who cares about IE problems with standards ?

[VGR]

To elaborate a bit on the off-topic discussion in this thread : http://www.expertsrt.net/main/forum/topic,1273.0/

Contrary to GrandSchtroumpf's and Esopo's views, having tried "my" solution, it seems to work in making people adopt a more responsible attitude via a move to a standards-compliant browser.

The browser share evolution (trend) clearly shows a growing adoption of Firefox over IE6 and IE7 (which also compensate each other, ie people ***usually*** "upgrade" from IE6 to IE7, when not moving to Firefox )

For instance, here's a wide audience website designed for medecine practicians [they're not at all "tech geeks"] where there is a "warning IE users" message leading to a page explaining why they should upgrade to Firefox :

Code:

Varapp (http://www.varapp.org)
Total hors Bots = 2285 from 2006-03-27 17:56:30 to 2007-06-30 08:25:05
Browser comptage % Rem
MSIE 7.0 293 12.82 % \
MSIE 6.0 684 29.93 % |
MSIE<6 13 0.57 % / total IE = 43.33 %
Moz Firefox 896 39.21 % \
Moz Gecko 58 2.54 % |
Mozilla Others 183 8.01 % / total Mozilla = 49.76 %
Opera 0 0.00 %
Others 119 5.21 %
Unknown 39 1.71 %

as you can see, over the last 15 months Mozilla (mainly Firefox) has roughly 50.00% of the audience, while IE is at 43.50%

On a different website, completely accessible for IE (so no message appears when an IE user comes in) where the audience is no more tech geeks either, I see this over 15 months :

Code:

Les Vieux Safrans (http://www.vieuxsafrans.org)
Total hors Bots = 1580 from 2004-08-04 20:45:07 to 2007-06-30 08:33:34
Browser comptage % Rem
MSIE 7.0 519 32.85 % \
MSIE 6.0 549 34.75 % |
MSIE<6 22 1.39 % / total IE = 68.99 %
Moz Firefox 352 22.28 % \
Moz Gecko 117 7.41 % |
Mozilla Others 5 0.32 % / total Mozilla = 30.00 %
Opera 1 0.06 %
Others 15 0.95 %
Unknown 0 0.00 %

The evolution is slower.

IMHO this means that taking action to warn IE users that they should change ***may*** brings fruits and results...

Anyway, even if explaining people why they experience problems and should change doesn't make them change, it does no harm warning them. They're from that point onwards responsible for the shit they get from the shit they use (SHISHO : shit in, shit out ;-)

Moreover, my professional conscience is relieved : I did my job ;-)

PS I'm conscious that in some countries the situation may be different today, but I'm of an optimistic nature in thinking the "change for the best" trend is global ;-)

[rdivilbiss]

I wish those numbers were indicative of the general browsing public, but alas all browser stats I've seen still show a significant lead by IE, and showed a slower rate of Mozilla growth after IE 7 was released.

I do not disagree with the premise that when it comes to standards IE is still significantly flawed, however.

But the question "who cares about IE problems with standards" to me is answered best with: "who cares, should be any web developer working on any site for which interoperability with any significant percentage of the general public is required or make economic sense."

On commercial web sites I'm not willing to offend the 2-10% of the browsing public who may not have JavaScript enabled any more than I'm willing to offend those with screen readers.  My ability to provide for all of the various user agents may not always be successful, but I must care lest I offend potential customers.  I would never consider it acceptable to ignore IE as much as it may pain me at times to accommodate IE.

This is my, hopefully reasoned response to who cares about IE's problems with standards.


I see this trend across my various sites....e.g. IE gaining ground since IE 7.

Code:

January 2007

MS Internet Explorer 29.80%
Firefox 28.20%
Mozilla 4.50%
Safari 1%
Konqueror 0.30%
Opera 0.20%

June 2007

MS Internet Explorer 70.60%
Firefox 15.30%
Safari 3.40%
Mozilla 1.80%
Camino 0.70%
Konqueror 0.30%
Opera 0%

[rdivilbiss]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers shows a multitude of different sources for browser stats, and IE is a huge percentage of the general browser public still.  To big to ignore in a general purpose site.

[VGR]

well, the problem is not to "ignore" a given browser, but to refuse to accomodate for its defects when they touch the cosmetics of the site (ensuring operability is a must). "best viewed with clean glasses" ;-)

as for your thinking, what do you think of the complete ignorance by Microsoft of Mac users, both those on the web and those that were not, in the period 1994-2006 ? Isn't this exactly what I said ? A way to force some users to change to your own solution ? And it worked...

as for the link you gave, the data are completely flawed and biased. I wonder how they were obtained ("rough estimates" it says). For 2006, Firefox at 9% is a complete underestimation that everybody will recognize (even in the US it was at more than 15% some time ago; look at the maps I provided ; I doubt it fell to 9% without any clear evidence thereof).

For computing a yearly value, I would rather take some mean or median from monthly data, for instance from that graphics :


It's true Firefox slowed a bit, but it grows from IE. With nearly 370 million full copy downloads, Firefox can't sustain a double-digit growth. This is noral, just looking at the number of people connected to Internet (or other HTTP networks) in the world : they aren't "billions" ;-)

It's also true IE7 vampirizes IE6, but that's normal. Nevertheless, a fraction of IE6 ussers finally change to Firefox. I mean, why use a beta bloatware copy when you can have the original ?

the same could be said of Office 2002, 2003, 2006 or whatever names they have : microsoft made them slightly incompatible with Office97 binary formats ; it's fun :D
Thus I never regretted my move to Open Office, completely compatible both ways with "microsoft office". And whan I save an Open Document of 20KB when "microsoft office" had it at 1 MB, I smile :D

[rdivilbiss]

I general response to your last point, I never said I was a MS supporter or apologist.  Far from it.  I acknowledge many deficiencies with MS formats and compliance with general standards.  My point was only that a web developer can not ignore IE.

However, since the thread that spawned this tactic was related to the HTTPRequest object...that was technology first released by MS, and only later supported by other browser makers, similar to the innerHTML DOM method. The HTTPRequest object is not part of the current W3C standard, but it may be added to the DOM3 standard.  It would be nice if MS adopts the same syntax to create the object when DOM3 is released, but in this case, any standard regarding the HTTPRequest object goes to the MS, not the following adopters who implemented what MS developed and released, sans royalties.

From developer.apple.com

Microsoft first implemented the XMLHttpRequest object in Internet Explorer 5 for Windows as an ActiveX object. Engineers on the Mozilla project implemented a compatible native version for Mozilla 1.0 (and Netscape 7). Apple has done the same starting with Safari 1.2.

And the problem with the code in the original question had nothing to do with IE behaving in a non-standards compliant way.  The code was flawed in many places and gave errors in both MS and non-MS browsers.

[rdivilbiss]

It would be nice if MS adopts the same syntax to create the object when DOM3 is released,...

Whoa Microsoft Bashers!!!

IE 7 DOES support the same syntax to create the XMLHttpObject as all other browsers!

http://www.cafesong.com/test/jsErrorTestingIE7.html

<html>

<head>
<title>Standards Compliant XMLHttpRequest Creation</title>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var req;

req = new XMLHttpRequest();

if (req) {
   req.onreadystatechange = showResults;
   req.open('GET', 'jsErrorTesting.txt', true);
   req.send(null);
} else {
   alert('No XML Http Request Object');
}

function showResults() {
   if (req.readyState==4) {
      if (req.status==200) {
         document.getElementById('results').innerHTML=req.responseText;
      }
   }
}
//-->
</script>
</head>

<body>
<div id="results">...</div>
</body>

</html>

[VGR]

I didn't create this separate topic to see it driver off-topic by you ;-)

I'm very happy that with the httprequestobject, Microsoft finally contributed something useful to the World ;-)
(plus the Microsoft BASIC of the eighties, of course)

I only wanted to point that - probably, let's be cautious and cartesian - when you refuse to support any longer some old systems, people are obliged to change for a new one. This happens all the time for a lot of areas IRL, so why not for our browsers ?

I'm not here to bash microsoft, so create your own badger thread and I will happily contribute ;-)

PS I changed my mind about microsoft when windows 3.0 won over GEM 3 and when DR-DOS finally didn't win the (frankly unlosable) war against IBM-Dos/MS-Dos