RSSMicrosoft seeks 'community' help to make IE8 Standards Mode work out
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published December 4, 2008, 11:24 AM
If users install their first Internet Explorer 8 updates, and they notice their favorite Web pages look like scrambled egg soup, will they blame the browser? That's the dilemma Microsoft is facing as it cautiously embraces "Web standards."
As testers of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 are already aware, the new default rendering mode for Web pages is one that promises compliance with standards officially set forth by committees such as W3C. But the big problem major Web sites have all experienced (guilty as charged) is that they must support the somewhat standards-skewed rendering mode of previous versions of IE, up to version 6, in order to accommodate a majority of browser users.
"Despite all the outreach to sites, we saw from the telemetry data that IE8 Beta 2 users still have to use Compatibility View a lot," wrote IE8 Program Manager Scott Dickens yesterday on his team's blog. "Looking at our instrumentation, there were high-volume sites like facebook.com, myspace.com, bbc.co.uk, and cnn.com with pages that weren't working for end-users with IE's new standards compliant default. We could also see from our instrumentation that not all IE8 visitors to those sites were clicking the Compatibility View button. So, large groups of people were having a less than great experience because they weren't aware of the manual steps required to make certain sites work."
There actually aren't too many manual steps to take (conceivably, as few as one); the problem has apparently been with compelling users to want to take any steps at all.
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| A recent test of IE8 Beta 2 shows BetaNews itself doesn't look all that hot in standards mode. |
To that end, Dickens revealed yesterday, future builds of IE8 -- distributed at first, most likely in the form of update patches and through the first Windows 7 public betas next month -- will maintain an ongoing list of sites that appear to require Compatibility View, in hopes of aiding the browser in making the switch automatically. However, Microsoft doesn't want to be compiling this list alone.
"When users install Windows 7 Beta or the next IE8 update, they get a choice about opting-in to a list of sites that should be displayed in Compatibility View," Dickens wrote. "Sites are on this list based on feedback from other IE8 customers: Specifically, for what high-volume sites did other users click the Compatibility View button? This list updates automatically, and helps users who aren't Web-savvy have a better experience with Web sites that aren't yet IE8-ready."
Rather than take a cue from Google, this list will not be automatically compiled and shared with some server in the background. Instead, Microsoft will have humans make the determination, based on submissions from beta testers and frequent users. Microsoft will regularly update this list for IE8 users in the background, but only if users opt in to that service, Dickens demonstrated.
"Whether developers get around to doing this work or not, the people who use the Web expect that the web will keep working," the program manager concluded. "They want the benefits of interoperability and standards. They don't want to deal with compatibility issues."
Looks like the real problem is sites that aren't compliant.
Standards mode in IE8 is an important step in the right direction, but are the development tools from of Microsoft going in that direction too?
It's been ages since I looked at Microsoft tools but it would be great if you could just update FrontPage, or whatever they have now, press the deploy button and publish a standards compliant version of that nasty old web site.
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|i agree with dooley.. i suspect most of these formatting errors are "IE specific" code being rendered by W3C standards when it was designed for the opposite purpose (hacks to deal with IE's previous non-standard rendering).
and now that there are three versions of IE to support.. we'll have rewrite our pages to exclude IE8 from IE7 and IE6 render hacks.
it's a step in the right direction at least.. it's not like we dont have to rewrite s*** for IE all the time anyway.
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|I suspect this is highly due to the fact that many sites (high and low volume) deal in code to specifically address IE's past issues.
Now, with the new 'standards compliant' version we have sites that say, 'If it is IE, then do This, or That' and as a result, the site looks skewed, when it should be fine...
The worst of this is that now we have three separate versions of this bloody browser to support.
Thanks Microsoft.
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|Maybe the Guy's @ Opera, can help, Microsoft, fix there Browser! There's is "Good to go"
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|At least MS is realizing what a mistake it was to try and create their own standards without leaving room for the rest.
It will be painful for them to switch but its the right thing to do, eventually sites will do what is necessary for their visitors but MS just may lose some people in the meantime.
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|i don't use ie8 because it screws up the fonts in outlook express.
i've complained about it, but the microsoft monkey's in charge is the one for:
"see no evil and hear no evil".
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|Improve your's English.
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|I'll give you a very good reason why 'the community' are unlikely to be so ready to point out what it's rendering wrong.
Money.
There's money to be had in updating sites so that they are compatible.
Why let Microsoft fix the bugs when you can charge to do it yourself?
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|a lot of whiney babies around.
I use IE, ie8 and will keep on doing so.
"Standards" don't neccessarily mean anything is better, it just means something will look the same in all browsers. Like Vanilla will taste like Vanilla to all tongues, regardless if you like the flavor or not.
Quit hating on MS and IE just for them being them, it's the same thing Opera users try to hate on Firefox users, etc, ad infinitum...dorks abound indeed.
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|You're trying to make the situation seem simpler than it really is. For example, screen readers do a much better job if web standards are used. This significantly helps the blind and visually impaired. Web standards also make things easier for web browsers. Much of a browser's code has to deal with the need to parse shoddy code. Web standards would reduce bloat and improve response times for browsers and for websites.
"Standards" certainly do mean that some things are better. It sounds like you have no experience at all with making websites with decent code and functionality.
On a side note, Vanilla will not taste the same to those with limited or no ability to taste things or whose sense of taste has been switched with another sense. :)
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|you're an idiot. nothing you said here is worth debating. thanks for polluting the world with your retard logic
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|"Compatibility View button"
Sounds almost like a joke.
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|What the hell is IE?
Everyone quit using that virus magnet a long time ago....... Now we all use Firefox!
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|It is about time that Microsoft made Internet Explorer compliant with web standards.
I have had good experiences with IE 8 Beta 2 so far. ^__^
Hopefully IE 8 can help bury IE 6, the bane of the web...
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|the experiences i've had with it were that it has horrid alpha support, haphazard rendering, an inadequate javascript debugger, and a compatibility mode with ie7 that doesnt actually render things exactly like ie7... so on that note, it's still horrid
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|Sounds to me like: Microsoft wants to add a browser compatibility plugin for IE8. A subscription service, sort of how the "Adblock Plus" plugin for Firefox works. They'd like everyone to contribute to help them overcome their 5 or 10 year legacy of foisting on the public, a non-standard browser. Which they purposely designed that way, to gain market share. Maybe they should be tried in Federal Court and if found guilty of monopolizing, pay a substantial fine to help fund software engineers working for Mozilla (Firefox), WebKit (Safari & Google Chrome) & Opera.
I've found that Adobe's Flash program can often have problems displaying web content properly, depending on which browser is being used.
Their Flash player version 10 may fail, but the version 9 player still works, for some web sites.
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|Yeah good idea, they should continue on the path of designing IE to be non-standard, rather than to try to come back to standards.
How dare they try to unbreak things! STRING THEM UP!
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|What IE8 and Vista have in common (other than Microsoft) is that both are attempts by Microsoft to rectify bad design issues in the past. With Vista, it's about not allowing developers to act as though they own the computer (insisting on admin rights, even if they don't need them) and for IE8, it's about getting more on the same page with everyone else and being more "enlightened".
People blame Microsoft for using UAC to help keep software in check. People are/will blame Microsoft for broken websites with IE8, even though the web developers at those websites were incompetent and/or lazy (and more comments along those lines).
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|they need to stop releasing half finished products. They could have left ie6 to die for a while more until they had something with a working rendering engine, but they keep pushing broken engines on the web making more work for developers. web developers, despite opinion to the contrary, are not worried about job security because they dont have enough work to do. There is plenty of work involved in developing working web apps without having to do the front end twice over due to poorly designed microsoft products.
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|Microsoft knew this day was coming when they'd eventually have to learn to speak the same language as the rest of us. (Look no further than the incredible waste of time and money they put into the MS-OOXML debacle -- 7,000 pages of gibberish that Microsoft itself can't decipher, so they're now allowing ODF as a native file format!)
There are four other browsers out right now that are technically better than IE8, and that's not counting standards compliance! As IE's marketshare plummets toward 60%, a growing minority are comfortable not using IE anywhere.
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|The statistics you're basing this information on shows Safari's market share as 7%, which makes me think that the statistics is based on the US market and it is not worldwide, as apple's market share worldwide is around 2-3%
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|Just had to throw in the OOXML comment huh zaine? Surprised you didn't make a reference to METArt, the site you spout so liberally as being "not porn". I guess some people have to bash a company for anything they can when they don't have any real content to add. Bravo for not changing your trollish ways :) Also, I would like to see where you got this 60% number. Last I checked with various large stats producers, IE still has an average of between 85-90% depending on the statistics you use.
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|webshare and install base arent the same. not every computer is connected or using the web, ace
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|http://www.w3schools.com...sers/browsers_stats.asp
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|And that only proves that people DEVELOPING SITES are visiting the w3schools site in those browsers. That is not a representation of normal browsing as I am sure 90% of users don't care about such sites.
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|For most website, there is no reason to not be standards compliant by now. IE8 betas have been out for a long time now and sites that are too lazy to validate their code just slow the web progress for everyone. I hope Beta News is planning to send their webmaster(s) back into the cubical to fix the remaining validation errors. Until you have valid html you have no reason to blame IE. It may even still render pages wrong if they are 100% valid, but it's still a beta after all.
Opera on the other hand has to compensate for IE's short comings and with the release of Opera 10 Alpha 1 yesterday we can all be thankful again that we don't _have_ to use IE anymore.
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|Actually there is.
Unfortunately, the goalposts have changed since Beta 1 of IE8.
Until it goes gold there is NO point in recoding for it and the goalposts will likely move again.
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