Microsoft Pushes Devs With Wider IE8 Beta 314
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."
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.
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
Lazy dumbasses (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if you don't code to standards, that's what you get. I don't feel sorry for them.
"it's better than nothing" (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately??? (Score:5, Insightful)
yay for MS on this call
Not that bad (Score:4, Insightful)
A little pain now for a lot less cumulative pain later. I'll take that!
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...
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.
Idiots (Score:2, Insightful)
"I used non-standard code on my site and it stopped working. It must be someone else's fault!"
Morons.
Re:Lazy dumbasses (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Lazy dumbasses (Score:2, Insightful)
Only sad thing is that it wont be the long gone pointy-haired bosses that get bitten, but instead the poor on-the-floor webdevs.
hogwash, this is not a lot of work (Score:2, Insightful)
and you have the page render in ie as appearance b
then its a rather simple top level switch to say "all ie8 requests get rendered as appearance a"
you're not talking about a lot of work here folks
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:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lazy dumbasses (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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.
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:3, Insightful)
IE has now fallen under the same spell that the rest of the web standards community has fallen under, namely, the illusion that old web sites will be upgraded for newer browser. Here's a hint, W3C, Mozilla, and now Microsoft: They won't.
Large commercial websites (for example, this one: http://www.jcpenney.com/jcp/default.aspx [jcpenney.com] ) are coded using the 1998 method of lots of tables and hardly any CSS. And that's a page that's:
1) Been updated every single day for the last 5 years at least
2) Could have massive, massive bandwidth and render-time savings if they switched the layout.
And that's one site. And that's just one site that's actually maintained. There are thousands of others, still written using the same methods. Many of those are entirely orphaned or unmaintained. Many of those contain critical information that you can't get on any other sites.
Any web standard that isn't written with this in mind (for example, XHTML) will fail. It'll just be one more standard for browsers to support until the end of time, until browsers are so bloated it takes twenty minutes to render Yahoo.com.
People on this site who hate Microsoft actually should be applauding this decision, since users upgrading to IE8 will simply think IE8 is fundamentally broken. Of course, the tears'll start flowing when Firefox, Safari, Opera, and all the browsers Slashdotters like have the same problem. My personal guess is that Microsoft isn't going to let this happen, and they'll make super-strict mode off by default.
IMHO, the HTML 5 spec is a move in the right direction. We all agree that web standards suck, but whatever we do, we need to ensure backwards compatibility.
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.
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:5, Insightful)
If people were using these instead of horrible CSS hacks to make their pages work within IE then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Unfortunately too many people are still using CSS hacks to make their pages render properly.
By using browser specific stylesheets, assuming that IE8 is actually standards compliant like FF, then IE6 and IE7 can continue to load their stylesheets to fix their problems and IE8 will only load the non-specific stylesheet as FF does and then all will be good.
Since you place the browser specific stylesheet after the generic one the styles in defined in the browser specific stylesheets override the ones in the generic stylesheet, while the ones only defined in the generic one cascade down. This is the beauty of Cascading Style Sheets.
Re:Lazy dumbasses (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"it's better than nothing" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Joel on Software: Idealists vs Pragmatists (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
<eta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7"
on their pages. Nothing else is needed to ensure their pages will continue working in the new IE. If they can't be bothered to do that then I don't care if their pages break...
Re:"it's better than nothing" (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, I'm quite sure some Microsoft software is actually worse than nothing. Much of the on-line help in recent versions of some products is just an annoying distraction when you accidentally hit F1 and it takes several seconds to appear, for example, and it's usually faster to use a search engine to find useful answers on the web anyway if you actually wanted some help.
But most of the time, I agree: Microsoft's software is useful, and substantially better than nothing.
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cue the "M$" 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.
Re:"it's better than nothing" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a shame that it took a European company like Opera Software to force European Regulators [internetnews.com] to stop the Microsoft's take over of the Web.
Re:hogwash, this is not a lot of work (Score:3, Insightful)
Despite the original point of HTML being "content is important, layout is decided by the user (or, more accurately, their software)", it's not really worked out that way - hence why CSS came to be.
7 years ago, IE was the reference implementation not because it was any good but because it was what most people were likely to be using. So web designers could very well find themselves designing for IE (because that's what most of the customers would be using) then tweaking to make it look much the same in Netscape (because no matter how much we say "Layout is not the business of the web designer", that never really cut much ice with the designer or their boss)
Sooner is Better (Score:2, Insightful)
There are those who feel that maintaining the old rendering mode would be preferable - allow developers to add the meta tag forcing standards mode. "Don't break the web."
The problem is that unless 100% of new pages include that tag, the amount of broken stuff out there keeps increasing.
Assuming the goal is write-once, standards-based content (please tell me that's the goal), you can break it now, or break it years from now when the amount of content has grown.
Do it now, rip the bandaid off. Force future user agents to use the One True Markup so we don't end up in this situation again.
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.
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:3, Insightful)
Write a standards-adherent CSS, and check that it works in firefox, konqueror, safari, elinks and $BROWSER. Then, write a completely different CSS stylesheet for IE. Make apache return one or the other, depending on the user-agent string. Any reasons why this would be infeasible?
no. PLEASE NO ! (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes, there's these crazy (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, I forgot to mention, these bosses sign our paychecks.
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:2, Insightful)
Forcing users to do things "the right way" will make most of them at least try.
Remember the "C:\Program Files" and "C:\Documents and Settings" folders? In order to use them, programmers had to use long filenames, so support for long filenames was soon implemented in most programs.
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:3, Insightful)
Funnyily enough I agree with all of your post except the ***
For starters "DEP" known to the rest of the world as the NX bit, has been supported in linux kernels since 2004, now this should not require any code changes at all to utilize. The kernel handles memory protection, and when the binary is loaded I'd imagine everything in .data and .bss should be protected, aswell as every malloc.
now, on to ASLR, since linux 2.6.12 it's on by default, and also, requires no special code, it just works, as it should (and hopefully does) do on vista.
now onto vista 'protected mode', essentially this reduces the privilege level, awesome, now windows isn't running it's browser as root essentially, but every decent windows person should have a restricted personal account themselves in which they do things regardless, making it moot, and nobody sane in linux does everything as root.
as said, I agree with the rest of your post, but the *** part makes you sound like you listen to too much microsoft advertising, the people who code firefox are smart, don't bash them without looking into things.