May 03
Is Microsoft listening?
2004 at 04.06 am posted by Veerle Pieters
Apparently they are if we are to believe Robert Scoble. According to Andrei Herasimchuk from Design by Fire who started all this we now have the opportunity to tell Microsoft about our daily sufferings with Internet Explorer. Maybe if we all voice-in the people in Redmond will see the light and bring Internet Explorer on par with the Safari, Firefox and other standard compliant browsers that are out there.
There aren't many opportunities like this so who knows what will come out of this. It certainly doesn't hurt to try ;-) It would be great if we all could start using the time that we loose with searching for hacks etc in spending more creatively thinking. We can dream can't we? So what do you have to do?
- Go to Scoble's website and post a comment.
- What is the problem exactly?
- How does it happen, exactly, using what code?
- Does the XHTML and CSS code work in Mozilla, Firefox, Opera an Safari?
- Pick only three problems. Do not flood Scoble with an novel side comment.
Here is my personal top 3
- 1. Fix the appearance of the "dotted" attribute
- 2. Lack of support for min-width and max-width
- 3. Lack of :hover support
Anyway here is a thanks to Andrei for trying to make our job a bit easier ;-)
10served
1
I’d propably bump PNG in my personal top3.
Anyway, nice to see something (could) happen for IE.
2
Actually this post is less than accurate. Scoble promises nothing. Not that anything new is forthcoming with MSIE. Not even that your comments will be heard. All he promises is that he’ll “pass your comments along”.
Think of it this way… MS is asking all of us to do the legwork to detail out things they should have known all along, going through the motions of “listening” to us, and then after they release MSIE 6.1 (or 6.5 or whatever they’ll call it) with XPSP2 this summer they’ll probably go right back to working on Longhorn.
All they are _really_ doing is keeping their market share up there while working on Longhorn. Oh yeah, probably one more shrewd thing too: listening to our feedback to make sure that in 2006 (or 2007) when Longhorn is released, they covered all their bases by making sure IT’S rendering engine - something much different than MSIE - does everything right.
As a developer, you’re stuck. As a user, your best bet is to use Firefox.
3
Dave is right on. how could the biggest softwares co in the world, that destroyed netscape, not be _able_ to write a standards complient browser? give me a break! all the others can, so let them fiqure it out. but my guess is that they _want_ it broken so that it only works on their _standards_ ;-) with the majority of folks on windows boxes using IE as their browser why chnage anything for the community!! gates & co will tell u “we are the community"…
4
Right on!
My wishlist:
1. CSS switcher (like Firefox’s)
2. discontinue support for CSS image filters
3. discontinue support for “htc” effects
Items #2 and #3 are non-standard CSS, rather they are proprietary.
MS has the tendency to drive it’s proprietary campaign, in its effort to monopolize and dominate.
Alas, we’ve got some developments under our sleeves~
5
@Dave: Actually this post is less than accurate
Why is this less than accurate? The question was is Microsoft listening and I wrote if we are to BELIEVE Robert Scoble they are. I never talked about any promises. I’ve also have some doubts about this which is clear if you read the article correctly.
There aren’t many opportunities like this so who knows what will come out of this. It certainly doesn’t hurt to try ;-)
So my point was it doesn’t hurt to try, no? If nobody tries everything surely will stay the same. I just took the opportunity.
6
It’s too late. 3-4 years until a new IE version gets high enough penetration.
7
Just a bit of trivia: according to the w3c, Mac IE 5 was the first browser to reach better than 99% support for CSS1, in March 2000
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
So MS hasn’t eschewed web standards completely - in fact it once was the leader of it’s class!
8
Chris, yes you are right here all the way, I.E. 5 was my favorite browser back then before Mac OS X and Safari. Tantek Celik was the person responsible for the rendering engine, this guy is a serious talent and a name in the CSS world. Too bad he just left Microsoft to start working at Technorati.
9
i too agree!
my hope is that microsoft comes around with a newer browser soon.
My biggest tiff is the :hover pseudo class. You could do so many other cooler things if that worked on more things besides an anchor tag.
10
Very good site, congratulations!