Microsoft.com Makes IE8 Incompatibility List 358
nickull writes "Microsoft is tracking incompatible Web sites for its upcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser and has posted a list that now contains about 2,400 names — including Microsoft.com. Apparently, even though Microsoft's IE8 team is doing the 'right' thing by finally making IE more standards-compliant, they are risking 'breaking the Web' because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE."
Options (Score:4, Insightful)
What if we could just define which rendering engine to use in pages, e.g. IE7 or IE8 in a meta tag...
Re:Options (Score:5, Insightful)
or, perhaps, fixing those pages comes to mind...
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Yeah, let me know how telling people to do hours of work for free goes for you....
Re:Options (Score:4, Funny)
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Bill Microsoft, of course.
Bill Gates
Re:Options (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Options (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a better idea
Let M$ build a browser that is W3C compliant.
Then all the webmasters out there can make their sites W3C compliant.
Now, see how easy that was?
Complying with standards, what a concept
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they deserve to go down with the ship they hitched their trailers to
This takes the car analogy in a whole new direction... the aquacar.
Re:Options (Score:5, Insightful)
A non standards-compliant web page isn't hard to write. If goobers would stop writing their web pages to impress people with their 133t sk1LLz (Yahoo news comes to mind) and make them clean and standards-compliant in the first place, there wouldn't be these issues.
If your site isn't compliant in the first place, you have no right to bitch about "working for free". If I screw up a project at work, I have to redo it. And if your site isn't compliant in the first place, you screwed up.
Suck it up and fix it. Next time, do it right.
Re:Options (Score:5, Interesting)
What if we could just define which rendering engine to use in pages, e.g. IE7 or IE8 in a meta tag...
Oh if we only could! [msdn.com]
Watching the development of IE8, the teams is taking great pains to make sure that site authors and owners have an overall say about how their page is rendered with respect to new IE standards-compliance. You can use both a META tag as well as a HTTP header to tell IE8 to use either the new rendering engine (default) or to fall back to the IE7 standards. Companies can also specify compatibility options using GPOs which should help keep older intranet sites working.
I think it's a pretty good tradeoff between pushing for modern standards and not "breaking the web". Yes, it is largely IE's fault that there are so many non-conforming sites out there, but compatibility is important regardless, especially for "offline" sites which cannot be fixed easily or cheaply (CD help files, embedded web servers, etc). At least by having the new rendering mode the default it will encourage standards compliance (or at least IE's [admittedly improving] version of it.)
Re:Options (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that a contradiction in terms? The whole problem with IE7 is, it's not standards compliant.
Re:Options (Score:5, Funny)
That all depends on who's standards IE7 is being compared to. IE7 is not standards compliant when compared to the w3 standard, but is VERY compliant when compared to the MS standard.
Re:Options (Score:5, Interesting)
No it is not. You apparently never tried to program a real web application to work in that thing.
It contradicts its own rules, based on random things like race conditions between the first execution of JavaScript in an <IFRAME> and the end of page the rendering routine.
Been there, seen it, circumvented stuff like that in anything from 2 minutes to no less than two weeks of hard debugging.
In the matrix of IE, you only have to remember one thing: There is no standard.
Everything can change, and change back in the blink of an eye, for no reason at all.
I fear that to be a Trident developer, you must be a genius to understand that mess, and crazy to stand it, at the same time.
Re:Options (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly right. I don't know why but this company seems to be doing everything ass backwards and still getting away with it. I work at a very large organization, and a lot of Office documents get sent back and forth on email. Most people have not "upgraded" to the latest version of office (2007/8). The few who have send everything in the new xml format (docx etc), which is not compatible with older versions. This is annoying as hell when I have to explain that Word is incompatible with Word, or Excel is incompatible with Excel. Thankfully there are tools on the microsoft site that can convert these documents, but there is no reason people should have to jump through these hoops. Even worse, these programs have expiration dates -- just today I tried to open a docx document and was told the program had expired. I had to go to the MS website and download a minor point upgrade to the converter program (the link was hidden on a page [microsoft.com] that was mostly about Microsoft Messenger. Then I ran the program and it told me to quit Entourage, Word, and Excel - each of which had about 10 windows open - just so I could update this external application. Even as I'm typing this I just realized there is yet another minor point update on the website, so I'll need to upgrade to 1.0.2 now. What a nightmare.
Here's another example of this sort of nonsense -- if you own MS Office 2004 for OS X, it has been updated to 11.5.3. But you can't just update from version 10 to version 11.5.3 in one swoop. If you installed Office years ago and kept it up to date it's a minor nuisance but if you're installing Office 2004 on a new computer, you need to use AutoUpdate like 15 times to get it up to date, one point upgrade at a time. Seriously, who has time for this nonsense? And who thinks up this crap?
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Do we really want a fully standards compliant Microsoft Browser? How can the next wave of standards be developed then?
Yes, we do want a full compliant Microsoft browser? This will have absolutely no impact on the development of new web standards to extend what we already have.
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Yes they are, you just dislike them to the point where you want to run around screaming to the top of your lungs and hitting everything with your fists till they turn bloody, then you fall down and whimper yourself to sleep while murmuring "damn proprietary standards... I hate you!"
There, fixed that for you.
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Yes, and if people had been making web pages W3C compliant in the first place 10 years ago, M$ would have been forced to come into compliance by their sheeple/customers.
Besides, I feel left out, my site didn't make their list. OTOH I used linux programs to build it.
Tuff titty M$, couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Peace, n.:
Re:Options (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't work at all in IE8; so I clicked the little compatibility mode button. It rendered it as IE7, but ignored the compatibility markup, totally breaking everything! Whats the point of an IE7 compatibility mode, if it ignores the IE7-specific markup?
That's totally useless when it comes to testing IE8, and hover/dropdown menus still doesn't work correctly; however you try and do them.
Disclaimer: Works perfectly in Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera/IE6/IE7, just not bloody IE8.
Re:Options (Score:4, Funny)
Looks like you just found a reliable way to detect IE8.
Re:Options (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not try changing your "if ie" to "if lte ie7" and stop confusing the hell out of the poor thing? Unless you've done some bizarre javascript (please tell me you're using one of the plethora of fully-cross-browser libraries!), this shouldn't really be an issue. At least not a significant one - it may not be pixel-perfect, but easily close enough. My brief testing in IE8 has it rendering stuff just as well as Firefox or Safari.
I realize that it's not always (read: almost never) an option with CSS, but it's far better if you can avoid browser-specific conditions by other means. For instance, you can check if a recent JS/DOM method exists (getElementsByClassName, for instance), use it if so, otherwise revert to your fallback/ugly/slow code. If/when the browser gets the method in question (not that it's at all likely, but what if MS patched some of the flaws in IE6/7?), your code will automatically use the better version without you having to touch it after the fact, and no browser sniffing.
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As I mentioned originally though, this is for a drop down menu using ul/li and the hover psudeocode. I can't find any way to do this that works nicer, and avoids using javascript. The "if ie" tag I'm using is non-essential and the site still works without it. However, to make it looks best it's
Re:Options (Score:5, Insightful)
So what should I use?? "if IE" comments are the cleanest solution for IE woes. Using them you can make your sites both standards compliant AND hack-free.
"Conditional comments" are perfect for linking to an additional style sheet that makes the site look decent in IE. They are the simplest and most reliable method of serving CSS/Javascript fixes, and they are W3C complaint (see this site: www.baltchem.eu - it uses those tags and is still valid XHTML 1.0 Strict).
This does not compute. (Score:2)
You can use both a META tag as well as a HTTP header to tell IE8 to use either the new rendering engine (default) or to fall back to the IE7 standards.
This makes no logical sense. If the html is on a cd it can't be changed to include a meta tag to use IE7 format. Yet IE8 format is the default which will break the CD html rendering. You need to be able to switch the browser to IE7 mode default for this to work.
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Simple. Quirks mode gets rendered badly, non-QM gets rendered right. Key off the presence or absence of a DOCTYPE declaration and you'll be right 404 times out of 405.
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compatibility is important regardless, especially for "offline" sites which cannot be fixed easily or cheaply (CD help files, embedded web servers, etc)
You can use both a META tag as well as a HTTP header to tell IE8 to use either the new rendering engine (default) or to fall back to the IE7 standards.
So requiring offline and non-updateable pages to tell IE8 to fall back to IE7 rendering helps backward compatibility how? They are already written, already offline, and presumably already don't have the metatag that they will need to be (im)properly rendered.
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You can.... X-UA-Compatible. 10 mins on Microsoft's IE blog would have told you that....
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Fuck IE (Score:4, Funny)
It can't even render simple fucking HTML properly. Simple little html table, written according to the guidelines. Looks spiff in Firefox, unholy mess in IE. The only way to make things line up properly in IE is to do illegal things that are correctly rendered as incompetent ass in Firefox.
Fuck IE and the modem it was downloaded on.
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Any chance you can post a link to a screenshot of this? My day could use a good cheap laugh.
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The SS of IE8 managing to fail at a basic task of rendering.
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What do you mean by "simple little html table"? I just tried making a really simple table and it looked pretty much the same... the default font was slightly different but that's to be expected, and doesn't prove incompatibility by itself.
Note: Sorry for responding to a flame, but I didn't have any mod points
Where's the story? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't get it. Why is everyone so surprised by this? Microsoft has been the biggest consumer of their own non-standard web technologies in both an effort to tie services to Windows and to convince other web developers to use their 'neato' technologies.
Has no one ever noticed that Microsoft.com had various effects, direct system access, and other features not found anywhere else on the web? Or that Windows Update only worked through Internet Explorer? Microsoft WANTS to be as non-standard as possible. And if you don't believe me, check out this wonderful document [annevankesteren.nl] penned by none other than Bill Gates himself:
Re:Where's the story? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, what else do you expect? Windows Update works by taking advantage of a major security hole known as "ActiveX," and IE is the only browser that doesn't block it.
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Um... that was kind of my point. That IE-only compatibility on Microsoft.com is exactly what people should be expecting. But for some reason it's a huge surprise to people that Microsoft.com is incompatible with standards.
Shock and horror.
Re:Where's the story? (Score:4, Informative)
Look, you can talk about bad security all you want, but the only difference between ActiveX and an xpcom plugin in firefox is that ActiveX would auto-install. Other than the fact that IE allows/allowed for auto installs, the two technologies are practically identical.
The problem is not ActiveX, its that IE would automatically install them. Then they made it prompt by default (it was always an option) before installing, but most users blindly click whatever they think will get them the free prize. Then they started with the unsigned warnings, but nothing was signed initially, so that was useless for a while, which again trained users to ignore it. Of course the fact that signed doesn't mean it wasn't signed by a bad guy, and since no own really does anything to the bad guys, they just make sure they are signed and go on.
I could list probably 20 things that could be changed that would have made ActiveX components not a threat, and none of those changes would actually involve changing an ActiveX component or the API in any way.
If you prevent IE from installing ActiveX components on its own you are functionally equivalent to Firefox. That doesn't mean that you can't be exploited via a bug in the browser which allows for an unauthorized install, nor does it protect you from installed components that have exploits which have not yet be found. Those problems effect Firefox as well.
Make a way for Firefox to have a page automatically install an extension and you've got the exact same problem.
Note: I pick on Firefox here because I've developed plugins for Firefox and IE. I do not use Opera, nor do I have any experience with Chrome plugins so I really can't comment as to how they may handle things differently.
Also I'm not saying you should use IE or that ActiveX is great. IE and ActiveX are crap for to many reasons to list here, but many of those same problems apply to the Firefox/XULRunner/XPCOM world as well, fortunately they just tend to be something you can fix in OSS software which takes away a lot of the validity of developers bitching about bad code, they should just fix it themselves :)
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Look, you can talk about bad security all you want, but the only difference between ActiveX and an xpcom plugin in firefox is that ActiveX would auto-install. Other than the fact that IE allows/allowed for auto installs, the two technologies are practically identical.
The problem is not ActiveX, its that IE would automatically install them.
No, the problem is that Microsoft promoted ActiveX as a way for web developers to add extra functionality to their sites. Their goals were to compete with Java and lock users and web developers into IE and Windows. The auto-install bit is only a side effect of that, so that the user experience would be as seamless as possible, security be damned.
So now there are still lots of sites (especially on large intranets) that require ActiveX for some business-essential functionality. I guess Microsoft succeeded to
Re:Where's the story? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm [www.iol.ie]
Lord only knows why that even exists...
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Re:Where's the story? (Score:5, Interesting)
validating Google.com [w3.org]. Don't think google ever tried to be compliant.
Re:Where's the story? (Score:4, Interesting)
While testing a socket helper class I was writing about a year and a half ago, I noticed that the Google homepage's entire direct content (i.e. excluding content like their logo, which the browser fetches in a separate request (and which will be cached for visits thereafter)) always arrived in a single TCP/IP packet. I assumed that this was on purpose, by the following reasoning:
So if all of Google's main page content still fits in the 1500 or so byte limit, then they prolly indeed are dropping characters here and there and violating standards, as long as it still renders properly, to maintain that snappy response we're used to when going to Google. In other words, I think Google's characteristically spartan home page was not only about the look, but the look and feel. Pretty smart.
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The list seems accurate (Score:3, Informative)
I've checked the main page at a few of them including:
tom.com
qq.com
mozilla.com
google.com
wikipedia.org
They seem to either:
1) Fail w3c [x]html standards
2) Fail w3c css standards
Google's rarely been standards compliant, failing to publish doctypes. Even if they did, many of their pages are built with javascript which do not create w3c-valid documents either. (But that goes for most javascript toolkits.)
Mozilla uses several "-moz" prefixed CSS attributes t
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Re:Where's the story? (Score:4, Insightful)
Has no one ever noticed that Microsoft.com had various effects, direct system access, and other features not found anywhere else on the web?
Not really, no.
Or that Windows Update only worked through Internet Explorer?
Windows Update has been a freakin' Control Panel and Service in Windows for a decade now. Please update the rhetoric to the 21st century, thank you.
Yes, the web-based Windows Update still works. Yes, it requires IE. That's because IE is the only browser that ever implemented ActiveX. But the thing is, HTML was/is *designed* so that companies can extend it! (That's why HTML ignores tags it doesn't understand, for example.) ActiveX was fairly extended in the correct manner prescribed by HTML. Is it a good technology? No. Does it violate the HTML standards? Also no. Is there any technical reason Firefox can't implement ActiveX? No.
Google.com?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm no web developer but how can google.com be on that list as well? It is one of the simplest websites around. A text field, few links and a bit of javascript.
How the hell can a web browser, that let's face it, is probably going to be the dominant web browser, not render that.
No wonder the general population get pissed of with 'the computer's not working again'. These days I tell them that I don't know Windows. I'm going to have to start walking around with a Ubuntu live on USB.
Re:Google.com?! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm no web developer but how can google.com be on that list as well? It is one of the simplest websites around. A text field, few links and a bit of javascript.
The problem here is that Microsoft released a list of domains that are not properly supported, and the list contains one entry: "*.*"
Re:Google.com?! (Score:5, Funny)
...the list contains one entry: "*.*"
At least my intranet site will be ok then :o)
Re:Google.com?! (Score:5, Informative)
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0 [w3.org]
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I find that absolutely stunning! Here we have a billion dollar company that prides itself on software and it cannot even get its core bread-and-butter gig correct.
It boggles my mind.
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Searching data is Google's core business, nothing more.
I agree Google could do better on their homepage, but that's NOT the same as saying they're not getting this right.
In addition to working well with COMMON browsers, Google works pretty darn well with anything else you throw at it, from phone browsers to lynx to SMS messages.
Gmail -does- have a lot of effort put in it to be portable. Works great on my Nokia N8xx tablet. I'm happy.
On the other hand, many Microsoft.com pages render in Firefox with menu lin
Re:Google.com?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Google should win a prize (Score:2, Interesting)
It's funny you mention that. I have always been amazed at Google's capacity for error. In 4 lines of HTML, on the very simple page you mention, Google has managed to fit 65 errors and 8 warnings. Sibling poster has a link to the w3c validator.
Re:Google.com?! (Score:4, Informative)
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True, they compress the html, css, and javascript output, but they do it with some "compression" software. However, that does not mean the said compression/html/css generating software can't generate W3C valid documents.
Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Rock and a Hard Place (Score:5, Insightful)
So slashdot, what should it be?
Break standards and keep compatibility? Or break compatibility and be standards compliant?
Either way they'll be unpopular it appears. At least in the short-term.
Re:Rock and a Hard Place (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the two will make them unpopular in the long term.
They've done neither. (Score:2)
Last I checked, IE8 was still far behind everyone else in standards compliance, and that's with the same standards (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript) that have been with us for a decade. That says nothing of the brand-new standards people are inventing (HTML5, SVG/canvas) which IE hasn't even touched.
I place the blame squarely on IE for the amount of Flash we have now.
And yet, they're breaking enough compatibility that Google.com (and Microsoft.com) won't render properly. Which means they've chosen to make IE8 anothe
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html/xhtml support is about
IE7: 73%
FF2: 90%
O9: 85%
CSS 2.1
IE7: 56%
FF3: 93%
O9: 94%
Not sure about IE8, but I doubt that it can be much more than IE7.
http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary?IE7=on&FX2=on&FX3=on&OP9=on&uas=CUSTOM [webdevout.net]
Depends on the standard and the test (Score:3, Interesting)
IE8 passes ACID 2:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx [msdn.com]
But in September, IE8 lags in the ACID 3 test:
http://www.anomalousanomaly.com/2008/03/06/acid-3/ [anomalousanomaly.com]
The closer they all get to standards (any standards) the better.
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Keep in mind, ACID is not a comprehensive test of standards-compliance, by any stretch. It is specifically targeting places where certain browsers are known to lag behind in compliance.
But it is worth noting that there does not seem to be a single standard test, objective or subjective, in which IE is ahead of other browsers in standards-compliance.
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they'd gain back some of the epic amounts of geek credibility they lost during the OOXML debacle
Some. The OOXML debacle is only the latest in a very long line of typically Microsoft practices.
Their geek cred has fallen a long way. Just as they would have to do everything wrong for over a decade before money was an issue, they'd have to do everything right for over a decade to earn back the respect they've lost for pretty much their entire existence.
Compliant? (Score:2)
Microsoft's IE8 team is doing the 'right' thing by finally making IE more standards-compliant, they are risking 'breaking the Web' because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE.
Well then, why even try, right?
Broken or not... (Score:4, Insightful)
If finally coming into compliance is what they are doing, then, Duh! By default the sites that are built for the not-compatible versions are going to be broken. I think it is wonderful. If Microsoft comes into compliance and renders web pages by the book (the W3C standard), then it is a great thing for all. Having broken sites is the price that companies pay for jumping on the bandwagon when they had the choice to do the right thing or not.
Consider broken sites a small price to pay going forward to gain real compatibility and a much better web. Less time spent developing around the broken browsers means more time spent building true content - maybe even more time on better security.
InnerWeb
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Poll time! (Score:2)
- IE8
- IE - Firefox
- Opera
- Konqueror
- Safari
- Lynx
- Who cares as long as it works
- I browse CowboyNeal
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The second option was meant to be IE<8
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See also the search query: http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=&query=browser&sort=1&op=polls [slashdot.org]
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Not done, that was almost a year ago...
Since then, I have stopped using IE and Firefox entirely... as i'm sure more have adopted it (well Firefox at least).
P.S. my preferred browser in that poll, and still is Opera.
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I use netscape navigator you insensitive clod!
(Ok, well I use Firefox now, but I *used* to use NN!!)
This would be great if... (Score:2)
Eh, whatever. At least it gives a chance to mock Microsoft. I thumb my chin at you, Microsoft!!
Wishful thinking (Score:2)
So does this mean my boss(es) will let me stop fussing over IE6? PLEASE?!?!?!
Not so much, I'm sure.
Oh great (Score:3, Insightful)
The web is already broken thanks to IE (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft's stance that fixing IE will break the web is counter intuitive propaganda. They broke the web when they failed to keep IE's standards compliance up to date, and since they strong-armed themselves to the top of the browser share pile, much of the web is built to satisfy their flawed implementation.
MS is giving that chunk of the web an incentive to fix itself... it's already broken.
If MS would approach this with some humility and logic, more people would understand that it's not the sites that are broken, it's the blue E.
MS made their own internet (standards) (Score:5, Informative)
About ten years ago, as Web-1.0 was beginning, I decided to learn to write HTML for a personal website. At that time, MS released a beta program (I forget its name) to automate HTML authoring and I signed up, downloaded and installed it. Then I found its output while great for IE, did not render pages well in Netscape or even Opera. So I uninstalled it and wrote with WordPerfect-7, correcting the code by hand.
Some weeks later, MS emailed me (the beta program, of course, required registration with an email address) with a special offer: a free year-long subscription to an upcoming MS magazine if I would document my use of a feature on my home web page that worked under IE but not under Netscape -- that is, I would get a worthless pile of MS propaganda every month if I would break web standards to the benefit of IE.
It was always MS' plan to dominate ("embrace and extend" was what is was called then) the internet.
I believe if there was one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standard compliant it was their losing fight with the EU monopoly courts and their punishment: to become standards-compliant with respect to APIs, networking and, apparently, at least in MS' mind, the internet as well.
Perhpas MS could take a feature from the Opera browser -- user agent spoofing, and let IE-8 users impersonate another brand so they can view standards-compliant sites as the designer intended them to be seen.
Standards-Compliance Practically Useful After All (Score:3, Insightful)
``the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE.''
Which wouldn't be a Bad Thing if the sites were also standards compliant. However, it seems that I have been part of a very small minority of people who have cared to make them that way in the past decade. Even today, the prevalent attitude seems to be that you "support" one or two browsers, instead of keeping to standards and having your site Just Work in every decent browser.
Re:Standards-Compliance Practically Useful After A (Score:2)
However, it seems that I have been part of a very small minority of people who have cared to make them that way in the past decade
So now we really know what happened to all that Webvan money!
Sorry, but I'm just like one of those people that worked to be compatible with the most popular browsers. I know that in some abstract sense it might be good, but I see no reason to alienate the best part of an audience.
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I agree. When I create web sites I test that they work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera (and yes, IE, when I feel up to it) and I always check that they validate as proper XHTML.
Big Organization = this kind of thing happens (Score:2, Insightful)
This is just a simple case of The Left Hand Doesn't Know What The Right Hand Is Doing.
Seriously, in any organization of Microsoft's size, these type of things will happen.
I'll bet that the guys developing IE8 really want to make it 100% standards-complaint, but the web developers dudes didn't get the memo. (Or more sinisterly, there are forces in Redmond whose interests do not lie that way.)
Fixed that for you! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Apparently, even though Microsoft's IE8 team is doing the 'right' thing by finally making IE more standards-compliant, they are risking 'fixing the Web' because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work incorrectly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE."
Thank you, Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazingly, they chose the second option. Those of us who understand why this is important should be applauding right now.
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So they are basically creating a VERY different browser. I bet if you did a spoof in IE8 of the headers and said something like Mozilla, rendering would be better, eh?
So perhaps Microsoft should take this opportunity to rename the browser? Change the user agent and browser reported back to our code which handles browsers?
I just added iPhone routines to some pages to render the footers better. I'm ready to add Microsoft Explorer 8 MSNIE to my list of what gets the NS/MZ pages. Those who aren't would ha
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If this is true, I'm genuinely impressed. I'll wait and see :-)
I can only imagine how stressful it is to work on any of the HTML rendering engines. With standards supported in IE, it might be possible again for ONE PERSON to completely understand a HTML rendering library. Right now it must take loads of people and far too many automated tests.
As I said, we'll see when it's released. :-)
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Easy fix (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that many sites will check if the browser is IE, and then do various workarounds. So Microsoft is stuck: they can fix the browser, but then the sites have to be modified to say (if browser is IE, but version 7 then do the hack)
I think the only good workaround would be for Microsoft to change their user/agent string so it reports itself as Firefox :)
Isn't that something to be proud of? (Score:2)
I used to block IE because it was not worth the extra work and feature removal, only to have the noobs of the Internet (which were not in my target group anyway, I'm a software developer) telling you your site was buggy.
Now I do not block them, because most of them simply do not know what they are talking about. And it is wrong to insult them, for being tricked by someone else.
So I tell them they got tricked, and how they can remove all the limitations, make their life easier, and get even more good stuff f
Standard IE8 worthless (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You have your answer there:
"It doesn't work right with Gmail, even in compatibility mode"
That means its doing user agent sniffing and going from that, and isn't made to go with a newer version... Compatibility mode is pretty much exactly IE7's rendering engine. So if it doesn't work, well...
Re: (Score:2)
I think you'll find it was Netscape who did that. They were kings of it.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
MSIE need to change it's UserAgent ID and CC-rules. Name themselves something new and be done with that. Simple as that.