IE8 Continues It’s Legacy of FAIL

Creative Commons - Courtesy an0nym0usmuse

Sometime back in the golden days of the Microsoft IE development team announcing their new found crush on Web Standards, many web designers and developers were beginning to see a light at the end of a tunnel that seemed never ending.  That tunnel would be the infamous “it works in Firefox, Safari, and Opera… why is it all FU*%ED UP in Internet Explorer?!?!”.  But nay non-believers of hope, that team of IE Devs said that Web Standards would be coming with the new release.. and all seemed promising in the land.  Well, guess what?

The very Web Standards they have promised are not working as planned… and that’s how it looks like IE8 is gonna ship.  Half-assed.  Just like all the previous versions.  They try to explain themselves here, so go get bored out of your mind have a read if you like.

The Modes

Since we all know that Microsoft is all about being a trailblazer (aka bridge burner) in terms of their internet driven endeavors, their new browser comes with this half assed nifty new feature called “Standards Mode”.  In essence what it does is this;  by default the browser runs in a mode that is actual Web Standards logic, but on the off chance that the site just isn’t behaving properly, it will roll into a different mode that will render it correctly by Microsoft standards.  Alternately, you can hit the “Standards Mode” button and *POOF* the page will now render under the IE logic that we all know and love.  More specifically, it will render like IE7 does.  Oh hooray.   

This is typical Microsoft.  You already know why I say this too.  It’s them not really wanting to play ball unless it’s under their rules.  Taking a moment to reflect on this decision, one can’t help but to remember exactly why Web Standards were being pushed to begin with;  to level the playing field for all browsers because Microsoft showed little to no interest to standardizing their browser for such a long time.  This stifled creativity and innovation for web developers and designers. When further development on Internet Explorer went stagnant after version 6 hit the streets, this gave rise to other browser developers to seize the opportunity of building the web into what we have today with forward thinking.  This was IE6’s only real contribution to the world wide web as far as I can tell.  Their inaction caused a wonderful reaction.

The List

One of the most interesting, if not depressingly ironic things about IE8 is that it can’t even load microsoft.com properly.  And they know it too.  Ya see, there’s a publicly available list out there that the guys up at Redmond have put together that lists over 2,400 websites that are identified to not render properly.  Here’s a sample of the list available at ZDNet, or you can grab it directly from Microsoft for XP or Vista.  Also, at anytime, if you want to find out if a site is on this list (got anything better to do with your time?), you can pull it up from within IE8 itself by typing “res://iecompat.dll/iecompatdata.xml“ in the address bar. So if they have found over 2,400 so far, that only leaves billions more that probably won’t function correctly either.  And they know that this list is going to keep growing.   Yea, I get the warm fuzzies thinking about all that extra coding time I have ahead of me too.

And the sites that are on that list aren’t just little dinky sites that no one visits.  Oh no, these are extremely high traffic sites.  Like Facebook.  Like Google.  Like CNN.  Again, half assed effort on their part… these sites are dominating traffic on the net.  How can they possibly justify offering an internet browser that won’t even work properly on the sites we all go to the most?  Oh sure, we can click the little magic button and go back to IE7… but then why the hell did we upgrade from IE7 if we still get it in our lives?  This feels like Windows ME (aka Windows 98 with a boob job) all over again.

The Remedy

Just like when Microsoft told everyone that their current computers weren’t up to snuff to be “Vista Ready” a few years back, now your website runs the same risk.  Microsoft is advising web designers and developers to get their site “IE8 Ready” by  adding a special tag on your site to make it totally compatible with IE8.  Which to me is kinda funny… we need to place a tag on our site to get their browser to work properly.. a tag that ALL of the other browsers don’t require.  How about just going with.. oh.. you know… Web Standards?  Ya know.. the thing you were talking about doing in the first place?

So we have to add a new META tag in place, which if you look at the code example they provide at the Microsoft site, tells IE8 to act just like IE7, or even better, act like IE5 in the event that IE8 is screwing the pooch.  You guys are killing me here.  If we have to tell your Standards compliant browser to not act like it’s Standards compliant in order to render a page properly, then you guys missed the whole damn point of ALL of this. 

Just go 100% standards compliant Microsoft!

It’s really that straight forward here.  Yes, there will be a slew of broken sites that were built to work with previous versions.  Hell, we have that issue already, it’s not like this is a new problem!  But we just hear the guys at Microsoft keep swearing by the logic that it’s the responsibility of the webmaster to be compliant with their browser regardless of the true state of affairs with websites falling apart under their browsers.  However, on the other side of the same coin, I keep believing that it’s the job of the browser maker to be compliant with Standards so we can all have tried and true development guidelines.  They’re called Standards for a reason.  In this case, the reason is to eliminate the very problems that IE8 is trying to hide.

Dropping a browser that is pure Standards compliant will force webmasters to update their sites, and in a hurry since it’s essential to anyone who has invested money or time into having a web presence.  If you have a site out there, you can never afford to let it get dated and become stale.  That’s how you lose visitors and value.  Having IE get on board with the other browsers will put the pressure onto web designers and developers in a major way.  If Microsoft is at all sincere about making the web work for everyone, it’s time for them to start working with the people who make the web possible in the first place.

Sphinn This Twitter This Stumble This Trackback