IE9 Preview Touts Cross Browser Compatibility 181
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 development team has announced the availability of the third IE9 platform preview release on the IE blog. Dean Hachamovitch writes, 'The third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, available now, continues the deep work around hardware acceleration to enable the same standards-based markup to run faster. This is the latest installment of the rhythm we started in March, delivering platform preview releases approximately every eight weeks and listening to developers. You'll see more performance, same markup, and hardware-accelerated HTML5.' The announcement focuses on cross-browser compatibility, noting that when 'developers spend less time rewriting their sites to work across browsers they have more time to create amazing experiences on the Web.' Curiously, however, the video embedded in the page works only in some browsers. Dear Microsoft, IE9 supports many royalty-free, web-compatible formats out of the box (HTML, CSS, WOFF, PNG, and the like) so why not at least one more?"
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
Because IE 6 was designed to fail horribly when it can't understand the web page. Therefore web site developers have to make it work in IE or give it a way to fail nicely.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:1, Informative)
Same problem here. Bank with 60,000 employers. All running IE6.
Now you try to explain the high up bank executive he needs to "upgrade his browser" without install rights when something "doesn't look quite right" during validation.
Nudging IT will only result in fear of taking risk ("it works now") and noone wanting to invest time and money in a upgrade while there are hundreds of projects running (planned up until 10 years in the future) and the IT-crowd already being under quite some load.
Cannot be done. IE6 slave myself until next client.
Re:Microsoft supports H.264 (Score:2, Informative)
H.264 is still a proprietary codex.
Re:Cross Browser Compatibility? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, Microsoft is generating a tons of CSS test cases, which more of an objective measure than the checkbox marketing which usually is used by browser vendors.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
"I am not a web developer, so I am a bit confused about why websites are unable to provide even a basic level of support for IE6 -- perhaps a simple page without any fancy effects that just gives people whatever information they were looking for. Is it really that necessary to use Javascript for everything?"
Good question, but it's not that simple.
See, CSS and Javascript were DESIGNED to "fail gracefully". You could put some useful style on say a list or a heading, then use CSS to format it. If the browser support was not there, you would see the base elements.
Now this failback would understandably be UGLY (your prettified CSS list menu would look like a 1994 bulleted list), but it would WORK.
If Microsoft chose not to support the CSS standards, they could have done so. It's optional.
The ONLY way Microsoft could ruin CSS and Javascript was by agreeing to go along with the standard, and then change all the meaning. It's like if you spoke a slightly different language than your neighbor, and every 3rd word you spoke had different meaning to your neighbor (as in, every 3rd word was a normal term to you, but an unexpectedly offensive curse word to them).
If a browser did not support said standards, we could have all designed for CSS and IE6 would get a vanilla plain text page.
Microsoft knew that novice web developers would code and test in the "popular" browser first, then test other browsers afterwards. If that was how you developed, you were an unwitting tool in Microsoft's effort to destroy the open web.
It worked, for a time.
Then web developers revolted, by figuring out how to document Microsoft bugs. In the end, we developed this pseudo-language that ran on top of CSS and Javascript, so we could "hide" markup and styles from either IE or from the standards browsers.
All this effort wasted uncountable hours of web developers.
Was this deliberate sabotage by Microsoft? Let's just say that in the US anti-trust trial against Microsoft, emails from Bill Gates were revealed. Bill's emails essentially stated he didn't want to see MS developers "wasting time fixing bugs in HTML that only affect competitive browsers". (Meaning, if your HTML/CSS generation in some desktop app generates horrible invalid code... DON'T fix it... just let the IE guys know so they can write undocumented code to show your page "properly").
Literally, there's a story here how grass-roots web developers fought back to save the "information highway" from being effectively privatized as one company's property.
This is why so many people HATE IE and IE6.. even if they're not the type of people who normally hate Microsoft.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, there was no designing involved in the failing parts. The code just ran into unspecified territory. You could say the outcome was determined by natural selection. ;)
Or... you could say it was designed into it in many areas where Microsoft intentionally ignored standards and inserted their own method of doing things. I would agree with you, if it weren't for all the memos, emails and such that went back and forth at Microsoft about trying to kill Netscape dominance by doing such things (see the DOJ case against MS for more info).
While the PP may seem like a conspiracy theorist, the fact is, ensuring web code would fail on IE unless written to Microsoft's specs/"standards" was indeed an intentional move on their part, combined with their push into the business world for their various technologies that only worked on IE. The intent, as I noted above, was to ensure that they would gain more marketshare over Netscape and take the Internet playing field away from them. They succeeded, and hence, we have IE6 (and IE7 and IE8) to code workarounds for.
I for one still remember the day of going to websites that were IE6 only...