Microsoft dry-cleans browser trousers ready for IE 9 beta Microsoft completed its round of pre-beta tests of the company’s upcoming Internet Explorer 9 by releasing the fourth and final platform preview of the software yesterday. The next time the vendor pushes out an IE 9 update it will come in beta form. Presumably that test version of the browser will arrive at some point in the …
Does anyone want yet another version of IE floating around? Regardless of improvements it's going to be yet another version of the browser that I am going to have to take into account when writing new sites. It's bad enough having to write custom CSS for IE6, IE7 and IE8 without also having to deal with IE9. Plus it means I'm going to have to use even more disk space for another virtual machine with IE9 on it...
I'm beginning to wonder if Microsoft's new strategy to kill all the other browsers is to force developers to spend all their time testing and fixing their sites on every version of IE out there. This will then ensure that developers don't have time to make sure their sites work with Firefox/Opera/Safari/Chrome...
I've yet to find any significant problems between Firefox or Chrome versions. IE on the other hand always has significant rendering differences between versions. Furthermore Firefox and Chrome users are usually quite tech savvy and keep to the later versions of the browsers (the auto-update in Firefox works very well too).
At the end of the day, IE9 is another browser that I've got to validate sites against, it will likely still have rendering bugs that aren't in FF/webkit and it won't make much of a dent in all the IE6, IE7 and IE8 installs still out there. Things would be a lot better if MS just gave up and killed IE or replaced it with a webkit core.
The fact that the browser is more complaint, you should have to do less custom CSS for the browser to render it correctly. In fact it should be the same CSS in IE9 as you use for Firefox/Safari/Chrome. If it doesn't render correctly then it's just another failed Microsoft project.
And, there, is the ultimate reason for further development of Internet Exploder.
It will force adoptions of new Windows versions.
Kind of insidious, when you think about it.
That's what IE has been about, ever since they stopped making it on the Unix machines (no joke) and even the Mac machines as well.
Webkit, compiled from source if you must.
Otherwise, text mode browsing FTW!
Seriously, have you heard of this thing called "business"? How _dare_ MS spend $millions making free software in order to increase sales of their paid products... seriously take a day-trip to this little place called Real Life. Why do you think companies like Goolge put money into open-source... to _make money_.
When it gets released, most regular people will use it as it is, on a new computer, and many others will find themselves using it through Windows Update. The savy ones will install something else, anyway, and IE's own conditionals are safe enough to bodge stuff in for the older versions.
I've already written most of the extra styling, for all the broken grey rectangles that came before it, and none of that is going to change. So, this one is starting to finally look like the IE that I can treat as one of the other browsers, that I never have to write special stuff for. That's good, since a growing subset of clients and internal staff are using other ways of viewing websites rather than sit-up-and-beg computers, anyway, so I'd far rather support that group.
A few people in our other offices are still stuck on IE 6, but the truth I've been trying to spread, is that a lot of our internal and external websites (which allegedly need IE 6) actually work fine in other browsers. It's just that no one has ever bothered checking them.
The fact that the people, at the site I'm particularly thinking of, are stuck on an ancient web browser, on an equally ancient operating system, is not wholly unrelated to the fact that their network administrator is a lecherous and creepy prick, who would rather deny something to his users than try and work out what was wrong. They know my sites work fine, when they're working from home, on their own PCs, anyway, because they're using a proper browser. Work is horrible: go figure.
I never use Windows, myself, but I'm okay with the fact that others do, and I welcome anything which reduces the side effects of them doing so, which impinge upon my working day in unpleasant ways. I'm old enough to remember what it was like to have to support Netscape 4, so I count my blessings.
"It grabbed an impressive 95 out of a possible 100 web standards credentials."
That would be impressive, 2 years ago. Now it's just sad. Opera and Webkit (i.e, Safari and Chrome) have had scores of 100 for ages now -- even their mobile browsers pass completely.
So IE9 beta beats Firefox 3.6 by 1 point. But FireFox 4 is in beta, too, and it already scores 97. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3#Browsers_that_pass)
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