• Home
• Reviews
• News
• Downloads
• CNET TV

About me

My posting summary

1 to 2 of 2

My comments

• Can we bill MS for the time it takes to hack?
  This open-source developer is tired of staying up late to make
  compliant sites work in IE. From what I am seeing, the battle is
  far from over. I just keep pushing everyone I know to FF and
  they are pleasantly suprised to find that they had a choice. I
  would be interested in forming a class action against MS to
  either make them cease and desist further bad software
  development or at least get restitution for all our collective
  efforts to make things look good in bad software. I am still not
  sure why they bother what with all the success of Xbox looming?
  Heck their investors would be pleased to release the IE dev team
  off the payroll -- or are they all temps anyway or outsourced to
  India which may shed light on some of the issues....The easiest
  solution is to take the source of Mozilla and slap that silly UI on
  it with a nod to the developers in the source somewhere. Beta-
  schmeta. My pain would be relieved and I would have time to
  spend with family and friends. Time to develop sites would be
  much faster. I'd be done on the first round of CSS. Hack-free
  pages would then make lighter page loads...think - just think -
  of the beautiful pages you could create if it weren't for IE. The
  list goes on and on...

  February 2, 2006

  0 replies

• Thanks for the review...can't wait to see what Zeldman has to say...
  I am thankful for this story. As a Web application UI designer
  and developer, I cringe at the prospect of IE 7 release for the
  multitudes that are not aware that they have a choice. Especially
  from the view point of working in open source and w3c
  specifications for Web page markup. Our team relies heavily on
  CSS to manage page display and are weaning our sites from
  using tables to force layout. Though we are able to develop our
  sites using standard compliant recommendations, IE is by far the
  biggest issue that we have in adhereing to these guidelines. It
  causes us to go over hours and to hack valid markup. We start
  builds on compliant browsers and then once this is refined, we
  view in IE to see what whacked-out issues occur there. Funny
  that our sites look fantastic on all other compliant browsers -
  the only issue is IE. That is a sad state of affairs in 2006.
  Meanwhile, we steadily move our clients to Firefox while we wait
  for IE to catch up with current browser software. Amazing how
  thankful these clients are and how they spread the word to their
  friends and family. Other than the neat little enhancement IE
  provides MS developers, it is junk to the rest of us. Thankfully,
  installing Firefox on Windows is a breeze. I was relieved to read
  that the CNET page displayed poorly in IE7 - that means it is not
  just our sites that will suffer display issues. Wonder who we
  should bill our time to fix issues upon the release? Our clients?
  How about MS? Perhaps MS should stick with Xbox which
  appears to be a popular item for them. Browser software
  obviously is not their gig. Why else would it take so long to
  release a new version? Or is it to wait for open-source
  developers to write the features such as tabbed browsing. I
  would recommend that MS save time and money, grab the
  source for FF or Mozilla, slap their remedial UI and brand on it,
  and offer it up as IE7. Viola! no more beta and it works
  everywhere (with exception to those MS developers that leverage
  IE specific features. - the answer for them is to proudly display
  that their site ONLY works in IE!) I am certain that a nod to the
  developers at Mozilla somewhere in the source is all that they
  would need to do to be "compliant"

  February 2, 2006

  2 replies