Just what has Microsoft been doing for IE 7?

Jeff Reifman writes "Last week, Windows columnist Paul Thurrott ripped into Microsoft for ignoring CSS standards with its upcoming Internet Explorer 7.0. "Microsoft has set back Web development by an immeasurable amount of time. My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators." With the redesign of my own site last month, I discovered just how non-compliant IE is with basic CSS: IE 52% vs. Firefox 93%. Is Microsoft purely incompetent and tone-deaf to customers — or simply counting on IE's non-compliance remaining a de-facto standard?"

The Percentages

[neonprimetime]

CSS 2.1 standard support:
IE 6: 52%
IE 7: 54%
Firefox 1.5: 93%
Opera 8.5: 93%
Opera 9: 96%

Ok, so I agree that the numbers seem to be good estimates, about right. But how on earth do they actually come up with these percentages? Is is a simple cumulative count of all css tags and attributes that work vs. don't work? Or do some have more weight than others? Seriously, they seem like fabricated numbers ... just like the /. article earlier today about how wide the universe is.

200...5 article?

[cpct0]

Unless they are mistaken, this is a 2K5 article. And it talks about the beta 1 release, I got beta 3.

Now on the topic of better CSS, I think IE7b3 is better than what is advertised in that article. It's still far from perfect though.

Re:The Percentages

[RonnyJ]

Here's the link that goes over all the figures: http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_summary.p hp?uas=IE6-IE7-FX1_5-OP8-OP9 [webdevout.net]

Article from 2005

[Anonymous Coward]

The article cited was posted on August 02, 2005. IE7 has released 3 betas in the year since then, and although certainly not perfect, the CSS support has gotten substantially better.

Re:The Percentages

[neonprimetime]

Thank you for your link. I found another link [webdevout.net] from your link which answers my question from above.

This article is a year old

[epohs]

Am I taking crazy pills, or is this article not over 1 year old? [ August 02, 2005 ]

Re:ACID2 - Whoopdeedoo!

[John Fulmer]

Fixing long-standing bugs =! Standards compliance.

jf

Re:Auto-boycot

[envelope]

Apparently Newscloud tried that [newscloud.com], and it just made a lot of people mad.

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[laughing rabbit]

Then, they should get busy!

The government hasn't dealt with any issues in years.

Do we all know what year it is?

[thejeffer]

It's 2006. Not 2005. Paul's article was not written a week ago, it was written a YEAR ago. Since then, the IE7 team has done a lot of work to improve their compliance with standards. It's not going to change the fact that I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole, but that's because I just love Firefox way too much to ever use anything else.

Let's be fair here and not criticize IE7 based on a year-old article that's talking about beta 1. If you've got gripes with beta 3's problems (which it does indeed have), then by all means, gripe away.

Re:IE developers use Firefox themselves

[loquacious d]

The "IE7" Javascript library [edwards.name] by Web guru Dean Edwards has helped me a lot with the IE6 blues.

It allows IE6 to render transparent PNGs (using ActiveX[?] hooks built-in to IE that allow it to render 8-bit transparency, but is mysteriously not enabled for PNGs by default) and programmatically alters the DOM and parsed CSS to enable complex subselectors and a smattering of CSS2/3 selectors as well (including fixed background positioning! [edwards.name]). It adds ~20K to pages using it, but it's a one-time cost as IE caches Javascript.

It's not a magic bullet, and sometimes causes issues itself, but definitely worth a look. Cause no one likes hacking their carefully-constructed divs back to tables, just to support a broken POS browser. (I also enjoy the irony that third-party Javscript hackers seem to be able to make more progress with IE's CSS compatibility than the actual IE team.)

Re:I vote de-facto standard

[DJGreg]

When buying a system from Dell, etc. Dell provides the support, NOT Microsoft.

That is the whole reason why an OEM copy of Windows costs less than the full retail version, it comes without support from Microsoft. It is intended to be supported by the OEM that puts it on the machine.

Last year, not last week

[jazir1979]

This article is over a year old, the poster got it totally wrong. Does anybody have any info on whether the comments are still relevant in the latest IE7? I have no reason to expect that they aren't, but just checking.

Re:Auto-boycot

[Ruff_ilb]

"If they want to use a broken browser, have a popup window say 'your browser is broken, use firefox', and that's it, end of story."

Uh, they do. Except they're EVEN MORE unobtrusive about it.

I was curious, so I decided to check it all out in IE myself. The page opened fine, just with a SMALL header at the top:

"Please consider upgrading your Web browser
Internet Explorer doesn't properly support CSS standards (IE 52% vs. Firefox 93%). If you visit our site with Firefox or Safari, it works perfectly. NewsCloud recommends you upgrade to Mozilla's open source Firefox browser for a better experience with our Web site."

What's wrong with that?