Enterprise Browser Analysis: IE8 As Laggard

1. 

   stelt

   June 1, 2009 at 7:22 am

   > … Firefox … leading the way on … SVG …

   Though Firefox is doing quite nicely on this aspect, Opera has been in the lead for years on this aspect
2. 

   admin

   June 1, 2009 at 2:11 pm

   I agree that Opera has pioneered on SVG and that is one reason I raised their rating on Features from Good to Excellent. There are notable Firefox misses in the SVG including the animation, color profile and font-modules even in Firefox 3; but by keeping it alive and improving it among the US browser vendors Mozilla prevents SVG from becoming a European-only feature. But look at Microsoft’s moves – refusal to implement and instead a move to get elements of its XAML/WPF as the foundation for a new “presentation” standard. The last thing the Web community wants or needs is an overlaying of more de facto extensions over incompletely implemented standards.
3. 

   DavidM

   October 3, 2009 at 7:09 pm

   Hi All,
   I am forever bemused by IE’s rating as having poor standars complience. I mean, there a very few occassions when IE doesn’t work on a complient page, and it is far more forgiving to errors or ommissions or simplifications of code and content than other browsers. Also, when you consider that there are probably more than 5,000 seperate tags, properties, and combinations of these to be supported and you can name the few that cause some problems for IE (and many more that cause even more problems for other browsers), I think that IE is held by the devel community to a higher standard than other browsers. Historically, there are many more flavours in other languages and operating systems (Unix used to have up to 20 different flavours that did not comply with one another at a fundamental level, and same went for FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, SQL, etc). I am not saying that efforts should net be made for everyone to be standards complient – no, I just think that people who are generally opposed to Microsoft tend to use standards as the be-all and end-all to criticise IE and other MS products when even the standards are flawed or unclear and that we should be very clear when using a term like “poor” standards complience – that would indicate to me that a page that was even vaguely standards complient would have difficulty running on IE.

   Cheers.
4. 

   Bruce Stoner

   December 6, 2009 at 10:35 pm

   Internet Explorer 8 seems to be better than any previous version of IE. IE8 is very stable and rarely crashes or cause blue screens.
5. 

   admin

   December 7, 2009 at 4:40 pm

   David, Bruce –

   Regarding reliability, I have just been working on a report that requires me to have about 100++ browser pages open at the same time. I began doing this in IE8 because I ran into some sites that had IE-proprietary code. However, when I went to about 20 pages. IE just could not cope with the load. It stalled and just made itself completely unavailable with that load of browser windows open. On the same machine I ran the identically same websites [less the 3 offending Windows-only sites]in Google’s Chrome 4.02 browser. NO PROBLEMS WHATSOVER. In contrast, Chrome provided fast response time, quick downloads, etc, etc. That is what I mean by reliability problems.

   As for Web standards being flawed and unclear I am listening at the same time as I have 100 pages open to a lecture about ECMAScript 5 and its new standards. These guys are not fooling around – rigorous peer review, jealous watchover by many vendors, and comprehensive testing are the topics of the day.

   David, as a Web developer what I resent most of all is all the extra work I and all my Web developer colleagues have to go through to make Microsoft IE in all its incarnations [IE6 still has 20%++ market share] work properly. Read the documentation for any JavasCript Framework [jQuery, EXTjs, Mootools are good and free ones] and see how much work and sophisticated hacks the developers have to do to make their DHTML work in the IE browsers.

   Finally, if you have any doubts whatsover on whether IE trails badly in browser performance, features and standards compliance – see the following wikipedia posting : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers

   Right now Microsoft is being as abusive of Web standards and development as IBM was to many people’s eyes in the lates 1980’s and early 1990’s. This disaffection was the key to Microsoft’s success, especially with Windows over the security conscious OS/2. Yet later in the decade after Windows won overwhelmingly in the market place, Windows playing fast and loose on “standards and security” caused havoc for businesses everywhere with not just blue screens of death but also a flood of worms and viruses. One sector that survived here in Canada – the banks which had standardized on OS/2 which lasted to the early 2000’s.

   So I look at the problem in this way – one of the reasons that Bill Gates is the richest person in the World is because he and his troopers have passed on a lot of HIS software’s problems [and the cost of fixing them up] on to to his customers and/or third parties. So, yes Bill and Melinda can go around the World solving some nasty but doable health problems. Well and good – but that has been done while the fixes, hacks and workarounds to IE and the Microsoft Web deficiencies [including stalling on delivering new Web standards- see Microsoft’s laggard record on XFORMS, E4X, JPEG2000, CSS3, HTML5 and likely ECMAScript 5 And as for Windows Vista, this was alpha code foisted on users. No wonder so many business shops stuck with Windows XP – while individual customers were forced to take Vista on a ll new compures from June 2008. Oh wait – no no you can get Windows XP on Netbooks because Vista would not fit …. I mean, please, defending Microsoft’s customer service record is Mission Impossible.
6. 

   John

   September 11, 2010 at 12:57 pm

   hey, nice blog…really like it and added to bookmarks. keep up with good work

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