

Why Internet Explorer 8 still Sucks Balls - pavs
http://www.windowhaxor.net/2008/03/06/why-internet-explorer-8-still-sucks-balls/
I was trying to load linux.com and it tells you microsoft’s feeling towards open source software by the way it was loading the website
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drm237
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.

~~~
nex3
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.

~~~
mechanical_fish
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.

~~~
scorxn
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...](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en)

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iowahansen
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?

~~~
jamesbritt
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.

~~~
iowahansen
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?

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xirium
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.

~~~
umjames
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.

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

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

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Rickasaurus
I just love the title of this article so much.

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

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domnit
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.

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

~~~
domnit
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.

~~~
neilc
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...

