Thoughts 14 Mar 2008 07:56 pm
Microsoft says that IE8 will break the web
I’ve read this several places.
By making “super-standards” mode the IE 8 default, Microsoft officials claimed that going the full-fledged standards route would “break the Web.”
It looks to me like they’ve got that backwards.
If their so called Standards based browser doesn’t display pages correctly then the problem is a broken browser not a broken website.
Microsoft has always had a problem with playing nice with others. They came up with their own standards a few years back and then claimed that they were standards compliant.
So now they seem to say that if a website doesn’t comply with their standards then it’s the website that’s broken.
Here’s a recent statement in which they appear to be backpedaling a bit, but still insisting that they are the leaders in their game of catch-up:
“We started from a simple statement of ‘enable (and encourage) interoperable web development, but don’t force IE to break pages that work properly in IE today.’ I think we all want to converge to a world where a web developer doesn’t have to spend much time at all testing and recoding their site for different browsers. At the same time, we can’t break the web experience on current sites for users like my mom, even for as good a reason as improving standards compliance. With all the great styling and layout changes we’re working on in our new engine for IE8 to be much more standards compliant, that’s a lot of potential breakage.”
Yet another reason to use Firefox.