Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2, Fuck You 2
5th March 2006 by
So I finally got round to downloading the IE7 preview. I didn’t really want it, but a lot of sites are effectively my problem now, so I thought I ought to check if our stuff was going to work all right.
The first thing I noticed was an absolute abortion of a user interface, but it’s hardly as though I’d ever seriously consider using it as my main browser anyway, so I skipped ahead to testing some of the problems they claimed to have fixed in order to be more standards–compliant.
Thing is, in the main, the problems they’ve fixed aren’t the problems anyone had, erm, a problem with. What they’ve fixed are all the bugs that people used to get around the actual crippling flaws in the IE rendering engine. The shitty positioning errors are still there. The margin implementation is still fucked. Still no support for min/max width and height. The hacks to avoid those problems don’t work any more.
Amusingly, last year the IE development team chided people for using those hacks and suggested seriously that everyone immediately remove them, replacing them with another shitty IE–only fix. Incidentally, at that point there wasn’t a public release of IE7 to test those changes in.
An uncharitable observer might suggest that it’s unreasonable to expect people to make changes against a piece of software that’s in a constant state of flux and that you can’t even see. Me, I think it was taking fucking liberties.
Still, we all have our valued users to think of, right?
Now, it’s still in beta, sure. Maybe everything will be peaches and cream come the final release. But any software developer not clinically retarded should know better than to fix the fix before fixing the problem. Personally, I’ve already had enough. IE6 is the last browser for which I’m going to make exceptions. Right now, this page doesn’t serve any CSS to IE7 whatsoever. That might change when IE7 Final ships, but if it’s still broken, it won’t.
Microsoft are the richest software company in the world. Apparently they “hope” to have min/max width and height sorted out for the final release. What kind of software company doesn’t a) know what features they’re actually building for a particular release and b) can even consider it acceptable to ship without basic, fundamental functionality missing? A shit software company, that’s what kind. So fuck ‘em.
And y’know, much as I’d like to, obviously I can’t do that in my day job. Management are never going to go for shutting out potentially 90% of your user base. But I don’t know. Fast internet connections are commonplace now. You can switch to a better browser in about five minutes. And the browser isn’t the application. The web that it browses is.
In 1993, iD Software released Doom and people spent hundreds of pounds on new PCs to play it. If a few cool, popular web applications — last.fm, flickr, myspace, heck, even google, etc. — required that people download Firefox or Opera, you can bet they’d do it. Mostly, they don’t give a shit what they use to get the job done. We have to care about that; they’ll use whatever it takes to get at the cool web site their mates are all talking about. Nobody bitches about downloading a Flash plug–in to watch the latest retarded cartoon going round the office. Firefox doesn’t take any longer.
Imagine if a handful of sites like that closed their doors to IE tomorrow. Would the sites die or would IE? What do you reckon IE’s share of the market would be the day after? How compliant do you think the next version of IE would be?
We’re constantly told that we have to support old browsers, browsers that don’t obey the standards, browsers that actively and purposefully break the standards.
Says who?
