Seriously Google, what is going on?
It’s been around four months since they released the browser for Windows, but still no word (that I’ve heard, anyway) on release dates. Around the time of the Windows version release, I eagerly signed up to their mailing list so I can keep up to date with Mac version development – but still nothing 
I’d like to think I’ve gained a fair bit of experience and knowledge of the way the guys at Microsoft like to deal with bugs and the like.
Microsoft Connect is a clunky, archaic piece of bespoke software that can be a pain to use. First off, its seriously slow for bug tracking software which can leave you frustrated and wishing the IE team just looked at some specific external bug log pages instead of making you jump through hoops to get a bug logged. Secondly, I have a gripe with the Feedback landing page- I despise the bug ticket ‘tooltip’ which displays most of the meta data associated with the bug. Yes, it’s useful to have access to that information without having to wait 5 minutes while the bug page loads, but the performance of those tooltips is absolutely dreadful. Intuitively you have to hover over a link to display the relevant tooltip, but it depends in what area of the link you hover over as to how long it takes to appear; the worst situation (which I have experienced many a time is when the hover behaviour gets into an apparent never-ending ‘cycle’ where the cursor type changes from pointer to cursor and back again every half a second or so. And please Microsoft, get rid of that annoying tooltip fade-in effect – I don’t care for pretty Javascript effects when I’m logging bugs.
When you come to file a new bug, you’re presented with a number of irrelvant questions (relating to a CSS/HTML bug, for example); “What language of your browsers frame?” (what does that even mean?), “What is your language preference order?”, “How often does this happen?”, etc etc. I’d suggest to Microsoft that they tailor that form page based on the criteria given in some of the initial questions. It’s not a case of it being confusing; it’s just a pain to answer these mandatory questions.
Another one of my pet hates is to do with the individual bug page once you’ve filed the bug (including speciying a test case URL). Although you’re encouraged to visit this URL, for some silly reason it’s outputted as plain text, meaning you have to copy and paste the URL string into your browser – please, please Microsoft transform it into a link!
Once you’ve filed your bug, you’re unable to edit your description.
One of the surprises I came across when I first signed up was to do with the Opacity property ticket. I was never really expecting IE8 to support this property (and indeed they’re not going to be), however I was alarmed at the fact that they so quickly closed the ticket as ‘Closed by Design’, and then later ‘Postponed’. At the time of this status change, there was little to no word from the IE team as to what they were planning on doing in relation to Opacity (or emulating it, at least), hence why there were so many frustrated developers leaving comments on the ticket. Although the original author of the ticket wasn’t completely clear as to the meaning of the ticket, myself, and I’m sure most others were clear it related to the Opacity effect in general, not the actual property itself. This was apparently something that the IE team didn’t understand as can be read in a subsequent comment left on that ticket.
Something I’ve stated in the past, is the fact that the IE team chose to stage a closed Beta program as opposed to an open one. I have no idea on how many testers Microsoft let in to the program, but one thing is for sure – it’s had a detrimental impact on the time it takes to find bugs, hence why we have layout bugs being shipped in a last-minute, closed RC1. Thankfully many people who weren’t able to join this program (for whatever reason) still posted links to either their own sites or sites they had spotted whilst surfing which include obvious layout bugs; this sort of participation is still a real help to us testers, since I’m more than happy to examine the bug and create a reduced testcase to send to Microsoft.
Recently, I’ve been noticing quite a few company TV adverts that don’t include their domain name; instead displaying ‘Search [keyword]‘ at the end of the ad to get their target audience to look on their site. To me, this strategy seems fairly risky; the majority of these adverts are time-limited and unless the SEOers involved have built up some good quality backlinks to the site (using relevant keywords in anchor text, and such), it’s going to be difficult for that site to get to the top spot – I would suggest that even second spot in the SEs for their most competitive keyword would count as a fail.
To be honest I wasn’t really expecting them to release this, considering they only recently posted detailing their release schedule from now until launch (which this Partner build wasn’t included in).
However, like a few others I was concerned that they weren’t going to release another Beta, so I’m pleased they’ve released this version which bridgees the gap between Beta 2 and the Release Candidate which should be with us by the first quarter of next year.
They’ve literally only just notified me of this private build, so I’ve only had time to run through the test cases for the bugs that I spotted and logged on my own IE8 Bugs page; after some initial testing, it appears they’ve fixed five out of the twelve bugs that I spotted in Beta 2.
It seems all I talk about on this blog these days is IE8; if you don’t have any interest in IE8, I apologise.
Upon checking my visit logs tonight, I discovered I was quoted on the ieblog referring to some things I mentioned in my initial post. Subsequently, Scott McIver from the IE team responded with some interesting comments.
In reponse to the ‘assumption’ I made where I described what telementary data the list will be made up from, Scott suggested that I had misenterpreted what will actually happen when in fact what will happen is, … a list of super-important sites is compiled (based on 3rd party survey data). We then look to see if users are having compatibility failures on those sites and, if they are, contact those sites and add them to the list.
What I don’t understand is why they’re planning to break down into this ’super-important’ tier. Even with 3rd party survey data
, it’s still a very subjective criteria; it’s an obvious fact that different usergroups will deem different types of sites to be most important – it’s a personal thing, at the end of the day. To me, it seems a no-brainer for them to base their list on sites (top 1000 or so) that the highest frequency of users perform a compatibility-switch on- this criteria seems far more relevant in this context.
Perhaps a more effective means of finding out whether your site appears on this list, is to make it public (Update: if you want to find out the contents of the active list, you can navigate to res://iecompat.dll/iecompatdata.xml in your address bar), rather than waiting for Microsoft to email you about it? On top of this, Microsoft need to provide developers which a clear means of contacting them regarding removal of their site from the Compatibility View list – currently, I see no way of doing this.
I’ve been pretty busy this weekend filing IE8 Beta 2 bugs (I’ve found 11 new (that aren’t logged on other prominent bug list pages) bugs in just one day). Just recently I’ve become acutely aware that the final release of IE8 won’t fully hit CSS 2.1 support, whether it’s because a spec implementation is buggy, or they’re not going to bother implementing a spec full stop. This lack of support got me thinking about the impact this will have on the users interaction with Compatibility View; even though many of the bugs I’m coming across are fringe cases or features that aren’t currently being used on a large scale (can be blamed on browser support, I’m sure), there is lack of support for (or bugs relating to) features that are commony used. These issues will of course result in a substandard page layout, and my concern is that end-users will be tempted to perform a compatibility-switch in the hope that it fixes the layout, when all it’ll do is either look the same or worse – OK, compatibility-switching won’t fix the lack of support for the print media descriptor when used with the @import rule, but you catch my drift.
I saw this post, in which we get a better insight into what the IE team were talking about when they said high-volume sites weren’t working for end-users with IE’s new standards compliant default
. Scott describes how styles that should be specific only to IE7 (to work around it’s layout bugs) are also getting applied to IE8, on the popular MySpace.com site. For example, they have chosen to use the gte IE7 (greater that or equal to IE7) operator which of course means that IE8 applies these styles too. The underlying issue here then, lies with authors making irresponsible decisions relating to which operator a conditional comment uses not that these sites aren’t coded to be standards compliant. So, perhaps in hinds sight, Microsoft shouldn’t have implemented the greater than operator in the first place.
I can in fact, see this being a problem across all future IE versions; for example, when we get around to IE9 (which will hopefully not include Compatibility View), sites like MySpace will continue to break in the same way they’re doing now if those site authors don’t update the Conditonal Comment operators they’re using.
On a side note, I had a little chuckle when reading this post from one angry developer; based on his use of uppercase text, asterisks for emphasis, and generaly formatting, I’d hate to meet him in person on a bad day!
This random video made me laugh. I didn’t particularly want to create a whole new post just to showcase this, so I’ve stuffed it in this one
It’s been a while since I’ve posted about the Emulate IE7 Compatibility View feature.
Granted, the position of the ‘Emulate IE7′ button in Beta 1 was ugly as hell, I can only assume that this button re-posiiton (and re-size) goes to show the apparent lack of thought that has gone into how users will identify with what this button actually does. Instead of a fairly prominent ‘Emulate IE7′ button positioned near the top right of Beta 1, the IE team have placed the new UI button for Compatibility View in an inconspicuous area to the right of the address bar. Chris Wilson has said, however , that they may move the button position based on user feedback
. The underlying issue though is that the target audience of IE8 won’t have the first clue what all this fuss is about.
The main reason for me writing this post is down to an article the IE team released yesterday relating to a new extension of Compatibility View, that will make the experience of defaulting to standards mode better for the end user
. Essentially they collect the data, relating to what high-volume sites other users clicked the Compatibility View button on (i.e which TLDs most commonly prompt a user to manually switch to Compatibility Mode). A list of the TLDs that prompt the highest number of switches is compiled, and then users who download the next update of IE8 (or install the Beta of Windows 7) have a choice as to whether they want to opt-in to the aforementioned list of sites that should be displayed in Compatibility View (check out the screenshot of the installation prompt).
Apparently, according to the article, high-volume sites such as facebook.com, myspace.com, bbc.co.uk, and cnn.com have been specifically flagged (presumably as a result of this collated user data) as not working correctly in the standards compliant default mode. As this user data has come from Beta 2 (and perhaps more worrying Beta 1?), which still has an alarming amount of rendering bugs still active, it’s highy likely that what end-users are actually seeing are Beta 2 (or Beta 1’s) rendering bugs, not as a result of a badly-coded website which relies on IE7’s quirky layout rendering.
Arguably, the most worrying situation for authors of these sites would be if MS decided not to refresh the data that the TLD list is based on, once the release candidate is distributed. Not refreshing this data (i.e wiping the data collected from the two Betas), would mean that authors of sites that appear in the ‘blacklist’ would presumably have to use the version targeting <META>/HTTP Header together with the newly introduced IE=EmulateIE8 value to remove their site from this blacklist – I presume this since there was a similar mechanism proposed back in August. So we are back to a similar scenario to the one where it was proposed Compatibility Mode be enabled by default, where even though a site is standards-compliant, the <META>/HTTP Header reset will need to be added by default to prevent these standards-compliant sites being viewed in Compatibility Mode.
I am still intrigued as to why sites such as Facebook, BBC etc were flagged, so I did a quick browse in Beta 2 and couldn’t find one rendering issuze on any the sites mentioned- I’d suggest that the apparent issues that end-users have experienced are down to performance (Javascript/AJAX) issues as opposed to layout bugs.
The latest post doesn’t actually mention whether this ‘community-powered’ blacklist will work alongside the user-specific blacklist mention in the initial article on Compatibility View. I imagine that if they were to run in paralell, then the user-specific blacklist would overwrite the community-driven one.
Overall, an interesting concept I’m sure you’ll agree. And this after Chris Wilson thinks Gerard was overplaying how many people will push that [Compatibility View] button
Beautiful picture and sound quality thanks to two additional URL parameter values (‘fmt=22′ & ‘fmt=18′), but obviously dependant on what quality the video was uploaded at, in the first place.
They’ve also changed the aspect ratio of their videos (whether captured in HD or not), to glorius widescreen.
Check out a 720p demo.
A new theme was in the pipeline ever since I started this blog, as I’d used a hacked Kubrick one before this. As you can tell the design is very simple; I didn’t want a design that would either take months and months to design or that would be a hassle to maintain, in the long run; the homepage is deliberately pretty bare, and Categories have been removed altogether and replaced with Tags.
One CSS module that I wanted to utilise in this theme was Web Fonts – I recently discovered the stunning Museo font from Jos Buivenga which I’ve incorporated into all my <h*>s.
I need to really get a logo made up for the site as I’m pretty awful at Graphic Design, so if you feel you’re up to the challenge, please drop me an email at james [at] idreamincode.co.uk.
Kudos also goes to Mark James at FamFamFam for allowing the free distribution of his beautiful Silk icons.
I have identified a some outstanding integration issues which I’ll be sorting out over the next few days; so for now, I’ll slap a big Web 2.0-style Beta badge on the site (hypothetically-speaking, of course 
)
Daniel Glazman/Dave Hyatt and now fantasai have proposed specs for Variables/Constants in CSS. Read my article on CSS3.Info which essentially sums up and compares both proposals with one another.
I’m currently trying to drum up some ideas for a new theme for the site – not sure how long it’s going to take, but since handing in my notice at National Strategies, I have ample time to at least come up with some conceptual ideas.
