dW

IE Takes a Shit

After the IE team announced that Internet Explorer 8 will pass the Acid 2 test I was wondering for quite some time just when they were going to take a shit and ruin that news. It took less than a month with this news. Lovely.

My friend, Jeff, wrote earlier today about this issue, but I’d like to throw my two cents into the matter. I agree with him and most of the world on this. For you guys who do not know Microsoft is proposing adding a non-standard HTTP header that tells IE what renderer to use whether it be IE 6, 7, or 8. Their proposal goes like so:

 <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=6">

This will tell IE to use IE 6’s renderer when rendering that page. My friend addressed many of the technical matters behind it, and many others have addressed this. I haven’t read a single one that really addressed the common sense side of things, so I think I’ll address those here.

Since my example allows IE to render a webpage using IE 6’s renderer one could assume there’s a flag for IE 7 and also for IE 8. When IE 9 comes out there will be another for IE 9 and so forth. By using common sense that would mean that Microsoft would have to include a renderer for every single version of their browser from here on out. We are getting larger and larger hard drives, but just how large would IE have to be when IE 13 comes out?

Let’s look at this same thing from another angle, Windows itself. Who expects Microsoft to keep the same old API introduced in Windows 95 and bullshitted until the complete mess it is right now with Windows Vista to stay the same for many versions? Microsoft in the future will have to overhaul Windows similar to how Apple did Mac OS with Mac OS X in 2001. Who even expects in that timeframe for processor architecture to remain the same as it is? We don’t know these things yet. This would require Microsoft to either reprogram all old renderers using the new API or architecture or use emulation. Things could get extremely nasty and overly complicated in the future, but then again Vista is already a rat’s nest.

Microsoft expects other programs to follow suit. These browsers aren’t included with every Microsoft operating system, so their filesize is extremely important. With all the bloat this single thing would create it’d make it horrible to download any of Microsoft’s competition. Maybe that’s their idea in the end. Who knows. We already know Apple isn’t going to support this bullshit, and well I think I can assume Opera’s answer to that. Would “Not no, but hell no” be an appropriate answer? I know Opera is professional and all, but I believe any response whether told directly like my description or in a nice, professional manner will say the same exact thing.

Internet Explorer already includes conditional statements to check for Internet Explorer versions. Many people use this to feed alternative CSS to Internet Explorer only. That, by feeding a stylesheet will end up doing the same thing. Yes the developer has to do more work to cater to IE 6, but in the end this old, tried, and tested method would have more power than the meta element with a nonstandard HTTP header proposed. Backwards compatibility should only address recent bugs. When IE 8 or 9 comes out and mostly everyone who has a Windows computer is not using Internet Explorer 6 we will not need to address its bugs and crap anymore. Who still really caters to Netscape 4, painstakingly making the code display perfectly in that ancient browser? In the future Internet Explorer 6 will not be an issue just like that browser isn’t. When using web standards you shouldn’t have to worry if an ancient browser displays your page correctly. You can’t help an old browser’s bugs, so if you code to the standards and the browser adheres to them then it should display it as you intended.

I feel sorry for Microsoft here, and I would hate to have the job of having to fix the endless bugs in IE. The fact of the matter is that they shouldn’t have waited five years to update their browser. This isn’t the solution, and neither is polishing a turd. Trident is completely incapable of keeping up with the modern web. Microsoft just needs to rewrite their engine and move on, catering to web standards. If they would just stop trying to push their proprietary bullshit on the world and just cater to web standards like the rest of their competition does they won’t look like a bunch of fucking idiots and won’t have to do this crap either.