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Internet Explorer 8 beta is out.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/intern ... fault.aspx

I must say, it's getting better, but Firefox still has my heart.

Until their page renderer is at least as standards compliant as FF2 (which, although very good, still wasn't perfect), I will always despise IE with an unrelenting hate. (Not to mention its about as fast as running Vista on a PII)

Microsoft wrote:some websites may not yet be ready for Internet Explorer 8

According to them, it's the internet, not their page renderer, which isn't yet standards compliant...

taaveti wrote:

Microsoft wrote:some websites may not yet be ready for Internet Explorer 8

According to them, it's the internet, not their page renderer, which isn't yet standards compliant...

Which is exactly why IE8 fails the Acid3 web standards test miserably...

The reason many websites "won't be ready" for IE8 is that IE8 is much more standards-compliant than the versions before it. A page that breaks web standards to work perfectly in IE7 (or god forbid, IE6 or 5.5) might become broken in IE8. I'm not going to say IE8 is perfectly compliant (because I doubt it will be) but it's nice to see them finally moving toward accepted standards.

Acid3... is kind of a bleeding edge test. I mean, it would be great if a powerhouse browser like IE would implement all these super modern web techniques, but I wouldn't discount the browser for failing that.

Also, finally, the Opera company charges that 95.87% of web pages aren't standards compliant. So maybe Microsoft isn't too far off the mark when they say the web is the problem.

LittleViking wrote:Also, finally, the Opera company charges that 95.87% of web pages aren't standards compliant. So maybe Microsoft isn't too far off the mark when they say the web is the problem.

That may be, but it precisely because of IE that such a large portion of websites don't follow standards in the first place.

I agree after setting it as my default browser for a day its not as good as Firefox.

IE8, now with a full 24 points on Acid3!
For comparison, Firefox and Epiphany score 71, Google Chrome 78, Opera 85, and Safari and Midori a perfect 100.

scythe33 wrote:IE8, now with a full 24 points on Acid3!
For comparison, Firefox and Epiphany score 71, Google Chrome 78, Opera 85, and Safari and Midori a perfect 100.

Chrome got a 78? Huh. Webkit is supposed to score 100, which is what Chrome uses. They must have intentionally broke features that were already working in the rendering engine to get that.

The reason the new Legacy site never went up was *exactly* because IE didn't support it enough for us to make it work, and so we scrapped the whole idea.

Hmm. I still like Firefox the most, because I like the Wikipedia feature, and the add-ons.

If not for this I think I'd choose Chrome. It's pretty... well, not shiny. But you know.

----------------
Now playing: Nintendo - SM64 - Fire Bubble
via FoxyTunes

LittleViking wrote:

scythe33 wrote:IE8, now with a full 24 points on Acid3!
For comparison, Firefox and Epiphany score 71, Google Chrome 78, Opera 85, and Safari and Midori a perfect 100.

Chrome got a 78? Huh. Webkit is supposed to score 100, which is what Chrome uses. They must have intentionally broke features that were already working in the rendering engine to get that.

I'm pretty sure Acid3 uses a good bit of javascript in its tests as well, and Chrome has a different javascript engine then webkit/safari

smartalco wrote:

LittleViking wrote:Also, finally, the Opera company charges that 95.87% of web pages aren't standards compliant. So maybe Microsoft isn't too far off the mark when they say the web is the problem.

That may be, but it precisely because of IE that such a large portion of websites don't follow standards in the first place.

I must disagree. From the perspective of someone who develops websites and works with others who do the same, I can say that I think the majority of websites aren't standards compliant for the primary reason of laziness. it takes just that little bit of effort to put the / on self-closing tags in XHTML, and a large number of people don't want to go to that extra effort. Even deeper, it takes effort to learn the standards. And that learning the standards thing is particularly tricky - I hear the computer applications teacher at my middle school teaching deprecated tags all the time, because she has not kept up with the standards. And so she teaches students to use deprecated tags, and they continue to use them, at least until they find out about the standards. But shouldn't they learn that from their teacher? I think that teachers are a primary source of the standards issue, because I'd go so far as to say the vast majority of them, particularly in high schools, are not teaching to standards.

but off the teacher thing. The reality is that making a website standards compliant takes extra effort, because you can't cheat and take advantage of the little shortcuts that quirks mode rendering offers you. Many developers simply don't want or don't see the need to check their websites for standards compliance. Additionally, a surprising number of developers still don't seem to know about the standards at all. I watched the web design finals at the Oregon Future Business Leaders of America skills competition. One of the judges was a 'web marketing specialist.' When a competitor mentioned that the website was W3C compliant HTML4, the judge asked what "W3C" meant. The contestant later mentioned Section 508 (a United States law that endorses the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, and requiring that all sites funded by the federal government comply with it. 'section 508' is often used to refer to the W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines in general), and the judge was completely mystified by this - the competitor had to explain the concept of web accessibility. Granted, this is very much the individual judges incompetence, but I think this is astoundingly common in the web design industry - people that don't know the standards and/or don't care.

I think the solution of the standards problem requires a two-pronged attack.
1) Serious education campaigns to get the standards out in front of everyone, from serious development companies to middle school students learning basic HTML.
2) Web browsers need to stop rendering in quirks mode.

yes, #2 would completely break the internet. However, I think that as long as Quirks Mode (or an equivalent) exists in all major browsers, developers will keep using it. The disappearance doesn't need to happen all at once, but I think the major web browser manufacturers need to announce that on such-and-such date they will start slowly phasing out Quirks Mode quirk-handling features. Within a couple of years, Quirks Mode should no longer exist - all webpages will render in standards mode, and if they aren't up to standards, they just won't render properly.

jean-luc wrote:

smartalco wrote: 2) Web browsers need to stop rendering in quirks mode.

yes, #2 would completely break the internet. However, I think that as long as Quirks Mode (or an equivalent) exists in all major browsers, developers will keep using it. The disappearance doesn't need to happen all at once, but I think the major web browser manufacturers need to announce that on such-and-such date they will start slowly phasing out Quirks Mode quirk-handling features. Within a couple of years, Quirks Mode should no longer exist - all webpages will render in standards mode, and if they aren't up to standards, they just won't render properly.

That just broke your entire argument.

The only browser that has a quirks mode is IE7 and up, and they only have it because they render better then IE5 and IE6 (yet IE7+ still sucks at rendering to standards), so they needed some form of backwards compatibility. But that only proves my original statement that IE fucked the internet long ago. The Gecko renderer doesn't have a quirks mode, WebKit doesn't have a quirks mode, they only have a standards mode that renders pages to standards because thats what standards were standardized for.

Your thing about XHTML self closing tags, thats not required in HTML 4, all they would have to do is declare their page an HTML 4 document, and then it is technically just fine to not use the XHTML self closing tags.

Bad teachers, and bad competition judges can't be helped. I knew more about web dev before I ever took a web dev class at my highschool, and later I was in a web dev BPA (Business Professionals of America) competition with equally stupid judges and rules (there was a 50k limit on page size, my friggen source code was larger then 50k). But thats not the cause of bad coding, most devs get their start like you and I (presumably you anyway, me definitely), by screwing around on our own time, then maybe getting some decent education on the subject later, not by taking some stupid class in middle school (if the teachers knew anything about web dev, they would be doing web dev, not teaching)

LittleViking wrote: Also, finally, the Opera company charges that 95.87% of web pages aren't standards compliant. So maybe Microsoft isn't too far off the mark when they say the web is the problem.

For example...

smartalco wrote:The only browser that has a quirks mode is IE7 and up, and they only have it because they render better then IE5 and IE6 (yet IE7+ still sucks at rendering to standards), so they needed some form of backwards compatibility. But that only proves my original statement that IE fucked the internet long ago. The Gecko renderer doesn't have a quirks mode, WebKit doesn't have a quirks mode, they only have a standards mode that renders pages to standards because thats what standards were standardized for.

Mozilla has a quirks mode. Opera has a quirks mode. Internet Explorer 6 had a quirks mode. Most browsers have a quirks mode.

maestro wrote: Mozilla has a quirks mode. Opera has a quirks mode. Internet Explorer 6 had a quirks mode. Most browsers have a quirks mode.

Hmm, I did not know that.
However, taking quotes from those first two pages:
Mozilla: "In quirks mode, layout emulates nonstandard behavior in Navigator 4 and MSIE for Windows"
Opera: "and Quirks Mode (essentially an Internet Explorer compatible mode)"
so we are still back to IE

smartalco wrote:

jean-luc wrote:

smartalco wrote: 2) Web browsers need to stop rendering in quirks mode.

yes, #2 would completely break the internet. However, I think that as long as Quirks Mode (or an equivalent) exists in all major browsers, developers will keep using it. The disappearance doesn't need to happen all at once, but I think the major web browser manufacturers need to announce that on such-and-such date they will start slowly phasing out Quirks Mode quirk-handling features. Within a couple of years, Quirks Mode should no longer exist - all webpages will render in standards mode, and if they aren't up to standards, they just won't render properly.

That just broke your entire argument.

Incorrect. virtually all browsers on the market have a quirks-mode equivalent (because they're virtually all based on the same rendering engines). Gecko and Webkit do both have quirks mode. in FF, go to Tools > Page Info. on the General tab, note the field "Render Mode" - it indicates what mode the page is being rendered with.

EDIT: I note that you have acknowledged this. Yes, I didn't argue that IE isn't to blame for creating the mess. However, I think the current problems run much deeper than IE. With the release of version 8, IE will no longer really be at fault for the current state and the lack of progress towards standards.

smartalco wrote:Your thing about XHTML self closing tags, thats not required in HTML 4, all they would have to do is declare their page an HTML 4 document, and then it is technically just fine to not use the XHTML self closing tags.

Absolutely true. However, XHTML is all the rage these days, and everyone who's anyone is using it (despite the multiple reasons why you shouldn't use XHTML). Yet they still leave off the slash for self-closing tags. And then people doctype the page as HTML4 Strict and include the slashes, which are prohibited by HTML4! You just can't win. People need to be sure to pay attention to the exact format they are using and then write code that is compliant with that specific format. People don't do this, and it once again comes down to just not caring.

Along with certain websites, software that lists IE6 or IE7 in it's install requirements may not work. I know I was suddenly getting errors with my HP scanning software when I updated.

Dear Microsoft,
Please consider that not everyone likes having fonts anti-aliased by default when they do not need to be. This does not make it look like you're rendering things better. This makes it look stupid. Many fonts were designed to be rendered without anti-aliasing for a reason.


I love the big red "FAIL" in the corner of the Acid3 test when you try it in IE8. haha

This is actually second beta. The first beta was released somewhere in June I think. Or at least I have it since June.