Through the Twitter grapevine, I heard a buzz about something that angered me to no end. Now, before I write this blog, please know that I just completed a rigorous 11.5 hour day of writing code. So if this comes off pretty aggressive, that’s why (aside from the fact that I fucking hate Internet Explorer with a passion).
The dev team for IE8 decided that they were going to once again make things needlessly more difficult for web developers and web standards evangelists. Quoted below from isolani.co.uk:
A year ago Microsoft announced (through A List Apart) that standards compliant websites would be forced to opt into a standards rendering mode in IE8. The uproar from the web standards community was loud and clear: the default should always be render in standards compliancy mode. Microsoft backed down.
So it is with considerably surprise and anger to read that Microsoft have quietly gone back to their original position. The gist of it is if you want to be sure your site renders in standards compliant mode in IE, you have to explicitly opt into it. Otherwise you risk being blacklisted and thrown into IE7 Compatibility mode.
So basically if you want your website to render in IE8 and not get blacklisted, you have to use a new meta tag that the IE8 dev team will inform us of. Otherwise your website will be blacklisted and stuck in IE7 compatibility mode. So when the time comes, not only will we have to test our websites in IE8, but we will most likely have to test in IE7 AND IE7 Compatibility Mode as well.
The thing that kills me about this whole thing wasn’t even in the aforementioned article. In another article on isolani.co.uk, they point out a couple quotes from IE Platform Architect Chris Wilson:
The answer is that developers of many sites had worked around many of the shortcomings or outright errors in IE6, and now expected IE7 to work just like IE6. Web developers expected us, for example, to maintain our model for how content overflows its box, even in “standards mode,” even though it didn’t follow the specification – because they’d already made their content work with our model.
Unbelievable. For years, Microsoft put out a sub-par web browser and now Web Developers like myself are the ones to blame? No. Just…no. We’ve compensated for their shortcomings and deprecated software for years on end and now it’s our fault.
We realized that “Don’t Break the Web” should really be translated to “Don’t change what developers expect IE to do for current pages that are already deployed.”
Now we’re all expected to add a meta tag to our web pages so that IE8 will oh so generously not throw our websites into IE7 Compatibility mode, and will so graciously render them for IE8 instead. Web standards evangelists like Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman have been spearheading the evolution of the web for years and now we’re all expected to take a step backwards to compensate for horrible, cruft-infested programming and they have the audacity to blame web developers as a collective for the shortcomings.
Give me a fucking break. Make a web browser that isn’t a steaming pile of shit for once. Even now, IE7 has issues.
Let’s take the Mozilla team for example. When there was empty promise of the expected IE killer, Netscape 5, the Mozilla team started from scratch and built what has evolved into the Firefox we know and love today. They started from the ground up and built a web browser that has promoted web standards right out of the gate. Instead of following a similar model, the IE dev team has decided to pile more shit onto the steaming heap that is Internet Explorer and continue to apply bandaids to the holes in the dam.
Earth to Microsoft, Internet Explorer is a worthless piece of garbage. Make something new and stop wasting our time.
I totally agree with you. This is getting ridiculous and insane. As web developers we have to spend way too much time testing in these crappy browsers… Clients don’t pay extra for it and in 99% of the cases it must work in IE.
Can we bill MS for the extra time spent on tweaking and css hacking IE?
Actually, where I work we have a spot on our website proposals for “browser testing”. Within the design firm I work for, we thought that it was a crucial part to the design process and we usually add a few hours for testing. We’ve never had a complaint about it and I don’t think we should anyway.
Also, there is rumor that Internet Explorer 8 is the last version and Microsoft will be switching over to a web browser foundation that is built on WebKit, which is what Google Chrome and Safari use. I’m happy about that (if it’s indeed true). I’ve started working with IE8 recently though and I’m happy to say that it displays websites pretty accurately. It only took MS YEARS to finally get it right.
I’m so hopping mad at Microshaft right now, I’m just spitting fire and brimstone. I just got a module working with Dojo that has a lot of floating objects and lots of behavior built into them. It’s a Java Enterprise web application. Things were swell in all browsers. I develop on Slackware Linux so I tried Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. Everything looks great, acts great, I couldn’t be more pleased.
Then I had someone pull it up with a Windows XP machine with Internet Exploder 8. Just crap! Nothing works and it looks like hell. Guess what? I get to redesign all of it. Why? Because Microshaft pushes rubbish to the masses and now we’re strung up with having to develop to its limitations. I wish I could send a bill to those quacks for costing my employer a ton of money and for what? NOTHING! Everyone suffers. The software will be less capable, the customer doesn’t get the best experience, my employer loses money, and the product costs more for less quality.
Everyone loses with Internet Exploder and it has always been that way throughout its life cycle. For what it’s worth, I appreciate this article. I needed to vent. I need to know there are other people out there who are as disgusted and hateful as I am to the losers over at Microshaft. If Microshaft would just go away *everyone*, users and developers alike, would be a whole lot better off. We could get on with making lives better, solving customer problems, making share holders some money, and giving less headaches to developers. We have enough to do without this utter nonsense.
I feel your pain. I primarily write CSS, (X)HTML, javascript/jQuery and I run into stuff like this all the time. It’s a neverending cycle and now it’s all about IE9. The problem is that there’s still a huge chunk of IE6 users somehow. Hell, I think there’s even a really small userbase still present for IE5! It’s ridiculous. When it comes to developing for IE6 and under, we’ve ditched it altogether. If a client specifically wants IE6 support, we charge extra for it. The amount of times in the past where we’ve had to put out extra man hours to workaround IE issues has been a pain.
Sidenote: Have you tried using the IE7 compatibility tag? It’s a stretch but perhaps telling the browser to render in IE7 compatibility mode might lessen the amount of issues you’re having with your web app. I hate the tag because it’s not standards compliant and I’m anal about my code, but it might be worth a try. Other than that I guess I would say try to float as little as possible. It seems like when you have a lot of floated elements involved, something is bound to go haywire.
I haven’t tried that compatibility tag. I will mention it to the others in our meeting today. It’s worth a shot.
My plan of attack is to rework queries to the server so less objects are on page at one time. I have about 350 objects, give or take a few and Internet Exploder can’t handle that many. I have pagination set up to only display about 30 to 40 at a time. But they are all there, just not visible. My thinking in this design was that user interaction would minimize server queries and thus reduce response time. Then, in each subset, the user could persist changes if they wanted to.
It actually works really well… in everything but IE. So now I’m going to look at redesigning the page to re-fetch objects as the user paginates through. This will reduce the number of objects, but increase the user response time and make the user experience slower, possibly much slower with much bigger load to our servers. I will make Restful, JSON queries to get the data to make it as fast as possible, but I still have to rework the object construction on the page, not to mention the Rest queries.
I don’t even care if IE ends up being doggy about it. It just has to work. I have no concerns about the other browsers and their associated user experience because I’ve seen that already and it was quite good.
I have to admit… it is extremely discouraging to not be working on cool, new stuff and customer requirements because I get to spin on Internet Exploder cruft for a few days.