Microsoft breaks IE8 interoperability promise

This simply and absolutely beggars belief, I, as I guess had many, had thought that we wouldn't have to think too deeply over how to deal with IE8 after MS assured that it would default to 'Standards mode' rendering.

How does this corporation manage all this absurd nonsense.

What really bugs the hell out of me is that MS have the absolute ******** cheek to place an icon depicting a broken page on the toolbar when a valid semantic standards observing page is rendered; I'm not having that, I labour to do things correctly and MS depict my work as being 'broken'!

It strikes me that we now need a reprise of earlier years when WASP ran their campaign against IE.

So MS once more reveal their true intentions and feelings on 'Standards' they simply do not want Standards unless they dictate them or am I being harsh

That is very disappointing.
It's going to be fun explaining to clients that the broken icon is not because there is something wrong with the site, it's just IE can't render standards compliant pages correctly.

Most of my clients wont understand any of it, they will just want it fixed.

Lets hope MS has another policy reverse soon.

Hm missed the fact that this checked setting is for 'intranet' sites.

Honestly this is storm in a tea cup stuff.

Its not got the compatibility mode enabled for the internet. The back of the envelope calculations done in that article are BS. Organisations with widespread http+html/intranet application deployment are most likely to tightly control the deployment of any software and have the expertise to deploy it with their own customised configuration in place.

And they've provided a simple button to switch modes. The sort of thing that its pretty easy to add to any instruction list, "press funny squiggly square button to fix page mess". The only thing missing is a simple method to add a site or page to the list of compatibility sites so that the next time you don't need to press the button.

Microsoft's whole argument for compatibility mode has always been internal systems that "just work" and organisations have no desire to spend money updating (and potentially breaking). These are supposedly the organisations still using IE5 and IE6. Moving these guys to IE8 is a big step forward as it should help consign both browsers to history - which for us is a REALLY GOOD™ thing.

As Chris says! I just love to leap to conclusions and read what I want to read so retract all of my original comments.. er mostly, well some of them oh hang it I'll let them stand.

Now that I have tried it, the icon actually seems like a practical method for mode switching.
Maybe it would be better to have it on all pages not just the standards compliant ones.

The first sites I tried were yahoo which has a quirks doctype, so no icon, and myspace which is trying to be standard compliant with a traditional doctype, this one the icon does it's job.

Unfortunately, the compatibility mode doesn't always render as IE 7.

Here's another take on the issue: http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2008/08/ie8-not-defaulting-to-ie8-rendering.html

Overly negative, I'd say. I agree, they could use a more attractive button, give it a more appropriate name and have a decent explanation as to its purpose and when to use it. If a user has the smarts to go in and check that box for all websites, they have the smarts to turn it off when they want it off. I'm afraid we can't have it both ways, it is reasonable for Microsoft to offer configuration settings. Some people might argue the intranet default setting - I'll leave that to people that have to support intranets - however it is unreasonable to suggest either there should not be a setting or it should be so obscure that it won't be found or its purpose won't be understood.

It does sound as though we are back to having to add a element (x-ua thingy) to a document to ensure users don't override settings and view our lovely pages in IE7 mode, then again I have a feeling that I simply care not, if user is smart enough to do that then on their own head be it.

It's not right that we should have to add anything though just to achieve or ensure 'Standards' it's a MS problem, yet I understand the argument and their dilemma when it comes to large apps built to render against older IE browsers