The Internet Explorer lock-in - Anne’s Weblog
Another great opinion, from the comments on Anne van Kesteren’s take on the issue:
Solutions? We can ignore this all together.
Ignoring issues seems convenient but there’s a high risk that things get worse in the end than if we didn’t ignore it.
We can get popular Web server software to set IE=edge.
No. This only leads to IE9 getting a different mechanism for the opt-in switch, because, obviously, if a lot of pages uses “IE=edge” without the author’s consent, IE9 would break all those pages, and that wouldn’t be acceptable to MS. So we end up with yet another switch.
We can convince the world to use a browser that does not have the ability to lock pages into a specific rendering mode.
Yes, but how? I wouldn’t expect IE8 standards mode to be on par with other browsers’ standards mode. People expected IE7 to be CSS 2.1 compliant, but it was the same IE with some bugs fixed, some new features, and a bunch of new other bugs.
For damage minimization, I would recommend Web developers to not use IE8 standards mode, as tempting as it seems. You still have to work around IE7. You know what the workarounds are. Continue to use quirks mode or “IE7 standards mode”, whichever you use today. If people don’t use IE8 standards mode, then MS won’t break many sites by continuing to improve “IE8 standards mode”, and thus they don’t have any reason to introduce yet another rendering mode for IE9.
The Internet Explorer lock-in - Anne’s Weblog
Tags: ie8
