CEO Steve Ballmer declared the move to be “a wonderful strategy that will finally place Internet Explorer solidly ahead of the competition.”

The change was unexpected, given the company’s long history of less-than-perfect support for web standards and general disapproval of open source software, though the move to WebKit may be the start of a new, friendlier Microsoft.

Web designers have been voicing their approval, though surprisingly there have been a few opposed to the change of rendering engine. One company in particular, a design firm known as Plaid Mango Design, claims that the move to WebKit will cost them 40% of their income, which is made primarily from the extra fees they charge to develop CSS hacks to enable Internet Explorer to render their designs properly.

Bazinga! April Fools!

If Microsoft were to switch from their proprietary “Trident” rendering engine to an open source solution such as WebKit or Mozilla’s Gecko, it would do far more than simply save designers headaches.

It would save Microsoft money and development time, net them some publicity, and vastly improve their web browser? What’s not to like?

What is WebKit? It’s an open source HTML rendering engine that powers Google Chrome, Apple Safari, the iPhone’s MobileSafari, and just about any Mac OS X application that displays web pages.

Internet Explorer could at long last become reasonably standards compliant, and Microsoft would be able to put their resources towards improving their browser’s user interface, rather than wasting time reinventing the wheel.

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but there is no reason it couldn’t be done.

Blogger James Edwards of SitePoint estimates that in twelve months or so Internet Explorer 6 should no longer be used by enough people to bother supporting, and has assembled a list of ten things that the end of IE6 will enable the web development community to do. My top three are 24-bit transparent PNGs, throw away 90% of CSS hacks, and make full use of min-width and max-width.

10 Cool Things We’ll Be Able To Do Once IE6 Is Dead [SitePoint]

Security isn’t exactly the browser’s strongpoint either, as the public is becoming increasingly aware of.

Microsoft has been losing market share in the browser area for the past few years, as people move away from IE. Slowly but surely, IE’s userbase is decreasing, and other browsers are picking up the switchers. Internet Explorer has 43.6% market share as of February, down from the 54.7% early last year, or the 91.1% from early 2005.

Firefox is up to 46.4% market share now, while Chrome, Safari, and Opera collectively have roughly 7%. (Chrome has shown very fast growth considering its age.) The general public is becoming more aware of browing alternatives, and the security benefits of switching to them. More people are buying Macs too, which include Apple’s Safari browser instead of Internet Explorer. People are learning, and moving away from IE.

Market Share

Until now, Internet Explorer has been surviving based on Microsoft’s virtual monopoly on the browser and operating system markets. They produce Windows, which continues to run on 88% of computers, and they bundle IE with it, giving computer buyers a conveniant “internet button” that the majority of users wouldn’t even think of changing. It’s just there. With their large preinstalled userbase, Microsoft hasn’t have to worry about anything really. They could ignore parts of the standard, implement it in a flawed manner, or not update the browser for six years.

Until now.

It seems people are finally learning. Adoption of alternative browsers is on the rise, and Internet Explorer is losing market share. Microsoft is going to have to either follow the standards to the letter, move to an open rendering engine like WebKit, or fail miserably.

Internet Explorer 8

I had hopes that Internet Explorer 8 would be the one to finally bring a fully standards-compliant rendering engine to the table, but events have convinced me that it won’t, despite Microsoft’s touting. This InfoWorld article has a couple worrying passages, such as:

Then there’s the issue of legacy HTML/CSS support. So much of the Web has been tweaked for IE 6.x compatibility that even Microsoft’s own attempts to implement a more standards-compliant browser engine in IE8 have met with disastrous results. For me, the situation so bad that when I do find myself using IE 8 (typically, to view a site that causes my copy of the Chrome 2.x beta release to blow up), I end up configuring IE 8’s compatibility mode as the default viewing option since the browser’s native rendering mode breaks practically every site I visit.

The author seems to be a little bit misinformed, but it is worrying nonetheless. Much of the web is tweaked to be compatible with IE 6, but those tweaks are mainly made to designs that are otherwise standards-compliant and display perfectly in Firefox or Chrome. If IE8 truly is standards-compliant, it should have no problem displaying those pages. It has been a few months since I used IE8, but I had run some informal tests that seemed to confirm my theory that IE8 isn’t as compliant as Microsoft claims.

Yes, IE8 passes the ACID2 test as Microsoft claims. I used IE8 to visit a few websites that I knew to work flawlessly in standards-compliant browsers, and to validate properly. They looked horrible in IE8, worse than they would have in IE7 or IE6. GMail’s login form was squished funny, Web Designer Wall didn’t look good at all, Freelance Switch was messed-up entirely…

It was a few months ago, and I figured “Well, it’s beta. They fix it soon.” Apparently they haven’t yet. One wonders how a browser can pass the ACID2 and display nearly every standards-compliant web page wrong. Did they cheat on the ACID 2 and put a conditional in to display a fake ACID2 result, while rendering every other page wrong unless you turn the magic “IE7 Mode” on? Sadly, I wouldn’t be surprised.

If IE8 is still rendering pages like it had been when I used it last, it’s not standards-compliant, by any stretch of the term.

Conclusion

If Internet Explorer doesn’t shape-up soon, Microsoft won’t be a major player in the browser arena anymore. People are moving to Firefox, Chrome, and Safari in flocks. You have the Mac switchers who are likely to use Safari or Firefox, the Windows users migrating to Firefox and Chrome, and the Linux users who are mainly using Firefox.

Microsoft has to deliver on their promise of a standards-compliant IE one way or another, or they will lose what market share they have left. Want to take bets on how long that will take?

Apparently, the a lot of of web pages will load in IE7 mode instead of standards mode. The Register has the full details.

This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.

So all intranet sites will be shown in non-standards mode. Then we have all the version targetting nonsense they’ve been planning.

Oh, and guess what happens whenever a page loads in standards mode? A little icon appears showing a broken page. When clicked, it forces the page into “IE7 compatibility” mode. So the browser tricks people into not using standards mode.

The picture shows a broken page. A broken page? Why is broken page icon shown next to standards-compliant pages? The idea, apparently, is to encourage users to escape standards-mode by clicking on the broken page. There’s a dastardly logic here: showing a broken page may make users wonder if they are seeing pages correctly. Authors are probably not too thrilled by having a broken page shown next to their pages, and the only way to avoid the icon is to not trigger standards mode. The message is clear: don’t use standards!

A broken page icon! Can you believe that?

Here I was thinking Microsoft was finally putting some effort into getting their act together in the browser department. Forget that. Microsoft, what is your problem? This rubbish will only hurt you, and the entire internet to boot, in the long run.

I’ve been contemplating about what to do re: IE6 for a while now, and it wasn’t until Elliot published his announcement last week that I decided that I will indeed follow suite. So from now on, I will be adding a premium (probably 10% / 15%) on all custom design work, should the client request IE6 compliance.

Go for it, Adii! IE6 is over seven years old now, which is rather long for any piece of static software (meaning software that dosn’t have software updates pushed to it, like an operating system or such). It’s CSS standards are laughable, and it’s about time it went away.

Do you want to do something to help combat Internet Explorer 6? Campaigns to kill the web browser that just won’t die: Internet Explorer 6.

The problem? Microsoft. Internet Exploder doesn’t support the property. Instead of ranting about Microsoft’s pathetic browser, I’ll skip to the solution…

First, make sure you have an IE-specific stylesheet to put all you IE hacks in. It makes it easier to manage things, and it makes sure hacks like this don’t stop your CSS from validating. (Believe me, this one will.) Include it in your page head like so:

<!--[if IE]><link rel="stylesheet" href="ieislame.css" type="text/css" media="all" /><![endif]-->

Next, add something along the lines of this to the file:

#mydiv { width:expression(document.body.clientWidth < 850? "850px": "auto" ); }

Just replace both instances of “850” with the minimum width you prefer.

Not too hard, but it shouldn’t be necessary.

Both sides of the argument have their pluses and minuses, and generally I would say “go with what best suits the instance.” If you want a certain look, which will require vertical tile images, and other images of specific width, you may need to go with a fixed-width layout. If you want as much control as you can get over the look of your design, or if you need your content area to be a specific size, go with a fixed layout.

Liquid layouts can adapt to the available space in the browser’s viewport, which makes a site more accessible, avoiding the annoying horizontal scrollbar that fixed-width layouts often generate at low resolutions. If you can put together a good-looking liquid layout that works well in your given scenario, go for it. However, you must rely on the CSS attributes min-width and max-width to make sure that your design can’t shrink too much, squishing your beautiful design into an illegible mess, or two wide, making for long, hard-to-read lines of text on large widescreen monitors. Too bad the attributes don’t work on Internet Explorer 6 (big surprise)!

You could also go for a hybrid layout where parts of the design are fixed, and others liquid. You could have a fixed-width sidebar with a liquid content column, for example. I’ve found that this method works better than having everything based off percentages of ems.

Unfortunately, we’re plagued by small groups of people with low-resolution monitors, very big widescreen monitors, tiny mobile web phones, and outdated browsers like Internet Explorer. We’re ill-equipped to handle all the possible scenarios, and far too many people don’t update their browsers in a timely manner, resulting in a lack of improvement in that area. All we can really do is support as many browsers and resolutions as possible, and wait for people’s computers to stop working, so they will get a modern machine, resulting in a tiny step forward progress-wise. Eventually Internet Explorer 6 will die-out, giving us better support for liquid layouts, which are becoming more and more important as screen resolutions diversify, having increasingly different aspect ratios as well as pixel dimensions.

Further Reading…

I managed to dig-up a post I found via Smashing Magazine back in August 2007. – CSS Layouts: The Fixed. The Fluid. The Elastic.

There aren’t many options for the large amount of Mac-using designers. To test a site in IE, your choices are pretty much limited to either using a PC, or using a virtual PC setup, like VMWare Fusion. If you have a PC on hand, good for you, you’re covered. Otherwise, you’d probably go for VMWare fusion, which costs $80 plus a $189 Windowss XP license. (Or you could just get the WinXP license and use the BootCamp software Apple provides with OS X 10.5) Rather pricey, though, isn’t it?

Luckily, there’s another option out there, albeit a buggy and hacked-together option. It costs $0.00 though, so who cares if it’s a little buggy?

IES4OSX allows you to run several different versions of Internet Explorer on your Mac, for testing designs, or using sites that refuse to work in your preferred browser. It’s a little buggy, it relies on X11, and it takes up a bit of CPU power. But it seems to render pages correctly the same as IE does.

So if you’re not using a Mac yet, here’s another reason to switch…

I’m very well aware that the browser is in beta, but I can’t help but be worried about this. Some pages seem to render worse than ever, and I can’t help but think “Are these bugs, or some sort of ploy to keep things as they’ve been?” It’s not really in Microsoft’s best interests to be fully standards compliant, after all.

Here are just a few examples of the render bugs I’ve noticed:

• WSC’s footer appears halfway down the page, right at the end of the sidebar, not at the bottom of the page where it belongs.
• The contents of Facebook’s main page are squished funny.
• The search bar on Apple.com appears below it’s parent navigation bar, instead of inside it.
• Digg’s header doesn’t match-up with the top of the screen, and has a bunch of extra padding below the navigational links.
• WebDesignerWall.com doesn’t look very good. The background image (which is most of the design) does not line-up correctly, because there is at least 800px of extra space inserted above the content.
• FreelanceSwitch.com looks horrible, and we’ll leave it at that.

Few sites have escaped its horrible rendering issues. Again, I know IE8 is in beta. But I wonder, how on Earth did it pass the ACID2 test with such horrible problems? Did they just adjust things until all of the ACID2 elements lined-up, messing everything else up?

I hope things improve.