Internet IE users reportedly get angry about being ranked the stupidest of all browser users i

[Kveldulf]

The report is a hoax.

 

[Hielor]

The report is a hoax.

Can't really say I'm surprised.

This kind of annoys me, though:

AptiQuant's website has been updated with an admission that it was a hoax, and an explanation that the stunt was motivated by frustration at Internet Explorer's infamously poor compatibility with web standards.

IE has been getting significantly better at web standards in IE8 and IE9, and the IE10 platform preview showed that it's still advancing by leaps and bounds. The problem is that even as newer versions of IE start supporting web standards, they're *breaking* websites that *don't* follow web standards--thus the need for things like compatibility view.

Yes, IE stagnated for several years at 5 and 6. But it's come a long way in the last couple of years.

 

[agentgonzo]

Seems it was a hoax.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/03/internet_explorer_iq_study_hoax/

 

[Notebook]

Well they fooled me, but they would, wouldn't they.

N.

 

[Tommy]

Take your browser for a test drive to see how performant it really is: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/
Compare IE9 to whatever other browser you want

Somehow I find it hard to trust Microsoft to provide a fair test - they have a vested interest in having IE "win". I wouldn't trust a test from Mozilla foundation or Opera either.

Can't really say I'm surprised.

This kind of annoys me, though:

IE has been getting significantly better at web standards in IE8 and IE9, and the IE10 platform preview showed that it's still advancing by leaps and bounds. The problem is that even as newer versions of IE start supporting web standards, they're *breaking* websites that *don't* follow web standards--thus the need for things like compatibility view.

Yes, IE stagnated for several years at 5 and 6. But it's come a long way in the last couple of years.

The question is: Since Microsoft has more resources than every other browser producer out there combined, why is it so far behind on standards compatibility? Considering IE has been around longer than Firefox, Opera, and Chrome it should be AHEAD of the curve - not behind.

The only reason there are so many sites that *don't* follow W3C standards is because IE *didn't* follow those standards - a legacy of the "Embrace and Extend" policy prevalent during Bill's "reign".

MS has come a long way since Bill stepped down, it is MUCH more standards compliant. IE is no longer a "bad" choice - it has become an acceptable browser in both features and security.

I use Seamonkey myself (a bit bloated, but has every feature I ever need online), because I use Windows, Linux, and OS 10 - and Seamonkey is the same experience on each platform. Whichever computer I'm using is the same as the others, as far as the internet is concerned. Makes for less confusion, at least for me.

I will say that even had this "test" not been a hoax, it still wasn't fair. As others have said, IE is the "default" for most users, so the "dumbest" people will use it automatically. It's kind of like saying the "dumbest" drivers use an ignition key to start their cars.

 

[Hielor]

Somehow I find it hard to trust Microsoft to provide a fair test - they have a vested interest in having IE "win". I wouldn't trust a test from Mozilla foundation or Opera either.

While I doubt the tests are explicitly include any kind of favoritism (e.g., "if (browser=IE) GiveAHighScore(); else GiveALowScore();"), you're probably right in that the tests are chosen to showcase things that IE does well. A car company that sells dragsters wouldn't present prospective buyers with a twisty road course on which to test them

I still wouldn't outright dismiss the tests, though--if nothing else, they show that there are some things that IE does better than the competition (or, at the very least, is competitive), and they're not just obscure features that no one's ever heard of--they're "cool" things that you can actually see.

The question is: Since Microsoft has more resources than every other browser producer out there combined, why is it so far behind on standards compatibility? Considering IE has been around longer than Firefox, Opera, and Chrome it should be AHEAD of the curve - not behind.

Well, not everyone at Microsoft works on IE--I imagine a more fair comparison would be just looking at the number of people who actually work on IE.

As for why it's behind, not ahead...the simple reason is that Microsoft is extremely slow to react to change. With Internet Explorer 6 in 2001, Microsoft basically felt the browser wars were over, and IE had won. At the time, Netscape was pretty much dead[source], Firefox didn't even really exist yet, and Opera had all of .13% of the market share[source]. Netscape usage declined rapidly, and IE usage was above 90% by the end of 2001, reaching 95% by 2004. Microsoft basically mothballed IE and moved resources elsewhere--if there's no competition, what's the point in spending a ton of resource on it? (No, I don't necessarily agree with that attitude).

Then, in 2004, Firefox started skyrocketing in popularity, and Microsoft had to start up working on IE again, but it took until 2006 for anything new to come out, and IE7 was mainly some UI improvements over IE6 without a great deal of improvements in the Trident engine--basically a stopgap measure. It took another three years after that for IE8, a browser that was actually a real improvement.

The same kind of problem happened in the mobile space--Windows Mobile was doing okay, and then rapidly fell behind as competitors showed up with great new innovations and ideas. Microsoft is again closing the gap with Windows Phone 7, but it's dangerously late to a game that already has quite a few strong players, and still doesn't have feature parity with its competition.

Yes, Microsoft has more resources--but the downside of this is the lack of agility. Microsoft is a very large machine, and it has proven many times that it doesn't have the ability to react quickly to changes in the market.

In the case of IE, the "standards compliance" push was championed by other people first, and IE took a long time to get back into the game.

Is it the best way to run a company? Probably not, but it's the explanation for why IE is behind currently.

There's also seems to be a lot more emphasis on not breaking things, given the much slower ship cycle that IE has compared to the other browsers--if Firefox breaks some webpages when it releases a version, oh well, the next version will be out before too long. The same can't be said for IE. This translates into a whole lot more time spent by developers and testers in making sure that old things don't break while you're adding new features.

 

[Ghostrider]

No it was above 250.

It's over 9000!!!

Darn, there goes another scouter.

 

[RisingFury]

IE has been getting significantly better at web standards in IE8 and IE9, and the IE10

Why did it take 10 version thought? It's like saying: "The N1 Moon rocket got significantly closer to putting men on the Moon, after 8th, 9th and 10th launch."

 

[Formatge]

Who are you kidding? Why would I go from something that runs Orbiter perfectly well, to something that I'll have to tweak, to make Orbiter run as well?

And what makes you think you'll have to tweak anything to run Orbiter well? XP is definitely a relic of the past. Vista is crap, that's for sure, but Win7 is not as bad as you might think. Orbiter runs perfectly well on it, no "tweaks" needed.

 

[agentgonzo]

Why did it take 10 version thought? It's like saying: "The N1 Moon rocket got significantly closer to putting men on the Moon, after 8th, 9th and 10th launch."

Yes, it's exactly like that. Well done.

It's largely historical and not just MS's fault. The first browser wars saw (mostly) IE and Netscape fighting to be top dog. Each started rushing out new features and new implementations without waiting for the functionality to be adopted into a standard (which is always takes time). As such, BOTH Netscape and IE started diverging from standards to push better features. This led web developers to start coding websites for specific browsers (which resulted in the 'best viewed in IE' or 'best viewed in Netscape' tags at the bottom of websites. Apple was still to make its Jobsonian revival and a lot of macs had IE as the browser on them in preference to Opera. Safari didn't exist (released first in 2003). When MS eventually won the browser war somewhere near the start of the millenium they had over 90% market share and 'what IE could handle' became the de-facto web standard. What's the point in writing a website that meets the standard if 90% of your customer base won't see it displayed properly? Websites started coding specifically for IE. Then, from MS's point of view, what's the point in writing a browser that meets the standards if the vast majority of the web is coded for your browser and doesn't meet the standards anyway? There wasn't a lot of reason to worry about the standards.

W3C only started making noises about standards compliance when MS/Netscape were deviating badly from them towards the end of the browser war. Acid Test 1 only came out in 1998, pretty much as Netscape was starting it's journey into the cosmic dustbin and most browsers did a pretty bad job of it. It was partly this deviation of Netscape/IE from the standards that made the W3C start to care more about the standards rather than just leaving them stagnating.

(Even when Acid2 came out in 2005, most browsers failed in a pretty poor attempt at it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2#Non-compliant_applications), including FF.)

It was only after a few years when IE had totally stagnated that Mozilla took the remains of Netscape and started making Firefox that anyone cared about using anything other than IE. Safari had come along and was on the nacent new mac incarnations and FF was a lot more usable than IE. W3C had done a lot of good in trying to get people to try and be standards compliant with the new browsers emerging and it became a good shouting point for them. As they gained popularity, the mindset of web developers changed from 'we must code to IE' to 'we must code to the standards' (something that was pretty much missing from the first browser war). At this point, the newer browsers (Safari, Opera, FF) that didn't have a huge legacy codebase that had stagnated for years could make fundamental changes easier than IE could and get better standards compliance. MS were found knapping (in the 5 years between IE6 and 7) and were primarily concerned at first with getting the browser's features up to match the new competition that trying to match standards as this had a more obvious payoff to the customer than standards compliance (end users don't really care too much about standards compliance and most of the web was still designed for IE anyway, so why worry). It was only once they'd brought the new browser up to scratch feature-wise (to compete with FF/Opera/Safari and later Chrome) that they could worry about standards, which is about the time web devs really started to stop coding IE specific things (as there was enough customer base out there for the new browsers)

At the end of the day, how many end users care about web standards? They care that the browser has good features and displays it OK. Most pages display fine in most browsers, even if none of them meet all the standards. Getting an n/100 score on the acid test doesn't mean anything to the vast majority of internet users. It wasn't that important to MS at the time. That's why it took up to V8, 9, 10 to get really good compliance scores. Before that it just didn't matter. The timescale where other (modern) browsers (Opera, FF, Safari, Chrome) have been standards compliant is only really been from about the time IE7 was released anyway.

---------- Post added at 14:00 ---------- Previous post was at 13:58 ----------

And what makes you think you'll have to tweak anything to run Orbiter well? XP is definitely a relic of the past. Vista is crap, that's for sure, but Win7 is not as bad as you might think. Orbiter runs perfectly well on it, no "tweaks" needed.

No it doesn't. Running Orbiter.exe (with the default rendering engine) on 7 results in your graphics profile dropping to basic (so you lose the aero theme) and really low framerates). To get around this, you have to run VistaBoost (which is a tweak) or Orbiter_ng.exe and use one of the other rendering engines. This is also a tweak.

 

[Wishbone]

YAY! Browser wars and OS wars in one thread, that's a record (YMMV). Wonder how the mods handle this

 

[agentgonzo]

While I doubt the tests are explicitly include any kind of favoritism (e.g., "if (browser=IE) GiveAHighScore(); else GiveALowScore();")

This reminds me of something MS did quite a few years ago. If you visited the MSDN website with a browser that Identified itself as opera (via the user-agent string), the website would send malformed CSS stylesheets that would display all the text starting about half and inch off the left side of the window so you couldn't read the first two words of each line.

Peolpe downloaded the page with curl specifying the user-agent string as Opera or IE, then displayed them both in both browsers. Both displayed them the same (malformed of the page served to the Opera user-agent).

There is a possiblilty that this was accidental but most people took the view it was deliberate by MS to try to suggest Opera was flawed.

 

[RisingFury]

It wasn't that important to MS at the time.

That and MS was trying to take over the HTML standard by adding a lot of it's own HTML and CSS and hoping everyone else would catch on. But it backfired... badly.

And as you said, there was a 5 year gap between IE6 and IE7. That's plenty of time to work on the features and standards, even if you start from scratch...

Also... IE 6 came out in 2001 and the first CSS standard came out in 1996, the second CSS2 in 1998 and earliest CSS3 proposals came out in 1999. And I clearly remember the "CSS tables rage" I had with IE 6. Turned out IE 6 completely ignored some CSS properties - most notably, those for table spacing and borders.


So yelling "BROWSER WARS WITH NETSCAPE" won't fly. MS played a large role in ignoring the standards and it paid a high price for it...

 

[garyw]

Peolpe downloaded the page with curl specifying the user-agent string as Opera or IE, then displayed them both in both browsers. Both displayed them the same (malformed of the page served to the Opera user-agent).

In fairness that might have been done to fix a flaw with an older version of Opera. A colleague of mine is a CSS wizard and says that most websites have two or three CSS directives for each page element simply because browsers don't all work alike.

 

[John_L]

What exactly does an IE test incorporate?
Downloading Firefox/Chrome/Opera? :lol:

There is no IE test, it was just a question on an IQ test that asked which browser the tested person uses. In the end, they can rank the browsers by IQ, and the lowest testing people most often selected IE as their browser of choice.

 

[Hielor]

And as you said, there was a 5 year gap between IE6 and IE7. That's plenty of time to work on the features and standards, even if you start from scratch...

Read the thread:

Microsoft basically mothballed IE and moved resources elsewhere--if there's no competition, what's the point in spending a ton of resource on it? (No, I don't necessarily agree with that attitude).

Then, from MS's point of view, what's the point in writing a browser that meets the standards if the vast majority of the web is coded for your browser and doesn't meet the standards anyway? There wasn't a lot of reason to worry about the standards.

---------- Post added at 12:57 ---------- Previous post was at 12:57 ----------

There is no IE test, it was just a question on an IQ test that asked which browser the tested person uses. In the end, they can rank the browsers by IQ, and the lowest testing people most often selected IE as their browser of choice.

Read the thread:

The report is a hoax.

 

[Pyromaniac605]

No it doesn't. Running Orbiter.exe (with the default rendering engine) on 7 results in your graphics profile dropping to basic (so you lose the aero theme) and really low framerates). To get around this, you have to run VistaBoost (which is a tweak) or Orbiter_ng.exe and use one of the other rendering engines. This is also a tweak.

Without using Vistaboost, the default orbiter.exe runs perfectly fine and doesn't change my settings to Aero.

 

[Codz]

There is no IE test, it was just a question on an IQ test that asked which browser the tested person uses. In the end, they can rank the browsers by IQ, and the lowest testing people most often selected IE as their browser of choice.

It was a hoax. Using a browser has about as much to do with intelligence as Elephants have to do with space travel.

 

[Hielor]

Without using Vistaboost, the default orbiter.exe runs perfectly fine and doesn't change my settings to Aero.

It's possible you have ClearType already turned off, and are already running in Basic mode?

 

[agentgonzo]

So yelling "BROWSER WARS WITH NETSCAPE" won't fly. MS played a large role in ignoring the standards and it paid a high price for it...

I'm not saying they were right to ignore the standards and that I agree with them. You asked why it took them so long to get good support for the standards. I gave you the reason. You don't have to agree with their behaviour, but that was the reason.