I tried the smiley face validation page using Firefox 2.0.0.13, and it looks horrible, all scrambled up. What gives? The pic you have of the IE8 rendering matches the Reference rendering on the page, so what's wrong with Firefox?

One day, someone will be ablo to explain to me why you want your code to be written once for all browsers. Professionally, I hate that idea. I'd much prefer the advantages of having every browser sport a very different feature-set, and accept the disadvantages of having to program everything a dozen times.

Programming everything a dozen times is easy -- for an experienced programmer. It's really annoying, and can often be frustrating and time-consuming, but it's incredibly easy.

As a web programmer, I'd rather get paid more for the easy stuff, and make it difficult for new programmers to enter the industry. I'm not interested in having my industry follow the paths of so many other industries -- into the lands of third-world cheap labour off-shoring.

And I say that as the owner of a programming business. I'm not interested in running a company of cheap inexperienced programmers. I'm interested in running a company of experienced and local programmers in a rich society.

We're programmers, any sufficiently frustrating task can be automated away. With entire web servers at our disposal -- not just plain html files -- it's not hard to code for agent strings. It's also not hard to have parts of your code browser specific and other parts common. Damn it it's about ten characters per block of code for me to restrict things to any know variable. I already have to do it for printer friendly pages -- which FF no longer automatically considers (they actually removed the feature).

Anything that supports expert programmers while frustrating new-comers is a good thing in my books.

Hey, I just met with a prospective client a few weeks ago. He wants to build his corporate web-site such that he can hire a new group of programmers for every individual feature. He intends to contract low-experience, low-expense programmers on a weekly basis. At least now, I can assure him that such things don't work for corporate solutions that have any chance of actually improving his business. So he'll have to be satisfied with a simple web-site. In the end, I may be hired as a consultant to keep those weekly programmers honest in their bids and suggestions; we'll wait and see.

I'd rather advanced features without standards -- is what I'm saying. I'd make more money, have less competition, and with a little extra work in the beginning it wouldn't be much extra work in the end.

Oh, not only print pages, but mobile phones*], javascript-disabled, and wide-screen monitors also. Oh, and the age-old browser font size flexibility. My pages are already compiled from dozens of code blocks, each adjusted based on a whole set of games to support all of these features.

Let's not forget that pages look different for logged-in users, and then again based on their preferences, like which currency they want to see, and which language they speak. To consider the agent string when pulling the layout is a lot easier than considering their chosen language when pulling from the relational database.

IE 8 is not support by Yahoo mail .

This post would make a better point if Opera didn't suck.

But I think I do know why FF can make a better browser than MS, because it's all they do. It's what they concentrate on, it's their whole job.

Firefox vs Webkit, the 20 mar 2008 beta versions:
http://i26.tinypic.com/34q44gm.jpg

You know, it's worth mentioning that are a lot of pages on the internet coded specifically to blow up IE8. Well, not intentionally, but that's what happens. Why? Well, because previous versions of IE were so bad with standards, and yet were so prevalent. As a result, there's a whole arsenal of IE-specific hacks out there lurking in almost every significant page. Some of them explicitly check for the user agent, but a lot of them take advantage of certain tricks to make their page render one way for IE and another way for other browsers. The "IE way" is broken (as would become apparent if that version was seen in say Opera or Firefox) but it renders correctly in IE. Now along comes IE8, which renders more correctly (more like the other browsers). But it is still being handed the broken version of the pages, which it now correctly renders, thus showing them to be broken (just like Opera or Firefox would). In other words, an IE that both renders correctly and identifies itself as IE is the worst of both worlds as far as the existing base of pages is concerned. The better and more standards-compliant the IE developers are, the more pages are going to look broken in IE8. And a lot of them aren't going to get fixed any time soon (considering how little attention most pages get, and how small the IE8 installed base will be for some time).

It's actually more complicated than that, and that's not the only problem, but saying a browser must "render code in a way consistent with what the web designer expected" overlooks the very real complication that any given web designer, at different points in the history of the web and its ever-evolving standards, might have very different and yet equally valid expectations of what they'd get from the very same code. And most web designers have written code for which they have different expectations depending on the browser (that probably isn't what they wanted, but that's the reality).

http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype

It's simple. MS wants the uninformed/partially-informed masses to draw the conclusion that 'standards compliant' = 'broken', and that doing things the IE6/IE7 way is better. Then IE9 goes back to the old MS-centric rendering style, albeit at 'popular demand'.

Cyril, try the Acid3 test just for kicks :P.

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

Firefox 3 beta 5 pre : 69
WebKit-SVN-r30881 : 90

http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t262/ancaemanuel/acid3.jpg

I feel your pain Cyril. My dreamworld exists where I can use CSS and XHTML once, and have it render the same everywhere.

Isn't this a pretty snap judgement of a beta 1 product?

The problems with IE7 and IE8 are just a lingering legacy from the "Browser War".

MS intentionally did not follow the industry-accepted web standards in made their own in order to crush Netscape.

I suspect that upper management who are charge of operations in still the mindset that Netscape is around. (Well, Firefox is an open-source descendant of Netscape) The programmers of IE have to follow their way or find themselves a job elsewhere.

Why can't IE Just Work™?

At first, I was like, "I don't see any difference." Then I actually tried using the navigation bar. Not cool.

Anybody else think they pulled a Nvidia/ATI cheat? Remember all the hoopla from several years ago where Nvidia and ATI "optimized" the performance depending on the game that was running, and a simple rename of the executable disabled the optimization? I'm willing to bet the IE8 developers did the same thing in order to pass the Acid2 test. In my mind, if IE8 can pass the Acid2 test, legitimately, then it shouldn't have a problem with any page on the Internet.

If they can't write a good browser, then they should just stop ruining web development.

And I had such high hopes when they announced it would use it's "good" rendering engine by default. Guess I got worked up over nothing, Microsoft never learns.