Why Internet Explorer 7 Will Break the Web
Author: Michael CaloreMichael Calore
Microsoft's next generation browser is due to arrive in a week or two (October 18 is the word on the street), so you'd better prepare yourself for the inevitable meltdown.
Much has been made about Microsoft's employment of a backward process for rolling out Internet Explorer 7. The IE7 team asked web developers to download the browser and test their sites against it. Here's the exact wording from a post on the Microsoft Developer's Network published yesterday, October 12:
Prior to deployment of IE 7, we strongly recommend that you test your Web sites, extensions, and applications to make sure they are ready. Microsoft recommends that Web sites and applications are ready for the release of Internet Explorer 7 this month.
Now, I've heard this warning before, but it still gets me riled up to read it. Upon seeing it yesterday, my first thought was, "This is totally backwards! Isn't this exactly the scenario that web standards were put in place to prevent?" The governing body of the web, the W3C (of which Microsoft is a member), dictates the standards that browsers must adhere to. That way, web developers can build their sites to comply with those standards and guarantee that any browser visiting their site will render the pages properly.
Of course, Microsoft has a history of dictating their own standards, and they have the power to do so because their browser is used by somewhere around 80-85% of the world's web surfing audience.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 Readiness Toolkit offers "testing guidance and tips for isolating and identifying a particular compatibility problem." Identifying compatibility problems should be Microsoft's task, not the web developers' task.
To be fair, Internet Explorer 7 offers more support for web standards than previous versions. Chris Wilson, the group program manager for IE, spoke about all of the work that Microsoft is doing to fix web standards support in IE 7 during an interview posted on ZDNet. Then, he concluded with this: "I do have to say we've got a lot more work to do after that. We've been plotting out the next couple of releases of IE - and I certainly don't think that we're done with improving web standards support at all."
Of course, there are a great number of web developers who refuse to play nice with web standards, as well. But the main problem is that most other browsers (Firefox, Safari, Mozilla and Opera) all behave the relatively same, standards-compliant fashion. Also add the fact that there will be multiple versions of Internet Explorer 7 – one for Windows XP users and one for Windows Vista users.
Web developers should be able to expect that IE7 will run their site's web app and render their pages correctly when it comes out. I started using Firefox 2 at beta 1 and it broke very few pages. I started using Safari at 1.0 and the only pages I couldn't access were hosted by online banking sites.
So, is that the way it should be, or is that asking too much?
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