A ton of activity today around the announcement that the Internet Explorer team will be introducing a big huge hack with IE8 to allow it to function like a normal modern web browser.
Mo has a better idea:
In real terms, though, it’s not worth the effort. Release a version of IE 6 [that] can be installed standalone and let the tiny handful of corporate users with weird intranet applications use it, and everyone else will use IE 8 with similar quirks / standards-compliant switches as Firefox …
Seriously. Why not let users run old versions of IE side-by-side with IE8? Pushing the problem of determining which browser / engine to use onto the user seems like the right solution here because the right thing is too complex:
The MIT guy did not see any code that handled this case and asked the New Jersey guy how the problem was handled. The New Jersey guy said that the Unix folks were aware of the problem, but the solution was for the system routine to always finish, but sometimes an error code would be returned that signaled that the system routine had failed to complete its action. A correct user program, then, had to check the error code to determine whether to simply try the system routine again. The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing.
The New Jersey guy said that the Unix solution was right because the design philosophy of Unix was simplicity and that the right thing was too complex. Besides, programmers could easily insert this extra test and loop. The MIT guy pointed out that the implementation was simple but the interface to the functionality was complex. The New Jersey guy said that the right tradeoff has been selected in Unix – namely, implementation simplicity was more important than interface simplicity.
The MIT guy then muttered that sometimes it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, but the New Jersey guy didn’t understand (I'm not sure I do either).
And in this case, the right thing isn’t even right. It’s a big huge hack.
Of course, putting yourself in Microsoft’s shoes, it doesn’t take long to figure out the problem with letting users choose between different browsers.
Note: I wanted to make a crack in here about rebranding IE6 as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework but it wasn’t working…
Discuss
Agreed, a huge hack. What’s more audacious is that Microsoft is asking the rest of the industry to adopt the hack, too.
— Richard Crowley on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 11:44 PM #
And everyone will add it too, as they want everyone to be able to use their web sites.
— Anonymous on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 at 12:10 AM #
Agreed. It’s the most retarded idea ever and I can’t wait to adopt it :) Fun times.
— Ryan Tomayko on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 at 12:29 AM #
I think people might be somewhat missing the main benefit to Microsoft. Namely, if you design a site for IE8 and IE8 actually has decent support for standards then you’re not designing a site for IE8. You’re designing it for web standards, and every desktop and mobile browser is going to have a fair shake of the stick.
If the site is so fragile it breaks upgrading from IE6->7 or 7->8 then what are the realistic chances that it’s going to work in Opera or Webkit. So this gives intranets a way to ensure their sites remain, not “websites”, but “IE-sites”. (And this is why “Don’t Break the Web”!? is one of the most disgustingly hypocritical things to come out of MSFT recently)
Seems like exactly the kind of thing that the EU should be ruling as illegal as part of Opera’s complaint.
— dave on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 at 06:48 AM #
The old version of IE should be renamed “Intranet Explorer” ;–)
— James on Thursday, January 24, 2008 at 10:39 AM #
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