March 12th, 2008

Will IE 8 break the Web?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:46 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Internet Explorer, Mix '08

Tags: Developer, Web, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Standards, Web Browsers, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

There’s been one nagging question about Internet Explorer (IE) 8 about which I can’t stop wondering: Once it finally ships, will it break the Web?

It’s not just because I’m an unabashed Microsoft skeptic that I am puzzling over this. It’s also because right up until Microsoft decided to go whole-hog and — as many developers and customers wanted — by making “super-standards” mode the IE 8 default, Microsoft officials claimed that going the full-fledged standards route would “break the Web.” What, if anything, changed, making Microsoft willing to assume that risk?

After all, just a month before announcing it was going to make super-standards mode the IE 8 default, IE Platform Architect Chris Wilson blogged:

“We started from a simple statement of ‘enable (and encourage) interoperable web development, but don’t force IE to break pages that work properly in IE today.’ I think we all want to converge to a world where a web developer doesn’t have to spend much time at all testing and recoding their site for different browsers. At the same time, we can’t break the web experience on current sites for users like my mom, even for as good a reason as improving standards compliance. With all the great styling and layout changes we’re working on in our new engine for IE8 to be much more standards compliant, that’s a lot of potential breakage.”

Did Microsoft cut some of the IE 8 features to make it less likely to break sites, pages and applications that adhered to IE-7-specific rules? Or were Microsoft execs guilty of crying wolf, knowing full-well that moving to standards mode wouldn’t really wreak the havoc they claimed?

I put this question to Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the IE team, last week in Las Vegas at the Microsoft Mix ‘08 conference. Hachamovitch said neither of my theories was correct.

“In the past with IE 7, developers weren’t as proactive (about adhering to standards) as they could have been,” Hachamovitch said. “We took that as a strong data point, regarding how quickly devs will respond to anything that we change in IE.”

He continued: “But this time, the community seems to have shifted. They say they will be more responsive. We are giving developers a much easier way to choose their own timeline (for moving to the fully-standardized IE 8)…. Long term, we know this is the right thing for the Web.”

My interpretation: Microsoft is giving developers more leeway regarding how, when and if they will use the full standards mode in IE 8, but isn’t overly worried about compatibility issues arising because it expects the majority of developers to give super-standards mode more lip service than rapid support.

Hachamovitch also noted that Microsoft was going out on a limb, to an extent, by promising IE 8 would adhere to a number of Web standards that are still evolving, like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1 and HTML 5. He said that Microsoft was not going to wait for the set-in-stone final versions of these standards, if the standardization process dragged on. Hachamovitch said if the standards changed substantially after Microsoft ships IE 8, the company would have to come up with a plan to deal with that fact.

“We will ship when we are ready to ship,” Hachamovitch said, noting that Microsoft cares more about the “installed base of Web sites,” than the “installed base of browsers” when figuring out how and if it would need to revise IE 8 if it ended up not being compliant with certain, currently unfinished Web standards.

So I’m back to square one. I think Microsoft’s official stance is that it’s done the “right thing” by making standards mode the default for IE 8, but it doesn’t expect many developers to actually rush out and redo their applications and pages to take advantage of this new mode.

What’s your take? Even though Microsoft is getting love for going the standards route now, whenver IE 8 is finally released (Beta 2 is due this summer), do you think the Redmondians will end up roundly criticized for “breaking the Web”?