A BulletProof Idea*

IE 8 Causes A Stir

// January 31st, 2008 // Internet Explorer, browsers, microsoft

Later this year we will see the latest incarnation of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, IE8. This comes hot on the heels (2 years later – not bad for Microsoft) of IE7 which was not the success that Microsoft hoped to achieve, but nevertheless it gave greater web standards support than IE6 much to the joy of web designers around the globe.

IE 8 promises to be a giant leap forward in web standards support, offering many options to designers and developers that have been missing from previous versions of the browser. It will also follow the CSS 2.1 spec due to the changes being made to IE’s rendering engine. (No more ‘Has Layout’ yay!). Also it is the latest standards compliant browser to pass the Acid 2 Test.

However, there is a caveat – Microsoft fear that with such significant changes being made to IE’s rendering engine to provide standards support, websites previously built without standards in mind will become broken.

What angered the web community with IE 7 was that websites that looked great in IE6 and designed with standards in mind became broken in IE7. According to Roger Johansson this was because:

1. Sites that have an XML declaration before the DOCTYPE, making IE 6 use quirks mode, but not IE 7. Both browsers still get the same CSS, so IE 7 renders it differently.
2. Sites that depend heavily on CSS hacks that no longer work in IE 7.
3. Sites that use conditional comments to feed a bugfix stylesheet to IE without specifying a version number, thereby making IE 7 load the bugfixes and mess up rendering.

A Fourth Problem – The DOCTYPE switch

Microsoft have themselves found a fourth – the DOCTYPE switch. This is a vital component enabling advanced CSS layouts to be displayed correctly. To cut a long story short, this means that a document with a well formed DOCTYPE of a current HTML standard will display and render the information in Standards Compliant Mode using W3C’s box model. If no DOCTYPE was found then the information would be displayed or rendered in Quirks Mode using a non standard box model.

The Solution?

Microsoft’s proposal to fix this is to implement a snippet of code in the HTTP header of documents:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />.

This new HTTP header makes future versions of IE being able to render documents just as they would in previous versions. In this case, IE 8 being able to render documents as they would render in IE7. This would solve the problem I mentioned earlier in this post when vendors complained about their IE6 sites breaking in IE7. It also means that you need to specifically declare that you want IE8 to be IE8 then you have to put in this HTTP header or the browser will just behave like IE7.

Reaction

These latest developments have caused a furore in the world of web design. Eric Meyer and Johnathan Snook are some of those in the ‘yes’ camp with Rachel Andrew and John Resig firmly in the ‘No’ camp. There are one or two out there sitting on the fence who still can’t quite decide, Ethan Marcotte says that he “feels uneasy about it.”

Safari have responded by saying that they would not be implementing version targetting on the Safari browser, while Mike Davies says that it is “The end of the line for IE”.

What does concern me is that it could bring back the bad old days of targeting specific browsers or browser ‘lock out’. Developers that are not that ‘well informed’ about the HTTP header would in the future just not include this new snippet of code, forever locking their sites to render in IE7 in whatever future version of IE is current. Savvy developers could use this to their advantage by locking down support for IE and turning their attention to other browsers – just like the bad old days…….again!

Another interesting development that came to light recently, was that Microsoft has warned corporate administrators that it will push a new version of Internet Explorer 7 their way next month (February 2008), and it has posted guidelines on how to ward off the automatic update if admins want to keep the older IE6 browser on their companies’ machines.

This was announced last October (2070),when Microsoft said it would no longer require users to prove they owned a legitimate copy of Windows XP before they were allowed to download the newer browser. Microsoft explained that the move was prompted by security concerns.

“Because Microsoft takes its commitment to help protect the entire Windows ecosystem seriously, we’re updating the IE7 installation experience to make it available as broadly as possible to all Windows users.” Steve Reynolds, IE program manager.

When you consider that more than 1 in 3 people worldwide still use IE6, there is going to be some big problems for all of us ahead.