"Compatibility View" "Improvements"

Yeah, I quoted the shit out of that motherfucker, and for good goddamn reason, too:

"Compatibility View"

If your site fails so hard, IE8's wild and drastic use of almost as many standards as other browsers makes it look like shit, Microsoft gives you the "fuck standards" option to make users of IE8 actually use IE7 instead. Fuck them for upgrading.

"Improvements"

If you have a shit site that needs fuck standards mode, and you have a lot of users, Microsoft already knows you can't code for shit. They've had enough beta users flag your sorry, broken ass that they'll preload a list of sites that suck.

So, I first had the reaction of,"Doesn't that defeat the entire fucking purpose of rendering in standards mode by default? Like, by making it not the default?"

But then...I had a fucking fantastic revelation.

This list (navigate to res://iecompat.dll/iecompatdata.xml in the next release of IE8) will go out to every user of IE8, including developers, managers, and the good people at the Web Standards Project, who will then have their very own, pre-fucking-broadcast, live-updated shit list of embarrassment. Mr. Dickens, Program Manager of IE, even called out a few to start us off, saying,

"Looking at our instrumentation, there were high-volume sites like facebook.com, myspace.com, bbc.co.uk, and cnn.com with pages that weren’t working for end-users with IE’s new standards compliant default."

Now, I know they have developers capable of making their shit work in IE8 (except maybe MySpace, which begs the question of what the fuck does a MySpace page look like when it renders like shit?), so don't take this as a call to come down on them like a fuckton of bricks. It does raise the question of why they couldn't even manage to put up their own flag for fuck standards, but maybe they didn't see this advertisement of their site's dirty laundry coming. Maybe some dumb-ass fucking manager decided they couldn't spare the time or effort or bandwidth for that single goddamn header, let alone actually allowing developers to improve their shit.

So next time you talk to someone who works for one of these sites, just mention this casually and see what kind of response you get. You may want to duck, if managers force this humiliation of rubbing shit in their face and then having it advertised to all of their peers and potential new employers.

I, for one, cannot fucking wait for this feature.