Users and Web Developers Vent Over IE7 528
Spinlock_1977 writes "ComputerWorld is running a story about developers frustration with IE 7, and Microsoft's upcoming plans (or lack thereof) for it. From the article, "But the most pointed comment came from someone labeled only as dk. You all continue to underestimate the dramatic spillover effect this poor developer experience has had and will continue to have on your other products and services. Let me drive this point home. I am a front-end programmer and a co-founder of a start-up. I can tell you categorically that my team won't download and play with Silverlight ... won't build a Live widget ... won't consider any Microsoft search or ad products in the future.""
Wouldn't it be nice.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a web developer by profession, and I must say IE6 and 7 are a frustrating pair of browsers to develop for.
I use the Web Developer toolbar extension for Firefox, which conveniently lets me know if my webpages are following standards and if there are any errors on the page. It's a bit depressing when you've developed a perfectly standards-compliant page, and then are forced to break standards, create Javascript warnings etc just so the page renders properly on the IE browsers.
I don't think Microsoft should leave the browser business, as competition is healthy.. but they have polluted the market with these strange browsers, forcing web developers to have to deal with these issues. It will be a triumphant day for us web developers when we can stick to standards and not have to degrade/hack-up our code in order for the majority of the public to be able to view it as it was intended.
Kinda funny (Score:5, Interesting)
I developed them in Firefox, tested them with Safari, and didn't give IE a thought.
IE7: All functionality worked fine, with one or two very minor formatting differences. (which I'm not going to do anything about)
IE6: Completely and unusably horked. Fortunately I don't have to care.
Thank goodness for internal only sites.
building up controversy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Websites and simple web apps must first be compatible, so the problem is not IE7 more than IE6.
Complex apps might benefit by targeting only "standard browsers" like Firefox and Opera, if you have to use a complex app you're literate enough to install a second browser, and the dev effort to reach compatibility takes resources away and prevents good but not cross platform stuff to be used. I'm not talking only about svg and xform, but little things which make a huge difference when you're behind a web app for hours: IIRC on IE6 you couldn't pick the correct entry in a long drop down menu by typing the first few letters when it's focused.
So this outburst of noise might just make the scheduled revamp of IE7 a "MS listen to us" propaganda stunt.
Does IE7 have a revamp? Well, FF3 is round the corner and opera is fast.
Re:IE8 announced.. (of course with no details) (Score:3, Interesting)
: IE Desktop Online Web Browser Live Professional Ultimate Edition for the Internet (the marketing team really pushed for this one
emoticons aside, that pretty much sums up a lot of problems at microsoft. I guess as director he must have some real pull.
Firefox is number 1 in W3Schools.com (Score:3, Interesting)
DK - large turd in a small bowl (Score:2, Interesting)
customer: "We standardise on the MS platform, what can you offer us?"
DK: "No i swore off it on some random blog, can't go back on my word now!"
customer: "Good day to you sir"
I feel sorry for this guy's staff if he thinks he should be the one driving what customers want, not the other way around.
Organise a no-IE protest day! (Score:5, Interesting)
A day organised where all web developers can band together and intentionally not make their sites work for IE, just for one day.
I can't think of anything that would be a more effective protest. A single day where every IE user couldn't access a significant number of sites might make Microsoft sit up and take notice.
Re:The same moral level as spammers. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've not checked to see how Dean's IE7 js thing works with the real IE7 - does it still work?
Re:CSS support (Score:5, Interesting)
So, I have a compatibility library. Yes, it adds another layer... but that layer *works*, and I don't have to rewrite the code every time I want to know where the scrollbar is or how big a div is. And it's fast enough for anything I've needed to do with it, which has included making calls to it every 100 milliseconds in some instances. And because I have my compatibility library, I can do things in minutes that take other people hours or days or weeks... if they can do them at all.
I've been doing extensive Dynamic HTML work since 1999, so I have to deal frequently with the various browsers' implementations of Javascript and the DOM. And yes, IE sucks. Bad. But you know what? All browsers suck, bad. I have constant problems with Firefox too, and with Safari. Do I have more of them with IE? Yup. If I had a nickel for every time IE made me swear, I could buy Microsoft. But that doesn't make Firefox or Webkit good. They're just less bad.
And, let me point out one case in which IE is the winner, in the hope of embarrassing Firefox (and Webkit?) into doing something useful to me... IE is the only browser with a built in API for replacing the scripting language. You want to replace Javascript with, say, Ruby? IE has the API, you can write a plugin and do it. Firefox doesn't: to write a plugin for it you'd have to extensively muck about in Firefox's internals.
Why should we be the ones to change? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Just plain incompetent (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wouldn't it be nice.... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're not trying to do slick marketing, you can always just dismiss IEs little quirks and let it become known among the public as the ugly but functional browser that comes with Windows before you stick FF onto it, just as they do with the default Media Player.
Re:DK - large turd in a small bowl (Score:1, Interesting)
The name of a good psychiatrist?
Or perhaps an accountant who can point out how much more it's going to cost to be IE 'compliant'?
Or the number of a help center in India, where the customer's customers or employees can get help with all the things which 'just don't work right' when they use IE?
Turning down unprofitable contracts can be a smart move, especially when the requirements mandate less than professional results. Cave on one, lose two more profitable ones later on. The customer is NOT always right.
Those who think they are - I certainly don't want or need their business.
Re:DK - large turd in a small bowl (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because this hypothetical client doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, if you'll pardon my French. What software the client is using doesn't mean jack squat if you're building a public website. What's important is what the rest of the world is using today, and what they will be using 12 months from today.
Standards compliance is not ideology. It's the practical application of the very principle that the Internet depends on: We have to be able to talk to one another using known protocols. Anything that subverts that principle should be treated as damage and routed around, to coin a phrase.
If a potential client doesn't care about turning 20% or more of their potential customer base away simply because they don't want to support software from more than one manufacturer, then I don't want to work for them, because they're going to be equally stupid about other decisions, too.
If you're talking about an Intranet application, then your point is moot. It has no bearing whatsoever on the the Internet, which is what's being discussed here. If I meet a potential client that wants a Microsoft-centric intranet application, then I'll politely decline the work and send them on to someone who actually likes that kind of thing. There's enough work to go around.
This argument has been rearing its ugly head since the mid-1990s. Do a Google search for 'standards compliant' in comp.infosystems.www.html.authoring and you'll find endless, tedious debate there. Frankly, I find it boring. I made the decision not to work with Microsoft anything on the web back in 1998, and it hasn't hurt a bit. I've never lacked for work, and I find I spend so much less time dealing with bugs and incompatibilities that I can actually focus on polishing and improving things instead of busting a nut against Microsoft's latest crap-du-jour.
All the browsers have issues... CCs? (Score:4, Interesting)
To be honest, I've run into so many quirks in all 4 major browsers alike (IE/FF/Opera/Safari) that I'd almost say I hate them all. As someone on IRC said a few days ago: I hate IE 1 MS, and I hate all the others several milliMS, but I don't love any of them.
IE7 still has issues with PNG's (just use AIL as in IE6, it works better, it's actually faster, and you have to do that for IE6 anyway), you can't use fading effects on text because of the cleartype issues and developers tools are just not nearly as good as their FF counterparts.
In the other hand, I've been playing with FF3 (and posting bug reports like crazy) and it breaks. It really really breaks. FF3b may pass the ACID2 test, but that's about all it passes. It has broken pretty much all the complicated sites I've tried in it. Sure it's a beta, and a lot of issues will be resolved, I just wouldn't be surprised if FF3 final still breaks a lot.
Opera, yeah, let's talk about Opera. The latest Opera is worse than FF3b. 9.2 is totally bugridden. It seems that every bug I run into, I upgrade to a newer Opera (every month or two) and it's fixed. Sure this says a lot for how hard the Opera guys are working and fixing things, but it's till bad. Opera 9.5b? I'm surprised to find it in that quirksmode comparison. According to that page it does lots of things it doesn't actually do - or only does half. Again, 9.5 breaks, and it breaks bad. They even had the nerve to 'fix' the mousewheel to now use - and + indices as the other browsers do. That's a good thing, if it weren't for the fact that pretty much all mousewheel JS depends on Opera doing it the other way around. Should we talk about all the redraw bugs Opera suffers from? Seriously it's amazing how may artefacts you see on screen that disappear by minimizing/maximizing (and other such operations that force the window to completely redraw). These are not really HTML/CSS rendering errors, it's just redraw code where corners have been cut that shouldn't have been. Sure it's fast, but if this is the price you pay....
Safari? Oh yeah Safari. It's bitchingly fast. Too bad the rest of the interface is slow as a dog. Really, who came up with the 'sliding' message box animation? Yeah there's an error, oh, hey, let me just wait 7 seconds on a really stupid animation that's not even anti aliased just so I can click OK. Webkit good. Safari interface bad. And it has LOTS of quirks as well (and I'm talking about v3 here, not v2, that's a horror of biblical proportions by itself).
Just saying. IE7 isn't 'the doggs bollocks', but neither are the other browsers. And with the betas of FF3 and Opera 9.5 I'm almost scared for the future, it doesn't look well so far, but at least there's hope in those departments.
Which brings me to my real point. Conditional comments. Sure, they may be bad practise, and yeah, they bloat. In the meantime, in the REAL WORLD, things need to be fixed. I can't sell to a client that we can't do something correctly cross-browser or it takes XXXX more hours because of quirk A in browser B that simply cannot be fixed without a bunch of javascript that does the SAME THING as a conditional comment would, but EVEN LESS mainta
Re:Parent has a halfway decent point (Score:3, Interesting)
Low IE6 to IE7 Conversion (Score:2, Interesting)
Though IE7 is still a mess, it would save developers thousands of wasted development hours if a sufficient enough number of people switched from IE6 to it.
A big part of this low conversion rate is the "genuine advantage" testing Microsoft now requires in order to download and install IE7. So in trying to force low-income people to purchase Windows they are costing developers millions of dollars in wasted development hours each year.
Quite frankly, IE6 is a major bottleneck in web development. It is retarding the development of web technologies.
Re:The same moral level as spammers. (Score:2, Interesting)
Might would use IE7 more... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Trash IE all you want but.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Sure, they dont have much userbase, but in terms of speed and standards support Opera beats Firefox, and IE is so far behind it cant even be seen.
While IE is only just getting grips on PNG, Opera is expirementing with SVG format backgrounds. While Firefox was showing IE how to do tabs, Opera had a full MDI for the last decade.
Its really amazing Opera has made so little impact except with its console/mobile browsers. (due to its small efficiant codebase).
IE needs to die
And Opera needs a decent marketing department
Re:Parent has a halfway decent point (Score:4, Interesting)
Sluggish as it is, by my measurements is around 5 times as fast as the one of IE7.
On a side note, I'm very surprised that setting the innerHTML of a table row doesn't work on IE- it will give an Unknown runtime error (very informative). I ended up writing a javascript setTRinnerHTML function that does what is really the job of the browser: interpret HTML, converting it to DOM and building up the table row like that. I guess MS couldn't have spent a day extra development time to let the browser behave as expected. A completely uninformative error message was easier to implement, I suppose.
Re:Parent has a halfway decent point (Score:2, Interesting)
For every rendering bug in IE, I'll raise you a segfault or sluggishness from Firefox. I realise that being on Slashdot gives you the impression that everyone in the world loves Linux and Firefox and that the only reason people use Win and IE is because they are forced to (or know no better), but really there are a lot of people who actually like them - me included.
(Typed using Opera on Fedora, FYI. I'm not speaking out of ignorance here)
Re:Wouldn't it be nice.... (Score:3, Interesting)
POS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:CSS support (Score:3, Interesting)
You guys seem to forget something critical -- "standards" are supposed to be what most participants do, not what most participants should do, or are being told to do. In this case, there's only one plarey in the game that's been in teh game for more than five years: IE.
Well, I for one applaude your proper use of quotes.
"Standards" are indeed those de facto standards, where a monopolist does what it wills, and the rest ought to scramble after it.
Real standards, however, are specifications agreed upon by most or even all players, as you call them. The rules of the game, if you will.
You can't, or rather you shouldn't be complaining that IE doesn't support some arbitrary spec from some arbitrary corporation that's never built to their own spec. The W3C had a browser of their own for six seconds, and it never came close to adhering to their own standard. So they've decided to sit back and tell others what to do.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Microsoft a member of the W3C?
Besides, W3C is not a corporation (at least AFAIK), but a consortium. Do check the meaning of the abbreviation.
It's nice that FF has come along, and chosen to support much of what the W3C have said. But that too is a copp-out. They've decided to make no decisions, and simply to follow what someone else says -- in this case, someone else who's got absolutely no experience actually doing anything.
Oh, I'm sorry. I guess you want to say that a standardization body should actually implement each and every standard they make?
Would you then argue that ISO shouldn't make any standards, as they don't really implement most of them?
Standards are meant to be adhered to, not arbitrarily broken. That's why they're standards.
You also can't complain that a company has built a product that you don't like -- you don't have to use it, and you don't have to care. It's their product, and their service, and their business. If you don't like it, you're welcome to build your own product any day of the week.
*sniff* I smell an astroturfer.
You have said it yourself: Microsoft is (or at least was) the de facto monopolist in this field.
That, unfortunately for the point you're trying to make, means that sometimes you are forced to use that product.
Furthermore, Microsoft Embrace-Extend-Extinguish approach to standards means that some pages (fewer of them every day, but still) are built to be viewed exclusively using IE.
So stop complaining, and do it yourself. That's what business is all about.
Yes, but not everyone is in that business.
We all use products built by someone else.
Or will you tell me that you build all your own tools yourself, and if you buy something defective, you don't complain, ask for a refund and so on and so forth?
All of that said, I've got no problem with IE. I've got no problem supporting multiple browsers -- quite frankly, it benefits my business to do so and to have to do so.
If you're building websites for others, yes, I can see how it benefits your business.
However, your benefit is at the same time a loss for every client of yours.
But you don't have to. You can build your own browser. You can stop supporting browsers that you don't like. Hey, I did. I don't support Safari, I just don't like it. I don't support Opera either. Until this year, I didn't support FF, and I still don't support FF for backend components. That's my right, it's my business.
Now, this I like.
I, for one, do not support IE.
IE users get an alert that they should view the site from a real browser, e.g. Firefox, and are redirected to getfirefox.com.
If they do not wish to be redirected, their browser is crashed.
OK, so I can afford that kind of assholey behaviour because