I’m not a blind Microsoft-basher, neither am I an MS fanboy (in fact, I think the whole idea of aligning yourself with any single technology or brand is pretty narrow-minded). I think MS do some things well, and some things poorly. I am going to have a bit of a pop at them at the end of this article, but I’m going to start by defending them.
After two days of commotion regarding the Internet Explorer team’s decision to include a standards opt-in in the next version of their browser, Mozilla’s John Resig has noticed something rather important in an exchange on IE’s Chris Wilson’s blog; namely:
Internet Explorer 8 will support DOCTYPE switching for new DOCTYPEs (like HTML5).
Predictably, yesterday’s announcement from Microsoft about the new standards opt-in switch has created quite a stir in the web development community. As I noted yesterday, the reaction from the other browser makers would be quite important — and it looks as if they’re not interested.
The Internet Explorer team announced today that we will have to opt in to using the improved standards support in future versions of their browser, by means of a meta declaration in the head of our documents:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
It looks like Microsoft are giving a big push to get users of IE6 upgraded to IE7; the browser is included in the latest Automatic Update, and when opening IE6 this morning I was automatically redirected to a splash page promoting IE7 and encouraging me to download it. I wonder what effect this will have on market share figures (if any). Although I think this should have been done sooner, I applaud Microsoft for the effort; IE7 is far from perfect, but it’s better than IE6.
After complaints from the web community about lack of transparency in the development of the next Internet Explorer, and a little browbeating from Molly Holzschlag, Bill Gates says there is no “deep secret” about what they’re doing with IE, and the IE team have responded by releasing the detail we’ve all been waiting for: the browser after IE7 will be IE8.
Thanks.