Microsoft's Website

[aj_nsc]

Yeah, so this may not come as a surprise or news to most of the seasoned developers here, but i was just browsing around microsoft's website to see how they're using web technologies and stuff in their site, and I started to think that the text size looked really ugly, then I got some weird mouseover effects up in the top right corner of the link below.

I thought to myself for a second, "nah, it might not be standards compliant but there's no way that it's so off base that it looks screwed up in firefox vs IE"......but it does. There's a significant difference to the way it looks and works in firefox versus IE.....I found this kind of......wow-ish.....check out the link below in firefox versus IE for an example....

Microsoft's Dirty Website (http://www.microsoft.com/products/info/default.aspx?view=22&pcid=ea710cad-37b0-4975-bcd6-abfee19961df)

[dtm32236]

it's a wreck in FF....

why would they do that?

i hate MS.

[NogDog]

It starts off by not having a doctype declaration on the first line, putting IE into "quirks mode", so right off the bat you know that the box model is going to be non-standard on IE, therefore messed up in FF when it looks right in IE. And of course it has 124 HTML mark-up errors (http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fproducts%2Finfo%2Fdefault.aspx%3Fview%3D22%26pcid%3Dea710cad-37b0-4975-bcd6-abfee19961df), and then probably a big part of the problem is that most of the CSS stylesheet does not get parsed due to what I suspect is a non-replaced place-holder causing a parse error:

h1 {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 130%;
font-weight: normal;
margin: 12px 0px 0px 0px;
color: <<pageTitleColor>>;
}

[EricG1793]

Wow, that IS horrible.

However, where is that page, from the microsoft.com homepage? If you just to to Microsoft.com and click products, it looks just fine. Rather nice, if you ask me. How did you navigate to that one page that looks lowsy?

[mattyblah]

I'm thinking that they are thinking "if they are going to msdn.com they are more than likely using ie." stupid assumption.

[aj_nsc]

Wow, that IS horrible.

However, where is that page, from the microsoft.com homepage? If you just to to Microsoft.com and click products, it looks just fine. Rather nice, if you ask me. How did you navigate to that one page that looks lowsy?

Make sure you have Javascript enabled, on the right hand side of the home page click Products and Related Technologies, then scroll down and click on All Products (it's a tile in the center between PC Hardware and Volume Licensing).....that brings you to the beginning of the poorly coded pages.

[scragar]

I know M$ would rather not admit that anything else exists in the world, but I thought basic support would exist, that's just awful. I've not got IE installed yet(did a fresh reinstall to the latest ubuntu, so I had to drop IEs4linux, will have to install it before I need it...) but when I check it in IE I'm gonna guess I'll need javascript or activeX enabled to be able to view it like they expect.

[WebJoel]

And M$ dares to call any browser other than IE, a 'lesser' browser...

[drhowarddrfine]

Actually, Chris Wilson, lead developer of IE, has said he knows IE7 is not up on the standards as other browsers are.

[LeeU]

Actually, Chris Wilson, lead developer of IE, has said he knows IE7 is not up on the standards as other browsers are.
That should look good on his resume, being he is "lead" developer.

[NogDog]

One thing to remember (even though I hate to even sound like I might be defending M$) is that there is very little incentive for M$ to invest money in updating IE. It is, to them, essentially an add-on to their main product, Windows. They do not sell IE separately, and I doubt that anyone (personal or corporate) is making their decision on which OS to buy based on whether or not IE is bundled with it. As far as their revenue stream goes (which is all that matters to their investors), IE just needs to be "good enough", it does not need to be "best in class". Therefore, I do not expect IE to ever be anywhere near the cutting edge of web browser standards compliance unless/until it either becomes a separate, chargeable product, or they decide to make it open source and let interested developers around the world bring it up to date for them. Personally, I don't foresee either of those things happening any time soon.

[LeeU]

Let's not forget, either, that IE was only created to destroy Netscape, not to create a decent browser. Microsoft's business model is to find something successful that someone else is doing and then pour millions of $$$ into the same type product for MS and blow the other one away (by sheer force, not quality).