Comments on: Opera, Mozilla and Safari react to IE’s solution for browser compatibility issues

By: John Svensson

John Svensson — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:07:56 +0000

It’s amazing how out of touch with reality you dweebs are… If SW enginners knew what made a good UI, there would not be so many utterly disastrous smart phones/PDAs out there.

By: Matthew Raymond

Matthew Raymond — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:04:58 +0000

@Thomas:

Intranet applications: What’s the problem to say those companies “please add the new meta tag with “IE=7″ to your source code and you will be ever locked to IE7″?

Why not get rid of the whole IE7-rendering-as-the-default idea and just tell corporations to have their web servers implant X-UA-Compatible with “IE=7″ into their HTTP headers for all intranet web pages? That would allow a company to use their web apps in IE7 rendering mode while leaving IE8 free to default to standards mode.

@Knaģis:

1) The switch will actually spell the demise of IE as a dominant browser. Think about it. If IE8 has any trouble whatsoever rendering standards-compliant web pages, then what are developers going to do? The have to use standards-compliant markup to target the ~20% of the market that’s using alternative browsers. They have to write pages that also target IE7 because people will be using that browser for years to come.

However, with this new switch, web developers do NOT have to target IE8 at all. IE8 will render their pages just like IE7. So you develop for standards, tweak your page for IE7 with conditional comments and IE-specific CSS, add the element and you’re done. IE8 becomes irrelevant, especially with MS pushing Silverlight as the next big thing for the Internet.

2) Considering how mindshatteringly awful IE’s support for CSS is, I don’t see how you can make arguments about web site attractiveness. There’s nothing, graphically speaking, that you can do in IE that you can’t do in a standards-compliant browsers. In fact, when you consider the fact that all of Microsoft’s major competitors are integrating native SVG support into their browsers, and all of them support

3) If I visit a site that doesn’t render properly in my browser, and I talk to the author of the page, and he tells me to download IE version x.xx, I don’t see how that’s appreciably better than “Works best in IE x.xx”. In fact, the latter is better, because at least then I can open the darn page using the IE Tab extension or something. Pages that render like **** without you knowing why aren’t better than pages that render like **** and tell you why.

4) Mobile devices are improving in their web capabilities, so it makes less and less sense to develop separate content for these devices, especially when CSS3 has more than enough support for targeting a different presentation to handhelds and other mobile devices. Most of Microsoft’s competition isn’t developing separate rendering engines for mobile devices either. Mobile devices are going to be as powerful as any PC running IE6 or IE7 in short order, so feeding them special content makes less sense everyday.

5) Can’t complain about IE8 defaulting to standards mode for , but even so, I’ll probably use and “IE7 or greater” conditional comments on those pages until I know that IE8 will support my standards-compliant content.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 13:51:43 +0000

Knaģis
1. This switch will stop the evolution of web standards, because ALL websites – excepting those from the minority of standardistas – will be shown with the IE7 engine. In the future when Microsoft releases the IE10 oder whatsoever, MS will say that they can’t dismiss the IE7 engine because that would “break the web”. When IE15 will be released MS will say the same thing till html5 is widely implemented and adopted (in the very far future). But than “quirks html4″ and silverlight will – may be – the worldwide standard because “it has worked good the last x years”.

2. The best solution would be: IE8 standard mode is the standard engine of IE8 and people who want to go back to IE7 should insert the meta tag (with “IE=7″) into the source code. No problem with IE8 and future developments for you.

3. The meta tag is not an information for the user but for the developer. But there shouldn’t be any special switch for a browser. That’s the sense of web standards (till IE8).

5. The day when html5 will be the standard html for the most web pages of the WWW is far far away. That hasn’t any relevance for us the next 10 years or more.

Intranet applications: What’s the problem to say those companies “please add the new meta tag with “IE=7″ to your source code and you will be ever locked to IE7″?

By: hm

hm — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:54:16 +0000

If peaceful co-existence means a continued destroyed web, then the peace ful co-existence must stop.

Microsoft painted themselves into this corner with their anti-competitive practices, remember.

By: Knaģis

Knaģis — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:00:23 +0000

No matter what computers they will use, they will require (or at least the corporate policy will) that the user uses browser version X. And this version X is also the one that the employees use to access all other web. This is the issue that Microsoft tries to overcome – to allow peaceful co-existance between these antique monstrous intranet webs and the real web that evolves exponentially.

By: hm

hm — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:48:00 +0000

If those intranet applications are years old then they can use years old computers to access them. Intranet applications should not dictate what the web is supposed to look like.

By: Knaģis

Knaģis — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:23:55 +0000

The problem is that those intranet applications are years old and costed millions. That IS the problem of the web that these applications are holding it back. Even if I like the IE boxing model better than standard, I would love to see IE6 sent to deepest corner of hell, because it does not allow me to express myself professionaly. But hey – the client needs the app to be compatible with IE5.5… Do not think I don’t hate that.

By: CorpDev

CorpDev — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:40:30 +0000

This just shows how the mindset is completely different. As usual, the two sides are talking past each other.

It’s easy to say that companies can “afford” something. In the real world, hardware upgrades are usually charged to a different cost center than application development. There simply is no money to change the intranet applications.

By: voodoo

voodoo — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:26:10 +0000

@Knaģis

1. If those big corporate companies can afford to upgrade all their computers, they can certainly afford to upgrade their internal apps as well. I don’t think intranet apps should be allowed to hold back the entire web.

2. That is a flat out lie. Making up stories about people who disagree with you is not going to score you any points.

4. It might be convenient for you to ignore the argument about mobile browsers, but the validity of the argument doesn’t change just because you are uncomfortable with the fact that you cannot argue against it (without declaring it unimportant). Have you ever tried Nokia’s browser? Safari for iPhone? The Wii Internet Channel? The DS browser? Yep. Mobile/device browsers can actually show the page as it was meant to look on a desktop computer. Heck, even Opera Mini gets close to that.

Mobile devices are limited. Having to ship multiple browser engines/engine versions, for example, would not be acceptable.

By: Knaģis

Knaģis — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:48:50 +0000

1. This switch will further the evolution of web standards because it will allow those big corporate companies to upgrade to IE8 without breaking their internal apps, that no one is supporting. Otherwise they will just not upgrade to IE8 and we will have to continue to use hacks for IE7.

2. Most of the people commenting on this thing is making their sites to comply standards, not look well on all browsers. There are so many of us that are doing the opposite. And we have no idea how the IE8 will work so we really need the ability to tell the browser “this looks good on IE7″.

3. Some are comparing this switch to the image “looks best on ***”. The difference is, this is not information to the user that he should switch browsers. In that case the user has no choice. This switch tells the browser to try to render it differently, if it can. The info is meant for the browser, not the user.

4. Enough about the mobile browser size limitations. Already the mobile browsers display a look different from desktop. On mobile devices the most of layout is ripped away and just the content is displayed. The meaning a single “float” or “display” CSS rule has a LOT less impact on mobile devices.

5. And I think the most likely scenario is that when the page is written in HTML5, not HTML4, IE8 will default to standards mode.

By: funTomas

funTomas — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:40:12 +0000

Wasn’t Microsoft the one who’d complained about HTML5 specs? Well, I personally assume this draft of MS-style standard compliance to be a counter attack towards a wide adoption of web standards. Let’s talk about browser-war 2.0. MS just hasn’t gotten a lesson, web dominance is the only MS’s goal.

By: nstuff

nstuff — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 04:09:04 +0000

I think the best way (for users, for MS, and for the industry) is to have a new option in the help menu… “Page not loading correctly?” or something similar

Clicking this would bring up a short wizard that, along with suggestions for 404 errors, 5xx errors, etc, one option cause IE to refresh the page and render in IE6 quirks mode.

This would add a nice touch to the user having more help with any general website issues, along with fixing websites that just won’t work in IE8.

IE8 will then tag the URL as something to always load in quirksmode as well as possibly (opt-in only) send the URL of the site to MS for them to notify the author of their crappy site.

MS could then potentially piggyback sites flagged as IE6 only along with the phishing protector feature.

Thoughts?

By: GT500

GT500 — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 04:00:24 +0000

Robert Accettura, Mozilla contributor
... CSS3 isn’t exactly a business secret.

I agree. I didn't read the article Daniel took the guy's comments from, but I completely agree with the paragraph that was quoted.

By: David Naylor

David Naylor — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:17:04 +0000

Yep, thanks for the nice collection of quotes… Really shows the different mindset between MS and Mozilla et al.

This is driving me nuts. I wish MS would just finally get with the times and for once stop being so backwards. The best thing we can do now is to just keep pushing Firefox and Opera to more and more users so that IE one day becomes irrelevant.

By: Al Billings

Al Billings — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:14:44 +0000

Not your fault. I realized it wasn’t on my “About Me” page (which I just fixed). http://planet.mozilla.org lists me and quite a few browser people know me from my old IE days, so no one had pointed it out before.

No foul on your part!