Site Compatibility and IE8

Kelson writes "As the release of Internet Explorer 8 approaches, Microsoft's IE Team has published a list of differences between IE7 and IE8, and how to fix code so that it will work on both. Most of the page focuses on IE8 Standards mode, but it also turns out that IE7 compatibility mode isn't quite the same as IE7 itself."

Comments

Target a standard

[BadAnalogyGuy]

HTML as a standard has been so bastardized over the years that the kind of incompatibilities that the article discusses exist not only across different browsers but also between browser versions.

Maybe it's time to start over. Flash and Java applets seem like a good place to start.

Re:Target a standard

[Samschnooks]

Agreed.

And at the bottom of your web page, instead of having some non-sense such as "This page best viewed with IEx", have something that says, "Page best viewed with standards compliant browsers, such as X,Y, and Z".

Re:Target a standard

[SirLurksAlot]

Maybe it's time to start over. Flash and Java applets seem like a good place to start.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or serious, or if you're saying that we should move back towards Java applets and use more Flash or if they should go away. Care to elaborate?

Personally the idea of bringing Java applets back makes me cringe. I also have FlashBlock set to block all Flash by default, so you can guess my stance there as well. In fact the trend to include more Flash and the increasing use of Silverlight has me wondering what the future HTML and CSS will be if they have one at all. (I say as I format my post with HTML tags...)

Re:Target a standard

[Antique Geekmeister]

That's odd. All the webpages I create work just fine with flat text, maybe a .css file to capture the style, and no dancing bears of any kind. Keeping the silly behavior on the server side makes them vastly more robust, handicapped accessible to people with text->speech needs or with large typeface needs, and generally keeps their bandwidth and support requirements way, way, way down.

Re:Target a standard

[Darkness404]

The nice thing about Flash though, its fast. Sure, some of the plugins enjoy eating up 100% of CPU occasionally, but as a whole Flash is a rather fast language, I haven't ever seen a fast Java applet on the other hand...

Re:Target a standard

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I haven't ever seen a fast Java applet

This is a temporary problem. As computers get faster, this problem will go away.

Re:Target a standard

[Darkness404]

This is a temporary problem. As computers get faster, this problem will go away.

Um, it has been stated that its a temporary problem ever since Java applets were introduced in the '90s, and even today with dual-core multi-ghz CPUs commonplace as Gigabytes of RAM, the problem still hasn't gone away.

Similarly, Flash seemed just as fast on a Pentium III with about 128 MB of RAM as it does today on the latest quad-core box.

Re:Target a standard

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

HTML rendering is actually pretty consistent among standards compliant browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome & Opera). The problem is that the largest browser vendor by marketshare (Microsoft) has a poor history of standards compliance; rather they ignore parts of standards for their own proprietary implementations, which change from version to version.

This has caused Microsoft their current position, where it becomes difficult for new versions of their browser to match the quirks and partial standards compliance of the past versions. It's hard to remove features from a browser when a popular site coded years ago is still using them. In essence, they have painted themselves into a corner.

The problem is not in HTML, the problem is the long term effect of proprietary technology instead of standards compliance. Vendor-owned technologies such as Flash or Silverlight are not the answer, in fact they're characteristic of the problem!

Re:Target a standard

[aurispector]

They had all the resources they needed to produce perfectly compliant browsers, so one must inevitably conclude that the incompatibilities were deliberate. If your average clueless Joe has trouble with anything but the bundled IE, there's big incentive not to change, right? It's not done 'til Firefox won't run!

It's quite ironic that MS's shenanigans are coming back to haunt them.

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why Microsoft has been pushing so hard for new standards: "Render in the manner of IE 6.0"

Re:Target a standard

[tecnico.hitos]

Somehow Flash isn't as fast to me.
I can barely watch a Flash animation in low Q mode at half Speed

I have a Athlon XP, 2 GB RAM.

Re:Target a standard

[Darkness404]

Plugin version? OS? There seem to be some versions of the Flash plugin that are super-fast, other versions enjoy eating your CPU and RAM. Usually, Mac/Linux versions aren't that great compared to the Windows version, but here on Flash 10 R22 on Ubuntu 8.10 running on a Athlon 64 3500+ with about 700 some MB of RAM, it works fine, no Flashblock, no NoScript, no Adblock (though I do have a hosts file configured to block most ad servers) running on Firefox 3.0.7

Re:Target a standard

[tecnico.hitos]

But then Flash came along and suddenly you've got crap that can't be indexed and is inaccessible to people who are blind or deaf

Yes it can be indexed and yes it can be made accessible. If people don't do that, it's just because they don't care/are lazy.

Re:Target a standard

[tecnico.hitos]

Ouch! I'm really sorry.
The post above was supposed to be a reply to http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1160881&cid=27193055

Re:Target a standard

[Sleepy]

>Maybe it's time to start over. Flash and Java applets seem like a good place to start.

Yes. Because Microsoft has bastardized open standards like HTML and CSS, let's move a vendor-controlled standards.

After all, it's not like Microsoft went out of their way to bastardize Java RIGHT?

Never mind how locking up valuable data in ANY proprietary format, has NEVER turned around and bit mankind in the ass time and time again.

Our intranet has been standards-only for 5 years, and our public website is XHTML strict, with a few (validating) hacks to support IE 6 and 7.

The momentum for standards compliant browsing is pretty strong. The biggest obstacle are the people who make webpages in FrontPage or Office... they're getting calls from customers who can't read white text on a white background, because the MS tools still go out of their way to (deliberately) suck.

Big comment FAIL. Hope you weren't serious and not a troll

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is plenty fast. It's just that applets haven't been used for anything worthwhile in a long time, so you remember Java performance from back when CPUs had clock rates in the double-digit MHz range. The only real problem with Java performance is the comparatively slow startup time of the runtime environment.

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Hope you weren't serious and not a troll

You hope he was kidding and earnest?

Perhaps you might want to think about your "Big comment FAIL".

If you are hoping he isn't a troll, why? Is it because you took the bait?

Re:Target a standard

[sjames]

It is fast. It's so fast that it can screw up spectacularly faster than I can make it stop. I must admit that nothing gets your message across faster than an all flash index page.

Unfortunately, that message is "we're sorry, but our message is all hype and no substance. We were afraid you might figure that out if we didn't guide you firmly through our message with no opportunity to look behind the curtain, or for that matter, to think about what we're saying and realize that it adds up to nothing at all. On the bright side, since you block flash by default, at least we know you're the sort of "critical thinker" who we can never win over with gibberish.

I'm not saying flash is all bad, it seems to have it's place in the world (though it needs to be replaced with an equivalent that actually works on all platforms). I block it by default, but do have it installed for the few cases where it actually makes sense.

Too often, flash is resorted to to get around the apparent fact that MS has a whole division that does nothing but come up with the oddest and most brain damaged possible interpretation of a standard and makes sure that's what gets implemented. Their motto: "Those weirdnix guys are rank amateurs"

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

More resources is not usually the solution to a problem.

Re:Target a standard

[thetoadwarrior]

So what are some examples of Java applets that you have problems with?

Without a doubt there were a lot of shitty Java applets out in the past. After all it was the first way for a lot of people to build multi-media websites and as such it suffered by it's easy entry point and the fact people didn't have any previous examples of what they should doing with multi-media on their website.

However I would say most applets aren't a problem. Most of my wait time on Java based gaming is the downloading of content, just like Flash games.

Lastly, if Java was that shit I doubt one of the the world's largest MMORPGs (Runescape) would use it. More so when the applet has to perform along side flash adverts for non-paying customers.

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you seriously suggesting that web sites be build using nothing more than flash and java? ewwwwwww! I won't even vista one of those all flash sites. I despise flash. Its only usefulness is for youtube videos!

Re:Target a standard

[hairyfeet]

Yes, let us please kill that lie right now. Working with SOHO and SMBs I can tell that there are most likely millions of machines still doing their jobs in offices accross this country, as well as in many customers homes, that are between 1GHZ and 3.6GHZ with anywhere from 256MB to 2GB of RAM. In fact for purpose of this example i am typing this on a refurbed office machine I have had working as a Nettop(long before there was even such a word) for the past 9 years. This machine is a 1.1GHz Celeron with a maxed out 512MB of PC133.

For the Internet it works beautifully EXCEPT if the evil known as flash is allowed on. In fact let me quote the system requirements for Linux Flash Player 10 that a fellow Slashdot reader posted(Thanks McGuirk) "Minimum Requirements: Modern processor (800MHz or faster) & 512MB of RAM, 128MB of graphics memory For "Standard" and for HD playback:Intel Core Duo 1.8GHz, AMD Athlon(TM) 64 X2 4200+ processor (or equivalent) & 512MB of RAM & 64MB of VRAM"

I'm afraid I have to agree with his comments after reading the specs "Good God...that's more than many games" and you want to use THAT as the "standard" for making web pages? I have many 3d video games that aren't that damned bloated! But to me it simply highlights why Flash is bad: It is made by Adobe. No offense, but Adobe has always been a "throw more RAM and CPU at it" kind of company. There products have always gotten more bloated and buggy with every release. That is just who they are. But wanting to turn the whole WWW, which is used by countless millions across the planet, including businesses, charities, users rich and poor alike, into a giant flash site because the HTML and CSS code has gotten sucky is just insanity.

If the HTML and CSS standards suck, then have a fit and demand they change! But don't turn the web into a giant bloated playground for a single monopoly. We went through that in the 90s with "This site is designed for IE only" and I'm not really wanting to go back to that, Are you?

Re:Target a standard

[skeeto]

Whoosh!

Re:Target a standard

[aztracker1]

First off, most of the quirks that are specific to IE come from before the standards were well defined enough that an implementation was clear.

Not to mention that the big boys at the time had very differing implementations, and the w3c-dom spec really doesn't resemble either. IE6 implemented a lot, but was left to stagnate while gecko, khtml/webkit and others passed it. IE7 kind of split the difference, and IE8 is a godsend by comparison.

I'm sorry, but I just don't see the point in bitching about 8-10yo software like this.

Re:Target a standard

[DomainDominator]

Or how about Silverlight to any HTTP server? :-)

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Every single Java applet I've had to run in both Windows (IE and FireFox) and Linux (FireFox) on computers ranging from quad cores to pentium 4's run pathetically slow. I still see GUI elements refresh slowly. I still see slow loading/initialisation times which almost always lock up the browser for between 4 and 15 seconds. I still see delays in response time to interactive elements. It's still slow god damn it!

Re:Target a standard

[BikeHelmet]

He's being sarcastic. He's saying we should start by redesigning Flash and Java. (or basically, cutting their backwards compatibility to glean a simpler non-bastardized codebase)

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

There are certainly badly programmed applets. Like today's Javascript programs, many applets were written by people with no computer science background. The results are unnecessarily complex UI layouts and inefficient code which causes unnecessary redraws and doesn't scale well. Flash is mostly used as an animation program with little user code. When Flash is used more as an application platform, the same efficiency problems that plague some Java and Javascript programs will affect Flash too. Some Flash applets use 100% CPU time even though nothing happens on the screen. That's just a foreshadowing.

Perhaps you could point us to a couple of those slow applets you're seeing.

(A datapoint: The Java applet runtime starts in under a second with no cached files on my system, which is a low end dual-core. I think that could and should be improved. From cached files the runtime startup time is hardly noticeable.)

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they were deliberate. They have been trying to push their own standards for years by leveraging their market position to do so.

Re:Target a standard

[BikeHelmet]

You're kidding, right? Please tell me you are...

Flash certainly is popular, but I would not describe it as "fast". Its power comes from how easy it is to create flash stuff. Not from having a great backend.

Problems with Flash:
-Huge memory leaks
-Shitty scripting performance
-Mediocre rendering performance of rasterized graphics
-Poorly designed input handling (makes it unsuitable for games - ironically)

Problems with Java:
-Slow start time
-No easy to work with vectorized graphics
-Java is "Java", and thus is bad (because java is bad)

Here's the proof.

Claim 1: Flash rendering performance is very poor.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408513

Most flash game designs do silly stuff like putting a semi-transparent invisible square over the screen to manage fading. Those alpha-shades every rendering operation on the CPU, and precludes all hardware acceleration.

This game has very poor performance on a 2.2ghz Athlon XP w/ 1GB RAM + 7800GS. It uses many final-fantasy-style sprites/graphics, in addition to vectorized graphics for dialog and the interface.

In Java, even in an applet, simple sprite blits like that would run fine on a 300mhz P2. However, character portraits and the interface would have to be rasterized to work in Java.

Verdict: Both have negatives. Flash runs (very) slow, but is fast to create. Java runs fast(er), but is (very) slow to create.

Claim 2: Flash input handling makes it unsuitable for most games.
http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-542

When a flash "movie" tries to run at a high framerate... Flash allows it. And then it fails.

Flash rendering slows down, but input does not. This means that if a game wants 200fps, but the computer can only render 20fps, input can lag up to ~10 seconds because of how the flash input handling works. It buffers input, but doesn't skip any slots in the buffer. You get 200 slots per second at 200fps, but if it takes 10 seconds to clear the buffer, oh well. Once the buffer is clear, it accepts another second of input, then waits for it to clear again.

This makes playing flash games on slower computers (such as netbooks) quite challenging.

It's worth noting that flash also interferes with general IO. While the input buffer is overflowing (the time between the first second of receiving input until the buffer is clear) it garbages your keyboard presses and mouse movement/clicks, and also does something that screws up other IO on your system.

It has been reported that flash messes up monitoring software like SpeedFan, MBM, etc.; it's like it gets caught in an endless loop saturating all IO. I've seen systems reboot because they thought they were overheating, because of a flash movie not playing at 100% speed.

Adobe is ignoring these issues.

Verdict: It falls to the developer to pick a framerate that will run on slower systems.

Claim 3: Flash data handling makes it unsuitable for most games.
http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html

Remarkable game. Unfortunately, your saved games may be cleared upon upgrading your flash player. Also, there's the insane input lag on slower systems.

Frequently I go to a website after upgrading my flash player, and all my old scores are gone. Oh well? I guess that may be a good thing - it also means every flash tracking cookie vanishes at the same time.

Verdict: Flash needs a second kind of storage - persistent storage - which is guaranteed not to be cleared at random intervals, or by upgrading the player.

Claim 4: Flash leaks like a bitch.
http://www.warpfire.com/
http

Re:Target a standard

[DiegoBravo]

From my observation, Java Applets and Flash run at similar speeds (indeed, there is no real reason for them to differ.) The single and big problem was the Java Applet startup time that was really BIIIIIG and consumed resources to the point of freezing the PC.

Since many people in the 90's used Applets just for trivial and short animations, that startup time turned to be the principal contributor to the total user experience.

Flash had a lot less ambitions (in the beginning), so their initialization time was as expected (i.e. non detectable.)

Re:Target a standard

[bonch]

Gopher!

Re:Target a standard

[Toonol]

And as computers get faster, the relative performance of Java compared to other languages doesn't improve one bit.

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't ever seen a fast Java applet...

Well, I spent my whole day today working with some VERY fast Java applets and can't even take the credit for having made them fast.

Nonetheless, I don't want either Java OR Flash to be a first-resort solution for "web compatibility".

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

java applets. Ugh, Just the word java makes me cringe. Heck Id rather deal with flash or silverlight then java.

Re:Target a standard

[Strake]

Yes, Flash and Java are _definitely_ open standards.

Also, they interact incredibly well with browser functions such as bookmarks and back/forward controls, to name a few.

Re:Target a standard

[MasterOfCeremonies]

Woosh! (Or should that be Flash?)

Re:Target a standard

[pmarini]

well, if maxing to 100% a faster CPU means just that...

Re:Target a standard

[pmarini]

a bit offtopic, but let me be the first to reorder the names those 4 browsers and group them under the acronym "fantastic FOCS" !

Re:Target a standard

[shutdown -p now]

They had all the resources they needed to produce perfectly compliant browsers, so one must inevitably conclude that the incompatibilities were deliberate.

Not really "inevitable". Having the resources is one thing, but there are many ways to spend them. One might as well conclude that those who decided on those things have thought that available resources are better used elsewhere for higher ROI, at least until recently.

Re:Target a standard

[RotHorseKid]

You don't get it, do you?

It's slow, nobody wants it, nobody needs it. At least anybody with a FUTURE. Java is dead. Dead. DEAD. DEAD.

Now leave me be, someone just called me on my Android Phone...

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because you don't have video drivers installed.

You're welcome.

Re:Target a standard

[glebd]

From my web site footer: "Best viewed with a web browser."

Re:Target a standard

[DragonWriter]

HTML as a standard has been so bastardized over the years that the kind of incompatibilities that the article discusses exist not only across different browsers but also between browser versions.

Maybe it's time to start over. Flash and Java applets seem like a good place to start.

Neither Flash not Java or open standards, nor do either of them really serve the basic role of HTML. If you need an open standard for the purpose that HTML is designed to serve that isn't HTML, what might be good is to reverse the direction HTML took from its early forms and drop the semantic markup and make an XML-based, unpaged-display-oriented physical markup language -- essentially the unpaged equivalent of XSL-FO -- and use whatever XML you want for semantic markup with XSLT to convert to the new display language.

But I really think that HTML is mostly good enough for what it does, and is entrenched enough that its not likely going to be replaced in its role anytime soon.

Re:Target a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

have it's place

"its".

My favorite

[AKAImBatman]

This is actually a pretty good list and will allow me to encourage action on some standards-compliant bugs I know of in sites I work on. (e.g. Some programmers previously relied on getDocumentById searching "name" elements.) However, there is one bug in this list that has me both bemused and disgusted:

Object Detection

Object detection works great when used correctly. However some pages assume the existence of one feature based upon the presence of another, leading to problems when both features are not implemented in the same release.
if(window.postMessage) {
        window.addEventListener(
                "load",
                myHandler,
                false
        );
}

SOLUTION: Perform proper object-detection for each feature used.

if(window.addEventListener) {
        window.addEventListener(
                "load",
                myHandler,
                false
        );
}

Hmmm... maybe that's because Microsoft didn't implement the fucking standard correctly? The standard is more or less DEPENDENT on DOM2 events. (At the very least, I doubt anyone expected someone to implement the standard with a dysfunctional DOM.) That's why you can assume that you can use addEventListener to set a postMessage event receiver. But Microsoft didn't implement DOM2 events, despite helping develop the standard 10 years ago.

IE8 standards compliance is a joke. A sick joke played out by millions of unsuspecting users everywhere.

Re:My favorite

[RomSteady]

I think you are missing the point of the example given.

Microsoft isn't saying that they didn't implement both window.postMessage and window.addEventListener.

They are saying that if you want to test for the existence of feature A, you check for the existence of feature A and you don't infer its existence by checking for the existence of feature B.

Re:My favorite

[AKAImBatman]

I think you're missing my argument. The assumption that addEventListener should exist if postMessage exists is a good one. Why? Because postMessage relies on addEventListener. However, Microsoft decided that proper DOM support wasn't important to standards compliance, and implemented a bastardized version of the spec.

The example they gave as a solution is actually buggy. The original code checked for cross-document messaging and presumably would have fall-back logic if the feature didn't exist. Microsoft's "corrected" code does not correctly check for cross-document messaging. It simply assumes it exists and registers an event for it. Which is likely to break a lot of truly standards compliant browsers while "fixing" IE8.

Re:My favorite

[BasharTeg]

http://webkit.org/projects/css/index.html

So let me understand this...

WebKit isn't yet CSS 1 compliant.

WebKit isn't yet CSS 2.1 compliant, and does not currently pass the CSS 2.1 suite.

WebKit isn't yet CSS 3 compliant, but CSS 3 isn't a finished standard yet anyway. ( http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work )

IE 8 is coming out with full CSS 2.1 compliance that passes the CSS 2.1 test suite entirely.

CSS 2.1 is the newest *completed* CSS standard level.

But according to the Intarnets, Microsoft should replace their IE Trident engine with WebKit.

Which would reduce their CSS standards support...

I'm confused.

Re:My favorite

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

IE8 will have full CSS 2.1 compliance? I'll believe it when I see it.

Instead of simply making assertions it's much more informative to compare CSS support by function, as in the following chart:

CSS contents and browser compatibility

From this it appears that IE8 DOES have improved CSS 2.1 support from previous versions, although it's still lacking in certain areas. The web's problem child has almost caught up to the rest of the class. Sadly, IE8's CSS 3 support is still far behind the curve :(

Re:My favorite

[AKAImBatman]

Just because they checked the box on the feature doesn't mean it works correctly. I'll grant that IE8 is better with CSS, but most of their "standards compliance" BS is just for show. Microsoft has no intention of supporting the standards that are in wide use. Instead, they focus on areas where their desktop APIs (i.e. Win32) won't be impacted. Thus the focus on complete CSS2.1 compliance. That lets them claim a commitment to standards without actually furthering the existing use of standards on the web.

Case in point: IE was the last major browser to reach ACID2 compliance (by a wide margin) and is the only upcoming major browser to score below 95 on the ACID3 test. (Around 20, if you're interested.) Most of the upcoming browsers that will directly compete with IE8 already support 100/100 on ACID3. That's a much more pragmatic test than Microsoft's checkbox fascination.

Microsoft isn't stupid. They know that the web is making their desktop lock-in obsolete. The last thing they want to do is help it along. That's why they're pushing Silverlight so hard. If they can provide Microsoft lock-in for web applications, they'll maintain the dominance of the Windows platform. In the meantime, they have to convince the public not to move to other browsers and give up their Windows/IE lock-in. Thus the box-checking on poor standards support.

Re:My favorite

[BasharTeg]

Acid2 isn't a standard. It also isn't a part of the test suite of W3C. Acid3 isn't a standard. It also isn't part of the test suite of W3C. It's a marketing gimmick of Opera and people lap it up like it is more important than real standards work from the W3C. Plus, Acid3 is more about DOM than CSS, and Acid3 tests for features that have not yet been standardized.

You can push for implementation of standards, but to knock someone's products because they haven't implemented DRAFT standard recommendations is just stupid.

And your claims that Microsoft isn't really implementing the CSS 2.1 standard correctly and that they're just "checking a checkbox" don't actually stand up to the test of reality:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/01/27/microsoft-submits-thousands-more-css-2-1-tests-to-the-w3c.aspx

Your arguments are a subjective standard, you want to appeal to the W3C for "standards" authority, but then set the bar for judgement to be whatever "people are using" or whatever marketing gimmick "standards" test IE fails and others ALSO fail, just fail less.

Stick to the W3C standard test suites for an actual measure of standards compliance and leave the Acid tests to the fanbois who are out to prove a point. And don't talk about "standards" that are not yet standards.

Re:My favorite

[Shin-LaC]

How up-to-date is that page? For example, it says that white-space pre-wrap is not supported, but a quick google search found that they were fixing bugs with pre-wrap in 2008 - which means support for it was implemented at least a year ago.

"Not yet CCS 1 compliant" is a joke. Look at the bugs that remain. They are things like this. If you hold WebKit to such a strict standard, you'll have to do the same with other browsers as well. I guarantee you'll find such bugs in Firefox too, as you will in IE8 when it ships.

The first two lines after the title on the CCS 2.1 test suite page are: "This is a development version of the CSS 2.1 Test Suite. It is woefully incomplete and may contain incorrect tests." If you're using that as the basis to gauge CSS 2.1 compliance, I have a bridge to sell you.

Re:My favorite

[BasharTeg]

Can you explain why that page indicates all green for CSS 2.1 on WebKit based browsers, except for the "static" classifications, yet WebKit claims that their CSS 2.1 support is not yet complete?

Perhaps using the W3C standard test suites would be a better measure than some guy putting green boxes next to features?

If WebKit claims their CSS 2.1 support isn't done yet, I'm going to take their word for it.

Re:My favorite

[BasharTeg]

It's okay, Microsoft is helping with the CSS 2.1 testing.

http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/01/27/microsoft-submits-thousands-more-css-2-1-tests-to-the-w3c.aspx

Either you're standards compliant or you're not. WebKit claims they're not. I believe them.

Re:My favorite

[BeerCat]

Acid2 isn't a standard. It also isn't a part of the test suite of W3C. Acid3 isn't a standard. It also isn't part of the test suite of W3C. It's a marketing gimmick of Opera

Or maybe, from the Web Standards Project -

a group of professional web developers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium

, so may not be part of W3C, but wants to work to their guidelines.

Re:My favorite

[FloydTheDroid]

Isn't this why we have libraries like jQuery? In my experience IE isn't alone in it's quirks. Most browsers aren't going to treat events 100% the same so using a js library to process events seems like a no brainer to me.

Re:My favorite

[AKAImBatman]

Amusingly, I never stated that ACID2 and ACID3 were standards. I stated that supporting these tests are a pragmatic approach to optimizing resources for implementing parts of the standards. (The stated purpose of the ACID tests is to promote implementation of standards with immediate applications.)

The truth is that the fine details of the CSS standards are hard for EVERYONE to support. Including Microsoft. No one except Microsoft claims 100% CSS 2.1, because it would be disingenuous to do so. I've only heard that claim (incorrectly) assigned to Microsoft.

You can push for implementation of standards, but to knock someone's products because they haven't implemented DRAFT standard recommendations is just stupid.

This would be a good argument, except for one problem: Microsoft is implementing DRAFT standards while NOT implementing the RECOMMENDED standards they're based on. Want an example? Look up to the top post. Cross Document messaging is not yet recommended, but Microsoft is bound and determined to mis-implement it.

In any case, your argument betrays a misunderstanding of how web standards work. The current approach being used is that standards will not reach a recommended status until at least two successful implementations of the standard exist. The idea is that this will determine if the spec is actually implementable or not. (One of the primary reasons why CSS 1 & 2 are not fully implemented is because the spec was written without implementations. The spec ended up being extremely difficult to implement correctly.)

Now if Microsoft wanted to be the browser that would only implement recommended standards I would be fine with that. But they're not. They're explicitly picking and choosing, being careful to avoid the standards implemented by everyone else. ESPECIALLY the RECOMMENDED standards that would make IE compatible with other browsers.

What is the point of standards compliance if you're explicitly trying not to be compatible?

And that right there is why their standards compliance is a farce. A sick joke that's all about control for Microsoft. It's just sad that people are buying into Microsoft's friendly veiner, all while Microsoft slides the knife even deeper in their backs.

Re:My favorite

[hey!]

This is getting into the philosophy of ontology.

AKAImBatMan says: If exists(A) -> exists(B) and exists(A), then we should be able to assume exists(B).

RomSteady says: it it possible to test for exists(B), then we should test for exists(B), even if we believe exists(A) -> exists(B).

I think that you are both right. It comes down to a simple principle of design: contain unnecessary assumptions.

A web app developer, assuming that the browser won't violate your expectations is bad unless there is a compelling reason to rely on those expectations. It doesn't matter whether those expectations are reasonable, because even if the browser developer intended to honor them there many be bugs in the implementation.

For a web browser developer, assuming that developers won't rely on some aspect or implications of the standard that isn't (in your opinion) necessary) is bad. You should strive to meet as every expectation that is demonstrably implied by the standard.

I tend to wide with AKAImBatman's view a bit more, though. In practice the accumulation of "best programming practice" can result in code that is cluttered with exception testing. Developers when coding should deal with concepts rather than implementations, and creators of platforms should make this feasible as far as humanly possible.

Re:My favorite

[Blakey Rat]

Hmmm... maybe that's because Microsoft didn't implement the fucking standard correctly? The standard is more or less DEPENDENT on DOM2 events. (At the very least, I doubt anyone expected someone to implement the standard with a dysfunctional DOM.) That's why you can assume that you can use addEventListener to set a postMessage event receiver. But Microsoft didn't implement DOM2 events, despite helping develop the standard 10 years ago.

IE8 standards compliance is a joke. A sick joke played out by millions of unsuspecting users everywhere.

Yeah, they didn't. But they're making a good try here at fixing the problems, so fucking relax already. The only people who give a shit about web standards are web developers, and that's a very, very small percentage of the population. The amount of kicking and screaming and tantrum-throwing I read on this site on a daily basis is just crazy. Relax!

The example posted above is common sense, anyway. If you want to use "addEventListener," check for the existence of "addEventListener." Duh. Why would you check for anything else, anyway, except for being retarded?

Re:My favorite

[Blakey Rat]

What does ACID2 have to do with web standards? That's not part of the test suite.

Re:My favorite

[Blakey Rat]

Ok, so let me ask a serious question.

Browser Foo gets 86% on ACID2. Browser Bar gets 99% on ACID2.

What exactly does that tell me, as a web developer?

Re:My favorite

[AliasMarlowe]

Can you explain why that page indicates all green for CSS 2.1 on WebKit based browsers, except for the "static" classifications, yet WebKit claims that their CSS 2.1 support is not yet complete?

Maybe you just looked at the CSS 2.1 Selectors section, which is mostly green for Webkit browsers (but with a few marked "static").

However, if you also look at the Webkit browsers in the CSS 2.1 Declarations section, you'll notice that one item (content) is marked as "almost", while another (table columns) is marked as "incomplete". Perhaps this is why Webkit does not claim complete support.

Perhaps using the W3C standard test suites would be a better measure than some guy putting green boxes next to features?

Obviously.

Re:My favorite

[RightSaidFred99]

blah blah...usual meaningless drivel..blah blah

...Microsoft's friendly veiner...

My creepy uncle once told me he had a friendly veiner. I believe he called it Mr. Blue Veiner. Let me tell you something. It wasn't so friendly.

Re:My favorite

[Shin-LaC]

In other words, Microsoft is writing its own compliance tests. I'd be surprised if they didn't score 100%!

What determines standard compliance is not any test, but the standard itself. If you had ever tried coding a website to the standards, you'd know that IE has been the worst-conforming browser by far. For version 8, Microsoft has found CSS2 to be a low-hanging fruit (especially with an a basically abandoned compliance suite that they could resurrect and shape to their convenience to gain an appearance of legitimacy), and might actually deliver an implementation that's on par with the average modern browser - for that specific standard alone. Meanwhile, they've given up on getting decent DOM conformance in this version.

They're not fooling anyone, and neither are you.

Re:My favorite

[vadim_t]

Acid2 tests aspects of HTML markup, CSS 2.1 styling, PNG images, and data URIs. It should render correctly on any application that follows the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet Engineering Task Force specifications for these technologies. The idea is that if both web sites and web browsers follow agreed-upon industry standards, then any web site will work the same in any web browser.

So, it's a page you can point a viewer to, and quickly see how standard compliant it is.

For your question, it would mean that Browser Foo is more likely to misrender a page coded according to the standards it tests than Browser Bar.

So if pretty much every modern browser passes it, but IE does not, it would mean that a page made according to standards should render well in pretty much every browser, except probably IE. And in reverse, a page made to render well in IE would likely look bad on pretty much anything else.

Re:My favorite

[Anonymous Coward]

But they're making a good try here at fixing the problems

Not these ones. They've done no work on DOM2 Events at all, even though this particular feature depends on them. They skipped ahead and used a hack to make it look like they are catching up, when in reality this is a huge deficiency. Why don't you check out the bug report for lack of DOM2 Events on their public bug tracker - it was closed with their equivalent of WONTFIX.

fucking relax already

I've personally put in probably over a thousand hours working around IE's many shortcomings. This is one of the biggest computer companies in the world. They can do better, they choose not to, with costly consequences for a lot of people. Every shortcoming in IE8 will cost me time and money, and cost clients money and features. Don't tell people to "fucking relax".

Re:My favorite

[Blakey Rat]

So, it's a page you can point a viewer to, and quickly see how standard compliant it is.

From my understanding, it only shows you how the browser handles errors in the markup. That isn't the same thing as "standards compliant." Unless you have contrary information, in which case please fill me in.

Re:My favorite

[vadim_t]

See the list

Yes, it tests for markup errors. It also tests for other things, like PNG transparency and CSS paint order and positioning.

Re:My favorite

[pizzach]

From Wikipedia:

Acid2 tests aspects of HTML markup, CSS 2.1 styling, PNG images, and data URIs. It should render correctly on any application that follows the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet Engineering Task Force specifications for these technologies. The idea is that if both web sites and web browsers follow agreed-upon industry standards, then any web site will work the same in any web browser.

It's a test, nothing more nothing less. The World Wide Web Consortium, also known as the W3C for short, is known for their definitions of CSS and HTML standards. That's the connection. Hope it helped.

Re:My favorite

[Anonymous Coward]

The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

Yeah, IE has historically had issues conforming to published standards. It's easy to forget that it evolved before a lot of those standards existed and, as is fairly common in those situations, the standards solidified in a manner contrary to the existing implementations. People quickly forget that Netscape was considerably worse.

You claim that CSS2 was the low hanging fruit. If that were the case, why aren't all of the browsers 100% compliant? The low hanging fruit would be to decide to implement the easy pieces of CSS3 instead of deciding to fully implement all of CSS2.

As for the test cases, all of these cases have been submitted to W3C for inclusion in their own implementation tests. The W3C's project had been sorely behind and of no use to any implementor. If you feel that Microsoft is stacking the tests then feel free to peruse the tests, which are all openly published, and point them out.

Microsoft is also submitting test cases for CSS3 and HTML5, so those are definitely on the road map. But while you bitch about MS not implementing either CSS3 or HTML5 remember that neither are standards. If Microsoft were to implement them and then W3C were to finalize the standards with contrary behavior you would be the first to bitch that MS fucked up and is trying to pollute the web. Gecko and WebKit will invariably get the implementation wrong, and that won't stop you from praising their shit.

But go ahead and continue to grind your axe. It's not like reality is really of any concern here.

Re:My favorite

[Gorshkov]

Developers when coding should deal with concepts rather than implementations, and creators of platforms should make this feasible as far as humanly possible.

First, "humanly possible only goes so far.

Second, concepts are design, and coding IS implementation.

Re:My favorite

[pbhj]

I think it might be because you're misreading it, having followed PPK (author of QM) for many years I'd be shocked if he had it wrong, he's very thorough!

On that page ( http://quirksmode.org/css/contents.html ) in the "CSS 2.1 Declarations" section under table columns you'll note that all the WebKit based browsers have "incomplete" - ie quirksmode says that WebKit is incomplete for CSS2.1.

What's your reference from the other side, what are the WebKit guys saying isn't finished, does this confirm or contradict?

I found http://webkit.org/projects/css/index.html which says:

Finish CSS2.1 Support
        Most of CSS2.1 has been implemented in WebKit, but a few holes remain. The new white-space values pre-wrap and pre-line are not yet supported. Some of these features have been implemented in the current KHTML tree, and a merge may be possible for some of these features.

However testing those features using Konq3 and Saf4beta2 I find them to work fine. Perhaps WebKit haven't updated this? Particularly one notes that pre-wrap and pre-line are part of ACID3 which the WebKit team claim to have passed with nightly builds of the WebKit engine ( http://webkit.org/blog/280/full-pass-of-acid-3/ ).

Re:My favorite

[BronsCon]

Gecko and WebKit will invariably release fixes for their implementations in a timely manner, as updates to the current versions at the time. That's what garners the praise.

MS will invariably implement what the hell ever they want and promise to fix it in the next release, several years later. That's what garners the axe-grinding.

IE may have come along before standards, but that's no excuse to be the last to come along to meet those standards once they exist.

I'm typing this in FireFox 3 on Vista Ultimate. Windows does rock my desktop, no doubt. And, before anyone shouts MS fanboi, let me point out, once again, that I'm typing this in FF3; be similarly advised that I've got just under a dozen X11 applications forwarding to this machine from the beefy Linux server in my closet.

Everything has its place, even IE. IE's place is in the dark recesses of my hard disk, sleeping until patch Tuesday. It doesn't really come out for that, anymore, since Windows Update is becoming more like a real application. I do awaken it from its peaceful slumber for compatibility testing, but I typically do that with IETab.

Yes, I work with this every day. That is why I keep a sharp axe.

Re:My favorite

[slashbart]

be careful mentioning this, someone modded me troll for saying pretty much the same thing. :-)

Re:My favorite

[hey!]

And when implementation bleeds into the conceptual level, misery results.

Re:My favorite

[Blakey Rat]

I've personally put in probably over a thousand hours working around IE's many shortcomings. This is one of the biggest computer companies in the world. They can do better, they choose not to, with costly consequences for a lot of people. Every shortcoming in IE8 will cost me time and money, and cost clients money and features. Don't tell people to "fucking relax".

I read complaints like yours as:

"I have to actually QA your products in the environments your customers use!"

Which leads to the "awww, poor baby! Want a blankie?" response. Seriously, you're writing software, and you're sitting here with the illusion that you'll never need to QA your own product? Believe me, it's orders of magnitude easier to QA for the web than for any other platform, even closed ones like game consoles. If you didn't plan for that, you are a shitty developer. If your manager didn't schedule for it, you have a shitty manager. Period.

Blaming IE when your product doesn't work is ridiculous. It wasn't some mystery that you'd need it to work in IE, right? Then why the hell didn't you QA it!

Re:My favorite

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have to actually QA your products in the environments your customers use!"

Uh, no, having to write extra code because a particular browser simply doesn't support the proper way of doing it is not "QA". Since everything you wrote from that point on is based on this idiocy and a whole bunch of straw men, there's no point responding to the rest of your comment. Feel free to try again if you think you can argue against what I actually said though.

Re:My favorite

[Bogtha]

From my understanding, it only shows you how the browser handles errors in the markup.

You understand wrong. From my usual copy & paste comment on the subject:

Have you actually bothered to read the Acid2 page? Because I hear this repeated all the time, and it's downright misleading.

There is a checklist of about a dozen things the Acid2 page tests. Incorrect code is just one of them. It is necessary to include incorrect code in a test like this. How else are you going to check whether a browser follows the CSS error handling rules?

It's incorrect code, sure, but it's incorrect code that has a defined rendering according to the CSS specifications. It's not something a compliant browser would trip up on. There is a correct way to parse the incorrect code, and the Acid2 page tests to see if a browser parses it correctly - among many other things it tests for.

Where are you guys getting this idea that the Acid2 test is all about error handling? It's a very small part of the test, but plenty of Slashdotters seem convinced that the test revolves around broken code and nothing else. Was there a weekly meeting I missed wher eyou all got this myth drilled into your heads?

Re:My favorite

[pmarini]

hasn't that been their purpose all along ? leverage those 50% of Internet Explorer users on version 7 to "upgrade" to version 8, while at the same time making sure they confuse those PHB...
they are losing terrain and it can be noticed !

Re:My favorite

[pmarini]

the way I see it is that the IE team managed to develop (almost released) a good product, but their bosses missed the cue so they jumped in at the last minute and demanded to keep the same level of product quality as usual for the next version... that is, a c*apload of s*it

Re:My favorite

[pmarini]

for that someone is more "either you're standards compliant or you buy your way into it"...

Re:My favorite

[BasharTeg]

Which is for all intents and purposes, an Opera marketing effort, if you actually look a little deeper. Look at the people involved.

How are options bad?

[Chas]

Come on! If I wanna make something standards compliant, I can.

Only not quite.

Sorta.

Kinda.

When the stars align in the heavens just so...

...ish

And now Microsoft has given us a new wrinkle^H^H^H^OPTION...option! Yet another way of almost (but not quite...sorta...kinda...YOU GET THE IDEA!) emulating IE7! A most wonderful *COUGH*, stable *COUGH!*, standards comp...AW FUCK! WHO AM I KIDDING?

Yup. Just another pooch-screw waiting to be exploited in some particularly nasty manner!

Status quo!

They seemed to miss something...

[cjmnews]

There are little things that could be fairly important where they don't render things correctly. Just search and you'll find quite a few examples and work arounds.

The most basic one I can't understand is by a basic inset or outset button renders with a solid black line in IE8? The work around is to color each side of the border individually with the custom color you need to make it look inset or outset.

IE8 Standards mode??

[nurb432]

How about following the standards the rest of the world uses instead?

Re:IE8 Standards mode??

[Midnight Thunder]

How about following the standards the rest of the world uses instead?

Habits are hard to break ;)

Re:IE8 Standards mode??

[SirLurksAlot]

The rest of the world where? I'm as pro-standards as anyone else, but I hate to break it to you that most of the world is still using IE.

Yes, standards-compliant browsers are gaining more support every year, but it doesn't change the fact that with such a huge market share MS is still setting the defacto standard. This is especially true in the corporate environment. The great majority of corporate intranets are still using IE as their supported/required browser, and there is still A LOT of legacy web applications out there that rely on technologies like ActiveX to function. All that being said I'm glad to see Microsoft is finally starting to get with the program with IE8. Whether or not businesses start following suit and update their sites to be standards compliant is another question entirely, but I would hope that would be the case.

Re:IE8 Standards mode??

[Anonymous Coward]

IE is the rest of the world AFAIK, isn't it still the most popular browser?

Re:IE8 Standards mode??

[BasharTeg]

http://webkit.org/projects/css/index.html

So let me understand this...

WebKit isn't yet CSS 1 compliant.

WebKit isn't yet CSS 2.1 compliant, and does not currently pass the CSS 2.1 suite.

WebKit isn't yet CSS 3 compliant, but CSS 3 isn't a finished standard yet anyway. ( http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work )

IE 8 is coming out with full CSS 2.1 compliance that passes the CSS 2.1 test suite entirely.

CSS 2.1 is the newest *completed* CSS standard level.

But according to the Intarnets, Microsoft should replace their IE Trident engine with WebKit.

Which would reduce their CSS standards support...

I'm confused.

Re:IE8 Standards mode??

[Anonymous Coward]

The rest of the world where? I'm as pro-standards as anyone else, but I hate to break it to you that most of the world is still using IE.

So, because most of the world uses IE, the rest of the world apart from IE ALSO uses IE?

What the fuck?

Re:IE8 Standards mode??

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the world is still using IE because that is what was installed when they purchased the machine. If people were given a choice when they installed it, you would see IE with a much much smaller market share.

IE is a an inferior product compared to pretty much every browser out there. IEs market share will continue to decline and that makes me so happy. I am sick and tired of creating a design in Firefox, works in every single browser (maybe a minor tweak here and there for Safari) then spending a few hours to make it work in IE. Look at what they score on the ACID tests! Its no wonder I waste my time on it.

You supporting Microsoft and their completely screwed up browser hurts everyone. I waste countless hours because of YOU.

Microsoft is holding back innovation and it won't stop until they drop under 33% market share. That is the day, that I will throw a party.

Re:IE8 Standards mode??

[tecnico.hitos]

IE is not compliant with IE standards.

Re:IE8 Standards mode??

[Anonymous Coward]

You talk as if IE still had a 90% plus market share. According to Wikipedia, in February IE was barely above 66% and dropping steadily.

Re:IE8 Standards mode??

[Anonymous Coward]

CSS is hard. Let's do Active X!

Re:IE8 Standards mode??

[pbhj]

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2# is more interesting, with versions you can see IE7 > FF3 > IE6 > Saf3.2.

Aug06 to Feb07 MSIE7 gained 30% of the market, how, via windows update.

I'd bet FF is the most installed browser, whilst IE is the most pre-/auto-installed operating system component for internet browsing.

I'd comment on the article but...

[InsertWittyNameHere]

I just can't seem to figure out what compatibility mode to set my IE8 to to read the article...

Great....

[Chrono11901]

Wow now i need to test my site in at least 4 browsers, this is getting fucking ridiculous.

Re:Great....

[theArtificial]

I feel your pain. The CMS software our company produces uses a single style sheet and supporting multiple versions of IE is already troublesome (IE6 especially so). IE6 css support is by far the most irritating to deal with when testing designs on different browsers. Hopefully they'll provide free sunshine enimas with the release.

Re:Great....

[Blakey Rat]

Poor baby. If you were writing a desktop app, you'd have to test it in:
Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 (possibly Server 2000, 2003, 2008 also)
Mac OS 10.3, 10.4, 10.5
Linux -- God knows! 3-4 versions of top 5 distributions, perhaps.

The only people who cares about web standards are web developers, and web developers already have less QA work than most other software fields. I feel like breaking out the tiny violin when I hear stuff like this.

Re:Great....

[Anonymous Coward]

the difference is, if it compiles for those platforms, it normally works and looks the same. Try web programming where your design and parts of your code are liable to behave completely differently based on the platform, and where it can take almost the same amount of time again(as making the application in the first place) to make it work in IE6, if your boss demands IE6 compatibility.

Re:Great....

[Blakey Rat]

the difference is, if it compiles for those platforms, it normally works and looks the same.

Your software must be unbearably buggy.

Re:Great....

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent Funny! - intentional or not. Ten years ago a bare minimum would be two versions of IE on PC, two versions of IE on Mac, and two versions of Netscape.

Re:Great....

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a mobile application developer, you insensitive clod. You guys don't know how good you have it. Do you know how many different, incompatible, buggy piles of shit are called "cellular telephone"?!

Re:Great....

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow now i need to test my site in at least 4 browsers, this is getting fucking ridiculous.

only 4?
ff, opera, chrome, safari, ie7 & now ie8

ms should just pull out of the browser market, they can't adhere to standards they should not be allowed to participate, simple

Re:Great....

[lordtoran]

Nope. If written using real cross-platform libraries and platform neutral code, you would have to test and debug it under various flavors of Windows, while it would run flawlessly and without stupid "special case" adaptions under all other platforms.

Re:Great....

[Blakey Rat]

Considering text fields don't even behave the same way in Linux and OS X, I find that VERY hard to believe. Most toolkits get it wrong. Firefox is *close* to correct on Mac, but still wrong.

I say forget IE

[Vu1turEMaN]

My websites will block IE8, and a message will pop up telling people to go download Firefox, Opera, or Chrome.

I tried IE8, and it is a pitiful joke. I'm not going to work around it, and Microsoft should realize I'm not gonna jump through hoops just to please their idiotic decisions.

*fully extends third finger in direction of Microsoft*

Re:I say forget IE

[Samschnooks]

I would suggest, if I may, that instead you show the web page without IE specific code showing all its ugliness and with a message that states that IE isn't standards compliant, you don't have the resources to code around IE's hacks, and that the user would be best served by Firefox, Opera, or Chrome.

This accomplishes two things: one, it shows that their browser isn't that good, and two, it shows other browsers are available and lastly, it doesn't just throw those folks out - otherwise, they'll just move on; unless you're the coder for the Wall Street Journal or some other website where the viewers are captive.

Re:I say forget IE

[Kozz]

My websites will block IE8, and a message will pop up telling people to go download Firefox, Opera, or Chrome.

For those whose whom their website is not tied to their livelihood, I suppose one can afford to be smug.

Re:I say forget IE

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not gonna jump through hoops just to please their idiotic decisions.

So you'd rather force your viewers to jump through hoops in order to access your site? Guess what, most will probably shrug and go someplace else on the Web. Hope you're not running business websites.

Re:I say forget IE

[Anonymous Coward]

My websites will block IE8, and a message will pop up telling people to go download Firefox, Opera, or Chrome.

I can assure you I won't be using your websites then ... along with millions of other people.

Thanks for playing. Good bye.

Re:I say forget IE

[Vu1turEMaN]

One could also consider that the time is ripe to throw IE off of its throne, and trying to conform to such shitty standards might actually make your website worse.

If MS really cared about the quality of their products, they wouldn't be releasing something that is this poor. In reality, they want to have their own set of standards for people to follow. We followed them for IE6 and IE7, and IE8 is where I draw the line.

Re:I say forget IE

[alukin]

Pretty good decision but how much web sites will follow you? How much sites can kindly suggest to use standard-compliant browsers?

Browser market share itself is not a problem. Problem is army of web-designers with microsoft addiction %)

Re:I say forget IE

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually wouldn't block it.
I remember i thought the same as you, block IE and just give them a message, but i came up with a better idea.

Just have a bare-bones site, no JavaScript.
But i will have one conditional comment at the top of the page that will insert a header before page content
A Double-bordered red box that states they are using IE and they might not see all the features, then scare them in to updating their web browser (viruses lol), links to X, Y, Z browsers.
Fear is a great tool :)

Re:I say forget IE

[fermion]

Yet for years web sites blocked IE for no apparent reason, other than this was an option the MS pushed on web developers. Even if this were only 5% of the market, I hardly think that any business wakes up in the morning and says I am going alienate 5% of my customers. I don't know, maybe they do and that is why we are in the situation we are in. We are so,a s you say smug, that firms see themselves as a entity customers must pay tribute to, rather than the other way around.

Re:I say forget IE

[pauljlucas]

I hardly think that any business wakes up in the morning and says I am going alienate 5% of my customers.

Maybe not wuite like that, but, historically, at least banks and other financial institutions required IE due to perceived security reasons. (Banks tend to be extra careful with people's money, at least on the web.) Presumably, they simply didn't want to spend the time/money to test in other browsers. And they already have your money and I highly doubt customers are going to close their accounts and move elsewhere due to the bank's site not working in a non-IE browser.

Re:I say forget IE

[kestasjk]

I'm not going to work around it

You will :-)

Re:I say forget IE

[nyctopterus]

Mac users might. I certainly would.

Re:I say forget IE

[RightSaidFred99]

Ahahaha. I find angry, impotent nerds to be absolutely hilarious.

Thank you. You've made me laugh. Please tell people who use Firefox about your righteous jihad against IE when they visit your page, I want to laugh then too.

Re:I say forget IE

[Blakey Rat]

So you dislike IE's lack of standards support breaking the web. And in response, you ... break the web.

Brilliant!

Re:I say forget IE

[Vu1turEMaN]

jihad...nice touch :)

Re:I say forget IE

[Vu1turEMaN]

No, I merely refuse to follow their skewed standards any longer, therefore I will use Normal standards. And when others follow suit, then maybe MS will catch on.

Re:I say forget IE

[bjourne]

Oh come on. Either most web developers are just unusually incompetent or just lazy bums. It isn't that hard to abstract out platform differences and to build your site using those abstractions. Developers have been doing exactly that for decades. They have been working around OS incompatibilities, C standard library incompatibilities, JVM incompatibilities, shell incompatibilities, hardware incompatibilities and a whole host of other stupid and annoying things that wouldn't exist in an ideal world. All that code you have to write and fix even though YOUR code is correct because someone else screwed up.

But somehow, for web developers it is to hard to develop for multiple browsers.

Re:I say forget IE

[Kozz]

You know, I can't say I disagree with anything you've said in the above post, save for "drawing the line".

I do despise IE for a multitude of reasons. It is the enemy. See http://tomaskral.cz.nyud.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/antiexplorer.jpg which I have posted in my cube.

And yet there will be a large number of people who will use IE8. And we'll have to make at least a token effort to get our pages to render properly there, too. Because our jobs depend on it. As it's said, there's "in theory" and there's "in practice", right?

Re:I say forget IE

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

You're not a web developer, obviously. Supporting multiple browsers is nothing like having several makefile targets. To make a bad analogy, it's more like trying to compile a C program so a single binary works in Win16, Win32, MacOS, *nix, and BeOS.

Re:I say forget IE

[BronsCon]

The difference is that an application developer can offer a Windows, Mac, and Linux version of their software, tailored to each environment. A web developer can only hack away at a feature for so long before having to decide to leave it broken for some users or remove it altogether, since users won't accept multiple versions for each different browser, the way they do for each OS.

Re:I say forget IE

[mgblst]

It is not fucking smug is it? I understand, and I am in the same position, you need to code to the lowest common denominator. But it is not smug, it is being correct, and being pissed of at the people (in Microsoft) who have made a lot more work for you.

Re:I say forget IE

[Vu1turEMaN]

And if the US jumped on the bandwagon for asking for Windows 7 to have a "pick your browser to install" option, would you still feel the same way?

As I see it, if they had that in the US, there would be little need to do that stuff.

Re:I say forget IE

[Anonymous Coward]

The troll sounds like MSNBC.. OMG!

haha

and I for one 7am going to draw the line too! oh yeah I can hear the Anons gathering up.

Re:I say forget IE

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd follow him, we don't have to shove in the ass that piece of shit that is IE anymore and there is alternatives not like in the Windows API world.

Perhaps I like the idea of warning the visitor that is not using a standards compliant browser and put a link to other page with a brief summary about WTF is a "browser" and "compliant"

Re:I say forget IE

[Strake]

Microsoft uses a different finger, you know - they won't understand your insult.

Why web developers should be dragged out and shot

[girlintraining]

People, the web is fine for multimedia and information presentation, but why is there this constant push to integrate everything into the web? There's all this crap being tacted onto what constitutes a "web browser" that it's becoming less and less a browser and more and more a platform every day. This is not the direction we want to go right now. A lightweight browser that can present information in a variety of devices is where the web needs to stay: Accessibility is more important than features. HTML, XML, CSS, and maybe some javascript is all the farther anyone needs to go. But then Flash came along and suddenly you've got crap that can't be indexed and is inaccessible to people who are blind or deaf, and increasingly devices like mobile phones which have enough power to do the basics aren't enough because the standards are getting jacked up to the point that we have to cram a laptop's worth of computing resources into a form factor that can fit in your hand, and a battery life of less than a day.

This so-called progress is a step in the wrong direction. We need to work on a set of standards that can be implimented with minimal computational resources, is flexible enough to offer a range of presentation options sufficient for most information (images, text, some video and audio) -- and leave it at that. By extending the web into areas reserved for applications and then trying to do everything at once (cross-platform, intensive computations, entire application suites stuffed into web browsers) we are opening a can of worms that promises to segment the web into a million incompatible methods.

We need to work on making this information as available and accessible as possible, not coming up with fancy new ways to make it inaccessible to larger and larger groups of people in the name of progress.

xhtml = xml + html

[Anonymous Coward]

try xhtml

Microsoft's interfaces are written on quick sand.
use their standards at your peril.

Microsoft has never met a standard that they won't try to break.
That is what happens when lawyers and accountants are the designers of software.

Re:xhtml = xml + html

[supernova_hq]

Microsoft has never met a standard

There, fixed that for you.

Don't get "Compatibility View"

[krou]

Am I missing something here? Why the hell even introduce the idea of "Compatibility View"? That's just pure sloppiness.

Since when was it the browser user's responsibility (or even the browser's) to decide what mode a page should be viewed in? Isn't it the developer's job to tell the browser how to behave, and the browser does so accordingly, in a consistent fashion?

Re:Don't get "Compatibility View"

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's excuse was "Because if we make a standards compliant only browser now, it will break the whole web"... you know, for certain Microsoft-centric values of "the whole web".

So then they came up with this horrible compatibility mode hack, and told us all "Yeah, you'll have to put a non-standards-compliant tag in your page to force our browser in to standards compliance. It will default to IE7 mode" which of course put the entire web design community up in arms.

So they default to IE8 standards mode, then throw in some blacklist of major pages that forces the browser to IE7 mode on those major pages, on the theory that their users won't see broken pages at sites that may not update fast enough for IE8 release. Except that IE7 mode doesn't actually render like IE7, which means companies will STILL have to retool their pages for IE8 to work, completely defeating the purpose of IE7 mode that they original set out with. Which means they introduced not just ONE new non-standards-compliant browser this time around, but TWO. Yay!

You're right, it's completely incomprehensible and stupid, and it's going to be an albatross around everyone's neck for the next few years.

Re:Don't get "Compatibility View"

[kestasjk]

Even Firefox has different rendering modes depending on what sort of site it's looking at. Most web-dev plugins for it will tell you whether it's rendering in Standards mode or Quirks mode.

It's more about pragmatism than sloppiness; they need to support new sites which need a correct implementation of standards, and they need to support the old sites used in corporate internets which are kludgy messes, that no-one would dare try and update.

Re:Don't get "Compatibility View"

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it the developer's job to tell the browser how to behave, and the browser does so accordingly, in a consistent fashion?

Actually, HTML and the web in general started with the premise that the consumer (and his/her browser of choice) could decide how a particular element should be handled / rendered. HTML was originally about the structure of information, not visual format. Only when the web became much more commercial did designers begin to devise ways to achieve and enforce pixel-perfect designs.

IE == dead

[sunshinekiller]

Last year the IE market was around 80%, its not down to around 60%. Windows 7 will release, and that market share will become 40%. Sure you still have those grandmas and the average unlearned person using their old xp computer with IE and tons of malware but companies are switching to linux and that will make IE lose, plus I hear that they are making IE an option on windows 7?, and their standards compliance is a joke. I stopped making websites that work with IE.

Re:IE == dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad you stoped working with this POS. Now if you only could start making shorter sentences that made grammatical sense...

Re:IE == dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Get the dick out of your ass. That ain't happenin'.

Re:IE == dead

[Anonymous Coward]

you are fucking retarded

Re:IE == dead

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great. Please get more FOSS morons such as yourself to go along with this.

I will work on IE compatibility. This means more work is available for me in this failing economy ! Thanks !! Thanks a lot.

And companies switching to linux? hahahahahahahaahahahahhaah

The same people who measured the IE market share also measured the Linux share at 0.9% OMG OMG OMG 0.9% after 15 years of trying to copy windows. Are you hippies on par with Win 95 yet? Do you need some pity cash from microsoft to help you?

Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh

[Anonymous Coward]

You are making a great argument, but let me tell you also, KDE as example, show that even without standards one is able to create bloatware performing slower on older machines, and alike slow on newest machines.

The same applies to Firefox, it's not the standards, it's bad programming:

1) programmers start using 4GB RAM and 3GHz CPU and code as if there was no 400MHz 128MB machine - i386 or ARM (like iPhone) ....

2) next release, the developers have 8GB RAM and 5GHz CPU (multicore), and the program is alike responsive, more bloated, but they don't notice the program actually is SLOWER because they use faster machines

3) and it doesn't matter if it's open source or not, bad programmers are everywhere

So, not standards, but programmers are the culprits.

A few examples:

BIND vs NSD: save 100MB RAM usage, 20 domains
Apache2 vs Lighttpd: save 150-350MB RAM for 10 domains serving web-site with 1000GB traffic/month (cgi/perl/php mixed)
Firefox2/3 vs Opera: save 50-200MB RAM with 3 windows with total 60 tabs/sites open

so, this shows there are solutions which are truly faster, and using less memory, but that often means to start from scratch and go different paths than the established ways.

Flash: doing what HTML/JS/CSS does not provide and missed to include for a long time (animated SVG coming slowly) - I would recommend abandon Flash, but given the YouTube is quasi standard to deliver (entertaining/educational) videos these days, how can you abandon it now?

Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

People, the web is fine for multimedia and information presentation, but why is there this constant push to integrate everything into the web?

That's easy. The desktop OS market is monopolized and innovation has slowed to a crawl. The market is attempting to route around the damage. It's not working well, but that's what is happening.

What's the point...

[nicodoggie]

...of having a fuckin' IE7 compatibility mode if it isn't going to be compatible with IE7?

Shit, and after I RTFA, it seems that keeping compatibility with IE7 is potentially just as time-consuming as recoding for IE8. Web Designers coding with browser market share in mind, might not really code as close to spec as IE8 can get, instead they'd just make sure it works for both IE7 and 8 under "compatibility" mode!

Microsoft doesn't really give a shit about web standards, IMHO, they're just making sure that they're browser doesn't show ill-rendered XHTML 1.0 Strict, HTML 4.01 and CSS 2. Especially since people who build their sites to spec display badges of honor, the IE dev team would just look bad if they can't properly render those pages.

Considering any site worth a damn have people who code for all major browsers anyways, so my entire post might be just rantish and view as Anti-Microsoft. (not saying it isn't)

Bring back JAVA

[bussdriver]

JAVA: ahead of its time! NOW the things we want to do are what it could have been doing way before Flash could have filled the demand.

Applets were dismissed back when our needs were simple and our computers were slow.

1) Javascript is SLOWER than JAVA! (browser and flash use it)

2) Flash started out as a vector graphics format; now its a Director/HyperCard mess that is moving towards becoming an Applet platform itself. Flash 10 is NOT anywhere near the same as Flash 1. Its not just an animation format.

3) We have battles over JavaScript 2 at ECMA trying to turn JavaScript into a clone of Java and now the browsers are runtime compiling the script-- next will we start seeing pre-compiled javascript bytecode? (Maybe in Flash?)

4) "safe" platform independent access to web cams and audio hardware-- we have people running ARToolkit in FLASH from a webcam in real time! Its not a vector format anymore... its another kind of applet.

5) Java Applets need better integration; they've not progressed since people dismissed them in the 90s. Now its open; we should be trying to integrate it; catch up to where it should have been now if it were not so ahead of its time.

6) Java was designed to take on massive projects; flash and javascript are not. Java Applets should get DOM access so complex web apps can be made without making javascript a rerun of java-- this means tight integration and FASTER startup times. It could be done.

7) New formats can be done using Java without installing client-side plug-ins. Sure, it is not quite as fast and has overhead; these issues can be addressed-- Flash games are not so simple to startup-- its pre-loaded with the browser... and it has built-in loading screens... Java sure beats being unable to access something in Flash 10 when your setup is too old to install Flash 10. JVM is open now; flash is still risky (and crashes my browser more than anything else.)

Re:Bring back JAVA

[Hurricane78]

6) Java was designed to take on massive projects; flash and javascript are not. Java Applets should get DOM access so complex web apps can be made without making javascript a rerun of java-- this means tight integration and FASTER startup times. It could be done.

Well. Java Applets and Javascript have an interface. You can call functions of the one in the other.
So you can code-up some wrappers for the DOM functions in less than half an hour, if they are not already accessible in Java.

Besides: I agree, with all your arguments. Java really is nice for these things.

I just thing that we need two major changes in the nsplugin API.
First, Applets should be able to render as any document element, and flow with the layout like them. Then you could seamlessly integrate plug-ins into sites. This is already partially possible, by giving an "object" tag a id or class, and setting styles like "position" and "display". But there still is the problem with transparent backgrounds and laying html over the plugin rendering area (not fully working or very slow). Same problem as with form elements. This needs to be fixed.

Then, plug-ins should be pre-loaded in a way. The best moment for this would be after the browser is done starting and loading the session tabs, when it starts to idle. As long as the user does not use the browser too much, and as long as the session tabs do not already need the plug-in.

This two changes would make plug-ins first-class members of a site. Because there is no reason that web-sites should only consist of html and images. Every format should have the same level of integration.

Re:Bring back JAVA

[Toonol]

1) Actionscript is slower, although with 3.0 it's gotten much better. However, the flash interface and UI may be more responsive then Java. As far as user perception goes, Java often feels slower, because of its really bad UI.

2) Yeah.

3) I'd like that; Actionscript 3.0, is a really nice little language, completely apart from the Flash environment. Easy to program in.

4) Yep.

5) Yes, and tied with 6:

6) Yes. Java is just too big. Very overengineered for most sorts of web applications. Good for big apps, but for a simple calculator, animation, game, or whatnot, it just has too big of a footprint. I'd like to see a Java-Light, I suppose; core java with 90% of the libraries and cruft stripped out. But then it probably wouldn't be any better than Flash.

7) I have a hunch the flash that crashes your browser is probably really poorly made ads; if they weren't in flash, they would be in Javascript, Java, or some other language, but still written with no regard to security or stability.

Re:Bring back JAVA

[Blakey Rat]

There's a point you're missing here: Nobody has Java installed anymore.

Java might have been great at this purpose back in 2001, but they missed their boat. Now it's not on computers by default, nobody installs it, and nobody has to because no sites require it. Also the Sun Java client is godawful.

Re:Bring back JAVA

[Anonymous Coward]

JAVA: ahead of its time!

"Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS" --Alan Kay

Javascript is SLOWER than JAVA! (browser and flash use it)

Though it's far faster to start in my browser. So that's misleading: it makes a fine server, but for the things I care about (and for which you're proposing it), it's significantly slower.

Java was designed to take on massive projects;

Early 1990's set-top boxes were "massive"? Maybe if you go by weight.

Java Applets should get DOM access so complex web apps can be made without making javascript a rerun of java-- this means tight integration and FASTER startup times. It could be done.

Alternatively, one could also make Javascript faster and more capable. You still haven't given us anything that Java can do that Javascript couldn't be made to do with a bit of work.

Java sure beats being unable to access something in Flash 10 when your setup is too old to install Flash 10.

You decry lack of perfect backwards compatibility in Flash, but simultaneously claim to prefer that Java add a whole new set of features (e.g., applet DOM access) over the performance improvements being put in most Javascript implementations already. Did you start with the conclusion first?

Re:Bring back JAVA

[Anonymous Coward]

> Java Applets should get DOM access... it could be done

And, in fact, has been:

http://blogs.sun.com/octav/entry/javafx_and_ajax

"This lets [JavaFX] call JavaScript functions defined on the web page, modify the Document Object Model (DOM) of the web page on the fly, and generally write JavaFX Script apps that integrate well within the web page."

Re:Bring back JAVA

[bussdriver]

Not to burst bubbles...but
No, last I looked Mozilla was the only one with some undocumented project to give some DOM access to Java. Perhaps there is a javascript bridge that could be done because I know they added onto nsplugin for javascript plugin interaction.

Transparency on embedded content has always been a problem even for the well integrated Flash. I agree they should fix this; but its rendering engine and speed issues that have prevented this from the beginning.

The Flash plug-in is always loaded in ram. Even if they unload it, so many web pages contain flash content its likely that the plug-in is loaded all the time. The JVM could be running...

Also, the JVM setup already mimics google's chrome in that they don't run in browser memory space-- downsides... but at least it can't crash the browser all the time like Flash does.

nsplugin API is less than half the market; active-X takes the majority... We know MS won't go for this; especially if it undermines their flash contender... They would love the web to migrate away from HTML.

VIDEO / AUDIO will get tighter in HTML 5.

Re:Bring back JAVA

[bussdriver]

1) Swing sucks. there are alternatives. See Eclipse.

6) Java is not too big. Its not currently engineered at all for this environment. Flash is almost a whole platform now. The MS attack on Flash is going to take it more towards being a new kind of applet with MOTIVES to undermine DHTML; if not a side result.

Javascript IS ALREADY "Java light" (its how you want to think about the problem; a fast interpreted java inspired language would come out a lot like Javascript.)

7) Java has a beefy security model and runs outside the browser. Flash (any plug-in) lives in browser memory space and can do anything the browser can. One of Google's Chrome browser biggest features was plug-in separation for stability and security. Java does it now.

ACID 2 Test

[caffeinejolt]

Currently less than 25% of browser usage can pass the ACID 2 test. It will be interesting to see how the release of IE8 affects this. Luckily for JS developers, projects like JQuery make cross-browser scripting WAY easier and less error prone. Hopefully broad support for an increasing subset of web standards will make cross-browser layout quirks less annoying for web developers. Overall I think the ACID tests are a good thing to measure this.

Re:ACID 2 Test

[socsoc]

The only thing that ACID does is encourage browsers to pass the ACID test. It does barely anything to encourage them to uniformly and accurately implement proper standards.

Reject IE8

[Onymous Coward]

Please don't encourage yet another browser we'll all have to support.

If your job depends on addressing the market, then write to standards (test in Firefox and Safari and Opera) and IE7/IE6. That's where the market's at right now.

If your boss says you should anticipate IE8, point them to this graph and this graph. Tell them your anticipation is that IE8 will add work without adding substantial market benefit. You can put off IE8 support until it proves it can achieve the same penetration as IE7.

Re:Reject IE8

[pbhj]

You can put off IE8 support until it proves it can achieve the same penetration as IE7.

You know how IE7 achieved speedy penetration don't you? MS flick the switch that says "push the new IE to windows update". Kaboom, instant market uptake. I'm pretty sure eventually they'll do that again, there's less reason not to now as they've the IE7 compat' mode.

Re:Reject IE8

[Onymous Coward]

Yeah... Okay, that's a problem.

Thankfully IE usage is just in freefall overall.

Who uses IE anymore?

Re:Reject IE8

[pbhj]

Apparently a lot of people who should know better .. http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/01/02/internet-explorer-loses-ground-firefox-safari/ !

Re:Reject IE8

[Onymous Coward]

Ah, well that's a heartening corroboration, the fact that security-minded persons are ahead of the curve in the switch away from IE.

I'm surprised the numbers aren't more dramatic.

Re:Reject IE8

[Onymous Coward]

So maybe it's not a problem?

Microsoft Internet Explorer Users Slow To Adopt New Release

http://www.crn.com/software/215901500

Bc/ of craptastic intranets

[Nicolas MONNET]

Early Microsoft web frameworks, circa 1998, generated code so ugly it should qualify as crime against humanity. The stench has contaminated many enterprises, which are stuck with those unmaintainable festering sores.
Looking at the javscript those beasts produced is fascinating; they could put ";" in places you never expected.

To be fair give MS credit where it's due

[thetoadwarrior]

Actually Microsoft did include functionality to allow people to build a site that would have made it dead easy to cut out the proprietary crap, the hacks, etc. in the form of IE conditional tags.

Had developers and designers made good use of these then it should be relatively easy to convert the bulk of the crap.

They could have done more to promote these but then again you shouldn't call yourself a professional and include CSS hacks for IE6 in your main stylesheets.

Re:To be fair give MS credit where it's due

[Anonymous Coward]

can't put ie conditionals in css stylesheets, only in the html document.

Don't blame professionals for your lack of understanding. Also, nobody should be forced or encouraged to use the proprietary conditionals. All that would do is add fuel to the fire. Sure they are good when you gotta use them to make IE work properly, but using them to make IE work better is just plain ignorant and idiotic.

Re:To be fair give MS credit where it's due

[thetoadwarrior]

You don't need to put put it in the CSS. You include extra CSS with the conditional comment within the html.

No it's not ideal to have to use proprietary conditional comments. I never said it was. However if a company is going to include proprietary functionality then including something that allows you to separate it out is a good thing and by using them all you have to do to remove the bad code is a regex find & replace to remove the conditional statements.

Encourage Standards

[Onymous Coward]

Try to push things towards using a single standard so that move towards "write once, run everywhere".

Hinder further fragmentation of the code you have to write. The two major versions of IE already complicate things unnecessarily, so discourage adoption of IE8 every chance you get.

Internet Explorer is lame.

When you think about it, you realize it's true. Generally the cool kids aren't into IE.

Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck yourself and that stupid ass "route around the damage" quote that's been abused to fucking death.

I'm curious to see how much closer...

[CFD339]

...IE8 will be with Webkit/V8 based browsers and with Mozilla based browsers.

      Until we get much closer to parity with these things, many of us are still going to work very hard to do most code to the least common denominator -- avoiding if(IE){ } whenever possible.

Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh

[hkmwbz]

why is there this constant push to integrate everything into the web?

Because web is, in theory, accessible from anywhere, from any kind of device, any kind of connection. It's easy to develop web applications. It's faster and easier to develop web apps than native apps.

But then Flash came along and suddenly you've got crap that can't be indexed and is inaccessible to people who are blind or deaf

Which is why web standards need to replace Flash, and that's exactly what Mozilla, Opera, Apple and others are working on with HTML5 and such.

getElementById finds 'name' attribute values!

[slashbart]

I didn't realize that even IE7 was that pathetic; it doesn't even see the difference between a 'name' and an 'id' attribute.
Very happy that I'm not web-developing any more.

My favorite

[93 Escort Wagon]

This one caught my eye simply because it's caused issues for me so many times...

The method getElementById is now case-sensitive and no longer searches name attributes. (emphasis added)

For me, that right there expresses what's been fundamentally wrong about IE development for many years.

PRESCRIPTION FOR THE SHORTSIGHTED

[Onymous Coward]

WTH? Relax? Fuck that.

You obviously fail to understand the gravity of the situation. Does the web seem like a trivial thing to you? Are you one of those people who says "oh, it's just another thing on the Internet -- no need to take it seriously"?

You think that it's okay to pain "a very, very small percentage of the population" with compatibility problems? I guess you wouldn't give a damn about sewer system engineers or transportation system engineers or power grid engineers either, eh? That's pretty idiotic myopia.

"Yeah, you're suffering. Big deal, there aren't many of you. Just relax." Fuck that.

If you'd been following along you'd have noticed the 5 year languish of IE6. Microsoft dominated the market using its distribution and then just stopped. "Tada! The World-Wide Web! Let it rot." What, you never had to clean up a friend's IE6-spyware-infested machine? Only when their dominance was threatened did they rouse themselves to make any changes. And now you think "they're making a good try here at fixing the problems"? And you're ready to take what they serve you? You trust these guys? The same purveyors of stagnation?

The self-serving protocol pollution and dominance games of Microsoft are only half the problem. You are the other half. Ignorant users (and developers) who fail to see the importance of standards and who are either virtual amnesiacs about Microsoft's track record of standards subversion or are just acting like battered wives.

What happens with standards and the web is pretty damn important. Get some glasses, jackass.

Re:PRESCRIPTION FOR THE SHORTSIGHTED

[Anonymous Coward]

Anti-ms trolls are out in full force. Whee. I wonder if these tinfoil nutters get paid for spreading FUD? So tell me whats your prize? Lunch with stallman? Getting permission to clean stallmans toilet?

Writing portable apps is a pain. Similarly writing portable websites is a pain. Thats the fucking job of web developers. If they think its too "hard", its OK. Lots of other people would love to get those
contracts. Wait till the money dries off, they will be back supporting IE6 in no time. Damn linux whiners. Bunch of pussy geeks. Check.

Next, If you're friend got infected, then hes a retard. Much like you, that probably explains why youre friends..

Re:PRESCRIPTION FOR THE SHORTSIGHTED

[Blakey Rat]

Is this a joke, or are you serious?

Does the web seem like a trivial thing to you? Are you one of those people who says "oh, it's just another thing on the Internet -- no need to take it seriously"?

No. No.

You think that it's okay to pain "a very, very small percentage of the population" with compatibility problems?

Sure.

I guess you wouldn't give a damn about sewer system engineers or transportation system engineers or power grid engineers either, eh?

I'd wager that the web environment already has *orders of magnitude* more standardization than any of those jobs. But let's assume that's not true: you're asking:

"Do you also think that sewer system engineers should have to do more work because of a lack of standards in sewer systems?"

If that additional work is tied in to the success of their business, then hell yes I do. I think you were trying to paint me as a hypocrite there, but I'm not entirely sure.

"Yeah, you're suffering. Big deal, there aren't many of you. Just relax." Fuck that.

I'm not against web standards. You seem to think I'm opposed to them; I'm not, I just don't think they're that big a deal. I'd much rather see Microsoft (or Mozilla or Apple or whoever) add more features for *users* of the browser and fewer for web developers. Web developers are already getting their share, let's make browsers easier for mom and pop for a change.

For example, Word has had splittable scrollbars (allowing you to see two parts of a document at once) for close to 20 years now. There's a standard OS widget for it in Windows and OS X. Why has *no* browser implemented this? I'd find that 100 times more useful than Microsoft making "object.textContent" work.

What, you never had to clean up a friend's IE6-spyware-infested machine?

You're changing subjects. The insecurity of IE6 has nothing to do with its lack of standards support. There's extremely little in the standards relating to security, and IE6 had all those parts nailed anyway.

99% of spyware is installed by people who pressed "Ok" when asked whether to install the software. I agree it's a problem, but it's a human problem and has nothing to do with the quality of IE6 as a product.

(Note: the only time I got a virus from the web was when using IE7. And the virus installed itself using a *Java* exploit.)

Only when their dominance was threatened did they rouse themselves to make any changes.

Ok...?

And now you think "they're making a good try here at fixing the problems"?

Yes, I do.

And you're ready to take what they serve you? You trust these guys? The same purveyors of stagnation?

Yeah. But part of the reason is that I'm not a brainwashed zealot like you are.

BTW "Purveyors of Stagnation" would be an awesome band name.

You are the other half. Ignorant users (and developers) who fail to see the importance of standards and who are either virtual amnesiacs about Microsoft's track record of standards subversion or are just acting like battered wives.

Explain to me the importance of standards. Pretend I'm the average man-on-the-street, and tell me why Firefox's rendering of webpages is better than IE's. Seriously.

(It's hard, isn't it? Standards don't benefit anybody except web developers.)

What happens with standards and the web is pretty damn important.

Please. I'm a *web developer* and I don't think it's "pretty damn important." This is what I do for a living. The difference is that I started my career writing actual software, so I understand this concept that a lot of web developers have issues with, called "QA".

See, whether or not Microsoft or Mozilla or Apple or whoever follows the standards, you *still* have to QA in every browser. People on this thread are griping, gnashing their teeth, because Microsoft makes web developers (a tiny percentage of the population) do a couple more rounds of QA on their product. Get a grip.

Re:PRESCRIPTION FOR THE SHORTSIGHTED

[Your.Master]

Jesus fuck, aren't you so important.

This always reminds me of the DRM arguments.

The recording industry wants software makers to support DRM schemes whether or not users want them because it makes some industry people's lives easier. That's bad.

The web industry wants software makers to support Web Standards whether or not users want them because it makes the some industry people's lives easier. That's good.

Yeah, you can draw a line between the two. But so many of these arguments DON'T. Especially when you start talking about spyware on IE6 as if that had anything to do with standards support on IE8.

You even go so far as to blame the users. The people that you are supposedly hired to produce for. Way to respect your customers.

Web standards are important. But YOU are not that important. You are exactly as important as any one of the "ignorant users" that you so arrogantly look down upon. No more, and no less.

Re:PRESCRIPTION FOR THE SHORTSIGHTED

[BasharTeg]

CAPSLOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR THE SUPER SERIOUS!

Get over yourself. Web development is important, but the situation isn't as dire as you make it out to be. Somehow over the years that Internet Explorer has been dominating the market share and completely ignoring web standards, the world wide web grew by leaps and bounds, millions of businesses grew online, millions of people used the web to communicate and spread ideas, and a very large majority of it took place in a proprietary browser with proprietary extensions and poor web standards compliance.

Not only that, but one of those proprietary extensions turned out to be the foundation of today's web standards. Microsoft invented a little COM object we used to call XMLHTTP. That in turn was copied by Mozilla and became what we now know as XMLHttpRequest, the foundation of AJAX and the basis of all Web 2.0 development.

You anti-Microsoft zealots take advantage of Microsoft a innovation to implement your Web 2.0 applications, the whole while talking about how Microsoft has been such a huge setback to the web. It's pure hypocrisy.

There's a place for proprietary technology and innovation, and there's a place for open source and standards based development and innovation.

Re:PRESCRIPTION FOR THE SHORTSIGHTED

[BronsCon]

I'll take a karma hit for this but...

I love you.

Re:PRESCRIPTION FOR THE SHORTSIGHTED

[Onymous Coward]

Standards don't benefit anybody except web developers.

This is the foundation of your failure to understand.

If you can't see how fragmentation impacts more than the people who build the websites, you are shortsighted. If you don't see how Microsoft's incompatibility is a matter of their choice, you are blind.

The fact that you started your career writing "actual software" may be what's got you confused. The web is basically a single platform. It's not a proliferation of distinct operating systems that require ports. Microsoft intentionally creates and allows/maintains incompatibilities for the sake of vendor lock-in. (Netscape did this, too. I don't just hate on MS.) That's self-serving, needless infliction of wide-scale inefficiency. You don't get that this adds up? The people who pay for websites pay more and get less. The people who use websites and web apps end up paying through a variety of inconveniences and at times complete breakage to the point of being unusable. The people who were locked into using IE suffered more downtime and cost us more in support. The overall loss in human productivity has not been limited to web developers, hello. Glasses.

Take a look here:

• IE1 - 1995-08 - ...
• IE2 - 1995-11 - 03 mos.
• IE3 - 1996-08 - 09 mos.
• IE4 - 1997-09 - 13 mos.
• IE5 - 1999-03 - 18 mos.
• IE6 - 2001-08 - 29 mos.
• IE7 - 2006-10 - 62 mos. == The Great Languish
• IE8 - 2009-05 - 31 mos.

Try correlating that period, 2001-08 through 2006-10, with what's going on this graph. Microsoft only cared about bettering their browser as much as it helped them maintain control. If you weren't fed up with IE6's impact on you and everyone else for the first half decade of this millenium, you weren't paying attention. No, that behavior was not "...Ok?" It was bullshit and I'm not lying down to take more of it.

Anyway, I don't think there's any convincing you and other battered wives like you that Microsoft's embrance-and-extend behavior is something requiring opposition. You seem to have the dog pack mentality that believes domination is equal to righteousness. And you call the needless extra work QA, but you fail to understand what you're actually doing is grovelling compliantly with your multi-browser ports and hacks. You enable Microsoft. I'd love it if you figured out what was going on then stood up and pushed back some. I suppose being antagonistic with you only serves me to feel better for a moment as I vent my anger rather than actually gives you space to think the matter through. I call you a jackass because of your belligerent and harmful ignorance, but that only sets you up to resist these ideas rather than to be ready to see their merits. My mistake. You're still a fool, but it's a disservice to us all that I failed to take a tack with you that stood some chance of helping you be enlightened rather than entrench you in your idiocy. I guess I'm just talking to myself at this point. No hard feelings!

I'm just glad that Microsoft's dominance is quickly coming to an end in the browser market, as you can tell by the right side of that graph. I'll continue to work to hasten it, and to hasten broader compatibility. Evidently by the rise of Firefox et al. there are enough people working towards this end even if there's some number out there who think like you. I hope your attitude of enabling another Great Languish is ineffectual. No hard feelings, but please don't try to convince anyone that IE is a good choice, thanks.

Humanity's got enough problems. Needless inefficiency is needless. I imagine your more fundamental misunderstanding is regarding the concept of independence. I hope the current financial crisis is driving home for

Re:PRESCRIPTION FOR THE SHORTSIGHTED

[Rockoon]

If you are really a "web developer" then I got news for you buddy..

If there was indeed broad standards support then you would probably be out of a job.

Here you are in an industry that is continualy changing in such a way that it makes you personally worth less and less, and you are screaming "hurry up!"

Yeah... i'll take the karma hit here.. your religion has convinced you that suicide is a good thing. All that specialty knowledge you have had to learn to support the quirks of the various browsers has VALUE that you are currently benefiting from. It is the quirks of the browsers that makes you special. Take away those quirks and you are no longer special.

Re:PRESCRIPTION FOR THE SHORTSIGHTED

[Onymous Coward]

There's plenty of work aside from incompatibility mop up. And I prefer not to be making a living by grace of a societal problem.

That's a pretty shitty way to make a living.

Learn this concept before you bring up your unethical leeching lifestyle argument with anyone else: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy

Re:PRESCRIPTION FOR THE SHORTSIGHTED

[Blakey Rat]

This is the foundation of your failure to understand.

Then explain it to me.

Microsoft intentionally creates and allows/maintains incompatibilities for the sake of vendor lock-in. (Netscape did this, too. I don't just hate on MS.) That's self-serving, needless infliction of wide-scale inefficiency.

And yet, IE is still 95% compatible with other web browsers. Far more compatible than, say, OS X desktop software is to Linux desktop software. Or the Seattle sewer system is to the Baltimore sewer system. (Remember that example? Oh yah I brought it back!)

You don't get that this adds up? The people who pay for websites pay more and get less.

But they're already getting more for orders of magnitude less! You can put up a website for $15 a month and reach more people than a $15,000 TV ad easily. What you seem to be missing is a sense of proportion.

The people who use websites and web apps end up paying through a variety of inconveniences and at times complete breakage to the point of being unusable.

Gee, maybe the web developers who made those sites should have QAed their website, then? What the holy fuck does IE's standards have to do with this?

If you have a Linux app that constantly crashes and breaks "to the point of being unusuable", do you blame the GNOME/KDE API? No, you blame the web developer who didn't do his fucking job. (Then you probably go home and wonder why web developers are looked down on by other software developers.)

The people who were locked into using IE suffered more downtime and cost us more in support.

And the fact that your product didn't work in the browser they use is *their* fault, no doubt? It couldn't possibly be your fault, as a web developer. Web developers are holy angelic creatures capable only of perfection!

The overall loss in human productivity has not been limited to web developers, hello.

If your web developers had done their job, you wouldn't have had the additional downtime and broken websites in the first place. You're not convincing me, buddy.

Try correlating that period, 2001-08 through 2006-10, with what's going on this graph. Microsoft only cared about bettering their browser as much as it helped them maintain control.

It's their product, they can do whatever the hell they want with it. If I don't like it, I'll use another browser. (And I do, except when I'm working on web development.)

If you weren't fed up with IE6's impact on you and everyone else for the first half decade of this millenium, you weren't paying attention.

Or maybe I have a sense of proportion and realize it's an extremely trivial problem in the history of humanity.

Anyway, I don't think there's any convincing you and other battered wives like you that Microsoft's embrance-and-extend behavior is something requiring opposition.

Oh, well you better type 650 words about it then.

Of course, in all those words, you still haven't explained to me how web standards affect anybody except web developers. The closest you've come is to give an example of a product you made that was really shitty because you failed to QA it in the browsers your customers use; that's not even remotely close to the same thing.

So, pretend I'm a naive user. Pretend I'm Aunt Tillie, or Joe Six-Pack, or whatever persona you like to use, and explain to me why I should give a crap that IE doesn't implement "object.textContent". I dare you.

The farging cork sorckers

[ronmon]

If you haven't seen the move 'Johnny Dangerously' you probably won't get it. Sorry, but these bastards screwed up all the web standards. Just fix the damned thing and move along, please.

Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that 99 bottles geeky dweeb really is an insufferable dipshit, I have to agree.

Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh

[RightSaidFred99]

Because web is, in theory, accessible from anywhere, from any kind of device, any kind of connection. It's easy to develop web applications. It's faster and easier to develop web apps than native apps.

Anywhere availability is nice in some domains, not so important in others. The corporate world is an area where people tend to use web apps overmuch.

As for it being faster and easier to develop web apps than native apps. Ahahaha. Seriously? Tell me you're joking? Not even in the same league - a good desktop GUI development toolkit will _always_ be much more effective.

Which is why web standards need to replace Flash, and that's exactly what Mozilla, Opera, Apple and others are working on with HTML5 and such.

I guess it's nice when some commercial entities anoint themselves standards makers. How nice for them. The problem is people are sick and tired of trying to make the web work. That's why things like Flash and Silverlight are popular with developers. People want to develop web apps the way they develop desktop apps.

Heh

[TheMightyFuzzball]

Compatibility with IE7's bugs, not W3C standards...

I hate IE8

[ducomputergeek]

We have an online shopping cart system that renders correct in most browsers even going back to MSIE 5. We have a lot of users still browsing the site with IE 6 because of where they work and their lack of ability to install anything else. Still 70%+ of the traffic is MSIE. It renders fine on all platforms with Opera, FireFox, Safari, and Chrome. Even works on most cell phones with a javascript enabled browser including LG phones, Opera Mini, Blackberrys with 4.7 or greater installed, Blackberry storm, android, and of course the iPhone.

But MSIE 8.....the div with the "Add to cart" button doesn't even render. In MSIE 7 compatibility mode, it renders, but it splits the div into two elements on separate sides of the page for no reason that I can find. I am considering redirecting MSIE 8 users to page that says:

"Due to incompatibilities Microsoft creating in MSIE 8, we are unable to support your browser type. Our website will work with previous versions of MSIE or any standards compliant browser such as firefox, opera, safari, or chrome. We recommend you switch to one of these browsers for improved browsing of the internet."

Re:I hate IE8

[Anonymous Coward]

"Due to incompatibilities Microsoft creating in MSIE 8, we are unable to support your browser type. Our website will work with previous versions of MSIE or any standards compliant browser such as firefox, opera, safari, or chrome. We recommend you switch to one of these browsers for improved browsing of the internet."

Of note, bad grammar in error messages tends to make your site look far from professional (or that English isn't your native language). You might want to check the grammar there if that is the message you plan on using.

I'll be helpful and say it's in the first sentence, check your verb tense.

Re:I hate IE8

[Anonymous Coward]

"Due to incompatibilities Microsoft creating in MSIE 8, we are unable to support your browser type. Our website will work with previous versions of MSIE or any standards compliant browser such as firefox, opera, safari, or chrome. We recommend you switch to one of these browsers for improved browsing of the internet."

Please include a link to one of your competitors at the end of this message. It'll save me time googling them.

Re:I hate IE8

[Anonymous Coward]

Please include a link to one of your competitors at the end of this message. It'll save me time googling them.

Do your own homework, you lazy twit.

Re:I hate IE8

[Anonymous Coward]

You should look into the different rendering modes that can be specified via HTTP Headers.

This can be setup in IIS *and* Apache.

The HTTP Header is: 'X-UA-Compatible', and if you set the value to 'IE=5', it will force the rendering mode of the browser to display similar to IE5.

This is one example; if you look on the IE8 site on MSDN, there's much more info about rendering modes, and how to setup headers. You can also add a meta tag to a specific page to do the same thing at the page-level.

completely wrong

[circletimessquare]

"it's becoming less and less a browser and more and more a platform every day. This is not the direction we want to go right now"

no, this IS the direction we want to go. google isolates all chrome tabs as individual processes, (so crashes are isolated)

they are focusing in lightning fast javascript, so that the browser IS the OS

just look at netbook sales: cheap because the issue is just getting on the web. everything everyone wants to do is on the web, this IS the future. the future is dinky os, without even a trashcan or document in site. and one big wonking rbowser, in which you do EVERYTHING you want and need to do, even something like photoshop

no really, this is the future and you are completely wrong

Not truly Adobe

[pingveno]

I hate to be pedantic but Macromedia, not Adobe, is the originator of Flash. There have been changes since December '06 but I doubt there has been a rewrite.

Re:Not truly Adobe

[martinX]

Well, going back a little further, FutureWave Softwave made FutureSplash Animator, which was bought by Macromedia and became Flash 1.0.

Re:Why ...

[pbhj]

Things like integrated spell-check are overrated?

Seriously though, you rail against pervasive accessible multimedia. I think yours is probably a contrary view to that of the populous who wish their telecoms, music, video and such to be seamlessly presented across various devices. The commonality for that seamless presentation is the internet and, for the persistent media, the web.

What you are proposing appears to be the equivalent of suggesting everyone should only read for entertainment/information gathering rather than watching video or listening to music.

The web very soon after its genesis stopped being solely a system of textual information presentation and moved to be a system for multimedia presentation and, shock-horror, entertainment.

Millions and millions of people are enjoying playing flash games online in their browser right now - but you think we should cut this off until what, until we can present all human knowledge on a teletype?

Accessibility is King, granted (I'm a huge advocate of accessibility and standards compliance) but without features to access what's the point?

NB: Flash /per se/ isn't that bad, it's just that on the whole it is written without accessibility in mind - this too is not as bad as it seems as multimedia games [the primary use it seems] simply aren't [generally] accessible by the blind and deaf.

No need for an article

[Sigma 7]

As the release of Internet Explorer 8 approaches, Microsoft's IE Team has published a list of differences between IE7 and IE8, and how to fix code so that it will work on both.

Compatibility issues can be solved very easily: Remove the detection code that detects IE8 as an obsolete browser and prevents you from visiting the website that requires you to upgrade to a later version.

Hell, it's already happened with Opera 10, which gets detected as Opera 1.0.

Re:No need for an article

[Rockoon]

Well Opera is "officialy" only at 9.64, so they got 36 more versions to actualy tackle this problem before it adversely effects its users.

Quite honestly, I love the browser. I have always been an Opera user from way back when I ran Win3.1. Opera was the smallest fastest graphical browser at the time and is still one of the best by those metrics. It has also always been ahead of its time in the feature war.

And even though its "browser share" is pretty pathetic, that doesnt count the real business that Opera is in: Browsers for devices, where it is pretty much the indisputed king.

Ha

[DanJ_UK]

Most of the page focuses on IE8 Standards mode, but it also turns out that IE7 compatibility mode isn't quite the same as IE7 itself.

That old chestnut, eh?

Code for the standards let the browser sort it out

[Anonymous Coward]

Code for the standard and not a browser so screw the browser if it doesn't conform to the standard. Shoot I did a page and it looked different on mobile safari(ipod touch) compared to even the desktop safari. I really had a good laugh at that one so if it can't read the stadard screw it.

This is it

[Lord Juan]

I am officially getting retired this year from the business of making websites/systems for other people, I'll just work on my own stuff using standards, and only use the IE detection scripts for display a message informing users why the site doesn't looks right on their browser, posting links to standard capable browsers.

Internet Explorer 8

[Anonymous Coward]

There you have it
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4988
Internet Explorer 8 No Compatibility Issues

Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh

[hkmwbz]

Anywhere availability is nice in some domains, not so important in others. The corporate world is an area where people tend to use web apps overmuch.

Maybe there's a reason why they use web apps so much. Maybe it's because it's faster, easier and cheaper, along with the other things I mentioned.

As for it being faster and easier to develop web apps than native apps. Ahahaha. Seriously? Tell me you're joking? Not even in the same league - a good desktop GUI development toolkit will _always_ be much more effective.

That's your claim. I disagree, and so does the rest of the world it seems. I am not surprised that C++ programmers feel threatened, though.

I guess it's nice when some commercial entities anoint themselves standards makers.

The commercial entities are part of the process of making standards. The standards process is run by a non-commercial entity. Non-commercial entities (like Mozilla) are also part of the process.

That's why things like Flash and Silverlight are popular with developers. People want to develop web apps the way they develop desktop apps.

Silverlight is not popular. Flash is popular because it covered a need.

Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh

[DragonWriter]

People, the web is fine for multimedia and information presentation, but why is there this constant push to integrate everything into the web?

Because browsers, despite the incompatibilities, are a lot more ubiquitous and differ a lot less than native operating systems, and because most devices that you are interested in reaching already have one installed. Therefore, its a lot easier to build an app that relies on the user having one of a handful of common browser profiles and expect the user to be able to reach it over the internet and interact with it than it is to do so any other way and reach the same size audience.

This is not the direction we want to go right now.

It may not be the direction you want to go, but it clearly is the direction the rest of the market has collectively decided to go, with or without your blessing.

A lightweight browser that can present information in a variety of devices is where the web needs to stay

It can't "stay" there because it hasn't been there for years. Sorry.

HTML, XML, CSS, and maybe some javascript is all the farther anyone needs to go.

Clearly, other people have different perspectives on their needs than you do.

We need to work on making this information as available and accessible as possible

If that's what you feel you need to work on, then work on it, and convince people that what you've developed is a better choice than what everyone else is developing.

Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh

[RightSaidFred99]

Have you ever used WPF? Ever used even old school MFC? It was very easy to create very nice looking GUI apps. There are similar design tools for Java. C++ - meh. In terms of GUI apps, C++ is probably only the right answer about 25% of the time.

You seem to think there's a debate here. There isn't. Developing for the web is demonstrably and provably more difficult, expensive, and slow than developing with the best GUI toolkits for the desktop.

A simple thought experiment proves you're simply wrong. Which target platform has more restrictions and compromises, a web browser or a desktop OS? Yeah, thought so.

Maybe you're thinking of whatever TrollTipTech Super-Cutie "technology" the Slashdot crowd thinks is hip? Yeah...no. That stuff is primitive shit.

The only web design ((HTTP/javascript/CSS - not Flash/Silverlight) platform that's reasonably efficient to develop in IMO is GWT. I guess ASP.NET / JSF type hacks are OK too.

Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh

[cstdenis]

Because pushing everything into the web is what the PHBs want.

huh? Java is all over the place.

[bussdriver]

You probably have java and just do not know it yet (windows user?) Apple has JVM and JVMs with Linux is going to become common.

The biggest programming language has been Java for years now. I've seen "windows" apps that install a JVM and with some integration most users can not tell the difference (some app-specific JVMs, others system wide.)

Nothing says you must install a system wide JVM library. Browsers can include their own tweaked JVM, its open sourced now. It doesn't have to be a do-everything JVM (the browser could choose-- like Firefox does with the integrated SVG library.)

BTW, your cell phone may have JVM on it. Those are not massively huge and slow...

Re:huh? Java is all over the place.

[Blakey Rat]

There's no way to have java on windows and not know it. Suns updater is the noisiest, most irritating piece of software ever.

Microsoft stopped shipping their Java VM like 8 years ago now. They still ship Flash. That alone is enough to declare Java dead on the web. Sure, non-MS OSes may have it installed by default, but as long as 90%+ of the market is on Windows, that doesn't matter.

Chicken vs Egg

[bussdriver]

No argument.

1) There is more than Sun's JVM.

2) Cisco's IP call center app I looked at long ago was java based and sun's java wasn't visibly present or pre-installed.

3) Before your time, there was windows 95, windows NT and windows 3.1. They were a larger majority of the market than windows has today and MOST of them had no WEB BROWSER or PPP setup! Yes, there was a time when people had to install a web browser and/or configure and install network hardware/software to get on the internet-- all of these processes being more difficult due to the lack of internet access or default support for it. Did that stop us from making websites?? nope.

3.5) Firefox is dead on the web! Blakey Rat just said so! not having it on windows by default is "alone enough to declare Firefox dead on the web."

4) Market share stats are skewed. Most such stats are based upon SALES; of which, business and government comprise a super majority. Consumers are a different group but the numbers often lump them together. Then there are data centers...

Re:Why web developers should be dragged out and sh

[hkmwbz]

You seem to think there's a debate here. There isn't. Developing for the web is demonstrably and provably more difficult, expensive, and slow than developing with the best GUI toolkits for the desktop.

You are assuming that everyone is using Windows PCs. This is of course not the case. More and more people are doing stuff from other types of devices. But even on a Windows PC, a web application is a lot less difficult to produce than a native application, regardless of C++ tools.

A simple thought experiment proves you're simply wrong. Which target platform has more restrictions and compromises, a web browser or a desktop OS? Yeah, thought so.

That depends on what you are trying to achieve. Most of the time, the restrictions of the web as a platform are irrelevant compared to the benefits (faster to develop, cheaper, easier to maintain, wider availability, etc.).