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113 Comments
- talledega500, on 10/12/2007, -5/+81Lets be real here. Is MS really really going to focus on a browser effort? To me it sounded like the guy was fighting the good fight but that fight didnt matter upstairs.
Thats the same in every company. Even project managers dont get to make the big decisions. You cant sneak in full CSS support into a project that has a timeline and deliciously add resources to fill those gaps. You do what you can most times and if anyone wants to be pissed at someone it shouldnt be this guy.
He doesnt set the direction he just fights for what he can within severe constraints.
Like most of us do every day.
Given that IE and its vertical "embedding" into windows and its destruction of Netscape as a company has provided MS with the biggest butt punch monopolist payback to a software company since IBM had to break up: I think you could understand why MS doesnt want to focus on it and is basically playing dead with the browser.
When they do get interested in succeeding in a market it wont be because of great software. It will be because of back room deals which squeeze the competition.
CSS has nothing to do with MS goals as a corporation. Thats what this project manager has struggled with. You heard it from the horses mouth what else could you possibly want. Was anyone looking forward to IE7? Not me. Go FIREFOX GO! - mvent2, on 10/12/2007, -11/+43"What has frustrated me the most has been the uninformed or unrealistic comments. I don’t like my team being called lazy, for example; I don’t like being told my team is “[finding] excuses for not making other improvements.” We’re not looking for excuses; we’ve done the best we can in IE7 given the limitations of time and space. Everything is a tradeoff – look at the progress of the Firefox 2.0 project and I think you’ll see that project management is not that simple."
And do you remember how you got in that boat in the first place? Because when you took the majority of browser share you just left it to collect dust. Had you continued proper steady development and supported these standards earlier on you wouldn't be playing serious catch-up now and your team wouldn't get all the harassment it is now.
With all due respect (I know you are hard-working now), there are certainly no excuses for burdening web developers because of your lack of effort these past few years. Now you must face the consequences and backlash, and you live with it. End of story. Dugg++. - halleyscomet, on 10/12/2007, -2/+31@CaughtThinking
IE support only costs an extra 15 minutes????
What alternate reality are YOU from?
Have you ever designed a web site that tried to USE CSS??? - razei, on 10/12/2007, -2/+29Serves them right?
- MrBabyMan, on 10/12/2007, -5/+31In other news, the devil says hell is really hot.
Where's that 'OBVIOUS' tag when you need it? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24Jumping through hoops is the least part I enjoy in my job. If I had to give up some pay so that I didn't have to spend 75% of my time bugfixing for IE, then I would jump at that chance. MS's lazy attitude toward standards will put the Internet back another five years.
- dpower, on 10/12/2007, -1/+23Well that's what you get for designing an IE only site. Web 2.0 must be killing them.
- Zer0Fade, on 10/12/2007, -2/+21I don't see why Microsoft can't give up and just admit defeat. IE7 is a nice looking browser but with several of the sites I visit (i.e. digg) screws up the whole layout, comments are all weird and I am just extremely frustrated with it all.
I was always an avid user of IE and just recently have started playing with firefox. I cannot believe how different Digg looks between the 2 browsers.
Perhaps Microsoft should scrap IE or maybe strike up an agreement with the mozilla team and use its engine. - SparQy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20It's nice that Firefox and in some small measure Opera has given the IE team a kick in the pants.
It seems obvious that there are at least some people on the IE team trying to turn that mammoth of a ship around.
Without both/all browsers being 100% completely standards compliant and implementing an identical rendering engine, developers will always need to use work-arounds and jump through some hoops. But hey, that's why they pay us the big bucks.... Right... ? - WorldGroove, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19Obviously CaughtThinking and Escamillo are not WebDevs.
It's not just 15mins. You *always* have to keep in mind and implement nonsense code to be compatible with IE for anything you develop. And when the next IE patch/upgrade comes along and breaks the code, you get a bunch of clients yelling at you that their customers can't use the WebApp you built. Depending on your support-agreement, that can distract from current new projects you're working on. And, if your client was mad at you... you might to get on a plane and fly down there to see him face-to-face and explain to him that the IE patch/upgrade messed it up... even though you know he won't care about your explaination. And, do you think they'll pay for that plane-ticket... or your personal time?
It's not....just...15....minutes, sir. What I just described is just scratching the surface of all the trouble WebDevs have to deal with because IE doesn't follow standards. - Gatesophile, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15You're taking the first step to a better tomorrow by admitting IE's faults... I wish you luck in your quest of a better browser.
- bigalreturns, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15I don't think anyone here believes they are internet gawds [sic], but there is a panel of the most knowledgeable and influential people on the internet, known as the W3C, who, in effect, are "internet gawds." They lay down standards as to how browsers should interpret code that developers write. IE decides instead to use its own interpretation of the standards, in other words, the way in which IE renders many pages is wrong. Not just different, but wrong.
Your use of the term "'CSS compliance' rigmarole" would imply to me that you've never tried to write a cross browser compatible page in your life. In the real world, where it really matters, people spend hours trying to make a page look correct in IE. Why? Because IE implements its own unique rendering system, to which the rules can only be found by trial and error.
Could you explain what you mean by most internet-compatible browser out there? To my knowledge, there are very very few things on the internet that can only be seen using IE, and those that there are, are generally like this because they exploit an error in IE, not because it has extra functionality. - Hydraulix, on 10/12/2007, -6/+17Can't keep up? Microsoft released IE back in 1995. Firefox (Phoenix) was released in 2002 and Opera was released back in 1996. Out of the three it's the oldest browser and it can't keep up? Just shows the lack of development MS has.
Microsoft, your days are numbered. Evolve or die. - reknaps, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13A Blog about a blog about a blog.
- washcapsfan37, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8While I think the article was accurate, I feel the title was completely nothing more than M$ bashing. No mention that the article has to do with the amount of CSS compliance to W3 standards at all in the title, just that "IE sux and Firefox rulz!!" IE has made tremendous steps towards W3 compliance as compared to the old Netscape 4 vs IE 4 browser wars. But I also feel it's not in their best interests, which being a web developer myself causes me much grief.
For the record, I love Firefox and use it (even on my Mac). I use IE when I have to and have no qualms with it (except all the security bugs, but the most popular browser will always have that problem).
Buried for inaccurate M$-bashing title. - gaYak, on 10/12/2007, -6/+12Marked as inaccurate, the original poster decided to remove few lines from the topic text, by putting words to Wilson' mouth. Before "In nutshell" add this line:
"In his article, Wilson defended IE, and more specifically, he decried the poor rating given to the browser in a web standards support summary."
The Wilson's blog can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2006/08/10/694584.aspx
And he did not say Opera/Firefox were better, actually.. he didn't mention those browsers at all in the text. - mvent2, on 10/12/2007, -7/+13Maybe I should've made it clearer, by "you" I meant Microsoft as a whole (especially higher management), not the IE dev team. Even if you do practically own the market, that doesn't mean you can just sit on your laurel and ignore the trends because you will be overthrown.
PS. My family all use Firefox, TYVM. - lcarsdeveloper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I helped someone create a site yesterday, I coded a lot of it, and it looked fantastic, it was strict XHTML with 0 errors and 0 warnings, it worked great in all the resolutions I tried, and it loaded very fast. I was happy until we tried it in IE and it broke. I then had to waste another 2 hours trying to fix all the bugs (which were not easy to fix). It makes many of our lives a misery because we can create gorgeous looking sites which we're proud of, and then when we show them off to someone who uses IE they look at us funny because it doesn't work.
And yet, I refuse to be one of the people who makes a Firefox only website, because I'd be locking out around 60% of my visitors, meaning a loss of ad revenue and sales. What are we supposed to do? If IE7 did support CSS properly, and displayed our sites correctly, then within the next 5 years we'd be able to relax a little and spend more time enhancing the site than making it work for the majority who don't understand the differences between "web browsers" and "Internet", much less knowing that there are IE alternatives available. I dream of an Internet where Firefox/Opera are the majority rather than the minority, but with such a huge portion of users browsing with IE, I just don't see that happening. I do what I can to spread the word, but in the end we're stuck with IE. I don't run a tech site like Digg or Slashdot, if I boast about how my website is "XHTML compliant, looks best in Firefox" most of my visitors won't even care. For now, I'm stuck with adding on a minimum 10% extra development time to get my sites working in IE. My comment is nothing more than a rant by a fellow frustrated developer, because I have nowhere else to air my grievances. - trogdoor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5No, they will just use quirks mode.
- vdxc, on 09/29/2008, -1/+5they way I see it is,
Microsoft want to improve user experience, so they have improved the ui and added tabbed browsering to attract new users. they're not bothered with pleasing developers, because the way they see it, if 80% people use IE then developers still have to try and accomodate it. - ShrimpCrackers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I'm quitting as a web developer for these very reasons. Without standards its a nightmare. I'm sick and tired of writing complex scripts and writing all these honestly lame hacks just to get them to work across all browsers. IE7 isn't even fully compliant with CSS2. Heck none of the browsers are 100% compliant. Its causing problems and slows development time.
More time could be spent on making better sites instead of checking for bugs.
All these guys should just freaking agree to fulfill the damn standards, I'll even pay them for it, otherwise I spend the majority of my time with cheap hacks to get around them. - mvent2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4FYI, Microsoft is a member of the W3C (or as you put it, "internet gawds") as listed here: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List and they haven't implemented most of the standards listed by the W3C. Standards exist for a purpose, to ensure compatibility for a common service no matter what product you use.
And you can shove your "best view of the net" in IE7, I'll be busy surfing my favourite perfectly-rendered sites in Firefox with Adblock Plus, Filterset.G and Mouse Gestures. Toodles. - vdxc, on 09/29/2008, -0/+4microsoft has more surely? i mean, how many companies allocate $5 billion or more for r&d( http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/day.asp?pubdate=8/7/2006 ), I bet you the mozilla FOUNDATION don't have that kind of money to spend.
- Zippo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Just more reason to stick with and help spread Firefox.
- corser, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Maybe they aren't FF fanboys, maybe they are Opera fanboys or even Lynx fanboys. I'm personally a "broswer that's easier to develop for" fanboy.
- w0mbat, on 10/12/2007, -6/+10troll
- MrViklund, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Ok, if this is innacurate. How come that Chris Wilson admits that IE does not support CSS as well as Firefox and Opera?
- MrViklund, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Must be hard to work at Microsoft. I mean, when everyone is bashing them. But yes, the support could be better and I really hope that Microsoft upgrade IE7 down the road to support at least what Firefox support. But if Microsoft made IE support even better, No one would have anything to complain about and the would have swept away one of their biggest headache and troll-feeder.
- corser, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3To be fair Microsoft was the first to care about CSS1, since then they've sort of let success breed complacency. Microsoft's hold on the browser market is shrinking (though slowly). My grandparents, though more technical that most of their generation, use Firefox on their desktop and laptop.
A little bit on non-compliance is preferable to a large amount of it, and Firefox's extension mechanism is great. (How did I live without mouse gestures? ) - dioxmat, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Fact is IE7 standards support suck more than they want to admin it. Do they have good CSS support? No, they fixed most of the selectors, most of the known and visible bugs, and that's all. DOM/JavaScript improvements: none. Also... They promised good and native XmlHttpRequest and PNG support, and... we are still waiting for it: http://digg.com/software/PNG_support_in_IE7_not_so_native_after_all
- vdxc, on 09/29/2008, -1/+4what, nearly 80% of people use IE? that's just sucide for websites.
- corser, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3As a developer I can see when the blog's author is coming from. I would have to constantly hear about home much something I developed sucked.
But it it's true that the guys in charge don't care about making their browser play nice then what's the point of continuing development of IE. Maybe their effort would be better spent taking on of the existing open source browsers and improving upon that, much like Apple did with Konqueror. Maybe it's time Microsoft rethought their strategy of owning the whole experience and started using some of the resources that are available out there for everyone to use. - dogStar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3You obvious you don't know much about designing websites. For the developer its hell to code for non-standards compliant browsers. For the user its irritating because using a non-compliant browser ruins you browsing experience.
Standards compliant CSS rendering is as important to the web as ISO9001 compliance is for household white goods.
If your browser is not standards-compliant things will break - that upsets your customers and ruins your business.
The same is going to be the case for Microsoft when Windows users are forced to upgrade to IE7 and half of their favourite sites don't work anymore. - ezrider0, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5if you read the actually blog post [ http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2006/08/10/694584.aspx ] you will notice that he makes some valid points about the scoring of that test and the feedback IE7 has received. The most troubling part about that entire post was this statement:
"for example, it dings our support of each CSS property, one at a time, simply because we support a proprietary “CSS expressions” feature"
why is microsoft still supporting proprietary features that can only run on IIS servers. ASP is a nightmare to code, in no way as powerful as php. I'm glad I don't or ever will again use IE. - corser, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The added benefit to that would be that even though they would be required to provide the source code to their changes, nobody would want it if it involved ActiveX or VBscript
- Outdoor83, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Good spot. The actual blog says nothing of the kind, and isn't inflammatory in any way. It actually tries to open an honest dialog about the advancements of Internet Explorer. Posting inflammatory and false titles takes away from Digg's credibility and reinforces all the stereotypes of Digg users.
Marked as inaccurate. - fatdog789, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3So IE can't match standards that MS never really cared about huh? Tough. But hey, FF and Opera combined don't even come close to matching the numbers of IE users, so I guess that makes them even.
Standards or numbers? I guess it depends on whether you want people to visit your site or you just want to be able to brag about how the site should look. The problem is that CSS support in most browsers isn't anywhere close to what the standards actually are, so until the alternatives are 100% standards-compliant, it doesn't matter if they are more compliant; you still end up having to deal with the exceptions created by the non-compliance. - corser, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3It doesn't matter where it came from, FF is a huge improvement in usability and ease of development over IE. The javascript debugger extension alone is worth switching. (IE's debugger tool suck donkey)
When IE first came out I loved it it was a huge improvement over the Netscape at the time but IE is starting to show it's age. Maybe in time IE might come out with a version that will get me to move away from FF but from what I've seen it won't be anytime soon. - Escamillo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Another whiney web developer that's too lazy to do his job. You're paid big bucks to be a web dev, so stop complaining that it might take a bit of work.
- CarzorStelatis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3The problem IE has is that it's developed by Microsoft. Before I get buried into oblivion, this isn't a Microsoft-bashing post, hear (read?) me out. Both Mozilla and Opera are companies focused entirely on making internet software (web browsing and email). Microsoft, on the other hand, makes many more types of product.
As well as the problem that a company's attentions are divided among so many projects, some of Microsoft's many interests compete with each other. For example, if Microsoft's browser division were to include an Adblock-comparable advert filter in IE, then yes it would improve IE but it would hurt the MSN division's advertising revenues. Mozilla and Opera, on the other hand, simply have to ask one question: 'Is this a worthwhile effort for the improvement in the software it will bring?'. If it improves their software, they do it, they don't need to worry about it hurting their other products. - vdxc, on 09/29/2008, -0/+2I haven't seen any anti IE or adverts discouraging you from using IE instead of a different browser, haven't seen any adverts, flyers, websites, campaigns by companies, etc at all! have you?
it doesn't work, people use what they want, your not going to change someones mind by flashing big 'download firefox or opera' banners all of your site rendering it impossible to read to ie users; people just go to the next site which doesn't have a web developer who thinks that microsoft suck, yet firefox's is the best (firefox is better, but no where near perfect. proper css rendering ala acid2 test is a better sign up quality, and sadly firefox doesn't not do this) - vbsurfer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I know exacly what thats all about... makes me tired and sick to the stomach when is see it break in IE. I wonder why I do work on the web sometimes. Its a tough job but someone has to do it. =D
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3solution for IE, start from scratch all over again. Firefox is so great, and it has such a simple interface, im tired of 'explorer.exe" crashing the whole pc when it gets to some java sites, they need to untie IE from the rest of windows
- TheBigGuycouk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The Gecko engine is free and open source so Microsoft has no excuses as it could use that code to start with to comply with the standards and then work off that to add there proprietary things like ActiveX and VB script
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -7/+9Hey, IE7 team, do I have to say "you'll reap what you sow"?
You could have saved face when you started the development of IE7, by saying something of the sort - "We acknowledge that people are very dissatisfied with IE and its standards compliance, so we want to say that we are fully committed to implementing all standards in the next couple of versions of IE. Unfortunately we allowed ourselves to fall far behind the curve and we'll need time to implement it all, so bear with us." Instead, you started pointing how flawed CSS 2 is and why it's not worth supporting it.
What were you expecting? That people will just go - "yeah, screw CSS"?
Maybe it was the fault of the management, and not the developers, but now you'll have to live with it. - geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2How can this glorious billion-dollar company not produce a standards compliant browser when a non-profit organization manages to whip one out, and each new version that comes every 6 months maintains standards compliance.
The only explanation is either a) mass incompetence or b) evil intentions to subvert standards or c) a combination of both. - p0windah, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4==EDIT==
In a nutshell, the report said that IE 6 and IE 7 _WON'T_ match the level of standards support found in Opera and Firefox. - robche, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3It's not that they shouldnt, but think about it, this is going to be essentially a compulsry update, imagine the amount of sites that will break on people if all of a sudden they updated. IE7 Is a great update, and will add a lot of features to IE, but it cant do everything at once, if anything the people at IE should start telling webdesigners to being converting their code over, and use javascript or something to choose which styles are used.
I agree it is something to be fixed (3 browsers diffrent amount of support to design for), but you cant expect them to change it in this update, or any update soon. - corser, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Firefox is great, but I'm sure that even Firefox has room for improvements. Lucky the Mozilla team has roadmaps and timelines for these improvements, and when deadlines slip it's measured in weeks not years.
*looking forward to Firefox 2.0 - ArcusOfSV, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2What is it about browsers that makes MS care so much? Its not like they sell it. What part of IE makes it a profit center? Why bother fight the fight at all?
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