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I am confused. Why do they call the standards compliant mode, "quirks mode" ?


FTA: Web developers will be able to add a tag to their page (or their web server) to force pages to render in the same manner as IE7. Pages without the tag will continue to use the "doctype switch" to choose between the old, nonstandard "quirks mode" and the new "standards mode"; pages with the new tag will still use the doctype switch, but this time to choose between "quirks mode" and "IE 7 mode."

RTFA could prevent confusion (and probably immature MS bashing).

There is nothing immature about pointing out the flaws in both Microsoft's products and their business practices. Even with the improvements IE 7 has, it is still the town idiot of web browsers. IE 8 will be the same.

As long as Microsoft's browser remains as closed and tied to proprietary crap as it currently is, it will always be the most useless browser of the bunch.

-->There is nothing immature about pointing out the flaws in both Microsoft's products and their business practices.

Pointing out flaws is of course not immature, except when the flaw pointed out does not exist as in the case of OP.

-->As long as Microsoft's browser remains as closed and tied to proprietary crap as it currently is, it will always be the most useless browser of the bunch.

If by closed you meant closed source = crap, then I beg to differ and provide Opera as proof.

Regarding "tied to proprietary crap" I would be very much interested and appreciative if you enlighten me what exactly constitutes this proprietary crap. My sole objection of the kind was ActiveX (from a security standpoint) which have been already dealt with in IE7.

The only major issue remaining, web standards support, is supposed to be resolved in IE8.

Personally, I will not fancy the idea of using IE as I am so dependent on several Firefox extensions that my whole computing experience will take an unfortunate dive if I switch. Yet, calling IE useless as a browser, especially for the common 'internets' user is, at the very best, unjustified.

You've just used a word which has a lot of importance here, which is MAJOR. Microsoft had hard time in the past dealing with web standard, maybe because they thought they were so big that they monopolized even the web. The only thing we can hope, is they do it right this time. I guess IE8 is in fact what have been planned for IE7 and just got postponed. I remember reading a lot of stuff about IE7 supposed improved standard compliance. When Vista launched, the IE dev team finally issued a statement that standards compliance wasn't so important.

Hopefully, if it true, prepare to get a whole new browsing experience, even with other browser, because MS will target their .Net framework and other web technologies at the standard web. A compliant IE means a better web for anyone. If web developers drop their dependence on old IE-bound technology, more people will start to use other browsers. A lot of people still use IE exclusively because they're bound to it, because of their banking site or other important institutional site.

No more javascript and CSS hacking, yeah!

"Pointing out flaws is of course not immature, except when the flaw pointed out does not exist as in the case of OP."

I don't know. IE sucks so bad to program for that I think one may very well be justified in pointing out non-existent flaws as well.

"If by closed you meant closed source = crap, then I beg to differ and provide Opera as proof."

No, I don't mean closed source. I mean closed as in not following web standards, but instead following Microsoft's proprietary closed standards. You are right, some of this has been fixed in IE 7, but not enough.

"Regarding "tied to proprietary crap" I would be very much interested and appreciative if you enlighten me what exactly constitutes this proprietary crap."

Same as above. Microsoft's CSS support is still not up to snuff, and IE should just drop ActiveX support all together. At least IE7 finally made XMLHttpRequest a native object instead of a retarded ActiveX object. All the other browsers follow open standards, Microsoft traditionally has not. They are coming around, but too slowly.

"The only major issue remaining, web standards support, is supposed to be resolved in IE8."

We'll see. When I can write web code on my OS X or Linux machine and have it run in IE without all the hoops and headstands, I'll share in your optimism.

"Yet, calling IE useless as a browser, especially for the common 'internets' user is, at the very best, unjustified."

I'm not calling it a useless browser for the average user at all. I'm saying it is a heap of crap to program for.

Now, IE does only run on Windows, and I would say that with the exception of games, Windows is a useless OS compared to everything else out there, so by association...

Except that you really don't have any point to make. IE8 is standards-based. You can embed content in your pages to provide compatibility with previous browser versions, but that isn't the default. So, really, what is your point, other than venting?



Compare the security records of Firefox, Safari, and IE7. Unless you're one of those people whose ideology prevents him from objectively evaluating cold, hard facts, you'll discover (oh, the shock, the horror) that Firefox/Safari have had, in fact, far more vulnerabilities than IE7. Yeah, all of that bunk about browsing "safer" was just that: bunk. Further, for all those "advances" that Firefox has made, it's had remarkable difficulty getting plug-ins to work from one update to the next. I've lost count of the number of times that it's crashed; meanwhile, I'm told to get rid of my existing plug-ins before installing new updates, and then reinstall the plug-ins, afterward. Wow... remind me about all this newfound efficiency that I'm supposed to be seeing...



Opera is closed. Does that make it "crap", too? Nope, didn't think so. And what, exactly, is "proprietary" about IE8? Like Opera, it's built on prevailing Web standards.

Edited 2008-06-16 07:30 UTC

And if you examine those facts without your blinding ideology, you'll see that the mean time between a security issue being raised, and the patch being issued is a factor smaller than with IE; for whom Microsoft not only does not fully disclose many vulnerabilities, and tries to mask them as Windows bugs, they leave people in a state of complete insecurity for weeks, months and even years before finally patching that zero-day exploit.

In 2006, IE was insecure for 284 days waiting for patches, where Firefox experienced just one 9-day period for that year. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/01/internet_explore...

As a computer doctor fixing messed up, virus-ridden machines every day, I *know* Firefox is more secure than IE, and the facts back it up.

---

Secondly, IE is not standards based. It has standards tacked on. Try developing something serious for it, and then get back to me on how good it dealt with the standards. There's no native SVG, the Javascript implementation is a complete disaster, the DOM is still full of proprietary junk. The CSS engine still fails at the basics.

The point being made here is that someone shouldn't need to write any code to make their sites compatible with IE8 because it should have been done right in IE from day one.

Thanks for admitting that IE has been a clusterf*** for compatibility from the very first minute.


I love the way security problems are categorised in the Windows world ;-).


Has it? Hmmmm.


The answer is no because it actually works properly, and doesn't make life difficult for web developers because they want to write code that locks you into their browser.


I don't think you understand what proprietary means. Have you not picked up anything since you've been around here? You can't just pull the term 'web standards' off an MSDN blog and start shouting it from the rooftops.

"Except that you really don't have any point to make. IE8 is standards-based."

As I said in a previous post, "We'll see". When I don't have to pull my bottom lip up over the top of my head and staple it to the back of my neck to get some Javascript or CSS to work right in IE, I'll stop calling IE a complete waste of time to program for.

"Compare the security records of Firefox, Safari, and IE7."

I'm not talking about using IE. I don't run Windows, so I don't use it. I have wasted many hours trying to get code that works fine in Opera, Firefox, and Safari to work right in IE though. As long as that is the case, IE is and always will be the town idiot.

"Opera is closed. Does that make it "crap", too? Nope, didn't think so."

Actually, that's debatable. I don't particularly like Opera from a usability standpoint. It is a good browser though. However, I am not talking about closed source. I am talking about closed, Microsoft-only ways that I have to interact with the browser as a developer. I don't give two hoots in poop what browsers other people use. I only care when a browser wastes my time as I'm programming and IE has definitely done that.

"And what, exactly, is "proprietary" about IE8? Like Opera, it's built on prevailing Web standards."

When, like Opera, I can write a web app without having to waste a bunch of time writing workarounds, I will stop calling IE a heap of poo.

Edited 2008-06-17 05:48 UTC

@tomcat

Oh, I forgot to comment on your statement regarding Firefox plugins.

I would MUCH rather uninstall old code and replace it with new that have the Firefox guys build in support for every previous version ever made. That is another one of the big reasons IE sucks. ActiveX support, for instance, should be dropped and dropped hard. It should have never been included in the browser in the first place. It was a bad, poorly implemented idea from the start.

In my opinion, it is always best to force people to migrate away from outdated technologies and "standards" like ActiveX.

did you read on ?

Pages without the tag will continue to use the "doctype switch" to choose between the old, nonstandard "quirks mode" and the new "standards mode"; pages with the new tag will still use the doctype switch, but this time to choose between "quirks mode" and "IE 7 mode." The tag will be supported in beta 2 of IE8 (due in August), and is also available to IE 8 beta 1 with the latest security update.

in fact, in case you missed it again....

but this time to choose between "quirks mode" and "IE 7 mode.

They're clearly talking about IE7 modes there, where it chooses between IE7 quirks mode (IE6 behavior) and IE7 mode, which is still pretty quirky. Notice they don't call it IE7 standards mode, they just call it IE7 mode.

I've got news for you: Web development is, by definition, crappy. Yeah, it's semi-useful for browsing toy web pages to read email, view lousy MySpace/FaceBook pages, and watch poor quality YouTube videos, but nobody in his right would advocate getting completely rid of client applications and moving to a completely browser-based model. That isn't Microsoft's fault. It's the generally lame-ass state of browser technology. It's barely advanced in the past 10 years -- neither in quality nor reliability -- and the same marketing hucksters are trying to sell us the same old crap in a seemingly new wrapper ("Web 2.0"); when, really, it's just another attempt to separate dumb rubes from their money. Wake me up when something really noteworthy happens. Because the current state of browser technology is utter crap.

It may be hard to see it because of the hype, but "Web 2.0" if used well is actually a big improvement for the users. It may not be the best solution technically (actually far from it) but it's just the way things have evolved and these things sadly will not change over night.

My customers love that I've started to upgrade their interfaces with ones that are heavily javascript/ajax driven because it is a big improvement in terms of usability and efficiency.

That said, there's no point in trying to move every desktop app to the web using the current technology, but that doesn't stop people from trying, people always try to push the limits of things. And even though they might not be successful it will usually result in advancement of technology that might prove itself useful for other applications.

I would prefer if we could just forget about the current web and start over from scratch with something that is actually built for what we use it for. But it just won't happen.

I think there is a tedency within the IT world that when a technology is introduced, it is first flogged to death, then there is a slight reprieve as people come down out of their 'high' and realise the limitations of the said technology. I remember when Java first came on the scene - software companies went crazy with all manner of "Java power products" - Triteal developed a 'Network User Interface' that was apparently ment to make the desktop more 'interactive'; Corel released Wordperfect Suite for Java etc. You get the story.

Web 2.0 will be just like this. There will be some great situations where Web 2.0 is able to enhance and improve the user experience - in alot of cases, replacing where flash used to be used (Flash is now simply being used in alot of cases as a container format for h264). There are those today who are flogging it to death; trying to use it as the 'silverbullet' to address all of lifes problems. There will be a gradual pulling back and realisation that Web 2.0 will be one tool in an arsinal of technologies used to address customer demands.

Crappy yes. After 10 years it still feels like its trapped in quicksand - all because the biggest player hasn't played ball.

Heck if browsers had gone standards compliant five years ago then Flash would not be a normal browsing requirement.

Lol. Where the hell have you been these past eight years or so? I've got news for you sweetheart. Guess why so few organisations have made any move to VB.Net?

1. VB.Net does not suite the use cases for which VB was traditionally used.

2. People are not going to rewrite all their code for zero benefit.

3. If they are rewriting code then they're writing web applications because they don't have to worry about clients, and more importantly, client installation and configuration issues.

Enlighten yourself:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html


Who's fault has that been then? You've admitted that IE has been devoid of any standards compliance from day one, and has been unbelievably slow in adopting any web technology (CSS for one thing) that makes life that bit easier.

No it doesn't. It turns developers off, unless they are somehow mentally entrenched in Microsoft technology; either by corporate decree, or by personal ignorance.

I'm a web developer and I simply won't deal with IE anymore. If my code runs on IE, great, but I'm not going out of my way to make it do so.

When my customers weigh the costs of making code work with IE or simply installing Firefox, the choice is pretty clear.

Some web developers don't have this luxury, but for those who do, IE is completely irrelevant. The longer Microsoft remains non-compliant with well documented standards, the worse it will get for them.

"No it doesn't. It turns developers off, unless they are somehow mentally entrenched in Microsoft technology; either by corporate decree, or by personal ignorance."

I'm not talking about internet web apps, I'm talking about the millions of corporate intranet sites that use IE 6 functionality. Regardless about the correctness about how they are written, there are a lot of these out there, and the business world doesn't just change over night.

Being a sysadmin, I would prefer this route than having to spend hundreds of thousands to fix/upgrade/replace all the broken custom web apps deployed at my site, or having to keep all my desktops running IE 6 (In my defense I didn't work here when most of this crap was written)

You win the award for "most clueless post ever." I'm sorry, but any web developer who says the 80% of the market still on IE is irrelevant has never really developed any real application on the web. While I *wish* we could behave like that, any business would be foolish to ignore IE entirely. It would be suicide to launch a site that did not work properly in IE, and irresponsible for someone claiming to understand the web to condone it.

I can't imagine who would actually hire a developer that actually said that. I don't know what "customers" of yours are content limiting themselves to just the 10-15% of the market not on IE, but I've never heard of such a thing. IE is anything but completely irrelevant.



Again, spoken like someone who has no idea what they're talking about. Sure, it's easy to install Firefox on a machine. What about an enterprise with 500+ desktops? Firefox is distrbuted as an EXE file, not an MSI. It cannot be managed by policy in Active Directory, and when it is, it's some third party build that is usually not current. It needs constant updating, but it's not automated, and not everyone runs their machine as admin.

I understand your POV, but the fact remains that the real world doesn't actually work like your XP desktop.

Reality is ugly man. So what? This is Osnews! Rant away and be happy.

Edited 2008-06-16 15:07 UTC

"It would be suicide to launch a site that did not work properly in IE"

Actually, that depends on who your customers are. As I said, I'm able to get away with it just fine, so I do. For me, IE is truly irrelevant.

"I can't imagine who would actually hire a developer that actually said that."

Good, then I won't have to worry about you stealing my customers.

"Again, spoken like someone who has no idea what they're talking about."

That's funny. I would apply that same statement to your post. I'm making a successful living doing exacly what I said.

"Sure, it's easy to install Firefox on a machine. What about an enterprise with 500+ desktops?...

...Firefox is distrbuted as an EXE file, not an MSI. It cannot be managed by policy in Active Directory"

Most companies who have 500+ desktops are not just blowing out software using policies. Rather they are using software from LANDesk or Symantec to blow out software updates. These kinds of programs can make batch-installable packages out of any EXE, so this is not an issue. Also, I don't do much work for companies of that size.

Just a business tip. It is poor business in most cases to cater to everyone. You have to find a segment of the market you want to serve and only focus there. That's what I do anyway and it works well for me.

"I understand your POV, but the fact remains that the real world doesn't actually work like your XP desktop."

I've never owned an XP machine. I dislike programming for Windows more than I dislike programming for IE.

Let us all know how the unemployment line is. It would be a shame to let developer ego get in the way now, wouldn't it? I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are brand spankin' new to the world of web development...fresh out of college where it was engrained in your brain that anything/everything MS related is evil and not to be trusted.

You are doing both yourself and your so called "customers" a huge disservice by inflicting your beliefs on them. After a few months in this business, you'll come around. You'll have to, otherwise you'll starve to death. You'll start giving up on some standards to decrease overall TTM. You'll stop worrying about something being off by a pixel in Safari when it renders fine in other browsers. And you absolutely WILL have to start including IE support as priority #1 in your service offerings.

Edited 2008-06-16 18:20 UTC

The world needs ditch-diggers, too ;-p

Edited 2008-06-16 19:28 UTC

The world needs ditch-diggers, too ;-p "

Hey, its not that funny these days. Given the shortage of trades people in New Zealand, a 'ditch digger' can earn more money than a web tag jocky.

As for the original poster; yes, we need to 'encourage standards' but it shouldn't be at the expense of end user ability to navigate the site. Now sure, have special features that are only available if you have a decent web browser (Opera & Firefox) - and thus cut down on coding time - but it shouldn't stop the user, in the case of encommerce, to use atleast the basic functions of that site.

Or perhaps my customers are my customers because of their beliefs and desires. Did you think of that?

I do not write web applications for public consumption (well, not for work anyway) so I can get away with not supporting IE. Don't get me wrong, I can support IE if my customers want to pay more to have me code in the necessary hacks, but most of them don't.

I'm not looking at my post now, but if I recall correctly, I made it very clear that my case was an exception and that most people couldn't get away with what I'm doing. Why are you all so upset by that anyway? Is it because you have to support IE and hate it, or is it because you like IE?

Anyway, I have been doing this sort of thing for about 8 years now and it has only gotten better and better. When it is no longer lucrative, perhaps I'll subscribe to a different point of view.

I just created an HTML page with a drop-down with 3'000 <option>s in it, and Firefox worked flawlessly.

Firefox 3 is the fastest browser, uses the least memory out of IE, Firefox, Safari & Opera, it releases memory better than the other browsers.

I think you're talking complete crap to be honest.
I've been using Firefox 3 since a2 and it's been really very good all the time.

People might not like Firefox because of personal flavor (I dislike Opera on Mac because of the terrible theme/layout), but it's no good spouting falsehoods.

Are you running it under WinXP? The Windows version was and still is OK(you could even say GREAT) from the beginning but the Linux binaries crashed far too often for my taste. That might be fixed now as my last try was with B3 and 4. It could be that people are having problems with some distributions or OS versions.
ff3 is certainly as good as it claims. ff2 had many problems yet it still was better than the alternatives when they were compared as a whole.

. Multiplatform (All major and minor OSes, all architectures)
. High market penetration (over 15%)
. Extensions (I don't use them but they make a lot o people happy)
. Pleasant default themes(We can now forget ff2 ever existed).

I'm on Mac. I don't know how Linux users are supposed to update tomorrow. I have an eee I'd like to update, but I'm not prepared to tango on the command line. All I want to do is download it, double-click and it be installed, is it too much to ask??

You could go through that mess on linux too, but I'd rather just tell the package manager to do it for me.

Try this one :

With a list of city in my case, the file is 40450 lines long and always contain 3 empty lines between the options. FF2 needs 10 seconds to print it and the CPU becomes very high !

All browser except firefox can read it without problems. FF3 is a little bit better than FF2.

I don't criticize FF just to do it, I've been a fervent supporter of it, but it's really time for this browser to become what it claimed at the beginnning, a lightweight and fast browser.

For those who say that it is fast, try safari, the javascript engine is incredibly faster, and I'm not talking about bench, you feel the difference when using it.

An HTML file over 40'000 lines long takes time to parse. News at 11.

Your original claim was 300 option items, even with four lines for each option (option plus 3 blank lines) that's only 1'200 lines long.

If you want to prove something, please save the HTML file in question and upload somewhere so we can all test.

Regardless, this is a fringe case involving bad programming. Different rendering engines in different browsers choke on different things. Safari can be slowed down by things that have no effect on Firefox and vice-versa.

I'm not talking about the quality of the html code, just about how the browser treat it :

http://www.savefile.com/files/1612694

The end-user experience is not good as you will see.

Yeah, I 'll beg to differ on that. I know a lot of Mac-heads and none of them like Safari. They even laughed at me when I installed it on my XP box.

Your Kidding, right? SeaMonkey IS netscape, just the whole shebang opened up. Firefox was made to be a light weight, browser only version of it.

no Newsgroup readers, etc... that was in Mozilla, just the webbrowser itself.

Seamonkey / Netscape is the heavyweight in this one, FF the light weight.

Actually things are way worse, the main problem is that if you do currently something in the web you still have to support IE6 you also have to jump onto the ajax bandwagon, additionally supporting IE7 which still is way inferior to all other browsers is a must as well.
The corporate world for instance still is locked heavily on IE6 and seeing IE8 there wont happen before 2010 if at all. The main issue is, IE6 has been there so long that almost every corporation has a load of IE6 only inhouse apps which they cannot get rid of or rewrite by now (a lot of those apps are asp,php,jsp based apps with no mvc so doing a rewrite is hard)
So IE7 is now somewhat three years old IE6 still will be an issue for at least another 3-4 years until it finally is phased out. Given that Vista did not catch on for many reasons which I can understand maybe even longer.
Face it the time when IE6 and all its garbage will be made obsolete arrives probably will be the time IE10 arrives but then all versions of IE until this version has to be supported as well.
In my experience only IE causes those massive support problems, version switches in Mozilla usually end up pretty swiftly with the old version being phased out within half a year.
I dont know why that is but probably because of all the critical tie ins the IE engine has into windows, and stubborn users who after so many years still think the web is ie6 only.

No. They're just different browsers which implement the standard differently. For web developers there is no "better" or "worse" browsers, unless you believe the beauty of CSS has anything to do with coding productivity (ever heard of web frameworks? html/css generation?).

We want one web rendering standard. Doesn't matter if it's W3's, Microsoft's, or Firefox/Gecko, or Opera's or Safari's (oh yes their "standard" is different from gecko's!).

Just One.