Molly leaves Microsoft in disgust

webwiz posted this at 04:45 — 17th February 2009.

Joined: May 2007

Web standards evangelist and all-round good egg Molly Holzschlag worked for Microsoft for 18 months, trying to get them to adopt generally accepted good practices for browser design. She recently changed jobs, apparently out of disgust at Microsoft's decision to encourage IE 8 users to put that browser in IE 7 "compatibility mode."

From what she says, there are plenty of headaches for developers ahead. Read what Molly has to say at Molly.com -- then get testing in IE 8, folks!

Cordially, David
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delete from internet where user_agent="MSIE" and version < 8;

Gog posted this at 12:21 — 17th February 2009.

They have: 41 posts

Joined: Dec 2008

Why design a new browser and backdate its compatibility mode. The idea with a new browser is to push the technology and move on.

decibel.places posted this at 16:07 — 17th February 2009.

He has: 1,494 posts

Joined: Jun 2008

Gog wrote:

Why design a new browser and backdate its compatibility mode.

1. People have designed their sites for IE7 compatibility - so IE8 can act like IE7

2. God damn MS - we're already tweaking and adding conditional stylesheets for IE7 and IE6 and now along comes IE8 that is not standards compliant either...

webwiz posted this at 21:45 — 17th February 2009.

He has: 629 posts

Joined: May 2007

decibel.places wrote:

now along comes IE8 that is not standards compliant either...

Well, IE 8 does seem to have quite good CSS 2.1 compliance. The point is, though, that they are encouraging people to switch to IE 7 compatible mode, which is definitely not compliant, and has bugs a-plenty.

Cordially, David
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delete from internet where user_agent="MSIE" and version < 8;

decibel.places posted this at 03:05 — 18th February 2009.

He has: 1,494 posts

Joined: Jun 2008

On her blog Molly gives this warning:

... Microsoft IE8 will blacklist sites where the IE7 compatibility button is used by many people. This means that if you want IE8 readiness, you have to get ready now, or you run the risk of having your sites be on this blacklist, forcing IE7 rendering even if you authored the sites using open standards. So while this post is a personal announcement, anyone working on the Web please read up on this issue and pre-empt a potential blacklist on your site.

I do not see that as "encouraging" people to use IE 7 compatibility

Megan posted this at 16:24 — 18th February 2009.

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

I thought she left Microsoft quite awhile ago, like last summer sometime.

(Yep - last June)

I remember reading something else from her somewhere that was much more candid about what happened there but I forget where that was ... probably comments on someone else's blog around the time of the big IE7 by default commotion.

Megan
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