Micrsoft Breaks IE
Just figured I shared this screen capture with all of you. Isn’t it beautiful how Microsoft websites don’t work correctly on their own browsers?
Archive for February, 2008
ie8 Updated News
Our sources at Digg: http://www.digg.com/microsoft/Internet_Explorer_8_passes_ACID2_test have found out how IE8 is passing the Acid2 Test:
if( ACID2 == TRUE)
useFakeSmileyRender();
else
useNormalCrappyCSSParser();
This is not true (we assume but nothing is certain with Microsoft) but it made us laugh a little. Is intresting to point that all the comments on the Digg entry are from Web Developers fainting, cheering and celebrating IE8 announcment of compliance. Ei: “Wow, a story about Microsoft and Internet Explorer and most all of the comments in here are positive? I Never thought I’d see that!”
Let us all hope it is true.
ie8 will still break sites
i was at the ieblog site today and was surprise to findout that ie8 even with it’s super standard mode will still break sites????WTF
i am sad to say that i am not the only one mad at the fact that ie8 will still not work to standers but that there is going to now be another version out there to code for i had hope that they would just let it die at 7 and just start shipping firefox with there os.
i will say no more take a look at the ieblog and the Quotes here is my quote and my top two.
Saturday, February 23, 2008 9:20 AM by kimane
i have just about had it with Microsoft i have been a web developer for over 8 years and at the point of just doing something else!!! coding now for 3 versions of ie is making everyone nuts do you all not read what people are saying, i think not cause now your going to put another one out there come on would you all over there just please resign and have them ship the os with firefox For The Love Of God please BILL just let them all go.
crying web developer
Thursday, February 21, 2008 8:06 PM by Oliver
And of course you’re going to allow me to run the beta standalone aren’t you. I mean anything else would be crazy wouldn’t it, given the number of changes you’re making to turn your product into something that has suddenly started to adhere to standards…
Oh wait… you aren’t? I’m going to have no way of testing compatibility between versions 5 through 8 of what has been the buggiest, most consistently inconsistent browser of all time?
“Run them in virtual machines”. No. I’m not going to have 4 different installations of Windows on my machine. I can’t be bothered any more. I’m just going to develop in Flash, Flex and AIR (Silverlight can take a running jump given how I feel about how I’ve been treated as a developer by Microsoft over the last 7 incredibly painful years) and if I do write HTML I’m going to make it standards compliant and include a “gold bar” at the top of the window telling IE users to download Firefox.
Including proprietary headers like X-UA-compatible is not something I’ll be doing just to save Microsoft’s blushes. As much as the current team is to be commended for their efforts, their employers did nothing for *years*. Developers were required to work hundreds of hours for no recompense to get it to work properly and I, for one, have had enough.
Thursday, February 21, 2008 8:09 PM by Gyrobo
You’ve just ADMITTED that even WITH super standards mode as an opt-in, IE8 will STILL cause site breakage.
The question remains: are you incompetent, or do you just hate developers?
When Frustration Strikes The Game
Play the cubicle freekout game
Good for the days that you just feel like smashing stuff and if you are a web developer doing css on ie6 and ie7 this is every day!!!!!!!!
Two tweak tools that will make our life easier with IE7
Here i bring you two tweak tools that will help us customize a little, that evil IE7.
One will allow us to remove the search bar from the upper right of the browser; two options either messing with the registry following the explanation on this link:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/12/remove-search-bar-from-ie-7.html
or downloading a simple application the guys from IntelliAdmin has created, on the download section of the previous link.
The second one will tweak IE7 in diferent ways, like showing or hiding different bars on the evil browser. Two ways again, messing with the registry following the instructions or installing a well created applications developed by the same guys here:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2007/01/tweak-your-ie-7-settings.html
This will make our life easier and i do want to thank them for this.
Don’t forget to check their download section for others tweak tools for Windows and company, here:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/Downloads.htm
PD: And if any of them are reading this post, i will like to tell them, that i share the same frustration they have using Windows Vista. I’m this close to throw my PC into my backyard lake.
New Meta Tag?
Microsoft has done it again (technically they haven’t done it yet but they will with IE8). Microsoft has, again, invented new tags for their browser. On this occasion I’m only going to talk about the META tag developers will need to use to let IE8 know that it should render the page under IE8 standards.
So what is this META tag anyways and what does it do? To make put really simple, it tells IE how to render a website, as IE7 or as the more standard compliant IE8. At first you may seem confused as in why would you need to tell the browser which version to use. After all, a browser should be complaint from the beginning or at lest offer backward compatibility meaning that it should understand the hacks you had to use to make it work in it’s previous version.
But what’s really baffling is that IE8 is setting a precedent that may become a nightmare for web developers as new versions are created. According to this article Microsoft may be thinking that by letting developers choose which version their pages will render, it will assure that their websites won’t break on newer versions. But, why should a new browser version break a website that is already working? If you are IE, the answer is simple: Complete disregard for Web Standards.
So the point we are trying to make here is that the META tag approach is the wrong approach and it should be seen as another attempt by Microsoft into doing whatever they want and bullying everybody else into following. For starters, if they had committed to develop a standard compliant browser from the first place, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
A Simple Browser Comparisson
This link does a good job of illustrating the differences between browsers:
http://operawatch.com/news/2007/09/opera-vs-firefox-vs-internet-explorer-picture.html
If you are still using Internet Explorer please join us on 2008:
Note: It’s funny, but Apple makes a better browser for Windows than Microsoft.
What’s The Point?
Some people have asked us: “What’s the point of this blog?” or “What are you trying to accomplish with it?” We don’t have a reals reason and apart from ridding the world from Internet Explorer, we don’t plan to accomplish anything with it. Truth be told, one day, after finalizing a website, and forgetting to test it on IE (we know, how dumb) we get a call from our client telling us: “What’s wrong with you guys? This website looks like shit” We quickly fired up firefox and saw our website looking perfect and working even better when it hit us, we forgot to test it on IE. At this point we opened IE7, Safari & Opera and found that website was working perfectly on them as well but we were not so lucky with IE7
Then, after hours beating our heads constantly trying to get all elements of a website to work correctly on IE7 and sacrificing some design and functionality, we call the client to let her know that everything should be fine now.
To our surprise we get a call back from her 30 minutes later asking us to please stop wasting her time and fix her website. We looked at each other wondering what was going on when suddenly, IE6. sure enough, the website look like hell on IE6.
Four hours later, including the time spent swearing at Bill Gates we had our own little “frankensteinian” website that worked well enough and looked ok enough in all browsers.
We called our client a third time and after hanging up we were all ready for some beers when suddenly, another call. This one wasn’t so bad but our client instructed us that there where still elements that look out of place. We open IE6 while still on the phone with her and saw that the website was looking correctly on our end. So after 15 minutes of going back and forth with settings and searching the internet, we had our client send us a screen print. To our surprise, for some strange and undocumented reason, the website was dropping some of the floated block elements making it look incorrect.
To be more precise, the same version of IE6, on two different computers, with the same operating system, monitor resolution, etc, were displaying a website on two different ways.
I hope this little story has helped you understand us a little bit better and now you can join us in our quest to make all web developers live easier.
Breaking the code to fix it on IE
This was a nice article I picked up. It reminded me of those days in which we had to break our code, add scripts, hacks, etc in order to make our websites work on IE. thanks god those days are gone. No wait, IE still sucks and we still have to break our code, add scripts, hacks, etc to make our websites work on IE.
My favorite quote: “Their browser has such a large market share that people are forced to make pages work in it. Other browsers don’t make these mistakes, but people blame them anyway. They end up recommending IE, and IE’s dominance gets enforced, and with it, the Windows Operating system that it runs on.” Be sure to read on the conspiracy theorist.
