They’re quite nice, you know. I met Dave Massy, Markus Mielke and Chris Wilson before, at “W3C events” and as it happens destroying the web is not on their list of things to do. We had coffee and lunch with them (during our trip regarding Vista) and discussed “typical browser thingies” such as testing and funny people commenting on weblogs. For what it’s worth, Markus posted a list of Internet Explorer CSS improvements.
I just hope they weren't referring to me as one of those 'funny people' because I'm bloody serious when I say that it would be a very bad thing for them to release a browser that still has a fundamentally broken (but with different bugs than IE6) CSS-implementation...
One thing I've never understood, is how these guys manage to get up in the morning, and go to work on a piece of software that is so universally hated. Not ignored, but actively hated. And when they improve it a little, and post about it on the IEblog, the vast majority of comments will either be plain insults, or simply reminders that IE is still *so terribly* behind the competition.
So how do they manage to continue to work on IE? Is it the money? Is it some sort of macho-pride ("woa, it takes balls to keep working on IE!")? Or are they simply so hypnotized by the corporate culture, and out of touch with the outside world that they don't care?
I'd be interested to have Anne's point of view on the question, although he might not be able to express it here for obvious diplomatical reasons.
Improving the HTML renderer from IE6 is like putting padded leather seats in a Yugo. Sure, it's better, but you're still in a Yugo. They haven't faced up to the fact that it's (way past) time to pull a Netscape 5, and start from scratch. In the amount of time they've let IE6 sit idle, they could've rewritten an entirely new browser from scratch in assembly language.
Hi, your fixed-positioning examples, found by google, were very helpful, thanks. For IE 6, they depend on quirks mode. I've tried to find a standard mode way to accomplish this - I don't care about old browsers. But I haven't seen one. Is there risk that these quirk-mode fixed positioning techniques will break in IE7. Have you found a better way since your articles of 2004-07.