| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| Simon |
IE7I see Microslop have resorted to copying their peers with regards to tabbed web browsing and the like. I personally won't be using it but it's good to see that they are finally waking up to a much better way of surfing the web that has been around for years.
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| Barefoot Andrew |
Re: IE7
...and it's still crap. A. |
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| Simon |
Now there's a new and innovative idea - 
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| orangepippin |
Yes this is a clear case of MS playing catch-up - I think it got to the point where MS developers were using Firefox internally. | ||||
| jema |
But it is still crap on JavaScript, crap at CSS, and even the tabbed interface seems poor compared to Firefox. | ||||
| orangepippin |
Such a shame it is so widely used! | ||||
| tahir |
Re: IE7
Yup |
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| orangepippin |
It's not that bad. More standards compliant than previous versions, and far better to use than IE6. Better than Safari, Konqueror et al. I can't get used to the minimalist toolbar though - refresh button too small and in the wrong place. Of course it is very easy when you are developing web apps to assume that what you think is important in a browser is also important to end users - it isn't. Not that I had you down as a website developer Tahir - maybe one day eh! | ||||
| JB |
Or putting it another way - ie7 is not quite as carp as ie6? It is still woefully poor in supporting standards and security and the only real change is the standard MS trick of not changing any functionality or fixing any bugs but just shuffling all the menus around in the hope that people will think it really is a new version. |
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| jema |
Except if it wasn't for the developers sweating blood to make things work in a browser as broken as ie7, then the users would be forced to care, as the sites they visited simply wouldn't work 
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| dougal |
Can't be bothered to find a more appropriate thread.
Some users don't even know how to switch the thing off ...
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/toronto/biggest-bsod-of-all-time-320824.php
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| hedgewitch |
 At least it's not a sad mac face. 
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| lottie |
How very relaxing for me that I haven't a clue what you are on about----I press the buttons and the magic pixies in the box do all the little spells to make it happen for me. | ||||
| bagpuss |
its always amusing to see such things at trainstations last time I was alton towers some of their computer screens had defaulted to a dos prompt! |
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| orangepippin |
I don't think MS are totally behind the need to support the W3C "standards". *You* might think that is important (and I might think it is important), but from their point of view naturally it isn't. It's a bit like saying that sharks should be vegetarians, just because you happen to be one. Most of the developer problems with IE stem from the attitude of thinking that IE *should* be standards compliant - it is far more productive to just work with it rather than against it. I've even seen developers criticising the Ajax syntax for IE as being non-standard, forgetting that MS invented it and it was supported in IE5 long before standards-compliant browsers had cottoned-on to it! Anyway, thankfully we have Firefox. |
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| Barefoot Andrew |
Oh dear - has to be said, that's quite a poor argument OP, IMHO. Standards have been engineered and developed to try and make life easier to the community at large; in their poor support for standards Microsoft would thus seem to have no regard for whether millions of websites work properly, or not, in their browser. A. |
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| jema |
If developers slavishly allow MS to do whatever they want as they have market dominance then things will stay as they are
Better that developers work to the goodish standards that are out there, so that people who use non standards compliant software get some incentive to move and MS get some incentive to be compliant. |
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| orangepippin |
If the people developing the standards did not take account of the de facto standard set by the market leader whose fault is that? Millions of websites do work properly with IE, because most developers have the sense to make sure their websites work with the browsers that their users choose to use, not the browsers that developers *think* they should be using. IMHO the user is always right, not the standards committee. Having said that, I always try to make sure my websites are standards compliant, but that is my choice because I think it is good practice, and not something that users will necessarily bother with. Most users actually surf looking for content, not checking for standards compliance. |
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| Barefoot Andrew |
But a number of the standards came first...
A. |
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| jema |
You would only have a point if the user was exercising a choice. 99% of ie users are not actually choosing at all
If developers don't seek to put any pressure on MS to get compliant, then where will we be? Endlessly doing twice the work 
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| JB |
Which principle could be used to allow every browser to use their own incompatible standards and then saying that every web page should support every different interpretation of the standard even if it is blatantly wrong. "My spellings good spelling its just that the letters all get jumbled up"? |
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| Barefoot Andrew |
Do Microsoft publish readily-available documentation online describing their de facto standards and how to code HTML & CSS to suit? That's a genuine question - I don't know the answer. If yes, there is merit to your argument, if not, their de facto "standard" isn't a standard. A. |
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| JB |
Ignoring the fact that many of the standards predated MS's bastardisation of them ... If the user is always right then the vast majority of users who make a choice choose anything except IE. So by your own argument you should follow standards and not IE. |
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| JB |
I have not seen any standards publication from MS but W3C and netscape (who set many of the standards) do publish those documents. |
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| Northern_Lad |
Standards, in any system, should be set up to provide the best service and functionality, not reflect the dominance of one system over another.
There's nothing to say that companies shouldn't go beyond the standards, but they should all support those standards. |
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| orangepippin |
The vast majority of users either choose to use IE or don't care. As I said above *I* do follow standards, and for personal use I always choose Firefox - but I also believe that foisting my prejudices as a developer on to clients or people who visit my websites is wrong. I think MS should be far more committed to open standards, but for many good and bad reasons they aren't. Beating them over the head with it may make you feel better, but won't achieve much. I do wonder if anyone who criticises IE for standards compliance has actually done anything *positive* about it, instead of just moaning about it. It is quite easy to create standards compliant websites that (also) work with IE, and IE7 is far better than its predecessors in this respect. With positive pressure and a bit of goodwill perhaps the next one will be even better. |
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| Barefoot Andrew |
Yes, standards should arguably be enhanced and extended, otherwise there is never any innovation. (And I can understand how commercial motives drive unilateral "innovation" without regard to the larger community). It's the deliberate or careless flouting of existing standards that's annoying. IE6, for example, does not seem to properly handle the CSS for HTML ordered lists. Why, in version 6, can they not effing get it right? Having said that, if MS have made available clear and precise documentation of their particular implementation of all things HTML & CSS, then I can see merit in OP's argument that it is thus a de facto standard and should be considered as such by the developer. I haven't looked, but I may well do later on. If however, no such documentation exists, then all criticisms of MS and IE stand. A. |
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| Barefoot Andrew |
But there also loads of older systems out there running IE6 and IE5, perhaps run by the very people you describe - ordinary folk who don't care which browser they use. Until faced with modern websites that haven't been coded for IE5/6s quirks, and don't work properly on older machines. A. |
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| tahir |
I can't install IE7 on my Win2K machine (thankfully) | ||||
| orangepippin |
Microsoft development - http://msdn.microsoft.com
IE5/Netscape4 et al - check your webstats to see what proportion of users you are getting with these older browsers and design your site accordingly. |
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| JB |
Do they actually publish their version of the standards there though? I have not found it. There are examples of how it works but they are not consistent across versions of IE and not complete definitions of how it works. Of course if your argument was right then why are ms trying to make IE more standards compliant rather than just making each version use the same standard as the previous, after all if ie6 is the most common browser then surely ie7 should use the same de facto standard? ... and what happens to all your ie7 compliant sites when ie8 comes along? |
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| jema |
What happens each time MS releases a new foul up is that millions of web developers have a lot of work to do 
If some big sites like Amazon or Ebay were to create some new features and tell their users they would only work on a standards compliant browser MS would soon have to toe the line. Lets make no mistake about it, MS are abusing their position and the more web sites jump through hoops to deal with it, the longer the situation will last. |
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| orangepippin |
There is tons and tons of documentation, it will be there somewhere.
You (as a developer) can set IE to render in standards compliant mode or quirks mode. One of the differences is the notorious "box model" where MS and the W3C disagree on how you set the width of an object plus margins and padding - academic to an end user though. In general there doesn't seem to be much of a problem with backwards compatibility to earlier versions of IE - but of course this is a big issue for MS and much less of an issue for more recent standards compliant browsers which generally have little or no need to worry about legacy users. |
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| jema |
Well my latest site was still borked in a few places with ie6 even after I had got it working with ie7
We are not talking about the first few versions of a browser when all the standards were emerging. My JavaScript reference was on its 3rd revision in 1998! they have pretty much had 10 years to make a browser that follows the rules
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| orangepippin |
You equally have had 10 years to make your websites work with IE. It's not that hard. | ||||
| JB |
I've got a wweb site here which works in Firefox, Opera, Netscape, ie5, ie6 ... fails in ie7 because ms have decided to change their minds on how divs and spans layout. It is hard because not only do MS not obey the standards they don't even follow their own standards from one version to another. It's a bit like saying that we should all spell colour as 'color' because there are more Americans than Britons but then discovering that last year they spelt it 'kolor' and next year they change to spelling it 'hue'. |
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| jema |
But it does add 20% more work load to each and every web developer as we have to write different code to support this crap. Clearly it is an insane situation that would be easily solved by Microsoft bothering to follow standards that have been there for a decade. Why defend the indefensible? In some cases it is hard to imagine that they have not got specific code in the browser there just to break things. e.g. how come you can assign to innerHTML for all elements apart from tables in ie7? You can do it indirectly by using a div and assigning to the innerHTML of the div
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| JB |
It is quite clearly deliberate. They know that they have or had the largest part of the browser market. If they create a feature which works in ie but breaks all the standards then their rationale is that it would persuade people to use ie rather than someone elses standards compliant browser. |
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| orangepippin |
Jema, I largely agree with your various technical comments and the importance of standards, and the benefit to all if MS followed them. However MS may have very good reasons (to them) for not agreeing with your view. You may not agree with their reasons - but just think for a moment, perhaps they may not agree with you.
Unfortunately, you don't have the ultimate truth (and neither do they). I think JB is nearer to the mark, although I think MS are such a big organisation that it is entirely possible for one division to be in open war with the W3C whilst others are all for standards compliance. |
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| JB |
That's quite probably true. If I have a web site developed in visual studio the rendering is different in the preview from visual studio to that shown by ie. (interestingly the visual studio view is closer to that shown by firefox than that shown by ie) |
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| jema |
Microsoft certainly do have there reasons
The question is as developers do we slavishly support them, or do we try and push them towards compliance by giving ie7 users a poorer experience than they will get on a standards compliant browser? |
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| Simon |
And try finding a copy of IE6 on line for older machines nowadays. The bar-stewards have retracted it and tried to hide all trace of it. I can quite understand that but I'm running 98 on one machine and can't install messenger without IE6 being installed first. I would boycott messenger but all our family in the UK use it and getting them to move to something better is impossible.
(if anybody does need it I finally found a copy of the full package that doesn't need to visit the MS site at all to install). |
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| orangepippin |
You should always do the best you can for your users IMHO, even the ones who use IE - but no harm in putting a link to download FF at the bottom of the page! |
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| jema |
The long term best interest for the users is for the situation to improve, and that needs a bit of a stick! |
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| orangepippin |
Carrots are often more effective. Cooperation rather than confrontation is more likely to help those developers within MS who are sympathetic to open standards. | ||||
| MarkS |
So use something else instead of messenger. I dont do much IM but pidgin works with whatever M$ others on here use. Or at least I could communicate fine when mafia. I'm not going to waste effort trying to discuss ie and M$ |