Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8

Although Beta 2 of Internet Explorer (IE) 8 isn’t due out until some time in August, Microsoft is cautioning Web site owners now that they need to be prepping now for possible problems the new, more standards-compliant browser may cause.

As part of this week’s IE June Security Update for IE8 Beta 1, Microsoft introduced a new tag, “IE+EmulateIE7″ — which it is counting on to head off some of the incompatibilities the company is anticipating could occur, based on feedback it received from IE 8 Beta 1 testers.

[From Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8 | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com]

Big trouble ahead for all of us whose livelihoods depend on writing web applications that will render properly in the worst browser used by the biggest amount of our users: Internet Explorer 7. Somewhere out there a miserable bastard still has a user breakdown with a majority of IE6, I don't feel sorry for him: better him than me.

It's funny because this whole standards compliance switching is not much appreciated outside of the circle of people that have to make the damn websites look OK. There are even morons suggesting that there is no point on upgrading. They don't understand that there are millions of people that don't even know what a web browser is, to them the internet/web is the blue IE icon on their quick launch bar and desktop.

They have no clue about Firefox, and of course they can't tell the difference between IE6 and IE7 because either they don't know or they don't care.

Us, on the other hand, are in trouble. Every time we see something render right in IE and wrong in Firefox, we say fuck it, this is a corporate app, they are locked into IE. But what happens when everyone gets migrated over the weekend to IE8 and suddenly (thanks to the strict standards compliance mode) everyone sees the app look as crappy in IE as it did in Firefox.

Suddenly it looks like Firefox was right all along.

Right now I can tell I am going to have serious issues with two things:

1. The menu controls that ship with ASP.net 2.0.

2. The way fieldsets render in non-IE browsers.

I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.