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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."
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.
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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.
or, perhaps, fixing those pages comes to mind...
839*929
One of the two will make them unpopular in the long term.
No sig today...
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.)
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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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.
I was testing my *new* site in IE8 yesterday, I'm using the "
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.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Who says anything has to be done for free. Consider this Microsoft's contribution to the economic stimulus package.
Bill Microsoft, of course.
Bill Gates
validating Google.com. Don't think google ever tried to be compliant.
Je ne parle pas francais.
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.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Amazingly, they chose the second option. Those of us who understand why this is important should be applauding right now.
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 :)
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.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.