Busting IE8’s Mythbusting | Hacker News Reader

Busting IE8’s Mythbusting

geektechnica.com

32 pointsnoodle35 comments

First: I use Chrome. IE is an awful browser. IE8 is bearable. I think that the advertising campaign that they are using for IE8 is disingenuous and despicable. As a Microsoftie, I'm not proud of it. I'm going to let it slide simply because I want as many people as possible to upgrade from IE 6 and 7. I do, however, believe there are more honest ways to go about it.

I think people have found my defensive insight into Microsoft to be a valuable perspective. Let's keep the streak going...

While the advertising teams have taken serious liberties, the engineering team has been honest.

I can't find the source now, but I've heard that they were only aiming for CSS 2 support because CSS 3 is an unfinished draft: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work

Many people complained about broken standards, so Microsoft decided not to ship a browser which map to unfinished standards. This would create future compatability issues. I think that's a reasonable call considering the critical mass of their browser which causes it to be a defacto standard.

This looks to be in line with independent findings which show IE8 has fantastic CSS 2 support, but weak 3 support: http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html

Additionally, the IE team has made significant contributions to the W3C with CSS 2.1 test cases: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/06/ie8-and-css-2-1-...

I always found it weird the file extension is .xht instead of .xhtml at as in http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20061011/index.xht

I would never have guessed why.

Well, let's get real here. We know where this is going. Microsoft really needs to either a) give up on the browser business or b) rewrite/scrap IE. The previous PM of IE (can't be bothered to remember/google his name, maybe Dean) basically had a breakdown and a "please don't be mean to me" serious of blog posts. It's silly that a company like MS cannot build a browser that lives up to standards set by a project like Firefox (maintaining compatibility with badly written corporate apps targeted at IE5/IE6 is a non starter -- very simple technical solution).

I wrote this on Reddit recently:

"It's about control, which leads back up to money.

"Windows is the default OS and IE the default browser. This is also why IE is broken. Microsoft doesn't want IE to render the same as its contemporaries because then you don't need to test on IE anymore, which means you don't need Windows anymore.

"Microsoft controls things this way and it's been part of their corporate philosophy for a long time -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They make something mostly compatible with the standard or competing product and then add proprietary extensions or quirks, and their marketshare alone forces people to take notice, and the hope is that eventually people will forget about the non-IE stuff and not bother to test on it anymore, meaning that now things don't work unless you have IE, meaning that you can't use the internet without Windows. That doesn't happen as often with the internet anymore, but as most of us know, it was quite successful for a pretty long time, and it's still successful for many non-web technologies (see DirectX v. OpenGL, etc.).

"And while things are no longer panning out to complete MS dominance, IE still plays a major role in defining what techs get on the web and what doesn't. For instance, crappy HTML 5 support because HTML 5 harms Silverlight. This is all intentional, don't fool yourself."

Not sure what you mean by "Microsoftie", but it'd be interesting to hear an MS advocate's or employee's position on this.

Microsoft doesn't want IE to render the same as its contemporaries because then you don't need to test on IE anymore, which means you don't need Windows anymore.

Are you implying MS are purposely breaking IE in order to sell Windows licences to web developers? How many licenses exactly do you think are on the line here?

There's one here. I'm an Ubuntu user, but I have a paid copy of XP that I use in VMWare so I can test IE6 & 7.

EDIT: But I'm probably an outlier.

I'm not saying none exist. I have a windows machine that I use mostly for IE. But (a) I didn't buy it for that purpose, it already existed and (b) I would probably want to use sites I work on in IE even if it worked perfectly. It's the most popular browser. They don't have to break IE.

You could try out "ie4linux" (unofficial, of course) http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

I've heard it's nice, I think it's essential IE files and wine slapped into a pretty package - but I've also heard/seen that you can have several versions of IE for testing stuff out. Might.. be nice. I dunno.

It's illegal to use Internet Explorer without a valid Windows license, even through Wine.

I do also use ies4linux. It's quite good for testing how IE handles CSS layouts, but it doesn't render fonts the same way IE renders fonts on Windows (presumably because the fonts available differ on Ubuntu).

I am implying that. Microsoft's motivation behind IE is to exploit their dominant position to crowd out the rest of the competition. As I explain in my first post, compelling Windows licenses for testing (and, by the way, many are on the line, I think) is just a small part of the overall plan (possibly the only part that's working really well right now).

Microsoft wants IE to be different because they hope that eventually companies will decide it's not worth the cost to support or utilize the technologies that have smaller marketshare.

For a while, this worked with IE and there were large swaths of the web inaccessible through other browsers. Recently, it hasn't been working as well and in fact has been backfiring as frustration with Internet Explorer mounts and developers shy away from supporting it, or imbue it with lesser features, which is why IE is much more compatible than it used to be, but still not _quite_ there.

This strategy still works well in other areas and has been part of Microsoft's philosophy for many years -- see the Halloween memos for more.

Microsoft really has no incentive to continue Internet Explorer _except_ control. They leverage it to try to make Windows a requirement to browse the web, which would render OS X, Linux, and any other potential competitors comparatively useless for desktops. That's the mission and goal of Internet Explorer.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Microsoftie

How many times must it be said that you should never assume malice where ignorance explains it?

Microsoft is full of smart people with good intentions. Do you really think that there are 100,000 evil, evil people who are on a crazy power quest to dominate the world by destroying computing for everyone else? No. These are people who love technology and honestly believe they are doing right by the world.

OK, so assuming that is true. How do I explain why IE is so broken?

Microsoft is an ENTERPRISE software company. Consumers are small potatoes, who, until recently, were completely ignored by the brass of the company. When enterprise customers have an itch, Microsoft will accept their damn good money to scratch it. If there's no itch, there's no scratching.

Many years ago, Internet Explorer rendered the web just as well as any other browser out there. Microsoft added proprietary extensions in order to be able to build things customers wanted. They didn't fix bugs that customers weren't complaining about. Maybe the individual engineers comprehended the importance of web standards, but leadership hadn't even heard of them. Besides, Microsoft wasn't even sure this web thing was going to take off. So when enterprise customers stop complaining - when their _intranets_ were good enough - Microsoft stopped investing in browsers. Simple as that: move on to the next thing that will make us money.

Lest we forget: Microsoft "embraced" the web by writing IE. Then they "extended" the web by inventing Ajax <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)#History>. Why did they do this? Because they simple would have been unable to build Outlook Web Access without it. Gmail would not exist as it is today without Outlook on the web.

I talk about OpenGL and Direct3D here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=593801

Apple and Google are "extending" the web as well: <http://webkit.org/blog/138/css-animation/>; Apple noticed an itch for their Mobile Me product, so they scratched it. This is how technology evolves. Web standards aren't created in a vacuum.

>Microsoft is full of smart people with good intentions.

I agree completely. All of the Microsoft employees I've come in contact have seemed perfectly competent and decent, and I believe they'd be capable of writing a compliant browser if management would permit it.

>Do you really think that there are 100,000 evil, evil people who are on a crazy power quest to dominate the world by destroying computing for everyone else?

No. Again, Microsoft employees are nice and good, and I don't believe that they believe they're "destroying computing for everyone else". I also never claimed Microsoft's strategy of EEE is "evil" or anything like it -- I think it's good business. That doesn't change the realities of the situation.

You can have a very wide base of well-intentioned people working under the direction of a handful of executives and C-levels, who don't always clue them in to the overarching strategy, or the exploitation of their leadership position.

I don't posit that Microsoft doesn't contribute to the progress of computing. I certainly don't think they do as much as they think they do, but C# is awesome, and Microsoft has done good things. I don't believe that it's an evil company and I don't believe that anything immoral occurs within MS at any exceptionally different rate than in other companies of similar size. Again, however, that doesn't change the fact that they attempt to leverage IE to make Windows a prerequisite for the web.

Everybody does this. Apple does it. Almost any proprietary software vendor does. It's about achieving the holy grail of consumer computing: platform lock-in. The goal of Apple, Microsoft, and others is to keep compatibility to a minimum so that you don't have the option to leave if you change your mind. DRM'd iTunes music, iPods, or things in other Apple-owned formats don't play on non-Apple products. Microsoft's products require Windows-based technologies. You start with one, start to build some documents and significant data up, and before you know it the cost of switching environments becomes prohibitive for non-technical users.

That's what free software is all about; it's not about keeping people from making money or anything like that, it's about keeping your data under your control and purview, so that you don't have to cross your fingers and hope that Apple doesn't decide iTunes now costs $500/user, and if you don't like it, or if you want to keep listening to the music you own (which just so happens to be encoded with Apple-proprietary formats) without paying the increased license fee, well, you're up a creek without a paddle.

Obviously standards are determined by the needs of their users, and there's nothing whatsoever wrong with proposing or implementing benevolent extensions. That's not what MS is doing by making IE misrender. They're utilizing their position to keep Windows and IE relevant and necessary.

I think you get the picture here. It's just how things operate. I don't particularly hate Microsoft and I'm not opposed to using their products when I feel they're the best fit for the job. You can't seriously assume that Microsoft is just _that_ bad at making a good browser, and holds it off for so many years, and so on. Ignorance doesn't match up, imo.

I appreciate your views as they are far more balanced than the average lock-in conspiracy theorist. You seem to have thought this out thoroughly and I respect that.

I'm telling you now that lock-in has never been an explicit goal of any team I have worked for or with. Lock-in is often an unfortunate side effect of prioritizing customer paint points and integration, while downplaying the importance of engineering.

"What is my escape plan?" is a very real question that enterprise buyers consider. Microsoft software does, in fact, offer escape plans. You just need to think at the enterprise level instead of at the consumer level. Consider our server technology: someone builds an intranet app for their enterprise which uses .NET, IIS, Windows Server, etc. Their app is now tightly bound to a Microsoft stack. Each of these individual components has evolved together due to business needs and it is quite difficult for open source software to replicate any piece of the stack. That is more an accident of process than anything else.

Now lets say Microsoft server licenses are too expensive and your enterprise decides to move to Linux. The Microsoft licensing costs are already sunk. The enterprise doesn't say "Oh dammit. We've got to get rid of all these old Microsoft servers and move everything to Linux!" Why would they do that? If it isn't broken, don't fix it. Instead, they keep on running the old servers and put up with the old problems because they have already paid for that stuff. It's in the past. Enterprise customers don't buy individual components. They buy "solutions". Sure, if you get a Microsoft server stack, you're locked into the Microsoft server solution. But you wouldn't ever change any one piece of that stack anyway even if you could. Enterprises simply don't operate that way.

Now, in the document space, you want your old data to keep on trucking if you decide to switch to OpenOffice or something. Customers want that escape plan and if they don't get it, they won't buy. So Microsoft spends the money on developing that escape plan. Engineering decides that the existing standards aren't sufficient (it's true, the open spreadsheet standards still are not finalized for cell functions!), so they go build their own, but apply for standardization so that others can replicate the standard. They documented that spec in incredible detail because there was A LOT of skeptics. They had to silent the skeptics to convince governments to buy Office.

Lock-in hurts Microsoft too. Our customers expect escape plans, but we're not going to spend dollars developing escape plans that customers haven't asked for. That's just bad business.

Doesn't IE8 support some of HTML5? Doesn't that make it obvious that the "unfinished" line is total BS to justify strategic standards compliance manouvres?

Note they use the exact same excuse for dodgy ODF in Office and surely no one is gullible enough to believe Microsoft has a sincere desire to deliver on that standard.

The IE8 comparison is very misleading. They give IE checkmarks for "security," "privacy," and "ease of use," where Firefox and Chrome get none. What, so Firefox and Chrome have ZERO security and privacy? Wow, thanks for warning me, Microsoft!

The truth is that all three browsers have security and privacy features, which are too complex to be reduced to a single checkmark. Firefox at least gives some quantified argument on its pages: "An independent study shows that, in 2006, IE users were vulnerable to online threats 78% of the time. Firefox users? Only 2%."

It's interesting that this comparison doesn't concede a single category. In "performance," they say, "hey, let's call it a tie!" Actual timed measurements of Javascript performance show that IE8 is WAY slower than the competition.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/27/ie8s_javascrip...

http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/browserStatistics....

Microsoft's browser comparison truly is deceptive. I'm glad they're moving people away from IE6, but they're far from having the best browser our there.

You might be interested in this paper presented at SOSP on AjaxScope by some guys from Microsoft Research

http://www.sosp2007.org/papers/sosp095-kiciman.pdf

Check out page 2. Interesting table. IE7 is 3 orders of magnitude (i.e. 4870ms instead of 6ms, with Firefox 2.0 at 116) slower than Opera at String+ operations in Javascript.

It's interesting. AjaxScope is pretty neat as well.

In "performance," they say, "hey, let's call it a tie!" Actual timed measurements of Javascript performance show that IE8 is WAY slower than the competition.

Plus neither of the links you posted tested Firefox 3.5 which has improved javascript performance which implies IE8 slips further behind.

Complaint #1: its is a possessive; it's is a contraction for it is. (The author kept using its as if it meant it is.)

Complaint #2: The author kept using the form:

The Lie: <a summary of the author's opinion> The Truth: <an explanation of the author's opinion>

That's messed up. The "lie" should be what he thinks Microsoft got wrong.

Complaint #3: The whole thing is just his opinions. It would be nice to link to some actual benchmark results, for example, rather than just countering Microsoft's "IE8 is the fastest" with "No it's not!"

Not worth reading.

I agree that the article isn't very helpful. Here is a benchmark for you:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/27/ie8s_javascrip...

Here's another test. Out of 10 browser versions tested, the only one that IE8 beat was IE7.

http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/browserStatistics....

That's unfair. It should be noted it also beats IE6.

But things may change as you do down the version ladder. I bet it is slower than IE 2 or 3.

As a long-time and primarily Windows user and developer, even though knowing that they're false, I was interested in seeing these so-called "facts" Microsoft has been spreading around about IE8 being busted in a clear, concise and researched way.

...But as I opened the page, this came up:

"Windows 7 is the best Windows yet (unlike Vista) and IE8 is the best IE yet (unlike IE6-7)."

Can't they be even more biased? Despite Vista having a bad launch, it was far from being a bad OS and is, as of right now, extremely solid; IE6 and 7 were a significant improvement over their predecessors.

I'm sorry to de-rail the topic.

Here's how I read that statement: IE6 and IE7 were only the "best IE yet" at release due to how truly awful each previous incarnation was. IE7 is a lousy browser, so calling it the "best IE yet" at the time was like saying that chewing on tinfoil is more fun than chewing on rusty razor blades. It might be an accurate statement, but it doesn't mean you're enjoying that tinfoil. IE8, on the other hand, actually feels like a step (admittedly a smallish step) in the right direction.

Similarly, Windows 7 is actually more _usable_ than previous Windows. Vista was shinier than XP, and had a couple nice features like integrated search, but there's a reason Dell had to start selling machines with XP licenses again.

I think the author intended the statement to be something like this: that Windows 7 and IE8 actually _deserve_ the title of "best ___ yet."

What this says is that Microsoft is willing to be very deceptive about a free product. But you can't blame them at all, it's just a web page. Even if this deception actually has some demonstrated effect on browser market share, those market share changes will be based on the personal decisions of people to switch. It's not like Microsoft has gone and deleted everyone's IE7 and Firefox installations without permission.

Remember that any source of information should not be implicitly trusted. [Trust me! ;) ] If an individual decides to believe Microsoft's statements without doing any further research, and downloads and permanently switches to IE8 based on lies, then it's that person's problem.

Lets be real here. MS's marketing lies does not make people want to use IE. There are a few major reasons why people still use IE, and all of them are marginally valid.

  Deployment tools for organizations
  That's what has always been used, why should I change?
  It's installed by default on Windows, and many users lack the knowledge that there IS something else, in addition to not knowing how to install that "something else."

The only way we can get rid of IE is to ensure that it is NOT distributed with versions of Windows, providing deployment and security lock-down tools for organizations, and educating the public about all of the options.

Microsoft marketing has gone from uninspired and mildly disingenuous to outright pathetic lies.

This should come to no surprise to anyone, they feel the heat building up from multiple directions (the web slowly replacing the OS, apple gaining more and more marketshare, oss quality steadily increasing, drastic measures imposed on them by anti-monopoly organisations in the EU and many more). They face this heat, as noted by multiple commenter above, with their usual embrace/extend/extinguish tactic. Wonder if it will work on HTML5, the stakes are unusually high on that one.

I'm almost starting to think that this recent IE8 promotion and "facts" is actually a clever marketing strategy.

Just releasing a poor or decent browser doesn't get that much mentions or headlines - but with outrageous claims or even lies you get tenfold mentions in blogosphere and media. It might not be a smart for Microsoft appear as liars but hey, at least people know that IE8 is out.

The media really doesn't care much for web browser competition. Blogs, do, but the blogs that care are the ones read by people who already know IE is bad.

Microsoft isn't doing some clever targeting with this. It's pretty obvious that they're going after ignorant people with an ignorant tactic, and let's face it, they couldn't attract users any other way.

For them, the best way to attract users is to make OEMs bundle only Windows+IE with computers they sell. Most people don't reinstall the OS or even know what IE is.

Targeting smart people is seldom a smart strategy - they are not as numerous.

Point. But I was talking about outside of bundling, since I figured it was a given. I'm guessing Microsoft here is trying to retain that hold, at a time when many people download Firefox or Chrome or Safari first thing on bootup.

They never engage competition on a level playfield - for them, it's a waste of resources.

Bundling makes a lot of sense because they can deal with ten, at most, clients and have a huge impact on just about every computer user on the planet. Groklaw has an interesting piece on the probable reasons why Asus pulled the plug on their ARM-based netbook and I guess this is their typical behaviour.

Want to bet the net MSN Live Messenger (or, will they call it "Bing messenger"?) will make every search on the system default to Bing?

Playing fair is so strange to their corporate DNA it would provoke a violent allergic reaction.

Microsoft is stuck in a bad place. I don't doubt they've got some brilliant people working for them, but they made a bunch of tasteless products and now they can't even scrap it all and start again because they have to offer support for all the crap they've made. So they take the only viable path, which is continuing to force crap into crap and making everybody unhappy.

Not everybody.

I won't let them ruin my day.

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