Sunday, August 31, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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5 Comments:

Blogger Morbus said...

I'm just commenting to let you know I support your cause ;)

7:49 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There are lots of businesses that use IE. For IE8 to be a compeling product for businesses, it must be compatible with non standards intranet sites, which many businesses have invested millions of dollars in. If IE8 made intranet pages standards mode by default, when businesses installed the new build, many of their internal tools would cease to function. It really was a smart move on IE's part.

12:52 AM  
Blogger The Hater said...

Thanks, morbus.

anonymous: So you mean to tell me that adding a single compatability header in the software or on the server just seems to fucking complicated for those intranet applications? Give me a fucking break. They just want someone else to clean up after their own shit. If a company's intranet application breaks in a browser they want to roll out, they need to push back on the assholes writing bad intranet software to IE's bugs and not to web standards.

8:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm a web developer and i found your blog after typing "IE Sucks" during a moment of frustration at work during finding another W3C standard broken by IE. Good on ya.

9:27 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gee I wonder if the developmnet team over at IE have managed to master the concept of transparent PNG files yet. Morons.
Be nice if they could also find a a way to stop SWF's files continuing to play in Div tags after you have have navigated away from them.
I.E. is a Joke and the fact that it is bundled with windows shouldnt be an excuse for its continuing sub standard development.

6:48 PM  

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