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

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?!

[pgn674]

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

Re:Options

[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.)

Re:Options

[duguk]

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

Re:Where's the story?

[Dionysus]

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

Re:Options

[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.

Re:Options

[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?

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:Options

[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.