Not long ago, IE6 was the dominant browser. CSS support was lacking, security was weak and performance was bad. However, with no competition, IE6 remained on top. Then Mozilla came along and things started to change. Mozilla and later Firefox proved 2 things.
- We should expect better than IE6.
- Microsoft can’t afford to have a crappy browser anymore.
So, with the help of the wonderful Molly Holzschlag and several other web standards gurus, Microsoft started to turn things around. IE7 was much less crappy than IE6, and IE8 is actually downright ok. However, with each improvement, the IE team seemed to get more flak rather than less.
Criticism focused in 4 areas:
- Poor CSS support (limited to CSS3, since IE8 has better CSS2.1 support than any other major browser)
- Slow Javascript performance
- Slow page rendering
- Bad text aliasing
Today, the IE team released some early details on IE9. Based on the early builds, the team has made massive headway in all 4 areas. Clearly the masses of developers that have nothing to do but complain about IE should be happy right?
Unfortunately, almost all of the comments are negative. They even include some great references to pngs (fixed in IE7) , Box Model (fixed in IE8) and IE6 (already addressed here). I would love to meet these “developers”. As a web developer, I’m expected to have a basic understanding of what browsers people are using and what features they support. However, it’s clear that these web developers are somehow still employed while being completely oblivious to 70% of the users on the web.
In the end, most of the people commenting on the IE blog are completely ignorant. The IE team is busting their ass to make a quality browser, and unlike most other browser vendors, they get shit on every time they make an improvement. I know that older versions of IE are a bitch, but crucifying the very people trying to fix things isn’t going to make things better and in the end may make things worse.
In closing, I want to thank everybody on the IE Team. You guys are working everyday to make my life as a web developer easier and you should know that many of us appreciate it.
To Dean, Ali, Bruce, Justin, Tony, Chris, Eric, Dave and the rest of the crew:
Thank you for you hard work and I look forward to IE9!
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I’m anything but a Microsoft fan, and tend to er towards being an MS-hater, but even I can recognize that IE9 looks really good, and I don’t even have many arguments for IE8 as well.
I think the negativity comes more from the sense that Microsoft has typically always done what they wanted and didn’t care what the user thought. It has really only been somewhat recently that MS has become transparent to show the world what they’re doing as far as meeting the users wants/needs. The “screw web standards” mentality has stuck with them for better or worse and probably mostly at this point because they refuse to kill IE6. And don’t forget you’re always going to have the “PCs are better” and “Macs are better” crowds.
I myself am excited for IE9 and think they make leaps and bounds with every new release. People forget that really large organizations take a lot longer to adopt change/new mindsets (web standards) than the open source community, such as Mozilla.
I’d agree with you on every point except for the IE6 thing. Unfortunately, Microsoft is legally bound to support IE6 until support for XP is dropped since IE6 is considered part of Windows XP. People seem to think the Microsoft is providing support for old buggy software to make a point, but in reality there hands are tied. Having met several people on the IE team, I can honestly say that the only people who hate IE6 more than web developers are the people at Microsoft who have to maitain it.
However, IE6 would be easy to kill if a few vendors got together to kill it. If there was a kill IE6 day, where a significant number of sites made the decision to kill IE6 support on the same day, it would be a pretty effective way of getting rid of it. The only way to kill it is to make it useless to everybody, not just web developers.
I cannot wait for the day that IE6 is no longer supported. I specifically omit it from project scopes unless clients want to include support for it.
IE7 and IE8 were major improvements, and it looks like they’re addressing the right things in IE9. I’m looking forward to widespread support and use of CSS3, and font-smoothing will make a lot of designers happy.
I think some developers have gotten so used to either exploiting or working around IE issues that standards compliance actually becomes an afterthought. Some people I’ve talked to don’t even run their pages through the W3C validator. It’s a shame, but hopefully with better browsers, curmudgeon developers will start to get it, be weeded out, or made irrelevant.
It’s funny, most of the agency I know of don’t include IE6 support by default.
This is a good thing.
Honestly, I hear a lot less complaining about IE 8 than I do about IE 7, and lots less about IE 7 than the pinnacle of crap that is IE 6 (I think everyone realizes that, so I don’t think it should offend anyone at this point).
I’m just glad we’re not still going 5 years between browser releases. The web is changing too fast for tech to stay stagnant, and in this market, standards-compliant competition (Firefox at ~19% and Safari at ~6%) is a very, very good thing.
After reading the epic thread of comments on the post (and noting that both IE supporters and detractors seem to be equally deranged), it really seems as though one of the big reasons Microsoft still doesn’t earn the respect of many developers is that they aren’t as open as the Mozilla and WebKit teams. If they addressed more of users’ concerns with *reasonable* explanations of why they’re going in a certain direction, I think it would go a long way.
For example:
* Why not use WebKit? (Microsoft’s going open… this would seem to fit in the strategy, wouldn’t it?)
* What’s the status of some of the more innovative HTML5/CSS3 features that other browsers are trying to adopt (video, canvas, SVG, etc.)?
A nice blog post from the team detailing their perspectives on each version - and why each version is its own version - would be nice, too. They could answer the following for those who can’t read: why do you still support IE6? Why not make IE 8.1 instead of IE 9? What are the major differences between IE 6 - 9, and will we have to test against 4 different versions of IE?
There comes a time when you just have to admit that there are shortcomings in your earlier products, but that you’re trying to make progress. It’s hard for an outfit like Microsoft to do, but I think it’s necessary if they ever want to win back the support of web devs.
@Justin
In all honesty, I think that the IE team hasn’t addressed the issues because the commenters likely don’t care about the answers.
Webkit is primarily developed by Google and Apple. While it is open source, it’s been clear that both Google and Apple have significant control over the development direction, which is why webkit was split from KHtml.
The IE team is already working on CSS3 support for IE9, which they mentioned in the post.
For the status of HTML5 and additional CSS3 features, questions should be directed to the w3c. Unlike other browser vendors, Microsoft has been sued and fined for not adhearing to web standards. Since HTML5 and many portions of CCS3 aren’t a CR, Microsoft faces potential legal issues should the standards change before it becomes a CR. This may sound ridiculous, but it’s already happened to Microsoft multiple times. Keep in mind, HTML5 likely won’t be a CR until 2012.
The team has also made posts about IE6, which I linked to in my post. Microsoft is legally bound to support IE6 for as long as they support Windows XP. This is why every IE newer than 7 isn’t integrated into the Windows OS. It prevents mutual support issues.
As far as version numbers go, they make sense to me.
IE7 was obviously a completely different browser than IE6
IE8 added full CSS2.1 support, doubled javscript performance, added the color-coded tabs, web slices and several other new features.
IE9 will support all CSS3 CR specifications, correct rendering for fonts, as well as another huge boost in javascript and rendering performance.
Microsoft and the IE Team has repeatedly agreed with the dev community that IE6 sucks. However, contrary to popular belief, they don’t have the magical ability to force everybody to upgrade.
As I said in my post, most of these arguments / issues have already been addressed by Microsoft and the IE team. However, it’s easier to make a 2 sentence comment on a blog than take the time to actually research what web standards are actually standards.