Håkon Wium Lie calls out IE8's about face on standards

Even after the CTO nerfing he has to apply to what he writes, he always sounds like one pissed off motherfucker. I like him.

In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: "use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default."

Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise.

This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.

Read the rest of the article for a nice bit of IE8 bashing, with a fantastic he-just-fucked-your-shit-up conclusion.

IE8 Beta 2 Released

Go get it, and rip it to motherfucking shreds.

On a related note, Peter-Paul Koch has already updated his CSS contents and browser compatibility page to include it. For that, I salute him with as many appendages as I can find readily available.

In the IE8 Technical Beta program via a backdoor

"Backdoor," a.k.a. Chris Wilson, who offered in a comment on my post about the program:

@the hater - there's a backlog on responses at the moment, since there was a lot of replies asking for TechBeta invites. Send me an email and I'll send you a code. (That's generally true for anyone, BTW - send me an email, I'll send you a code.) cwilso@microsoft.com.

-Chris Wilson

He posted his email, fucking inviting everyone to join the beta, regardless of whether their screening process "accepts" you or not. I took him up on the offer, and the code arrived in short order. Anyone who reads what I write should join me, I don't give a shit whether you agree with what I write. I don't fucking care if you think IE gives its users the best browsing experience out there (okay, I do care, and you need a fucking wake up call), the IE team has put out a call for two-way communication on their new code, which sure as fuck beats the "communication" on the IE Blog. They post random shit and everyone fights in the comments like starved dogs over discarded scraps of meat.

From what the original IEBlog post says about the program, you'll get access to bash the shit out of IE8 Beta 2 no matter what. You just can't tell them what fucking sucks unless you get into their IE8 Technical Beta program. And bitching to the world, while satisfying (I should know), doesn't count as a fucking bug report. Just don't stop trumpeting what shit they break (or haven't fixed), as I sure as fuck won't.