Posted on 08/07/2006 2:38:01 PM PDT by rock_lobsta
In a recent blog posting , Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) Lead Program Manager Chris Wilson revealed many of the technical improvements that Microsoft will add to IE 7.0 for its final release. Almost all the improvements are related to bugs in IE's implementation of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), an HTML-like technology that Web developers use to create Web sites. Many of these bugs aren't fixed in the currently available IE 7.0 Beta 1 release, Wilson noted. Wilson's post raises some serious questions about IE 7.0, not the least of which is this: If IE 7.0 Beta 1 doesn't include the fixes that most Web developers need, why did Microsoft release IE 7.0 Beta 1 only to a small group of Web developers and other testers, not to the general public as originally promised?
Wilson's post is disappointing because Microsoft doesn't plan to fully support the latest CSS standard in IE 7.0. Instead of using well-established Web standards, IE 7.0 will continue to foist proprietary technologies on Web developers, forcing them to choose between two competing ways of creating Web sites. "In IE 7.0, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that Web developers hit as we can, and we will add the critical most-requested features from the standards as well," Wilson said. "Our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate Web standards, in particular CSS 2. I think we will make a lot of progress against that in IE 7.0 through our goal of removing the worst painful bugs that make our platform difficult to use for Web developers."
The most critical point in Wilson's post, in my mind, is Microsoft's admission that it will fail the crucial Acid2 browser-compliance test , which the Web Standards Project (WaSP) designed to help browser vendors ensure that their products properly support Web standards. Microsoft apparently disagrees. "Acid2 ... is pointedly not a compliance check," Wilson noted, contradicting the description on the Acid2 Web site. "As a wish list, [Acid2] is really important and useful to my team, but it isn't even intended, in my understanding, as our priority list for IE 7.0." Meanwhile, other browser teams have made significant efforts to comply with Acid2.
Microsoft blames backward-compatibility problems for the stalemate over true Web standards compatibility. Put succinctly, the company has gone its own way for so long and now has to support so many developers who use nonstandard Web technologies that it will be impossible to make IE Web-standards-compliant without breaking half the commercial Web sites on the planet. Furthermore, by halting all IE development for several years before reconstituting the IE team to create IE 7.0, Microsoft has set back Web development by an immeasurable amount of time.
My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators. Because of their user bases, however, Web developers are hamstrung into developing for IE at the expense of established standards that work well in all other browsers. You can turn the tide by demanding more from Microsoft and by using a better alternative Web browser. I recommend and use Mozilla Firefox, but Apple Safari (Macintosh only) and Opera 8 are both worth considering as well.
I'll update my IE 7.0 preview on the SuperSite for Windows today to reflect recent IE 7.0 developments. My IE 7.0 review will be available later this week.
That's why you need to complain loudly, every time you run up against some silly MSIE-only crap. I do it politely, but let them know that alternative browsers are steadily increasing in marketshare.
I'm a big FF user, but I don't want FF or anything else to have an overwhelming dominant position in the market, because that just leads to stagnation. The history of MSIE is a textbook case of the dangers of monopoly power in a marketplace.
>>how good a product Firefox is<<
FF is NOT a "good" product. It may be better than IE and I'm forced to use it due to the incompatability of sites with Opera, but I don't like it. It has serious memory leak and stability issues that the developers absolutely refuse to fix.
Have you complained? It's the only way to get things to change. It's obvious that if simply setting the user agent makes everything work, that there is no valid reason for them to attempt to make you use an insecure and buggy kludge like IE on a banking site.
You can knock it you like but the tabbed browsing implementation is much better than the Firefox original and the integrated RSS is great. I give Firefox a look occasionally and just don't see anything there that is all that special except the tabbed browsing and since IE7 handles that so nicely I think I'm just going to stick with Microsoft.
I like Firefox & I've been using it for a couple of years now, but I have to admint I don't 'get' the tabbed browsing thing. How is it so much better to have a bunch of tabs open in one window than to just have several windows open?
It really does. I think IE7 Beta 3 is already a better product, despite the incompatibilities. I use Safari more often now and I've tried Opera, but I'm not 100% happy with any of them.
We've been doing a lot of stuff with AJAX on our projects, I hope IE7 doesn't mess this up.
There are two ways of incompatibility. One is fake, when they just detect for IE and kick you out or screw you up. As was mentioned, use the User Agent Switcher extension. Your browser will report itself to the Web site as IE, Opera, Firefox, etc. But please, after switching to IE, switch back to Firefox so you aren't over-reporting to sites the usage of IE, which will cut the reported marketshare of Firefox (this happened with Opera).
The other is when the site is actually incompatible with Firefox due to bad html/css or ActiveX. For that, use the IE Tab extension. It'll open a tab, but the insides are rendered with IE. You can configure it to always render certain domains with IE.
For me it's a reduction of screen real estate required to have multiple sites open. I can use the keyboard to quickly move from one tab to another without the context switching you get when you go from one window to another.
Also, there are extensions available to make tabs even more flexible. I know folks who want to be able to select a bookmark, and have it open 5 or 6 tabs automatically. I don't use that at the moment, but have been thinking of ways it could help some tasks.
Firefox has its problems, but the biggest special thing is the community of extension developers out there. Remember, FireFox was designed to be the basic browser, fairly small and fast, with the ability to add functionality easily.
With a few free extensions you can make Firefox far better than any other browser. Here are mine:
I'd suggest loading Firefox and then getting any extension that sounds remotely interesting. Start deleting the ones you don't use after a while.
Basically, the UI space saved.
If you're using Firefox, I'd appreciate you or anyone going to this site (the El Paso Times) and click on the AP Video: Flood clean up begins. Hopefully some one can tell me how to deal with this.
Excellent listing of extensions. I always learn something and usually add one or more when reading these posts.
Yes, by phone & email. They said the site would work with Netscape. My complaints that Netscape and Firefox were essentially the same browser meant absolutely nothing to them. Then they told me they would be glad to help me "upgrade my browser" so I could use their site (at which point I hung up). If it wasn't so much trouble, I probably would have changed banks over that.
That was the event that prompted me to go looking for the agent switcher. I knew that if the site worked with Netscape, there was no reason it wouldn't work with Firefox. I have otherwise been happy with Suntrust Bank, but their online support people are either totally computer illiterate or a bunch of aholes (most likely both).
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