CSS Support IE 7.0's Weakest Link

dilbertspace writes "Anyone who has ever developed a website knows that cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility is a nightmare, mainly due to Microsoft's willful non-compliance with the CSS2 standard. As this eWeek article points out, it seems Microsoft will continue their poor support for CSS2 even in the IE 7.0 release. This may have worked when IE was the only game in town, but now that Firefox is a serious player, it won't help them keep market share as they think it will."

Dupeage

[scapermoya]

DUPE I emailed the on duty editor when i saw the red bar, nothing happened.

Duplicate, you moron editors

[jleq]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/17/152925 8&tid=126&tid=95&tid=113 Pay more attention to your own fucking site.

Not a dupe!

[fm6]

Wrong! The first story pointed to an article on Microsoft Watch. The second story points to an article on eWeek. It's not the editors' fault that the eWeek article is just a summary of the Microsoft Watch article!

Re:firefox is a pretty serious player

[Anonymous Coward]

Read your history, FF/alternate browsers have been around for years.

Re:Not a dupe!

[gl4ss]

actually it is the editors fault if he accepts a story that has the same information as was presented already before..

Re:well duh

[flacco]

Why conform to existing standards when you can make your own?

to not be a douchebag?

MS would have to break IE backwards-compatibility

[starvingartist12]

If Microsoft fixes their CSS support in Internet Explorer 7, every single little CSS IE hack used around the world will break.

The problem is that all these years, Web developers have had to resort to these little IE-specific hacks to compensate for years of neglect on Microsoft's part. Sure Microsoft can add more security or tabbed browsing... but CSS? It'd be too risky on Microsoft's part to send out a new IE that *breaks* exisiting websites. (Although to be honest, they done it before - twice - IE:mac and later, IE for Windows. But this time they can't rely on DOCTYPE Switching [hsivonen.iki.fi] anymore.)

Microsoft's mantra of backwards compatibility would be at odds with releasing a fully CSS 2.0 compliant IE browser.

Re:Don't count on it

[Jace of Fuse!]

He said the public perception of IE's security has declined. It doesn't matter if IE is more or less secure than it has been in the past, because generally speaking, most people don't trust IE anymore.

Re:Don't count on it

[masklinn]

every page I visit seems to increases the Working Set by a couple of megs of ram.

It doesn't just "seem to", your impression is right, it does. There's been a nice bug for quite a few years (3? 4?) in the engine which causes the browser to not release most of the memory it consumes, and just use more and more.
It's very clear on some machines, less on others, it's worse when you use tabbed browsing a lot (the memory leak happens when you close a tab, the memory it used isn't always released)

The good thing is that this bug has been fixed in Mozilla 1.8 (the one that'll never get released, you know...)
The slightly less good one is that the fix will only land in Firefox when said firefox'll fuse with Gecko 1.8 (the current trunk), and thats Firefox 1.1

Summary: there is a memory leak bug in Firefox tabs, it's been known for years, it blows and can cause sever instabilities on some computers, it's completely random (aka you can be lucky and run FF np with 64Mb RAM, and you can be unlucky and have it hog 500Mb every time you use it) and worsens if you keep the same browser window (not tab, window) for extended periods of time. That bug still exists in Firefox 1.0.1 and will still be in 1.0.2, it'll be fixed in Firefox 1.1 which is supposed to be released in 2-3 months.

Recommandation: if you happen to get hit by the "CrappySlowMemoryHogFirefox" and can't bear it, don't switch back to MSIE, use Opera instead, it runs fine, is fast, has a quite low memory foot print and a quite good support of HTML and CSS.

Additional Informations: one of the great strengths of Firefox is the XUL extensions system, but it's also (obviously) it's biggest weakness: some extensions can have memory leaks on their own or cause slowness or crashs. One of the most well know "unstable" extension is "Tabbrowser Extension", which is arguably the best Tabbed Browsing extension feature wise, but is also the most bloated and dangerous one (and one of the worst and most random Firefox extensions, even the author himself says so).
If your firefox is unstable/slow and you use TBE, uninstall it or create a new "clean" profile before dissing FF...

Oh, BTW, about the extensions, do pay visits to websites like The Extensions Mirror [extensionsmirror.nl], one can get true wonders and squeeze the best out of Firefox with the good extensions plugged in

Re:MS would have to break IE backwards-compatibili

[alernon]

This is true for some CSS, but they could possibly improve other things. IE for instance thinks that there's some mysterious element that surrounds the HTML tag so, you can pass styles to IE by using * HTML {}, while other browsers will ignore it. If they fix both the quirks that the hacks are fixing, and the method of passing the hacks to IE, it would be no harm no foul. It's just that they'd have to make sure they got everything right. So that the new IE doesn't end up ignoring a hack it needs...