Unintentionally Blank

2008 is turning out to be the year of the browser, IE8 is in beta and passes the Acid 2 test (I’ve seen it do it myself!) and Firefox 3 is in its final beta stages (also passing Acid 2) and is expected to launch in June. But this week it is the turn of the smaller, but no less important browsers, the generally well behaved, but still with single figure percentages in the share of the market, Opera and Safari.

Who Needs Acid 2? We’ve Got Acid 3!

Earlier in the week, Safari 3.1 was released bringing web fonts and, the disputed, CSS animations. The real news, however, is in the nightly builds of both Opera and Safari, both of which claimed to have passed the very new Acid 3 test. Opera posted first on Wednesday to say that they had passed with 100/100, but were closely followed by Safari claiming 100% in Webkit too. The only confusion is that to get 100, the Webkit developers actually recorded a bug in the test which was subsequently fixed before they posted, so maybe Opera only makes 99, we’ll have to see. My copy of Firefox 2 I’m writing this with made a paltry 53/100, so even nearly there is a great achievement.

Competition Rules When Everyone Competes

Competition and tests and standards have clearly had Opera and Safari developers working incredibly hard to pass Acid 3. If only this were true for Mozilla, who don’t seem to believe in it. I understand that they are readying a final release and that perhaps the intricacies of Acid 3 aren’t that important now, but blowing it off entirely is not the correct attitude (even Microsoft changed their tune about Acid 2 from when they wrote this to the recent joy of passing).

The only sad point is that neither of the two largest browsers are focused on Acid 3 at the moment, which means that regardless of all the work the Opera and Safari teams have put in, no-one will be able to safely use many of the standards, all from prior to 2004 as set out by the rules of the test, for longer still.

Congratulations

Nothing can be taken away from either of the development teams though, congratulations to both Opera and Safari, and here’s hoping that the other two take notice of these successes and get on with supporting these standards too.

It’s all go in the developer community this week and Microsoft are at the centre of it all!

Version Targeting Missed The Target

First, on Monday, Dean Hachamovitch posted about Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8. The point of the post was to change their mind over the version targeting idea, no longer will the default mode for Internet Explorer be IE7’s rendering mode. Standards support has now been seen to be of top priority, as is working like the other browsers. This is also in response to the feedback from the community.

Not my feedback, of course, I eventually decided I approved of the original idea so that web site owners who had no idea what web standards were wouldn’t be battered by another round of breaking sites like when IE7 was released. One of the more important lines from Dean’s post seemed to me to be:

[T]his choice creates a clear call to action to site developers to make sure their web content works well in IE.

Now it is up to everyone who owns a site to make sure it works in IE8 or add the meta tag to ensure IE7 rendering. It’s a big job, but we can start now!

IE8 Beta 1 Released

Yes, it’s here! IE8 Beta 1 is available for download now! I’m writing this on a Mac at the moment, but I look forward to getting my hands on it, testing my sites and experiments, testing the web in general. Things to look forward to, as developers, in the new IE are:

• Full CSS 2.1 support
• Better scripting performance (though, according to comments on the IEblog article, this hasn’t been optimised for this beta, so will seem slower)
• Early support for HTML5
• Built in developer tools

…and much more!

A Bright New Future

So, I don’t mind that the IE team changed their mind. It means less thinking for me, as I don’t have to add meta tags or HTML 5 DOCTYPES, and it means that progressive enhancement lives on as we know it. The issue of multiple rendering engines (IE 6, 7 and 8 to start with, it sounds like) and the weight and complexity of it will still be a question but one that should be answered soon. Finally, it is nice to see the product of all this work and debate and get to grips with it. I will try not to turn this blog into a report on IE8’s wins and losses (like Jonathan Snook’s Twitter stream earlier!) but I am fascinated by the arrival of the newest version of the world’s most popular browser.

All in all it is a bright future for web development and this first beta is a peek into that future of standards support across the board. Let’s hope it is a good peek.

Quick bit of news today, Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 has been released to a select few for testing. I wonder whether, as some suggested, the version targeting has been left out at this stage. Then again, I also wonder what it looks like, what it feels like to use, how much of an improvement it is in terms of CSS and JavaScript and how much better it is than IE7. I would love to have an early look! Apparently there will be a public beta soon and we can look forward to demonstrations at the upcoming Mix 08, but who wants to wait?

So, if anyone’s listening in Microsoft, I’d love to see your new browser!

As the dust takes a long time to settle after the recent discussions over the version targeting in Internet Explorer 8 we seem to be living in the future. Tim at CSS Karma made an interesting observation over the market share IE6 and 7 have at the moment.

IE7 Surges Forward

His stats from the North Carolina State University Blackboard login page show that IE7 has taken over as the dominant browser from IE6. Up until now I had assumed that the two were fighting it out quite evenly, but here was some evidence that IE7 is finally starting to win. I checked my stats and the recent trend showed that IE7 was also in the lead.

Maybe this is due to Microsoft opening IE7 up to all Windows users (i.e. including those who didn’t pay for it, if you know what I mean) by removing the Windows Genuine Advantage check back in October last year. Maybe the recent second round of automatic updates pushing IE7 out again are helping (though it’s interesting to note that Microsoft still feel like they have to provide escape mechanisms for those who insist on sticking with IE6, another argument for version targeting perhaps).

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Of course, Tim’s stats come mainly from young, tech savvy students and mine are most likely interested in web development and this skews the figures somewhat. Plus, the only browser usage stats that matter to your site are the ones for your users. But I’m interested anyway, so what are the trends on your site/blog? Have you seen IE7 taking a larger slice of the pie? Is IE6 still holding strong? Is Firefox beating both of them (it is here)? Drop me a comment and let’s see if this trend is for real.

The debate still rages regarding Microsoft’s decision to allow web developers to target which version of IE they want to render their pages in. I have made my thoughts known and follwed up when I learned more. As I have spent some time away from the computer and had time to reflect, I just wanted to make my final thoughts known on the subject.

A Quick Correction

In my last post I referred to “lazy developers” being those that wouldn’t necessarily want to, or know how to, fix their sites if a new browser release broke them. Zeldman put this in a much better way with “the second-grade teacher defense” and I concede that, due to poor writing by myself, I was horribly off the mark and I hope I didn’t offend anyone. Rather than those who cannot be bothered, it is those who create websites for themselves and their close communities, teams or families, those who don’t know what a web standard is or what the difference between Internet Explorer and Firefox in terms of rendering is, those who certainly don’t have a copy of Zeldman’s book at home to consult that will be affected. Rather than their sites falling apart at the mere mention of a new version of IE, they will have some stability and IE users around the world will not suffer when they “upgrade” their browser.

Users, Users, Users

That last point above really is the crux of the issue. Perhaps releasing the information on A List Apart to a bunch of web standards fanatics wasn’t the best of ideas, since the first thing you ask is, “What’s in it for me?”

For everyone who reads A List Apart, there is potentially nothing of any use in the version targeting, especially since we can sidestep the version lock in using the “edge” keyword or unknown DOCTYPES, like HTML5. The real benefit is to users, and Microsoft has a lot of them. The thing is, if a new version of IE breaks a website, any user of that site who upgrades sees or is unable to use that broken site. I had a great conversation about this in the comments of Joe Dolson’s post on the matter, which is worth reading too.

Software Issues

The final concerns I have about the matter are based around IE itself. Carrying rendering engines and legacy code, maintaining and patching them but retaining the same bugs is all going to be incredibly hard to do and Microsoft have their work cut out for them for the future now. I only wonder whether this plan is meant to fail eventually, once Microsoft has had some breathing space and managed to finally catch up with implementing the standards that we have already. Then the consideration is whether someone invents another switch or whether there should be one final hit, one more “breaking the web”, before we can view IE as an equal with the other browsers and we never have to switch anything again.

In Conclusion

This is the last I have to say on this issue for now, unless something truly groundbreaking comes along. I don’t mind the switch, I hope it keeps the web intact for those that need it while I look forward to seeing IE support more and more standards, from Acid2 to, hopefully, CSS3.

Finally, I just wish the news had been broken using lemurs. I think there would have been a lot less hassle and everyone would have understood much quicker. Maybe something to think about for the A List Apart editors!