IE8 – ‘The Dream’ coming true or more heartache for developers?
I came across a post last week, so long ago now I can’t recall how I found it, and it gives and overview of a presentation by Chris Wilson, platform architect of Internet Explorer, on the future developments taking place over at IE towers. As I read some of the ideas, in particular the part about ‘Web site authors to “opt-in” to standards mode when developing IE 8.0 sites‘, I couldn’t help but feel a bit annoyed. I understand that Microsoft have their reasons for wanting to maintain some independence and not just step in line with the other standards-compliant browsers, but for a web developer this seems to point down the road to code being needed rather unnecessarily to make future sites work in IE8 and beyond.
In terms of standards complinacy, if the next version of IE adopted the standards already in use by browsers such as Firefox or Opera, would the ratio of users really change that dramatically? IE is currently the broswer of choice for the mjority of web users and shows no real sign of slipping. By adopting proper standards would this not take away the reason to switch to another browser? I think it would be fair to say Microsoft have lost users who have already turned to standards compliant browsers, I mean would you really go to the trouble of getting the latest version of IE when you already have a perfectly good and compliant browser in use? No. But if they concentrated their focus on getting the IE users up to speed then that’d be it. Battle won. MS can go on selling their operating system with nice sexy standards compliant browser pre-installed and would probably still maintain their leadership.
This is never going to happen as there is a lot more at stake for them than this here XHTML/CSS coder’s dream that one day he will code something that will display happily with no worries of it breaking in IE.
The article goes on to mention the improvments in developer extensions, but this just makes me think ‘too little too late’. Whatever IE can come up with is unlikely to convince a Firefox user to switch as the extension list for Firefox is constantly growing and a version of the IE tool will no doubt appear in no time.
I had many more ideas to write here but I’m getting tired and I can always come back and edit this at a later date. For now I’m going to wrap up saying I hope that whatever Microsoft has in mind, it will consider the feelings of us humble developers otherwise they run the risk of angerng us further and telling everyone to switch to Firefox….
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