Microsoft earlier this year committed to delivering a standards compliant browser when they launched Internet Explorer 8 at some undetermined future point.
According to this article at the Register today, Microsoft has broken this promise with the release of IE8, Beta 2:
This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.
This is yet another reason why more than five years ago, I switched to using Firefox.
Author: Matt Craven
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It might be worth putting a bit more effort in and making it more clearly what’s actually happening here. :/
The screenshot quite clearly shows two checkboxes: one for intranet pages, and one for websites. Only the intranet checkbox is ticked by default. Regular websites are still shown in standards-compliant mode.
This would make sense as intranets I’ve used (including router control panels) have had horrible HTML. There’ll obviously be those that’re well coded too though, so it is a bit of a weird distinction to make.
I’m not sure how exactly is discerns what an intranet page is. If it means any local page, that’s a bit iffy as most people testing their websites will be doing it locally first. I can see a lot of developers not in the know being weirded out when the pages that looked one way on their local machine look markedly different once online.
Obviously switching to Firefox made you lose your rationality as well. I mean, Firefox is so standards compliant as well isnt it?
Seriously, Microsoft screwed up years ago and now are going about the only possible way of fixing it… it’ll take a long time and it’ll be annoying but its sure a lot better then doing what you and others seem to be suggesting. Boy companies love browsers which break just about every page they want to use.
And since when was the Registar a quote-worthy source? =P
Wow, it really has been 5 years eh? I feel old now. I think 0.7 was when Phoenix started working well enough for me to use it as my primary browser. What a great 5 years it’s been, too.
i u sure its not them making sure that all the companies that auto update dont just lose there intranet. in my oppinon they would be idots not to do this. can u picture all those admin going around turning this furture on (on some this hundudes of PCs ) because the company needs inranet and can’t just recode the whole site in a cople of days?
This is yet another reason why more than five years ago, I switched to using Firefox.
Since you had no knowledge of this five years ago, I’d imagine it hardly affected your decision.