Why IE Sucks

Opera Mini 5 on the iPhone

2010-03-23T18:20:00.003-05:00

Off topic (does anyone actually give a shit about mobile IE?), but damn this looks sexy.

Opera Mini for iPhone was officially submitted to the Apple iPhone App store on March 23, 12:25 UTC.

How UML can clearly illustrate your fucked up process

2010-03-04T11:56:00.008-06:00

I just had to share this one, if only for the convoluted diagram which shows endpoints that actually modify other endpoints, rather than ending there, at the bottom of the diagram. From IEBlog, How IE8 Determines Document Mode:

"This post describes how IE8 determines what Document Mode such as Quirks or Standards Modes to use for rendering websites. This topic is important for site developers and consumers.

It's related to the Compatibility View List that we recently updated. This list is down by over 1000 websites, from over 3100 to just over 2000, since IE8 released last March. As we work with site developers and standards bodies, we're excited to see the sites that need to be on the Compatibility View (CV) List continue to go down."

Make damn sure you click through to see the 1010x1552 pixel diagram, complete with doctype chart.

"IE is being mean to me"

2009-12-16T18:05:00.003-06:00

Promoting a comment, since it includes a musical performance of an original song (embedded below):

Anonymous said...

One of our developers wrote a song called "IE is being mean to me" and you can find the video here:

http://with.us/meanie
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTTzwJsHpU8

Hope you like it.

"IE is Being Mean to Me" is an original song written and performed by Scott Ward.

IE8 XSS protection introduces XSS vulnerability to sites

2009-11-20T09:58:00.003-06:00

Breaking the web in new and exciting ways: IE8 bug makes 'safe' sites unsafe

"The latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser contains a bug that can enable serious security attacks against websites that are otherwise safe.

The flaw in IE 8 can be exploited to introduce XSS, or cross-site scripting, errors on webpages that are otherwise safe, according to two Register sources, who discussed the bug on the condition they not be identified. Microsoft was notified of the vulnerability a few months ago, they said.

Ironically, the flaw resides in a protection added by Microsoft developers to IE 8 that's designed to prevent XSS attacks against sites…"

Why Google Chrome Frame won't help

2009-09-22T14:17:00.004-05:00

So Google just announced a new open source project: Chrome Frame.

Google Chrome Frame is an early-stage open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome's open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer. With Google Chrome Frame, you can:
Start using open web technologies - like the HTML5 canvas tag - right away, even technologies that aren't yet supported in Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8.
Take advantage of JavaScript performance improvements to make your apps faster and more responsive.

Just to clarify: I don't think it hurts anything, and I applaud Google's intentions to rid us all of supporting such a piece of shit like IE. It looks like a cool piece of technology and the most creative effort I've seen since the Mozilla ActiveX control.

But it'll do jack shit to get around supporting IE in all of its broken glory.

I'll ignore the current requirement of adding a meta tag to a page in order to trigger the plugin, and also the fact that this extremely young and experimental project doesn't have things like deployment tools for IT departments to use. They just announced this, and want feedback from developers at this point so they can continue working on it.

Google Chrome Frame will do jack shit, because the stick-in-the-mud companies that can't part with IE6 won't install a browser in a plugin. If the companies didn't have ignorant, self-defeating, head-up-their-fucking-ass rules about what level of corporate hell they'll ban you to for trying to install something on your machine, they would simply let you install the browser itself. None of the companies currently threatening their employees with fines or even firing will consider for a second adding an entire browser via a plugin. Employees might try to install it on their own in order to try to hide the fact that they get more work done when not using a complete piece of shit, but that will just prompt more companies to learn how to block people from installing browser plugins.

One of the reasons even the more laid back companies would probably let people install a whole other browser before installing a browser in a plugin: support. If you have employees using web applications that take advantage of Chrome Frame and they hit a bug either in the web application itself or something more severe like a browser crash (or maybe the always entertaining BSOD), that will fucking suck to figure out what happened. And if you installed Chrome Frame without their knowing, then call up support with a "my browser fucking crashed on me again" that turns out to stem from Google's crap code, your employer will fuck you. Shit, once they finally upgrade to IE8 they'll have enough of a problem with browser engines.

We instead need to find out what products companies use that require IE and either get the distributer to stop that shit, or provide alternatives. This will take a fucking long time, so I expect we'll also need to educate some of these dumbasses who think that they'll stay more secure by using an ancient fucking version of the least secure browser in existence, so they'll at least let one of the better choices onto the machines. Then employees will still have IE6 for the ten-year old shit software that requires it, and something else to use that actually works with the rest of the world.

IE6 death push makes CNN

2009-08-06T11:22:00.003-05:00

Web citizens trying to kill Internet Explorer 6:

'On the surface, the campaign against IE 6 may seem like a cult of disgruntled techies who are angry at Microsoft or want to gripe about people who lag behind the technological curve.

But that analysis is too simplistic, said Dan Oliver, editor of .net, a UK magazine about Web design.

"This isn't an anti-Microsoft campaign," he said. "Microsoft makes some fantastic products. The latest version of their browser is a good browser. But with regards to IE 6 ... [it] is an awful browser and no one should be using it."

He added: "Ultimately, we've kind of waited long enough. That's why there's a big movement of support for it because the geeks out there have known about this for years and have been waiting for big sites to jump on and push it forward."

In a statement to CNN, Microsoft said it also wants people to turn away from IE 6.'

I completely fucking disagree with the "The latest version of their browser is a good browser." statement, but the point that people should use it over IE6 definitely still stands.

I added a Twitter widget to the sidebar

2009-07-30T14:10:00.002-05:00

Let me know whether or not it pisses you off.

If you know how to make it static, rather than continually cycling through things with that annoying as shit animation, please tell me.

UK government fails to follow its own advice on not using IE6

2009-07-23T14:18:00.003-05:00

From MoD sticks with insecure browser:

'The MoD is implementing a secure desktop computing service for 300,000 users worldwide through its Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) programme, but defence minister Quentin Davies said: "DII currently uses Internet Explorer 6 and at the current time does not have a requirement to move to an updated version."

Watson expressed his dismay at the response.

"Many civil servants use web browsers as a tool of their trade," he told GC News. "They're as important as pens and paper. So to force them to use the most decrepit browser in the world is a rare form of workplace cruelty that should be stopped.

"When you consider that the government supported Get Safe Online initiative advises that companies should upgrade from IE6, you would imagine that permanent secretaries would like to practice what they preach," he added. "Why civil servants should not be given the choice to use Firefox or Chrome or Safari is beyond me. UK web workers deserve better.'"

Emphasis mine, because I fucking loved reading that part.

Okay, fuck it. Follow me on Twitter

2009-07-18T21:43:00.002-05:00

http://twitter.com/whyiesucks

Bonus points for the first person to recognize my profile picture.

IE6 Must Die moves to Twitter petition

2009-07-18T12:37:00.002-05:00

For those of you involved in this Twitter thing (which I almost feel compelled to join now...fuck me - I can't believe I just said that), you can now add an icon to your Twitter profile image using a service called "Twibbon" - IE6 Must Die. This came about after James Lynch (lynchjames) read Mashable's article, IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On:

"We've sputtered on with the dead weight of IE6 since 2001, but we’re just now reaching a breaking point, and companies are starting to feel it. YouTube and Digg clearly believe that it’s not in their best interests to continue supporting the outdated browser and thus have put the word out about their plans to phase out support. More and more companies will take their lead as it becomes harder and harder to justify the cost of keeping a site running correctly in Microsoft’s old browser.

But looking forward, HTML 5 standards will enable the building of richer web applications. More and more of our lives are on the web, and our use of web apps like Facebook has skyrocketed. Google’s even announced Google Chrome OS, an operating system that will run web apps instantaneously because it is built on the browser. But projects as rich as Google Wave will not realize their full potential (or run at all) if they must cater to a browser that runs on outdated standards."

The campaign as of this post has just about 5000 supporters, which doesn't seem too shabby for a day's work. Still, let's see that number really fucking rise!

IE6 Must Die

IE6 will die a long, horrible (for us) death

2009-07-09T01:51:00.006-05:00

Or, further evidence that PPK knows his shit.

A short while ago, PPK (of indispensable QuirksMode fame) wrote a post entitled "State of the Browsers - IE edition" which you should have read by now. If not, go fucking read it.

"Recently I held a presentation at a local Microsoft conference in the Netherlands. Slides are here. Fanatical followers will recognise most of the topics I discussed from earlier slide shows, but the last one, about the changes to the market share of IE6, 7, and 8, is new.

Basically, IE6 will continue to exist when IE7 has all but disappeared, and, contrary to what you might expect, this situation will create exciting opportunities for Microsoft’s competitors.

Besides, last week the news came that Microsoft is going to voluntarily de-bundle IE from all Windows 7 machines that will be sold in Europe, and I continue to have my doubts about that affair.

So it’s time for a special State of the Browsers IE edition."

Make sure you read the entire thing, don't just skim the fucking thing and come back here.

Now, what he wrote should make complete sense, even if you didn't want to hear much of it. Who wants to admit that IE6, the shit-stained cockroach of a browser, will likely last longer than IE7?

Confirming this, a recent post on Digg looks deeper into the usage of Digg by users still stuck with IE6 and why the fuck they don't use something else. Turns out, most of them can't use something else. According to their poll, some 70% of IE6 users who participated say their job won't let them use something sane (either by direct denial or by blocking admin access).

Around the same time as the poll, it came to light that Orange UK not only instructs their employees to only use IE6, but it outright fucking threatens them with a £250 fine if they find Firefox on their work machine, even though Firefox helps them work more efficiently. This not only follows in the my-ignorant-fucking-company-won't-let-me-upgrade vein, but also the fuck-you-I'll-get-something-even-better.

The best of all (so far, I have no fucking doubt in my mind that others will continue to follow suit) comes from the United States government, where State Department workers asked Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, if they could use Firefox instead of IE. In fact, they couldn't believe they even had to bother asking in the first place:

MS. GREENBERG: Okay. Our next question comes from Jim Finkle:

Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just – (applause) – I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn't use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don't understand why State can't use it. It's a much safer program. Thank you. (Applause.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, apparently, there's a lot of support for this suggestion. (Laughter.) I don't know the answer. Pat, do you know the answer? (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: The answer is at the moment, it's an expense question. We can --

QUESTION: It's free. (Laughter.)

Update: Tom Watson, a UK MP, has joined in, questioning various government departments of their plans (or lack thereof) to move from IE6 to something not quite so fucking old and decrepit. Side note: one government department, which has at least started thinking about the move, wins the department naming contest: NOMS.

Firefox 3.5 Released, and Microsoft runs an idiotic ad campaign

2009-06-30T14:22:00.004-05:00

Download Firefox 3.5 today to thank Mozilla for not running shit like this:

Also, for the features.

Quick IE8 Suckage

2009-06-29T17:41:00.003-05:00

Brought to you by the magic of Twitter.

@jeresig: Anyone else having issues with IE8 randomly switching into IE7 mode without warning or in a reproducible manner? Pulling my hair out.

@ppk: @jeresig When this happens the IE8 engine has crashed, and IE automatically switches to IE7 mode.

Normally I avoid Twitter-related goings on, but I couldn't just let this fucking gem go by without sharing it.

Register Frustration

2009-05-19T10:34:00.002-05:00

Nestled in my feeds today, I found a quick little rant in the middle of a review of Wolfram's Alpha on The Register:

"Alpha is really good at telling you all sorts of information about mathematical expressions, showing you publicly available data about populations and geography, and comparing stock quotes. However, I am a software engineer by trade, and the information I need is about Python module documentation, Apache configuration, and why some fucking snippet of CSS won't fucking render in fucking Internet Explorer fucking 6. For someone like me (and in the web market, there are a lot of people like me), Alpha is breaking ground in a New Kind of Uselessness."

Emphasis and knowing smile mine.

Web Standards Shit List Update

2009-03-30T18:26:00.003-05:00

Microsoft just keeps making this shit list better and better. We now get a chronological view of the 3,135 sites in an Excel sheet (hey, at least they released it - maybe one of these days they'll find out what the fuck HTML does), when they piss off enough of their users to make it onto the list, and when (and if) they beg Microsoft to remove them.

For the record, a few sites have already removed themselves from the list, most notably Flickr and Yahoo! (redundant, but still big enough in their own right that they can get separate mentions).

Thoughts of a web designer and a user on IE8

2009-03-29T12:04:00.006-05:00

As some of you might have noticed, IE8 made it into the world of regular users recently. Not another beta or release candidate but the real fucking deal. Since in the release, Microsoft seems to have only made the change of removing the "RC" tag, I just didn't fucking bother to write anything.

While watching the world for reactions other than simple parroting of Microsoft's lies, damn lies, and goddamn motherfucking non sequiturs, I found two reactions from very different perspectives that really show how little progress Microsoft has made in all these years.

Internet Explorer 8と XHTML (Google-translated version, for the Japanese-impaired):

"今さら気づいたのですが、IE8って Content-Typeが application/xhtml+xmlの文書に未だ対応していないんですね。ファイルのダウンロードになってしまいます。。。

Blogをはじめとした XHTML文書では application/xhtml+xmlで送ることが推奨されています。当サイトのように XHTML1.1にあえてしているものは尚更です。IEって昔から Webの進化を止めてるなぁってつくづく思います。透過PNGもそうだし、XML宣言もそう。レイアウト上のバグの修正もしてくれない。。。"

Internet Explorer 8 - faulty straight out of the box… (on the installation dialogs and process):

"The next step is [Choose your settings dialog]

How the hell do I know? I've not used the thing yet, I don't know what the features do, or whether I want them to do it - and I sure as hell don't want IE8 set as my default, nor do I like the way they've sneaked it in with a whole batch of other stuff where it's easily overlooked, so I'm going with the custom option.

...

The thing is, IE is the first point of contact with the Internet for almost every new computer user, and in the past has been perfectly usable with zero knowledge - with the introduction of IE8 I think newbies are going to be way out of their depth. Sorry, Redwood[sic], I've had great faith in MS products for a long time, but seriously, you can shove this one."

Fantastic fucking IE6 splash screens

2009-03-19T15:16:00.002-05:00

Efforts to wipe out this piece of shit we call IE6 continue

2009-03-16T12:46:00.003-05:00

Bring Down IE 6: a campaign by .net magazine

"The premise is simple: Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn't support key web standards, and should be phased out. This isn't about being anti-Microsoft, it's about Microsoft's lack of development in the browser market. With IE7/8 not available for Windows 2000, IE6 accounts for up to 20% of web usage, primarily via business users. Clients pressure designers to 'force' sites to work in IE6, and designers, not wanting to lose business, comply, using hacks and workarounds. This wastes time and money. Microsoft needs to fix this, designers need to unite, and we all need to move on."

Ballmer throws more weight behind drop IE6 campaign

2009-03-06T11:00:00.003-06:00

Steve Ballmer ber IE6-brukere oppgradere:

"Microsoft recommends end users that are browsing the web with Internet Explorer 6 to upgrade today to benefit from numerous improvements including security features and usability enhancements.

Interoperability is key to enabling developers to continue to create great user experiences on the web. Our commitment to the technical community continues with our significant investment in Internet Explorer 8.

We continue to believe in the importance of supporting the end users and encourage the technical community to work with us in securing a good transition for the users that today are using IE6.

Hope that helps"

See Google's translation for the Norwegian impaired: Steve Ballmer asks IE6 users upgrade

Track the campaign

2009-02-23T12:04:00.003-06:00

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.

Let's end support of IE6 on behalf of Microsoft

2009-02-20T18:15:00.003-06:00

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.

Because you can't use dick until IE expires

2009-02-19T10:45:00.004-06:00

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.

An update on compatibility view updates

2009-02-17T12:59:00.002-06:00

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:

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.
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.

Apologies for those keeping up with me via a feed reader

2009-02-13T15:28:00.002-06:00

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.

Of dropping IE6

2009-01-23T15:06:00.002-06:00

Everyone should go say hello to Doug Bowman, design god, and give him a,"Fuck, yes!" of encouragement on his decision to drop IE6 support for his newly designed site:

"IE6: the new Netscape4

This version of the site is also my first opportunity to give IE6 the proverbial finger. It was liberating to develop this site without checking my work in IE. Time for everyone to say I dropped IE6. Hello :before and :after pseudo-selectors, attribute selectors, adjacent-sibling selectors, and all kinds of other simple selector tricks that should have worked years ago in every browser.

I didn’t even check any version of IE until last night, when I figured I should at least take a peek to see how gloriously IE6 barfed all over a 10-year old CSS2 specification. Impressive, it was. For now, I’m using conditional comments to serve a custom stylesheet for IE6 just to turn off most of the styles. This seemed like the lesser evil, and at least ensures the poor souls still using IE6 can at least read my content. IE6 gets a stripped down, single-column view that will get no more attention of love after this. I’ll be able to yank those conditional comments and the entire stylesheet anytime I want. I noticed IE7 had one major problem with a negative margin, so IE7 gets its own little stylesheet too."

He also links to I dropped Internet Explorer 6, a site that really should have more than 49 sites registered.

EU on IE

2009-01-20T00:50:00.003-06:00

Okay, let's talk about this for a minute. If you see EU and IE in the same sentence and don't have a fucking clue what happened, go read up:

BBC: Microsoft is accused by EU again

"The European Commission has accused Microsoft of harming competition by bundling its Internet Explorer browser with its Windows operating system.

The commission said it had reached the preliminary view that the US software giant had undermined consumer choice and infringed EU rules.

Microsoft and the European Union have engaged in legal battles over competition issues for years.

Last year, the EU fined Microsoft 899m euros ($1.4bn; £680.9m)..."

Slashdot: EU Antitrust Troubles Continue For Microsoft (linking to and quoting from Network World's EU slaps Microsoft (again) for antitrust over IE bundled with Windows)

"Opera Software's year-old antitrust complaint against Microsoft took another step toward being vindicated, and the Oslo-based browser maker can't help crowing over the European Commission's decision. Opera had filed a complaint with the EC in December, 2007, contending that Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows violated antitrust rules. Yesterday, the EC sent a 'Statement of Objections (SO)' to Microsoft with a preliminary finding that bundling IE with Windows does indeed constitute an antitrust abuse. Microsoft has eight weeks to plead its case and change the EC's mind, an unlikely outcome if ever there was one. Opera's CEO said, 'On behalf of all Internet users, we commend the Commission for taking the next step towards restoring competition in a market that Microsoft has strangled for more than a decade...'"

Computer World: EU: Microsoft 'shields' IE from competition

'The European Union's antitrust agency on Saturday confirmed that it has charged Microsoft with breaking the law, saying that the company "shields" Internet Explorer (IE) from "head-to-head competition" by bundling its browser with Windows.

The CEO of Opera Software, the Norwegian browser maker whose December 2007 complaint sparked the EU's investigation, welcomed the move. "This is extremely important," Jon von Tetzchner said in an interview late Friday. "It's important that people have a choice of browsers. It's important that we don't have one company dominating the browser market..."'

...and covered by just about every Linux and Mac news site in existence, along with everyone else whose boiling blood at seeing "IE" instantly felt worlds better at seeing the rest of the sentence, which typically described the EU walking in on the aforementioned IE getting shoved into some orifice its citizens by Microsoft, who apparently forgot the gag this time.

However, many cannot help but wonder how users would download their browser of choice without IE installed on the machine from the start. How do you download a browser without a browser? Or, to quote one of the latest mind-numbing dumbasses commenting in support of IE,"If IE was not bundled with Windows, how would you visit Mozillas page for downloading Firefox?" Or more articulately by one of us merely exploring the options available in order to comply with a ruling against Microsoft,

"...How do you download a browser without a browser? I’m sure the clever crew here at QuirksMode can come up with a few solutions, but I’m also sure an average end user won’t have the faintest idea what to do...

...This leads to a very confusing situation in which nobody wins and the end user loses. For these reasons I start to wonder if the unbundling can realistically be executed. Then again, if we do nothing Microsoft retains its advantage over the other browser vendors..."

Now, this got me thinking about a method by which not only can Microsoft show how much they actually mean all of their fucking groveling and apologizing to the EU and pathetic "we work with the open source community" infuriatingly shallow, yet endless pool of watery shit, but how they can put their money, their users, and their all-too-slowly shrinking collection of monopolies behind their fucking-son-of-a-bitch-I-will-cut-you mouth. Not only this, not...only...this, but they can also preemptively avoid similar (and otherwise unavoidable) decisions by fucktons of people. For instance, about that the way in which Microsoft's products miraculously work in harmony that means IIS can sometimes outperform Apache in Windows, SQL Server can integrate better than Oracle on Windows (even with PHP for fuck's sake), and you can only construct a supposedly reliable Microsoft server setup by ditching everything Microsoft didn't shit out itself, who then charges you for the honor of catching that shit in your mouth for years on end.

Anyone from Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter, who bundle Safari and Quicktime with fucking iTunes...possibly just to spite Microsoft?), feel free to start tuning back in at this point. If you take just one fucking thing out of the myriad of beautiful possibilities of what you might learn from the Linux and BSD communities, learn this: people like free software.

This has nothing to do with piracy, you greedy motherfuckers. You give away IE and Safari for free, don't you? That's one form of free software. Granted, Apple has done a much better job of getting the "free as in freedom" part with the WebKit project than Microsoft, who still grapples desperately with the "free as in beer" aspect. But let's put aside the "freedom" part of it for now until you get a pair of balls big enough to look that subject in the face and give your users some real goddamn respect.

Right now, we'll just talk about "free as in beer."

Users of all major distributions of free operating systems can, today, install a browser without first having a browser installed (though most come with at least one or two), if they so choose to install the operating system without that particular piece of software. They could install FTP programs, word processors, media players, and entire enterprise-ready server setups without ever installing a browser in order to get to some site. Some distros offer thousands of software packages, while others offer merely hundreds, all via a simple (okay, not really simple) piece of software generally referred to as a "package manager."

Before anyone starts scoffing at this idea, just sit your ass back and consider what the fuck the goddamn iTunes store does. Apple has already started learning about the power of putting real design muscle (or, at least, what little it deigned to assign) and a hell of a lot of marketing power behind a package manager that works with just one little branch in an OS' family tree. With so much of the software available for MacOS available via a simple, all-contained package that you can drop into the Applications folder, they have such an advantage over Microsoft on this front I would find it difficult to believe that everyone in Microsoft thinks they did things right by making people finger their Windows registry in order to completely remove half the shit that IE willingly installs for them.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch: anyone wondering how Grandma will get to her emails and pictures on the Internet could rest easy if Grandma's machine starts up with a piece of software that asks her what the fuck she wants to do with her computer.

"mail"

Here, have a few options, with pretty fucking pictures of what they look like and reviews of them so you can decide for yourself (sound familiar?). Want something usable? Try Thunderbird. Want something you can hack the shit out of into your very own artificial life form of something resembling an email client? Try mutt.

"internet"

Here, more options with pretty fucking pictures and reviews from people. Something called "Opera!" I like Operas! Look at all the pretty things I can use to dress it up! Something called "Firefox!" That sounds like the balls to the motherfucking wall Harley I used to ride compared to this "Internet Explorer" shit.

"radio"

Here, have options ranging from full fucking media servers to a bare-bones, simple, usable, easy media player.

"write"

Here, have some options ranging from no-distractions writing tools to word processors that can index, cross reference, categorize, and merge before you realize you need it to.

In the Linux and BSD world, where many happy people live, all of this comes free. And not just free as in "for 30 days" or "I can use this for non-commercial purposes, and I'll get this goddamn watermark all over everything," but free to use forever. And (generally) free to do with it whatever the fuck you want. Download it once and copy it to all 50 machines in your office. Put your company's branding on top, or turn it into a collaborative tool. Download patches, extensions, plugins, and hacks to make that motherfucker better, stronger, faster!

...breathing slowly, and riding that orgasm back down to the subject at hand...

Users of distros like Debian (Ubuntu's sugar daddy), FreeBSD, Slackware, and innumerable others have all provided examples of how to do this in a way that best suits their users (albeit some better than others). Take users' opinions of you on the chin and give them the choice. If people really do prefer your software to that of others, the reviews and downloads will reflect that. If they don't reflect that, then I guess you have some marketers to fire (or better yet, put out of ~~their~~ our goddamn misery) and a shitload of catching up to do.

Regardless, your users crave and deserve choice, and you can give it to them. You saw what happened when Apple released a package manager for the iPhone: developers tripped over themselves to pay Apple for the honor of getting in line for the chance to take Apple's restrictions up the ass. You, Microsoft, only have to copy them once again (in copying someone else) and loosen the noose a bit so actual browsers and media players can play in the same fucking sandbox. If your software really does just beat the shit out of the rest of them, then why not try proving it for once instead of cowering behind your fucking EULAs and OS-level integration?

I won't pretend that you can just announce this and have the world forgive you of your sins, but that transition from the software management quagmire in which you now live to a proper solution rests on your fucking shoulders. I hate your goddamn company and everything you've created, but because I want a better tool out there for my fucking users, I felt the need to give you some advice.

New favorite 'net radio station

2008-12-28T14:14:00.002-06:00

Red Mercury, and not just because for their 192kbps of chewy goth/industrial goodness, but because of this footer on their site:

"This site has been designed to work best with Firefox, Safari and Opera. You need a web browser that supports transparency in iframes, and PNG. You also need Java and Java script enabled. We are not responsible for how fucked up it looks in other piece-of-shit browsers. To comply to our standards, download FireFox NOW."

Now, they may not have the most advanced site in the world (Java? iframes? "Java script?!"), but they have their rivet-adorned hearts in the right place.

I
2008-12-22T10:13:00.004-06:00
A contribution by: The Ingenious Teresa Lea

IE (aka: Internet Explorer) represents all that is wrong with this world... stupid people.

If by some chance you're confused brain thought "why?" after the previous statement, then please read on - this story is for you.

Imagine yourself in Boston - I know it's hard since you have never been there, but work with me here.

So, you are in Boston and you need to go somewhere, so you find the closest T station - because who wouldn't want to ride the T while in Boston?? Not I. But first, you need T tickets. Luckily, there is a very handy kiosk that will allow you to buy your tickets to ride the T, so you decide to avoid the lines and use the kiosk.

As you go through the menus, you realize that the kiosk isn't selecting the options you are selecting. Instead, the kiosk is picking the selection below your selection. You become a bit frustrated and go back to the beginning of the menu so that you can allow for this discrepancy and get the right ticket for your ride on the T. You go through the menu again and halfway through you realize the kiosk is now picking the selection above your selection - as you go to start over, you hear an announcement of your oncoming train. This time you begin to rush which makes you even more frustrated, you have to make this work - but alas, you can't make it work.

Completely pissed that you've now missed your ride on the T (and really, who wouldn't be completely pissed that they were not able to ride the T?) so you make your way over to the ticket window to ask for a manager. The manager is flabbergasted! She takes you over to the kiosk to see what in the world is going on, and the kiosk walks her right through the menu system, allowing her to purchase your tickets with no problems.

Now you feel crazy, so you try again with the manager looking on so that you can show her that you aren't in fact crazy or stupid. And BINGO! the kiosk is behaving badly again! You exclaim to the manager "SEE!! SEE!! I told you!" and the manager replies, "No sir, I see you pressing the wrong buttons...". In a fit of anger you tackle the manager, enraged by her accusation!! Other passengers come to her rescue pulling you and your crazy ass off of the manager. In the tussle your glasses fall off and break... you've had the glasses since 1973 so you aren't too worried about it.

In your maddened frenzy you pull away from the other passengers and run to the kiosk to show them. You quickly go through the menu and say "SEE! This machine is making me mad!" and you realize - the machine is working... it was your glasses.

In that moment the passengers overwhelm you and you wake up in a looney bin and live out the rest of your days.

This is what it is like making websites for the stupid people that are still using IE - we waste time and go mad trying to make the sites work for some stupid jackass wearing outdated, shitty ass glasses.

Get some new fucking glasses asshat, THEY ARE FREE - so we can be productive with our time and solve real issues, like world peace, hunger and poverty.

That is all.

You may want to think about switching from IE -BBC

2008-12-16T12:00:00.003-06:00

You know that huge fucking hole in IE that has had everyone talking lately? The most recent one, I mean. BBC News took that story and put that shit up on its front page, as the highest technology news story: "Serious security flaw found in IE"

I'll forgive their headline writing on this one, which should have gone a little more like,"IE users seriously fucked," or,"IE broken enough to lose second browser war."

"Microsoft says it has detected attacks against IE 7.0 but said the "underlying vulnerability" was present in all versions of the browser.

Other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, are not vulnerable to the flaw Microsoft has identified."

One of the nice things about the article, aside from its pure fucking domination of the technology news section, it offers direct links to other browsers for you to download.

It also has a nice little feedback form so you can tell BBC exactly how much IE has a long, painful history of security vulnerabilities and a bad fucking habit of not actually fixing their shit. Just keep the profanity to a minimum if you want to see your comment even get close to published...or pile it in there to give them a good sense of the "FUCK YOU IE AND YOUR USER-RAPING COMPANY" way you might feel.

A Very Manley Contribution

2008-12-12T14:41:00.003-06:00

Our first contribution comes from Josh Manley (he used the pun first, so don't blame me for that shit), whose site greets people with a typical web developer's life story, and a rallying cry to spread word:

if you are using ie...

...The web browser you are using does not comply to the web standards of the internet developed and maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). As you may or may not know IE *shiver is the worlds most widely used web browser for one reason and one reason alone. IE *shiver which was created by Microsoft is shipped with every Windows *shiver operating system which is shipped with over 90% of all computers sold around the world. By default IE *shiver owns the web browser market.

"Most people don't even know that they don't know." -Ron Burton That basically sums up the issue at hand. Now you may be wondering why this is such a problem. The answer is simple: Because IE defies web standards and in turn the web itself. Please allow me to elaborate.

When I am writing a website I use Firefox and validate my code frequently to ensure it validates under these standards. In the past I would have to then go and check the site in IE and tweak my code to conform to this corrupt browser. Then re validate and repeat this process until my code validates. I have grown tired of this process and find it incredibly vexing.

Microsoft for one reason or another seems to be bent on world domination. They have turned their backs on the world and made it harder for all web developers by intentionally ignoring the standards created to make the web a better place. So what do we do? We boycott IE. Download any of the many free alternatives to IE. Firefox is a good place to start. Tell your friends. Tell you family. Tell your neighbors. Spread the word. Don't conform. Don't be ignorant.

Microsoft says IE6 has ignorant users who know nothing of security

2008-12-12T09:03:00.004-06:00

A fantastic quote from the fantastic Register, which features Matt Crowley, Program Manager for IE "extensibility" at Microsoft:

'Why are so many people still using the security-challenged IE6? Crowley gives you the answer you already have. "People who use IE are not the most tech-savvy people. If you ask them about what security they have in place, they think you're talking about your house. It's more ignorance than anything else."'

This seems like a nice, big "FUCK YOU" to Microsoft's key partners. Only companies that suck Microsoft off on a regular basis would still use IE6. Only companies who have fundamentally broken intranet applications which rely on IE6's inherently fucked up "features" would need to force IE6 up the asses of their employees. Only companies with scores of Windows admins around to actually prime the asses of the new employees and do the rough shoving would fall into this category of "not the most tech-savvy people" of which Mr. Matt Program-Manager-at-Microsoft Crowley speaks.

Comment of the week

2008-12-09T11:09:00.002-06:00

This week's comment struck me as impressively creative simply due to how many fucking rants this anonymous commenter tried to cram into 75 words.

Well, microshit is doing it's best, and they have bettered any famous criminals to date, short of the Bushyboy admin...........organized crime at its best, thats the way to define vista and ie.........but, alas, in amerca, we now support criminals all the time, just look at the bailouts as an example........

In reality, micrshit is run by a geek, who is wanting to get revenge on the world cuz he's mad and hates himself

Anonymous managed to shove "microshit," criminal behavior, the Bush administration, organized crime, Vista, IE, the United States' social problems, bailouts, and the world/self hating behavior of Bill Gates all into the same, compact comment, like a condensed rock of hate, shit out at the site of an old post. Er...well done? Now go get some fucking ritalin and keep your thoughts on the same topic for more than a few words at a time. I see some good, old fashioned, Microsoft-raping commentary in there dying to get out.

"Compatibility View" "Improvements"

2008-12-04T01:01:00.002-06:00

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.

Comment of the week

2008-12-02T11:15:00.002-06:00

While tempted out of nothing but pure fucking selfishness to choose TeresaLea's declaration of her love for me, I decided that I simply cannot overlook the following gem from one "Rev. I M Pissed," whose use of the tongue strikes me as purtier'n a ten dollar whore.

Thank the great browser gods I have arrived in Nirvana. I have been writing and rewriting and every one of the browsers, except one, reads and displays what I designed. Guess which one. Out of 4 browsers, the almighty, do I hear a Amen, for the self appointed god of the internet. The Great, the one and only, IE.

Yes, that's right, that one and only, the largest, the biggest, Cock Sucking, Mother Fucking piece of hardened Shit, that mortal man has ever devised, and brought us to the lowest depths of hell.

Now go my children, and spread the word, the gospel of standards, I say standards, of the mighty browsers that support those standards, and throw back, the demon, yes, I say the demon, IE back to the fiery Hell where it was begot.....

Yeah, I think I need to bring a little more attention to some of the utterly fantastic rants and cries of,"Thank fucking god/satan/squid I've found others like me!"

Call for contributors

2008-11-19T23:08:00.001-06:00

So I've come very, very slowly to the conclusion spotted already by many out there: I just don't fucking update this often enough. IE sucks hard in more ways than I can keep up with on my own, especially now that we have IE8 making its way out to the real world of standards, and the IE team takes its sweet fucking time sweeping IE6 out of our goddamn way once and for all. Seriously, IE7 doesn't amount to much more than IE6 with a roll of duct tape and tabs, but IE6? That broken piece of shit fell into our laps over seven motherfucking, agonizing years ago. Put that shit in a sack and toss it the fuck out while going 80 miles an hour on I-40 through a nice, long stretch of desert where we'll never have to see it again.

But I digress.

If you want to contribute, send it to whyiesucks@gmail.com and I'll post it with as much or as little attribution as you want, using your real name or a pseudonym so some smart-ass fucking interviewer or manager doesn't wave a printed up copy of it under your nose with a raised eyebrow (or pink slip, depending). If things go well, I'll invite some people through this thing in order to grant write permission directly to the blog itself.

I know some of you out there, especially the evangelists, have venting you need to get out of your system and I want to give you the chance to do so, loudly, and without fear of it coming back to haunt you.

I know some of you out there, especially the designers and developers, want people to know what you think about IE's complete and utter lack of support for 90% of what you want or need to do.

Let's hear it.

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

2008-08-31T11:34:00.004-05:00

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

2008-08-27T20:43:00.001-05:00

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

2008-08-23T11:54:00.003-05:00

"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.

Request to join the IE8 Technical Beta program

2008-07-30T15:01:00.002-05:00

Work and life have taken over for a while, but I have not given up the fight.

Hello,

As a web developer with almost ten years of real-world development and usability experience, I would like to express my interest in joining the IE8 Technical Beta program. I have worked with IE since version 3, and would bring a valuable perspective of a developer working with the tool in their day to day tasks. I will have no problem detailing the exact issues that I come across, including as much information as I can pertaining to the issue, while remaining professional.

I invite you read what I write on my own blog while knowing that my profanity and vitriol will remain confined there. I have every motivation to help you make IE8 the best release we've ever seen, as it will only make my life (and the life of my clients) better.

Sincerely,

T.H.

You may notice a distinct lack of "fuck," "shit," and "you lying motherfuckers" in my request. In order to actualy have any hope of them taking my request seriously, I have to keep that shit here. Plus, the fucking SMTP server rejected my first goddamn email because I dared include a link to my own site, since it contains the word "sucks" (honestly...The Simpsons has worse language than that).

How can I resist such an easy target: the IE version switch

2008-01-23T10:59:00.000-06:00

I have had a lot of shit going on, and haven't really posted anywhere near as much as I would like. But seeing the IE team blow away their own record on pure fucking stupidity, with the help of people who know better... Fuck, Chris Wilson even wrote:

With this painful and unexpected lesson under our belt, we worked together with The Web Standards Project (in the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force) on this problem. I can’t give them enough credit for this work; it’s tough to step into the shoes of a browser vendor that ships to half a billion users to figure out what the best thing to do is, when you really just want to sit down and write code to the standards.

That seems painfully close to We really want to write a standards-compliant browser, if only those meanies in the Web Standards Project would let us!

This proves to me that not only did Microsoft come up with a phenomenally badly designed proposal for IE8, but they fucking know it and try to push the blame onto the very people trying to get them to stop this shit in the first place!

For those who haven't seen this latest round of the "how can we fuck developers and users even more" game, go read the A List Apart article that started it all. I don't want to have to explain that shit to you before I continue ranting about it, so seriously: read it.

Jeremy Keith put it quite well when he found himself writing Unless you explicitly declare that you want IE8 to behave as IE8, it will behave as IE7. This proposal for the meta tag version switch flies in the face of common sense and then cock-slaps it for good measure. With it, Microsoft fucking requires that you programatically declare your site compatible with a specific IE version. This brings back the "Best viewed in IE4" fuckery remembered not very fondly by developers from the Netscape/IE wars years ago, but fucking enforces it. If you don't want to add the meta tag, you will never see IE support web standards any better than IE7. EVER.

If Microsoft gets away with this, they will get away with shitting all over web standards efforts and pissing in the face of the W3C. IE will require its own doctype, in a sense, in order to allow sites to use web standards.

One of the saddest aspects of this bullshit: otherwise intelligent people like Jeffery Zeldman end up supporting this, seeming to reverse their stance on web standards. In his post, Jeffery has proven to me that he will now live on his knees, forever drinking from the dripping cock of the beast.

7 + 1 = 8

2007-12-05T22:45:00.001-06:00

So the world seems abuzz with chatter about the most recent bullshit from the IEBlog, which included this fucking priceless gem:

'Of course, some people care about other aspects of IE8 much more than they care about the name. As I've walked different people through the plan, I've gotten "Does it have feature X?" "When is the beta?" "When does it release" and even the more thoughtful "What are you trying to accomplish with this release?"

You will hear a lot more from us soon on this blog and in other places. In the meantime, please don’t mistake silence for inaction.'

I can only assume that Dean posted this in an effort to parody the previous bullshit posted on the information wasteland formerly known as the IEBlog.

What can I possibly write here that hasn't appeared in conversations elsewhere - even said to Bill "I know my OS gets bigger each time, but you can still fucking take it up the ass" Gates:

"MOLLY HOLZSCHLAG: So, I have a little bit of an infrastructure question, as related to MIX and the open conversation and transparency. A few years ago, MIX was a big information and conversation about the opening of ideas, it was about when in the specific we talked about the browser, IE 7, a lot of interest in that, a lot of talking about it. So, for the last year or so, I’ve been working, I’ve been a consultant here with the IE and tools teams to try and help get standards implementation to be strong, and we see some really great advances.

But very recently there seems to be a shift in infrastructure, and I don’t really know exactly what happened, but what I understand, my understanding is that IE sits on the Web platform rather than in the — excuse me, on the platform, on the Windows platform rather than the Web, and something seems to have changed where there is no messaging now for the last six months to a year going out on the IE team. They seem to have lost the transparency that they had been able to get some momentum going on in the IE 7 phase, in the year and a half since MIX06.

So, I’m very concerned about this, because being the person here that’s supposed to be the liaison between designers and developers for the Web and the browser conversation, this conversation seems to have been pretty much shut down, and I’m very concerned as to why that is, and how we can correct it.

BILL GATES: I’ll have to ask Dean what the hell is going on. I mean, we’re not — there’s not like some deep secret about what we’re doing with IE."

Apologies to Molly for quoting a moderate piece, but oh...look at the size of it, and how much it just fucking begs for attention!

In the end, the IE team has posted bullshit that amounts to nothing. The only reason that their post receives any attention: they included three characters representing what developers have fallen to their knees, mouths open, and fucking begged for: IE8. They had no need to mention anything about IE8, because they knew that the mere mention of it would get the web development world wet and ready.

We can only hope they don't fucking prematurely ejaculate and leave us all disappointed, frustrated, and looking elsewhere for pleasure. Again.

Chris Wilson has a sense of humor

2007-10-30T17:15:00.000-05:00

Why else would he proclaim ...as I've frequently spoken about publicly, compatibility with the current web ecosystem - not "breaking the Web" - is something we take very seriously. in his recent post?

They "break the Web" (as he so eloquenty fucking puts it) more and more with each release! Actually, this may explain why they rarely shit out a new version of IE. They want to break things less. So if they release less frequently, they break shit less frequently.

So in some fucked up sense of logic, they almost have carried through with their goals. Except, of course, for the giant pile of bullshit that line of reasoning sits on in order to work.

Really, they need to rip the fucking "JScript" out of IE and implement JavaScript. They have a long way to go to even get close to Mozilla's progress - to pick just one example of a browser kicking IE's bloated, diseased, and leaking ass when it comes to JavaScript support.

The Rise and Fall of Transparency in the Development of IE

2007-10-11T12:17:00.000-05:00

When the IE blog started up in July of 2004, it brought with it an optimism that the browser everyone hates (or uses out of pure fucking ignorance) would finally have a more open of a process. The IE development team would bring much needed communication with the communities of developers and users to their process of trying to fix the mess Microsoft had dumped on them like so much raw sewage spewing from the bowels of the company.

From that initial posting, Dean (Product Unit Manager of the IE Team) wrote:

"Our goal in this blog is to be a good place, direct from the source, for information about IE. What are we working on? How do we make decisions? Why does some part of IE work the way it does? What keeps us up late at night? What are we thinking of around security, extensibility, and other key areas? Hey, any good tips and tricks?"

Now, I get from this paragraph that they honestly wanted to open the process up to the world to make IE development better in-tune with what users want, and through this, make IE a better browser. Or at least less of a shit-stain on Microsoft's name...okay, less of one of the shit-stains. I guess one place on Microsoft's name that has a little less shit on it than the rest.

The IE blog even kept up this optimistic view, posting about IE7 development. I even praised their efforts, saying:

"While I hate IE and it makes me scream in frustration several times every day, I have a lot of respect for the current IE developers. Hence the link I've posted to the IEBlog. I want people to go there and see how much they've opened up the process. They've started working with the Web Standards Project to try to dig IE out of the fucking shit-hole it got stuck in after the first of the great browser wars."

Now, the last entry I see on the IE Blog that has anything remotely to do with their initial intentions didn't actually get posted by any member of the IE team! Back on April 2, Molly Holzschlag wrote about the people within Microsoft she met with, discussing how to handle the simply immense range of things IE does blantantly wrong, how fucking wrong they did them, and how start making a plan of not fucking their own users and maybe even the web developers as well.

I can only assume that at this point, the IE team took Molly's suggestions, plans, and generally well-informed feedback, and put it on the toilet paper in the office. This way, each and every member of the IE team can do physically what they do to Molly's suggestions and their users each and every day. Every day that they have explosive diarrhea. Every day that they wipe urine away to stop the burning. Every day that they sneak off to the bathroom for a quick jerk-off session at the thought of thousands of people's panic at yet another ActiveX vulnerability that will compromise trillions of dollars of business assets. The IE team has since not had Molly post anything at all, and they have yet to post anything even acknowledging the insight they received over six months ago.

Each and every day that passes without providing some level of feedback or some level of discourse on IE's direction wipes more shit on the users, and makes it all the more obvious that the IE blog had no purpose other than to misdirect the users and developers, just like every other corporate blog out there. It does nothing but whisper in the ears of its readers that of course it will give you a reach-around next time, they just need to fuck you purely for their own depraved, animal needs this once.

Lately, its posts haven't even kept whispering that promise, pretending to give a shit what the readers, users, and developers think and feel. The IE blog has turned into nothing more than a copy of the release notes pinned to security updates, sprinkled with bullshit and laced with marketing.

So fuck them. Nothing has changed. The browser still has no future, and every day that they keep a closed process and a deaf ear to its users and developers digs their grave faster and deeper. The more they fuck us, the harder they really fuck themselves.

A memory leak in IE? Seriously?

2007-09-21T23:10:00.000-05:00

According to a post, IE6 Form Tag Orphans, "Apparently if you try to remove/destroy/trash a FORM dom node in IE6, it won’t delete it, instead creating a bizarre orphaned node stuck sucking up memory until the browser window is refreshed..."

The post has a fairly comprehensive look at the cause, effect, and even a workaround.

Honestly, sometimes I think IE teams of the past just wanted to fuck with developers...

Exploring the issue of IE's market share

2007-07-31T18:40:00.000-05:00

IE has a monster of a monkey wrench clamped down on the nuts of the industry when it comes to market share. It didn't earn it, and very few of its ~~suckers~~ users out there consciously chose IE over another browser. The vast majority of people use it for the same reason they use it to look through their C drive for the porn they downloaded: they don't know that better options exist, or they think that installing a browser will have the same shit-ware that came with their cheap-ass Windows machine in the first place.

Most sysadmins out there like the fact that they can use Microsoft's tools to auto-configure IE to their company's policies in an attempt to keep every one of their doomed machines from getting eaten alive the second some jackass in marketing tries installing a "weather alert program" from a popup. Well guess what? Every other major browser out there installs more securely by default. Since they don't come as part of the core fucking operating system, they have at least a few more non-ActiveX steps for attackers to take before they can remotely annihilate a machine. Hell, Firefox even makes it damn easy to distribute a customized, branded version of it to your employees.

I won't say companies should drop Windows. Not in this post, at least. The majority of the companies out there rely on Microsoft Office, which means they need Windows. Open source equivalents like OpenOffice work great until you need to work with people using Microsoft Office. Microsoft's own Mac Office suite doesn't keep up with the Windows suite, and has its own compatibility issues. Switching to another operating system in a corporate setting, while completely possible and encouraged, has its own vast fields of shit sysadmins must cross on their bellies in order to start the process.

IE lacks the support of any useful technologies, like a modern JavaScript engine, SVG, canvas, or even native XMLHttpRequest support. Fuck, IE still renders its select inputs as core OS widgets, making it near impossible to display other markup elements over them. IE represents all the wonders of modern engineering of a fifteen year-old Ford Escort that won't die, its owner sinking thrice its worth into fixing the piece of shit rather than giving it away and starting fresh.

Microsoft waves its market share in our faces, just to see us writhe in disgust because we know how they got it. IE's market share proves its superiority over other browsers just like Vista's market share proves its superiority - it proves fuck all, other than Microsoft can cram anything down the throats of consumers and, while the consuming public might choke a little at the size and roughness of it, they'll slurp at it and beg for more. Some of them may bitch to their friends about how they don't like it, but they always find themselves back under Microsoft's hulk, taking it like any other bitch.

IE7 can't handle basic HTTP authentication with RSS

2007-06-16T08:54:00.000-05:00

So, it turns out that rather than take advantage of the IE codebase that can already handle HTTP authentication (one of the most basic methods of authentication in the wonderful world-wide web), Microsoft insisted that IE7 use their new RSS "platform" instead.

So not only did Microsoft reinvent their own fucking wheel, but they did it so badly that they don't support part of the HTTP spec from 1999. How much time and money do you suppose Microsoft fucking burned to create this sorry-ass "platform" for reading RSS? Just about every language out there already has an API to deal with XML (and ATOM, which the "platform" simply translates into broken RSS) and they insisted on creating their own. Then, unsurprisingly, they fucked up part of the core technology that their browser has supported for years.

Now, you can preview a feed that uses HTTP authentication in IE7 just fine. Even a browser as fucked up as IE7 supports HTTP authentication. The feed then renders in the browser, since it has its own ways of parsing and displaying RSS. Once you try subscribing to the feed, remember...subscribing in IE7, it leaves the browser itself and then the "platform" takes over. Because of this, any HTTP authentication you've already passed using IE means shit at this point. Another application has taken things over, and it doesn't know a fucking thing about HTTP authentication.

Let me summarize this, just in case anyone got fucking lost on the way through that last paragraph: IE7 does not support RSS, it uses Microsoft's RSS platform. Microsoft's RSS platform, which has its sole purpose of retrieving markup over HTTP, does not support HTTP.

I think someone in Microsoft either has a fantastic sense of humor, or Microsoft just can't fucking understand this new "internet" shit people keep shoving at it.

Microsoft and IE fuck Windows gamers

2007-06-03T18:36:00.000-05:00

Holy hell, I haven't posted in a while...

Anyway, a post by a gamer entitled Top ten things that are wrong with Games for Windows - Live caught my eye because of a new and curious way that Vista fucks users (well, all IE7 users, but Windows XP users can at least downgrade).

2. It's Vista only for now. No XP.

Sorry rest of the world. Since you need to be in a game to run GFW - Live, you won't be using GFW - Live on Windows XP. That's because the major launch titles, Shadowrun and HALO 2 are exclusive to Windows Vista. (Note that Shadowrun is cross-platform and will be available for XBOX 360 also).

Funny thing, though. You can't use the "Game Advisor" which is a main link promoted on almost every webpage on the Games for Windows website. It gives you an error message if you are using Vista: "Windows XP Game Advisor requires the use of the Windows 98/ME/2000/XP operating system and the Internet Explorer 6 browser."

I’m confused. Do you or do you not want me to run Vista?

This, in particular, strikes me as amusing. In order to play the games, you have to run Vista. But you can't access shit online, since they haven't made their sites work in IE7 yet.

Now, at first, I figured some third party jackasses just didn't look at their market when making the site. But then I checked the bottom of the page and saw © 2006-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft doesn't support their own browser, or their own operating system. Both versions of which, they have starting lubing up and forcably shoving up the asses of their own customers, without seeing whether or not they wanted Microsoft to fuck them with something bigger and harder to take.

Fucking priceless.

Four steps to a better IE

2007-04-22T14:32:00.000-05:00

Not much, but they sure as hell need to start somewhere.

Recently, the Chris Wilson of the IE team posted about What to Expect from IE at MIX07? and a flood of supportive comments followed.

Actually, a scattered assortment of fucking Firefox! and No, IE! wet slaps ensued. A scarce assortment of people still reading the blog chimed in with speculation about what pathetic "enhancements" and mandatory bug fixes the IE team might or might not pull out of their asses this time around. A meager 21 comments, mostly from a few assorted commenters, mostly quoting each other for no other reason than to say Wrong! and No! Right!.

Microsoft, you have a fucking huge market share. You own it. You have more developer muscle, marketing power, and better standing with businesses (from a market prespective, not opinion - even Microsoft-only shops still fucking hate Microsoft). How do you manage to so consistently fuck yourself?

Allow me to extend my opinion on the matter (what a fucking shock, I know):

You need to break some shit. Not in the ways that you broke IE before, but you need to break the shit that hacks revolve around.

Step 1: Pull that "Mozilla/4.0" the fuck out of the User-Agent string. If any ancient code still references that, it probably doesn't work at this point anyway. Nobody uses it, nobody thinks IE has anything to do with Mozilla, and if they do they deserve to have their shit broken. Having that in your User-Agent string wastes a dozen bytes per request (not counting "compatible" and the parentheses around the actually true part of the string). How many users do you support? 500 million? How many IE requests get made per user each day, on average? Maybe 1,000, if we stay extremely conservative. Even rounding down a few times, this useless little string that every page of every web application on every server simply ignores takes up (continuing to admit that I just made these low estimations up on the spot) somewhere around a trillion bytes of bandwidth each day. Most servers log User-Agent strings, and this shit just piles up. So yank it the fuck out!

Step 2: Make IE's DOM support work. I understand that IE has a lot of shit code in it, and the architecture for this file manager cum web browser basically hard-coded entirely too much shit all over the place, making this difficult to pull off. Fuck it. Write a new browser from scratch if you need to do it that way. Shit, you should have written a new one for Vista, but I suppose that would have caused more delays only to get pulled from the OS in the end anyway... Back to DOM support, if people can't bother to write decent markup, screw them. Do you think anyone will really notice if somebody's piece of shit MySpace page renders a little differently? Or whether Mom'n'Pop online stores will notice that the margins and padding on their block elements look a little off? Most of these idiots can't spell, let alone use CSS, so fuck them and the world will applaud you.

Step 3: Pull your heads out of your asses (or your boss' ass, whichever) and realize that nobody gives a shit about ActiveX but you. Drop it from IE. Make a standalone ActiveX player if you get all weepy and sentimental, but that shit has brought you nothing but trouble. Maybe then you can keep your JavaScript (not "JScript" you fuckers, but JavaScript) at least closely behind the rest of the browsers out there.

Step 4: Start active development on IE. There, I said it. Every other major browser posts about their CSS3 work in-progress, or <event-source> support, or detailing exactly the parts of the SVG specificition they support and how far they have to go. And you guys post things like We’ve gathered input from customers for the next version of IE through formal research like user studies and surveys, and also at conferences, comments on the IE blog, and direct emails from you; we will continue to listen at MIX07. that make you sound like a bunch of fucking spineless politicians. And by the way, if you read that sentence in IE, just pretend that IE supports the "q" tag that has existed for fucking years that IE still doesn't support, but does in fact surround that inline quote.

As I said: not much, but they sure as hell need to start somewhere.

Animated onload?

2007-04-01T10:52:00.000-05:00

Why would IE still fire the onload event on animated images every time it hits the first frame? Every other browser fires it, you know, only when the image fucking loads. But IE (up to and including IE7) dutifully keeps firing away.

For some fun, make a two-frame GIF with an alerted onload. Pretty much the markup equivalent to setInterval("alert('Fuck you!');", 10);

In response to an "iFags" comment

2007-03-23T21:19:00.000-05:00

I originally wrote this as a comment in reply to the following comment, but then realised it captured a little more about my purpose than that which would otherwise get left in the dusty remains of a post dead to the world.

anonymous said...
meh...

IE and their iFags to the rescue...

we had nightmares over here when we tried to make our so web 2.0 front-end apps work 'ok-ish' on IE...

Firefox load&render time: 10s
Opera load&render time: 11s
IE6 load&render time: 68s (WTF?!?!)
IE7 load&render time: 45s (FOMSFM!)

My response, now posted here instead:

anonymous:

"iFags?"

What the fuck happened to you that created that mashup of terminology?

If you want to insult IE or the team behind it, you'll have to do much better than insinuating homosexuality using language best kept to bible-banging fucks protesting funerals.

Tell the IE6< teams that they suck satan's hard, scaly cock. Tell them that they roast infants over a pit of fire, skewered with a rusty spike, and then vomit their baby-dinners over the ashes. Tell them that the entirety of their careers has led up to costing billions of dollars from nations around the world, starving the poor and fucking over every citizen whose government has had Microsoft tear their asshole open like a railroad spike hammered through a keyhole.

But if you insinuate homosexuality, you haven't done a goddamn thing except render your urgument weightless. If you insinuate homosexuality by using "fag" as an insult, you've simply exposed yourself as a fat, stupid, mid-western American.

P.S. IE sticks to the two HTTP requests per server rule, even though they ignore a metric fuckton of other standards. Try consolidating your scripts and styles into fewer total requests.

P.P.S. If your web app takes ten seconds to load, at best, you had better have written this from Abode about the new web-based Photoshop...'cause, damn.

By the way, if anybody knows what the fuck "FOMSFM" stands for, please let me know. And "iFags" with the small "i" just makes me think more about internet-savvy muscle boys from Cupertino than about anything that sounds remotely insulting.

Microsoft Script Debugger

2007-03-07T23:54:00.000-06:00

I fully grant that I lose several points for getting my hopes up on this one.

I've installed the debugger, I hit "open" in the "View -> Script Debugger" menu (since, you know, that makes the most fucking sense...rather than "Tools" or its own fucking "Debug" menu), scripts open, and the goddamn thing freezes on me. To the point where not only do I have to force the piece of shit to exit, but when IE comes back up, it doesn't even have the option to open the debugger any more.

...one reboot later...

Making my way through, and when I break on the next statement, which happens to exist in the form of an event handler, I get a single-line script of the anonymous function. No other files opened, nothing. I need to select "Running Documents" and then navigate down the tree and double-click the file that should come next in evaluation. Basically, I guess they want to get the message across that not only do they not give a shit about the users, they don't give a shit about the developers trying support their worthless spawn of marketing.

And, yes: "spawn of marketing" generates much more vulergatity and insult than anything remotely like calling them "ceo-fucked whores with an affinity for puppy's assholes" could convey.

Security enhacements, my ass

2007-02-25T01:15:00.000-06:00

Crock of shit.

Need more?

Fuckers.

Molly, I envy you...

2007-02-08T12:51:00.000-06:00

Okay, so this happened over a week ago. Well, fuck me for having a life.

Molly's recent move from working with the IE team to working for the IE team basically gives her the job I would love. Microsoft now pays her to tell them how much their browser sucks ass, in which ways it sucks ass, and how they should really just support the same fucking standards everyone else does.

As the woman who has no problem putting Bill on the hot seat, on record, on his own turf, she definitely fits the job well. We can all start breathing a little easier knowing that the IE team has someone pushing their nose in the DOM, JavaScript, and CSS support they shit out years ago, to keep the same mistakes from happening again.

I just don't understand why they didn't come to me first. I would have no fucking problem telling them how much developers would rather suck Satan's spiked cock than write their way around another IE bug.

Development time

2007-01-26T00:12:00.000-06:00

How the fuck does a developer with years of experience and sought after by many of the big-name web companies, suddenly realize that dealing with IE shit still takes up a shockingly large part of development? Why the fuck does anyone still support this sorry excuse of a browser?

Oh, yeah...people still don't know any better. These people ( or "managers" and "goddamned mislead, fucking ignorant masses", by which I prefer to reference them) use it day after day, not knowing that they see the "Internets" (I want to fucking kill anyone using this word...) through fucked-up glasses, not actually making out a single thing as intended. They get a warped view of things and don't even know that things can look so much better!

IE7 introduces CSS support matched (and largely surpassed) by every other browser for years...big fucking deal. It also crippled its DOM support even more, if you can imagine that, and slowed its scripting/DHTML runtime from "fucking slow" to "holy shit, I think the motherfucking ice caps melted before my animated transition ended" in the process.

Development of something so simple as CSS menus should take, at most, a day. I mean really, nicely done, slick menus. With CSS, something with which IE6 has a nodding acquaintence and IE7 took up the ass because it had to or it would get fucking killed. But in order to support the piece of shit that will exist in full support from Microsoft for altogether too goddamn long, I have to spend hour after hour trying to teach IE6 what the fuck it should do, instead of finishing my work and moving on to something else.

Edited 1/26 to clean up the post from the initial no-sleep version. Now includes slightly more coherent phrasing and punctuation.

Further evidence that IE7 still sucks

2007-01-23T11:03:00.000-06:00

According to one arse-ow, IE7's JavaScript engine sucks even worse than IE6. Though he phrases it in such a way as to bring to mind the sharp edges of IE7's acronym causing some nasty scrapes that make it difficult to urinate without screaming:

IE7’s JSFoo sucks so badly it’s painful!

A quick excerpt from the post, before he gets into the more technical explination:

Since I work for IBM, I can’t officially say that IE sucks in my code comments — someone complained..

But by god I can say it here… IE7’s javascript engine is complete shit. They need to scrap it completely and start over. Firstly, It’s sloooowww.. IE7’s JS is slower than IE6.. which I find to be impressive as IE6 was slow as hell..

Still fucking here

2007-01-12T09:59:00.000-06:00

I assure you I have had no trouble finding new and wonderful ways in which IE sucks fucking balls. The time to encapsulate it coherently and write about it, however, has escaped me lately.

So today, you get a link to just how much IE makes it fucking painful to work with element attributes, as written by Tobie Langel (someone who, according to their about page, has no comment).

"I've had this article in mind for a while, as I have fiddling with Internet Explorer's crazy handling of attributes in order to patch Prototype's $$() utility.

"Well, fiddling wasn't cutting the deal, so I ended up doing some large scale testing (basically running thousands of test using a sample HTML 4.01 document from W3C) to try to figure out what was going on."

Page load times with large selects

2006-12-11T14:35:00.000-06:00

Okay, so side-stepping anything on server-side performance optimization: I have to work on some code that currently pushes out almost 500k of markup to the browser, in a combination of a little tabulated data (15 columns, only a couple of rows), select inputs (several of them currently push the browser limit of options) and cross-referenced data in unordered navigation lists. This server also has a lot of other shit running on it right now, pretty much resulting in a completely fucking gang-banged database and thirteen seconds for the entire page to get generated and spit out to the browser in its entirety.

That said, once the browser actually receives the markup, it shouldn't take all that long (comparatively) to render. Doing some basic, non-scientific testing, a 2.8Ghz Intel box with two gigs of ram, rendered the page in about seven seconds in Firefox 2.0. IE7, running on the same box, took a whopping 57 fucking seconds to render. Not only that, but it basically stopped rendering when it hit the large selects and just fucking gave up until it figured it all out.

Now, I know IE has an inexplicable fear of rendering tables. It hates it, it fears it, and it will do everything it can to make you never want to use tables of any useful goddamn size, considering tables display tabular data. But selects? When the fuck did that happen? Even IE6, running in Virtual Fucking PC on a slow-ass Mac 1.4Ghz PowerPC with a gig of ram, even that rendered the same page in seventeen seconds.

I don't know what the fuck they did to IE7 to get the CSS support in there, but they broke some shit when they did it.

IE7 still refuses to listen to dynamically changed attributes

2006-10-24T10:56:00.000-05:00

As I've covered previously, IE6 simply would not listen to changes made to an elements attributes. If you asked the element for its className immediately after assigning it a new one, it would proudly tell you that it assigned it. But it would fucking refuse to actually apply any kind of rendering change to the element.

IE7, just released, still doesn't get it. Guys, when I give you a new className or any other attribute a new value, I fucking mean it.

So until this works, any dynamically changing attributes need have the element's parentNode's innerHTML set to itself. Yes, set to itself... Just because IE knows changes get made doesn't mean that it listens. You have to sprinkle your code with:

// Seriously, IE. I really fucking meant that: change the goddamn class.
changed_element.parentNode.innerHTML = changed_element.parentNode.innerHTML ;

Internet Explorer 7 has Escaped

2006-10-19T08:59:00.000-05:00

IE7 has just stumbled out of Microsoft and into the hands of the general public. It's hangover from getting high on CSS it had until now only heard about as "the really good shit" has started to kick in and it can't find enough DOM support to mellow things out again.

Microsoft's latest (and, don't get me wrong, entirely encouraged) round of shit-shining has yielded some vast improvements to CSS support, some improvements to its DOM support, and fuck-all to its JavaScript (or BULLSHIT, as they call it). Even so, I welcome this major step forward in hopes that people will, at the very least, end up using a browser that at least gets us past the days of contaminating our stylesheets with * html and width: (x); _width: (x - suck);. Hopefully, some of the IE users out there will get a chance to see how some real browsers have beaten it several times over in performance, stability, features, extensibility, and standards support.

Whichever way you feel about it, install IE7 and throw a fucking bitch-fest at whatever sites don't support it yet. The faster we get the mainstream to support IE7, the faster their developers will start looking at developing with actual standards instead of browser-specific nonsense.

Never-ending errors

2006-09-22T13:33:00.000-05:00

I'd like to know just how the fuck I managed to get an infinite loop of errors on a supposedly anonymous function, when I've emptied the cache and removed all JavaScript from the fucking page. Thanks to IE not telling me anything the least bit useful when this happens, I don't even know where to start looking...

Needless to say, every other browser works perfectly fine. IE just can't fucking deal with something on the page, but it won't say what.

IE's Documentation Sucks

2006-08-29T00:24:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I've known this for a while. I've always hated the docs on MSDN. However, for the most part, I hated them out of personal preference. They always seemed like they needed to sell the technology of the company rather than document it.

At any rate, I just ran across this gem while researching just how badly IE completely fucks up any hope of resembling an implementation of a W3C standard:

"Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 gives you a rich set of properties and methods to dynamically construct and alter Web pages on the fly. For example, a script can insert a list of section titles at the beginning of the document, or replace that list with a list of links to the actual sections in the document."

They have this as the description of the first topic under HTML and Dynamic HTML. Now. As in, after they've released IE7's first release candidate. As in, eight fucking years and ten months after IE4 got released on us all. I don't mean that IE4 didn't move web applications forward - it certainly did. Netscape 4, even in comparison to IE, gave me my first real heart-felt bouts with explosions of profanity over something so trivial as a web browser.

Ah...memories.

IE7 Supports XMLHttpRequest Natively, My Ass

2006-07-28T10:30:00.000-05:00

IE7 Beta 3, installed fresh. Before you ask: yeah, I made sure I had the checkbox checked for "Enable native XMLHTTP Support." So I go to check some of my code and get the following:

A Runtime Error has occurred.
Do you wish to Debug?

Line: 286
Error: 'XMLHttpRequest.prototype' is null or not an object.

Which means a detect script that used to weed out IE6's non-XMLHttpRequest support like this just fucking breaks in IE7:

if (window.XMLHttpRequest &&
   XMLHttpRequest.prototype.isPrototypeOf(someobject)) {
...
} else {
...
}

So, basically, this makes me think that they didn't port shit to a native JavaScript object. This just looks like they made an ActiveX control that runs even if you disable ActiveX.

IE cannot set events via the DOM in order to pass parameters to functions/methods

2006-07-19T14:10:00.000-05:00

Not one of the following examples will work in IE:

anchor.setAttribute('onclick', 'doThis(' + param + ');');
anchor.onclick = 'doThis(' + param + ');';
anchor.onclick = new Function('doThis(' + param + ');');
anchor.onclick = function() { doThis(param); };
anchor['onclick'] = 'doThis(' + param + ');';
anchor['onclick'] = new Function('doThis(' + param + ');');
anchor['onclick'] = function() { doThis(param); };

If I want to dynamically write out a list of links, I have to fucking spell out the entire string rather than using DOM methods and then innerHTML my way to working code, or stick javascript:void(...); into the href. I can't define event handlers without some serious hacked-out solution, because I need to pass a parameter when it gets called.

Edited 3/5 to add: rather than post yet another comment in reply to yet another anonymous comment...any of the above will work in IE, provided you call anchor.parentNode.innerHTML = anchor.parentNode.innerHTML afterward. Yes, you must tell IE explicitly to listen to the markup contained in the page that it already knows about.

When PRE does not mean PRE

2006-07-17T11:49:00.000-05:00

So say you have a <pre> element. Say you need to update that <pre> with new contents. This should work, right?

document.getElementById('my_special_pre').innerHTML = some_big_block;

Well, almost. True, it does replace the contents of my_special_pre with some_big_block. However...IE for some reason simply forgets to preformat the white-space. Even if you assign the new content and then explicitly tell it you really do want that block to white-space: pre; - it still can't figure out that it needs to actually listen to newlines.

Now, I would at this point guess that IE parses the XML, basically ignoring the white-space, making some_big_block a single line of text without newlines. Except this corrects the behavior:

document.getElementById('my_special_pre').innerHTML = some_big_block.replace(/\n/g, "<br />\n");

Fucking brilliant. That hurt to write, so somebody please let me you know of a better way to correct this moronic IE "quirk."

*edited for a small grammer fix.

Another quote, this time from an IE user

2006-06-29T13:55:00.000-05:00

"You also added CTRL-A (Select all) to the address bar and search box! ... Love you guys! Thanks :-D"

Yes, Internet Explorer 7, beta 3 brings startling new technologies, like selecting the text of the location bar. What fucking lame excuse of a browser gets people excited when basic, fundamental text field keyboard shortcuts finally work in version 7?

Contributed from a co-worker

2006-06-29T11:40:00.000-05:00

Not that he knows it, but I'll use it anyway.

"For fuck sake.. In IE if you make something have a transparent background, its not clickable."

Help IE not suck...as much

2006-05-26T09:54:00.000-05:00

Please, please, please chime in at the IE Blog to let developers know that more than Visual Studio Whatever Edition, more than alpha-released Web Developer Toolbars that don't really have much of anything to do with JavaScript, Web Developers need a JavaScript console for Internet Explorer. Especially after using Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. for so long this seems like such a basic tool that you'd think we just hadn't found where to enable it all these years.

I would prefer the ability to port extensions like Firebug (new 0.4 release!) over to Internet Explorer, but that simply can't and won't happen for a multitude of reasons.

So go tell the Internet Explorer team to make Internet Explorer suck just a little bit less and incorporate a JavaScript console. Either that, or just kill the fucking browser once and for all so none of us have to put up with this shit any longer.

Dynamically Changing Classes

2006-04-04T12:54:00.000-05:00

Internet Explorer doesn't notice a fucking thing.

Say I have the following:

<div class="thin">stuff</div>

and I want to using unintrusive JavaScript to change it to this:

<div class="wide">stuff</div>

I would hope that would work fine, like it does for every other browser, but Internet Explorer simply ignores it.

Well, I suppose it does notice the class change - if I call (the element in question).getAttribute('class') it returns the correct value. I just completely fucking ignores all styles associated with that class.

I've tried a number of "cheats" to try tricking Internet Explorer into doing the useful thing:

(the element in question).innerHTML = '' + (the element in question).innerHTML
re-setting the stylesheet in question
even looping through the stylesheets, disabling them and then enabling them after a short timeout to make sure they turn off in the first place

No change.

So thanks to Internet Explorer, I now get to get several blocks of "IE blows fucking chunks and I have to write this load of JavaScript when a single class swap should do the trick" instead of moving on to something else to get this project done.

Extended Crunch Time - Thanks Internet Explorer!

2006-03-22T12:00:00.000-06:00

Internet Explorer has expanded the crunch time I've wallowed in for the last couple of months and will keep it going for just a bit longer. Other things have caused the extension as well, but for every JavaScript/CSS change, I need to double the time just to get that piece of shit known as Internet Explorer to render correctly.

This would all go a hell of a lot smoother if I had something like Firebug for IE.

But no.

I get stuck with useless fucking error message after useless fucking error message. "Line 174. Expected identifier." Well thanks, dipshit! I have several linked files, none of which have an error on line 174!!! I can comment code out, move logic around, add alerts to my heart's content and it doesn't change a thing. Can I drop IE support yet?

It fucking feels like trying to debug errors as described to me by a computer-illiterate retiree.

No min-width support...still...

2006-03-01T08:45:00.000-06:00

So the IE developers keep saying that they'll support more of the CSS2 spec (yes, CSS2 - we have no fucking hope of getting any CSS3 in there for a while), but they haven't put min-width support into the betas yet. Still. Min-width and min-height did not suddenly spring out of the fucking air! Why so long to implement these things? I feel like I should consider myself lucky that IE6 supports things like anchor tags.

Today's Word: Ignorance

2006-02-23T18:24:00.000-06:00

Before I go any further, let me say that though I write this about ignorance in developers, I do not mean this necessarily as willful ignorance. Instead: I put the blame for this ignorance on Microsoft's monopoly and IE's complete saturation of the browser space.

Because such a high percentage of users use this browser (and such a fucking scary amount of them don't know that Internet Explorer does NOT equal the goddamn internet), a correspondingly high percentage of designers and developers code for Internet Explorer first and others second, if at all. This strange mentality often comes from the misconception that you can only code for one browser at a time, and you should always code for the one with the biggest userbase. Either that, or you should code for the most widely used browser first and then fix for everyone else.

I get that you need to support the biggest userbase - no argument there! However.

I'll give you reasons to code for standards first:

1. Forget the idealistic "oh, standards will save the poor!" kind of reason for now: coding shit for Internet Explorer first makes more work for you. Yes, you. Have a look at the fixes for CSS bugs in IE7. Have a look at the fixed box model in IE7. Look at the IE-specific crap people put in their CSS (JavaScript evaluation in statements? What the fuck did they do that for?), their AJAX-related code (ActiveX objects, woo-hoo!), their DOM manipulation code (totally fucking different and broken). Write all that for IE and then try to "tack on" support for everyone else? Why not just write it using the standards first and then put an if/else here and there where IE flips out?

2. Government contracts. This may not impact everyone, but going back to the "future-proof" concept, you'll have to re-code everything to pass Section 508 testing. I don't give a shit if 90% of government sites don't pass it now: most of them got uploaded by small offices (or large, ignorant ones) years ago. The templates simply stuck and now a single region of an agency can have a quarter of a million static fucking pages that don't validate. Now in order to get government contracts, by law, you will need to make things accessible. It doesn't matter if your government contact tells you that it doesn't have to pass: if they get sued it falls on you.

3. Maintenance. If you code like we've gone back to '99 or earlier and refuse to give up putting a font tag in every single table cell in your nested-table layout, you will hate yourself when the time comes to redesign. It will go faster to dump the entire codebase and start from scratch. Split things up into structure (markup), look and feel (stylesheets), and content (for fuck's sake, use templates...), switching looks or adding a new disclosure link at the bottom of each page will pass by infinitely faster.

4. Bandwidth costs money. The bigger the site (in traffic) or the denser the intranet web application, the more bandwidth you need per hit. Even without reducing the amount of code, if you pull styles out into external stylesheets, browsers can now cache that. Same for JavaScript files. Then, reduce your markup to hold nothing but the structure and suddenly your 80k - 100k hits weigh in at 10k.

5. Microsoft won't improve shit that so much badly written code still relies on. Think about user-agent strings (http://www.pgts.com.au/pgtsj/pgtsj0208c.html). Holy fuck, how did we end up with so many? Now guess how many non-mozilla browsers have "Mozilla" in them? Internet Explorer 7b2 on Longhorn even has "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0)" Mozilla/4.0?! Guess why: people coded dumb browser-specific shit and forgot about it.

Thanks to Internet Explorer and Microsoft's way of convincing the world that they can't access the internet without it and web apps won't reach the world unless you code for it first, seemingly intelligent designers and developers still write bad, browser-specific code and think you should, too.

Just so IE7 doesn't feel left out: phishing detection

2006-02-05T01:30:00.000-06:00

IE7 introduces a whole lot of new functionality that many of us developers have waited five years for.

...and some new crap that nobody asked for.

For instance: IE7 now looks at sites you navigate to in order to try to catch phishing sites. Sounds cool, right? Except...in order for them to pull this off, they send every fucking site that opens in your browser (news, mail, porn, political opinion) to their own goddamn servers.

Now, some of you may think,"Of course, they won't keep track of anything you view," or,"Why do you care? Do you have something to hide?"

To those of you who live in the U.S. (a fair amount who do would say something like that), I say,"Read your fucking Constitution one more time. Better yet, print it out and read it every goddamn morning. If you still don't get it: thank you for reading Mr. President."

For those of you running Windows: most likely you run anti-virus software. When that software wants to test a file for known viruses, I can pretty much guarantee you that it doesn't fucking upload the file to a server somewhere, check it, and return the results to you. No, it periodically updates a database on your machine and checks against that.

Just for an added note to those who may stupidly ask why they should care if they don't view anything they don't need to hide:

If it relies on a remote server, someone could attack you by sticking a worm on your machine that redirects all traffic going to the "help, does this look like a phishing attempt?" site MS setup to another page that simply approves everything. Which means that feature now does jack shit to protect you.

Hitting in the location bar re-submits a posted form?

2006-01-30T14:38:00.000-06:00

Okay, this one boggles my mind a bit.

Step 1: Submit a form via post.
Step 2: Click on the location bar to highlight the URL
Step 3: Hit return.

At least when you have variables in a GET request contained in the URL, IE decides that it won't let you submit a form a second time.

Wait, wtf?! I don't want you to submit the form (remember - method="post" for this one), I want you to fucking go to the URL in the location bar. And don't you fucking tell me I can hit refresh to resubmit the form - I don't want to!

But no. I need to go somewhere else, paste the url back in there and then it will let me go there.

Thanks, guys. Really intuitive...

What if I want to...say...code for IE 5.5, IE6 and IE7?

2006-01-13T09:44:00.000-06:00

In this rare occurance, Apple and Microsoft share the same fucking moronic mistake. Apple a little less-so than MS, but still.

I know we all have ways of shoe-horning more than one version of IE onto PCs, but it really shouldn't take unsupported hacking in order to test more than one version of a browser on one fucking machine.

And anyone who brings up Virtual PC as a solution to this deserves to get dragged out into a parking lot and beaten to a bloody pulp. If I had the money to waste on crap like that, I'd get another machine and have something that I can actually use.

For those interested in the alternatives for testing more than one version of IE on one machine, go for it.

Multiple IEs in Windows (via css-discuss: BrowserTesting)

For those of us that would like to test with different versions of Safari (a.k.a. WebKit), the WebKit site has some info on how to do just that (and also how to build and run nightlies).

Bonus reason from Ajaxian on IE's overflow nonsense

2006-01-04T15:10:00.000-06:00

This one touches on the wonderous overflow bug in IE: CSS Quicktip: overflow: hidden; and IE

Damn Managers

2006-01-04T15:05:00.000-06:00

Microsoft has wedged their browser into the minds of some Windows users so far that even though (for instance) a manager has Firefox open to run through what you've worked on, they open IE in order to get to Google. It doesn't matter that Firefox has a fucking built-in Google search box.

More of a political reason as to why IE sucks, but still a very valid one.

No defaulting to HTTP on non-standard ports

2005-12-27T14:13:00.000-06:00

If I put in a URL like: 192.168.0.17:8023 in IE, it craps out. Stick an http:// in front of it and it works just fine.

Now, I know that ports 8023, 8042 and 8093 don't mean HTTP. However, if I use a web browser to test sites on those ports, shouldn't it at least give HTTP a try? Call me a lazy bastard (and rightly so), but I don't feel like typing in http:// every time I type in a domain with a non-standard port...

Schneier says it sucks

2005-12-26T10:52:00.000-06:00

See Bruce Schneier's post Internet Explorer Sucks .

2005-12-19T15:45:00.000-06:00

This one little line, which should get included at the top of the XHTML page, completely fucks IE's interpretation of CSS. Not necessarily required, so out it goes even thought everyone else plays fine with it...

Two words

2005-12-15T17:17:00.000-06:00

"box model"

I know Microsoft made the first version of AJAX...

2005-12-13T13:51:00.000-06:00

...but if they can't implement half of its uses correctly they shouldn't pretend to support it.

Well, technically I guess they haven't even bothered to pretend they support the XMLHttpRequest object (unless you count their fucked up view of how you should get to XML methods from JavaScript). Since all of us have to resort to a series of if/then statements just to create one fucking object in more than one browser.

That doesn't even begin to talk about the frustration IE creates when you try to use the goddamn thing. For instance:

I have an XMLHttpRequest I need to make
It uses a unique token to keep track of which request has just loaded and where the response should go.
Since it uses XML (and IE fucking chokes on application/xml, but I'll save that for another post), I have the XML responses getting served as text/xml.
I need to copy the contents of an element (which has an xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" as it should) into the DOM

You'd think that importing nodes using something (say...element.importNode) would work without the browser all but crashing on you. You'd think that IE would recognize that you have an XHTML DOM in the browser window and an XHTML DOM in the form of element X.

But no.

In comes yet another fucking if/then for IE.

However...wait for it...IE can't handle its own required call to element.cloneNode. Because I have a form coming in.

Fine, I'll take the form out and copy form inputs into the fucking thing. But the most I can get out of the piece of crap: null. Yes, it takes the XML response, recognizes the nodes enough for me to get the token back out of it and then it chokes and dies on the element using the XHTML namespace.

Brilliant.

I'll post the work-around later...once I make one.

New window does what by default?

2005-12-13T12:11:00.000-06:00

File > New Window in IE creates a new window. Fine, I wanted it to, since I can't have a new tab until IE7...

However, why does it default to loading the current page again in the new window? If I make a new window, I don't want to duplicate it! In fact, I can't think of a single reason as to why I would want it to do this. If I wanted to navigate from this page in a new window, I'd fucking right-click on the goddamn link to get me there and open that in a few window.

Cache issues

2005-12-12T20:14:00.000-06:00

Can IE please, please, just listen when I tell it to let go of its cache? I would go to the included files individually (css, javascript, etc.) and hit refresh if it didn't just fucking download the files and open them up in the text editor. When has that ever helped?

Workaround: downloading the Web Developer Toolbar for IE gives you a ton of useful...well, tools. Including: a few different ways of clearing the cache that don't involve going into several layers of options and dialogs!

There you have it: another reason as to why IE sucks hard and a way to get around it.

Just to get this out in the open right now

2005-12-09T13:27:00.000-06:00

I hate IE.

You probably guessed that much already, but stay with me as I intend to expand a little on this. Or add an aside. Whatever.

While I hate IE and it makes me scream in frustration several times every day, I have a lot of respect for the current IE developers. Hence the link I've posted to the IEBlog. I want people to go there and see how much they've opened up the process. They've started working with the Web Standards Project to try to dig IE out of the fucking shit-hole it got stuck in after the first of the great browser wars.

Seriously, I do have respect for the IE team. They post some dumb shit from time to time, but despite the constant (and I mean constant) flaming, they've kept posting whatever they've worked on to go into IE7. From poor Sam who implemented alpha png support to letting designers know exactly what to expect in the next generation of css 2.1 support (yes, they'll have some!), they've worked hard to keep an open dialog with anyone who cares to listen.

So before I post again about what a monstrous pile of shit Microsoft ships for its browser, just keep that in mind.

Posted for readers (once I have some) and the IE team alike (if they ever find this).

Now it chokes on element.appendChild()?

2005-12-09T10:08:00.000-06:00

I should've seen this coming, but apparently IE chokes when using element.appendChild() on a div when the markup to get appended has a form in it.

This just blows my mind. IE has issues with bringing in table pieces (which should act like normal elements, just with some added default style) unless you build the thing element by element, attribute by attribute.

Okay, fine. IE blows with table modification.

But IE can't handle bringing in something when it has a form included somewhere in it? Not even bringing it in and fucking up the style for that piece of the content - it just freaks out and says "No such interface supported" as if it never heard of such an insane method call.

First Post

2005-12-08T16:12:00.000-06:00

In an effort to vent in a healthy manner, I will vent here. Without further ado, the first (well, first posted here, many other reasons have come before this) reason as to why IE sucks ass:

IE doesn't support element.importNode(), part of the DOM Level 2 Core Specification.

I ran into this and now I have to make IE happy by using element.cloneNode(), which for some reason keeps bringing up an unsupported action error on that line.

That reminds me of today's second reason as to why IE sucks: completely useless alerts when it craps out running JavaScript. Half the time it doesn't even get the line number right (how fucking difficult to get the right line number?), and all of the time the message doesn't even say what went wrong. Might as well give me a bsod, it would help just as much...

Piece of crap.

Why IE Sucks

Opera Mini 5 on the iPhone

How UML can clearly illustrate your fucked up process

"IE is being mean to me"

IE8 XSS protection introduces XSS vulnerability to sites

Why Google Chrome Frame won't help

IE6 death push makes CNN

I added a Twitter widget to the sidebar

UK government fails to follow its own advice on not using IE6

Okay, fuck it. Follow me on Twitter

IE6 Must Die moves to Twitter petition

IE6 will die a long, horrible (for us) death

Firefox 3.5 Released, and Microsoft runs an idiotic ad campaign

Quick IE8 Suckage

Register Frustration

Web Standards Shit List Update

Thoughts of a web designer and a user on IE8

Fantastic fucking IE6 splash screens

Efforts to wipe out this piece of shit we call IE6 continue

Ballmer throws more weight behind drop IE6 campaign

Track the campaign

Let's end support of IE6 on behalf of Microsoft

Because you can't use dick until IE expires

An update on compatibility view updates

Apologies for those keeping up with me via a feed reader

Recommended reading

Of dropping IE6

EU on IE

New favorite 'net radio station

You may want to think about switching from IE -BBC

A Very Manley Contribution

Microsoft says IE6 has ignorant users who know nothing of security

Comment of the week

"Compatibility View" "Improvements"

Comment of the week

Call for contributors

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

IE8 Beta 2 Released

In the IE8 Technical Beta program via a backdoor

Request to join the IE8 Technical Beta program

How can I resist such an easy target: the IE version switch

7 + 1 = 8

Chris Wilson has a sense of humor

The Rise and Fall of Transparency in the Development of IE

A memory leak in IE? Seriously?

Exploring the issue of IE's market share

IE7 can't handle basic HTTP authentication with RSS

Microsoft and IE fuck Windows gamers

Four steps to a better IE

Animated onload?

In response to an "iFags" comment

Microsoft Script Debugger

Security enhacements, my ass

Molly, I envy you...

Development time

Further evidence that IE7 still sucks

Still fucking here

Page load times with large selects

IE7 still refuses to listen to dynamically changed attributes

Internet Explorer 7 has Escaped

Never-ending errors

IE's Documentation Sucks

IE7 Supports XMLHttpRequest Natively, My Ass

IE cannot set events via the DOM in order to pass parameters to functions/methods

When PRE does not mean PRE

Another quote, this time from an IE user

Contributed from a co-worker

Help IE not suck...as much

Dynamically Changing Classes

Extended Crunch Time - Thanks Internet Explorer!

No min-width support...still...

Today's Word: Ignorance

Just so IE7 doesn't feel left out: phishing detection

Hitting in the location bar re-submits a posted form?

What if I want to...say...code for IE 5.5, IE6 and IE7?

Bonus reason from Ajaxian on IE's overflow nonsense

Damn Managers

No defaulting to HTTP on non-standard ports

Schneier says it sucks

Two words