IE8 Breaking Microsoft's Web Standards Promise? 329
An anonymous reader points out a story in The Register by Opera Software CTO Hakon Lie which tells the story of how Microsoft's interoperability promise for IE8 seems to have been broken in less than six months. Quoting:
"In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default. Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise. This week, the promise was broken."
There's a saying.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably the corporate customers (Score:5, Insightful)
MSes volume license customers probably asked MS to make IE7 mode the default. And when money talks, companies listen.
No, intranets are not the web (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like the same old backward compatibility for corporate intranets, sharepoint, etc.
And the GUI shown that controls this can be changed with a single click of a checkbox.
Sounds good enough for me, though I suspect nothing MS does will be good enough.
P.S. Opera is my default browser, and I have used it since they made it free, but their CTO's claim
is mostly all wet.
Re:Probably the corporate customers (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that it makes sense for the intranet pages to be viewed in Compatibility Mode.
However showing a broken page icon next to standards-compliant web pages is another issue altogether. Clearly the broken page icon should apply to pages that aren't standards compliant!
Alarmist article. Boring. (Score:5, Insightful)
The dirty secret is buried deep down in the ÂCompatibility view configuration panel, where the ÂDisplay intranet sites in Compatibility View box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.
So they use standards compliant mode by default over the internet, but not for internal sites that are probably aimed at the specific browsers supported by the company's IT department. Sounds reasonable to me. Anyone have a problem with this?
Misleading summary.... it's INTRANET ONLY (Score:5, Insightful)
MS is "breaking" that promise only for intranet pages and, honestly, intranet pages are a very different. If you think corporations are going to be updating all these internal applications when all they have to do is switch on compatibility mode, well you've got another thing coming.
And, if intranet pages stop working I'd wager a whole lot of users and corporations would just turn on compatibility mode for EVERYTHING and be done with it. One could argue even more people will use the regular IE8 mode if this is left as default.
Wait, I don't know what I was thinking. M$ IS EVIL LIAR!
(Intranet vs. Internet) & Efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:INTRANET only (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess this all reflects the same woe preventing any standard's adoption: is it cheaper for the corporate sector to go with it or go against it? In the case of Intranet apps, I suspect the answer is a resounding "no," and it would most likely just be seen as breaking compatibility for an abstract reason.
I bet that, with enough poking and shit from the community, however, the MS guys could be convinced to have it default to compatibility mode for intranet sites only on Business versions of Vista.
Re:There's a saying.. (Score:3, Insightful)
You must be new here. Seriously. Go read the Hans Reiser post. People are often modded up for preachy, glib, and obvious. If all three it's almost a sure thing.
Genius (Score:2, Insightful)
I will not be surprised if standards mode is even removed completely by the time it leaves beta. They're just easing people into the idea of not using standards mode by starting on intranet pages at the moment.
SURPRISE! Not. (Score:2, Insightful)
Come on, man! Metaphorically, it is about the same as expecting a long-time multiple-repeat-offense child molester to behave from now on, based on her claim that she has "Seen the light," and has been "Healed! Praise the Lord!"
Yeah, right.
For a number of years now, whenever I hear another claim from Microsoft, my response has been "I will believe it when I see it."
And sadly, the fact is that I haven't been seeing it.
Re:Probably the corporate customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies with intranets that don't work in a standard web browser can set all their clients to use the broken backwards compatibility mode by default as part of their policy settings.
Re:Probably the corporate customers (Score:1, Insightful)
there are a lot of intranet apps that are coded to work around a lot of IE only quirks
They're not coded to work around the IE only quirks.
They're only coded to work with IE.
There's a marked difference between the two. The first assumes that they work with other browsers. The second makes it obvious that there is no concept of 'other browsers' on a corporate intranet.
I work in an IE only intranet shop. I'm the 'rogue' using Firefox to ensure that at least what I produce is robust (I mean, you can't beat the web-dev tools for trouble shooting, and they aren't much good if you can't see what you're producing in at least FF and IE.)
or it could be... (Score:3, Insightful)
Only intranet pages are not rendered in standards mode by default,
Because SharePoint (and other denizens of the MS ghetto) does not, and never will, comply with relevant open standards.
(Should we be thankful they still use TCP? Or should we pray for the ultimate ghettoisation - let them isolate themselves behind their own proprietary walls.)
Exactly - tag: AndThisSurprisesYouBecause (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Probably the corporate customers (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, having installed IE8 beta for the first time about five minutes ago. I clicked the broken page button, and sure enough, the page broke (on a site I've been working on and haven't gotten to IE6/7 hacks yet). Works as promised, I guess. Thankfully, the default strict compliance mode either works correctly or close enough that my lack of IE-conditional stylesheets didn't matter.
I think a little explanation that pops up in that first-load box would be sufficient. They could even use it to paint themselves in a good light - "By default, IE8 will show websites using the latest web standards. Some websites have not been developed to the latest web standards, and may not appear correctly. If this happens, click the compatibility mode icon (image) and the page will be drawn in a less standards-compliant mode that should be closer to the website designer's intentions."
Seriously, attack the web devs and designers in the firstrun message if you have to. Use it as an opportunity to brush up on your doublespeak and make us look bad. We don't care, so long as you render the page as well as the Gecko and Webkit engines by default.
Intranet sites, whatever. I think that should be done within the network rather than the browser's defaults directly, but that's not a major concern to me really.
Re:Why should this surprise anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a ridiculous thing to say. Internet Explorer 6 was the first Windows version that had doctype switching, which enabled them to ditch the 5.5 engine as "quirks mode" and do things like fix the box model, add real auto margins, etc. Internet Explorer 7 included additional selector support, min/max-* support and fixed positioning. Internet Explorer 8 includes further selectors, the selectors API, CSS tables, generated content, DOM Storage, data URIs, and more.
I'm a web developer. I'll be holding a grudge against Microsoft for years to come. But even I can recognise that there has been actual progress. You don't have to invent reasons to criticise them, their actions are appalling enough without having to resort to making things up.
Misleading (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stop the press. (Score:3, Insightful)
Public opinion of Microsoft is a strange thing. When viruses and worms live in the holes and cracks of the Windows platform, people blame the writers of said malware exclusively and hold Microsoft blameless, or worse, paint them as the victim of being so successful.
What world do you live in ? Microsoft consistently get the blame for just about everything that goes wrong with computers in general, even when it's not even remotely their fault.
Microsoft is the enabler in most of these situations and the public needs to be reminded of that fact until it is generally accepted and understood.
By far the most common "enabler" in all computer-security-related incidents is the user.
Re:or it could be... (Score:2, Insightful)
Only intranet pages are not rendered in standards mode by default,
Because SharePoint (and other denizens of the MS ghetto) does not, and never will, comply with relevant open standards.
(Should we be thankful they still use TCP? Or should we pray for the ultimate ghettoisation - let them isolate themselves behind their own proprietary walls.)
Yup, Sharepoint is ghetto when compared to the Linux alternatives...of which there are no real contendors. No. Stop. There aren't.
This makes sense for MS.
Re:INTRANET only (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, grasshopper, when you get a real job (not at McDonalds') you might find that your corporate masters have set up this elaborate internal information system that does, like really important things. And further, you might find that it was coded a number of years ago and the coders used, let's guess, Internet Explorer 6. The evil company spent lots of time and money getting it to work Just Right. They don't feel like upgrading it just year. That's "in the budget".
You, Mr. New Employee, are using this exact same code to get your work done and hence your pay check. The real world does, and likely will continue to use various incarnations of IE.
That's why you care.
Re:There's a saying.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Stop the press. (Score:3, Insightful)
I live in a much bigger world that hasn't heard of the RIAA or MPAA before, the world where most people think "PC" means Windows, the world where Linux doesn't quite exist yet.
Yes. That would be the world where everyone blames Windows (and Microsoft) whenever something goes wrong on their computer.
Is your heard buried in the sand or buried in your world?
Apparently yours is, if you think anyone except Microsoft gets the blame whenever, say, someone's game crashes, or a dodgy video card BSODs their machine.
Microsoft knows the base-line of users it is dealing with. It spends millions knowing the user and user interfaces and the like. It is the same Microsoft that has STILL not taken out the "run on insert" autorun.inf nonsense from many machines.
This is changed in Vista.
It is the same Microsoft that thought it was a good idea to put ActiveX on the Wild-Wild-Web and expect everyone to place nice.
In 1996. Got something a little more up to date ?
The same Microsoft that makes a file executable by all users simply by having a ADE, ADP, BAS, BAT, CHM, CMD, COM, CPL, CRT, DLL, DO*, EXE, HLP, HTA, INF, INS, ISP, JS, JSE, LNK, MDB, MDE, MSC, MSI, MSP, MST, OCX, PCD, PIF, POT, PPT, REG, SCR, SCT, SHB, SHS, SYS, URL, VB, VBE, VBS, WSC, WSF, WSH or XL* (probably not a complete list) extension on the file name.
You do understand that those files aren't actually "executed", right (well, except for the ones that are actually executables like .exe) ? That the shell just passes them off to whatever program is registered to handle them ?
You know, just like every other remotely user-friendly GUI shell does ?
The same Microsoft who thinks they can set up a stable server on an OS platform designed from the ground up for running user games and applications without consideration of security.
Your understanding of Windows's development is severely deficient.
Microsoft could easily have done what Apple did -- rewrite a new OS and build a compatibility layer for old apps, but they didn't [...]
Yes, they did. They just did it half a decade earlier (like Apple tried, but failed, to do).
[...] and every time they threaten to do that (as in the case of the next version of Windows after Vista) but they back off on it just as they back off on all other challenging improvements to the OS they have promised. In the end, they just repackage everything they made before and sell it to users once again.
There is no need to "rewrite" Windows NT. It is *at least* as technically capable as its peers.
Yes. Microsoft IS in fact the primary enabler. They could have fixed many of the problems I identified more than 10 years ago because they knew of those problems even back then.
The fact remains that the vast, vast majority of security problems on Windows (or, indeed, on any platform) are due to end users and third party software, outside of Microsoft's control. The only way in which Microsoft is an "enabler" is by being in the position of providing the most widely-used platform.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why should this surprise anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
IE7 also was the first IE to support full PNG alpha transparency. IE6 only did it in a half-assed hackathon way that was completely useless.
The problem with IE8 is not that it's not standard compliant enough (or that it's not out yet, for that matter). This is the trend MS must follow to stay relevant. The problem is that there are still the unwashed masses of IE6 users on Windows versions earlier than XP that have to be catered for. Displaying a message like "IE6 users go to hell or update" is not going to be acceptable until IE6 has less than 10% market share.
Re:SURPRISE! Not. (Score:3, Insightful)
Might want to read the article - no promises broken at all. This is for the intranet, not the internet. This is one place where the choice to do so by default (it can be changed easily by sys admins via group policy) is both logical and correct.
Re:Was excited but very disappointed about IE8 (Score:2, Insightful)
Netflix
There is a known compatibility issue between Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Netflix. Users of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 cannot view On Demand movies by using Netflix. Microsoft and Netflix are working together to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. This release note will be updated as soon as this issue is resolved.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949787 [microsoft.com]
Re:or it could be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which begs the question, why hasn't Mozilla put more effort in making Firefox easy for enterprise users to deploy?
It strikes me as a large market they are not particularly interested in.
Re:or it could be... (Score:2, Insightful)
But they don't NEED to put it in the stupid registry! Just build a nice pretty GUI that'll integrate in Server 2003 and 2008 that'll make a file that will alter the "about:config" would do wonders for enterprise adoption. Hell,just making it easy to lock it down so users aren't installing every extension they come across would be good too.
They need to put the settings in the registery to integrate with Group Policy.
What really surprises me though is why haven't a couple of programmers come along and taken the Firefox browser and cooked up some nice to use Group Policy controls for it,maybe with some easy to deploy extensions packages that would appeal to the business markets?
Group Policy uses .adm files which specify values which are stored in a machine's registry. What other mechanism are you referring to when you say "group policy control"? Yeah it is possible some MMC snap-in could be created to handle the generation of a prefs.js however handling this at logon time on a user by user basis involves either Firefox moving the values into the registry instead and thereby integrating with GPOs very nicely (an ADM file would be easy to create) or creating custom script(s) that would download a prefs.js during logon and place it into a user's Firefox profile folder.
I'm sure a good chunk of them would be happy to ditch IE if they had a way of controlling it on the network.
The thing about storing data in the registry is that it is easy to block access to the registry for regular users, just by preventing them from running regedit.exe or regedt32.exe. It would be difficult, if not impossible currently, to prevent users from modifying their prefs.js to customize it further than what company policy states while still retaining the company policy-based settings that must be enforced. Firefox would need to be modified so that the prefs.js file was divided into policy-based settings and user-customized settings and for them both to work properly when deploying a prefs.js using a logon script (or GPO-specific settings using an ADM). Maybe it provides some primitive support for this already. I don't know. I don't use Firefox at home because of issues with saving tabs with FF3 (on OS X). I prefer Opera on Windows even though I've been told tabs in FF3 supposedly are saved in the Windows version.
Re:INTRANET only (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:There's a saying.. (Score:5, Insightful)
IE7 is a good browser. IE8 will be a better browser. This article is ridiculous. Not having standards mode for intranet is hardly breaking a promise.
I'm looking at that statement and I simply cannot believe that anyone said it. I work, these days, for my sins, in a Microsoft shop; everything we build is for Microsoft platforms, practically every tool we use is a Microsoft tool. But the one Microsoft product that no-one in the building will use except for testing is IE. Most people use Firefox, some people use Safari, I use Opera.
So why not? Is it because we care about standards? Well, a few of us do. But mainly, it's the dreadful 'lets hide all the controls' user interface, the 'helpful' 'we know what you want' features, and the slug-like performance.
IE is so bad that even brainwashed pro-Microsoft zealots won't use it.... and that's a good browser?
Re:There's a saying.. (Score:3, Insightful)
boy do you miss the boat. Microsoft still has 75% of the web browsing market. Pages built for IE6 are still expected to work for banks, hotels, and intranets. When Microsoft changes a default 80% of the world suffers because internal developers write ONLY for IE. The original promise what that IE8 would render in W3C standards mode by default unless another page mode was triggered. This would have been huge, allowing people to properly write pages for Opera, Firefox, & Safari and have IE render them according the standard method. If IE8 kicks to "IE standards" first, then web programmers still have to modify their pages just for IE8 by putting the code to "kick" IE into the proper mode. This will put IE with 3 separate versions of compatibility just for IE "standards"... when the goal is to write 1 HTML page that works for everybody with no changes.
Intranets make the whole thing worse because internal apps simply won't move unless they have to. At my work we are still using one web app that requires Microsoft Java and IE6 and won't work with anything SUN. This is where Microsoft is so entrenched and any changes cause their "customers" great pain. So every time they talk about web standards they back of because of the entrenched developers.
Re:There's a saying.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Easy question. The pages aren't made with standards compliance or cross browser compatibility in mind. They are made to render correctly in IE.
Re:There's a saying.. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's funny, because I recall having to fix pages when IE 5 came out, again when IE 5.5 was released, and again for 6 and 7. Each version of IE came with its own set of quirks and changes that caused non-trivial CSS layouts to render oddly. Conditional comments [microsoft.com] greatly aided the transition, but it was a transition nonetheless, so why not make a transition that actually makes web development more uniform for a change?
As for still requiring Microsoft's Java (because of JDirect [codeguru.com] or the com.ms.win32 stuff, I assume?) and IE6, IE8 is a moot point. If you aren't changing your environment either way, what does it matter what the rest of the world does?
Then again, there's no reason why your shop couldn't use Firefox with IE Tab [mozilla.org] and set your intranet domain to automatically revert to the IE renderer. Best of both worlds: local compatibility with global compatibility.
Re:INTRANET only (Score:3, Insightful)
Who knows? Maybe you're too young to remember, but there was indeed a problem with Word 97 saving to Word 95 format. This caused a great deal of resentment in that either an entire organization and its partners had to stay on Office 95 or all upgrade to Office 97 together. A mixed environment was not simple. The only workaround at the time was to save a Word 97 document in RTF so that the earlier version could read it, albeit with a loss of functionality. The frustration was coupled with the fact that all Word documents had the extension ".doc", which meant that you could not tell which version of Word a particular document was written with short of trying to open it.