IE8 Stupidity

1th January 2008

Maybe I spoke to soon when I congratulated the IE8 development team on creating a browser capable of passing Acid2 as it now looks as though they have thrown away all their hard work be being stupid.

With the switch between older versions of IE they implemented a malformed doc type detector to enable what was commonly known as 'quirks mode' so the site would render using the previous engine. At first look you've got to think that this was bad as you could end up with thousands of broken sites which relied on the old, faulty engine. And thats the point.

The only way to get old sites which only worked with faulty / flawed rendering engines is to make sure that when the users of the site install a new browser the site breaks. After all these users start complaining making the site work correctly suddenly appeals alot more.

This is NOT what has happened with IE 8.

Instead MS and their development team decided to flout previous acceptable methods and create a meta tag to signify the site should use then newly complient engine. So why exactly would anyone spend time and money turning their old site? As far as they are concerned the site works, who cares if its standard complient.

Yes its tough being the browser that most people use and with such a bad record of adhering to standards a big switch to a complient engine and site that was made for your old engine wont work and your stuck answering thousands of email complaints. Is this a goog enough reason... I don't think so; grow some balls and break the sites are meant to be broken!

If you want to see opinions of world renowned web experts on this stupid decision, take a look at opera watch.