I thought Internet Explorer 9 was supposed to be an awesome browser. Why does my markup and CSS look perfect in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox yet still manages to be “off” in IE? I still need to add conditional CSS. WTF.
I’m sorry for the rant, but it’s a legitimate question: Why can’t IE be as good as WebKit-based browsers?
Laurence
on 16 Aug 11Thank you so much for saying that! I thought I was on my own with this, that I was somehow stuck with a prebeta version that wouldn’t update and caused glitches.
Caleb Brown
on 16 Aug 11Have you tried starting with IE as your test browser? I find that if I do that, things usually go more smoothly.
IE 9 isn’t that bad. Be thankful that they stopped making IE for the mac. IE 5.5 for the macwas a beast.
Dan
on 16 Aug 11I’m glad to hear that from someone else too, am in the same boat here…wtf is wrong with the IE team.
JD
on 16 Aug 11I am aware that Firefox isn’t WebKit-based. Although it is slow as hell (last time I used it) it renders web pages perfectly as Safari and Chrome. Microsoft, it is possible!
Dan
on 16 Aug 11Seriously Caleb? we should develop on a broken browser and then break the healthy ones? besides the developer tools on IE aren’t good enough…Firebug and the Web Developer toolbar are absolutely essential for me.
Dominic Pettifer
on 16 Aug 11It’ll be better in IE10, we promise this time :-)
Cooper Dukes
on 16 Aug 11I think of it as MS has finally achieved full support for CSS2 with IE9. Any CSS3, however, is a crapshoot.
IE9 seems to be the awkward middle ground between IE8 and every-other-damn-browser-out-there, so I’ve been developing in Chrome and testing in FF/IE8. If I can get those three in order, IE9 will usually look fine (as will Safari).
Vlad
on 16 Aug 11Because Microsoft doesn’t want to discontinue their tradition in annoying web developers.
JD
on 16 Aug 11I also should note that I am aware companies don’t make software for the developers. They make software for the consumers.
My point is: As a developer I believe IE to be a sub par product. I will recommend all my Windows-using friends and family to download Chrome.
Vlad
on 16 Aug 11@JD: I slightly disagree. When it’s so hard for developers to make their site run perfectly on your browser (and when backwards compatibility is non-existing), it’s clear that some websites will fall through the cracks, and then the users are the ones having a sub par experience.
Jakub Pawlowicz
on 16 Aug 11Are you sure you aren’t using IE9 in compatibility mode with IE8?
The standards mode in IE9 works really well (compared to their older browsers) although lack of gradients & some CSS3 stuff hurts sometimes.
Charlton
on 16 Aug 11Incompatibility with everything else has always been a Microsoft competitive. The thinking seems to be, if the Microsoft product and the other product do not interoperate well, and the user is required to use the Microsoft product for some reason (web sites that only work correctly in IE, business partners who email around Word documents and macro-heavy Excel spreadsheets) then the user will not use the competing product.
It’s not that Microsoft can’t make a web browser that’s standards compliant and consistent with other browsers. It’s that their gut reaction is to embrace and extend in incompatible ways, because that served them well when they had 90% market share. There was a time when MSIE 5 for Mac was the most standards-compliant browser of all the major browsers.
Charlton
on 16 Aug 11...has always been a Microsoft competitive advantage.
Mate Solymosi
on 16 Aug 11It took a long time, but I’ve finally come to accept the fact that sadly, we’ll never have an ideal world where everybody has the latest browser with all the new features. Creating web pages has become increasingly difficult. 8-9 years ago we had IE with its 95% market share. Now we have at least 4 major desktop browsers and countless mobile ones. I’m glad that we have such a diverse browser market as long as the differences in standards-compliance are minor. And as much as I hate IE, I must admit that it’s catching up pretty fast, and I have no doubts that it will eventually reach the level of the others. I think the biggest problem is that Microsoft is unable to get people to upgrade their outdated browsers. That’s why – because it ships with Win7 – IE8 is likely to stay around for the next 4-5 years…
Nate Bird
on 16 Aug 11IE 9 is a crap shoot. IE 10 seems to be finally catching up in the standards corner with Firefox and Webkit-based browsers.
Here is the IE standards test site which should help understand what IE9 doesn’t support. http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/
JD
on 16 Aug 11This analogy pains me because I’m a Cubs fan, but it is true.
Internet Explorer is like the Chicago Cubs. Wait ‘til next year!
Roman Bercot
on 16 Aug 11I’ve been wondering for a while why IE can’t just use Webkit. Stand on the shoulders of giants, so to speak.
They could still load it up with all the awful cruft to make it feel like IE, but with a rendering engine that doesn’t take so much heat from the web dev community.
Graham Peel
on 16 Aug 11IE will always suck because there is not one red cent that Microsoft will make in extra profit if they ramp up the IE team to make it match the latest and greatest browsers. So why bother? Furthermore, I don’t even think MS event WANTS Internet Explorer to reclaim its glorious marketshare (90%+) from the early 2000’s. That just landed them in court a few times for monopolistic practices.
MS is still probably running scared of the idea of thousands of free web apps that can process email/documents/spreadsheets/etc. If you can do all that in a browser, why buy Office? Its in Microsoft’s business interests to slow down the rapid progression of the web until they get a better strategy in place on how to control it and charge for it.
Ryan
on 16 Aug 11Another question is why do javascript libraries have to make specific adjustments for IE? For example jQuery. Microsoft was very grateful that they took the time and effort to make it compatible with their browser though (even though it worked fine with the rest)
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Aug 11Firefox doesn’t use Webkit either.
Christian Augustin
on 16 Aug 11Yeah, IE9 is lacking in layout precision and inherited some weird problems from IE8. Seems that they can’t get the old bugs out of it and they introduce new ones on their way into the future …
Me thinks their concerns are more with marketing (“Our product is the best”—didn’t they tell us exactly this with IE9?), and enterprise programmers using .Net, than anything else.
AC
on 16 Aug 11@37signals
Why the hiatus from blog posting (nearly 1.5 weeks)?
Rich S
on 16 Aug 11I look at it this way…IE9 isn’t the best, but it’s a heckuva lot better than IE8. A step in the right direction, and a sign of (hopefully) better things to come.
P.S. I use Chrome day-to-day but still feel your pain. Trying to get my layout working in all browsers sucks.
TomG
on 16 Aug 11So if webkit does something, it’s automatically the standard that all browsers must adhere to? Don’t get me wrong – I would like this – but its naive.
Are we talking about stuff failing in IE9 that’s properly coded and an accepted WC3 standard?
I have been struggling for 13 years with this and believe me, I wish they all worked the same.
IMHO, when things are not cross browser, its usually a deficiency in the coding.
Develop a coding style that works in all browsers and stop whining about the quirky behavior all browsers have.
Dan
on 16 Aug 11a coding style riddled with hacks and workarounds? ... no way, that’s not why the standards exist.
EricO
on 16 Aug 11What do you expect from a company that built an email client that uses Word to render emails? :P
lawless
on 16 Aug 11<!-[if lIE]>Do some fucked up shit<![endif]->
Sadly, this will probably be around for quite a while…
Richard
on 16 Aug 11Just stick with IE6 like I do. It’s the most stable, feature-complete browser there is, and all sites work with it.
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Aug 11@Richard – can’t decide if you’re trolling or have a dark, dark sense of humour…haha.
Dan
on 16 Aug 11Anonymous Coward eh? Haha…oops forgot to put my name.
Matti
on 16 Aug 11But proper rendering isn’t half as important as hardware acceleration right? Because the whole reason ie9 dropped an operating system used by 50% of their market share, and made by their own fucking company, was to have radical Direct-X bullshit.
BRB, Windows is restarting to update my Bing toolbar.
Will
on 16 Aug 11Did you use a CSS reset?
Mathias
on 16 Aug 11@JD: You’re holding it wrong!
André R.
on 16 Aug 11Make sure you test in several browsers including IE9 early on, periode.
Expanded: MS made a strong stance in IE9 against supporting proposed draft standards, and instead only support stuff what was on it’s way to be recommended. In IE10 it looks like they will adopt supporting early proposals using -ms prefix more like the others. But it does not look like they are adopting the rapid release schedule from the other projects, so you will still complain in a years time about IE10 as well unless you always test early.
Tyson
on 16 Aug 11Welcome to 2004, Jamie!
MattO
on 16 Aug 11I give IE9 little thought when making pages since 6 are 7 are still really prevalent and will be for a while. I make sure my web apps gracefully degrade to versions 6 and 7 and call it a day. If users want to run non-standard-complaint browsers they should expect some flakiness. What do you guys think about leaving behind IE altogether prompting the user to use a different browser? I think you did that with a web based iPad app right ?
Grant
on 16 Aug 11Charlton has it right. I think IE still hasn’t caught up because the things that drive the company philosophically go against the very nature of the web. I’m not saying they’re not trying to change, but it’s a lot of inertia to battle. Sigh. I wish they’d just move their rendering engine over to webkit. Ha.
Jeff Putz
on 16 Aug 11Disclaimer: I work for MSFT, but not IE.
Not only are you wrong, but I don’t think you understand why the company makes a browser at all. I’ll let others take that one.
Back to the problem… it’s almost always an issue of having the wrong doctype, allowing the browser to slip back into some weird mode. I encountered this a few times (my team tends to do IE testing last as well, so you’re not alone), and it was a one-line fix.
Steve
on 16 Aug 11Microsoft’s biggest hurdle, as it has always been, is it’s backwards compatibility requirements.
Switching to webkit is likely a no-go for two reasons (IMO):
1. Too many legacy applicatons having a reliance on Trident rendering and API—how many remember the IE engine is called trident? :) 2. MS + Open Source == hahahahah. They are doing really well with open source in some areas, but I suspect it’ll be a cold day in hell when they get close to open source when it comes to core Windows stuff.
Also, it absolutely is in Microsoft’s best interest to make IE a great browser. They make all their money from Windows (and Office) and making a crappy product the main portal users will use for a majority of the user’s applications is, well, dumb.
This is not to say that IE is the best browser… it has it’s share of problems.
Dimitrios
on 17 Aug 11One way to make web pages look right in IE 9 is to do the following, I remember I had to do this:
1) Use HTML 5 doc type:
<!DOCTYPE html>
2) Set the following metadata tag to make sure IE renders the page in the highest mode:
Joel
on 17 Aug 11A large part of the reason is the mediocrity of two areas MS is beholden to: 1. enterprise 2. ASP.NET (with only a few exceptions)
Rachel @ Last Res0rt
on 17 Aug 11As long as IE feels the need to be special and use only MS-proprietary stuff under the hood, this will continue. _
Gemma
on 17 Aug 11“I thought Internet Explorer 9 was supposed to be an awesome browser. Why does my markup and CSS look perfect in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox yet still manages to be “off” in IE? I still need to add conditional CSS. WTF.
I’m sorry for the rant, but it’s a legitimate question: Why can’t IE be as good as WebKit-based browsers? “
No, you don’t need to add conditional CSS. IE9 has FULL supoport for CSS2 (but not for CSS3) so IE9 should be the first browser you test in. When that’s done, then you test in the other browsers. No need to target IE9 specifically.
IE9 is actually better than Webkit-based browsers when it comes down to providing full support for CSS2 (but not CSS3 obviously).
Jeff Putz
on 17 Aug 11This is complete, unattributed nonsense. Two of the five company divisions don’t even make stuff for the enterprise, and ASP.NET, particularly the MVC flavor, is the new hotness. You’re talking out of your ass.
Dimitar
on 17 Aug 11I feel your pain man. I develop web apps on Windows, and I find it Chrome perfect for the job. I especially like Chrome javascript debugging console, because I develop heavily JS based apps. Webkit FTW.
I don’t know if you ever used Opera, but the latest version 11.5 is the fastest browser I’ve tested. It’s even faster than Chrome, and the rendering is perfect. Too bad it’s marker share is low.
ape-inago
on 18 Aug 11Chrome Frame can now install without admin privileges.
Tiga
on 20 Aug 11@Gemma:
„IE9 has FULL supoport for CSS2 (but not for CSS3 ) so IE9 should be the first browser you test in. When that’s done, then you test in the other browsers. No need to target IE9 specifically.”
1. It’s a pain in the ass to develop on IE, compared to Chrome and Firefox. The development tools make a huge difference.
2. To use IE9 as your primary test browser, you need to be working on a Windows machine. Developing on a Windows machine is very inconvenient, if you’re used to a Mac.
Adam
on 21 Aug 11@Will: Traversing the entire DOM to reset defaults is going to make all browsers suck, especially for sites of the scale and complexity of 37s. MSFT has an IE 6 countdown. What they really need is a countdown for the entire product.
Design 311
on 21 Aug 11Well said! This is so (almost unbelievable) true! IE 9 is just a part of the problem unfortunately, we (web designers) still need to think about people who haven’t updated their IE 7, 8 browser. (Drop support for IE6 seriously!)
Thibaut Assus
on 21 Aug 11I could be still right ;) http://thibaut-assus.heroku.com/2010/03/03/2yearsfromnow/
I thought microsoft understood, but obviously, until Ballmer is out, it won’t be the case…
William Gill
on 21 Aug 11Tell me about it. And why can’t IE9 properly support HTML5? WebGL?
And WHY, for the love of god, do all the old-school tools like SAP, etc, that every employee of a large company is forced to waste time with, only work on IE? There’s a horrible, cruel irony in that.
Thomas Norsted
on 22 Aug 11Designing for IE is such a pain – not only do you have to use terrible developer tools, but you also have to consider up to 3-4 IE versions. How many of you design webpages for different versions of chrome, firefox & safari? Why is it so hard for Microsoft to make a browser that gets updated automatically. We just recently (FINALLY) gave up on IE6 support – but come on! it’s an 10 years old browser! Yet still we have several thousand pageviews every month coming from IE6..
:]
on 22 Aug 11My two cents: Microsoft can’t make auto-update. In this case all the sites/apps/whatever that got hacked into existence through piles of crap could likely break apart.
I recently lost all hope to make a site render well in IE8 (although it worked perfectly in FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari; worked pretty OK in IE7 and IE9), that I dumped IE=EmulateIE7 meta tag. I know it’s barbaric, but….
JD
on 22 Aug 11Astute hypothesis about auto-update!
This discussion is closed.