Has Internet Explorer Just Shot Itself in the Foot?
London-On-Sea designer Andy Budd weighs into the Internet Explorer 8 version targeting debate with perhaps the best write up on the subject so far (as far as I am concerned) in terms of clarity, and humour.
This idea has come about because Microsoft are worried about “breaking the web”. Essentially they’re concerned that new browsers will stop rendering older pages correctly, annoying site owners, browser users and – probably more importantly for Microsoft – corporate customers. If we look at the bigger picture, this logic does make a certain amount of sense. If I, as a regular Joe user, download the latest version of IE, I expect it to do a better job at displaying websites. I don’t expect my favourite Geocities page to suddenly break.
It’s the Geocities reference that puts it all into perspective. Ironically.
By constantly worrying about the past we risk missing out on the possibilities of the future. Imagine if all new media players had to be backward compatible? We’d end up with a device that could play anything from 8mm film right the way through to Blu-ray disks. It would be nice, but incredibly bloaty. Eventually we’d start dropping support for old media, or just stop inventing new ones.
I am NO expert on this topic so far, but what bothers me is the call by some developers for other browser manufactures to follow Microsoft’s… example.
Does that mean we’d be required to insert who knows how many lines of meta data into header markup to cater for each and every version of a particular browser?
Well, the real problem has been IE breaking standards itself, and Microsoft creating new standards (see ActiveX). Probably in part as a deliberate attempt to degrade the internet experience of Mac and Linux users (as an aside, I’m running Firefox in Ubuntu, Stumle Upon brought up this page, and it fails to display properly…with the right links overwriting a portion of this text box).
Now Firefox is shooting up in users base, and I don’t personally know a single geek (or anyone who knows a geek) who doesn’t prefer it for both quality and security. Well, there are a few Opera users, and the Mac users on Safari and such as well…but this is general Windows users. Occasionally you run into a site that uses broken HTML that displays properly in Explorer, or relies on ActiveX (and all the security problems that entails). But the reaction I tend to see is annoyance with the site itself for being broken, rather than the alternate browsers for sticking to published standards.
Weird display error hey? The code is valid and the page presents as intended in FF for Windows.
I stumbled this using Firefox 3 beta 3 in Ubuntu, and everything looks fine to me.