IE9

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03-15-2011
Mario F.

IE9

I wanted to use it, I really did. I'm want to stop using Firefox (especially now that Mozilla announced the intention of releasing 4 major versions every year), and Chrome isn't an option either. Unfortunately IE9 still didn't quite make it. Much better browsers no doubt. But still has weird standards/rendering choices that, for instance affect our forums here.

On the other hand, the one and only add-on I don't dream of scrubbing is Adblock Plus. IE9 introduces Tracking Protection which is sort of meant to be able to replace it. It however purposely over-complicates the process of manually adding new items to its list of blocked addresses. You have to do it from a text editor. Can't do it from within the browser.

These type of things simply just don't cut it, for me. I wished this was it and I was going to leave FF for good. But not yet. Still disappointed.

Anyone else too?
03-15-2011
Elysia

I don't see the point of IE9. And I don't see why Firefox is so bad, either. Why is it so bad?
Also, this tracking protection has already existed in Firefox for I don't know how long.
It seems that IE is still just trying to catch up.
03-15-2011
whiteflags

Forgive me, but I think the Do Not Track Me features coming in many browsers is in concordance with a new American law regulating tracking behavior by companies on the internet. I haven't really followed the story, so there isn't a specific bill I can name, but that's what I'm thinking. It's not really a replacement for ad blockers or no script or whatever else.

EDIT: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/1...-privacy-bill/
03-15-2011
Mario F.

I stand corrected on the rationale behind Tracking Protection.

This one annoys me particularly. I'm not sure if this is an IE9 issue or a vBulletin issue. But I cannot replicate it in any other browser:

Attachment 10423
03-15-2011
Yarin

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mario F.

I stand corrected on the rationale behind Tracking Protection.

This one annoys me particularly. I'm not sure if this is an IE9 issue or a vBulletin issue. But I cannot replicate it in any other browser:

Attachment 10423

Too bad. So much for 9's superior rewritten-from-scratch layout engine.
03-16-2011
msh

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mario F.

I stand corrected on the rationale behind Tracking Protection.

This one annoys me particularly. I'm not sure if this is an IE9 issue or a vBulletin issue. But I cannot replicate it in any other browser:

Attachment 10423

I occasionally get a less severe version of that glitch in FF v3.6.
03-16-2011
Fordy

I've moved to chrome on all my platforms (*nix, Mac & Win) and I dont yet see a reason to change again
03-16-2011
Elysia

Quote:

Originally Posted by msh

I occasionally get a less severe version of that glitch in FF v3.6.

FF4 is working pretty nicely now. Perhaps it's time to test the new version?
03-16-2011
adeyblue

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mario F.

This one annoys me particularly. I'm not sure if this is an IE9 issue or a vBulletin issue. But I cannot replicate it in any other browser

I don't have 9 but in 8 this is caused by the page being rendered in IE7 standards mode rather than IE8. If you open the developer tools and forcefully set it to IE8 standards mode, it renders correctly. I don't think you can manually set it to render as that by default, but the webmaster can do it automatically by adding the relevant emulation meta tag to the pages.

Pictures:
IE7 mode
IE8 mode
03-16-2011
DavidP

I like both Firefox and Chrome.

I primarily use Firefox because of the NoScript extension which I love. Apparently there is a new extension for Chrome which does the same thing (it's not made by the NoScript people but it has the same functionality), so I might try to use that sometime soon.

Firefox 4 Beta 12 completely fixed all Firefox memory issues as far as I can tell. Ever since I upgraded to Beta 12, Firefox has been squeaky clean in terms of memory consumption.
03-16-2011
Mario F.

Quote:

Originally Posted by adeyblue

I don't have 9 but in 8 this is caused by the page being rendered in IE7 standards mode rather than IE8. If you open the developer tools and forcefully set it to IE8 standards mode, it renders correctly.

Yup. Just did. It works well in IE8 and IE9 standards modes. Thanks for the tip adeyblue. But this raises so many questions...

This gives some sense to a discussion sometime ago that I was skimming through about IE rendering modes and how developers need some kind of feature matrix (?) to have any hope of knowing in what mode IE will render their page.

But what the hell?... What's the point of these modes? Why doesn't IE just render the page in the latest and shiniest of modes? Or why at least it doesn't let the user set a rendering mode that sticks through different browser sessions? I'm totally confused at this feature and in fact a little scared by it: Is this some kind of "rendering hell" for web developers?
03-16-2011
Elysia

Ah, you know, there's a story behind it.
Long ago, Microsoft made a browser known as IE6. It was famous. And disastrous. It was very poorly standard compliant.
Then came Firefox. It played very nice with standards. But since IE6 was still dominant, a lot of pages were still designed for IE6.
And so it took Microsoft many years before making successors. But there was a problem. Pages didn't render correctly in the new versions because they were designed for IE6.
So to fix that, Microsoft made a "quirk" mode that rendered the pages with an old engine by default.
03-16-2011
whiteflags

You can also remove Compatibility View at least partially by Tools -> Internet Options, click Advanced, find Browsing, and uncheck "Automatically recover from page layout errors with Compatibility View".
03-16-2011
Mario F.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elysia

[...IE6 usual babble. aka, how IE6 is responsible for the earthquake in Japan...]

So to fix that, Microsoft made a "quirk" mode that rendered the pages with an old engine by default.

IE9 doesn't render in quirks mode by default. It apparently chooses a mode based on the content of the website.

That it implements version-based mode, I actually find it a far better solution than the other browsers who only implement quirks mode and standards compliance mode. What I find absolute horrid however is apparently it makes choices on which mode to render based on code choices by the programmer that are rather innocuous. That is, if I decide to use the color tag, IE9 will immediately revert to an older mode and possibly render useless other features on the website because it will make no effort to support them in that mode.

I cannot blame only IE for it. It's clearly a programming issue on the part of the web developer. But, for pete's sake, the world is full of bad web developers and bad tools for developing websites. And this IE behavior has an impact on users that is far worse than simply letting it go like all other browsers seem to do.

Quote:

Originally Posted by whiteflags

You can also remove Compatibility View at least partially by Tools -> Internet Options, click Advanced, find Browsing, and uncheck "Automatically recover from page layout errors with Compatibility View".

Thanks. I set that to off now (although had no impact on this particular case). Should probably help on others, I guess...
03-16-2011
User Name:

I haven't used IE in a long time, mainly because I prefer open source applications where I can get them. Isn't that the main reason to use FF? Or, at least one of them...

I can vouch for FF definitely being the most feature rich of the two, but Chrome seems to be catching up. One advantage of Chrome is that they seem to have a philosophy of less bloat, something both IE and FF through out a long time ago.

The problem with IE keeping with standards causing problems seems to fit in with a larger pattern. The computer industry as a whole need to decide when old stuff should just go away. I got most of my hatred for way-too-far-backwards compatibility from the very limited OS dev I did, but the same issue seems to rear its head all over.
03-17-2011
cyberfish

Firefox did a lot of work for web interoperability. It was the first non-IE browser to have gained significant market share, which subsequently forced web developers to write standard compliant code, and test their sites on non-IE browsers, which in turn popularized other standard compliant browsers.

In a way, it standardized the web by breaking out of the chicken and egg loop (people use IE because websites only work in IE because people use IE...).

Nowadays we can use whatever browser we want and 99% of websites will just work. It was far from the case before the Firefox era. I know because I was already using Linux back then, and the lack of IE was very inconvenient.

I have a lot of respect for what they have done.
03-17-2011
Mario F.

I went and poked around in vBulletin's bug tracker and this is a known issue attributed to vBulletin code. So that's a relief and should be fixed soon. I still find all this nightmarish though. Particularly the obvious situation in which a web page can look better (and correct!) in IE 9 in a rendering mode other than what the browser chooses for us. But oh, well...

In the meantime I've been looking into ways of using Tracking Protection as an effective means for ad blocking. I think Microsoft did their best to make this hard for you. I clearly remember an option that allowed you to load a local file list, for example. And that option exists no more. In a way I can't blame them. Makes sense they want to avoid adblocking as a browser feature. But there's very little in the way of addons too. It's either payed ones, of the free ones are frankly uninteresting (to say the best). Either I can't turn it off for selected sites like Cboard, or doesn't facilitate access to its block list, etc...

Tough call I have here. Making the move to IE 9 is something I wish to do. But I'm letting go of one important addon and bumping into some rendering engine choices that I'm not sure I like at all.
03-17-2011
User Name:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mario F.

Particularly the obvious situation in which a web page can look better (and correct!) in IE 9 in a rendering mode other than what the browser chooses for us. But oh, well...

Does it still have an issue with rendering when you specify the standard with a doctype?
03-17-2011
Mario F.

Quote:

Originally Posted by User Name:

Does it still have an issue with rendering when you specify the standard with a doctype?

[ignore]Nope. In that case it works well.[/ignore] I mean, Yes. It ignores traditional doctypes. Sorry, only know realized your question.

It requires however specific targeting by specifying IE known X-UA-Compatible headers. Problem is, many developers never cared, don't care now, or won't ever care in the future. vBulletin, for instance as no such header. Yet these headers where a requirement already for IE8 rendering modes. And this is a commercial solution, so you can guess what these headers may mean to non commercial software developers...

That is, IE largely ignores the traditional DOCTYPE headers in its decision on what rendering mode to use. In the absence of such a X-UA-Compatible header it will fall back to some emulated mode I quite didn't grasp yet. On the case of CBoard, for instance, this means rendering it in IE7 mode. I suspect what it does is check features in the source code of the page to be rendered and choose from there. So, if there's an old tag there, or rendering errors (especially CSS), it falls back to IE7 or even quirks mode. My own homepage at Quiettech, Quiet Technologies doesn't include a X-UA-Comptible header or META, yet it renders in IE9 standards mode because it's fully compliant.

So, IE9 has this great rendering engine. The greatest and the latest, full compliant, and actually better (or on par) with the best the competition has to offer. But what happens?... IE will only use it if there nothing in your webpage that it hiccups about, or if you include a X-UA-Compatible header or META.

In the real world, this means a vast portion of the websites will not render in IE9 mode. And when you, the user, manually change the rendering mode to IE9 you get a better visual result and a nicer website. Ridiculous!