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

[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: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).