Sorry, more Internet Explorer woes...

Posted by Webmaster on 29 April 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: IE, internet explorer, browsers

IE8 is a pretty big event. Potentially it could revolutionise the world's browsing.

It probably won't, but it is still an important consideration for web designers and developers.

So we are all [or at least should be] watching closely to see what is happening.

I check the W3C's browser usage table http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp quite often, just to see how much closer we are to forgetting IE6 hacks, but also to see how many people are switching over. It's like a really, really, really long horse race. The favourites are already way out in front.

Once it gets to about 5% for IE8, I'll upgrade and make another VM with IE7 on.

Anyway, on to the point.

I was watching a video on how IE8 treats some box model (the way a browser draws squares and rectangles on the page, with width, height, padding, margins and borders) css attributes http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/dd483219.aspx and it just seems to cloud the issue even more.

The box model has always been a nightmare for web developers, especially for IE6. The way IE6 interprets the size calculations are way different from most other browsers (who do all seem to be slightly different) so you would think that Microsoft would want to get in line with the other 4 or 5 main players.

It was all looking good in IE7. The box model took a lot less work to hack and the browser generally behaved more like other products. It was still slow and we still had IE6 being used far more than was good for the world, but there was definite change in the air.

So IE8 arrives. Cynical me thinks it will still be slow, have more holes than swiss cheese and never get all the IE market share. I was optimistic about the prosect of rendering and CSS behaviour bein more normal [and some AJAX things that I won't go in to now].

It seems that IE is going right ahead and interpreting CSS 3 how it likes, rather then comparing notes which would seem on the face of it to be the best plan. Yet more IE specific attributes too.

It doesn't look good really.

The one saving grace for the moment is IE7 compatability mode. IE7 is pretty decent and behaves reasonably well, so I can see that it will be a commonly used meta value.

The real concern here is that it took IE a while to come [kinda] in line with everyone else for CSS 2, but with CSS 3 fast approaching finalisation, I can see it creating a great big interpretational divide again between the way browsers behave. This is likely to happen between other browsers like Chrome, Opera and Firefox too.

I can see some more blogging coming on in the near future. And me desperately looking for CSS 3 hacks....