Microsofts Compatibility Problem
Wednesday, 23. January 2008, 14:16:29
So, the Microsoft team are busy working away on version 8, and they're finding all sorts of web sites are breaking.
Welcome to the world of web development, Microsoft! It's what everybody else has to deal with!
Make no mistake, this is a real problem for Microsoft. They have to support legacy web sites. Often such sites are unmaintained intranet sites that would need to be totally rebuilt to support a new standards-compliant browser.
In their quest for a solution, Microsoft decided to get some outside advice, and the best they could find was a browser-specific meta tag.
I've already left my take on the problem, but I'll repeat it here:
The problem is fundamentally a Microsoft problem. It's a problem where sites have not developed a "web site", but have instead developed an "Internet Explorer site". This is not a problem to be solved by standardizing a new tag for all browsers. It's a problem to be solved by Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
The best solution to handling "Internet Explorer sites" is to have a dedicated "Internet Explorer browser". In practice, that would have to be a standalone copy of Internet Explorer 6. Maybe version 7, but there's already plenty of grumblings from places who have blocked updates to IE7 because it breaks their IE6 sites.
It's already possible to have a "nearly standalone" copy of IE6. Some details such as conditional comments don't work properly, and maybe some other things too, but it's hard to see it being a massive task for Microsoft to sort those out and end up with a truely standalone version of IE6 to be used for those legacy sites.
That would 100% solve Microsoft's compatibility problems and free up their IE development team to concentrate on bug fixes and new standards-based features.
Note that Microsoft's existing VM-based browsers don't solve the problem, as their customers will certainly want to set up icons to launch their legacy sites in the old browser, and I don't see how that could be done with a VM.
Welcome to the world of web development, Microsoft! It's what everybody else has to deal with!
Make no mistake, this is a real problem for Microsoft. They have to support legacy web sites. Often such sites are unmaintained intranet sites that would need to be totally rebuilt to support a new standards-compliant browser.
In their quest for a solution, Microsoft decided to get some outside advice, and the best they could find was a browser-specific meta tag.
I've already left my take on the problem, but I'll repeat it here:
The problem is fundamentally a Microsoft problem. It's a problem where sites have not developed a "web site", but have instead developed an "Internet Explorer site". This is not a problem to be solved by standardizing a new tag for all browsers. It's a problem to be solved by Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
The best solution to handling "Internet Explorer sites" is to have a dedicated "Internet Explorer browser". In practice, that would have to be a standalone copy of Internet Explorer 6. Maybe version 7, but there's already plenty of grumblings from places who have blocked updates to IE7 because it breaks their IE6 sites.
It's already possible to have a "nearly standalone" copy of IE6. Some details such as conditional comments don't work properly, and maybe some other things too, but it's hard to see it being a massive task for Microsoft to sort those out and end up with a truely standalone version of IE6 to be used for those legacy sites.
That would 100% solve Microsoft's compatibility problems and free up their IE development team to concentrate on bug fixes and new standards-based features.
Note that Microsoft's existing VM-based browsers don't solve the problem, as their customers will certainly want to set up icons to launch their legacy sites in the old browser, and I don't see how that could be done with a VM.
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