Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Why Internet Explorer 8 still Sucks Balls (windowhaxor.net)
14 points by pavs on March 6, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 21 comments


Anyone who's done website design knows that it's pretty standard to include hacks for IE. So the problem with IE now running in full standards mode, is that all of these hacks are still applied! And all of the IE conditional comments are still applied. So until developers have a chance to get their sites ready for a (mostly) standards compliant version of IE, of course it's not going to work correctly.


Well, the standard way to hack around IE is with conditional comments. And hopefully everyone has done the right thing and used "if LT IE 7" comments to avoid just this.


I don't think anyone could have predicted MS would ever attempt to become standards compliant.


Um, yeah, that's right. I was totally careful to comply strictly with Microsoft's recommended standards for nonstandard XHTML. Yep. I assure you that I certainly did not use any nonstandard hacks to get IE5 and IE6, the banes of my existence, to work at 3am on the night before the site launched. I swear to god.

Ahem.

On a completely unrelated note: Does anybody know if IE 8 runs in XP under Parallels? I have some websites that I should probably check.


MS updated their ie testing images on Thursday. ie8 + XP happens to be one of them. So I'd assume it'll work under Parallels. You'll have to run them thru Transporter first.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21E...


Sigh, one more browser version to test for. Plus with Firefox3 coming out this year and Safari gaining market share, things are going to get worse before they get better.

What are your favorite tools to automate functionality testing/layout verification in different browsers?


Selenium and WATIR and Firewatir.

On Windows I rigged up something to walk a site and take screen shots of each page so I could do a quick visual scan.


While there are a bunch of browser screen shot SaaS out there (browsershots.org browsercam.com), I haven't found a good app to do the same thing locally (that ideally controls the corresponding VMware instances as well).

Anyone seen such as a beast or do you need to roll such a thing by hand?


You've got at least 80% of web designers ensuring good layout as part of all of their compliance testing. Additionally, there's plenty of legacy intranet applications that only work well on Internet Explorer. Not defaulting to a quirks mode is a quick method to annoy designers and managers.


And hopefully a quicker way to get glacially slow, complacent IT departments (and the enterprise vendors they use) to use web standards.

So some pages break because the site was IE-only. Nothing like a swamped help desk to get the IT department up and moving.


As far as I know, IE 8 does default to quirks mode unless you specify the strict doctype. Seems reasonable to me.

If you have an intranet site that depends on the way IE 7 works, I think the simple answer is not to deploy IE 8 in your corporation until the Intranet site works with it.


i believe its still beta, and you showed 2 out of 80 gizallion sites.

- but! - this could be the vista of browsers. (no adoption)


I just love the title of this article so much.


usually i hate it when titles like "why X sucks", however, it's ok if you're talking about any flavor of IE.


Ugh. "Sucks balls." Ignore gay bash and hesitantly click.

So new layout features of a beta browser release are breaking some layouts. I wonder if the author ever used a Mozilla pre-release browser.


How is saying that something "sucks balls" a gay bash?


Agree. It has nothing to do with gay people. If he said "sucks ass", would you say "OMG, leave to gay people who love analingus alone!". Or, if he said, "sucks dick", is THAT gay-themed?

Isn't ball sucking a laudable trait in a heterosexual female as well as a homosexual male?

(Did I really just type that?)


Isn't ball sucking a laudable trait in a heterosexual female as well as a homosexual male?

fucking gold


You're right, I take back that it's a "bash", but it is informed by anti-gay culture. I don't want to get into a discussion about that, because it's very much besides the point. I only included it because I thought it betrayed the childish nature of picking on a piece of software for no reason besides that a beta release still has bugs.

If you ignore my criticism of the headline, the point still stands that it's the article is empty. All pre-release software has bugs that will be fixed in the final release, and browsers, including Mozilla's, usually have some layout bugs. These get fixed, so if people are looking for problems with a browser, they should look elsewhere.


Yeah, I totally agree about the article. Not only is it almost content-free, the content it does have is misguided. It's particularly ironic that the interweb flamed Microsoft for originally planning to make IE8's rendering conservative by default. Now that it is (more) standards-compliant and will hence break some pages that depend on the quirks of old IE versions, they get more abuse...


you complain "sucks balls" is anti-gay, but you call a bad article "childish". is that term not informed by anti-child culture?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: