Re: E8 development: Microsoft should learn from Apple, Mozilla
- From: "weedhopper" <Whopper@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:28:07 -0400
"Chance Furlong" <t-bone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:t-bone-003F40.19105415062008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From Arstechnica:
http://tinyurl.com/3o7qyn
Cuss and discuss, Wintrolls.
E8 development: Microsoft should learn from Apple, Mozilla
By Peter Bright Published: June 15, 2008 05:10PM CT
Internet Explorer 8 is set to be Microsoft's most standards compliant
browser ever. After originally stating that IE8 would default to the
same noncompliant behavior exhibited by IE7, Microsoft relented and
plumped for standard by default. The first beta of IE8 was released in
March and it did indeed default to standards compliance. Web developers
have been clamouring for standards compliance for a long time; IE is a
long way behind the competition, requiring considerable hacks and
workarounds to get pages working properly. IE8 should make things a lot
better, but it will still fall far short of the standards set by
Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Some of these problems are technical, but
others are cultural. Where the other browser developers are open and
communicative, Microsoft is still leaving web developers in the dark.
Microsoft was initially concerned that defaulting to standards
compliance mode would "break the web," that is, make a significant
proportion of web pages render so badly as to be unusable, and
experiences with beta 1 have provided some justification for the
company's concerns. Microsoft is appealing to web developers to fix
their web pages, but the unfortunate reality is that the owners of many
websites will be unwilling to foot the bill for those fixes to be made.
To mitigate this difficulty, Microsoft is adding a new feature to aid
the transition. Web developers will be able to add a tag to their page
(or their web server) to force pages to render in the same manner as
IE7. Pages without the tag will continue to use the "doctype switch" to
choose between the old, nonstandard "quirks mode" and the new "standards
mode"; pages with the new tag will still use the doctype switch, but
this time to choose between "quirks mode" and "IE 7 mode." The tag will
be supported in beta 2 of IE8 (due in August), and is also available to
IE 8 beta 1 with the latest security update.
With this tag, Microsoft is hoping that developers will have a low-cost
way of making their pages work once IE8 ships, while still allowing
standards mode to be the default going forward. The response from
developers, however, has been lukewarm. Many commenters on the Internet
Explorer blog have stated that they are happy to do the work to make
their page's standards compliant; the problem is that Microsoft has not
disclosed which parts of which standards it will support, nor which bugs
will be fixed.
The ultimate reason for these problems with standards mode is that IE7's
standards mode was both buggy and nonstandard. Developers wrote IE7
specific workarounds to ensure that pages worked in both reasonably
standards-conforming browsers (such as Opera, Safari, and Firefox) and
IE7. Without telling developers what to expect for IE8, the same problem
is liable to occur with that, too; instead of targeting the standards,
pages will contain workarounds and hacks to avoid IE8-specific problems.
Taking clues from Apple and Mozilla
To really tackle this problem, Microsoft will need to be a lot more open
about its plans for the browser and offer updates far more frequently.
Both WebKit (the rendering engine of Safari) and Firefox offer nightly
builds, and even the commercial Opera browser has weekly builds
available. These regular releases make it much quicker for bug fixes to
get into developers' hands, making it easier for them to update their
sites now rather than having to wait months between betas.
Greater transparency about what is and is not supported is also needed;
for example, although Firefox 3, due for release any day now, will not
have complete support for SVG, we can see exactly which bits it does
support. Internet Explorer has no equivalent documentation, with the
result that developers are operating in the dark. Although in the case
of SVG, IE is "easy,"it has no support for any of the specification, in
areas such as CSS and HTML, IE does offer partial support.
Microsoft has made steps in the right direction; the IE blog is giving
more insight into the browser's development than it used to, and
developments such as the CSS 2.1 test suite are a useful benchmark for
all browsers. But the standard has been set by the open source browsers,
and so this is the level of openness and transparency that MS should be
striving for, even if it finds that this sits uncomfortably with its
commercial nature.
Internet Explorer is hemorrhaging market share, thanks to its virtual
abandonment between about 2001 and 2006 and the rapid progress by
competing browsers. To stop losing ground to Firefox and Safari,
Internet Explorer needs to stand head and shoulders above both of them.
But with Microsoft's lack of clear objectives, infrequent releases, and
poor communication, IE8 will be struggling to even achieve parity with
its competitors.
MSIE, used by 73% of computer owners.
.
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