Monday, February 23, 2009

Track the campaign

IE6: Do Not Want!
"This is all about the campaign to rid the WWW of Internet Explorer 6 that has devastated web developers and held back the evolution of everything that blocks the tubes for far too long. This can not go on any longer! Off with its head!

To raise awareness please send in tips to your major news sites about this campaign and use these tools to spread the word."
They've started keeping track of each country, site, and blog post they can find that tells everyone to ditch that broken piece of shit once and for all.

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Friday, February 20, 2009

Let's end support of IE6 on behalf of Microsoft

A fantastic proposal from the ever-creative and wonderful Chris Blizzard:
"It sounds like some people in Norway have started to band together and just choose not to support it. But one thing that would really help is to just pick a date and have it spread world wide.

My suggestion is for everyone to just say that Dec 31st, 2009 is the last day it should be supported - drop support from libraries, stop testing, etc. IE6 usage is already sliding quickly and it’s time to help it across the line. The web needs an upgrade."
Still here? What the fuck! Get to work and spread the word about this goddamn wonderful idea! Digg the ever-loving shit out of his post! We finally have a light at the end of this web developer trodden tunnel, but we need to make sure it fucking happens!

If we don't, we'll need to keep cursing at this piece of shit every day until something like mid 2011, when Microsoft has scheduled its already long overdue execution.

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Thursday, February 19, 2009

Because you can't use dick until IE expires

Catching up on things, so bear with me.

Alexis Deveria posted a great breakdown of when you can use various browser features and pieces of specs. In addition to confirming what we all know - IE fucking sucks - it also gives a good visual of when you can plan to start using given features based on your matrix of supported browsers, which will invariably include some version of IE. For many of us, that even includes the dinosaur itself, IE6.

A couple of highlights from the results:





If you notice anything amiss in the results, don't just fucking dismiss the whole thing - let Alexis know in the comments so he can fix it.

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

An update on compatibility view updates

The IEBlog just tried posting another round of "Okay, we'll say it again: we fucked up...but we've tried to make it up to you by switching to 'standards by default,'" trying to get people to quit posting the goddamn opt-in standards misinformation. This reminded me that I really need to check out that shit list of sites that both fail in IE8 and lack the "I fail in IE8" header. At first, I wondered about the legal issues of posting information from an XML file residing in a release candidate, and then I realized two things:
  1. I don't fucking care. I post this reasonably anonymously, so I would really have to stir up some shit in order for Microsoft to bother coming after me for something.
  2. Microsoft already posted the entire list (Google-rendered HTML from the fucking Excel sheet of the XML file - why the...? FUCK IT...moving on...), making any legal argument simply a figment of my whisky-addled mind.
So without further ado, let's talk about just a scant few of the 2396 domains. Yes, two thousand, three hundred, and ninety-fucking-six entries. So much for the plan of only making exceptions for sites in the top hundred (or even thousand) visited list.

Now, several of these, I think we all expected. I think if microsoft.com didn't make the list, we'd all pass out from shock. Others, like amazon.com, google.com, and yahoo.com, make sense simply because they get so many fucking hits every second that adding a single header would blow their bandwidth usage even more through the roof. They also have to put every single design/implementation change through a goddamn fucking gauntlet of tests and justifications before even considering rolling them out to the live site. Making changes for a piece of shit beta, or even a piece of shit release candidate, doesn't make sense. Microsoft will likely (hopefully) fix more of their shit before actually pushing IE8 off the back of the bus and out into the real world, which would just require more work for sites like Google and Yahoo, and a whole fuckton more pissed off users.

Before we move on to the shit list portion of this XML wonderland, I'd like to point out a few of the more amusing entries in the list:
  • thepiratebay.org - No particular reason, I just find it slightly amazing that enough Pirate Bay users use IE8 to warrant Microsoft adding the site to the "we don't want to piss off our users" list.
  • myspace.com - We already knew about this one, but still...what the fuck does a broken myspace page look like? How the fuck can you even tell?!
  • circuitcity.com - Because the "we went broke and no longer have a site, let alone a company" page renders incorrectly? What the fuck?
  • mozilla.com - This one should also appear in the shit list section of this post, since I know many developers at Mozilla capable of making the site work just fine for IE8. Instead, I decided to put this into the amusing section not because of the competition angle, but because opera.com does not appear in this list.
And now for the pure "what the fuck?!" entries of pure shit list glory:
  • adobe.com
  • apple.com
  • craigslist.org
  • facebook.com
  • flickr.com
  • sourceforge.net
  • twitter.com
  • wordpress.com
You guys have no excuse. I know some of you use a lot of bandwidth, but come on! Even fucking craigslist.org?! Either you guys have some serious IE hacks in your layouts, or you have a lot of users who just think your minimalist design looks like shit and kept hitting the "IE broke my internet" button. And twitter.com? You guys throw parties all the time, shit gold, and can't get a one-line "microblogging" web app to look right? I bet you want to sit in the "we get too many hits to change things for our users" list, but no. Yahoo and Google have so many fucking areas of business, they have damn good reason for not rendering everything correctly. You have one area of business, and more than enough talent and money to fix your shit.

Needless to say, I haven't exhausted this list of notable entries. Take a look for yourself and let me know if you find any more pure fucking gold.

Okay, bonus round: barackobama.com and johnmccain.com both make the list, but whitehouse.gov doesn't. Between this and the circuitcity.com thing, I think this demonstrates just how long it takes for changes to come to this wonderful shit list that then gets updated on each and every goddamn user's machine when they fucking feel like letting it update. This should motivate your teams even more to keep your site off this fucking list. If it takes up to a year or more for a reasonable percentage of your users to get the updated "we no longer suck" version of the shit list, this makes it even harder for you and your users, who will remain stuck in IE7's suckage for even longer than they should have had to already.

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Friday, February 13, 2009

Apologies for those keeping up with me via a feed reader

Getting into the spirit of all things modern (or at least some things recent), I added some default tags the the posts here. Blogger then decided that adding a tag meant updating the date modified of every motherfucking post to a few minutes ago.

I thought about adding a few other tags giving further hints as to the topics at hand (web standards, JavaScript, CSS, etc.), but fuck that. I'll just add them as I go from now on, rather than have Blogger shit in my XML feeds again.

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Recommended reading

In no particular order:

Security expert: Microsoft should cut IE’s links to Windows:
'"If Microsoft removed IE from Windows and made it independently updatable, I think you'd get improved update performance," said Kandek.

Although pulling IE from Windows would mean that Microsoft would have to come up with a different mechanism for Windows Update — currently the service relies on IE — Kandek believes the benefit to users would be significant. "Taking IE out of the [monthly] patch cycle would give us better protection," he said.'
All Aboard the IE8 Fail Bus:
"After installing the very first IE8 beta, and having it completely hose my Vista box at work, I was a bit wary about installing the latest releases of this as-yet-unofficial web browser. When IE8 was first announced, I thought there was a lot to be excited about. Microsoft appeared to finally be taking standard’s compliance seriously. They seemed to be a lot more open to what the problems with their browser were.

However, as things have progressed, I have less and less faith in Microsoft to finally put out a reasonable browser, let alone a good one."
Is your company testing on IE8 RC1?:
"Yes, the bane of every web developer's life, Internet Explorer, is now out in lovely version 8 RC1. The trouble is, no one seems to be testing on it. Not here, not our business partners - consumer facing businesses! What is wrong here?"
IE6 : "Arrivé à un certain état…":
"En 2001, c'était peut-être le top du top, mais plus aujourd'hui. Internet Explorer 6 plante comme un rien, ne supporte pas la transparence des PNG, n'implémente pas correctement les CSS, rencontre des problèmes absurdes avec Flash et ne propose pas de navigation par onglet. Comment faut-il le dire ? Internet Explorer 6 est complètement dépassé, un point c'est tout."
10 Reasons Why NOT to Use MSIE (Internet Explorer):
"Am I a Internet Explorer hater; No, but close. Consider This: If you have ever worked on a design or a particular cool feature for your web application and all went well people loved it and even your boss loved it. All to find out the ##*@@ IE, dosen't work the way you expect. Knowing myself well I wouldn't even bother. However we live in a strange world where inspite of the best avilable browsers being free, we still use IE. I am a big fan of Firefox, yes Opera and Safari are also really great.

Now comes the tricky part I can respect anyone using anyone of the listed browser above but, Why still people use IE. It just escapes me. I request all of you to please download our fav browser and use it instead of the Stupid, Unresponsive, Technical Blunder, and Arrogant IE."

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