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Ask DLS: What do you make of IE8's giant incompatibility list?
I particularly like one excerpt from the IEBlog: Site owners are *always* in control of their content. That's important to remember in case you were thinking the browser had something to do with why a site looks fine in Firefox, Chrome, or Opera but not IE.
How, then, to avoid these problems? Why, with the incompatibility list, of course! Sites added to it will automatically load in "compatibility view," thus providing the average user with a more hiccup-free browsing experience. Trouble is, the list is getting big. Stupid big.
ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reported that the list currently contains 2,400 sites that don't render properly in IE8. Even better is the fact that the list includes some pretty major sites, like Yahoo! and Google. Google? How does a web browser not render Google correctly?
What do you make of the list? What does it say about the state of Internet Explorer and web standards?
Topical addon: The Register has published a post about Norwegian websites banding together to urge users to upgrade from IE6 to a "more compatible" browser so they don't have to hack up their code.
Comments
21
Subscribe to commentsgonintendoFeb 19th 2009 6:15PM
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Wow, google, now that's ust plain sad. My cell phone browser can render google properly!
Andrew GarrettFeb 19th 2009 6:22PM
You'll also note that microsoft.com is on the list.
Lee MathewsFeb 19th 2009 6:21PM
I guess it makes sense that any site that shows up as a default bookmark in IE7 or earlier would be on the list, since those would likely be non-compliant.
Go MS!
alahmnatFeb 19th 2009 6:49PM
IE has turned into one huge train wreck of epic fail over the past 8 years, and is a regular source of desk-induced headaches for me at my job. My co-workers (who all do desktop application development) think I'm nuts, mainly because they don't understand how I could have so many problems with such a common (I refuse to believe that IE is "popular") browser from such a massive company.
The IE team would be better served by resurrecting the IE6 engine, sandboxing the everloving crap out of it, and embedding it into a new WebKit or Gecko-based browser as a true "compatibility mode". Give the new browser its own, brand-new UA string, and suddenly the Web isn't Broken (thus resolving the IE team's constant struggle to "Don't Break The Web", which is horribly disingenuous... the Web's not broken, their browser is), and I get to keep my hair.
mynkFeb 19th 2009 7:59PM
seriously, sometimes i forget IE is made by microsoft. they have great products all around, windows 7, xbox 360, microsoft office, windows live... but how could they get a web browser so horribly wrong. especially when a pair of 2 Norwegians in a basement can grow into one of the best browsing experiences in the world (im writing this from opera 10.0 right now)... why is a company as big as microsoft not able to get it right. they should just put firefox or chrome engine heavily modified, or work on a opera/safari style engine.... IE just doesn't do it. and i dont know when microsoft will learn. it better be fast, because a large majority of the people still depend on it.
AbscissaFeb 19th 2009 8:20PM
"What do you make of the list? What does it say about the state of Internet Explorer and web standards?"
Speaking as a programmer, I'd have to say "It depends, I'd have to look into the details of what the specific technical problem is with IE and Google, or with IE and the other sites." It really could go either way. You just can't say "Combination X and Y messes up, therefore it must be X's fault.", regardless of what X is and what Y is. We could speculate all we want about whether it's IE8's fault, the web site's fault, or something else, but it's all nothing more than just that, speculation, unless we look at the technical details of what's going on. And at the moment, that's not something I can really comment on, I'd have to go look into it. (I try to avoid web dev whenever possible.)
As far as the list being really big, well yea, of course, that's only natural. If IE8 has bad standards support, then ok, that can manifest itself as a high incompatibility rate. But if IE8 really does have improved standards support, then that is still going to result in a high incompatibility rate as well, in part because sites haven't had a chance to update their pages to not rely on the old bad behaviors. So all in all, it doesn't necessarily mean *anything*.
RocketboyFeb 20th 2009 9:54AM
Let's also not forget that the majority of things that make the web nice to use are not standards. Flash, Java, Javascript, etc. They are not 'standards' in the standard meaning of standard. So it's not correct to say that someone does not support the standard when it comes to non-standarized functions.
AbscissaFeb 21st 2009 12:47AM
I'm not so sure I'd consider Flash and JavaScript things that make the web nice to use (ok, coming from me, that's an understatement). And Java rarely used on the web these days (Of course, I'm just referring to client-side here.).
acmeFeb 19th 2009 9:01PM
all this list does is make web devs lazy. If you add their page to the list then they don't have to go fix their site...
SkapigFeb 20th 2009 1:04AM
Easier said than done. It takes time to come up with fixes, depending on the complexity of the site. If coded in a standards compliant way with maintainable CSS, then it shouldn't be too bad in theory. Most sites, however, don't follow such ideal practices.
A lot of work went into making them function properly in IE6 and IE7 (giant pains). IE8 is a nice step forward, but it still takes some "creative" paths and is full of CSS bugs. Hopefully these continue to be ironed out, but that goes to show you that developing for the test releases of IE8 will only get you so far. You don't know what is going to change by the time that we get a final release. It can certainly give you a head start, but you still have to fight the bugs and re-test with each release to make sure that nothing has broken.
QuikboyFeb 19th 2009 9:15PM
Is it just IE8's fault? Couldn't it be the site owner's fault? I know a lot of websites include a version for the non-standards IE7 and previous versions, so maybe they've been lazy and haven't updated their sites to render standards compliant for IE8?
Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not familiar with coding websites. But it could be the site owners too, right?
bill cant fartFeb 19th 2009 11:00PM
It's Microsoft's fault, mostly. Why should developers have to put in extra code in just for IE? Shouldn't it render things properly when all the other browsers do?
QuikboyFeb 19th 2009 11:46PM
@Bill Can't Fart: Isn't that what I said? I thought I said IE8 should be able to render things properly, but I'm guessing a lot of those 24,000+ sites are using old code that IE8, something considered standards compliant, wouldn't recognize because it's still Internet Explorer.
MDWFeb 19th 2009 9:21PM
@ acme: "all this list does is make web devs lazy. If you add their page to the list then they don't have to go fix their site..."
That's unbelievable. Web Dev's shouldn't have to go update a site (or in most cases, sites) simply to comply with a web browsers piss poor coding.
My thought is that IE has long outlived it's usefulness, if in fact, it ever really was all that useful to begin with. Time to burn it to the ground and roll with Firefox or Opera. If MS really needs a web browser, they would be better off firing the entire IE staff; because clearly, those schmucks just can't get it right.
RocketboyFeb 20th 2009 9:57AM
As much as I love Opera, Opera does hit quite a few sites with the ugly stick. Sites that are enhanced to work with IE do not always work with Opera. So, should we always hold sites to strict compliance, and go back to the days of The Internet 8+ years ago, where you were being creative if you used a mouseover?
SimonFeb 20th 2009 1:58AM
It probably means that people are doing workarounds that target IE... but they target it indiscriminately. So now when IE gets something right, but the webmasters still think it's broken and work around it, it gets more broken. Instead of fixing it, they're lazy and keep things broken and add themselves to this compat list instead.
Joe B.Feb 20th 2009 10:47AM
The problem lies primarily in the what behavior sites choose when encountering the user-agent reported by IE8.
NeuroFeb 20th 2009 7:11AM
This particular thing is not really IE8's fault - the sites see it's IE and serves him code full of hacks for ie6/ie7. But ie8 is more compatible and thus the hacks break the site. I don't see what could microsoft do there - some massive heuristic to guess if the site expects old or new IE? They're simply paying for their old sins - similar to the security prompt in Vista, which is basically a good idea, but since it enforces rules on apps that didn't exist before, all the apps trigger it constantly.
If I want to be pissed at IE8, it's for all the other things. Why isn't the CSS2 support complete and bugfree by now? Why not SVG and Canvas? Why not improved javascript? We should wait for IE9, right? When that's gonna be out, 2012? Microsoft is one of the biggest sw companies yet it seems that everything takes them years (windows mobile?). And given all the GUI changes in IE8 I am not even sure if they care about the rendering core - so why don't they give up on it? Just freeze IE7 core in the state it is, use it for old sites and for apps embedding the ie engine to render html internally, and use webkit or gecko for the new browser. Use the saved time on more GUI tweaks or whatever the bosses love this week. Please?
TonyFeb 20th 2009 2:07PM
I say Meh to all of this. Every single time a new version of a browser comes out, there are page compatibility issues. Hell, Googles Chrome browser didn't work with Hotmail until a month or two ago.
whiskeyFeb 20th 2009 11:33PM
And Chrome is how many years old?...
Exactly.
They have had years to fix stuff, they have spent millions on it, and the great thing they can come up with is a hack...