IE7 Compatibility a Developer Nightmare 416
yavori writes "Internet Explorer 7 has kicked in at last on all MS Windows OS running PCs because of the fact M$ decided to force it's users to migrate through update. In fact this has started a IE7 Web Developers Nightmare. The article actually explains that most of the small company B2C sites may just fall from grace because of IE7 incompatibility. One of the coolest thing IE7 is unable to do is actually processing form data when clicked on an INPUT field of TYPE IMG... which is pretty uncool for those using entire payment processes with such INPUT fields."
Vague FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm gonna grant the author a free pass on the writing since it's obvious English is not his first language. But the rest of the article seems to be vague hand-wavy FUD and anecdotal complaints. To take two of the more cohesive statements:
The truth is that standards were not the first priority of IE7 (they are an evil mega-corporation after all), but they did do an awful lot of work on them. Just take a look at the list of CSS improvements [msdn.com] over at the IEBlog. They acknowledge that there's a lot more work to do, but it's clear from this that they've solved a lot of headaches for CSS developers.
I'm assuming the author means forms won't submit with an <input type="image"> tag. Without even testing it, I can't believe for one second this is true. This is a major backbone of HTML going back to at least HTML 2, and used in millions of websites. If this were broken it would have been fixed during beta. Microsoft may not care that much about web standards but they do care about backwards compatibility, and a lot of their decision making process has centered around not breaking things that worked in IE6.
It's likely IE7 is going to be a headache for web developers, but this article doesn't do anything to support that argument. As a web developer IE7 hasn't really taken any of my time. So far it's been more reliable than IE6, and I look forward to the day when IE7 is the standard and IE6 is an afterthought for picky clients.
unprofessional (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft does suck (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vague FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder if he even gave much thought to it:
Since when was the W3C site representative of the world-wide browser market share?
What a terrible article. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft does suck (Score:4, Insightful)
Beta testing? (Score:2, Insightful)
TFA was written by a guy who only recently has started porting sites to Firefox, so it's not really surprising he's finding this to be a pain.
Really, the only people this will bite are people who didn't care about standards compliant cross-browser support before, and now are annoyed because IE7 != IE6.
I dunno about this guy... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd take what this guy has to say with a large grain of salt if this is how he treats his sites.
Maybe make your pages simpler? (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, firstly, I'd be bloody amazed if the pages in question validate. The guy goesn't give any link to the site, though, so I can't tell.
Secondly... if you're using lots of client side Javascript to make a site work, you're asking for trouble. Google can do this, because they have massive dev and QA teams. If you don't have the manpower to do enough testing (for example, in the beta period) and fix problems, maybe you should make your site simpler.
Every single web application I work on, worked perfectly in IE 7. Even, yes, the ones that use Javascript. This is achieved by:
Re:Bah (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Affects Apps, too, not just web sites (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft does suck (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vague FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Vague FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
I know IDs must be unique full stop, but I was always under the impression that if something was new functionality it should have a new name.
Re:Completely and 100% untrue (Score:4, Insightful)
Check out my uid. I've been here a while. What's frustrating is that Slashdot used to be good. After they went public, the quality of the articles have gone downhill dramatically.
Eh, I've been around awhile myself, and I have to say that this sort of thing went on before. They've never spellchecked, and they've always run some crap-o-rama articles. Hey, at least Jon Katz is gone. :) Everyone complained about quality back then, too.
I think one of the things that makes Slashdot good is the fact that they do have human editors. Human editors mean human mistakes. Granted, sometimes you have to shake your head at the level of stupid mistake, but on the whole, Slashdot is where it is because of CmdrTaco, not despite him. I think replacing the editors would turn Slashdot into just another ranting blog.
Re:The developers fault to begin with... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just in case it *is* broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My website CRASHES IE7 (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude, you seriously need to clean up that HTML. There are validation errors galore (object in the head, mis-nested table/form tags and an open option tag, for example. Second, the CSV file has five columns for the header but only four for the data. Third, you refer to the wrong column names in your data fields. And fourth (and this is causing the crash) your data filter is messed up. Remove the filter parameter from the data object and it no longer crashes the browser.
That javascript could use a good going over, too. You've made it way more complicated than it needs to be.
I'm amazed that page works in any browser.
Re:Beta testing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, its not convenient, but between that and IE6 having 100% market share, I chose the current situation.
Re:Mod up!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Without Microsoft / IBM, we would have had Apple, Acorn, Commodore and many others competing for the desktop market. All of these got GUIs as standard before any Microsoft platform. In addition, I suspect that the lack of a single strong player would have encouraged the widespread adoption of open standards much earlier; how else would you with your Mac be able to work with your customer and his Amiga?
Bad math.. Not 60% (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not a useful article, really (Score:2, Insightful)
I am on Windows automatic update and was concerned after reading somewhere here on slashdot awhile back that IE7 would automatically be installed.
But I was given a dialog option to install IE7 or not, and I checked no. There was nothing forced whatsoever, so I'm not sure where that is coming from.
rd
Re:unprofessional (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vague FUD (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean like the horrible notion of "meme" which catched up and refuses to die.
In Soviet Russia you use concepts, in memetic theory concepts use you!
Re:Just in case it *is* broken (Score:3, Insightful)
Tough. If you're tech-savvy enough to disable JavaScript, then you're tech-savvy enough to know better than to use MSIE. If I'm going to cater to IE users at all, I'll cater to the ones who legitimately don't know how to use anything else.
Re:Mod up!! (Score:5, Insightful)
When IBM finally decided to sell PCs, Apple had a damn good run at first-mover advantage. IBM wanted to keep Apple from getting the same kind of lock with the Apple ][ that it now has with the iPod, so they decided to rush a disposable launch-vehicle product into the market, then evolve what it considered a 'good' product once its place in the channel was secure. They gave the job of designing the new product to an engineer who had the good sense to run a production capacity baseline, and realized that it would take something like 18 months to open a factory that did nothing but ship empty boxes. Any product design, supplier contracts, and production setup would have to be added to that time.
Instead, he proposed a radical solution: build the initial product from off-the-shelf parts, using third-party assembly houses for the actual production. That would put the new product in the market fast enough for IBM to build a place in the channel, and would buy them time to work on setting up production for an all-IBM product. Trouble was, that model would be vulnerable to copying, so IBM needed something to keep its proprietary lock on the product.
The result was the BIOS chip. That was IBM property pure and simple, and no computer could run (or at least be compatible with IBM's machines) without one.
The plan was approved, and IBM established contracts with a whole slew of outside vendors to supply parts of the initial system, including a tiny little place in Washington called Microsoft.
Then some bastard from a company called Compaq reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS chip and developed a brutally legal clean-room copy.
That opened the floodgates of commodity PCs. Not anything IBM or Microsoft did by choice. In fact, since the OS was the only thing that made an IBM computer distinct in the market, IBM suddenly found itself needing Microsoft more than Microsoft needed IBM.
And that's how a tiny little company with a crap product came to inherit one of the largest and best organized sales channels in the world, and bootstrapped itself into one of the largest companies of all time.
Re:Just in case it *is* broken (Score:2, Insightful)
look right in other khtml based browsers either). I really can't imagine that you meant it to look like this.
A good idea to make site work well everywhere is to run them through html validator at http://validator.w3.org./ [validator.w3.org] When it passes the test, test it in whatever browsers you plan to support, if something doesn't work, remove or change the feature in a way that the page validates correctly.
This gives you the best chances that your site will work even in browsers that you haven't tested.
Currently your site generates 1024 errors when validated.
W3c have also similar test for validating CSS. Use it and then remove or make adjustments so that it works in the browsers you officially intend to support but still passes w3c tests.
BTW, IE regardless of version is a disaster, when it comes to supporting CSS.
Just try http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html [webstandards.org]
Firefox will not work properly either, but it is far better than IE. Konquerer passes acid2
and probably others based on KHTML such as Safari, Opera is supposed to work as well.
I really wish browser manufacturers would start to support CSS properly, it would make it so much easier to build and maintain good web sites.
Re:Mod up!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Apparently many people have forgotten recent history (the past 10-20 years). MS is the reason there are no other commercial web browser and commercial desktop OS vendors. Just look up all the info on the anti-trust trial, and that is just the beginning. The problem is indeed MS. They smash all competition then get lazy and start crapping out really poor code again. They don't care. Their goal isn't to make the best OS/browser ever, their goal is to take over the software world.