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."
I'll be happy with proper XHTML support. (Score:4, Interesting)
So, because I use PHP, I go and tell everyone that the page I'm serving up is application/xhtml+xml. Whoops, MSIE doesn't understand that... *roles eyes*. So I have to chuck in a bit of code to check for MSIE, and then add a disclaimer at the bottom, "If your user agent has MSIE in it, then this page was served as text/html. Maybe you should stop using MSIE if you are, or change your user agent if you aren't."
Not to mention having to chuck in IE specific CSS (the
which allows a separate style sheet that no other browser sees).
Meh, I'll continue not developing for MSIE, unless I have to, and because I'm using standards compliant code, the site should still be perfectly viewable, even without CSS. If only other people decided not to develop for MSIE, maybe more people would get a better browser...
Actually maybe MSIE 8 will actually mean that I don't have to care that IE even exists? (Sorta how I don't care that Opera exists, because I know that it is relatively standards compliant.)
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:5, Interesting)
demo of how MS sets a standard .. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well , they could have bothered while they were about cloning Netscape [edge-op.org] and making running any other browser a jolting experience [edge-op.org] and preventing Netscale from sabotaging their protocol extensions [edge-op.org]. Or in english, making web pages not render correctly in other peoples browsers
Re:"it's better than nothing" (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:3, Interesting)
And I believe those alternative browsers have about 30%-40% of total users now, and growing.
And Firefox adoption alone will force those webmasters to use standards, now that Firefox 3 is finally a fine browser (and the other browsers are making nice progress too, but firefox leads in users) it will make Internet Explorer have less than 50% of all users in 2008 or the first half of 2009.
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it is a very good move.
The question is, how much good will it do them?
My estimate is that the mere fact that they were willing to change their usual policy to that extent shows how much weaker their market position has become.
Most new sites, as far as I've noticed, are coded to standards. Most of the others are no longer "Best viewed under IE 6.0" either. Firefox holds about 25% of the global browser marketshare, and over 40% in certain European countries.
Microsoft did not switch to standards because of the goodness of their software-making hearts. They did it because there is no longer any other game in town.
Of course, that does not mean they will not try to subvert standards at some later date, when they have stopped bleeding users and maybe even regained some markertshare. But for now, standards are of utmost importance -- without them, they know they will continue bleeding users to other browsers.
It has to mean something when you have the OS monopoly, when you've used it to gain browser monopoly, and now you're still losing.
I welcome Microsoft's new strategy because it will not help only Microsoft, but also all the others. Unless, of course, people fail to update their sites and Microsoft remains the only browser capable of rendering them. But they are in a minority.
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:4, Interesting)
Because I felt that it was the Right Thing to do, I've always coded for standards compliant browsers first, and hacked it to work for IE later. So with this announcement by MS, it's interesting and ironically funny to me that it a move by MS (albeit after many years of loud public complaining by web devs) is going to for once make me work *less* than those who code for IE only.
I never thought I'd say this (and reserve the right to take back this statement until I've seen that IE8 *really* does have compliance to W3 standards when it's released), but, well, here it is: Good job, MS IE Team!
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:3, Interesting)
Kinda like the guy coming to his senses and complying now that a gun is at his head.
Face it, as much as MS has tried to "own" the web, open standards and competition (mostly from open source projects), has figuratively put the gun to their head.
I sure don't miss the day when webistes told me I needed to be running a certain version of windows with a certain version of IE with a certain window dimension.
Next step towards standards is more "media rich" content. W3C is working on this standard, and hopefully this will clear up the muddied waters with WMV, Flash, QuickTime, Java, SilverLIght, et al.
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:4, Interesting)
Why can Microsoft simply support the new standards?
Because it's not that simple. You have to remember, they have a whole business model built around keeping a large customer base which they've been building for almost 20 years happy. There are companies out there that have built their entire infrastructure on MS products, namely IE, and for MS to "simply support the new standards" means breaking (lots) of old functionality. That translates into actual dollar amounts when it comes time to fix all the old web applications out there that rely on the borked functionality that $_IE_VERSION <= 7 provided. In other words, this is going to cost a lot of companies a lot of money. To make it even worse for MS once IE supports the standards it means that lots of corporate sites will render correctly in a variety of browsers, giving people even less reason to use IE. This is a lose/lose situation for MS.
Why can't MS fix them once and for all and be done with it?
The response you've given makes perfect sense from a consumer point of view. "WTF mate, how hard can it be!?" exclaims the user who doesn't have to pay for or worry about implementing the changes. Now, having said that I have zero pity for all those businesses who were duped into vendor lock-in and are going to be in a world of pain if they don't get their sites up to spec, and I have zero pity for MS. They have well and truly made their own bed and they can certainly sleep in it.
If they screwed up in the past, they should admit so and make up for their screwup.
They are. That's why IE is going to support the standards by default. I'm not sure what you're looking for here, although I suspect a good many people want a blood sacrifice and sworn oaths to never put web developers in this position again.
My point is that's why we're bashing Microsoft, not because we take perverse pleasure in saying rotten things about them.
Oh come on, of course we take perverse pleasure in saying rotten things about them ;-)
Re:"it's better than nothing" (Score:5, Interesting)
But once you've installed an expensive Microsoft product that is a failure because most people hate it and only a few people use it, there's a cure: just replace a little bit more of your working infrastructure with Microsoft products, and suddenly the unused Microsoft products will become vital, useful parts of your business instead of embarrassing mistakes.
So the whole project tanked in the end? Well, you can't blame the Microsoft technologies. They're all "Best of Breed" products with all the right buzzwords and bullet points. Just think of how efficient and unstoppable you would be if you had just managed to convince your employees to use it. I guess you weren't ready to be a Best of Breed business.
This is the eternally recurring story of Microsoft developers, consultants, and "process experts" who just push Microsoft instead of actually doing their jobs.
Doing their jobs, by the way, means studying the businesses they work for, finding out what features would be beneficial and which would actually be used, and figuring out how the available technologies will fit into current practices and current infrastructure. Oh, and figuring out how software can help you simplify process. More often than not, behemoth kitchen sink software does not allow you to create a customized, lightweight process for a unique business.
Most Microsoft consultants who read that last sentence will say, "Ah, here's where it becomes obvious that this guy is on drugs/inexperienced/trolling." Because their Microsoft marketing brochures -- sorry, "educational publications for developers" -- tell them that the only way to create a customized, lightweight solution is to buy the BIGGEST and most featureful product available. You wouldn't want to adopt (or, gasp, develop!) a product and find out it's missing that one vital feature that's necessary to make it lightweight.
So, instead of doing their job, they compare products on a bullet-point basis, using Microsoft "educational" materials to guide them, and work towards a vision of the future in which the more processes and supporting software features people use, the more efficient they are. It's no accident that project plans for adopting Microsoft technologies usually involve adopting tons of practices and processes at the same time -- it helps justify the expense and complexity of the software, and it helps construct a utopian fantasy in which the business will run in perfect synchrony because of the awesome power of process, in defiance of human nature and in defiance of the finite number of hours in the day.
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Let's Bash Microsoft! (Score:3, Interesting)
http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html [joelonsoftware.com]
The web standards camp seems kind of Trotskyist. You'd think they're the left wing, but if you happened to make a website that claims to conform to web standards but doesn't, the idealists turn into Joe Arpaio, America's Toughest Sheriff. "YOU MADE A MISTAKE AND YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BREAK. I don't care if 80% of your websites stop working. I'll put you all in jail, where you will wear pink pajamas and eat 15 cent sandwiches and work on a chain gang. And I don't care if the whole county is in jail. The law is the law."
On the other hand, we have the pragmatic, touchy feely, warm and fuzzy engineering types. "Can't we just default to IE7 mode? One line of code
Secretly? Here's what I think is going to happen. The IE8 team going to tell everyone that IE8 will use web standards by default, and run a nice long beta during which they beg people to test their pages with IE8 and get them to work. And when they get closer to shipping, and only 32% of the web pages in the world render properly, they'll say, "look guys, we're really sorry, we really wanted IE8 standards mode to be the default, but we can't ship a browser that doesn't work," and they'll revert to the pragmatic decision. Or maybe they won't, because the pragmatists at Microsoft have been out of power for a long time. In which case, IE is going to lose a lot of market share, which would please the idealists to no end, and probably won't decrease Dean Hachamovitch's big year-end bonus by one cent.
And long filenames is different. Win16 applications were still presented with the aliases (C:\PROGAM~1 and C:\DOCUME~1). In fact they still are. Win32 ones weren't. But you needed to recompile (and do a lot of other stuff) to go from Win16 to Win32 anway, the fact that MAX_PATH changed wasn't really noticable.
And older Win32 applications worked on NT which always had long filenames.
They didn't push long filenames onto old applications, because that would have been stupid. Win16 applications could use a special API to get at LFNs, but they had to opt into it, just like web pages should opt into to a standards mode which will break pages that are designed for IE6.
Re:"it's better than nothing" (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:"it's better than nothing" (Score:4, Interesting)
However, there aren't many other consulting religions in which most of the consultants themselves are devout believers who retain their faith no matter what kind of destruction they cause. Even Rails and J2EE developers eventually come to realize that those technologies only are good in certain contexts. Microsoft guys just blame the customer for not reaching far enough for the helping hand Microsoft offered them.
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:2, Interesting)
What? Is it 1998 or something? There are these things called 'Cascading Style Sheets' which allow you to apply a style to an (X)HTML document.
They actually save bandwith, because everything is written only once (instead of putting font tags everywhere in the HTML, like in the Old Days) and you can use a single file (and thus, download) for all the documents in a domain.
If 'good looking' sites are slow for you, it is probably because of poor browser choice. It should both render fast and reliably on your hardware AND let you set a style to be used on all web pages, if their 'bullshit' degrades your browsing experience.
Now, of course, there are asshats who make their entire websites in Flash. I personally think they should all die in a well, but that's just me :)
(BTW, Firefox has this nifty extension called Flashblock, it blocks Flash! don't know about Java, I never see that any more)
Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills (Score:3, Interesting)
Safari is insignificant, even with their bullshit bundling tactics. You can use these same marketing and advertising statistics to knock down the hugely overstated "Apple revolution" we're in the middle of, with their grand ~7% market share.
Oh, and back to desperate to validate your perspective, with IE holding 73% of the market share, and Firefox holding 18% of the market share, and Safari holding 6% of the market share, to make a statement like "and now you're still losing" is just ridiculous. Holding 73% of the browser market share isn't "losing", it's just "winning less". And if you look at the Firefox versus IE numbers, Firefox's growth against IE has started to simmer down. They had a big boom towards the end of 2007, but the installing Firefox trend seems to have burned itself out and FF growth has gone back to the slower trickle that it was before the boom started. If you look at the number objectively, that's the reality of the situation.
*** BTW if anyone who works for or is associated with Firefox is reading this, can we get some protected mode under Vista please? It's about what benefits the user, not what beef you have with Microsoft/Vista. I know you'd feel sick at the idea of a Firefox exploit that works on every platform but Vista, but deal with it, get over it, and do what's right for the consumer. As a front-line internet program that people are supposed to trust, the fact that you guys don't take full advantage of DEP, ASLR, and Protected Mode doesn't exactly impress. I'd expect you to take advantage of the same features on Linux and OSX too, if they offered them. Quit picking sides in the OS war and go that extra mile to support your users. ***
Just like the fantasy land the Apple fanbois are living in with their 7.8% market share, versus Windows having a 91% market share. All the witty commercials on earth can't change the fact that you hold less than ***10%*** of the PC market, despite having an arguably superior product and a fairly heavy marketing campaign. But at least Apple has some consumer appeal. Firefox? Most people don't give a damn about installing "another" browser. Their computer has IE, so they use IE. End of story.
Disclaimer: I'm shopping for MacBook Pros and I have no beef with Firefox, just with people who look at the situation through a magic lens that makes the world look like they want it to look.