Well, apparently is not that good. According to Mandown IE8 still breaks some mapping websites even when the emulate IE7 button is on.
I haven’t tested this myself, but if it’s true, then we can expect the IE8 will break websites that are already working on IE7 even if we, as developers, tell it to render it as IE7.
Once more, Thanks Microsoft for making our lives so wonderful.
The reason for the Emulate IE7 button on IE8 is because Microsoft is always behind on what they should do. For instance, you have a crappy browser, IE6 so you decide to force people to update but, and only if, you have a valid version of windows. So obviously a lot of people do not update their browser. Of course Microsoft realizes that this is a mistake and releases IE7 without any genuine check so that everybody can upgrade but there’s still some people that do not want to and we are just left to wonder, why if they force other stupid updates they don’t get everybody to IE7 once and for all.
Now with IE8 coming this year, it looks like IE7 will still be around which means that developers will have to use the IE7 button when testing their websites to make sure it looks correct on both versions and after that, use Multiple IE’s to be able to test on IE6.
Thanks again Microsoft, for making the Web DEveloper life so more interesting.
So here I have a simple login page
Notice there is nothing fancy and I’ve included a forgot your password button that is using the Mootools Framework to slide the form used for the forgotten password recovery as well as disabling the form used to login
It works perfectly on all browsers including IE7 (haven’t tested this on IE8). That is of course the first time around. If I decide to cancel the forgot password and then open it back up, I get only half of the first line like displayed below:
This behavior happens only on IE7 and although it might not be common for a user to open, close and then open the forgot password again, it faces me with the decision of leaving it as it is, after all it works perfectly on every other browser, try to figure out a way to make it work on IE7 or changing my whole idea so that the forgot password form doesn’t use the mootools slide.
Thanks again IE, for making me waste my time in your stupid products.
Following in the same line as our post: The Microsoft Way Of Thinking we found this article about Martians Headsets that elaborates on why it is important to follow standards.
The article is lengthy and a little weird, it uses Martian lingo like: Qxyzrhjjjjukltk, but it is worth a read to understand more the damage that IE has done by not following standards.
“…the specification needs to be fixed, not the other way around.” Yes, I know. I also clinched when I read this. As it turns out, there is somebody defending IE8 and the Microsoft team and they base their argument in their theory that standard compliant Websites are not the norm and so, browsers should change according to whatever anybody is doing and somehow accommodate and render every website correctly.
I decided to create a mental experiment and apply this theory to several aspects of our daily life to see the results:
1. Traffic lights. Following in this theory, traffic lights should accommodate according to motorist and not the other way around. Yes, some lights will stay on longer at certain times of the day to improve the flow, but according to the theory presented above they would need to let everybody go while stopping everybody at the same time since motorist would be in control, not the lights.
2. Baseball. Since the season is almost here let’s take a look at how this theory would benefit the game. Umpires would need to learn each teams set of rules before hand and somehow combine them so that each team can play the game according to their own set of rules and without breaking the game. So, If team A decides to have only one out while team B stays with the normal three outs rule, well, I don’t see an easy solution for the umpire.
3. Laws. All of them. Could you imagine the court system having to conform to each and everyone of us and our own interpretation of the law? It would be sweet in some cases but really crazy and scary in others.
So, fixing the standard because a bunch of people decided to create websites without following the standards makes absolutely no sense and I have yet to see a non standard or standard website break in a standard compliant browser the way a lot of standard and non standard websites break on IE8, IE7 & IE6.
Firefox 3 Beta 4 has been released, and is now available for download. test
This is a list of CSS improvements for Firefox 3:
display property’s inline-block and inline-table values are now implemented.font-size-adjust property now works on all platforms; previously it was only supported on Windows.rgba() and hsla() support for color (bug 147017):default pseudo-class support (bug 302186)-moz-max-content, -moz-min-content, -moz-fit-content, and -moz-available values have been added to width, min-width, and max-width (bug 311415 and bug 402706)) are now supported.ime-mode property is supported.text-rendering property for HTML is now supported (bug 387969).-moz-border-*-start and -moz-border-*-end CSS properties are implemented (bug 74880).-moz-initial is now implemented for almost all CSS properties (except quotes and -moz-border-*-colors) bug 80887.window.getComputedStyle() now supports all supported CSS properties (bug 316981).content’s none value is now supported (bug 378535).cursor’s none value is now supported (bug 346690).-moz-border-radius (bug 24998).white-space’s pre-wrap value is now supported (bug 261081).z-index values are supported correctly.What can i say about the improved performace:
And so much more. I think that this time, Microsoft’s IE is going down. The numbers of Firefox download are increasing. Even my mom is using Firefox.
Is still a beta. but can’t wait till is ready, i’m already using it. 
So I’ve seen a lot of websites talk about the new IE8 beta. Some, even call it the surprise of the year because of it’s support for Web Standards. Others talk about all the new features it offers, and some others even compare it to Firefox.
As this article points out: http://mashable.com/2008/03/05/firefox-ie-fight/ There’s really no innovation on IE8 and all the features are more of a catching up to other browsers than anything else. I mean, when the main hype comes from being a web standard browser, when other browsers have been doing this for ages, well…as the article points out: “You’ve got a problem.”
So we finally got down to installing VMware on the Mac in order to be able to run Windows applications like CutFTP and of course, Stupid IE so we can test our websites. Here are a couple of screen shots that look more like a composite but that are actually true screen shots:
We can see the litte take the windows XP tour, which we didn’t have to take to make it go away.
Here’s IE7 running natively on Leopard
And my favorite FTP program, CuteFTP, whose Mac version sucks.
The most interesting part? Installing Windows took like 20 minutes (that cinludes creating the partition, etc) and booting it up takes around 1 minute. I’ll post a video soon so that we can count.
It has always been a mystery to me why Microsoft decided to disregard web standards and just do whatever they wanted it. I was so dumb to realize when the answer was so simple, after all, this is Microsoft we are talking about.
This blog post Computerwolrd gives us a nice perspective into Microsoft Evil and the apperance of Racist Websites (here’s a list of some of these websites) . In the author’s own words: “Making IE behave differently from truly standards-based browsers reinforced corporate decisions to standardize on IE and develop their Web applications in non-standard ways. And every time “This Web site requires IE to work correctly” appeared on a site it squeezed companies that made other browsers, like Opera, further into a tiny corner of the market.”
See, even though this blog is Called Stupid IE, deep down inside I knew there was something more to it but I never intended to realize that I was the stupid one. You see, Microsoft has always been evil and when you don’t understand something they do (300Mb patch anyone?) you only need to think with the evilest, darkest more atrocious and destructive way you can so that you can think as Microsoft.
Here’s a little script of how I think things went down on Microsoft when developing IE6:
Chief Programmer: Mr executive, we are halfway done with IE6 and so far we are doing very good with standards.
Mr Executive: Standars?? What does that mean? Whose standards.
CP: Well Mr. Executive, Web standards, our browser is conforming very well to the W3c and our browser will be loved by developers.
ME: Hold on Mr Chief Programmer, if we put a product out that works right from the start, how are we supposed to make any money?
CP: Huh?
ME: Do me a favor and rewrite this whole thing so that it does things that no other browser do so that we change the standard and we force everybody to use our browser. Throw in a couple of proprietary things and tie the browser very deeply with our Windows operating system.
CP: But Mr. Executive, we need to lunch this browser in one month. There is no way we will have it ready on time.
ME: Even better than I thought. This will force people to get our patches so that we can install more and more crap on their systems to fuck it up even worse and make them buy our newer operating systems promising to fix all the fuck ups we did in the first place. This is perfect, absolutely perfect.
Well, the real story might differ a little bit from this post but at least we can all rest peacfully knowing the truth behind the racists websites we have all encountered.
