May Contain Nuts

So Digg and Reddit have been ragging on this for over a day now, but as a web developer, I thought I’d chime in with some longer-than-140-character comments on Microsoft’s new “IE8 is the most awesome thing ever invented” comparison chart. While the “reasons to install” page is fairly reasonable,  the comparison chart is complete and total bunk, and also tremendously condescending. Taking it point by point:

1. Security - I’m tempted to give them points on this, since Vista and Win7 run IE in a super-restricted access mode. However, Firefox seems to be much faster in pushing out security patches when they’re needed, and neither it nor Chrome have such deep-seated access to the OS that compromising them has the potential to cause widespread damage to the OS. Also, IE’s restricted process mode isn’t available in WinXP, which I think is still the dominant OS by a wide margin. Further, IE8’s “ScreenFilter” (seriously, what’s up with the CamelCase features?) has already been implemented by Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. FAIL.
2. Privacy - And so the outright lying begins. Both Chrome and the upcoming release of Firefox 3.5 have identical private browsing features (and in fact, Safari’s had it for years), and Firefox 3 even has an add-on you can use to gain this capability now without downloading the Fx3.5 beta. FAIL, Microsoft.
3. Ease of Use – I have two words for you, Microsoft: Information Bar. This thing is a hyper-sensitive waste of my time and an extreme annoyance on a daily basis. Also, have you looked at your preferences screen in the past decade? Jesus Christ… Minor points for Accelerators (with deductions for stacking the deck with your other products), but Web Slices are arguably a complete waste of time, and the rest of the browser is just an absolute mess (good luck trying to uninstall an add-on by yourself, by the way… the IE dev team had to post a how-to on their site for that!).
4. Web Standards – Yes, I will give you congratulations for finally making it to where everyone else has been for the past 5 years. You do at least deserve that. However, your ongoing dismissive attitude towards CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript performance, and the ACID3 test are not encouraging. To be sure, ACID3 is not a test of established standards the way that ACID2 is (and lordy did you crow about passing that one). However, passing ACID3 is about much more than meeting obscure draft standards. Look at the blogs that the WebKit developers posted in their race to beat Opera to 100/100; they mention making deep-seated performance tweaks and fixing long-standing rendering glitches in order to attain the coveted perfect score. ACID3 is as much a stress test of a browser’s existing capabilities as it is a future-facing standards test, and on both counts, IE is failing miserably, and getting thoroughly spanked by Gecko, WebKit, and Opera. The competition isn’t standing still here…
5. Developer Tools - Now you’re just being insulting. Every web developer I’ve ever talked to considers Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar the gold standard in web developer tools. WebKit’s developer tools run a close second (they’re a bit more tedious to use when editing content on-the-fly). IE’s developer tools are junk. Sure, they’re bundled into the browser, which I guess is good news for the <1% of internet users who do web development, but they’re clunky, it’s difficult to add properties or make changes to existing attributes on-the-fly, and the enable/disable style feature seems to be completely unreliable in my experience: changing a style in the developer tools, uncovering a “fix” for a rendering issue, and implementing that fix often results in a completely different rendering outcome than the one implied by the developer tools. FAIL again, Microsoft. And an even harder FAIL for slapping developers in the face with your crappy tools and saying we should be thrilled about them. And why is this on the consumer-facing facts list? What average computer user is going to care about this? It’s like advertising Visual Studio Express on the Windows 7 features page…
6. Reliability - Another lie. Chrome supports both tab isolation and crash recovery (though not explicit automatic crashed tab recovery [which seems stupid... if a tab crashes, you're probably not going to want to automatically re-launch it, because odds are it's going to crash again], so you get a few points on a technicality), and both Firefox and Chrome are far more reliable than IE8 in my experience. You could possibly win points over Safari on Windows, but that’s like beating the kid in a wheelchair on a 100-yard dash. Uphill. Nobody’s going to give you any credit for it (yeah, Safari on Windows still has some stability issues, but I’ll still take it over IE any day of the week).
7. Customizability – Now I know whoever made this chart is a complete idiot. For all its awesomeness, Chrome is hardly customizable, so I’m not sure why they tried to make it look good by giving it a check mark. That said, IE’s customizability selling point seems to be that Microsoft has already done the customizing for you. That seems wrong somehow (it also seems like something they enjoy accusing Apple of doing)… And they then go on to mention the 1700 add-ons for IE in the Mythbusting section (which I’ll get to), while simultaneously denigrating Firefox’s much larger add-on library. Can’t have it both ways, Microsoft. Major FAIL.
8. Compatibility – I hate you so fucking hard… if it were up to web developers, IE would be the least compatible browser on the market, but we can’t exactly do that when it controls over 60% of that market and people expect their websites to work. And you have no idea how bad it looks to only give yourself a check mark for compatibility when developers are already building in progressive enhancements to support the more advanced rendering features in other browsers like CSS rounded corners and SVG canvas support. IE is only more compatible with SharePoint and ActiveX-reliant sites, and speaking from experience, I hate both of them, and want them to die in a fire. FAIL, FAIL, FAIL.
9. Manageability - Finally, something IE can honestly claim to have the upper hand in: enterprise distribution and lock-down support. I would frankly love to see Firefox pick up some enterprise-level GPO support, because it would only further erode IE’s market share (what are the chances of the GPO controls being impossible to build into open-source software though? Possible dick move alert…). The biggest base of IE6 users seems to be corporate enterprise and the US Government (at least, that’s what everyone cites when defending IE6’s ongoing existence). Get Firefox 3 with the IE Tab add-on on every one of those machines and watch public IE usage drop like a fucking stone. And they’d never have to upgrade off of IE6 for their internal sites (this is how I use SharePoint at work).
10. Performance – Please, this is just pathetic. From a usage standpoint, IE’s interface is painfully slow. Opening new tabs is glacial thanks to the tab isolation implementation that IE uses. And gods help you if you want to install more than a few add-ons from IE’s huge 1700-strong gallery, because they’re only going to make the problem worse (seriously, throughout IE8’s development process, the only fix provided by the IE team for slow application launch and tab creation was disabling your add-ons… that’s sure customization-friendly!). IE8’s JavaScript performance is at least a generation behind modern browsers, and the disparity is only going to get worse as web applications put a larger and larger strain on JS DOM manipulation, and HTML5+CSS3 take the place of Flash and Silverlight for most website glitz and glam. One more FAIL for you, Microsoft.

The Mythbusting page is just as bad…

1. “Internet Explorer is much slower than Firefox and Chrome.” – Again with the speed comparison. They even link to a video that uses the phrase “as it turns out” to prove their point (a phrase which my favorite author, Douglas Adams, once said made it possible to prove anything without backing up your statements… I think we have a case in point here). The video does nothing but compare page load times… no JavaScript performance comparisons, no comparisons of actual operations within pages like performing drag-and-drops, not even a demonstration of their Accelerators (which is what I thought the video was going to be about… when it comes to speed, pretty much the only point that could be made in IE’s favor is Accelerators, because they’re certainly going to be useful to some… though the lack of Google-targeted Accelerators is probably going to deter their use for many, because Google is synonymous with everything from search to translation to driving directions). As I said before, developers and other browser makers are not standing still. IE8 may meet today’s JavaScript performance requirements (and I personally don’t think it even manages that), but it’ll be at least another 2 years before we see even the beginning of IE9, and by then, who knows where things will have advanced? IE is definitely not leading the pack as it so bizarrely claims (and unlike Apple, whose claims that Safari is the world’s fastest browser are still questionable, IE isn’t even in the running for second place).
2. “Internet Explorer is less secure than Firefox. “ – I’m amused by their use of the phrase “catches almost twice as much malware”… sounds like an affliction the way they’ve worded it, but whatever. I also don’t think it’s wise to make a claim that you respond faster than any other browser maker to new threats when evidence to the contrary is easy to come by… even the NSS Labs report on malware blocking indicates that Firefox is faster to block new threats than IE8. Kudos on using a MS-written report on security fixes to back up a MS-written marketing blurb though, and points for being on top of malware problems. Is MS using a different validation system than Safari/Fx/Chrome? Would they be willing to share for the benefit of all browser users? (Fat chance there… this is like the only point they’re scoring on.)
3. “Firefox is a richer, more adaptable browser than Internet Explorer.” – Seriously, you’re going to try and refute this claim? For real? Are you on crack or something? Even if I give you the point for having more features out-of-the-box, half of those features you think I want are things I turn off during the setup process (Web Slices, Suggested Sites, virtually all of the Accelerators because most are pretty useless to me…). The things I do want, like spell check and ad blocking, are things I have to go find an add-on for anyway. Let’s also ignore IE’s lack of a download manager, and their absolutely worthless developer tools (I can’t really even say they’re better than shooting blindly at the problem, because of aforementioned discrepancies between developer tools-made changes and actual implemented code). Further, their boisterous claim of 1,700 add-ons is totally smashed by Firefox’s almost 7,400. Hell, there’s more add-ons in Firefox’s “other” category than in IE’s entire library. As to their claim that IE implements “almost all of the features [in] the most popular add-ons in Firefox” (their words, not mine), here’s a list of the top 10 most popular add-ons on AMO:
   • AdBlock Plus
   • FlashGot
   • Video DownloadHelper
   • NoScript
   • DownloadThemAll!
   • Greasemonkey
   • Personas
   • Firebug
   • IETab
   • Cooliris

   Of those, I think IE implements Firebug (sort of), and obviously IETab. Yep, that’s totally almost all of the features in the most popular Firefox add-ons. Isn’t there some sort of truth in advertising requirement FAIL going on here?

4. “Internet Explorer doesn’t play well with Web standards.” – Again, I’m willing to begrudge them a lot of points on this because they have come a long way even just from IE7, but they’re still not off my shit list. I spent a whole day building a new skin for DPWR in IPB3.0 and had to essentially reboot the whole damn thing because I hadn’t tested it in IE at the time (I was working on my Mac and didn’t want to have VirtualBox running), and when viewing the site in IE8 and IE8’s IE7 Compatibility Mode, the entire skin was almost entirely unusable (topic view especially was impossible because anything after the first post was simply missing). And this was after building it using validating XHTML code and CSS 2.1 definitions. AUGH!

I’ve harped on this before, but Microsoft seriously needs to get their shit together when it comes to IE. Rather than actually dedicate more time and resources to getting a quality modern browser on all fronts, Microsoft still seems to be taking the path of least resistance and over-hyping their accomplishments to the point of fabricating outright lies about the competition. Every other browser developer is pushing strongly into HTML5 and CSS3 territory while back-filling what are frankly tweak-level CSS 2.1 compatibility issues (I think supporting content:before and content:after on fieldset tags was brought up on the IE dev blog as an example of IE8’s awesome CSS 2.1 superiority… how many times have you needed to use that?), and pushing JavaScript performance into frankly obscene levels. Meanwhile, the IE team is trumpeting their support for CSS 2.1 (we’ve only been waiting for you at this party for 5 years now, guys) and deriding other browsers for focusing on JavaScript performance and supporting draft standards (when you’re already supporting the vast majority of the CSS 2.1 spec, there’s not much else to focus on but the future…). The problem is, IE is already still well behind the pack with IE8, and with IE9 easily 2-3 years away, they’ll be even farther behind on supporting those emerging standards and performance benchmarks, while every other browser will have them in spades.

Don’t even get me started on their mobile platform, which in 2010 will still based on IE6. Urge to kill… rising…

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Computing, Internet, Programming, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.