the 200ok weblog

Windows 10 now includes an Ubuntu bash shell!

A while back, Microsoft stunned the standards world by responding to developer objections and agreeing to have IE8 render like IE8 by default (and yes there are many things in that sentence that should be wrong, but aren't).

Nobody could quite believe that Microsoft would really do something that genuinely supported web standards, especially when they were reluctant to do it.

Sadly the disbelief was justified - Microsoft have now done a backflip on their backflip. IE8 won't always default to rendering in standards mode after all, interoperability principles notwithstanding.

It's rare that I'm amazed at Microsoft* in a good way. It's more or less unheard of when web standards are involved.

The longer I think about X-UA-Compatible, the more I think it's not really about "not breaking the web". I think it's about "not breaking big bad web apps".

While it's possible that Microsoft wants to be friends with standardistas, or at least make us shut up, they really don't want to be enemies with a much larger group - large web application vendors and administrators.

WSJ.com - The Men Who Came To Dinner, and What They Said About Email. The email (ie. webmail) project leaders for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo got together for a friendly dinner. What did they agree on? Well, Gmail is the clear leader of the beta-version pack; but also they just wish that everyone would use IE and stop hassling them: The men reported similar pressures: cranky users of Web browsers with tiny market shares demanding that their browsers be supported, while not appreciating how much work is involved.

Here's the thing - some of us do understand how much work is involved... and we still think they should get it right. Remember that we're talking about products and companies with massive budgets and massive userbases. All three companies consider email to be a key factor in obtaining and retaining customers - yet they're unwilling to let those users make a simple choice like which browser to use.

It's an odd aspect to the IT industry... major companies willing to cut out whole segments of their market, just because it's "Too Hard" to cater to them. Applied to another industry it'd look ridiculous - imagine a petrol station turning away anyone who isn't driving a Toyota Camry!

So anyway, it's clear even from a brief paraphrase that these three companies (or at least their email teams) are not keen on standards and resent expectations of cross-browser support. In fact, they look like classic Angry, Acceptance-Averse Application Administrators to me. Old school "it works in my browser so what's the problem" guys. No surprise, of course.

I think it's also about time we started calling companies about this "permanent beta" thing. It's too convenient an excuse - "hey, it's just a beta product, what do you expect?". Sure, but beta for years?

But hey, maybe I'm being too harsh and the final release of Gmail will actually work properly across the board. After all, it's just beta...