Microsoft: Old Internet Explorer is terrible and 'we want to help'
As every web developer knows, one of the biggest headaches of building modern, standards-compliant web pages is getting them to look and work right in Internet Explorer. Well, coders, apparently Microsoft feels your pain, because it has released a new set of free tools to help you do just that. The tools, collectively dubbed …
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No. I have to admit that I was probably later than some other designers, but about 7 years ago I stopped using tables for web layouts. I still use them sometimes for tabled data, and I use them every week for email newsletters (gotta love outlook right?).
Google Chrome – tooting the horn of web standards compliance from the very beginning
Apart from the fact it is packed full of non-standard stuff. Webkit extensions, Pepper API, NaCl, Gears, ...
the logic that's really required?
If ( browser in standard_compliant_browsers ) then
do standard_compliant_stuff
else
display get_your_standard_compliant_browser_for_free_from_here
fi
Of course if your business isnvolves selling stuff to morons, that's probably not good enough!
Re: the logic that's really required?
Standards compliant browser you get the full site.
Non compliant browser or one with javascript disabled get a light html site also suitable for mobiles.
(With a link for Chromeframe, Chrome and Firefox for XP users.)
Customers?
Is "Customer" the right word to describe a user of IE6? I'd say "victim" is a better fit.
Perhaps...
They should opt for a subscription model like Office 2013
The more we use it, the more they pay US.
I pity the poor developers
Firstly, whoever came up with this deserves recognition. I think that Microsoft has finally realised that its only choice at the moment is damage limitation: website developers are seriously fucked off by having to support such completely different rendering engines without the pain of users switching on "compatibility" mode for sites which are standards compliant. Oh, I know there is another flag you can set to stop that, except I there are other workarounds for IE < 9 that you need that disable UA-compatible="IE=Edge". A proper migration path for all current versions of Windows would have made this all unnecessary. But, okay, web developers will accept a certain degree of pain to support paying customers.
But it's those poor customers who are suffering most as a result of the extremely cynical migration path the Microsoft chose - no one forced them to limit Windows 2000 to IE 6 or XP to IE 8. One of my customers still has a "don't use IE (8) for the internet" because it's still unsafe. It has been considered too much work to migrate to IE 9 and shortly afterwards to IE 10, whenever it becomes available for Windows 7. In the meantime Firefox LSR has been certified and rolled out everywhere (> 100,000 machines). The result is that people have dropped IE for everything except the usual ActiveX infested inhouse "browser" applications and management has been given I-Pads.
Then there is the site itself with friendly advice like this:
We've found that you have vendor-specific prefixes causing compatibility problems. This can help minimize compatibility issues in Internet Explorer and other browsers.
Well, colour me blue and call me Nansen if those two sentences are contradictory. Vendor prefixes are a world a hurt in themselves but using them does not cause compatibility problems because they are, er, vendor specific. Anyway, the site I tested doesn't use any vendor prefixes.
I suggest the IE team start polishing the CVs as they're going to be needing them.
Something about that video ..
It's like watching a cross between, "The mentalist" and "CSI: NY", ie 'psychic Patrick Jane' and `Detective Stella Bonasera' ...
IE is stupid! But Im too lazy to learn Chrome
Why is Chrome and Opera taking centre stage? IE is a joke! I just can’t understand why, despite MS claims that its better than ever, it’s actually a pain. It crashes – without fail every time I fire it up the first time. I have to force it to shut down, only then will it start to work. I’m too lazy to learn Chrome – I just don’t think limiting XP to IE8 only - is a wise decision. MS YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED!
oh the irony
so ms spends time and resources to create a tool to make your nice w3c compliant site work in their browser rather than just making a browser that works... hmmm. seems like they're loosing their edge. I would have figured by now that they would have already jacked the code for Chrome or Safari and released their own code bloated version named "zing" that crashes every time you scroll. thats what i expect from the king of redmond.
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