Such a terrible idea

However, I'd be all for a better way to target browsers with custom CSS - that put the onus on web developers, not browser builders. An [if Safari] directive, or [if IE > 6] for instance.That way, there's no need to maintain multiple modes in the renderers, just directives to read only the appropriate CSS files. Would make it so much easier - and safer - to correct for rendering bugs, instead of using hacks or javascript detection (which is fraught with difficulty).

Maybe that's a terrible idea too, though.

Is Microsoft non compliance that important now?

Look, I have Firefox as my main browser. Everyone I know does. Every internet cafe I was in ran Firefox. Then there's my mobile browser, it's Safari on the iPod Touch.

If any business or website made their site incompatible with Firefox or Safari, I wouldn't run IE to fix it. I'd just not use their service or buy from their store. So incompatible modes from Microsoft don't mean squat and only hurt themselves.

We had an awakening today. An excel 97 sheet would not open in Excel. No warning no nothing, it just didn't open. It did open in Open Office. Revelations! We need to switch to Open Office to ensure we can open old Excel spreadsheets!

Their incompatibility games hurt themselves.

@I don't think even MS is stupid enough to try and trick people by making the page a special case.

Oh, they are... remember when they put a massive bug into Hotmail's CSS just for Opera users? At that point Opera users made up about 0.000000001% of all browsers or something similar. I wouldn't trust Microsoft to draw a straight line with a ruler.

Solution is really simple

Microsoft should fully embrace the standards. Full stop. Period. End of story.

They are standards simply to ensure that the web development community develops to one code base. We already do this with all the other browsers, so for goodness sake why does Microsoft expect us to keep coding to their awful browsers.

It was Microsoft who decided to fall asleep for half a decade and stop developing IE -- or fixing any bugs for that matter. The world didn't stop just for them and things have moved on without them.

Just get used to it Microsoft; adopt the standards and stop bloody whinging. If your Trident rendering engine's not up to it, is that really the fault of anyone but Microsoft?

What ever they do

is fine well fix it whatever it is (takes out revolver and whiskey from top drawer of desk) anything else?

MSFT lacking cojones

The weird thing is that MS want IE8 to act like IE7 unless you tell it to act like IE8.

There is a vast number of legacy pages that were written specifically for IE, and those pages are broken. It is obvious when viewed in a modern browser. The important thing to remember is that so many reside on intranets served to a captive IE audience. These business pages are what worry MS, as suddenly, "IE broke my pages" becomes the plaint heard 'round the world. Then there are all the banks and other financial institutions that have long written their customer applications to work only in (the non-compliant) IE.

To avoid appearing to break all these pages, MSFT want to have their shiny new v.8 browser default to the broken rendering mode. Those of us who actually write pages that are compliant are expected then to add a new http-equiv meta element to opt-in to standards mode in IE8. What a crock!

MSFT should have the balls to do the right thing. Make IE8 default to standards mode. Instead of putting the onus on developers to cover for their mistakes, let the user select the rendering mode. If a page breaks when viewed, let the reader click the switch.

One thing I have always admired in Netscape was their decision decision to bite the bullet when they found themselves on the losing side in the W3 standards wars. V.4 was orphaned and v.6 aimed at standards compliance. I remember running both v.4.7 and v.6 so I could view pages written against either. Netscape did the right thing. I doubt that IE will.

Microsoft should have some balls

The only way to fix the IE mess is to finally make a version that's standards compliant, make it available on all Windows/Mac platforms, and then leave it at that. Older sites break? Tough - recode them. Older browsers then don't support them? That's what you get for using IE - either upgrade to 8 or get FF/Opera.

It will be a ball-ache for some, but far less of a ball-ache for others, and it will solve the problem for good. We're all sick of MS wasting our time when building sites, so why not have one final bash at it, and then it'll all be over, permanently.

Storm in a teacup

It seems to me that Microsoft is just trying to ensure backwards compatibility. This has always been a big thing for them in their business model.

If IE suddenly started rendering properly then all the old versions of pages (for their non-compliant browsers) would no longer render correctly.

What is a bigger headache to a web-developer? Adding a meta tag or recoding a page?

Think fast - Microsoft rolls out the new version so there are people using IE6 (the Win2000 crowd), IE7 (much of the planet) and IE8 (those who take the bait). IE8 renders in standards mode and now your pages won't render correctly. You've got until tomorrow to fix your pages before customers start to complain. If you make the page standards compliant then IE6/7 won't render. If you leave it as it is then IE8 won't render it properly. Oh did I mention you have until tomorrow?

The tag buys developers some time to test and amend pages.

Yeah I know its all their fault for not being compliant in the first place, but I think they're actually being quite sensible about this.

I think the people who are gnashing their teeth are people who don't like Microsoft on principle and refuse to be objective: "Anything that comes out of Redmond must be crap and evil just because it is Microsoft. Anything that Steve Jobs does must be hip and cool just because it is Apple. Even though Linux is terribly user-unfriendly and is only just beginning to mature it is better than Windows just because it is free". See things for their merit and not the hype.

I use Firefox. Its not standards compliant and its getting bloated and slow. Who are the Firefox people to moan about IE?

@ Wasp support / @ What's the fuss

From the article: "So simple, the Web Standards Project supports the idea and has gone as far as to suggest this should be extended to other browsers."

According to http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/, *some members* of WaSP support this idea.

Comment by James Le Cuirot: "What's the fuss?"

What I understand from discussions on many blogs is that:

* This will not stimulate organizations to have their web sites made according to standards, as there'll always be an IE7-compatible mode - actually, it will be the default mode in IE8. This hurts other browsers and progress of standards.

* This (re)introduces browser discrimination. If other browser vendors include this too, newcomers or small players in the market will have to endlessly reverse engineer the major browsers' implementations of standards (including their bugs). For example, which rendering mode should Safari or Opera use with a site that says it's only been tested in IE7 and FF3? Their most compatible one? Or one with quirks to emulate IE and FF bugs? And in that case, whose bugs: FF's or IE's?

* This suggests that new versions of IE will always come with older rendering modes, so IE9 will be able to act as IE6-, IE7, IE8 and IE9. Competitors will then need to be able to render not just like one or two buggy IE versions, but like all of them since IE6.

Can't we all just get along!

I've spent the last 4-months developing a web application that simply MUST be primarily compatible with IE as about 99.9 of users in the company use IE 5 and higher.

Unfortunately for me, this makes the page slightly screwy in Firefox and Opera but there is simply nothing I can really do about that.

I don't find that IE's HTML rendering is that bad as XHTML compliant pages sometimes render better in IE than in Opera/FF, how is that possible?

Now if M$ want me to alter my pages so they can sidestep their responsibilities, they can go take a very long jump of a very short plank. I just wish Mozilla, Opera & M$ would get together, form a binding agreement so support web standards 100%, with fines to be paid if they break the agreement.

That way we can all stop faffing about trying to make pages that render in all pages and just get back down to designing functional and attractive web sites, confident that they will render the same in all browsers.

@Graham Dawson

I'm a long-time Opera user so I haven't forgotten about how they did that with msn.com. Didn't hear about Hotmail. But I stand by my point because to do that with Acid2 would be so blatantly obvious and the backlash would be so horrendous that it would make no sense to do it in the first place.

Other ways to 'super standards mode'

I think the meta (or http) tag idea is pretty retarculous, but from reading Chris Wilson's various comments, it sounds like this won't be the only way to put IE8 into its new super-duper standards mode. It can also be triggered with an HTML5 doctype, or by sending XHTML with an XML mimetype.

"Microsoft could find a way to get around genuine Acid 2 support"

Instead of getting around genuine Acid 2 support, why can't they just whole-heartedly support it?

Sorry to belittle Firefox (it *is* my main browser btw) but I imagine Microsoft have a hell of a lot more money/manpower/etc dedicated to building a browser. Why can't they just do the job properly?

Flip the meta's meaning

It would make more sense to flip the meaning of the meta tag - run in IE7 mode if it's there, otherwise run in standards mode. This way non-compliant sites have a simple fix, but sites that are doing it right work properly. It should be sites that are broken that get fixed, not the other way around.

Better way..

..Can't they just write something that bypasses rights management and detects if you are using some dusty old version of non-compliant garbage and then install a stands compliant browser instead?

Do they think that seeing "Microsoft™" at the top the page works like advertising (doesn't) and makes us all want to spend money on them? It has the opposite effect, we see "Microsoft™" we see an ill-rendered page and we alt-tab to Firefox™ for instance, and see it looking fine. Then we hate Microsoft™ just that little bit more.

As toen of the early posters said, surely coding a new standards(un)compliant web browser will just be a waste of time/money/ball-ache on El Reg? WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER ONE. JUST MAKE THE NEXT SERVICE PATCHES INSTALL FIREFOX INSTEAD!

If any "business" has an intranet that only allows IE use then.. erm. So? Their coders continue writing bad code for the sake of a bad browser, they prevent IE updates so the status quo is continued. If they want to improve security then they should have moved to something better a long time ago. The fact their employees won't be able to view external webpages properly is a minor aside. You made your bed, you lie in it. Removing IE-broken code and then starting to write correct code from then on will pay for itself after a while.

Plus with HTML 5 soon it's just going to be another raft of "IE doesn't support this, so we can only tentatively use it for now". Pretty fucking infuriating.

IE

A no brainer.

Rename IE to "Windows Update".

Opera easily outdistances it, and SeaMonkey fills in for the very few sites that seem to have issues with it.

Tag name?

DTD or Tag ?

<!DOCTYPE HTML IESH1T

@Sandeep Sandhu

Actually I've tried the latest Ubuntu and still have it installed on a harddrive in my box. I dual boot it every now and again to show it to people.

I'm completely in love with the Compiz Fusion desktop and adore the Gnome user-interface. I found everything exactly where "it should be" without having to bother reading the help files to find the hotkeys. It was also fast and smooth on my box. I won't say anything bad about KDE, I just like Gnome.

The package manager was awesome - point, click, install, use. The Ubuntu update manager was also really nice. Everything I tried out on Ubuntu worked first time without needing any head scratching or fiddling in the shell.

But Ubuntu isn't stable on my hardware configuration. After installation it crashed after 30seconds to 2 minutes (not a graceful crash either - just a system freeze). I spent hours (2 or 3) reading the Ubuntu user forums for help and saw that it's a fairly common problem. I rolled back my nVidia drivers (3rd party, not Ubuntu's "fault") which improved my uptime to around 5 to 10 minutes.

I read that there are issues with Firefox in Ubuntu, but I'm not sure if I can replicate that yet and not running Firefox doesn't really seem to help my uptime.

The default Ubuntu installation didn't cope very well with setting up my Grub options so the thing wouldn't boot. I had to get Supergrub to fix things up.

Ubuntu is supposed to be the newbie's Linux and so I think my statement about Linux being user-unfriendly is something I'll stick to. I will back down from "terribly".

I think the next Ubuntu will be the one that gets me to swap permanently. I'm betting it will be stable on more hardware configurations and hopefully mine will be one of them.

Internet Explorer.. isn't that what you use for Windows updates

That is until we got WSUS working.

Compatibility

I am truly shocked by the number of people that throw flippant comments like "sod backwards compatibility, just force people to re-write old applications". That sort of attitude is what causes IT and business to clash so badly.

First of all, a de facto standard is still a standard, and the fact many hundreds or thousands of development hours are spent on applications targetting an earlier platform should not go unnoticed. Of course it is nice to always have the latest and greatest but it is very ignorant to assume it is always possible.

The other thing is it is very short sighted not to see the meta-tag solution as an interim solution. With reasonable time the default position can change as old applications are phased out. Of course within 3-4 years it is probably acceptable to change this.

Finally, how people can slate IE7 like they think they know something others don't. The fact of the matter is IE7 works very well and despite using Firefox for testing, I still prefer IE7. It is faster starting up, more stuff works currently and I get SharePoint and Project Server integration - and this is the sort of stuff that is actually important.

Most of you are already doing this...

You stick in hacky bits of CSS that explot internet explorer's traditional failure to support voice browsers, the "!important" directive, or, well other bits of CSS, generally.

Internet Explorer ahd become the new Netscape 4. All that's being proposed, is that we agree to indentify it, as such in a future-proof and explicit manner, rather than relying on clever ways to trick it's bugginess into rendering the page correctly.

Very consistent from MS

This is actually very consistent: MS knows that a whole bunch of web desiners are actively supporting their monopolistic ways, by coding IE-only websites even when they know that this is nothing like proper HTML.

MS doesn't want to disappoint its minions... so they can't go the standards' way straight away.

To all the "preserve backward compat" comments: people who coded IE-only websites did it on purpose, knowing that they were coding crap. And if they didn't, they shouldn't be allowed to put code online anyway. They made the bet that MS would dominate the world completely, and that the standards would adapt or die. They actually actively pushed towards that. Now that it appears that they have been a bit too "optimistic", they don't want to bite the bullet. Pathetic weenies.

@Chris Ovenden

"It is fairly safe to assume that a site that has a proper DOCTYPE has been coded to work properly in Firefox"

If only...