Submitted by “There, I said it. Microsoft has been bombarding the media with claims about how much better IE9 is than all the other browsers, more HTML5 and CSS3 compliant than any other browser that ever existing and ever will. It’s the only browser that passes all the tests they made up. And, Microsoft has finally implemented the CSS3 selectors that were implemented by other browsers back in, what? 2003? Because Microsoft has updated IE to support CSS3 selectors and rounded corners, they want us to believe that somehow IE9 magically supports the whole slew of CSS3 visual styling. I’m afraid it doesn’t. As a matter of fact, IE9’s support for CSS3 visual styling is so poor that the results are shocking.”
Is still beta dude, calm down.
Let’s hope it changes until final comes out. This is really shocking.
.
Edited 2010-10-23 10:01 UTC
If it was alpha I wouldn’t worry much.
But this is beta – which implies (at least for me) – that the feature set is locked.
If that is the case then… *sigh* this is bad.
Yeah is concerning, but I also smell something fishi, the guy didn’t show the code of the page and the screenshot is of two webkits browsers (Where is FireFox), so that guy needs to show the code first.
I really hoped IE9 would finally allow web developers to use all the cool stuff without caring for an old, bugged IE.
You know what? IE should simply stay unsupported. I mean if they are not able to have an up to date browser that can’t always cause us (web developers) headache. One always has to create two versions of every website. One for IE and one for the rest. This simply sucks.
Yeah, that’s an angry posting, but IMO I have a good reason for being angry.
You would think that if Microsoft were really serious about the “one markup” approach, they would be going out of their way to use tests from *outside* their own campus. Widely-accepted, neutral tests.
This doesn’t seem to be the case – we are told that the browser passes the tests “that *they* made up.”
Even if the browser is still beta, this approach by them speaks volumes. They don’t seem to have learned a thing in the last few years.
Edited 2010-10-22 22:51 UTC
It would be much better if we had access to the source code of the web page, before drawing any conclusions.
MS might have been really at fault here, or it might just be the case that the html might assume webkit specific behavior (Safari and Chrome are both based on the same rendering engine). Also there is no comparison on Opera, or Firefox which has different rendering engines as well.
Edited 2010-10-22 22:57 UTC
Apparently the source code is available in this post: http://css3wizardry.com/2010/07/13/css3-page-flips/ and a demo at http://vxjs.org/CSS3/PageFlip/index.html
You are right, he uses webkit specific properties like “-webkit-transform:” so the web app renders awful in Firefox.
Then that guy is an ignorant moron.
Thanks, I should’ve missed that.
But having half the CSS coded in webkit specific attributes, and then expecting other browsers to support them is not something normal.
Remember Navigator’s proprietary < blink> tag ?
Kochise
Informative post +1
But why has css3 got browser specific properties? I thought we were trying to move away from that nonsense. Are other browsers supposed to implement these webkit properties?
It’s standard practice to use browser-specific properties until the standard is finalized so the browsers can retain backward compatibility if the syntax in the spec changes.
I’ve noticed since switching to IE9 that entire sites no longer render any CSS at all.
I hope it’s a beta bug, especially since most web designers these days put the majority of their markup in CSS, absolutely destroying the site on browsers that don’t render it.
(Luckily, OSN renders just fine.)
Edited 2010-10-22 23:49 UTC
It sometimes happens. The browser works fine for several hours, but if I leave it open for an extended period it just stops rendering any styles.
Being a beta, I just close – reopen it, and it continues to work.
Also when I resize the window, GMail application does not follow, and produces a strange view.
Again, that’s a beta.
A Microsoft employee not to long ago addressed the issue of open standards and the fact remains that man of the browsers have buggy implementations that are silently fixed up with updates. I suggest anyone who thinks otherwise should check out the bug entries over at webkit to see the bugs relating to conformance being fixed.
Regarding Internet Explorer 9’s conformance; again, another article was posted regarding Microsoft writing tests for standards that have no conformance tests – those have been submitted to W3C with many of the browsers testing and fixing up bugs behind the scenes. Like the whole Flash and ‘poor performance on Mac OS X’ fiasco, there seems to be a certain group of loud mouths spouting crap via their blog whilst ignoring that the situation is more complex than just ‘Microsoft sucking’ as the blogger implied.
In closing, if the individual believes that it is a bug then why hasn’t he contacted Microsoft or started a conversation over on Channel 9/MSDN forums? the venue is open to discuss such issues but it seem to be he is more concerned with generating traffic to his website than actually being proactive about getting the problem sorted.
Because he’s not being payed to seek bugs for Microsoft, a big company with obviously lousy management of their software development process.
Why the fuck do you think Microsoft has public betas? to get feedback of course! if you’re a developer, come across a bug then head over to the Microsoft website and say, “hey, I found a bug here – is this a known one? can I hope to see this fixed soon before I spend hours trying to develop a work around?”.
Sorry, but software development isn’t the great unwashed masses and the ivory tower with nether interacting with each other. There is a public beta for a purpose and the fact that the web developer couldn’t be even bothered contacting Microsoft to report a bug tells me he is more concerned with bashing Microsoft than bringing the bug to their attention.
Do you know how many of the bug reports I’ve filed with microsoft over IE behavior that I found in public betas have been fixed? Wanna guess ? I’ll give you a hint: multiply the number of bugs fixed ( call it X ) by any number (call it Y) and you will get X back.
XY=X for all Y in R
I have a similar score on the bugs I used to report for all Microsoft Products.
The only ones that actually got fixed (two) had to deal with Data Corruption in
1) Excel cells in a column were truncating data when a certain long set of calcs were performed in two or more other cells/columns based on one this one column.
2) Microsoft ODBC drivers for Oracle, when using Crystal Reports and generating these same Excel Reports would some how do a “Big Endian – Little Endian” conversion of the data in a column effectively flipping the least significant to the most significant and on down the line in the data.
Those are the only two bugs (out of hundreds) I have ever seen fixed. Of course, this was 1999-2003 era, when I was dealing Peoplsoft and Oracle and Wonderful Windows.
You have never done a single line of web development in your life, have you? Caveats well exposed aside, I can certainly agree with the overall sentiment. IE is a f%$%&#$ mess and nothing like giving MS that kick on the curb to have it catching up to the competition.
Having Direct3D-accelerated rendering and other neat features is nice and all but first they really ought to fix the long standing CSS2 bugs and start to implement CSS3 correctly as per the specification – that I bet that you will say that are not well written or some such silliness even though almost every other browser have little to no problem implementing them in a mostly compatible manner – before they start bragging about compatibility with these very standards.
What matters to me as a web developer is that in the end the website will look as intended on all browsers, gimmicks notwithstanding. They have yet to make up for the lousy job that they’ve done so far and earn their stripes.
And some people really have problems to learn their history: Not too long ago we’ve had this same bullshit with IE7 and then sometime later IE8 that supposedly had a standards-compliant renderer and a separate “quirks mode” to render the legacy crap that we’ve been inflicted in the past but neither did a decent job on a reasonably CSS-heavy page.
Stop acting as if you were rooting for an underdog company. Microsoft has the resources to bring it on par with the other browsers and it is about time that people call them on it so that they can actually fix this mess the way the should!
If you spent just one hundredth of the hours that web developers spend just to come up with hacks to tame this beast when they could be spending them doing something actually useful you would certainly see understand where the hatred is coming from…
Edited 2010-10-23 00:52 UTC
Amazing how you give Firefox a free pass on the issue of CSS2 bugs to which there is a hell of a lot more than Internet Explorer 8. If you look at Microsoft website where they inform you of the latest test Microsoft’s browser conforms to CSS2 to the letter – it is hardly the fault of Microsoft that there are crappy developers out there who have been using these features incorrectly and the established browsers compensating for it. Yes I have done web development and Internet Explorer 9 is a huge leap over previous versions. Are there bugs? sure there are but I’m sure as hell not going to start bashing Internet Explorer 9 whilst ignoring the massive bugs that webkit and Firefox have.
I’m not rooting for an ‘underdog’ company – what pisses me off are people who are deliberately disingenuous with the facts. I’ve got problems with Internet Explorer 9 but I sure as hell don’t start lying about non-existent problems simply to generate web traffic. Stick the facts and show that you actually give a crap about improving the situation by reporting the bugs instead of using a blog as a platform which benefits no one at the end of the day.
Another problem with this blogger is that he doesn’t enable comments in his posts, so I’m going for ‘troll’
But that’s Microsoft’s “standards” MO. They read the raw standard and implement it “to the letter”. But they go out of their way to play games with things like “may” versus “shall” getting all rules lawyer. Rather than just playing along. They then flood the standard’s maintainer with boxes of bug reports or “clarifications” on every little thing. These guys are way smart, but Microsoft breeds the kind of employees that would cheat little kids out of their lunch money with no conscience.
I play some Magic:TG and hang out with some DnD folks too. I see people that are brilliant do this all the time and it makes things Unfun and stressful for no reason, they have some sociopathic need to “win” all the time and won’t follow or be led at all. They do this to throw political monkey wrenches into the existing community, forcing existing players to support Microsoft or some small player. IE9 is a symptom that Microsoft has not changed their culture at all, at some point trying to undermine “everybody else” the folks wake up and realize if they cut YOU out things go better.
It’s all a big game to get the customers and businesses locked-in. WE are the product being sold to marketing firms and content providers. So it’s important IE9 supports things that marketers and content firms need.. because THEY buy the big ASP and .NET installs and development tools. YOU just buy a cheap license from an OEM, they’ve got your money all ready.
Come on, isn’t it a bit irresponsible to report this without any kind of caveat? In this case I’d suggest, “The guy’s making downright false accusations” as adequate. Having tried that page in Firefox it was more or less the same as IE9. Would anyone say Firefox was well behind CSS3 implementation? This is not news, so should not be linked to by a respected news site.
If a website renders correctly in both Webkit (Safari/Chrome) & Firefox, but does not render properly in IE, then IE is at fault.
But if it renders properly in only one rendering engine (in this case Webkit) but renders improperly in Firefox & IE9, then it is the markup that is at fault, not the browser.
Edited 2010-10-23 03:14 UTC
I am suprised that no one has picked up 2 major flaws in this guys arguement yet.
1. There is no IE9 beta 4, only the first beta is out. (I think he is talking about IE9 Preview 4). So he is either completely incorrect or spreading fud… The important point here is that there are still betas and release candidates to come.
2. CSS3 in IE9 Beta, according to ACID3 meets 95% of the standard. SO, I think its a far streach to say that “IE9 is the IE6 of CSS3”. Specially seeming they are aiming for 100% complicance by release.
I honestly think that this artical is just a peice of troll poo.
IE9 is in beta.
He didn’t provide his source.
This is obviously a troll post.
I’m guessing he is worried about people switching to IE9 and is trying to drum up hatred before it is even released. This is all incredibly silly anyways given that IE8 will have a sizable share for years.
Yep, just thought about the source of the test page, too. Why just not post it? It’s a bit suspicious..
Hi OSAlert!!,
Can you post one more article saying that the article “IE9 is the IE6 of CSS3” is invalid ? Initially, when I read the ariticle I also thought that IE 9 is not working, accidently I read all the comments, I found one of comment saying that the author has used WebKit’s specifc CSS to render the page. Then I have tested the same page in Opera, it is perfect workly like IE only. This proves that WebKit is the culprit.
Without your own investigation and validation from reliable don’t just rush /jump and post something and create a false opinion to the users.
Err, no. OSAlert doesn’t have any responsibility in “checking” whatever is submitted. We, the readers, are educated enough to spread some knowledge and enlighten each other. To the point that your own first impression has been changed by insightful remarks and comments challenging the news item. That’s what a community is for.
I believe the community has been remarkable on this very news item. It may well teach a lesson to those who read the teaser or the article without reading the comments.
Seriously, talk about stupidity!
Here’s a tip, if you’re going to bitch about IE lacking CSS3 support, use a test that actually USES CSS3 and not the ‘for testing not for use on development websites’ -moz and -webkit prefixes.
Of course that neither gecko or webkit ACTUALLY SUPPORT ANY OF THE REAL CSS3 PROPERTIES YET!!!
Go through the source, delete every -moz- prefix, and change every -webkit- prefix to -ms-, then report in on how it works!
Really funny the only browser that ACTUALLY supports the REAL CSS3 properties is Opera, and because said test DOESN’T EVEN USE THE REAL CSS3 PROPERTIES it doesn’t work their either.
Absolutely pathetic.
Edited 2010-10-23 12:09 UTC
WHAT HE SAID! Only with less CAPs and !s.
Actually, I wouldn’t say stupidity; I’d go for troll, along with some comments above. But other than that, what he said.
Gecko and WebKit support many CSS3 properties, just not all of them. Every browser supports standards to a varying degree – point me to one that supports HTML 3.2 in full.
I modded up people defending IE, the end of days really is comming then?
Feels strange, does it not?
It’s very easy nowadays to sit around bashing IE, especially IE6. Take that “IE 6 funeral” nonsense of just a few months back… Fact is, it’s aged like milk and M$ disbanding the IE team and resting on it’s laurels for half a decade put them squarely in last place…
Unless you count Amaya (and who the *** uses Amaya?) every release of IE from 4.0 to 6.0 were at the time of their release the most standards compliant browsers of their time — Think on that! Lemme just say that again…
Every release of IE from 4.0 to 6.0 were at the time of their release the most standards compliant browsers of their time — MIND BLOWING. It’s easy to forget today just how far ahead of the curve IE 5.5 and 6 actually were… that’s what killed off the competition in the first place and why with little or no extra effort I can usually make pages that work just fine all the way back to 5.5 with most every whizbang feature CSS 2.1 can deliver using a few simple bugfixes like inline-float, haslayout or expressions to recreate missing functionality like min/max-width/height.
When IE 5.5 and 6 were getting CSS 2 and 2.1 draft into something resembling working, Netscape was effectively running in place, gecko was a buggy unstable train wreck not useful for anything, firefox wasn’t even a twinkle in a FLOSS fanboy’s eye, Opera 4’s alleged CSS 1 and 2 support had gaping holes in it that made IE 5.0 look complete… and that’s before we talk all the stuff IE innovated.
Think back… First browser to even attempt to include parts of CSS2 Draft? IE 5.0. Ajax? IE 5.5! Properties that have been adopted into CSS3 like word-break? IE 5. @font-face? IE 5.5 with EOT support… Extensions? What do you think ActiveX controls are?!?
The really sad part is MOST of the problems with IE7 and lower are related to backwards compatibility BECAUSE IE implemented CSS2 DRAFT and people started deploying it on websites before it hit recommendations. Box model difference? Came after IE5 started implementing CSS width and height controls… We already had websites out there using it and forcing them to the new box model would have broken millions of sites; So they added the doctype trip since doctypes weren’t part of the draft specification when IE 5 and 5.5 implemented the box model!
So what are we doing today? Developers everywhere starting to slap CSS3 up on their pages; a specification NOT EVEN OUT OF DRAFT YET… More things change, the more they stay the same. Right now the people making HTML5/CSS3 sites for real-world deployment are just setting us up for the exact same train wreck that the switch from IE5.x to IE6 was.
If anything, FF, Opera and Safari are to CSS3 as IE was to CSS2… and that’s not necessarily a good thing for the future when/if we ever end up with a recommendation.
But as always, nobody seems to understand what words like “beta” or “draft” mean.
Oh, but IE6 was probably quite good on its days (although it lacked tabs). The problem is that after that, there was no release or update of IE for ages.
Competition has moved on, and it took a lot of time for microsoft to realize it and even more time to react properly.
Maybe IE9 will put IE back on track, maybe not. Can’t tell about standards supports, but in the beta, there are still unjustifiable lags when creating a tabs or at browser startup. However, there’s sure already an impressive improvement compared with IE7-8 which could completely freeze for a few seconds before doing something on low-powered computers : now, it’s around the second mark…
Edited 2010-10-23 17:22 UTC
Using vendor prefixes. It won’t be quite so bad this time around. HTML5 is a different matter altogether.
The IE team’s tune has definitely changed. I think it’s Apple we should be worrying about. They’re all for using vendor-specific codes.
The way the w3c works is that the criteria to go from “working draft” to “recommendation” is two 100% implementations. The way that most browsers work is they implement emerging standards as proprietary extensions (using the -webkit, -moz, -ms, -opera prefixes) until they are happy with the implementation, when they drop the prefix.
The problem that guy had was that MS was getting a lot of good press around CSS3/HTML5, even though IE9 has hands down the worst support out of all the browsers. What makes things worse is that IE users are either unwilling, or incapable of upgrading their browsers, as old versions just never seem to go away. Best case would be something like chrome being the lowest common denomenator, they don’t even give their users the option to not upgrade, so as soon as they fix something, almost everyone is upgraded within a week. With IE it takes 5-7 years before the never version has the same level of saturation.
So, the reason this sucks is that once ie6 is finally gone, the lowest common denominator will be ie7. After that, it will be ie8. Everyone was hoping it would be different, but it looks like once ie8 goes away, it will be ie9.
I tried the test page in chrome and it doesn’t actually work. Sure, the index renders correctly, but the page flips don’t work. I think the webkit specific properties are what are doing the page flips. So, I think what he really means to be complaining about is that the basic page itself doesn’t render properly.
Shouldn’t any other browser trying to render the same page just ignore the webkit specific properties and basically be able to render the same index assuming the CSS was done correctly?
If that is the case, then even firefox doesn’t render this page correctly. Which might mean that his code is incorrect, and is relying too much on webkit specific properties for basic page layout regardless of the fancy flip stuff.
I want to vote articles like this one down.
Sorry, Thom, but I think you did a mistake posting some FUD about Microsoft made up by some moron who knows exactly what he is doing.
That moron has made on pourpose a page which can only work with Webkit specific experimental features no other browser engine shoud use. And then went bashing Microsoft for being incapable of doing something they must not do.
In fact, the rendering of that page works is very similar in his IE9 and in my Opera 10.63, but Opera doesn’t do rounded corners or the shadows. Firefox doesn’t do the shadows, so I assume he has used some Webkit-only thing.
Looking the code, the reason for the lack of rounded corners is pretty obvious: it uses -webkit and -moz properties for rounded corners, which should only work on Webkit (Chrome, Safari…) and Gecko (Firefox…). Opera follows the standards to the letter here, and only supports rounded corners without those prefixes.
So what’s shocking me now is the fact that IE9 is painting round corners, because, following the standards, it shouldn’t.
Every modern browser has mistakes in standards support; they are very well known by web developers, so making a test to make any of them look bad is usually a matter of knowing how to use Google.
The promise of “Same Markup” is a noble goal, but no browser has ever been able to attain it. Some of the reasons are technical (it is a very, very difficult thing to do), but I think that nowadays no browser vendor can achieve a complete standards support because of two reasons:
– Standards are not as precise as they should. There are some obscure issues not covered by them; it is usually solved by agreements between browsers to do it the same way, or by copying the first one who implemented it.
– Standards are a work in progress. CSS 3 is only a draft! HTML 5 is being written! They aren’t even standards; they will be standards once they have been completed and approved, but they aren’t now, it may requiere years to get there! W3C could decide to kill them, or make radical changes, and what then? We would have a world wide web full of non-standard pages running in non-standard browsers. They would not do as much (they would get the worse of it), but it should be expected little changes, which are going to break current browsers and pages. Anyway, by definition, if a standard is not finished, you can’t say you are following it.
This is a publicity stunt by a moron with a blog nobody reads, and you are giving him a lot of visits and misleading your readers. Please, Thom, remove the link, or make an update with a correction. I love your work to much to see it ripped by this mistake.
Actually, the reason it is getting torn apart is because it appears everyone here thinks they know what they are talking about, even though they dont.
MS said that IE8 would not try to implement emerging standards. IE9 on the other hand is supposed to have great css3 and html 5 support, the implication being they aren’t so far behind everyone else.
Now the way that w3c standards work is they become recommendations AFTER there are working implementations. Since the w3c is the browser vendors (this is a consortium, not a standards body), it is the vendors job to actually implement them as they are getting written, so that the final versions actually have the kinks worked out.
During that process, vendors use the proprietary extension syntax (like -webkit, or -moz) until they are happy enough with the results, at which point they support the version without prefixes as well.
So according to MS, IE9 is throwing their support behind emerging standards. They are doing it, but only for a handful of things, pretty much where the rest of the world was at a year and a half ago.
The reason this is such a big deal is because safari, chrome, and opera users tend to upgrade in under a month after the release of a new version. Firefox it is more like 6-8months. IE it is measured in years. So 5 years from now when IE9 has enough marketshare to actually care about, we will be dealing with a browser that is just starting to implement the newest generation of standards, while all of the other browsers around now are almost done.
Please, see my comment (http://www.osnews.com/permalink?446938) where I give my point of view about this. I don’t think we should mangle the news item. I don’t think Thom having posted a user submission is wrong or that the member who submitted did anything wrong. An open mind receiving educated opinions is better equipped. Don’t you think? I, for one, didn’t know about the w3c’s standards adoption process, and that’s just an example.
Anyway, I’m sure the true content (and intent) of the blogger’s post is less likely to mislead people now that we’ve debated about it here.
Edited 2010-10-25 12:22 UTC
Web surfing is a declining activity and web-browsers are going to be relegated to the scrap heap in a few years.
I’m reading this article on a P4 machine with 512 mb ram running Windows 98se enhanced with KernelEx. I’m using Firefox 2.0.0.20 (but with user-agent change to make it look like some 3.x version of FF) and I have flash 10.x installed.
What does that tell you? It tells me that nothing really needs to change.
Not sure I understand your point. That current websites work on very legacy software ?
> Not sure I understand your point. That current websites
> work on very legacy software ?
Yes, that’s correct. Websites like youtube that look at your user-agent and throw up bogus messages about incompatibility do it for no reason (well, at least when it comes to older versions of FF). I change my user-agent and the nag screens go away, and the page renders just fine, I can watch the video’s just fine, etc.
I know IE6 was a joke for at least the past 5 years and it really does botch the rendering of a lot of web content, but a lot of people running win-2k or XP-sp0/sp1/sp2 are still using it.
I don’t know why Microsoft plows so much money into IE. They originally did it back in the mid-1990’s to kill Netscape (which was a hollow victory for them) but when you look at the millions they’ve spent developing and bug-fixing IE and the issues they created by integrating IE into the very core of Windoze, what did all that get them but a lot of bad PR and bad optics from the POV of platform security, the MAC guy vs PC-guy commercials, etc. How has or how will Microsoft gain back even a fraction of what IE has cost them over the past 15 years?
But the bigger picture is that as a share of total web traffic, web-browsing has now fallen behind netflix, and as dedicated apps replace browsers on hand-held devices, and as more people connect network appliances to their TV’s leaving the desktop PC in the basement to gather dust, the HTTP browser will join the usenet client on the garbage heap of discarded software.
Edited 2010-10-24 15:25 UTC
That says nothing about how much people are browsing the web. Video takes a lot more bandwidth than browsing. The bigger picture is that people are using the internet more for video instead of cable or rentals.
More ‘desktop is dying’ wishful thinking. Web browsing will actually increase as more consumers get faster connections and better computers.
It tells me that Firefox 2 can handle HTML 4.01.