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."
Re:Probably the corporate customers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Misleading summary.... it's INTRANET ONLY (Score:3, Interesting)
If corporations need this it still doesn't have to be the default. They can set it in group policy. It's Microsoft that needs nonstandard IE mode (aka compatibility mode) to be the default for intranets, to lock in SharePoint.
Re:There's a saying.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Considering IE's pattern of "improving" standards compliance over the last decade, a "more compliant" IE8 wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. MICROS~1 seems to think that fixing support for one thing and breaking support for 50 others is an improvement. It isn't. Even IE8's true "standards mode" is just as non-compliant as IE 7, 6, and 5.5. The only thing that has changed over all these revisions is the nature of the rendering errors. One version might treat a certain block element as inline, while the next fixes that issue only to draw inline borders incorrectly. All they do is change the errors, never fix them.
Anyone who thinks IE standards support has improved from IE7 to IE8 is sadly mistaken, and while we'd all rather have a truly compliant IE, it just isn't going to happen. I know I'll get a lot of hate for this, but I'd rather have one broken web browser to develop hacks for than 4.
Re:INTRANET only (Score:5, Interesting)
The article only says that INTRANET pages are not shown in standards-compliant mode by default.
Yeah the article is too harsh on this point, but...
Furthermore, web standards are discriminated against in IE8 by the icon that appears next to standards-compliant web pages
This is just terrible. This sounds like Ballmer came down there personally and mandated this. On the other hand...
First, I suggest that IE8 not introduce version targeting which only perpetuates the problem of non-compliant pages. Instead, IE8 should respect the established conventions which don't need manual switching between modes.
One of the things Microsoft does very well is maintain backwards compatibility. This is of tremendous value to enterprise customers. The least evil way to do this is with rendering modes. You can argue that standards should be the default, but to suggest that Microsoft should stab its most profitable userbase in the back and completely break backwards compatibility just to altruistically further the state of web standards compatibility is ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, I wish it would happen, but it would be a pretty stupid move.
Re:Misleading summary.... it's INTRANET ONLY (Score:3, Interesting)
If only... I have a few businesses from which my company subscribes services and some are actually using Sharepoint as a portal to those services and completely blocks out my Firefox browser. Another is a security company that will only allow Safari and MSIE. But perhaps they aren't using a newer Sharepoint installation.
Re:It's Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't say that personally. I don't think that the security issue is a morality problem so much as they apparently don't employ people that are going to say that something doesn't work.
I'm not sure what other explanation there could be. MS hires some of the best experts in the world and yet has an OS which really, really doesn't reflect the talent. It's almost as if the CEO is demanding the design be a specific way without keeping current on technology.
You can suggest immorality or conspiracy, but realistically most of the things which cause Linux, Mac, *BSD, etc., trouble cost them money as well.
Re:I'm surprised (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically the only thing I have found in several months of using MOSS 2007 with FireFox is that you can't drag and drop webparts around in 'edit page' mode - you have to move them through the webpart settings. Otherwise, everything seems to work fine.
Re:There's a saying.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It has improved. The difference between 6 and 7 wasn't too great, basically just bugfixes and additional selectors, but there are significant improvements in Internet Explorer 8, for instance CSS tables. Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test now, where 6 and 7 were miles off. While it's not a conformance test, it does give a good indication of how far they've come, and it's a result of additional support, not merely "rearranging bugs" as you seem to think (which would actually be far more work than just doing things properly).
Re:Alarmist article. Boring. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Misleading summary.... it's INTRANET ONLY (Score:3, Interesting)
Treasure in the cave (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, it's interesting to note that Hakon Lie has a vested interest in preserving quirks, because his company Opera has built its business on emulating IE (so called "IE5 bug-compatible") in mobile browsers.
So naturally, Opera would be opposed to any move by Microsoft to curb the chaos and make web pages easier to render. They couch this in terms of backward compatibility [zdnet.com], and in fact Hakon Lie and other Opera employees event went so far as to found a new standards body to push their own agenda, and started with similarly threatened browser vendors as members. (Contrast this with the W3C, which invites both vendors and users of a technology to hammer out a standard that serves both ends of that economic stick.)
So, why support a Microsoft decision that seems so harshly standards supporting, as Joelonsoftware points out? Perhaps because a harsh position is unworkable, and perversely leads to delays in adoption of IE7 and IE8 with their new features and new implementations, thus leaving more time for Opera to milk the IE5 bug-compatible business, while they build up their new standards.
Oh, and it seems like the "backwards compatible" mantra has been dropped a bit, with all the hoopla over dropping "apparently unused" attributes such as "rel" from HTML5.
Re:Why should this surprise anyone? (Score:1, Interesting)
No, he's right. You don't honestly believe that it is impossible for Microsoft to deliver the best browser by the end of the year, do you? Any rendering bug in IE8 exists for one reason only: Microsoft doesn't want IE to adhere to a foreign standard. They want it to be just good enough to not lose their stranglehold on the web.
IE8 is years behind other browsers, but since some of the more prominent rendering bugs have been fixed, it is already hailed as a worthy opponent to Firefox/Safari/Opera. Microsoft has done a lot to win back users and developers. A browser without a script debugger or DOM inspector just wasn't viable anymore. But those additions should not obscure the fact that the rendering compliance is still appalling.
Re:Why should this surprise anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Yes!
Is there a i-developed-a-website-that-had-to-support-IE support group?
Not exactly unbiased (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, it's dishonest, even for intranet pages (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft could have dealt fairly with this in a hundred ways. The essence of fairness here would have been to present this to the user as a conscious choice to be made.
For example, during installation, or at first start, the browser could query the intranet in some well-defined way to determine whether the intranet administrators wanted "compatibility view" for intranet pages. Then it could ask the user: "Your company, Amalgamated Widgets, recommends "compatibility view" mode when you are accessing intranet web pages. Accept this recommendation? [x] Yes [ ] No."
You can think of dozens of variations on this.
What Microsoft chose to do instead was to make the choice that best serves Microsoft's interest, rather than the best interests of its corporate customers (let alone the end-users), without telling the user that it is making this choice. And carefully finding the golden mean: making it a preference, thus deflecting criticism, but cagily burying the preference where 99% of users will not know that a choice has been made for them, or even that a choice exists.
Re:INTRANET only (Score:1, Interesting)
One of the things Microsoft does very well is maintain backwards compatibility.
You are kidding, right ? Didn't some people had issues with the latest versions of MSWord not opening files from old versions ?
The default should be proper web code (Score:2, Interesting)
As a web developer, all I care about is that the browser will work in strict mode if I tell it to do so. I noticed quite early on that if a DOCTYPE was missing the system identifier, IE would revert to quirks mode. This isn't a big deal for people like me who actually study the guidelines and use a proper DOCTYPE, but to people who tend to copypasta code from a quick Google search, they will continue to write bad code without even realizing that the browser isn't in strict mode after all. You can't force people to research, but you can still beat them over the head with rendering problems if they just piecemeal their projects together. Maybe it'll encourage the company to get a proper web developer instead of asking the clueless secretary to perform updates.
The DOCTYPE has still not made its way into old, lousy HTML tutorials, so using its presence as a way to determine strict mode would be a good idea. If IE still has exceptions for malformed DOCTYPEs and is too eager to uses quirks mode, then these rendering issues will go on forever.
To me, having strict mode on by default sounds like a major corporate headache, and I don't blame Microsoft for second guessing their promise. But, they should tighten the rules for when quirks mode is selected.
Let's hope the developer mode in IE8 final is more vocal about standards compliance issues, too. Even Firefox is loath to complain about issues unless you have an extension like Web Developer installed. Giving errors to normal people is of course a bad idea, but it shouldn't be so hard or require so much 3rd-party software for developers to get the information they need.