Ya know, Dan... given that MSFT updates their browser maybe once every year or two, and Moz & Safari are updated on a scale measured in weeks and months respectively, maybe rather than continually bitching about MSFT code, they could just make the stuff work in their browsers. I mean, fine, leave the transitions out, but how difficult would it be to let MSFT specific filters work? They're good extensions, even if the W3C hasn't shone a beam of light down from their ivory tower and blessed them. People hate MS so much they get a sort of NIH syndrome when MSFT browser extensions are involved.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have IE-specific websites work right than yet another idiotic add-on or translation into a language used by a tribe with only 6 remaining people who worship goats and don't even know what a computer is.

If they could handle the IE specific stuff, there'd be no reason to HAVE to use IE. Transparent functionality regardless of browser selection sounds like a good thing to me.

-Posted by JC on July 24, 2003 11:45 AM

no fair, it hid my [rant][/rant] tags....

-Posted by JC on July 24, 2003 11:45 AM

[quote]
I'd rather have IE-specific websites work right than yet another idiotic add-on or translation into a language used by a tribe with only 6 remaining people who worship goats and don't even know what a computer is
[/quote]

I rather have a site that isn't IE specific, but somehow people get lulled or sucked into that situation.

I'm not sure what you are getting at with the tribe metaphore (seriously).

[quote]
I mean, fine, leave the transitions out, but how difficult would it be to let MSFT specific filters work?
[/quote]

I never write any functionality that works in one browser and not another (but I will write non-functional code that only renders in one browser and treat it like a nice-tohave for those who can see the results).

And yes, any html that isn't in the list of tags above the Message entry textarea will be stripped, even tags that aren't in any DTD that i know of. :)

-Posted by Dan on July 24, 2003 01:46 PM

No, you don't, of course. Nor do I, generally speaking. (at least not in any way that would reduce the functionality for people using other browsers. Eye candy things sometimes, though) But we're pros. We do this stuff for a living and know more than Jim Bob with his copy of front page. Most people aren't, and don't know any better.

It's the same point I was making with the ADA thing, really. Make the browsers read the code, and no one has to suffer from broken websites due to the horrible evil people who dare to use IE specific code.

The tribes metaphor was a stab at Mozilla (and every other team-driven open source project out there) being translated into every obscure language under the sun as if it's a primal sin not to have it in, oh, ancient greek or klingon, with thousands of mostly useless extras that some developer somewhere thought would be cool.(eg a search plugin just for that developers website or a sidebar that pulls in the news from his hometown newspaper)

Seriously, for a team of talented programmers, how difficult would it be to take a break from adding yet another obscure feature no one but a geek digging deep into the menus will find, and just put IN the stuff people always complain about being "IE specific."

I'd like to see Safari, especially, capable of every single thing that IE 6 for Windows is capable of. Let it do borders with colors (actually, I think it handles those but moz doesn't), let it understand the marquee tag (if it doesn't already) and css filters, and so on. Sure, maybe teaching it to read IE specific javascript's a bit much, but the rest would be a benefit to user and designer alike. JimBob Frontpage could keep on using his excessive marquee tag and display his lack of taste in glory, you and I could use some of the nice eye candy features and have them seen in more than just IE (for example, glowing links on hover. Hell, anything on hover.) and need nothing more complex than a line or two of text instead of a bunch of javascript and graphics for rollovers and so on.

Of course, most of this has nothing to do with your post.

In response to the concerns in your post, I don't believe for a heartbeat IE will lose significant market share just because it's not planned as a standalone anymore. And the bit about 'odd messages' is silly. They're talking about an expired/untrusted/not-yet-valid certificate warning messge. You don't have to upgrade your browser to rid yourselves of these "odd messages"; you go to windows update and download the newest set of trusted SSL certificates. Or just wince at the price and use a widely accepted SSL provider in the first place instead of one of the cheapo ones. It's a tradeoff between price and convenience for your users. The same bank who mentioned the odd messages sent out an email to all customers saying that IE wouldn't be available any longer after whatever date they gave. Not exactly an intelligent or responsible thing to do when it was obviously false.

Yes, it's best to support standards and so forth, but the evidence the article is using to make its point is just weak to the point of foolishness.

OK, I'll stop b*tching for the day. :-) Sorry for cluttering your blog.

-Posted by JC on July 24, 2003 06:02 PM

For the record, Safari does handle color borders fine; 1.0 fumbles on background images a bit (it was following the spec a little TOO well). And according to Dave Hyatt, it looks like CSS3 support is coming in. Frankly I'd rather see that then support for the MARQUEE tag.

I think the hardest thing to come to grips with IS someone like Joe Bob Designer, who just made his first site in FrontPage and looked at it in IE 6, where it's perfect - despite dropping the stink bomb in every other browser. My gut instinct is to say, "He needs to know about other browsers," and I personally think he does. But how? "Sorry, Joe Bob, this will look horrible in Mozilla." "Whatzilla?"

The dilemma with IE's big market share is that a good chunk of those people simply don't know that the browser can be switched out; I'd guess a large chunk of them don't really know what the browser *is*, either. I'm longing for a strong education campaign about it, but I'm also not holding my breath.

You know, this wouldn't be such a large problem if IE had been updated after the Civil War.

-Posted by Paul on July 25, 2003 08:26 AM

[quote]
The tribes metaphor was a stab at Mozilla (and every other team-driven open source project out there) being translated into every obscure language under the sun as if it's a primal sin not to have it in, oh, ancient greek or klingon
[/quote]

Heheh, yes, indeed there is some weird desire for people to get their open source projects to work on zillions of processors, or kernels, widget libs, etc. Another oddity is that I have 5 web browsers on my Mac that are all based on Gecko. I mean, how many gecko browsers do I really need?

[quote]
Yes, it's best to support standards and so forth, but the evidence the article is using to make its point is just weak to the point of foolishness.
[/quote]

Yes, I have to agree with that. but I do belive there is a grain of truth in ther somewhere. And I read another quote where the MSFT rep said that browsers must become a part of the OS for them to advance. THAT is just plain wrong.

[quote]
OK, I'll stop b*tching for the day. :-) Sorry for cluttering your blog.
[/quote]
No, please don't apologize, and feel free to rant (in that nice way that doesn't require asbestos).

-Posted by Dan on July 25, 2003 09:43 AM

[quote]I read another quote where the MSFT rep said that browsers must become a part of the OS for them to advance.[/quote]

I was reading something interesting the other day -- not sure if it was something you linked to or something from /. or boingboing.

The gist of it was that the reason IE hasn't advanced much is it's simply reached the limit of its codebase and needs to be rewritten from scratch. Since it's already a very mature product that does 99.9999% of everything people need it for, and it's a free product, MS doesn't plan to rewrite it as a standalone product, because it would have to work with multiple versions of windows using old filesystems. Instead, they're going to do a version that's designed for their new system that's based on SQL server, and is not backwards compatible to DOS-descended systems or even the NT ones. The speculation was that the first version of this might even be *less* fully featured than IE 6 because in a sense it's version 1.0 of a new product.

I don't know how accurate that is, but it makes a lot of sense.

No one's going to upgrade to a new OS over a browser, and MS isn't banking on that; but since they need to develop the new OS anyway, and they integrate the browser and OS tightly (and I do NOT think that's a bad thing. If I had to write an OS, I'd do the same thing. No reason to write an entirely different application inside the OS to do very similar functions), the new version of IE will grow from the OS, rather than a truly discrete entity.

So in a sense, he was right. Yes, obviously, they COULD continue adding stuff onto the existing codebase until it's even more bloated and buggy; or they could scrap the existing codebase and start a new one from scratch (nS 4.x -> Netscape 6/Mozilla). But it would be wasted effort to do so. No ROI. So IE 6 will be around a little longer than IE 4, 5, and 5.5 were, but probably not NEARLY as long as NN 4.x

-Posted by JC on July 25, 2003 05:41 PM