7 ms·

IE’s big leap forward; CSS3 selectors fully supported

84 points by mbrubeck 16y ago

cmgarcia 16y ago
Working as a web developer in the education sector, this gives me a great deal cautious hope for the future. About 90% of our visitors use IE because they are students in the classroom.
alttab 16y ago
First Canvas and now CSS3. In the world created by my dreams, all of this is done to standards, with good performance. In reality, experience has taught me that they could easily destroy these standards by doing it their own way. Only if there is finally a reconciliation to full standards (or little deviance like other browsers), would these press releases even be worth it. If they "implement" canvas and CSS3, and basically the new web, and we still have to go "that's a great idea, but does it work in IE?" they have still failed. Crosses fingers Here's to hope!
pilif 16y ago
sigh - why oh why can't they support Windows XP? 80% of the customers using our web application are still on Windows XP (some even on NT4...) and seing how conservative these companies are, I have my doubts that they'll ever upgrade. Now if we could have a working IE without hardware acceleration that runs under XP, that would be wonderful. I do have some hopes for Google Chrome Frame's MSI installer though - to support a barcode scanner, we already have to force our users to install Java, so there's at least some hope with GCF. As it stands now, 20% of our development time is wasted on making stuff work on IE 5.5 (!) and 6
- antidaily 16y ago
  I don't see that in the article. Where does it say it won't run on XP? edit: says it here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/17/ie9_no_windows_xp/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/17/ie9_no_windows_xp/ wow, that stinks!
- fname 16y ago
  why oh why can't they support Windows XP? Why should they? New features and updates only available to newer operating systems, drive upgrades! Makes perfect sense to me, especially considering XP support won't be around forever. As it stands now, 20% of our development time is wasted on making stuff work on IE 5.5 (!) and 6 I'm not following... If it's a waste of time, why are you doing it? Drop support for those browsers in that case. Unless, of course, customers using those browsers make up a significant percentage of use, it doesn't sound like much of a waste to me.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    > it doesn't sound like much of a waste to me. Maybe not in an economic sense, but many people consider it frustrating to spend hours and hours on something that wouldn't need to be done if just someone else would act.
    - fname 16y ago
      if just someone else would act Which someone would that be? Microsoft or the Corporate IT folks reluctant to upgrade* ? * Due to some internal app that only works on IE6.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - eli 16y ago
        I still don't understand why MS didn't build a full IE6 rendering engine into IE8 that could be turned on site-by-site. Maybe too hard with all the ActiveX dependencies?
        steveklabnik 16y ago
        It's like reverse Chrome Frame! I like it.
  - eli 16y ago
- robin_reala 16y ago
  If your customers are sticking with IE5.5 and IE6 they won’t upgrade to IE9 regardless of XP compatibility or not. Require Chrome Frame or a different XP-compatible modern browser as part of your system requirements and that should sort the majority of your clients.
  - pilif 16y ago
    Well. We do have quite many users that upgraded to ie7 lately. And a small minority that went to 8, but both browsers are still far away from what you can do with all other browsers currently out there. But yeah. Google Chrome frame is really interesting once the MSI installation becomes possible or they find a way around requiring admin rights for the installation (unlikely)
- akmiller 16y ago
  Why do people think it is unreasonable to not support a nearly 10 year old Operating System? Safari 5 is not going to run on OS X 10.1 and in all honesty why would anyone expect it to?
  - pilif 16y ago
    I don't think it's unreasonable. Quite to the contrary. It's just that a significant share of our end users are running outdated software, so our customers and thus we have to support it.
  - spicyj 16y ago
    Actually, Safari 5 doesn't even run on 10.4, which was the newest operating system until Leopard came out 2.5 years ago. By that measure, Apple's doing worse than Microsoft. (Although, Apple still supports XP in Safari 5.)
    - alanh 16y ago
      ha! I think the parenthetical part of your statement is actually the most interesting. After all, not many people are left on 10.4, and 10.5 runs on all the hardware that 10.4 does (not so with 7 and XP).
  - alanh 16y ago
    Because 62% [1] of Windows users are still on Windows XP. And these people bought computers; they didn't rent them. It at least feels like Microsoft's duty to herd as many of these people to the modern web stack as possible. OS X, on the other hand -- virtually everyone is on Snow Leopard or Leopard by now, with a few stragglers on 10.4 Tiger. No one is on 10.1, or even 10.3, anymore. [1] Part of the difference in the upgrade curves can be attributed to the legendary way Windows bloats and requires beefier hardware with each release (possibly excepting Vista → 7), the fact that Apple only needs to release OSes for its own hardware, the much cheaper and simpler (one version) OS upgrades on the Mac side of the fence, and frankly the anti-consumer DRM/validation tactics of Microsoft that make people fear updates. Apple makes no attempt to stop end users "sharing" or outright pirating OS updates — in part because everyone already bought hardware, but mostly, I suspect, because it's extremely beneficial to the (developer) ecosystem. [1]: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10 http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-shar...
StuffMaster 16y ago
"Another golden oldie that got dropped is cursor: hand, the MS proprietary alternative to cursor: pointer" I hate that no matter what it's called. For God's sake, don't use the hyperlink cursor for buttons!
- troygoode 16y ago
  Why? From a UI perspective I find it more natural to use "cursor: pointer" on anything that is clickable.
  - pornel 16y ago
    Your OS doesn't do that. Would you really like very icon, every button in OS to have hand cursor? Why webpage should be different? Buttons already have quite good affordance.
    - alanh 16y ago
      In some cases (e.g. elements that trigger JS events but aren't real links or buttons) an I-beam may appear. In these cases cursor: pointer; is quite beneficial, though cursor: default; (not the same as "auto") may be appropriate. But the web != your OS. Many things that work and are expected on the desktop, such as double-clicking, right-clicking, and dragging, are considerably more rare online, where there are a different set of expectations and, as you mention, affordances.
      - StuffMaster 16y ago
        Yes, but buttons are buttons wherever they are, and browsers even style them according to the OS theme. That's why I think they should be treated as buttons and not hyperlinks. And the sad thing is that desktop applications are starting to do this too. The new Symantec Antivirus interface is all webby and slow (something else I don't like), and uses the hand for buttons. This makes me a sad panda.
  - ary 16y ago
    The difference is that "cursor: pointer" means (by default) that the target will initiate navigation away from the current page. All other elements follow OS conventions as a matter of presenting a common UI grammar to the user.
mahmud 16y ago
Good job Microsoft! MS needs all the moral support and encouragement it can get. Really, we should treat MS like a recovering addict who declines a free hit and goes to bed early. They're doing their best and they're improving. Well done!
- ary 16y ago
  Except that in this instance the "substance" craved is money. Microsoft actively neglected to support standards until it started to affect the bottom line. Pretending that they were clueless to how difficult they've made web design and development is foolish. If there were any epiphanies they were had while staring at a balance sheet.
  - vijaydev 16y ago
    better late than never.. It came too late, but it definitely does not look like too little.
powrtoch 16y ago
As an Opera fan boy, this article hurts my soul a little. But good job for Microsoft (finally), perhaps it will motivate my boys in Norway to step it up. Now if they would just couple it with an aggressive upgrade program, we'd really be in business. Lack of XP support certainly doesn't help.
kenjackson 16y ago
I tried to tell people this was coming. It was clear to me listening to Dean talk about IE9. He was, for the first time, strongly hinting at the fact that users would want to use IE not because of features, but because it ran the web the best. I think MS made a smart call. They saw that the standards web was taking over. They couldn't stop it. So how do you sell Windows licenses in this new world? Be the best platform for the standards web. So now they're throwing all their eggs in this basket. It's the right move and I look forward to a new world when people actually say, "Use IE... no, seriously, use IE".
- pavs 16y ago
  While I applaud IE team for doing an amazing job in recent time, I can't help but point out the fact that their motivation for making IE more compliant has to do with selling more of their products and perhaps had little to do with making the best product. And they did it only after they realized that they are loosing browser market share by large number in a very short period of time. I am not suggesting that mozilla/Opera/Chrome developers don't care about money; but making the best browser for them was not a reactionary motivation to their low browser market share. At least for Opera, they have been right up there, or as long as I can remember, as the most standard compatible browser. Yet their browser market share never went above 1% (statcounter). And they are still making it better, recently developed the fastest JS engine. My point being. I can't trust a company/developer who is reactionary to the market share and their profit line as opposed to doing their job good in the first place. AFAI am concerned, as long as I have the choice, I will never use IE.
  - est 16y ago
    > their motivation for making IE more compliant has to do with selling more of their products and perhaps had little to do with making the best product. If you mean it, Firefox should have supported H.264. Mozilla/Opera aren't so innovating in the old days. I remember there was a HUGE ad in the toolbar area of Opera when it's still a shareware. I have to use a no-ad patch/crack. Tons of innovating features exists before Mozilla, there were lots of thirdparty IE shell browsers like MyIE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_Explorer_shells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_Explorer_shel... They were quiet because there weren't so many buzzword or hype nor any marketing campaign backed by Google.
patrickaljord 16y ago
Anyone knows if it supports flexible-box model?

84 points by mbrubeck 16y ago

Working as a web developer in the education sector, this gives me a great deal cautious hope for the future. About 90% of our visitors use IE because they are students in the classroom.

alttab 16y ago

First Canvas and now CSS3. In the world created by my dreams, all of this is done to standards, with good performance. In reality, experience has taught me that they could easily destroy these standards by doing it their own way. Only if there is finally a reconciliation to full standards (or little deviance like other browsers), would these press releases even be worth it. If they "implement" canvas and CSS3, and basically the new web, and we still have to go "that's a great idea, but does it work in IE?" they have still failed. Crosses fingers Here's to hope!

pilif 16y ago

sigh - why oh why can't they support Windows XP? 80% of the customers using our web application are still on Windows XP (some even on NT4...) and seing how conservative these companies are, I have my doubts that they'll ever upgrade. Now if we could have a working IE without hardware acceleration that runs under XP, that would be wonderful. I do have some hopes for Google Chrome Frame's MSI installer though - to support a barcode scanner, we already have to force our users to install Java, so there's at least some hope with GCF. As it stands now, 20% of our development time is wasted on making stuff work on IE 5.5 (!) and 6

antidaily 16y ago
I don't see that in the article. Where does it say it won't run on XP? edit: says it here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/17/ie9_no_windows_xp/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/17/ie9_no_windows_xp/ wow, that stinks!
fname 16y ago
why oh why can't they support Windows XP? Why should they? New features and updates only available to newer operating systems, drive upgrades! Makes perfect sense to me, especially considering XP support won't be around forever. As it stands now, 20% of our development time is wasted on making stuff work on IE 5.5 (!) and 6 I'm not following... If it's a waste of time, why are you doing it? Drop support for those browsers in that case. Unless, of course, customers using those browsers make up a significant percentage of use, it doesn't sound like much of a waste to me.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  > it doesn't sound like much of a waste to me. Maybe not in an economic sense, but many people consider it frustrating to spend hours and hours on something that wouldn't need to be done if just someone else would act.
  - fname 16y ago
    if just someone else would act Which someone would that be? Microsoft or the Corporate IT folks reluctant to upgrade* ? * Due to some internal app that only works on IE6.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - eli 16y ago
      I still don't understand why MS didn't build a full IE6 rendering engine into IE8 that could be turned on site-by-site. Maybe too hard with all the ActiveX dependencies?
      - steveklabnik 16y ago
        It's like reverse Chrome Frame! I like it.
- eli 16y ago
robin_reala 16y ago
If your customers are sticking with IE5.5 and IE6 they won’t upgrade to IE9 regardless of XP compatibility or not. Require Chrome Frame or a different XP-compatible modern browser as part of your system requirements and that should sort the majority of your clients.
- pilif 16y ago
  Well. We do have quite many users that upgraded to ie7 lately. And a small minority that went to 8, but both browsers are still far away from what you can do with all other browsers currently out there. But yeah. Google Chrome frame is really interesting once the MSI installation becomes possible or they find a way around requiring admin rights for the installation (unlikely)
akmiller 16y ago
Why do people think it is unreasonable to not support a nearly 10 year old Operating System? Safari 5 is not going to run on OS X 10.1 and in all honesty why would anyone expect it to?
- pilif 16y ago
  I don't think it's unreasonable. Quite to the contrary. It's just that a significant share of our end users are running outdated software, so our customers and thus we have to support it.
- spicyj 16y ago
  Actually, Safari 5 doesn't even run on 10.4, which was the newest operating system until Leopard came out 2.5 years ago. By that measure, Apple's doing worse than Microsoft. (Although, Apple still supports XP in Safari 5.)
  - alanh 16y ago
    ha! I think the parenthetical part of your statement is actually the most interesting. After all, not many people are left on 10.4, and 10.5 runs on all the hardware that 10.4 does (not so with 7 and XP).
- alanh 16y ago
  Because 62% [1] of Windows users are still on Windows XP. And these people bought computers; they didn't rent them. It at least feels like Microsoft's duty to herd as many of these people to the modern web stack as possible. OS X, on the other hand -- virtually everyone is on Snow Leopard or Leopard by now, with a few stragglers on 10.4 Tiger. No one is on 10.1, or even 10.3, anymore. [1] Part of the difference in the upgrade curves can be attributed to the legendary way Windows bloats and requires beefier hardware with each release (possibly excepting Vista → 7), the fact that Apple only needs to release OSes for its own hardware, the much cheaper and simpler (one version) OS upgrades on the Mac side of the fence, and frankly the anti-consumer DRM/validation tactics of Microsoft that make people fear updates. Apple makes no attempt to stop end users "sharing" or outright pirating OS updates — in part because everyone already bought hardware, but mostly, I suspect, because it's extremely beneficial to the (developer) ecosystem. [1]: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10 http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-shar...

StuffMaster 16y ago

"Another golden oldie that got dropped is cursor: hand, the MS proprietary alternative to cursor: pointer" I hate that no matter what it's called. For God's sake, don't use the hyperlink cursor for buttons!

troygoode 16y ago
Why? From a UI perspective I find it more natural to use "cursor: pointer" on anything that is clickable.
- pornel 16y ago
  Your OS doesn't do that. Would you really like very icon, every button in OS to have hand cursor? Why webpage should be different? Buttons already have quite good affordance.
  - alanh 16y ago
    In some cases (e.g. elements that trigger JS events but aren't real links or buttons) an I-beam may appear. In these cases cursor: pointer; is quite beneficial, though cursor: default; (not the same as "auto") may be appropriate. But the web != your OS. Many things that work and are expected on the desktop, such as double-clicking, right-clicking, and dragging, are considerably more rare online, where there are a different set of expectations and, as you mention, affordances.
    - StuffMaster 16y ago
      Yes, but buttons are buttons wherever they are, and browsers even style them according to the OS theme. That's why I think they should be treated as buttons and not hyperlinks. And the sad thing is that desktop applications are starting to do this too. The new Symantec Antivirus interface is all webby and slow (something else I don't like), and uses the hand for buttons. This makes me a sad panda.
- ary 16y ago
  The difference is that "cursor: pointer" means (by default) that the target will initiate navigation away from the current page. All other elements follow OS conventions as a matter of presenting a common UI grammar to the user.

mahmud 16y ago

Good job Microsoft! MS needs all the moral support and encouragement it can get. Really, we should treat MS like a recovering addict who declines a free hit and goes to bed early. They're doing their best and they're improving. Well done!

ary 16y ago
Except that in this instance the "substance" craved is money. Microsoft actively neglected to support standards until it started to affect the bottom line. Pretending that they were clueless to how difficult they've made web design and development is foolish. If there were any epiphanies they were had while staring at a balance sheet.
- vijaydev 16y ago
  better late than never.. It came too late, but it definitely does not look like too little.

powrtoch 16y ago

As an Opera fan boy, this article hurts my soul a little. But good job for Microsoft (finally), perhaps it will motivate my boys in Norway to step it up. Now if they would just couple it with an aggressive upgrade program, we'd really be in business. Lack of XP support certainly doesn't help.

kenjackson 16y ago

I tried to tell people this was coming. It was clear to me listening to Dean talk about IE9. He was, for the first time, strongly hinting at the fact that users would want to use IE not because of features, but because it ran the web the best. I think MS made a smart call. They saw that the standards web was taking over. They couldn't stop it. So how do you sell Windows licenses in this new world? Be the best platform for the standards web. So now they're throwing all their eggs in this basket. It's the right move and I look forward to a new world when people actually say, "Use IE... no, seriously, use IE".

pavs 16y ago
While I applaud IE team for doing an amazing job in recent time, I can't help but point out the fact that their motivation for making IE more compliant has to do with selling more of their products and perhaps had little to do with making the best product. And they did it only after they realized that they are loosing browser market share by large number in a very short period of time. I am not suggesting that mozilla/Opera/Chrome developers don't care about money; but making the best browser for them was not a reactionary motivation to their low browser market share. At least for Opera, they have been right up there, or as long as I can remember, as the most standard compatible browser. Yet their browser market share never went above 1% (statcounter). And they are still making it better, recently developed the fastest JS engine. My point being. I can't trust a company/developer who is reactionary to the market share and their profit line as opposed to doing their job good in the first place. AFAI am concerned, as long as I have the choice, I will never use IE.
- est 16y ago
  > their motivation for making IE more compliant has to do with selling more of their products and perhaps had little to do with making the best product. If you mean it, Firefox should have supported H.264. Mozilla/Opera aren't so innovating in the old days. I remember there was a HUGE ad in the toolbar area of Opera when it's still a shareware. I have to use a no-ad patch/crack. Tons of innovating features exists before Mozilla, there were lots of thirdparty IE shell browsers like MyIE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_Explorer_shells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_Explorer_shel... They were quiet because there weren't so many buzzword or hype nor any marketing campaign backed by Google.

patrickaljord 16y ago

Anyone knows if it supports flexible-box model?