It gives you information about compatibility with flash.

The interesting thing is that they only noticed after they broke the websites. Their marketers and managers are so disconnected from what the Web is that they were surprised. Either they didn’t bother testing those 200 websites, or more likely, the decision-makers just read the executive summary and pretended to understand. The IE engineers worked very hard to improve standards compliance, but the managers had no idea how crappy IE 6 was after languishing unfinished for five years. They’re only paying attention now because they accidentally “broke” the IE 6 web!

If they keep mismanaging their web browser’s development this way, it eventually won’t matter what new tags they introduce.

s/when or/when <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8.1″ /> or <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=â€?IE=9″ /> or

Microsoft’s “Don’t break the web” is a joke. They’ve been breaking the web for years by going against the very foundation of the web standards. What about stopping to break the web by fixing IE, for real this time. This mean using satndard mode by default, instead of IE7, and have developers opt-in for previous, broken, implementations. Opting out of IE7 mode to opt in for standards is complete nonsense.

Having IE7 as default mode may not break the old web, but it surely cripples the future web.

What do we do when when or pops out ? How are end users and other browser vendors supposed to deal with IE8 specific content ? Will browser vendors have to reverse enginneer, again, IE’s bugs in order to make such content accessible to ALL users ? This is complete nonsense. I know the reality is not as it ought be but there should be only one web, not the WWW and the IE-web. This META tag and IE7 as default mode reinforce the split of the web.

All/most the modern content ( web pages/apps, CSS hacks, JS frameworks, … ) use a correct DOCTYPE and feature detection + parser bugs to work around IE’s flaws ( and other browsers differences ). Such techniques constitute opt-in to fix non-standard mode. They will become dead code the day IE’s standard support finally come close to that of its competitors.

Content using quirks DOCTYPE can be treated as IE4 if they want. But the default mode MUST be standard and there is no need for this META tag.

Microsoft has experience with this problem. Recent experience. Faced with a buggy piece of software, which was backwards compatible with its earliest versions, they realized the only way to improve was to re-do some of the broken code, remove some of the old hacks. This allowed them to go forward and produce a better product. So they proceeded to make this new software, and through its development told the world that they needed to start thinking in a new way, and upgrade their old stuff. Some of the world listened, some did not. When time came to release their new software, sure enough, it broke hardware and software based on old bugs. Well written code, even from the old days, still ran, but stuff that was based on exploits was doomed. This product was meet with massive consumer rejection. The lifetime of its successor was extended, and they even implemented a downgrade program so that users could opt-out to their comfy old version.

By now most of you all can guess of what I speak, Windows Vista.

Microsoft, despite what all the apple freaks of the world think, is trying to be a forward thinking company. It was their forward thinking about CSS that got this whole mess started. But the corporate giants of the world do not buy Apple, they buy Microsoft, specifically for its support and reliability. Apple can afford to break the web, because it can simply force its users to upgrade. Apple does not worry that much about backwards compatibility. And its cool. Microsoft cares about the home user, but they also care about the giant corporations (and if you all think you wouldn’t if you were them, how many of you would think it was cool to be bought by Google? How many of you would structure your business such that this would be easier or more likely?). Giant corporations do not ‘just decide to roll IE8′. It’s a major decision to them. One that they prefer to make on their time, when they want to. Microsoft realizes that backwards compatibility, like it or not, is their game, and they have to do everything to protect it.

So they introduce a new way for web designers to allow their current sites to work, but access more correct functionality. Eventually, as IE6 and 7 become obsolete, the need for opt-in will be removed, and IE 10 or so will probably begin defaulting to correct rendering mode, and shortly after that, version switches will disappear again, and the world will be happy and using compliant browsers.

Recognizing that today is not that day, unlike their failure with vista, is an important step for them, and will allow them to implement a real, standards compliant browser, and, hopefully, eliminate cross browser issues down the line.

Hats off to Microsoft.

ps- This post was written in Windows Vista, by an author who actually listened to Microsoft when they said they were changing it up. How many of you can run OS 8 on your brand new Mac book air? Doesn’t work does it? This machine can run Windows 1.0.

Microsoft aren’t doing this because they want to. I’m most certain they would prefer not to do it for reasons of it impeding developing, testing and quality assurance and thus for economical reasons. The increased development cost is something they are willing to take because they do not think they could improve their standards support and still be able to render not only new content, but old content. Sure, they are only delaying the inevitable breaking of the web that will happen when they finally drop IE7 mode (and hopefully Quirks mode with it), perhaps indefinitely, but I believe they do not see a viable alternative. Making standards mode opt-out is not an option for the simple reason that the content that most need the opt-out is the content that is already written, not content that will be written in the future, and that already written content doesn’t contain such an opt-out. (Well, except for the opt out of triggering quirks mode. But they would need an opt-out for already written standards mode content too, and such an opt-out just isn’t present in live code.)

In other words, I do not believe that fixing standards support in IE would make that code you mention “dead code”. It would only make it so that sites end up in a part-of-tit-part-of-tat situation, which means breakage of the web. (As illustrated by the IE7 improvements to CSS breaking much live content.)

Another point I would make is that I really don’t see this alleged lock-in. The other browsers do not implement their Quirks Mode the same way as IE. Current Standards Mode is not implemented the same in other browsers either. Some content is indeed only compatible with IE, but most content in Standards Mode works in those other browsers by virtue of being coded for and tested in them primarily, then tweaked for the oddities of IE. If the content was never tweaked for IE in the first place, instead only using the subset that is common to all major browsers, then this switch wouldn’t be needed. As the situation is, I don’t see any other solution that would be acceptable from a don’t-break-the-web point of view.