[BC] Browser experiences

[Steve Lewis]

I primarily write software for a living and for most of this year the
software has been limited to creating web sites or fixing web sites that
won't work on anything but Microsoft browsers.

 

Relevant or not, Microsoft purchased the original browser code from, I
believe, Mosaic way-back-when.  Microsoft is not necessarily responsible for
some of the problems people have, though it would have been wonderful for
them to fix any problems along the way that had been inherited from the
original source.

 

Over the last 20 years we've gone through countless revisions in HTML
standards.  I can speak from experience that not all standards are standards
and more like recommendations.  Once upon a time Javascript didn't really
exist and Microsoft wanted/needed IE to perform interactively, so they did
what was logical at the time, what with the huge share of the browser market
they had, and added support for VBScript.  When JS had become accepted, they
added support for it.  When components (like media players) came along they
supported their own and Adobe's Flash. Etc.

 

But the situation put Microsoft in a funny position:  So many web sites had
been created using Microsoft's technology that they had to continue to
support it.  They couldn't very well release a browser based on "standards
only" and remove support for their own techniques.  If anyone is at fault
here, it would probably have to be the site programmers that did not modify
their sites to support the "standards" rather than Microsoft's workarounds.
Blame most likely lies with the bean counters who didn't see a need to
update a system that worked with IE already.  For internal apps, it would
have been almost impossible to justify the cost of hundreds or thousands of
hours to change.

For what I was doing when XP and IE6 came out, I had no compelling reason to
switch browsers to something other than IE.  When IE7 came along, I then
upgraded and when 8 came out I moved to that.  I noticed that somebody had
problems with IE8.  I have, instead, found it to be the best behaving
browser from Microsoft to date.

 

I installed IE9 when it came out not all that long ago.  Websites that had
previously displayed perfectly broke.  Our industry's own All Access Music
Group would not/could not log me in.  I can't say for certain which end
broke - I believe IE9 began supporting HTML 5 so it's anyone's guess.  I
cursed Microsoft but the problem could have been poorly implemented code on
All Access.  I rebuilt my machine to get all traces of IE9 off it.  I
cringed when Microsoft announced that IE10 was about to go beta.

 

If Microsoft made a major mistake it was trying to defend its actions of
preinstalling IE and causing it to become part of the operating system.
Stupid move, but that never prevented anyone from installing another browser
of choice so I don't see what the big deal ever was.

 

Over the summer I found a curious combination of factors required to make
compatible a former web application compatible across all IE's, Chrome,
Safari and Firefox.  Though I wasn't required to include Opera, I tested it
as well.  I only had to create dual code paths (IE/Non-IE) in one instance.
Other typical problems were the methods used to access various form
elements.  Microsoft had a method left over from the "early years" that
didn't work with the other browsers, but these leftovers didn't prevent me
from modifying the code to meet "standards" and IE continued to work just
fine.

 

I had to replace all the VBScript with Javascript which worked fine with IE.
The single major obstacle required variables that needed to be passed into
and out of the Javascript to use hidden form fields.

 

To summarize my thoughts:  It isn't always Microsoft's fault, and more often
than not IE renders non-MS websites just fine.

 

IE6 probably ought to go way, but I don't have any problems running IE8 on
my XP desktops so I don't see what the big deal is.  Will IE8 run on Windows
2000?  I don't know and am not curious enough to build a W2K machine to find
out.