Posts Tagged ‘IE8’

The past week has provided us with some interesting news.

First off, there’s been a hype of activity from both Webkit and Opera – Webkit’s blog kept us informed that it’s Acid3 DOM test score was increasing, it seemed every day, which ultimately led to it announcing on Wednesday that it had released a public build of a successful Acid3 rendering pass (but not an animation pass). This announcement came very soon (on the same day, in fact) after David announced that Opera’s latest internal build had passed all 100 DOM tests- it was just very unfortunate that some people misinterpreted this information and started accusing the Opera team of pulling stunts and deliberately trying to mislead – a sad state of affairs, especially because it came a result of this great news.

However this is not why I felt tearful.

MS decided to publish an article which details planned CSS support in the final release of IE8, which put a complete dampener on the day that I read it.

As I thought right from the start of talk of it’s release, CSS3 support is extremely disappointing, which is guaranteed to slow the adoption of features of CSS3. Well done Dean and the rest of the IE team- you’ve come up with yet another inferior browser.

which is guaranteed to slow the adoption of the fundamental layout-specific features of CSS3.

I’ve written a basic overview of the article. It mentions:-

• NO planned support for CSS3 pseudo classes
• NO planned support for CSS3 pseudo elements
• NO planned support for CSS3 features in Backgrounds and Borders module (no multiple backgrounds, background-size etc)
• NO planned support for CSS3 features in Color module (no RGBA, opacity etc)
• SOME support for Level 3 of Text module
• MINOR support for Basic UI module. Hardly surprising as the module currently has no owner, and there is no test suite Nice though to see that they’ve implemented box-sizing even though it’s with their own prefix.
• NO support for Multi-Column module.
• NO Media Query support

Before the announcement went public, I took it as a given that IE would HAVE to pass Acid2; looking back, it would have been simply astonishing if it hadn’t. But, now vendors are focusing on Acid3, which makes its predecessor completely redundant- with this in mind, there was absolutely no reason why the IE8 Acid2 pass story should have been as big as it was.

Forgive me for possibly coming across as ignorant – but when the IE team decided to implement this function, who did they think would use it? Is this a half-hearted attempt at a tool aimed at developers to allow them to test on both IE7 and IE8 on the same browser? Or is it a feature that they think their target market group are going to make use of?

Paul Cutsinger, IE’s Lead Program Manager explains over on the IE Blog that “it will help you with everyday browsing and with quickly checking your site as you work on it”; let me break his quote down:-

“it will help you with everyday browsing…”

How will it help someone with everyday browsing? If a site looks broken in IE8, the odds are that users aren’t going to wait around while the emulation process takes place (requires a complete browser restart); they’re just going to leave the site. I want to make my feelings quite clear – if a web developer doesn’t want to (or doesn’t know how to) create cross-browser compliant code then as a user, I shouldn’t expect to have to compromise my browsing experience due to their ignorance of standards-compliancy (or lack of knowledge) by having to take the regressive step of using the IE7 user agent string, version vector and layout modes.

Isn’t the ‘average joe’ going to be a bit bemused by the appearance of this shiny new button on their IE8? I have no doubt that they’ll disassociate themselves with it, as they’ll have no idea as to what it actually does.

“…and with quickly checking your site as you work on it”

Completing the backwards step of going from IE8 to IE7’s layout requires a complete restart of the browser. Even with the fastest PC, a user is still going to have to physically click buttons to complete the steps to switch layout modes. I hope this laborious process is simply down to the unpolished nature of a Beta; if we really have to go down the route of version emulation in the RC, the IE team needs to add an automatic close/open process- we shouldn’t expect end users to do this themselves.

So, who’s it actually for?

Well if I’m honest, I’m still not sure. Below I’ve highlighted the two possibilities:-

• For developers- Why then is the emulation button in the position it is within the browser window? I recognise it’s a Beta, but if this feature does makes it through to the RC (which I fear it probably will do), this button needs to be removed from the main viewport and into the developer tools. The ‘average joe’ won’t understand what this feature does anyway, so leaving it on the main viewport is likely to lead to confusion as to what it actually is and does. Looking back over the history of emulation software, is MS unaware that just by simply emulating IE7 you shouldn’t expect to gain a true representation of an IE7 standalone. There’s no substitute to virtualisation and running a cloned base image alongside the original, with IE7 on one and IE8 on the other; failing that multiple versions of IE would be the second best solution; in the instance of IE6/7, it was down to a third party to provide developers with a solution for running two standalones side by side- it would be great if MS developed an official standalone version which doesn’t automatically overwrite IE7 and doesn’t muck with registry files.
• For IE’s target market group- If in fact IE is marketing this feature directly to their target audience, then for a start they need to illustrate this feature (and the button) better. ‘Emulate IE7′ is likely to mean very little to the users that IE is targeting IE8 for.

Another agenda?

It’s no secret that MS are engaged in talks with the EU over anti-competition laws. I share the same opinion as others in that the sudden reverse decision to remove the opt-in standards mode days before the public Beta release of IE8 could have partly been down to MS taking note of what the EU were ultimately looking for them to do. I’m not complaining though; I’ve already expressed my delight before that the initial decision was reversed. From MS’s point of view it’s killed two birds with one stone; from the EU’s point of view it could be seen as a step towards opening up the browser market more. For us developers ultimately more vendors means more healthy competition, which means faster adoption of standards (think if FF hadn’t have come along, where would we be now; forced into using defacto standards and proprietary properties devised by IE?), and of course, the IE team now suggests IE8 is standards compliant (like we haven’t heard that statement enough times already).

NOTE:-The ‘Emulate IE7′ feature was specific to Beta 1 and has since been replaced by ‘Compatibility View‘, which I discuss in my review of Compatibility View

A few hours ago, the guys at IE released the first beta of IE8. First off, it was a surprise to me that they decided to release it before SxSW; also because only a couple of days ago they released details on how they reversed their initial decision regarding the proposed opt-in standards compliancy mode.

After frantically copying over a Parallels base image to create a test bed soley for IE8, I installed it – the UI looks virtually exactly the same as IE7, with the notable addition of an ‘Emulate IE7′ button (more on IE7 emulation in IE8) and the address bar highlighting the domain name (I’m guessing to try and combat phishing attacks).

While I think it’s great that MS has bitten the bullet and reversed their initial decision regarding the proposed opt-in standards compliancy mode, I wonder how much this new IE7 emulator feature will actually be used. Take this example for instance- the average joe uses IE8 to visit a site and notices that the site’s layout is broken, since it relies on IE7 quirks. Is the user really going to think, “Oh yeah, the site looks broken as the developer who built it has coded it with only IE7 in mind, so I’ll use the IE7 emulator – that’ll work.” Of course they won’t; they’ll simple get discontent and leave the site. My personal opinion is that this new emulator function is a half-hearted attempt by MS for them to be seen to be proactive about backwards compatibility, what with all those millions of sites that rely on IE7’s buggy CSS implementation (not to mention IE6). Similarly, developers who have coded a site with only IE7 in mind will probably not be ’savvy’ enough to even be aware of the new proprietary meta tag that switches IE8’s rendering to ‘IE7 mode’.

In terms of CSS, their really isn’t too much additional support which is disappointing to see, after all the buzz the IE guys created about passing Acid2; yes, it does for me (although a lot of people are noticing it doesn’t for them), however after carrying out some provisional tests using CSS3.Info’s Selector Test it’s frustrating to see that only 14 out of the 43 selectors passed (yes, you read that number correctly!). The press release on IE’s blog which accompanies the news does however mention quite clearly to expect “full CSS 2.1 support in the final IE8 product“. After all, considering that this version is indeed a public beta, I would have liked to have seen more CSS support out of the box.

Something that has been bugging the web community up until now is that MS hadn’t released any details to date as to what support IE8 will include for CSS3. However, after trawling through MSDN I came across a whitepaper detailing CSS 2.1 Compliance. In this paper, it mentions that while one of IE8’s main goals is CSS 2.1 compliance, it is also forward looking to CSS3. It goes on to mention, that IE8 “hopes to implement some of the most requested CSS3 features by web developers and designers”.

Peter G beat me to it, by posting on the CSS3.Info site regarding CSS improvements in IE8. He did however, miss out some notable new properties- they include:-

• Generated content (including ‘counters’)
• Outline
• New ‘display’ values (supports all ‘display’ values as per the CSS 2.1 spec)
• Box-sizing (utilises new IE-specific ‘-ms-box-sizing’ until spec has been further clarified)
• Writing-mode

One nice little feature they’ve added with developers in mind is the first installment of “… great, built-in developer tools” – again, they promise more is on the way.

Webslices are another new feature debuting in IE8; they’re basically portions of arbitrary websites to which a user can subscribe to. The HTML annotations for which Webslices relies on, are derived from the hAtom microformat.

Update: Since publishing this article, MS have released a new document outlining planned CSS3 support in the public release candidate of IE8; I also discuss this document in one of my articles.

Yesterday, Dean Hachamovitch announced that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what they announced initially which prompted a huge amount of feeback (good and bad) within the web community.

Dean goes on to mention that the change of heart was due to MS recently publishing a set of Interoperability Principles and suggesting that “…IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action”.

Full blog post