was the last time that you loaded the homepage and it failed to work?

That's the only correct that they are worried about. Given that the majority of web browsers that end up loading that site are not fully compliant with web standards, why bother fiddling to that test?

Re:Google.com?!

[Bryansix]

Holy crap. Some of those errors are little kid type errors! I made those mistake back when I was in high school in 1997 when I first learned HTML. The difference though is that I never published a webpage which had such errors. Seriously, how do you not put in the quotes around the color codes? That's lame.

Re:Google.com?!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fuckedcompany.com%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.606

Re:Google.com?!

[Bryansix]

Most of those errors are simply because they declare HTML 4.01 Strict. If they simply changed doctype to transitional it would probably validate just fine.

Re:Google.com?!

[pgn674]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://slashdot.org/&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional

Re:Google.com?!

[Bryansix]

Ya, see, less errors. Granted they still have 92.

Re:Google.com?!

[kramulous]

To me that means something is wrong with the standards. If your major websites (hitwise) do not conform then something is wrong. If all new graduates are learning the standards then what are they learning and what will things look like as a result in 5, 10 or 50 years time?

Now, there are snobs that'll say you learn more at the big learning institutes, but the content they produce will only be a drop in the ocean (beit a particularly nutritious drop).

Is it that programming for the web is like the English language ... there are rules but then there are the exceptions. Do these exceptions need to be clearly labeled at the bottom of the RFCs or other spec analysis streams?

I'll crawl back under my rock now. Most of this is probably obvious to those who do it on a regular basis.

Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[kbrasee]

The worst thing on the internet is a site that only works in IE. I just ran across one the other day that displayed nothing but a blank screen in Firefox and Chrome. There are many more that have crazy formatting issues in anything but IE. So, this is a good way to force these sites to update from their 1997 crapfest to the standardized modern web.

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[CrazyTalk]

Thats why I have 3 browsers (Safari, IE, Firefox, split across my Mac and PC). One browser cannot do it all. Gmail doesnt work properly on IE, my companys web version of outlook doesnt work on Safari, certain sites REQUIRE IE, etc.

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[techno-vampire]

I'm subscribed to a site that pays me to fill out surveys. All surveys from one, specific client of theirs hang on the first page in Firefox, under Linux. Curious, I stopped the page and checked the source. It's trying endlessly to load Real Player Gold, and I use a Linux plugin instead.

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[jgtg32a]

Just install IE Tab on your Windows FF and be done with it.

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[Anonymous Coward]

As a very smart yet very evil person working for Microsoft, I'm getting a kick out of these replies...

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[CrazyTalk]

but...what about my Mac?

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[shutdown -p now]

Gmail doesnt work properly on IE

It does for me and everyone I know, at least when I'm forced to use IE on occasion. And I would be very surprised if Google released a product that didn't support IE, beta or not. What's your problem with it, exactly?

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[Anonymous Coward]

True. My girlfriend does web development. In their shop, they spend about 60% of the time doing normal page development and the rest of the time making a version that works with IE. I've heard a lot of web developers complain about this. It would be nice if everyone was compliant.

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[kbrasee]

When I was doing web development I ran into the same problem all the time. We'd usually have a CSS file for regular browsers, and a hack CSS file to get everything to work in IE. Shoot, even now doing very little web development (maybe 5% of the time) I still run into these problems. Make a test harness page of type application/xhtml+xml, and IE6 decides to try to save it as a file... argh.

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[Erikderzweite]

Oh well, if a site requires IE -- that site has lost a visitor, because I won't install Windows or IE in wine just to see some crappy piece of web.
Well, I am a home user, no fancy intranet apps so I have it easy.

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[wvmarle]

Well as long as the market share of IE remains above 40%, MS won't have much to worry, the time investment is still worth it. Now they spend 60% of the time making a web site that works only in 20% or so of the market's browsers.

Like with the rest of computing, there are two sides: Microsoft, and The Rest. As long as Microsoft is about 95%, about 95% of development resources go there, and 5% goes to The Rest. When Microsoft falls to say 70%, The Rest would get 30% market and 30% of the development efforts.

Sorry, I can't come up with a car analogy here to make it clear but I'm sure someone can.

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[jonadab]

> The worst thing on the internet is a site that only works in IE.

Apparently you've never seen a site that works only in Netscape 4.

"I'm sorry, this pages uses layers. To view this site, please install a web browser that supports layers."

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[CrazyTalk]

Gmail worked fine on IE until - surprise, surprise - they released their Chrome Browser. Suddenly within a week it stopped working under IE (at least my configuration under XP). I'm not normally one to smell conspiracy, but this seems to be too big a coincidence.

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[shutdown -p now]

Just checked it, and it seems to be working fine in IE7; some troubles in IE8 though, but that's to be expected (I'd imagine the IE version is one large hack, so no surprise it's broken by a new version). I think you rather have some troubles with your configuration...

Re:Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing

[Mista2]

I wonder if these sites look at their stats and say "well, we don't get many non ie clients, so there isn't much point supporting them."

Rock and a Hard Place

[Toreo asesino]

So slashdot, what should it be?

Break standards and keep compatibility? Or break compatibility and be standards compliant?

Either way they'll be unpopular it appears. At least in the short-term.

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[Joce640k]

One of the two will make them unpopular in the long term.

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[Anonymous Coward]

Or 3) use Webkit and get both standards and compatibility.

There's nothing, other than Not Invented Here Syndrome, stopping them. Plus, they'd gain back some of the epic amounts of geek credibility they lost during the OOXML debacle, et al.

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[ari_j]

I don't know which answer is the right one, but I do know that we should use exclamation points as often as possible, without regard to their appropriateness!!!

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[Dylnuge]

The compatibility issues are due to them having non-standards compliant code in the first place. Who is Microsoft to tell the world to use something different then what the W3C defines, and further, who are web developers to listen to them? (Other then the largest software company in the world, of course). I'm thinking the list is designed to be a shock list, to make (uninformed) people think that standards compliance is a bad thing, and the evil W3C needs to be stopped (similar to Microsoft-backed SCO claiming GPL was unconstitutional? http://www.linux.com/feature/32357). Most likely, it's a bluff. I can't imagine Microsoft releasing a browser that doesn't fully work with their own website, nevertheless Google and the others. That would piss off more people then just releasing a non-standard browser would. In the end, they will probably keep their non-standard technology like Active X and the like. It's going to be up to the website developers to tell Microsoft to RTFM (the one published by the W3C) - by not using their archaic functions and making websites that follow standards, and not just Microsoft imposed rules.

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[SanityInAnarchy]

they'd gain back some of the epic amounts of geek credibility they lost during the OOXML debacle

Some. The OOXML debacle is only the latest in a very long line of typically Microsoft practices.

Their geek cred has fallen a long way. Just as they would have to do everything wrong for over a decade before money was an issue, they'd have to do everything right for over a decade to earn back the respect they've lost for pretty much their entire existence.

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[Anonymous Coward]

How about "fix the site so it's not standards-incompliant anymore"?

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[Anonymous Coward]

Break "compatibility" and be standards-compliant. Please.

Websites that check for IE6 or IE7 (you have to detect these two because they're very different) aren't going to work in IE8 for free, anyway. At least if IE8 was standards-compliant, there'd be a chance it'd work, because everybody has to support Firefox anyway.

We've already seen that IE7-mode in IE8 won't be exactly the same as IE7. If you're really desperate that it needs to work exactly as before, then the only solution that'll work 100% is to include a copy of IE7. And if you're including a copy of IE7 for that, then it doesn't matter if IE8 has backwards-compatibility.

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[FlyingBishop]

Let's be honest, IE needs to be a good browser before they will ever be anything but unpopular in the long term. IE8 is so far behind FF, Opera, Safari, and Chrome (to speak nothing of the myriad other Webkit/Gecko derivatives) that it will probably never become a good browser. It is obsolete technology, and Microsoft should put it out of its misery.

Unless they're planning on doubling the IE team's managing budget for a few years. (And for any meaningful results, they should start... yesterday. They've been behind, and marking time for years.)

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[BitZtream]

Sadly, they'll be less liked if they go the standards compliant route.

There are far more people with websites that they'd rather not update than there are people who want to update their site so it works in all browsers.

The majority of people would rather it just say working since they really aren't effected all that much by non-IE browsers, especially since they themselves only use IE.

Theres also little gain at this point for everyone to be standards compliant rather than IE compliant anyway. This is definitely changing, and a smart business could take advantage of this potentially. But lets face it, when the time comes that you really DO have to make your website work in all browsers, almost every business will be able to do so or pay someone do do so rather quickly. Very few companies have massive websites that use custom content management systems that would need major reworking. For most companies whoever they outsource their website to will probably just send them a bill and it'll be done when it needs to be, so they have no reason to WANT to get that bill as long as things remain as they are. Since dealing with it if things won't take long anyway, its just smart business to wait.

If MS forces the change, all those businesses (and individuals) will have to updates sites sooner rather than later. Now everyone bitches when Microsoft changes just for the sake of change, while techies won't see this as that sort of thing, pretty much everyone else in the world will.

From a business/PR perspective, its probably best for them to not make standards compliant mode the default.

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[HannethCom]

Part of the problem is every Beta of IE8 has had major standards compliance problems in standards compliance mode. How can you change your site to work in IE8 when you don't know what IE8 is eventually going to render like?

Some of the biggest problems I've run into is images being right beside each other and there's a space between them for some strange reason. That was fixed in Beta 2, but there's still the problem where you have two images on different lines separated by a break tag and there's something like a 3 pixel line between the two images vertically.

It sounds like the Release Candidate is now publically available, it wasn't before, maybe they've got the standards compliant mode rendering standards compliantly, but I only have so much time and after testing two betas on XP and the one in Windows 7 and found them to be useless for trying to test, how do I know I'm not wasting my time again on a RC?

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[JasterBobaMereel]

How about adhere to the standards *and* be compatible ....

IE8 is incompatible with IE6 and IE7 *and* not standards compliant ...

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[Anonymous Coward]

Compliancy with standards. If users don't like it then they need to voice their opinions on the browser manufacturers. That or find a browser that can handle compliant code.

At that point the webmaster/designer ahs done nothing wrong so cannot be accused of anything.

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[Anonymous Coward]

> Break standards and keep compatibility? Or break compatibility and be standards compliant?

Neither.

Stop IE development at version 7.

Start development of a new comes-with-Windows browser, call it differently than Internet Explorer, make a new set of icons for it, change the UI so that it doesn't look like Internet Explorer, but still actually is used the same way (iow, juste change some colors). Make it coexist with IE7 on the same system, so that users can start either. Call first version, either 1 or 2009.

Users are to start IE to view old, never-updated stuff.
And to start this new program to surf the web.
Make the new program live its life exactly as firefox, Opera, et al.

Problem solved.

Re:Rock and a Hard Place

[InverseParadox]

That's actually not a half-bad suggestion.

Virtually no chance they'd actually do it, though - particularly not given that this has been being marketed as IE 8 for so long already.

Maybe a faint chance for version 9...

Compliant?

[oahazmatt]

Microsoft's IE8 team is doing the 'right' thing by finally making IE more standards-compliant, they are risking 'breaking the Web' because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE.

Well then, why even try, right?

Broken or not...

[innerweb]

If finally coming into compliance is what they are doing, then, Duh! By default the sites that are built for the not-compatible versions are going to be broken. I think it is wonderful. If Microsoft comes into compliance and renders web pages by the book (the W3C standard), then it is a great thing for all. Having broken sites is the price that companies pay for jumping on the bandwagon when they had the choice to do the right thing or not.

Consider broken sites a small price to pay going forward to gain real compatibility and a much better web. Less time spent developing around the broken browsers means more time spent building true content - maybe even more time on better security.

InnerWeb

Re:Broken or not...

[mc1138]

Right on, maybe we'll see fewer sites coming back saying that you have to be using IE or it won't work. Trust me lots of places especially banks still do this.

Re:Broken or not...

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe even more time on better security.

You must be new out on these here intarnets...

Poll time!

[duckInferno]

So apparently people use IE8. I'd be interested to see a poll of ./ user's browser of choice (or lack of one).

- IE8
- IE - Firefox
- Opera
- Konqueror
- Safari
- Lynx
- Who cares as long as it works
- I browse CowboyNeal

Re:Poll time!

[duckInferno]

it didn't like my <8 :(
The second option was meant to be IE<8

Re:Poll time!

[Anonymous Coward]

no emacs?

Re:Poll time!

[andrewd18]

Done. http://ask.slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1407&aid=-1

See also the search query: http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=&query=browser&sort=1&op=polls

Re:Poll time!

[duckInferno]

No time wasting options = not a real poll

Re:Poll time!

[Vectronic]

Not done, that was almost a year ago...

Since then, I have stopped using IE and Firefox entirely... as i'm sure more have adopted it (well Firefox at least).

P.S. my preferred browser in that poll, and still is Opera.

Re:Poll time!

[Endo13]

I use netscape navigator you insensitive clod!

(Ok, well I use Firefox now, but I *used* to use NN!!)

Re:Poll time!

[Anonymous Coward]

I love emacs as an editor, never used it for anything more. How do I use it as a browser?

This would be great if...

[phantomfive]

This would be great if it meant that IE actually were standards compliant, but it's not. And that's the annoying thing. Now I am going to have to test in Firefox, Safari, IE8 and 7 (forget 6, sorry dudes. I also don't test Firefox 2 now, even though it runs differently than 3 in some cases. Or Chrome, or Opera. There's a limit to my testing patience. I hate testing actually).

Eh, whatever. At least it gives a chance to mock Microsoft. I thumb my chin at you, Microsoft!!

Re:This would be great if...

[cbhacking]

In terms of CSS and HTML prior to 5, IE 8 actually *is* standards-compliant (it still doesn't fully support data: URIs, though it has partial support - enough to pass Acid 2). JavaScript is still something of a mess, though it's better in IE8 than it used to be. For pure rendering, however, any HTML/CSS code that renders correctly in Firefox 3 and Safari certainly should work in IE8.

Wishful thinking

[dmomo]

So does this mean my boss(es) will let me stop fussing over IE6? PLEASE?!?!?!

Not so much, I'm sure.

Re:Wishful thinking

[moderatorrater]

Unfortunately, it'll probably mean that your boss will stop forcing you to mess with IE7. If people are willing to upgrade their browser, they'll have 8. If they're not, they'll have 6. The only people that will still have 7 are those unwilling to upgrade and with Vista on their computer, which I imagine is a very small segment. I expect to see next to no one running 7 a year after 8's released, but for 6 to still be in the top 4 browsers.

At least the market share for 6 is shrinking, and you've got to give props to Microsoft for at least moving it forward. IE7 is easier to work with for new sites than IE6 ever was, and if that trend continues through IE8 then the biggest headache in web programming will soon disappear.

Oh great

[moria]

Now web developers will need to test two more assuredly incompatible browsers, IE8 standards mode and IE8 compatibility mode!

Re:Oh great

[duguk]

As I mentioned above - why does the IE8 compatibility model (which renders much like IE7) completely ignore the IE7 specific markup?

Is it not meant to render like IE7? What kinda compatibility is it for? We web developers need IE-specific markup (e.g. "&lt!-- if ie") for fixing IE8, and probably again for IE8's compatibility mode.

I am not impressed.

Re:Oh great

[shutdown -p now]

Now web developers will need to test two more assuredly incompatible browsers, IE8 standards mode and IE8 compatibility mode!

No, they won't. Last I checked, there was no "browser-global" rendering mode in IE8, only per-page. And for all new pages it defaults to standards mode. So for anything new that targets IE8+ (heh), you only need to take care of IE8 standards mode.

Also note that the page itself can indicate which mode it wants to render in. For now, given that IE7 is still not going away anytime soon, the simplest approach is to code for IE7 (aside from handling Firefox/WebKit/Opera/etc, obviously), and request compatibility mode via META as specified in case someone opens your page in IE8.

Re:Oh great

[cbhacking]

IE8 compatibility mode is IE7's rendering engine. It's not so much that you need to test in more browsers, as that you can now test multiple rendering engines within one browser (not the only browser that allows you to do this of course, but the only one I know of that allows testing multiple versions of Trident, IE's engine and still the most popular worldwide by a large margin).

Re:Oh great

[Hal_Porter]

Not at all. You can add a meta tag, force IE8 into standards mode and serve IE8 the same code you serve to Opera, Firefox and Safari. Or you can do nothing and your site will be in standards mode by default.

Or if you have an old site that works on IE6 by serving non standard html to IE and Firefox/Opera/Safari by serving standard html and you don't update it, people will click the compatibility mode button and add your site to the compatibility list. Then people that visit in future will see the site in compatibility mode. If you want to chuck out the non standard html you can add a meta tag to force IE8 into standards mode regardless of the list. Then IE8 can share the same code as other browsers.

Re:Oh great

[Phroggy]

No, they won't. Last I checked, there was no "browser-global" rendering mode in IE8, only per-page. And for all new pages it defaults to standards mode. So for anything new that targets IE8+ (heh), you only need to take care of IE8 standards mode.

Except that:

1) Microsoft maintains a list of sites that should be rendered in IE7 compatibility mode, instead of the default standards mode.

2) Users can add sites to their own list of sites that should be rendered in IE7 compatibility mode.

So, if your site currently works in IE7 but doesn't work in IE8's standards mode, and a user happens to visit it, they may add it to their list, or Microsoft may add it to theirs. Then, after you update your site to work with IE8's standards mode, some users may still be viewing your site in IE7 compatibility mode.

If that really does render everything exactly the same way IE7 does, then you should be OK. What if it doesn't?

Re:Oh great

[shutdown -p now]

So, if your site currently works in IE7 but doesn't work in IE8's standards mode, and a user happens to visit it, they may add it to their list, or Microsoft may add it to theirs. Then, after you update your site to work with IE8's standards mode, some users may still be viewing your site in IE7 compatibility mode.

I'm not sure about that, but wouldn't an explicit META declaration on the page override this anyway? I.e. if you do not want to run into the above scenario, couldn't you just explicitly request that all your pages are rendered in IE8 mode within them?

Re:Oh great

[Phroggy]

Nope, the user has override control. Besides, standards mode is the default; there is no meta tag to explicitly force standards mode.

Re:Oh great

[shutdown -p now]

Besides, standards mode is the default; there is no meta tag to explicitly force standards mode.

There is. In meta tag, you indicate which mode you want, and you can ask for "IE8 mode" by specifying IE=8.

As for the override control - too bad. In the end, if the webpage author explicitly states that his page renders in IE best with IE8 settings, then it most likely does. I think the proper priority handling should be: meta is more important than user blacklist, and mode switch on the toolbar is more important than meta (so that user has a final say).

The web is already broken thanks to IE

[Dracos]

Microsoft's stance that fixing IE will break the web is counter intuitive propaganda. They broke the web when they failed to keep IE's standards compliance up to date, and since they strong-armed themselves to the top of the browser share pile, much of the web is built to satisfy their flawed implementation.

MS is giving that chunk of the web an incentive to fix itself... it's already broken.

If MS would approach this with some humility and logic, more people would understand that it's not the sites that are broken, it's the blue E.

MS made their own internet (standards)

[Anna Merikin]

About ten years ago, as Web-1.0 was beginning, I decided to learn to write HTML for a personal website. At that time, MS released a beta program (I forget its name) to automate HTML authoring and I signed up, downloaded and installed it. Then I found its output while great for IE, did not render pages well in Netscape or even Opera. So I uninstalled it and wrote with WordPerfect-7, correcting the code by hand.

Some weeks later, MS emailed me (the beta program, of course, required registration with an email address) with a special offer: a free year-long subscription to an upcoming MS magazine if I would document my use of a feature on my home web page that worked under IE but not under Netscape -- that is, I would get a worthless pile of MS propaganda every month if I would break web standards to the benefit of IE.

It was always MS' plan to dominate ("embrace and extend" was what is was called then) the internet.

I believe if there was one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standard compliant it was their losing fight with the EU monopoly courts and their punishment: to become standards-compliant with respect to APIs, networking and, apparently, at least in MS' mind, the internet as well.

Perhpas MS could take a feature from the Opera browser -- user agent spoofing, and let IE-8 users impersonate another brand so they can view standards-compliant sites as the designer intended them to be seen.

Re:MS made their own internet (standards)

[moderatorrater]

I believe if there was one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standard compliant it was their losing fight with the EU monopoly courts and their punishment: to become standards-compliant with respect to APIs, networking and, apparently, at least in MS' mind, the internet as well.

I don't think that was the one event, although I'm sure it played a part. Microsoft keeps their stranglehold on markets by appealing to the developers, and it's been clear for a while that the developers were flocking to Firefox. I saw the development of IE7 as being more of an attempt to stop the bleeding of devs to firefox. I don't think it was coincidence that development of their next browser started after their first real competition since netscape emerged. Competition is what made them release the first six versions of IE, I don't see any reason that would be true with these latest two as well.

Re:MS made their own internet (standards)

[mmj638]

> I believe if there was one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standard compliant it was their losing fight with the EU monopoly courts and their punishment: to become standards-compliant with respect to APIs, networking and, apparently, at least in MS' mind, the internet as well.

Nah, in my mind the one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standards compliant has been that their market share stopped growing and started going in the other direction.

Since then, they no longer have the power to decide for themselves what a browser needs to be capable of and have been forced to start following others, which ultimately has led to catching up with web standards, primarily because the browsers it has been forced to follow (Firefox, Safari etc) choose to follow web standards.

I think that had the shoe been on the other foot, and Internet Explorer were the David steadily gaining market share against the Goliath Firefox, then Firefox would be forced to follow IE on features, and would need to start adopting IE's features in order to compete. But wait, that sounds familiar... that did happen back when IE was stealing market share from then-dominant Netscape. Netscape was forced to follow Microsoft's version of 'standards' to some extent. In some regards the results of that are still being felt, and are why there are some Microsoft-y browser war 1.0 features in browsers today.

Re:MS made their own internet (standards)

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know what the hell you're talking about. GO peddle your FUD somewhere else. Netscape added just as many non-standard tags to HTML as IE

Re:MS made their own internet (standards)

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhpas MS could take a feature from the Opera browser -- user agent spoofing, and let IE-8 users impersonate another brand so they can view standards-compliant sites as the designer intended them to be seen.

Oh, the irony. So, now that IE is getting standards based, they are now the ones to have to spoof their identity, which is what the rest of the world has had to do on some websites.

I used to do web development, and for two reasons I won't touch it anymore. 1) Its gotten too complicated with CSS and the demand to make things pretty. I expect things to look nice too, but I don't want to spend 10% of my time generating content and 90% of my time screwing around with aligning everything to the pixel for every single different browser out there. Which leads to 2) IE sucks. Until very recently, I simply didn't have easy access to a Windows machine, let alone a bunch of Windows machines with different versions of IE.

The last website I've created were just simple web pages that used tables and not much more that simply looked like ass under IE.

The ironic thing was that I got into web development because it was a crossplatform way to display data. I left it because it was not crossplatform, mostly from IE's presence from the late 90s to early 00s. I guess in another 10 or so years the crossplatform part will become a reality.

Re:MS made their own internet (standards)

[toddestan]

Perhpas MS could take a feature from the Opera browser -- user agent spoofing, and let IE-8 users impersonate another brand so they can view standards-compliant sites as the designer intended them to be seen.

Except that they've already been doing that for a decade. Ever wonder why the word "Mozilla" appears in the user agent string for IE? It dates back to the early days of the browser wars, where the Netscape fans were purposely blocking IE, so Microsoft's response was to pretend to be Mozilla. The practice has continued since, with most other non-Mozilla browsers also adopting the same practice[*]. The only browsers that I'm aware of that don't have Mozilla in the user agent string is Opera (though Opera can be configured to send Mozilla in the user agent string by the user, and IIRC this used to be the default) and Lynx.

[*]Typical way of blocking IE was to check for the word "Mozilla" in the user-agent string, so while they were intending to block IE, in practice they were blocking anything but Netscape.

Standards-Compliance Practically Useful After All

[RAMMS EIN]

``the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE.''

Which wouldn't be a Bad Thing if the sites were also standards compliant. However, it seems that I have been part of a very small minority of people who have cared to make them that way in the past decade. Even today, the prevalent attitude seems to be that you "support" one or two browsers, instead of keeping to standards and having your site Just Work in every decent browser.

Big Organization = this kind of thing happens

[zindorsky]

This is just a simple case of The Left Hand Doesn't Know What The Right Hand Is Doing.

Seriously, in any organization of Microsoft's size, these type of things will happen.

I'll bet that the guys developing IE8 really want to make it 100% standards-complaint, but the web developers dudes didn't get the memo. (Or more sinisterly, there are forces in Redmond whose interests do not lie that way.)

Re:Big Organization = this kind of thing happens

[davidsyes]

No, they KNOW what they are doing. It's the reach-around/reach-in-front. They've just interlocked their knuckles and are putting more effort into the arc-work. Rather, they've been so BUSY with interlocked knuckles that they have become accustomed to that stance, and any new posture just hurts too much to feel good.

Re:Big Organization = this kind of thing happens

[Bill Dog]

It could also be that MS outsources the work on their web sites. I was a web developer once for a company that had about 30 of us. We were working on building web sites of a certain kind for the company's customers, and I was shocked one day to find out that work on our own company web site was not done in-house. It must've made perfect sense to someone in upper mgmt., tho.

Firefox and Opera work 99.9% 0f the time

[Anonymous Coward]

IF Firefox and Opera can handle 99.9% of web sites that are IE7 compatible, why can't IE8?

Re:Firefox and Opera work 99.9% 0f the time

[Anonymous Coward]

IF Firefox and Opera can handle 99.9% of web sites that are IE7 compatible, why can't IE8?

B'cause the page determines it is IE, and displays the non-standards-compliant page written for IE

That's why.

Re:Firefox and Opera work 99.9% 0f the time

[Mystra_x64]

MSIE need to change it's UserAgent ID and CC-rules. Name themselves something new and be done with that. Simple as that.

Re:Firefox and Opera work 99.9% 0f the time

[icannotthinkofaname]

There's an idea. They can call it "Web Investigator" or something like that. Something synonymous with "Internet Explorer", but distinctly not IE.

They've done neither.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Last I checked, IE8 was still far behind everyone else in standards compliance, and that's with the same standards (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript) that have been with us for a decade. That says nothing of the brand-new standards people are inventing (HTML5, SVG/canvas) which IE hasn't even touched.

I place the blame squarely on IE for the amount of Flash we have now.

And yet, they're breaking enough compatibility that Google.com (and Microsoft.com) won't render properly. Which means they've chosen to make IE8 another IE7 -- break tons of compatibility, probably introduce tons of new UI for no good reason, yet still be the least compliant browser in existence.

The smartest thing for them to do would be to break compatibility entirely, and start with something that's gotten it right -- Webkit or Gecko.

Re:They've done neither.

[dvice_null]

html/xhtml support is about
IE7: 73%
FF2: 90%
O9: 85%

CSS 2.1
IE7: 56%
FF3: 93%
O9: 94%

Not sure about IE8, but I doubt that it can be much more than IE7.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary?IE7=on&FX2=on&FX3=on&OP9=on&uas=CUSTOM

Re:Standards-Compliance Practically Useful After A

[tjstork]

However, it seems that I have been part of a very small minority of people who have cared to make them that way in the past decade

So now we really know what happened to all that Webvan money!

Sorry, but I'm just like one of those people that worked to be compatible with the most popular browsers. I know that in some abstract sense it might be good, but I see no reason to alienate the best part of an audience.

Fixed that for you!

[Giant Electronic Bra]

"Apparently, even though Microsoft's IE8 team is doing the 'right' thing by finally making IE more standards-compliant, they are risking 'fixing the Web' because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work incorrectly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE."

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Thank you, Microsoft!

[CopaceticOpus]

Microsoft had two choices:

1. Continue rendering sites in the same broken way as previous versions of IE, making life a real pain for web developers.
2. Render sites properly, making things better in the long run, but taking a public relations hit in the process.

Amazingly, they chose the second option. Those of us who understand why this is important should be applauding right now.

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[MazzThePianoman]

I agree but I doubt they will follow through with it. It is more likely they will rely on some kind of marker you can put in sites designed to be standards compliant. Honestly that would be fine by me as long as they at least force users to upgrade out of IE6.

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[ACMENEWSLLC]

So they are basically creating a VERY different browser. I bet if you did a spoof in IE8 of the headers and said something like Mozilla, rendering would be better, eh?

So perhaps Microsoft should take this opportunity to rename the browser? Change the user agent and browser reported back to our code which handles browsers?

I just added iPhone routines to some pages to render the footers better. I'm ready to add Microsoft Explorer 8 MSNIE to my list of what gets the NS/MZ pages. Those who aren't would have probably a 50/50 chance of sending an unknown browser to html/js et al that would render.

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[Sleepy]

If this is true, I'm genuinely impressed. I'll wait and see :-)

I can only imagine how stressful it is to work on any of the HTML rendering engines. With standards supported in IE, it might be possible again for ONE PERSON to completely understand a HTML rendering library. Right now it must take loads of people and far too many automated tests.

As I said, we'll see when it's released. :-)

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[shutdown -p now]

I agree but I doubt they will follow through with it. It is more likely they will rely on some kind of marker you can put in sites designed to be standards compliant.

You didn't track IE8 development, it seems - that's how they originally wanted to do it (you'd have to have a META element to indicate that you're standards compliant, and without it it'd use IE7 compat mode), but after heavy criticism for this decision, they have changed it to standard-compliant mode by default, with a META declaration to allow the page to request compat mode by itself, and a button on the toolbar for the user to have manual control over compat mode if needed.

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

We have to give it to MS for doing this boldly. Remember back when they were hit with the EOLAS issue and had to change the way ActiveX components were loaded?

The entire Internet hated them for it, but given a few months, all websites adjusted the way they loaded Active X to be compliant.

This is, as far as I know, almost the same scenario.

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[saati]

+1 totally agree

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I can see that option 2 is so much better than the 'don't break it intentionally to begin with' option number 3.

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[tobiasly]

Exactly. People can whine "well they shouldn't have broken the web in the first place" all they want, and while I agree with that sentiment, it doesn't change the fact that we are where we are and need to move forward. I think the approach they're taking is the best possible one.

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[Your.Master]

Without a time machine, there is no such option 3.

Denying progress because you're living in the past is a great way to remain in the past.

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[mikael_j]

Render sites properly, making things better in the long run, but taking a public relations hit in the process.

If the current state of IE8 is anything to go by they have a long way to become nearly as standards-compliant as the other well-known browsers. A few weeks ago I was messing around with a small site where I used well-documented parts of XHTML, CSS and a few other open standards, the results were pretty much what I expected; IE6 asked me if I wanted to save the page as a file (the ol' application/xhtml+xml MIME-type problem), IE7 rendered a blank page, IE8 rendered page elements all over the place (and with several missing), Firefox rendered the page fine except for the embedded fonts in the SVG images I used (read up on it, apparently Firefox currently doesn't have support for embedding fonts in SVG images), Safari, WebKit and Opera all rendered it just fine.

/Mikael

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

No. What Microsoft has done in IE8 is the third option:

Render sites in a newly broken way, and take a public relations hit in the process.

To paraphrase Fallout 3: Microsoft, Microsoft never changes.

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[jbolden]

I'm one of them. I've been watching this. I'm thrilled that Microsoft is taking a stand for quality.

Re:Thank you, Microsoft!

[Phroggy]

If this is true, I'm genuinely impressed. I'll wait and see :-)

The goal is true, although the implementation isn't perfect. IE8 attempts to render pages according to W3C standards[1] by default[2], unless the author has gone out of their way to indicate that the page should be rendered the way IE7 does[3] instead. The user can override this by clicking a toolbar button or adding the site to a list of exceptions, and Microsoft also maintains a list of sites that will be rendered in IE7 compatibility mode by default even if the authors didn't indicate that they should (that's what this article is talking about).

[1] While IE8's standards mode is much better than any previous version of IE, and is good enough to pass ACID2, it's not perfect. Neither is anyone else, of course (no major browser has a currently-shipping release version that passes ACID3 and Firefox won't for some time, although the others have it working in beta), but it can be argued that IE8 is worse than most, and that their goal was specifically passing the ACID2 test rather than generally good CSS support all around.

[2] Like all other browsers, this is only true if the author used a DOCTYPE declaration to indicate their awareness of the standards. If you leave that out, it's assumed that you don't know what you're doing and you probably designed your site for Netscape 4 a decade ago, so browsers will try to guess what you might have meant and render it roughly the way Netscape 4 used to, sort of. All major browsers do this; IE8 is no exception.

[3] While the goal is certainly for pages that IE8 renders in IE7 compatibility mode to look identical to how IE7 would have rendered them, the implementation may not be perfect. It may be possible for a page to render one way in IE7, but render completely differently in IE8 with IE7 compatibility mode turned on. I'm sure if this is a problem for major sites, Microsoft will patch it.

Ah, the irony...

[Zathain Sicarius]

And directly above the article is an ad for Google Chrome. Also, I only flipped through the first bit of the list really quickly, but I'm pretty sure I saw a few MSN domains... That's sad that they can't get their own sites to work on their own browser.

Google should win a prize

[iYk6]

It's funny you mention that. I have always been amazed at Google's capacity for error. In 4 lines of HTML, on the very simple page you mention, Google has managed to fit 65 errors and 8 warnings. Sibling poster has a link to the w3c validator.

This does not compute.

[goombah99]

You can use both a META tag as well as a HTTP header to tell IE8 to use either the new rendering engine (default) or to fall back to the IE7 standards.

...compatibility is important regardless, especially for "offline" sites which cannot be fixed easily or cheaply (CD help files, embedded web servers, etc). At least by having the new rendering mode the default it will encourage standards compliance (or at least IE's [admittedly improving] version of it.)

This makes no logical sense. If the html is on a cd it can't be changed to include a meta tag to use IE7 format. Yet IE8 format is the default which will break the CD html rendering. You need to be able to switch the browser to IE7 mode default for this to work.

Re:This does not compute.

[dgatwood]

Simple. Quirks mode gets rendered badly, non-QM gets rendered right. Key off the presence or absence of a DOCTYPE declaration and you'll be right 404 times out of 405.

Easy fix

[MobyDisk]

The problem is that many sites will check if the browser is IE, and then do various workarounds. So Microsoft is stuck: they can fix the browser, but then the sites have to be modified to say (if browser is IE, but version 7 then do the hack)

I think the only good workaround would be for Microsoft to change their user/agent string so it reports itself as Firefox :)

Re:Easy fix

[Locklin]

I think the only good workaround would be for Microsoft to change their user/agent string so it reports itself as Firefox :)

Better yet, they could just start it off with:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible...

Re:Easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the only good workaround would be for Microsoft to change their user/agent string so it reports itself as Firefox :)

It's not like this hasn't been done before.

See: Mozilla.

Re:Easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a great deal of such workarounds are based on IE version number. They use conditional comments which are valid comments in other browsers... but conditional based on version in IE.

Re:Easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the only good workaround would be for Microsoft to change their user/agent string so it reports itself as Firefox :)

It already does claim to be Mozilla - are they going to add a triple-negative to their UA string next?

Re:Easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

bah...

using user agent string as a way to detect a browser has been deprecated for some time now...

there are other ways to detect a browser if you need it in javascript (apart from the fact that by now it's probably just easier to use some js framework (jquery, prototype, etc.) that works across browsers)...

and as for the html/css - well - if you stick to standards mode you really don't have that much to check for (if you're not into the bleeding edge) except maybe using so called "conditional comments" to separate ie6 from the rest and provide a custom css for it...

Re:Easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

that's it :)

Re:Easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

Funnily enough the UA does identify itself as Mozilla - for exactly that reason, except vs netscape rather than firefox.

Re:Easy fix

[cbhacking]

It's actually even simpler than this; sites can instruct IE8 to use the IE7 rendering engine (compatibility mode) through a single meta tag.

That said, I have found pages which broke in IE8 until I changed the user agent (yes, you can do this).

Re:Easy fix

[jbolden]

No, this Microsoft's problem. You can check for version number so if I.E. 6 do X otherwise do Y.

Re:Standards-Compliance Practically Useful After A

[k33l0r]

I agree. When I create web sites I test that they work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera (and yes, IE, when I feel up to it) and I always check that they validate as proper XHTML.

Incompatible

[funkioto]

As long as Windows 7 doesn't break compatibility with Firefox then I'm happy.

The list seems accurate

[psyclone]

I've checked the main page at a few of them including:
  tom.com
  qq.com
  mozilla.com
  google.com
  wikipedia.org

They seem to either:
  1) Fail w3c [x]html standards
  2) Fail w3c css standards

Google's rarely been standards compliant, failing to publish doctypes. Even if they did, many of their pages are built with javascript which do not create w3c-valid documents either. (But that goes for most javascript toolkits.)

Mozilla uses several "-moz" prefixed CSS attributes that are not w3c either. Even Wikipedia has a minor CSS error.

Comparing websites to a standard depends on the standard. Microsoft doesn't have to write or test IE8 to the W3C's standards, but it would be great if they did. How many of the mainstream browsers even pass the ACID tests (v2 & 3)?

I think that microsoft.com being on the list shows a changing side to Microsoft. They may never be the friend of free and open source software, but everyone would appreciate Microsoft adhering to an open and popular standard. Of course they will always have their own quirks and extras beyond any standard, but raw web development could become pleasant again.

Re:The list seems accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Using -moz-* properties is not against the CSS standard; indeed, the standard itself defines them. An application should simply ignore properties it does not understand.

Re:The list seems accurate

[cbhacking]

How many of the mainstream browsers even pass the ACID tests (v2 & 3)?

Every single one, except IE7 (for Acid 2, at least). IE8 passes Acid3, but it's by far the last browser to do so - KHTML (precursor to WebKit) and Opera both passed Acid2 years ago, Firefox 3 and other browsers using recent versions of Gecko pass it, and the biggest news on Slashdot regarding the IE8 beta was that it passed Acid 2 (lots of other features too, but that's the one that had everybody excited).

Acid 3 is a trickier beast. There are versions of WebKit and Opera that pass it, and Gecko is close if they haven't hit it already, but most browsers still fail at least 20 of the tests. IE is again an outlier; no version passes more than 23 (of 100) tests in Acid 3, and while IE8 improved slightly over the last summer, IE8 RC1 actually regressed on Acid 3 relative to beta 2.

Non-standard = bad coding = non-standard

[MazzThePianoman]

Part of the problem is that a lack of standards compliance promotes bad coding. IE has a habit of trying to figure out and pass bad code and as a result there are a lot of people out there that fail to even try to validate their work.

On the flip-side some of workarounds to make IE render the same as other browsers are so bad they require hacks that make the code no longer standards compliant.

I cringe to think how many hours of development time has been wasted because of IE6 alone. I have yet to have any major problems with my coding with IE7 but a fully standards compliant browser would go a long way.

Who can trust this list?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the list, there's "mozilla.com"... but...

w3.org mozilla

Maybe, Microsoft didn't want to have "microsoft.com" all alone...

Re:Who can trust this list?

[jaavaaguru]

Do you really think IE8 supports the standards as well as the w3 validator?

I'm not surprised that there are some sites which validate perfectly and are still on the list of sites that don't work properly in IE8.

Re:Who can trust this list?

[Shados]

You can make a perfectly standard compliant site that still renders broken. Standard compliant just means you use valid code. It doesn't mean you coded well, and even the most standard compliant browsers render crap differently (since the standard specs is swiss cheese to begin with).

So thats not surprising, between that and the fact that IE8 is most likely not 100% compliant (though even if it was...it would have to both be compliant AND fill in the holes in the cheese the same way someone else did...The world went 180 degrees, since a few years ago, it was the other way around)

Isn't that something to be proud of?

[Hurricane78]

I used to block IE because it was not worth the extra work and feature removal, only to have the noobs of the Internet (which were not in my target group anyway, I'm a software developer) telling you your site was buggy.

Now I do not block them, because most of them simply do not know what they are talking about. And it is wrong to insult them, for being tricked by someone else.
So I tell them they got tricked, and how they can remove all the limitations, make their life easier, and get even more good stuff for free, and without hassle.
I even have a e-mail template for it. I only get positive responses.

Re:Isn't that something to be proud of?

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally don't use IE at all, mostly Chrome in Windows and Firefox in Linux. And yet, I can't turn down this flame. Two points:

1. About your 'noob' quip: don't be an asshole. In the real world, people use IE. Yes, even software developers.

2. The context in which you use the word "free" is wrong. I don't think that word means what you think it means. Standards compliance and free-as-in-beer have nothing to do with each other.

Re:Isn't that something to be proud of?

[Hurricane78]

1. About software developers: They are no developers, or never ever developed for the web, if they use that thing. As soon as you know what a horror IE is for web developers, you canâ(TM)t use it, except for being sadistic. And come on. A developer who is going to miss out on FireBug? Must not know what options there are with Firefox⦠Aka.: heâ(TM)s a noob. ;)

2. I think you completely misunderstood me. The good stuff for free are the add-ons. Like AdBlock Plus, Download Helper, and so onâ¦

Damned if they do, damned if they don't

[tuzo]

Good article on Joel on Software about the IE8 standards mess: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

good job Microsoft

[postmortem]

Microsoft has total count of web sites: 2400

Depends on the standard and the test

[psyclone]

IE8 passes ACID 2:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx

But in September, IE8 lags in the ACID 3 test:

http://www.anomalousanomaly.com/2008/03/06/acid-3/

The closer they all get to standards (any standards) the better.

Re:Depends on the standard and the test

[SanityInAnarchy]

Keep in mind, ACID is not a comprehensive test of standards-compliance, by any stretch. It is specifically targeting places where certain browsers are known to lag behind in compliance.

But it is worth noting that there does not seem to be a single standard test, objective or subjective, in which IE is ahead of other browsers in standards-compliance.

Re:Depends on the standard and the test

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't the (behind the pack right out of the gate) standards compliance with the new browser.

The problem is that they've not only come up with 4 new rendering modes (none of which are standards compliant OR fully compliant with IE 7 rendering as was promised), but that they require you to BREAK STANDARDS with a NON-STANDARD tag in order to force IE8 in to its fairly compliant but still shitty standards mode. The web development community bitched when they said they'd default to IE7 mode (that doesn't render like IE7 worth a damn currently), so they defaulted to standards mode in the last couple betas. Web standards folks quieted down. So now they slip this blacklist bullshit in. Read here for a good breakdown of what you're up against now if you design web pages. Pure, unadulterated bullshit . It's like they're actually trying to force you to design for as many possible different IE rendering engines as they can, so you don't have time to get the shit right on any other platform. I know it's pure paranoia to think they actually plan that strategy, but that's the only way I can account for such ridiculous behavior.

If they wanted to help all the developers out there do their job efficiently, they'd kill the IE7 mode that doesn't render like IE7, kill off quirks mode, and tell any company that needs IE7 for internal apps to block the damn upgrade through GPOs. Instead, they give all us designers a big fat "We've still got a monopoly and would like to continue abusing it, fuck you very much," and release another brain dead retarded product.

I'm not against companies making money. I'm not even against them having a monopoly. I don't hate Microsoft because I just want to be cool or because hating rich people is some kind of hobby. I hate them because they actively fuck with everybody on purpose, then flaunt it by walking out of legal confrontation with a wrist slap and keep doing the same old shit.

Fuck Microsoft. Fuck them right in the predatory monopolist ear. Fuck the overbearing management that comes up with this lame anti-competitive strategy that costs time, frustration, and money. Fuck the developers that never put their foot down with management, regardless of their own talents and knowledge of how hard they're fucking everyone over. Fuck the marketers that rename products just so they can continue to force feed the public with the next generation of the platform that enables all this shit. They can take yet another shitty, standards-breaking anti-competitive web-busting time-wasting incompatible browser and shove it directly up their overpaid collective ass.

Re:Depends on the standard and the test

[Anonymous Coward]

Awww. Look how cute, another MS hater.

The morons who complain about standards are going to get whats comming - unemployment.

If they dont know how to work around IE, its OK, that means more work for me ! Wait till your jobs start shipping overseas to see how quickly the bitching dies down.

This will be fun.

Re:Depends on the standard and the test

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, whatever.

Nowhere in there was a declaration of not handling it. Just sickness of their behavior. Reading comprehension is hard though, isn't it?

Google.com not validating, but also wasting...

[Anonymous Coward]

And think about the bandwith savings if they moved to clean html and css for the home form and the results pages! I really don't get it either...

It's a good thing...

[mattack2]

I didn't RTFA, but based upon the summary, I think it's a *good* thing. That means they didn't sanitize the data and clear out info about their own sites that would be embarrassing.

Re:It's a good thing...

[socsoc]

try reading it.

And what...

[Nathrael]

And what do we learn from this? Avoid releasing Software too early.

And we're suprised why?

[BitZtream]

Microsoft.com includes content from what most people would consider practically independant companies. Sure they are all Microsoft, but they have many groups that do web pages, its hardly surprising that a company that large hasn't had time to update EVERY page yet. It'll take years for that to happen, and likely never will as there will always be old documents kept in their original form intentionally.

I was hoping for some good MS fud, not this crap :(

Acid 3 on the list?

[brentonboy]

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

Do we really want a standards compliant browser?

[bigotes]

Do we really want a fully standards compliant Microsoft Browser? How can the next wave of standards be developed then? to be developed within the confines of a standards body? Anybody remembers that we are still waiting for the final 802.11n version? How many years they are taking?....... At most I like the choice to be mine in terms of web browser compatibility (a selection in a config. dialog box, perhaps).

This is really not meant as troll or flamebait

[Jane Q. Public]

just an honest question: why should we care if Microsoft is making an incompatibility list for IE8?

The only compatibility web developers care about today is W3C compliance, and older, incompatible (legacy) browsers like IE6 that a lot of people still use. New browsers are expected to be compliant. Period. If they are not, I guarantee you a lot of developers will just let Microsoft remain "incompatible".

If Microsoft's new browser is indeed W3C compliant, then their list of "incompatible" sites is merely a list of sites that don't bother to be compliant anyway.

Lazy web developers

[Tatsh]

Sure Microsoft.com makes the list. The developers of the site are lazy. All they care about is that it 'works' with IE and Firefox and a few other browsers. They do NOT care one bit about W3C compliance. Do you think they put the site through the validator? I DOUBT it. Otherwise, they'd fix the 176 errors .

And then there are web developers for big companies that do the same thing. Amazon.com: 1580 errors, eBay: 226 errors and a big one for a lot of us on Slashdot I am sure (US based people), Newegg.com: 566 errors. What is so hard about validating to the standards in place? If you do it from the start, you have no problems. But developers of these sites clearly do NOT care as long as the site 'loads'.

Do not forget so many of these sites rely upon Microsoft's ASP.NET, ASP and/or IIS.

Re:Lazy web developers

[Shados]

But developers of these sites clearly do NOT care as long as the site 'loads'.

The standard itself is broken (like almost everything the W3C craps out). That said, virtually all "very compatible" web sites don't validate, because to be as compatible as possible (and that means not just with IE6/IE7/Firefox/Webkit/Opera), you have to compromise. Then for some flashy effects you have to compromise some more. And then if you want to do some particular things, have em be cross browser AND don't want a mess of tables, some stuff is simply impossible even if CSS3 was fully implemented.

Do not forget so many of these sites rely upon Microsoft's ASP.NET, ASP and/or IIS

IIS is a web server that can serve any kind of content, so what does that have to do with it? And ASP.NET can (and aside for a few controls, actually does) output perfectly compliant HTML/CSS. Even more so, if you use third party controls (and most do), outputting perfectly compliant XHTML strict markup and css that is also compliant with most accessibility standards will be the default unless the developer themselves add code that breaks it.

Standard IE8 worthless

[dave562]

I've been using IE8 for a couple of months and have been staying on top of the beta releases. The browser is pretty much worthless unless I put it into "compatibility mode". It doesn't work with my banking sites. It doesn't work right with Gmail, even in compatibility mode. It doesn't work on Slashdot. It barely works anywhere. So either a good portion of the internet isn't coded to standard, or the IE8 interpretation of the standard is borked.

Re:Standard IE8 worthless

[Shados]

You have your answer there:

"It doesn't work right with Gmail, even in compatibility mode"

That means its doing user agent sniffing and going from that, and isn't made to go with a newer version... Compatibility mode is pretty much exactly IE7's rendering engine. So if it doesn't work, well...

Re:Standard IE8 worthless

[HannethCom]

Compatibility mode is pretty much IE7's rendering engine.

It's a slightly upgraded version of IE7's rendering engine. The most obvious visual clue to this is that images are bilinear filtered instead of pixel doubling. One of our QA at work had IE8 installed and there were things breaking in IE8 compatibility mode that worked fine in when tested in IE7.

It should be noted that the site in question did not do any specific browser checks and was designed to work in IE7, Firefox and Safari.

Re:Standard IE8 worthless

[owlstead]

Could you replace the user agent string somehow and see how it fares as other more standard compliant browsers such as Firefox 3? Maybe someone can point out a proxy that is easy to install and is able to modify the user agent string (or simple change HTTP headers)?

Re:Standard IE8 worthless

[Mista2]

It also doesn't work on my Mac or my linux box. Damn them!

Re:Standards-Compliance Practically Useful After A

[Bill Dog]

I've never been paid to code web pages to standards, my bosses have always told us to make it work in this and this browsers.

Re:Do we really want a standards compliant browser

[palegray.net]

Do we really want a fully standards compliant Microsoft Browser? How can the next wave of standards be developed then?

Yes, we do want a full compliant Microsoft browser? This will have absolutely no impact on the development of new web standards to extend what we already have.

Why is this bad?

[Rumata]

The problem is that many sites will check if the browser is IE, and then do various workarounds. [...] if browser is IE, but version 7 then do the hack

This still means there is going to be a reasonably standard-compliant version (for IE8) which should work fine for opera, safari, firefox and friends. To me this seems to be a distinct improvement over the current state where there's sites which don't work for non-IE, period.

Cheers,
Michael

Not news

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the big elephant in the middle of the room which has been burning me for years.

...because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE.

The problem, more correctly stated, is that IE ignores horrible html errors. Broken webpage generators and code morons make the horrendous crap I find every day. Upload almost ANY webpage to validator.w3.org, including this very page, and see for yourself. And even that validator doesn't seem to catch all errors.

so

[Anonymous Coward]

So why the "!" on this article title? Should be no shock at all microsoft.com breaks in ie8, since it's an ms site made especially for IE in the first place. lol

I'm not surprised...

[magnamous]

I don't get it. Why is everyone so surprised by this? Microsoft has been the biggest consumer of their own non-standard web technologies in both an effort to tie services to Windows and to convince other web developers to use their 'neato' technologies.

I'm not surprised. I'm just amused.

"Now, why would Linux users want to go to..."

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now, why would Linux users want to go to the Windows Update site anyway?"

Are you kidding? It drives me bat guano nuts when I CAN'T download Windows updates/patches from
LINUX/Firefox. Just because I have one machine with say Vista/MS Office why should I have to use IE and FFS pass some stupid WGA/OGA test just to download patches for things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place!

* Because I'm a sysadmin for multiple machines.

* Because I prefer to use LINUX/UNIX when at all possible.

* Because it is very reasonable to use ANOTHER PC to download updates/fixes for machines that ARE NOT on / online / available / working. Burn them to CD or copy them to the LAN or flash disc and you can update them when locally convenient. Actually most "critical" PCs aren't connected to the internet AT ALL by organizational security policy, hence they have to have their updates pulled from another machine.

* Because when I *most* want to see / download Windows Updates / security alerts / bulletins / patches is *exactly* in the situation when my Windows boxes are in danger of being 0wn3d by the unpatched remote code execution vulnerability of the month and I don't DARE connect them to the internet until the problems are identified / analyzed / understood / patched. Typically a lot of Windows based computer malware actively PREVENTS you from updating / patching the box or its virus definitions, et. al. If a Windows host is infected/vulnerable you have to worry about it being susceptable to more / initial infections by bringing it online especially via the IE browser.

* Because for instance Microsoft's download center helpfully offers downloads like monthly CD ISO image security updates or various other tools / documents in ISO image format. Oops MS Windows HAS no official built in capability WHATSOEVER to burn Microsoft's own ISO images to CD/DVD or to extract/mount them. Whereas if I download them on UNIX I'll have them burning in about 20 seconds and the images loopback filesystem mounted for sharing over SAMBA/CIFS to the LAN using perfectly standard built in utilities.

* Because for instance Microsoft has no built in capability to do things like MD5/SHA1/GPG verify the various downloads for which hashes / signatures are available, whereas it takes about 10 seconds with standard tools on UNIX.

* Because even on NTFS with Windows you typically run into stunningly brain dead limitations like 128 character path name limitations, and also a lot of the download/filesystem utilities are pretty bad about preserving file/directory creation/modification times. So if I'm trying to be organized and actually store information about WHERE/WHEN I've downloaded a given update I need UNIX tools/filesystems for best success. This is relevant since [thank you Microsoft!] they typically have no good / simple way based on filename or standard metadata to identify WHAT revision/version/platform a given patch is for, or even necessarily what KB/issue it is relevant to. You can end up with a lot of brain damaged "SETUP.EXE" downloads from microsoft and you'll forever be wondering "What's that?" "Why do I want it?" "Is it even the most recent version?", hence you need to manage the files in the filesystem which, as aforementioned, is much more difficult on FAT32/NTFS/Windows than LINUX.

* Because typically you don't find standard tools like download managers / bandwidth control utilities et. al. on Windows, though of course they're available as 3rd party tools. firefox, wget, curl, et.al. are better for UNIX than Windows.

e.g.: /home/sysadmin/2009-01-30-Microsoft/Windows_7_Beta_7000.0.081212-1400/download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.ISO ...illustrates nicely the problems with (a) ISO images, (b) 128 character path limits, (c) preserving metadata information about the date/source of the download that just doesn't happen on Windows, et. al.

Re:"Now, why would Linux users want to go to..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? It drives me bat guano nuts when I CAN'T download Windows updates/patches from LINUX/Firefox. Just because I have one machine with say Vista/MS Office why should I have to use IE and FFS pass some stupid WGA/OGA test just to download patches for things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place!

Except of course if you were a sysadmin for windows boxes I'd expect you to know that if you want to download the patches you don't go to windowsupdate at all, you either use SUS to have a box internally on your network that acts as a central update server for your machines. Even if you don't have a server to use as a system admin you'd know that you can download the security patches with no WGA checks altogether, from any browser on any OS. Admittedly if you want to browse and download from the entire patch catalog you do need IE (because it uses an ActiveX control for the downloads), but again there's no WGA checks. And complaining that MS doesn't have checksumming isn't true - all the MS downloads are signed via X509 and that signature's checksum is validated when the updates are ran.

Bonus - even your rant about preserving metadata information about the date/source of the download that just doesn't happen on Windows makes no sense, first you blame the download tools and then you blame the operating system.

Re:"Now, why would Linux users want to go to..."

[Blakey Rat]

Are you kidding? It drives me bat guano nuts when I CAN'T download Windows updates/patches from
LINUX/Firefox.

Get them from MSDN. The only thing Windows Update does is tell you which ones you need; you can retrieve them all from MSDN if you're willing to go through the effort of finding out which ones you need manually.

(BTW, I'd love to hear your proposal of how Windows Update could possibly work in your Linux copy of Firefox for a copy of Windows installed in a non-running VM! Talk about impossible engineering tasks!)

* Because I'm a sysadmin for multiple machines.

And you don't use SUS? What kind of crappy sysadmin are you?

* Because I prefer to use LINUX/UNIX when at all possible.

Well, ok, but then Windows Update's functionality doesn't apply, since it only updates copies of Windows. (Not Linux. You seem confused on this point.)

* Because it is very reasonable to use ANOTHER PC to download updates/fixes for machines that ARE NOT on / online / available / working. Burn them to CD or copy them to the LAN or flash disc and you can update them when locally convenient. Actually most "critical" PCs aren't connected to the internet AT ALL by organizational security policy, hence they have to have their updates pulled from another machine.

In the first example, you can get them from MSDN. In the second, SUS will take care of that for you.

* Because for instance Microsoft's download center helpfully offers downloads like monthly CD ISO image security updates or various other tools / documents in ISO image format. Oops MS Windows HAS no official built in capability WHATSOEVER to burn Microsoft's own ISO images to CD/DVD or to extract/mount them.

I thought you preferred to use Linux anyway. Also: what the holy fuck does this even have to do with using Windows Update in another browser? "I need to be able to use Windows Update in Firefox because Microsoft Download Center has ISOs!" WTF, you're not even making sense.

* Because even on NTFS with Windows you typically run into stunningly brain dead limitations like 128 character path name limitations, and also a lot of the download/filesystem utilities are pretty bad about preserving file/directory creation/modification times. So if I'm trying to be organized and actually store information about WHERE/WHEN I've downloaded a given update I need UNIX tools/filesystems for best success. This is relevant since [thank you Microsoft!] they typically have no good / simple way based on filename or standard metadata to identify WHAT revision/version/platform a given patch is for, or even necessarily what KB/issue it is relevant to. You can end up with a lot of brain damaged "SETUP.EXE" downloads from microsoft and you'll forever be wondering "What's that?" "Why do I want it?" "Is it even the most recent version?", hence you need to manage the files in the filesystem which, as aforementioned, is much more difficult on FAT32/NTFS/Windows than LINUX.

And... we're officially completely off the rails. "I want to use Windows Update in Firefox because NTFS has worse meta-data than Linux!" WTF! Were you oxygen-starved when you composed this list?

* Because typically you don't find standard tools like download managers / bandwidth control utilities et. al. on Windows, though of course they're available as 3rd party tools. firefox, wget, curl, et.al. are better for UNIX than Windows.

This is relevant to running Windows Update in an alternate browser... how? "I want to use Windows Update in Firefox because wget in Linux is better than Windows!" Uh... yah.

e.g.: /home/sysadmin/2009-01-30-Microsoft/Windows_7_Beta_7000.0.081212-1400/download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.ISO ...illustrates nicely the problems with (a) ISO images, (b) 128 character path limits, (c) preserving metadata information about the date/source of the d

Right thing = cover for buggy new rendering engine

[Anonymous Coward]

IEs new rendering engine is slow and stupid. IE8 in Win7 beta is soo buggy its unusable.

Breaking thousands if not several orders of magnitude higher with a new browser release is hardly progress.

Breaking the Web?

[johny42]

a list that now contains about 2,400 names

the vast majority of Web sites

Something doesn't seem right here.

incompatible Web sites

[viralMeme]

How difficult is it to get a website to display the same in different browsers on the same computer ..

FireFox 3.0.6

InternetExplorer7

IE8 Compatibility View Blacklist Checker

[Jantastic]

ie8blacklist.appspot.com put an API online to check whether a domain is on the list.

No worries for the hordes of IE8 fans around here, Slashdot.org is not on the list. I knew it, I knew it, Slashdot is getting Microsoft friendly.

Re:Another option

[Anonymous Coward]

A successful billionaire taking advice from a troll on Slashdot? YEAH...

Ohhh I can see the jealous ones squirming in their moms basement now.

1997 called ...

[nyvalbanat]

... it wants its nonstandard markup back.

I say it's a good thing!

[ohtani]

Overall it's a good thing! Even if it does break the web. ESPECIALLY if it breaks the web. Why? Here's why:

If IE8 is more standards compliant, there's less of a chance that competing browsers will have issues and that sites won't work with browsers besides IE. Now that sounds good for the new sites but what about existing sites? Once IE8 becomes the standard, many companies will say "oh no our site is broken, we need somebody to make it work again!". At which point they'll need to hire folks to make changes to the website, thus stimulating the economy a little. Or at least the web designer industry.

ASP.NET sites are broken

[tatman]

And pretty much any ASP.NET site that uses the ASP:Menu control for the navigation. It does render the drop downs correctly.

Kudos

[jbolden]

I don't see a main post on this but Microsoft deserves kudos for fixing the standards problem. They get a lot of slack around here when they do something wrong they should get credit for doing something right.

Re:Kudos

[shentino]

I think you meant to say flak, but I agree with slack.

Companies that use their market power as an excuse to be lazy with standards compliance should be spanked. And MS doesn't get ENOUGH bashing about that, IMO.

Yes, them doing something right is commendable. Whoopdedoo, they finally saw the light and started following the rules. Which I commend.

I say not "congratulations" but "it's about damn time".

Kudos? Sure! But they're already in the hole far enough as it is to receive net praise.

I'll start cheering when they make doing right things a habit.

Should IE just finally rebrand?

[upuv]

If you have read the posts here it is fairly clear that the one of the major problems is that IE8 is just IE7+1 or IE6+2.

Since most sites inspect to see if the browser is IE and then implement broken browser mode, is it not time that IE8 finally re-brand as a "NEW" browser.

Maybe identify as ZUNE8 instead. With the ZUNE tag it may actually look good. ZUNE market share goes from .00001% -> 23.00034% in less than one month. Microsoft hits it's first home run.

Compatibility View

[nickruiz]

What if we could just define which rendering engine to use in pages, e.g. IE7 or IE8 in a meta tag...

IE8 has a "Compatibility View" that allows the user to view pages that are not not standards compliant in IE. All would agree that IE should have been standards compliant from the beginning, but at least IE8 won't "break the Web," so to speak.