I just want to say: if you sit back and be cynical (no offense meant with that, just how you come across to me) about how we’ll never get rid of IE and how all our efforts our futile, then yes I can understand your position.

But, on the other hand, if you put effort into not only making your site be very accessible and standards compliant, but also an incentive for people to switch (without forcing it to them, but doing it in a nice and friendly way as I described 3 comments above), you’ll find that people actually do go the distance to try out Firebird or so, and this will (hopefully) strengthen your faith in this issue.

I’m not sure whether it would, for you, but I’m just saying that the attitude one could take on this entire thing is very important, as it greatly influences and affects your perspective and estimates. :)

Just my $0.02 anyway…

“I don’t see the situation as being that grim. With IE going stagnate for so long, it just gives more and more time for people to wake up and smell the coffee, or start itching for a change.”

You see, I WISH that were true. But if you look at what is going on, that doesn’t happen to any *significant* number of people. Windows users don’t seem to want to use anything but IE – other than us geeks and the people we can influence around us personally. But as the market en-masse – the ONLY shift we have seen in literally years is a shift *toward* more IE users, to the point where we are now.

IE is so tied into Windows that it makes it “work” to change it. Your average Joe really doesn’t have much of a motive to do so. And sites “working better” isn’t a motive to Joe. He thinks sites work fine. Heck – you spent hours on end making sure it does.

You could try and force the issue on IE users, but IMO I think it would be *very* unwise to force 98% (or whatever it is) of your users to go download Gecko, etc because you think its “better” (even if it somehow is). Particularly on a site that depends on commerce. A blog – sure.

Frankly, I HOPE I’m wrong. But I think that most likely, I’m correct. Only time will tell. We’ve seen this industry take sharp left turns before … the dot BOMB comes to mind… ;)

Tom

“Add an explanation page with nice, friendly and encouraging – but not actively recommending! – them to try out another browser”

That should be:
“Add an explanation page with nice, friendly explanations, and encouraging – but not actively recommending! – them to try out another browser”

My apologies for any confusion that that sentence may cause.

Then some comments on the comments:

Tom said:
“(I’m not making that figure up – based on a major brand redesign I’m doing right now that gets *millions* of hits – Opera is 0.1%”

Whoop dee doo. What you fail to realize, it seems to me, is that your site is not the only site on the Internet, and thus it targets a specific audience, and thus gets hits from a specific group of people. Other sites target other groups and get other people as their visitors. Me, for instance, my current (old) site has an average of 25% Mozilla users, 60% non-members (includes spiders like Google) and 15% users with IE. So, between the actual MEMBERS on my site, the real returning visitors, more than half of them use Mozilla. I may not get “millions of hits” each day but I’m just an example. A friend of mine has become just as big a Standards-whore (pardon my french) as I am, and he has actively converted up to ~90% of all his site’s users to using Mozilla/Firebird.
So while it may be true for your site, it does not indefinitely apply all over the internet, and certainly not necessarily as a ‘rule-of-thumb’ for us Standards-crazy webdevelopers. Sure, Google’s Zeitgeist shows that Google itself has been used for about 90% by IE5/IE6 users. But again, each site targets their own audience, and sites like these, SimpleBits, Meyerweb, etc. etc. etc., they all have a target audience that includes a very large share of webdevelopers like myself who care very much about Standards-based webdevelopment, and use a Standards-compliant browser.
This statement:
“That’s why your logs show 5% and less of those users.”
Will undoubtedly be completely off for a site like StopDesign.

Doug said:
“I don’t see the situation as being that grim.

With IE going stagnate for so long, it just gives more and more time for people to wake up and smell the coffee, or start itching for a change. Progressive-thinking companies have already started switching for security reasons. Word will continue to spread of alternative choices. Dreaming? Maybe. But in this game, awareness of choice is key. The longer that awareness has to grow, the more it will compound.”

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot for the past year, year-and-a-half, is how it would be possible to get a firm grip in the market with Standards-compliant browsers.

Certainly everyone here will agree with me when I say that a ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude is unlikely to get many people to switch. Likewise when I say that literally forcing people to use a good browser, lest they get a blank, style-less page like NN4, will not achieve the desired result.
So how do we do it, then?

My vision on that is simple. Don’t fight them. Be on their side.

Of course, you may think “Be on their side? What? Use IE or so???” – but that’s not what I mean. No, instead of trying to convince others actively to switch to a better browser, do it passively: offer explanations on why their browser may not be the wisest choice (Showing them dangerous IE security leaks is always a good option, if only because almost every week a new one will be found ;)), add cool add-ons using MOSe, useful functionality, prettier appearances and the like, and explain that these nifty things are only available in Standards-compliant browsers because they use Modern-day techniques that IE is sadly running behind on, a bit.

Whatever you do, try to avoid – at all times – to give the impression that you Hate IE. If people think, for only a split second, that you might just be an IE-hater, they will shrug it off and generally treat the rest of your explanations and all as “IE-bashing”. “Oh, this guy is just another anti-IE purist or something…”

Getting people to switch works best when they end up thinking “wow, I didn’t know how much cool stuff I could have been enjoying had I not used IE”. That’s also the best way to get them to tell all of their buddies to use a different browser, too.

So my suggestion to all webmasters would be: don’t hesitate to make plenty of use of Dave Shea’s excellent MOSe concept in your site design(s). Add an explanation page with nice, friendly and encouraging – but not actively recommending! – them to try out another browser, and link to that page visibly and plentifully on your site. Refer to it lots. The more people who have such a page, the more people will become aware of this, and the more casual web-visitors will be reached with our message.

Okay, I think I rant too much, but when I visualize something in my mind, I tend to get ‘a bit’ enthusiastic :)

Oops–it isn’t the codebase attribute itself that’s whack, it’s MS’s value for it (or perhaps Macromedia’s; dunno): the URI is supposed to point to the same domain as the object resides on, but is typically used to point to the plugin page for whatever is being embedded.

As well, Moz (and NS6+) barf on the classid attribute since that value is (for Flash at least) specific to Active-X controls–a proprietary Windows-only technology.

So MS has mucked about somewhat with the Active-X thing, but it isn’t all their fault.

My bad.

I’m not saying that other web browser will take over the web. But when it’s an issue about old software, the user eventually has to upgrade. This process itself might take 4-5 years before it’s widely spread. But we can’t really expect ourself to design for a 5 year old browser when that day comes. We just can’t. And the solution is A) Force the user to upgrade B) Stick with it. Don’t give a crap about other browser and make things work in IE. I for one vote for A.

However, I remembered the days when I sat with my Pentium II. Internet Explorer was so unstable that I had to use Netscape, because it didn’t crash every five minutes or so. Opera works better for me now, more funtions, mail integrated, hotlinks. IE doesn’t come close, unless I want to go 3rd party.

And there won’t be another version of IE. MicroSofts new web browser will have another nice name. And probably more browser-unique specifications. And probably a whole new set of HTML to go with it.

The Browser War ain’t dead. It’s just getting started. Again.

I am a programmer who uses web for really complex dhtml stuff as well as backend applications.

DHTML for ‘backend apps’? You man intranet/extranet apps or some such, no? When I’ve heard (and used) the term ‘backend’ it’s typically referred to the model and controller portions of an MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern–bits for which DHTML is useless.

When you want to learn the height of a particular “component” you want to know the damn height of that component. You don’t want to think about the margins, the border, the padding etc… [sic]

True enough, and I also preferred Microsoft’s original box model to the W3C’s insofar as it included padding and border in the width attribute.

That’s only one aspect of the difference between Microsoft’s CSS implementation and the W3C recommendation, however. CSS 2.1 includes a number of very useful properties (min-width, max-width), values (position: fixed, background-position: fixed on elements other than body), pseudo-classes (:hover on elements other than a) and selectors (adjacent and sibling) that Microsoft’s implementation does not, to say nothing of other W3C-backed standards that IE doesn’t support such as alpha transparency in PNG. I would rather deal with a sub-optimal width property and have those items than not.

Moreover, a key advantage of the W3C recommendations is that while they are not perfect, they are at least open: they are free to implement and can be influenced by anyone (well, anyone who signs up for the appropriate mailing list and/or can afford the membership fee). The W3C, for all it’s warts, is a vendor-neutral body whose participants include a wide range of firms and organizations–including Microsoft. Microsoft is just one software vendor. Be they ever so benevolent, they still must maximize shareholder value, just like every other for-profit corporation in the world. Their interests are not always identical to–and are occasionally in conflict with–those of the rest of the industry. More, they have a responsibility to their shareholders not to put the interests of the industry as a whole ahead of their own. One need only note the many ISVs and VARs have bemoaned their management of the Windows API, and recent issues with their disclosure and licensing per the latest antitrust settlement, to see that Microsoft does, in fact, take their duty to their shareholders quite seriously.

So people who think they are smart when they recommend the standards are not smart at all, cause [sic] they are not working on really complex applications. Their pages are extremely simple, their back-end apps are also simple. So the way I feel is that, there is no way Microsoft can follow these incapable people.

So your argument is something along the lines of “I build high-rise office buildings, you build single-family homes. High-rise office buildings are more complex than single-family homes, therefore your opinion is invalid”?

That’s just absurd on so many levels.

First of all, ‘DHTML’ is marketese for HTML + DOM + CSS + JavaScript. It’s woefully inadequate to describe rich web-based user interfaces because it excludes a whole range of technologies relevant to deploying browser-based apps including Flash, XAML, XUL, SMIL and SVG.

More, you’re imposing a false value judgement. Just as there is a need for both high-rise office buildings and single-family homes (putting aside various environmental and urban planning arguments for simplicity here), there is a need for both complex application-style UIs and simpler document-style UIs. One isn’t more valid (or valuable) than the other; they are simply different fields of endeavor.

As well, just because someone does a simple site does not mean they are incapable of doing a complex one. I’ve done many simple sites because that was what the client needed, not because I was ‘incapable’ of doing anything more complex.

Further, complexity isn’t a virtue in and of itself. Many would argue the opposite, in fact. Complexity is sometimes necessary to achieve a particular set of requirements, but it isn’t of itself a good thing.

More, back-end complexity and front-end complexity are orthoganal. Amazon, eBay, /., The New York Times and the BBC have relatively simple front-ends from a technology standpoint, but their backends are anything but. Lumping the two together is misleading at best.

You also seem to be unaware that the persons most responsible for CSS are, in fact, highly competent in the field of multimedia user interfaces. For example, the author of the very first CSS submission to the W3C, Håkon Wium Lie, was involved in multimedia UI development at MIT in the early ’90s–well before most of the folks posting here had ever seen a web page. You should read the bios of the authors of the CSS recommendations, such as Hakon, Bert Bos, Chris Lilley and Ian Jacobs before claiming they are ‘incapable’. Brushing up on the history of CSS might also be in order.

Finally, you fail to mention that Microsoft contributed as much to CSS as anyone. They are not only a member of the W3C, but also participate in the CSS working group and in fact have a patent on CSS. To claim that Microsoft understands the needs of developers where those responsible for CSS and other W3C recommendations do not is absurd because Microsoft is among those responsible for the W3C recommendations, especially CSS.

With all due regard for your web-based UI development skills, the statement above makes me more suspicious of your competence than of the competence of anyone at the W3C.

I know that some people with high egos made terrible decisions, like white space in xhtml. Well white space is part of xml, but most of the time you edit xml files for programs using apis. But you write xhtml by hand. It become more and more complicated to be able to test things.

To what are you referring, exactly? What is your issue with the handling of white space in HTML/XML?

People are sicking [sic] of referring to a component using document.getElementById, that’s not how we work in other gui apis.

The DOM can be cumbersome, true enough, but you should remember that it isn’t really a GUI API. It’s an API for manipulating documents–namely XML documents. Because it is intended for general document manipulation, rather than strictly for GUI development, it will be more cumbersome in some respects than a specialized GUI language. It is, however, also more powerful insofar as it can be used in a wider range of situations.

We need strong-typed [sic] javascript.

Firstly, that’s an issue to be raised with ECMA International, the maintainer of the JavaScript (properly ECMAScript) standard, not the W3C.

Secondly, it is up to browser manufacturers to implement support for other languages–be they strongly or weakly typed. The W3C DOM is intended to be language-neutral.

Finally, whether JS should be strongly typed or no is really a matter of opinion. Plenty of successful languages (Perl, Python, PHP) use weak typing. Strong vs. weak typing is a long-standing religious war in computer science. Some, such as Python creator Guido van Rossum, think weak typing is an advantage. In any case, the debate isn’t going to be settled here, nor is it really appropriate to this thread.

We need a standard way of including video and animated content on the web

There is a standard way of including multimedia in a web page: the object tag. It is serviceable now, though Microsoft and Eolas have peed in the pool, so to speak, with the proprietary codebase attribute and frivilous patent, respectively.

Controlling multimedia is the province of SMIL. If you want support for something of that sort in the browser, talk to Microsoft.

we want to be able to control the animation with simple apis, etc… [sic]

What would you suggest? I am not the world’s foremost Flash or Director expert, but my experience with those two apps indicates that using ActionScript or Lingo to control animation isn’t particularly more difficult than using ECMAScript + DOM. What the latter lacks boils down to a standard client (precisely the problem other posters are bemoaning) and some convenience methods that could be provided by a custom library as easily as by the core language/object model.

We also want to be able to produce graphs on the browser, right in the client.

You should look at SVG, particularly the RCC component of SVG 1.2. If Microsoft (and Opera, Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, etc.) would get on the stick we’d have just that.

On a related note, given your emphasis on applications you might also be interested in XForms.

Most of what you want is either available or undergoing active development at the W3C. The reason you can’t use it is because browser developers, particularly Microsoft, have been slow to implement the relevant recommendations–which is precisely the point of this thread.

Microsoft isn’t the solution to your problems. In fact, they are creating those problems: they help to author standards, refuse to support them and when developers complain about lack of functionality they offer up a solution which amounts to ‘buy our software’. That isn’t safeguarding the interests of developers or the future of the web; it’s a protection racket.

You accuse the W3C of making non-intuitive decisions, and use the content/box size model as an example. If you take a step back, a deep breath, and think about it, you’ll see that the content size model actually makes more sense in a generic perspective. How else would you specify the size of a container that would wrap around a 320x240px image, with 0.5em padding and a 1px border? From a graphics design perspective, the box size model can sometimes be more useful, but it’s easier to emulate that than the other way around. Besides: a) both models will probably be available in CSS3, and b) even Microsoft realized the error of their ways and fixed their box model bug in IE6.

Microsoft claims to support certain standards in their browser (HTML, CSS, …), when in fact they don’t. I think that’s a good enough reason to criticize them. Maybe IE7 will have better standards support, but then again … maybe it won’t. Maybe it will just include another bunch of MS-specific extensions that will tie their customers even more firmly to the company bandwagon?

/Tommy

People will attack me, just for saying this, without understanding what the hell I am talking about, but for those who are smart and really want to understand the reasoning behind Microsoft’s decisions, follow me.

I am a programmer who uses web for really complex dhtml stuff as well as backend applications. Because from time to time, I use linux, not very often these days actually but I might in the future, I decided to support mozilla from day one. So everything I do has to work both in IE and mozilla. I didn’t really go and read the w3c stuff deeply to understand every detail before starting the job, but eventually I ended up learning every detail quite well. I learned all of these during the my experience with mozilla. What I realized is that, w3c shouldn’t be behind these standards, cause they make terrible non-intuitive decisions. When you want to learn the height of a particular “component” you want to know the damn height of that component. You don’t want to think about the margins, the border, the padding etc… That complicates things for you, cause that’s not how you work in other platforms, awt, java, wxwindows, windows forms, etc… So people who think they are smart when they recommend the standards are not smart at all, cause they are not working on really complex applications. Their pages are extremely simple, their back-end apps are also simple. So the way I feel is that, there is no way Microsoft can follow these incapable people. I am not happy that Microsoft goes in its own way and others goes in its own way. But w3c people clearly didn’t listen to application developers’ ideas, and I know that some people with high egos made terrible decisions, like white space in xhtml. Well white space is part of xml, but most of the time you edit xml files for programs using apis. But you write xhtml by hand. It become more and more complicated to be able to test things. So anyway, Microsoft and application developers have no choice but to abandon w3c. We can’t let these incapable people control the future of applications. I don’t like the idea of developing web applications just for Windows, but I don’t see how these w3c people let more capable people move the standards forward for the application development. Especially when they think that they have the power cause there are so many people fighting for them. In the end w3c is the one killing the web. People who just trying to make things work will not follow w3c anymore. They are not moving forward, we need a much better platform for the web, so that application developers can develop really complicated, intuitive interfaces for the web. People are sicking of referring to a component using document.getElementById, that’s not how we work in other gui apis. Better encapsulation, better transparency is needed. We need strong-typed javascript. We need a standard way of including video and animated content on the web, we want to be able to control the animation with simple apis, etc… We also want to be able to produce graphs on the browser, right in the client.

I too have started designing first for Mozilla Firebird, then modifying the CSS to support IE. However I haven’t had the good fortune Dave has had with IE/Mac. I just worked on a design and ran into terrible problems because of inheritance of clear in child elements. It took me about an hour to make IE/Win to work and after three days with IE/Mac, I’m about ready to give up on 0.2% of our users because I just can’t get it to work when I get to the footer.

BTW, if you go to my personal site, please accept my apologies for the fact that my site’s CSS does not render in anything but IE. It uses a Domino database for the BLOG software and it currently doesn’t use the correct MIME types, so browsers other than IE don’t see the CSS. It worked when the base files where on my local disk. That’s what I get for free. :) They’re working on it.

I’d just like to let you know that you’ve salvaged my sanity–and though I’m not hopeful that I’ll ever fully regain my sanity since the bugs haven’t been squashed on my latest project, this lets me know that I’m in good company and not the only one debugging within the padded, white-walled room of a straitjacket you might call the IE Factor.

The funny thing about all this, when you step back far enough to see “all the turtles all the way down”, is that we’ve come so far since HTML3 (or even 1.0) in so little time, that I can imagine in 3-5 years this kind of discussion about that “cute quirkiness” of IE will bring back a kind of nostalgia for times when developing for the web meant primarily WEB BROWSERS… I mean, M$ wants its operating system in cell phones and video games and now they’re talking about taking over RFID chips! If their flagship product is this bad, standards folks in OTHER FIELDS better start ganging up on M$ now before they monopolize yet another growing technology-delivery tool and muck it up as bad as they have with IE!

Between the lack of features and lack of security in IE a slip in market-share is certainly possible — remember the Netscape! I think now that the mozilla website is comprehensible by those unfamiliar with the phrase “nightly build” its popularity will really take off beyond the WiFi & mocha set, albeit silently.

Of course, as Doug points out, companies are looking at their options, and really, that’s where the war will be won or lost. Again, remember the Netscape. There was a time when Netscape wasn’t free for commercial use, but IE, fresh-faced and an underdog at the time, was free for any use. By the time Netscape was that free, the war was lost. Netscape was so far behind price-wise and quality-wise that its dominance was destroyed; is this beginning to sound familiar?

“Oh you simpleton, it’s bundled with windows — it’s right there!” – you say, and that’s true, that is a clear advantage. However, entire companies run on standard installs, picture an image with Firebird preset as the default browser. IE would still be there, but in a much more limited capacity (due to the highly unlikely occurrence of a user actually going through the trouble of changing the default to use it). In that scenario it certainly seems possible to gain the market-share needed to threaten the IE monopoly. So, it’s not just up to M$, it’s up to IT departments everywhere, and where I come from those creating the images are the ones who pick the software are the ones who use Firebird.

But then, some companies are also sticking stripped-down versions of XP into ATMs these days, so maybe security concerns aren’t such a big deal after all.

I don’t see the situation as being that grim.

With IE going stagnate for so long, it just gives more and more time for people to wake up and smell the coffee, or start itching for a change. Progressive-thinking companies have already started switching for security reasons. Word will continue to spread of alternative choices. Dreaming? Maybe. But in this game, awareness of choice is key. The longer that awareness has to grow, the more it will compound.

Developers like Firebird and Mozilla, and Opera. Hard core users like them. Frankly, that’s about it. That’s why your logs show 5% and less of those users. You aren’t going to get 95% of the population to switch from a browser that is PART of their OS – literally – to some “third party” browser – not en masse, not in any large group.

You might get a person here and there, but that’s it.

We are stuck with IE until M$ decides its time to change. And even then, it looks like that won’t filter into the mainstream until the populace upgrades to Longhorn – an even longer way down the road. I think we are looking at a good 4-5 YEARS before the next version of IE is spread out in the market. Cheery news.

Tom