4 ms·

Well, shit. And for a few short years, it seemed that IE has outgrown its monstrous reputation it had rightfully acquired in the 00s; nope, still the usual "spe

Well, shit. And for a few short years, it seemed that IE has outgrown its monstrous reputation it had rightfully acquired in the 00s; nope, still the usual "spend enormous time catering to my quirks" IE. This makes me sad.

dak1 13y ago
There's definitely still some weird IE bugs, although they're more (but not exclusively) on the JavaScript side now rather than CSS. For example, if you have a form without a submit button in IE 10, and a `<button>` element anywhere else on the page, IE will treat the <button> as the submit and "click" it for you rather than submit the form. If you don't have a `<button>` element though it will submit the form as expected.
- riquito 13y ago
  I think this is a long time bug, not IE10 specific.
- dspillett 13y ago
  There are various inconsistencies between browsers (including between version of IE) when you do not explicitly set the type attribute of a button tag. Some will default to it being a submit button and some will default it to being a "button" button. In the instances where we hit this problem making sure to specify a type seems to make things more consistent.
EarthLaunch 13y ago
With each release of IE since IE7, there has been some kind of marketing push saying "THIS version is the one that is modern and totally standards-compliant, really", and a bunch of people repeat that. Then it turns out to be buggy. Then the cycle repeats. No one should be surprised at IE11's flaws. I believe IE's quality has been fairly consistent over the years. IE6 had a monstrous reputation mainly because it was outdated and widespread for so long.
- Piskvorrr 13y ago
  I have passionately hated IE6, 7, and 8; IE9 has managed to reduce this to a resigned "meh, good enough, what took you so long?" (which _was_ a significant change to the better). I was hoping that IE was finally shaping up to be an A-grade browser. Oh well.
belluchan 13y ago
It hasn't outgrown it's monstrous reputation and it will probably never. IE has long gaps between updates so it will always quickly fall behind. Software can still install toolbars and change your default search engine. IE is not open source. IE 11 does not implement X standards for business reasons, where X is WebRTC, some missing CSS thing, touch events, etc. You can't test for IE except on Windows. IE's developer tools are terrible. IE is used by people bad with computers and corporations with bad IT departments. For me to care about IE, it would: have to be available on Mac OS X. have to have bigger market share in mobile just have more people using it in general (because frankly it's not used much by any of the people we care about). have much, much better development tools Our development cycle is to develop in Chrome Canary, and proactively test and fix for Firefox. We don't test in IE but fix IE issues when someone complains about something not working in IE and if we have the time or think it's important enough.
- warfangle 13y ago
  IE11 has touch events, they're just a different api /than everyone else/.
- Piskvorrr 13y ago
  I have come to terms with this - since most of the compatibility issues can be papered over nowadays, and there are viable alternatives - all I was hoping for was "write and debug once, give it a quick look in A-grade browsers, fix minor quirks", without the usual "...and then spend double the time fixing IE's idiosyncrasies."
- strmpnk 13y ago
  Many of these points are partial truths or at least not as damning as it might seem. IE has had long gaps in the past because of IE being tied to larger updates and many people having invested in old technology depending on them changing that slowly to allow time to change. The IE team at MicroSoft is clear that they intend to do more regular releases and push updates out automatically. While it won't be monthly like other vendors, it's certainly a huge change from where it was. Software still installs toolbars on Chrome too. I recently tried Windows again for the first time in about 13 years and I'll tell you that I was caught off guard. Toolbars ended up in Chrome AND IE. Not sure if this is a browser problem as much as a software installation problem. Wish I would have learned about Chocolately earlier. Open source isn't something that makes the browser better at being a browser. It's possibly important in other aspects but you should be complaining about other browsers then. Many include lots of proprietary code on top of open engines like WebKit (i.e. Safari is really not all that open source) and then custom engines like Opera mobile. WebRTC isn't even half baked yet. Complaining that they don't release it to millions of devices as a feature is silly. It's great to see browsers experiment with new APIs that become standards... which leads me to: touch events. Touch events were a proprietary outgrowth of the early mobile web. While they've become defacto for mobiles, it's a limiting API that doesn't really help unify the way we handle input at all. MSFT released a vendor extension called pointer events which is a much better API that has now been proposed as a standard. It handles touch, mouse pointers, pen digitizers, and has space to interpret more kinds of devices. Much better than where touch events left us. It's sad that more developers don't demand this unified API either since it makes it far easier to implement cross-input-device friendly content. I haven't spent much time with the IE developer tools but it seems that MicroSoft now provides free VMs that can be installed to run IE for development (http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools) and their developer tools seem to have been improved (most people now just complain they want chrome's developer tools everywhere). So what is left is that I see people either stuck in the past or thinking that this whole thing is IE vs everyone else. IE's got the same problems as many other browsers. We just pick our check list with bias by telling all browser vendors they should just become Chrome. What's the point in an "open" ecosystem if people just demand we all do things exactly one way defined largely by one vendor which happens to develop these "standards" as proprietary extensions just like IE has for all sorts of things (XHR anyone?). >_<

dak1 13y ago

There's definitely still some weird IE bugs, although they're more (but not exclusively) on the JavaScript side now rather than CSS. For example, if you have a form without a submit button in IE 10, and a `<button>` element anywhere else on the page, IE will treat the <button> as the submit and "click" it for you rather than submit the form. If you don't have a `<button>` element though it will submit the form as expected.

riquito 13y ago
I think this is a long time bug, not IE10 specific.
dspillett 13y ago
There are various inconsistencies between browsers (including between version of IE) when you do not explicitly set the type attribute of a button tag. Some will default to it being a submit button and some will default it to being a "button" button. In the instances where we hit this problem making sure to specify a type seems to make things more consistent.

EarthLaunch 13y ago

With each release of IE since IE7, there has been some kind of marketing push saying "THIS version is the one that is modern and totally standards-compliant, really", and a bunch of people repeat that. Then it turns out to be buggy. Then the cycle repeats. No one should be surprised at IE11's flaws. I believe IE's quality has been fairly consistent over the years. IE6 had a monstrous reputation mainly because it was outdated and widespread for so long.

Piskvorrr 13y ago
I have passionately hated IE6, 7, and 8; IE9 has managed to reduce this to a resigned "meh, good enough, what took you so long?" (which _was_ a significant change to the better). I was hoping that IE was finally shaping up to be an A-grade browser. Oh well.

belluchan 13y ago

It hasn't outgrown it's monstrous reputation and it will probably never. IE has long gaps between updates so it will always quickly fall behind. Software can still install toolbars and change your default search engine. IE is not open source. IE 11 does not implement X standards for business reasons, where X is WebRTC, some missing CSS thing, touch events, etc. You can't test for IE except on Windows. IE's developer tools are terrible. IE is used by people bad with computers and corporations with bad IT departments. For me to care about IE, it would: have to be available on Mac OS X. have to have bigger market share in mobile just have more people using it in general (because frankly it's not used much by any of the people we care about). have much, much better development tools Our development cycle is to develop in Chrome Canary, and proactively test and fix for Firefox. We don't test in IE but fix IE issues when someone complains about something not working in IE and if we have the time or think it's important enough.

warfangle 13y ago
IE11 has touch events, they're just a different api /than everyone else/.
Piskvorrr 13y ago
I have come to terms with this - since most of the compatibility issues can be papered over nowadays, and there are viable alternatives - all I was hoping for was "write and debug once, give it a quick look in A-grade browsers, fix minor quirks", without the usual "...and then spend double the time fixing IE's idiosyncrasies."
strmpnk 13y ago
Many of these points are partial truths or at least not as damning as it might seem. IE has had long gaps in the past because of IE being tied to larger updates and many people having invested in old technology depending on them changing that slowly to allow time to change. The IE team at MicroSoft is clear that they intend to do more regular releases and push updates out automatically. While it won't be monthly like other vendors, it's certainly a huge change from where it was. Software still installs toolbars on Chrome too. I recently tried Windows again for the first time in about 13 years and I'll tell you that I was caught off guard. Toolbars ended up in Chrome AND IE. Not sure if this is a browser problem as much as a software installation problem. Wish I would have learned about Chocolately earlier. Open source isn't something that makes the browser better at being a browser. It's possibly important in other aspects but you should be complaining about other browsers then. Many include lots of proprietary code on top of open engines like WebKit (i.e. Safari is really not all that open source) and then custom engines like Opera mobile. WebRTC isn't even half baked yet. Complaining that they don't release it to millions of devices as a feature is silly. It's great to see browsers experiment with new APIs that become standards... which leads me to: touch events. Touch events were a proprietary outgrowth of the early mobile web. While they've become defacto for mobiles, it's a limiting API that doesn't really help unify the way we handle input at all. MSFT released a vendor extension called pointer events which is a much better API that has now been proposed as a standard. It handles touch, mouse pointers, pen digitizers, and has space to interpret more kinds of devices. Much better than where touch events left us. It's sad that more developers don't demand this unified API either since it makes it far easier to implement cross-input-device friendly content. I haven't spent much time with the IE developer tools but it seems that MicroSoft now provides free VMs that can be installed to run IE for development (http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools) and their developer tools seem to have been improved (most people now just complain they want chrome's developer tools everywhere). So what is left is that I see people either stuck in the past or thinking that this whole thing is IE vs everyone else. IE's got the same problems as many other browsers. We just pick our check list with bias by telling all browser vendors they should just become Chrome. What's the point in an "open" ecosystem if people just demand we all do things exactly one way defined largely by one vendor which happens to develop these "standards" as proprietary extensions just like IE has for all sorts of things (XHR anyone?). >_<