IE9 Preview Touts Cross Browser Compatibility

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 development team has announced the availability of the third IE9 platform preview release on the IE blog. Dean Hachamovitch writes, 'The third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, available now, continues the deep work around hardware acceleration to enable the same standards-based markup to run faster. This is the latest installment of the rhythm we started in March, delivering platform preview releases approximately every eight weeks and listening to developers. You'll see more performance, same markup, and hardware-accelerated HTML5.' The announcement focuses on cross-browser compatibility, noting that when 'developers spend less time rewriting their sites to work across browsers they have more time to create amazing experiences on the Web.' Curiously, however, the video embedded in the page works only in some browsers. Dear Microsoft, IE9 supports many royalty-free, web-compatible formats out of the box (HTML, CSS, WOFF, PNG, and the like) so why not at least one more?"

Comments

Doesn't matter

[capnchicken]

I'll be writing shit web code for IE6 forever anyway.

Re:Doesn't matter

[denis-The-menace]

Because IE 6 was designed to fail horribly when it can't understand the web page. Therefore web site developers have to make it work in IE or give it a way to fail nicely.

Re:Doesn't matter

[dagamer34]

Because that keeps enabling IE6. And providing even "basic support" takes a lot of work because of the number of hacks needed to make anything look decent. It's basically designing a different site just for IE6. No one likes doing that, which is why web developers want to explicitly not support IE6 to avoid that headache.

Re:Doesn't matter

[watermark]

IMO, with the existence of javascript libraries like jQuery or prototype, javascript isn't the issue. IE6 has so many bugs to keep up with (double margin, float bugs) that it forces you to create 1 1/2 websites (code that only runs on IE6 is the 1/2.) You tell it I want a a 6px border and place it 10px from the top and you can end up with a 12px border and 12px from the top. So you end up writing code to say, if its IE6, give it a 3px border and 8px from the top (knowing that it will double your 3px and add a few pixels to the latter.) So to answer your question, if we didn't write code specifically for IE6 (even without javascript) some sites would look so bad that they would be unusable in IE6. Stupid blue E.

Re:Doesn't matter

[WrongSizeGlass]

We absolutely can provide 'basic' or better support for IE 6 but we make sure the entire site works the same in all browsers. The real questions is "how many man hours, and how much of our client's money, should we spend trying to handle IE 6 compatibility and functionality?"

Some of our sites are relatively simple and use formats & javascript libraries we've developed that support IE 6 without any issues at all. If a new or existing client wants this kind of site we don't "break" the IE 6 support - we simply let them know that any future upgrades or additions may not be able to do everything they want (either we can't add the 'fancy' stuff because it would require reworking of the infrastructure or it would break IE 6 compatibility). We always give them the option and if they are willing to spend the extra money on IE 6 compatibility we'll do it but we design the entire site to work the same in all browsers so they have a limited feature set to choose from.

We see dwindling IE 6 visitors but we're also aware that some of our clients still have a large percentage of IE 6 visitors. Because of that we don't offer certain features or enhancements to them. We're upfront about it and they are willing to live with the less fancy site as long as it meets the needs of their visitors.

Re:Doesn't matter

[Sleepy]

"I am not a web developer, so I am a bit confused about why websites are unable to provide even a basic level of support for IE6 -- perhaps a simple page without any fancy effects that just gives people whatever information they were looking for. Is it really that necessary to use Javascript for everything?"

Good question, but it's not that simple.

See, CSS and Javascript were DESIGNED to "fail gracefully". You could put some useful style on say a list or a heading, then use CSS to format it. If the browser support was not there, you would see the base elements.

Now this failback would understandably be UGLY (your prettified CSS list menu would look like a 1994 bulleted list), but it would WORK.

If Microsoft chose not to support the CSS standards, they could have done so. It's optional.

The ONLY way Microsoft could ruin CSS and Javascript was by agreeing to go along with the standard, and then change all the meaning. It's like if you spoke a slightly different language than your neighbor, and every 3rd word you spoke had different meaning to your neighbor (as in, every 3rd word was a normal term to you, but an unexpectedly offensive curse word to them).

If a browser did not support said standards, we could have all designed for CSS and IE6 would get a vanilla plain text page.

Microsoft knew that novice web developers would code and test in the "popular" browser first, then test other browsers afterwards. If that was how you developed, you were an unwitting tool in Microsoft's effort to destroy the open web.

It worked, for a time.

Then web developers revolted, by figuring out how to document Microsoft bugs. In the end, we developed this pseudo-language that ran on top of CSS and Javascript, so we could "hide" markup and styles from either IE or from the standards browsers.

All this effort wasted uncountable hours of web developers.

Was this deliberate sabotage by Microsoft? Let's just say that in the US anti-trust trial against Microsoft, emails from Bill Gates were revealed. Bill's emails essentially stated he didn't want to see MS developers "wasting time fixing bugs in HTML that only affect competitive browsers". (Meaning, if your HTML/CSS generation in some desktop app generates horrible invalid code... DON'T fix it... just let the IE guys know so they can write undocumented code to show your page "properly").

Literally, there's a story here how grass-roots web developers fought back to save the "information highway" from being effectively privatized as one company's property.

This is why so many people HATE IE and IE6.. even if they're not the type of people who normally hate Microsoft.

Re:Cross Browser Compatibility?

[The MAZZTer]

Browsers can be made to be standards compliant. Web pages can be made to be cross-browser compatible (since not all browsers are standards compliant).

Without Firefox...

[Hurricane78]

Did anyone else think that we really have to thank the Mozilla team for this? Without Firefox, none of this would have happened. Wed’d still use IE6.

Firefox tends do go a bit downwards in quality, lately. But I don’t care. Thank you, Mozilla team! Every single one of you. Everyone who installed and promoted it. And the team who made the great logo and CI, that’s so fashionable that non-geek women put in on their t-shirts.
*grabs web-Oscar, steps down from the podium and runs away with it!*

HTML5 Canvas Support

[butlerm]

The best part about this preview is the addition of HTML5 Canvas support, the lack of which would be a serious impediment to cross platform deployment of a large number of useful applications.

Reminds me of a situation I had with a new phone..

[SharpFang]

back then I was scrapping for money, camera phones were relatively new, I needed a digital camera and couldn't afford one, and I could get a phone with decent camera, with a contract, for very reasonable money. And I needed a new phone anyway.

So I picked one. It could make photos okay, but to get them I could only send them through MMS to my email, for exorbitant fees. To download them I needed a special RS232-based cable... and the dealer didn't have them. No import, not available, if ordered from the net, including shipping, it would cost more than the phone, and about as much as a digital camera. But hurray, there are cheap chinese USB cables that supposedly work!

And they do, for everything EXCEPT downloading the photos. A 3rd party app can download thumbnails of the photos. The official app doesn't recognize the cable. The fora are filled with people asking how to get the photos, the universal answer is "get the official cable".

Quite pissed off, I first hacked together a RS232 cable using the plug from the chinese one and a handful of electronics. I found out the only difference from the "unofficial RS232" was that official had DTR and RTS shorted, the knock-off - unconnected. Still not satisfied I began reverse-engineering the AT command set the phone used to talk with the computer. I found commands to request list of photos, download and delete them, then how to extract the photo from the junk the phone sends as reply to request... I wrote a Perl app that worked with any serial, even the emulated RS232 over USB. It was clunky, it worked from command line only, but it worked with any cable.

I posted it on the official fora. To my surprise, instead of ban&delete, I received a surprised question from the developers: Why? Why would anyone want to use it? We have the official app which is infinitely better!

I explained how there are no official cables in my country. How I bought a phone for the camera, and I can't use the camera. That I understand they want to profit from their cables, but sorry, I feel cheated, I want to use the camera. Oh, and I listed an extract from first page of the support forum, about 20 posts of cable problems, to which my program was a solution.

That was the last I used my app. A new version of the official app was released less than a week later, and it ignored the DTR/RTS, working correctly with all cables.