text: Timeframe sounds about right. The large(ish) international consultancy firm I work for only very recently approved its empoyees to (optionally) upgrade from IE6 to IE7 on their workstations. The company wide default browser is still IE6.
  No it doesn't. IE 8.0 does not support standards and it's slow. It may pass Acid2 but it just fails with JavaScript, the technology of web 2.0.
  You do relise that first of all Acid3 test is not the be all and end all of tests - even the people who wrote the acid3 tests don't make grandiose claims that you are making.
  Regarding standards; your post is nothing sort of a blatent attempt to lie about Internet Explorer 8 to justify your own browser decision; can't you just be happy that Internet Explorer has finally been updated so that it actually renders things as they are supposed to?
  Good lord, I swear if you were any more negative it would sound as though I was stuck in an emo mosh pit at a My Chemical Romance concert.
  Edited 2009-03-19 20:34 UTC
  Acid3? IE achieves acid2 compliance just as javascript eclipses css in importance. Yay.
  CSS problems can keep a page from looking right. Javascript problems can keep a page or application from working at all.
  Edited 2009-03-19 19:47 UTC
  Precisely. Javascript performance, working through DOM2 and DOM3, is the area of major, intense competition in almost all browsers at this time. I think tracemonkey is the name of the new accelerated javascript engine in Gecko (with which they are having some trouble), but the javascript engine in Webkit (the name of which escapes me for now) seems to be leading the pack at this time. Impressive.
  Meanwhile, IE hasn't yet even got off the start line in this race ... and the trigger on the start gun was pulled eight years ago.
  PS: The name of the accelerated javascript engine in Webkit is "SquirrelFish", and later, "SquirrelFish Extreme ".
  Edited 2009-03-19 22:46 UTC
  Real solution: Use a browser that gets Javascript compliance correct according to standards.
  Even better solution: Use a browser with DOM2/DOM3 compliance, Xforms compliance and an accelerated Javascript engine that gets Javascript compliance correct according to standards.
  Essential approach to real solution or even better solution: Don't use IE.
  Edited 2009-03-20 01:59 UTC
  It doesn't have DOM2 (let alone DOM 3), by design. This is an ages-old shortcoming of IE, a deliberate omission of a major web standard.."
  Not having DOM2 in turn leaves out a major component in javascript compliance.
  It doesn't have SVG.
  Again, a major omission in IE. SVG became a web standard as long ago as 2001.
  In a couple of years, we will be coming up on the end of a decade of major non-compliance in IE.
  It is several steps behind other browsers in its implementation of CSS.
  It doesn't have SMIL....
  SMIL (in conjunction with fast Javascript) is, of course, a perfectly viable alternative to something like Silverlight. Trust Microsoft to go with its own, proprietary way of doing something, trying to make everyone have to use Microsoft software to do functions that should actually be universal standards.
  SMIL 3.0 is the current standard. SMIL 1.0 was first put up as a web standard in 1998 ... so we are already at the first decade of non-compliance for that one.
  Finally, there is Javascript.
  IE has a slow and "unique" implementation of javascript, implemented in such a way that Javascript written to work in IE often won't work the same way in other browsers, and what works well in other browsers doesn't work in IE.
  If IE implemented these standards properly ... then we wouldn't have any need at all for non-standards on the web such as Flash and Silverlight and ActiveX. All people would have equally rich access (depending on the capability of their equipment) without having to use one particular platform or another ... there would be such a thing as consumer choice in IT.
  An image say more than a thousand words.
  You're right; it reminds me of the argument over the Windows compatibility in OS2; it provides compatibility but to what extent is it used as a way to legitimise never actually having to provide a native version?
  Microsoft needs to make a break from the past; people complained about Windows Vista but Windows Vista never made a totally clean break from the past and thus it is stuck in a merky half way point where applications kinda work rather than a simple black and white, yes it does work, no it doesn't work.
  Internet Explorer 9 should be aimed to be released in a year, pass Acid3 compliance, a faster java script engine - possibly leveraging .NET/CLR JIT, and remove ALL backwards compatibility. Companies by that time would have had over a year to upgrade their products. If companies can't be bothered upgrading their products then customers of those companies should be offered by Microsoft free versions of Microsoft's equivilants as punishment for those companies failing to take care of their customers.
  I for one am sick and tired of the hand wringing involved by companies who have known about Internet Explorer 8 for almost 2 years and the need to make their products compliant - but instead they spent the money on private jets, large bonus's that are totally unjustified and cutting R&D and staff numbers simply to artificially boost the share price at the expense of long term product development and maintenance.
  Edited 2009-03-19 20:45 UTC
  Thom, I wholeheartedly agree with you about the terrible user interface of IE7 and later. It is one of the primary reasons for me to use Firefox, even at the time of version 1 and 2 of FF when memory leaks were annoying. And now, thanks to some great FF plugins, I am an FF addict ;-)
  I was fully mistaken when I replied to the safari post (paraphrase) 'no browser when properly used can make your eyes bleed' I was horribly naively blindly wrong... I am only a few hours in so I will reserve anything about features for a hot minute.
  How in world can this be the best they could do?
  One more time: hug an independent developer today! Thank them for giving you choices.
  This is the best they could do?
  Lawd it stinks on soo many levels! Fuh Huggeley!
  over at they have posted direct links to RTM files.
  I will agree 100% with you on this point. Before Firefox was released Microsoft said they would not release any more stand-alone versions of IE, and future versions would be "tied" to a specific version of Windows (i.e. IE7 + Longhorn, IE8 + Windows 7, etc). Once Firefox came out and started to gain market-share, Microsoft decided to reverse direction and release IE7 as a stand-alone application. Granted, it does not have everything when used with XP as it does with Vista, but Microsoft did release it as a stand-alone application. Now we have IE8, and starting with Windows 7 we can have a version of Windows without IE installed.
  Sorry, but no. You will reportedly be able to "turn IE off" (whatever that really means) but it will not be un-installed.
  Having said that ... I'd rather have IE8 on any Windows system that either IE6 or IE7, and I will recommend IE8 to Windows users who ask me.
  Edited 2009-03-21 09:04 UTC.
  Actually I am somewhat underwhelmed by this release, while I applaud the efforts obviously undertaken to support CSS properly, I see where the competition is and where Microsoft stands and all I can say is. First of all there is a huge load of people who still have not moved away from IE6 so even the new release so the pain everybody in web development has to endure wont change. But at least there now is a common ground which is CSS 2.1 which everyone can follow for all other browsers which makes the support of ie8 more or less a no brainer. But IE7 still will be an issue for the years to come if those not migrated yet will to migrate to ie7 first (which unfortunately will happen)
  But the main reason why I am underwhelmed is the still lacking support for the newest ECMAScript standards, which again leaves us without real namespaces and real inheritance, instead of rolling your own both constructs would have helped a lot to improve framework interoperability. And the fact that Microsoft was able to fork SVG successfully for silverlight but not supporting the real thing in their own browsers in 2009 still is a shame :-(
  So what is left, a release while I personally applaud it from a web developers standpoint leaves me cold!
  I'm forcing everybody where I work to upgrade to 8. Well when it becomes available on the Windows update site.
  The main reason for this is because I've tested the company's upcoming website in the beta and RC versions of IE 8 and it works flawlessly without the need for code tweaks.
  IE 8 is still far behind other browsers, but at least it's better than it has been. I can't force people to adopt firefox, safari, or opera, but I can at least get them to upgrade to IE 8.
  Ooh, the temptation to go on one of my Ayn Rand/Libertarian trademark rants over the evils of big government and how it entrenches monopolistic bebehavior is very intense
  Lets put it this way; if government wasn't so big, and people's reliance of having to interact with it on some level was that of being trivial (and the limited amount required was done using open standards formats) - then maybe we wouldn't have the entrenched Microsoft monopoly because of it
  Don't be so certain of that. There are countless tutorials on how to run both IE6 and IE7 in WINE. I gurantee you there are ubber 1337 haxors trying to get IE 8 running just so they can say they did it and then they will write a tutorial just to get some noob to pat him/her on the back.
  Edited 2009-03-19 22:56 UTC
  I have not used IE since the first release of Firefox. I was not impressed at all with IE7, it seemed like a just good enough stripped down browser. After just downloading IE8 I must say I am actually impressed. And it is indeed a very fast browser. Currently just got done comparing it to Chrome, Firefox, and Safari beta 4 and it stacks up very well. It remains to be seen whether I will use this as a primary browser, I still have a preference to Firefox. But hopefully, just maybe the Firefox team will get off their asses and release an improved browser as v3 has become really just a dog.
  I agree for the most part. In fact I am writing this post from IE8 and its decent. I ran some javascript benchmarks and looks like it is definitely quicker than IE7 was but still a bit behind when compared to Firefox 3. However I dont see any speed differences when it comes to browsing experience. I still dont understand what it means when people say that the browser feels faster...is it startup time or page render time? I guess I cannot tell the difference between Firefox loading up a page and IE8 loading up a page because it seems on my machine they all load up equally as fast.
  copy elements of it.
  Firefox 3 merges the Back/Forward navigation stacks into one button, which is a convention introduced by IE7.
  Chrome removes the menu bar and adds Page and Tool dropdown controls, this is also a convention introduced by IE7.
  I'll also note that when IE7 came out, many Microsoft bashers ripped apart these particular things, but they were totally silent when FF and Chrome adopted them.
  My problem with IE7's UI isn't the UI itself, but the slowness of its implementation. I've not tried IE8; hopefully that's been improved. Chrome, I think, has the potential to have the best UI; there are numerous annoying quirks that need to be addressed first.
  Well said. Don't forget the phishing filter or IE8 slices, back to the XMLHTTP stuff. ;-)
  Personally, I think IE8 is a good approach. The meta element to force IE7 compatibility is a good solution.
  Used it for a few hours and it looks faster than IE7 and as stable. I'm curious to give the new Javascript implementation a try...
  Mind you, XUL is pretty handy too, unmatched by any other browser.
  It is not a standard, but it is based on standards:
  Then there is always HTML5
  DOM scripting
  XHTML
  ODF viewer for web browser
  SOAP
  XQuery and XSLT
  Lots and lots of innovation for which Microsoft has a huge catchup required to get anywhere close to the current state of play.
  People who don't know better are likely better off running version 8 instead of version 7.
  There will be a lot of people out there who won't download Firefox or Opera and will think Safari will cost them since it comes from Apple. If Internet Exploder version 8 is any safer than version 7, I'd rather have them running version 8. There are likely a lot of people still on version 6 who need to change.
  It's definitely not a perfect choice, but any move from the old, screwy coding for IE 6 will be a blessing and getting people off that browser version will be a start."".
  Edited 2009-03-20 04:59 UTC"".
  I think 13 hours isn't enough time for the production version 8 to have much marketshare or influence at all.
  My thinking is that it doesn't matter how many knowledgeable people move away from IE 6 because they're probably not using it, unless forced at work, anyway.
  We need the people who don't realise how dangerous it really is to change at least, to a newer version. Some people will find Firefox or Opera or even Safari on their own, but most people will wait until the browser is placed in front of them without thinking.
  Exactly - right now, and there's still lots of crappy HTML n stuff around that was made to work on older "Internet Explorer" versions. If only the "compatibility feature" would disappear, this "non-HTML" wouldn't work anywhere, and developers could concentrate on the standards, instead of on the workarounds for a particular browser.
  I'm aware of the fact that most (!) other browsers treat HTML and the other standards as what they are: standards that you better follow (instead of inventing your own "MS-HTML"). I'd like to see at least this one MICROS~1 product in this group, so it would be less problematic to write HTML that is interpretable as it should.
  Don't get me wrong, it doesn't appear very often that I comment on MICROS~1 stories here, and especially when I do a quite positive comment (as I did and do at the moment) I put hope into it. The future will tell if MICROS~1 will finally come to that point that they respect existing standards and stop keeping theirselves out of the "conformity group".
  The web stuff I do usually runs very well on all browsers I take into testing, starting from Lynx (important for blind users) up to Firefox 2 and 3 and Opera and Safari. The only browser where problems were reported to me was this "Internet Explorer". I really hope this will stop. If I write valid HTML, I expect the browser to handle it correctly.
  By the way, my favourite browser functionality would be a built-in validator. And if the source isn't valid HTML, it displays an error box "This page doesn't containt valid content and cannot be displayed." :-)
  Are we including the neglicable market share of mobile browsers here or what?
  Because on the desktop, there is no way IE has less than 50% market share. Sadly, it's still somewhere around 60-80%, depending on location.
  Are we including the neglicable market share of mobile browsers here or what?
  Because on the desktop, there is no way IE has less than 50% market share. Sadly, it's still somewhere around 60-80%, depending on location. "
  Of course. One doesn't have to be sitting at a desktop in order to be using a browser to access the web. These days, one could easily be using one's mobile phone.
  Well, even with all those crappy mobile browser included (and by god they suck, including the iPhone's), IE's share is still somewhere around 60-70%. Sad, but true.
  Mobile browsers barely make a dent in the total browsing market since, well, they suck.
  Edited 2009-03-20 09:47 UTC
  Mobile browsers barely make a dent in the total browsing market since, well, they suck.
  I see your hitslink bet, and I'll raise you a w3schools.
  Edited 2009-03-20 10:11 UTC
  Those statistics are heavily skewed, and W3C even admits that. It's also quite obvious that they are, since they come from just one website (W3C's), a website which is most likely visited by computer savvy people anyway.
  The NetApp stats come from like 200 major sites that are not focussed on one specific group. The NetApp stats obviously are also just an approximation, but they are a lot more reliable than the ones from just the W3C website. That's pretty damn obvious.
  Me thinks you slept during statistics class. Our own OSNews stats aren't reliable either for the exact same reason.
  Only at the expense of other versions of IE.
  If that happens, I would welcome it. IE8 is better than other versions of IE.". "
  The problem is, most web developers nowadays know how to write correct page code which is following standards, but then there is one thing, you dont want it you really hate it, but customers insist of supporting old IE versions. If you do not support IE6 you will loose the contract period, it is that sad...
  So in the end you end up writing perfectly passing standards code and then sink 20% of additional time into IE6 hacks via conditional include and 5% additional time into ie7 hacks... IE8 so far for me has been sort of a no brainer, thank god, but I do not try to use anything newer and avoid SVG (unfortunately)
  IE 8 gets 20/100.
  I haven't tried FF 3.1 beta 3 yet to see how compliant the bleeding-edge Gecko engine is but FF 3.0.7 gives me 71/100.
  FF 3.1 beta 3 is only about 93/100.
  It also still has a bug or two in tracemonkey. This latter point is apparently the hold-up that is still keeping it in beta.