The Internet Explorer team is at it again pointing out that Internet Explorer 8 is looking to closely follow the web standards we’ve all become accustomed to in other major browsers. Earlier they demonstrated that IE 8 currently passes the Acid 2 test, and the IE blog actually admitted their lacking of compliance with the standards in the past:
I’ve been on the IE team for over a decade, and I’ve seen us apply the “Don’t Break the Web” rule in six different major versions of IE in different ways. In IE 6, we used the DOCTYPE switch to enable different “modes” of behavior to protect compatibility. When we released IE 6 in 2001, very few pages on the web were in “standards mode” (my team ran a report on the top 200 web sites at the time that reported less than 1%) – few people knew what a DOCTYPE was, and few tools generated them.
By default Internet Explorer 8 will render sites the same way that IE 7 does, but there will also be a “super standard” rendering capability that developers can take advantage of. To make any particular website render with the standards-compliant engine developers will have to specify this META tag in the HEAD section of the site:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
I think this is a good way for Microsoft to handle the issue of standards while maintaining maximum site compatibility, but I think this will give little motivation for non-standards sites to update their code. Is this the right route for Microsoft to go?
At least I get to decide, not the settings on the user’s client. That’s what I was worried about when I first read the title: user’s would have to enable it in the options!
Which, for most users, means it’d never even get looked at.
It’d take a damn lot to get me to switch from Firefox. FF is the only browser to use these days.
That’s what I was initially thinking as well, but Microsoft was smart on this one. The only problem I forsee is how long it will take people to upgrade. It may take years for developers to actually see the benefits of the IE 8’s standards.
I use Opera and Firefox on a regular basis, and I can’t ever see going back to IE either. It’s just not a browser for power users.
Why is it a good thing to require webite developers to insert a meta-tag into a page’s source code so that the page will display properly with IE 8? Do they own the patent or trademark to HTML? They should build a dadgum browser that is compliant with industry standards and be done with it. Heed this warning: Let them shoehorn into open source code, and they will eventually try to monetize the issue. HTML, whatever. I don’t think that MSofty is evil, but they are highly litigious and will spend money on claims to ownership where there are none, just to assert their will.
The reasons behind the IE-8 switch are actually quite solid. Microsoft does have a responsibility not to break the web, or not to break it any further than they already have.
Because of the massive dominance of IE6 (being the browser that was around when the internet exploded with people) lots of sites are designed to look best on this browser. So much so that when IE7 hit suddenly a lot of sites broke – I myself had to rush through code for a number of sites removing various hacks that were no longer working or even causing additional problems.
This switch is here to make future renditions easier – once the developer knows the site will look good in IE8 they can toggle the renderer. Until they’ve sorted it out it will render just like IE7. The choice for standards will now be fully in the hands of developers, rather than forcing them to break standards for IE.
For further reading check the latest from A List Apart:
[alistapart.com]
[alistapart.com]
I’m don’t think a power user would want an occasional site to run slowly, not at all, or crash the browser. Opera is the ultimate for power users, when it works. The unreliability for sites kills it, though
That is very true. I think they are taking the right course by letting developers opt-in to the new system. There will be a lot less complaints that way.
I feel the same way about Opera. I normally just use Opera when I’m reading through news, which results in dozens of tabs being opened and closed frequently. Firefox 3 might be the point at which I can switch back to Firefox 100% because the memory usage has definitely gotten better.
If IE8 truly puts it on the web developer to put in a tag to make IE8 render the site properly, I think in time that will help greatly. Then developers will be able to build their sites with no hacks and won’t have to waste as much time making sure it work with IE, they can just do their job. Of course time will tell whether this will lead to a time where you can build your site and know it will just work with little or no testing, but hopefully those days may come.
I just hope that the adoption rate will be faster than what it is with IE 7. A majority of our IE readers are still using IE 6 which actually shocks me.
Firefox sticks to the standards and doesn’t need any meta-tag to render sites properly… And I rarely see sites that are “broken” on Firefox because of that. So it rather seems like a weak excuse to me. All we have here is MS introducing yet another IE-specific trick that we have to use in order for our sites to look right. In the end we’re always giving MS its own special treatment, which means we have to give more importance to IE than to other browsers.
Well, the problem lies in some particular countries. I can’t remember details, but there’s one country (maybe it was Russia) where 90% of the websites don’t work properly in any browser other than IE. Microsoft has a much wider market base that they have to consider than Mozilla currently does.
In just doing a bit of programming I noticed that FireFox does not follow standards as well as IE7 does. For example, until recently, FireFox3 did not sniff the mimetype of a ZIP file. It also does not use the XSL template file for XML, and shows an unescaped & when viewing an XML file. All of this is just the easy stuff to see. Very strange to me since everyone else will tell you how FireFox follows the standards.