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Microsoft Pushes Devs With Wider IE8 Beta
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Jun 01, 2008 11:08 AM
from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.
from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.
An anonymous reader recommends a story about the upcoming beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8. InternetNews expects that the standards-compliant default mode will push many developers to update their sites. We've previously discussed IE8's standards compliance and other features. Quoting:
"Over the years of IE's dominance as the leading browser, designers regularly tweaked their sites to get the best possible accuracy in rendering pages in IE -- most recently, the current commercial release, IE7. Now those pages will need to be changed. Microsoft originally planned for IE8 to default to rendering similarly to IE7, while super standards mode would have been an option. The outcry from critics helped convince Microsoft officials to instead default to super standards. That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."
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Technology: IE8 Will Be Standards-Compliant By Default 383 comments
A number of readers wrote in to make sure we know about Microsoft's change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly. We've previously discussed IE8's render mode a few times. Perhaps Opera's complaint to the EU or the EU's record antitrust fine had something to do with Redmond's about-face.
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Technology: Internet Explorer 8 Beta Features Revealed 281 comments
Admodieus writes "It seems as though the veil has been lifted on the Internet Explorer 8 beta. Microsoft has revealed a list of the new features in IE8, including two interesting new additions called Activities and WebSlices. From the site: 'Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do ... WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.' Also aboard the upgrade train is automatic crash recovery, a favorites toolbar, and improved phishing filter protection. Microsoft has also posted links to download the beta, but none of them are working right now."
Firehose:Microsoft Pushes Devs With Wider IE8 Beta by Anonymous Coward
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Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:5, Insightful)
I know, I know, it's almost too little, too late, but it's better than nothing and as long as this trend continues, at least we might have a decent amount of cross-browser standards in a few years time, as opposed to none if Microsoft simply hadn't bothered.
"it's better than nothing" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:"it's better than nothing" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:"it's better than nothing" (Score:5, Funny)
From the actual transcript from Brian's Performance Review:
Boss: Well Brian, I see that since you took over the web site that complaints about our website have gone up 80 fold and we've lost more than half our customers. What do you make of this?
Brian: They're all idiots.
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Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to be high and mighty, but you really really really should develop against a standards-compliant browser *first*, which means any one of Konqueror, Safari, Opera, or Firefox, and then hack IE once you're all done using conditional comments. Since all the browser vendors other than Microsoft do a good job of adhering to standards at this point, by testing against one of those browsers you can pretty well guarantee you will be functioning in the rest of them. It makes much more sense than to test on the outlier (IE) and then try to fiddle with it until it works in everything else.
I'm quite confident that none of my sites will need to be updated for IE8 as long as Microsoft are doing their jobs, because the sites are written to conform to standards and only use conditional comments with special CSS for browsers <= IE7. That means that when IE8 rolls around, it will get served the same standards-compliant code as everything else and (for once) will not break on it.
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Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're writing and testing against IE, and you write a line of CSS that doesn't do what you expect and change it to make it work, but the reason it wasn't working isn't because you wrote it wrong but because IE calculates some dimensions incorrectly (read: hasLayout), then when you get around to testing it in everything else (and by "everything else" I mean "Firefox", since this is what the IE-first crowd seems to think means "everything else") it's broken. Now compound this issue 20 times, because there are 20 distinct things in the CSS that cause IE to fuck up. Maybe there are also some combinations of things that trigger a bug. So now, instead of writing hacks to work around IE's brokenness, you are writing hacks and sending different code conditionally to "work around" the browsers that are rendering it properly. Suddenly, when IE8 comes around and fixes the bugs you're relying on in IE, you've got a broken Web site again. It's just a bad idea, and getting things working across all the other browsers, frankly, takes a mere fraction of the time it does to get things touched up properly for IE.
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Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:5, Insightful)
If people were using these instead of horrible CSS hacks to make their pages work within IE then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Unfortunately too many people are still using CSS hacks to make their pages render properly.
By using browser specific stylesheets, assuming that IE8 is actually standards compliant like FF, then IE6 and IE7 can continue to load their stylesheets to fix their problems and IE8 will only load the non-specific stylesheet as FF does and then all will be good.
Since you place the browser specific stylesheet after the generic one the styles in defined in the browser specific stylesheets override the ones in the generic stylesheet, while the ones only defined in the generic one cascade down. This is the beauty of Cascading Style Sheets.
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demo of how MS sets a standard .. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well , they could have bothered while they were about cloning Netscape [edge-op.org] and making running any other browser a jolting experience [edge-op.org] and preventing Netscale from sabotaging their protocol extensions [edge-op.org]. Or in english, making web pages not render correctly in other peoples browsers
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Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it is a very good move.
The question is, how much good will it do them?
My estimate is that the mere fact that they were willing to change their usual policy to that extent shows how much weaker their market position has become.
Most new sites, as far as I've noticed, are coded to standards. Most of the others are no longer "Best viewed under IE 6.0" either. Firefox holds about 25% of the global browser marketshare, and over 40% in certain European countries.
Microsoft did not switch to standards because of the goodness of their software-making hearts. They did it because there is no longer any other game in town.
Of course, that does not mean they will not try to subvert standards at some later date, when they have stopped bleeding users and maybe even regained some markertshare. But for now, standards are of utmost importance -- without them, they know they will continue bleeding users to other browsers.
It has to mean something when you have the OS monopoly, when you've used it to gain browser monopoly, and now you're still losing.
I welcome Microsoft's new strategy because it will not help only Microsoft, but also all the others. Unless, of course, people fail to update their sites and Microsoft remains the only browser capable of rendering them. But they are in a minority.
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Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
So basically, Microsoft, listened to their customers, went with the better default mode (and it is better that they do this), and the Slashdot article ends with "But it makes more work for administrators - boo!"
*sigh
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
- IE7 not standards compliant
- Slashdot posts article complaining
- IE8 standards compliant but not by default
- Slashdot posts article complaining
- IE8 standards compliant by default
- Slashdot... posts article complaining
I can only echo your sighing...
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Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's only because Slashdot has both Complainers and Non-Complainers on any given topic, and the Complainers are the ones who enjoy posting most. So they do.
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Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone who uses IE6 does so by choice. The admins at my last workplace refuse to upgrade, install an alternate browser, or allow users to install an alternate browser.
From a user perspective, the best thing about Microsoft's decision in IE8 is that it will force IT admins to phase out IE6 as sites increasingly stop working with IE6.
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Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
People kept getting peeved off expecting Microsoft to start implementing some proper standard support (something which was expected of them in IE7) and then getting annoyed when they do a half hearted attempt at it.
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Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see any reason they shouldn't shoulder the blame for the cleanup costs.
-Peter
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Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
<eta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7"
on their pages. Nothing else is needed to ensure their pages will continue working in the new IE. If they can't be bothered to do that then I don't care if their pages break...
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Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
If moving to IE8 is going to "break" your site, it's already "broken" for anybody who views it in any browser other than IE. That's about 20% of the browsing population (and more every day).
If I was a corporation and my web development team had been shipping a site that flat didn't work for 1/5 of my customers, I'd have fired them long before this.
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Unfortunately??? (Score:5, Insightful)
yay for MS on this call
Pity the poor administrators (Score:5, Insightful)
The only "unfortunate" thing about the need to retool web sites is that it could have been avoided by coding to the standards in the first place.
Microsoft is losing their competitive advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
This reason is rapidly falling by the boards. First it was Visual Basic, which has changed so many times that there is no hope of old code running. Then it was the Windows API, where many things that developers did, originally with Microsoft's blessing, now cause security warning dialog boxes in Vista. Now it's their interpretation of HTML, which they convinced many web developers to follow instead of the standard.
Every time a developer codes to a Microsoft "standard", they had better be prepared to make extensive modifications at the drop of a hat.
Hopefully Microsoft's customers are catching on to this trend.
Re:Lazy dumbasses (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody really cares what work you have to do in order to make a site work for them. Your whining doesn't serve the purpose you want it to.
Sad, but true.
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