Remember the bad old days of “This site is best viewed with Browser X at Resolution Y”, before the concerted push towards web standards? Looks like they could be on their way back.
Now, I kind of understand their problem; they don’t want to have a whole load of websites appear broken when users upgrade to a new browser. But they’ve got their view of responsibility around the wrong way: site authors should have to opt out of standards in order to support IE, not opt in.
The details of the “compatible with IE 8.0″ scheme sound terrifying; multiple DOCTYPEs and modes and frozen bugs and all the potential security risks that come with them, and all the other browser makers being forced to support them in order for their own product not to appear faulty.
At some point, we’ve got to cut the tie from legacy browsers (read: IE) that don’t support standards correctly. The rest of the world can’t keep dancing to Microsoft’s tune just because they don’t want to lose face in front of some of their customers. If they’re serious about supporting old web apps, they should ship IE with multiple versions of the Trident rendering engine, that switches to an older version when faced with non-standard pages; that may make it bloated and heavy, but it’s their call if they want full legacy support.
Microsoft have shown they’re capable of making the switch to new standards when it suits them — Office 97 used different formats to Office 95 and below, for example — and all the products they sell now have a support lifecycle. I don’t think it’s unfair to expect web applications to have a similar lifecycle.
I think what it comes down to is that this is a problem of their own making; after ‘winning’ the browser war with the release of IE6, MS broke up the IE team and stopped active development. For six years they sat back while technology moved on. Now that they’ve realised what problems this has caused, they want to offload the burden onto everybody else.
Your absolutely right — It’s because of Microsoft’s irresponsibility to stay up to cut with IE that other browsers have the gained such popularity (see Firefox, for example) — If they would simply sit down for a night and actually see how many users they’re losing *just* because of their policy on matters like this in general, they might just make the changes needed after all… which leads one to believe it might be needed to possibly boycott the most well-known browser on earth (next to netscape, of coarse) :)
FM4k [May 5th, 2007, 11:05 am]
Problem is automatic opt-in is for all those people who have had the website designed for them which wouldn’t comply with the new rendering technique.
Potentially breaking a large amount of website isn’t something to take easy. And you can’t say that “Their webmaster should take care of it.” cause many don’t have a permanent webmaster and also isn’t particularly willing to suddenly shell out for an update when the old site “just worked”.
This new IE8 opt-in could be good, IF it’s a one time opt in trigger. The opt in would mean that once opted in the site has opted in to ALWAYS render with the latest rendering engine.
In which case we’d then have three modes: (I’m ignoring the mode inbetween Quicks and Strict here)
Quirks — the HTML soup from the dark ages of doom
Strict — IE6/7’s attempt for standard but which still shows it scars of the old soup model
Standard — Up to date rendering in line with Mozilla, Safari and Opera continually maintained which hopefully Microsoft will throw their own IE into.
The simple painful fact of a webdeveloper’s life is that support is that we just can’t suddenly drop support for the browser with the biggest marketshare. Clients don’t care that IE is the de facto standard while you want to comply with the W3C standards. They just want something that works.
I think our best bet is to keep lobbying Microsoft and keep stressing to them that some clean up action is required to allow the web standards and the web itself progress.
Thomas Thomassen [June 4th, 2007, 12:06 am]