molly.com

Friday 29 July 2005

Standards, Me, and IE

Chris Wilson has posted the list of bug fixes, corrections and implementations to IE that will appear in Beta 2 of IE7. I saw this list two weeks ago and it was decidedly not for public consumption, so I think the mere fact that Chris is making this information available is of itself a monumental shift in the way Microsoft relates to the public. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet, but it’s even possible he just made a decision to put himself out on a limb and do it no matter the consequences to show people that the promises being made are not empty ones.

Somehow by being an advocate and defending Microsoft and doing one thing – asking for patience from the community while all this unravels – has made a lot of people mad at me. This includes friends, some within WaSP and at least two I really have deep personal feelings for. That hurt so much I crawled into a bottle of wine and cried for most of the day.

I’m a sensitive girl.

For some, the idea of standards implementation is work-related, placed in a box, not worried about beyond the end of the day. For me, it’s religion. Why? I really don’t know the full answer to that, but I do know that it has to do in part with wanting to do something that strengthens the foundations of a technology I truly believe can, does and will continue to change the world in positive ways. Give something to the world that matters before I die.

Some women have families, husbands, children and other passions besides their careers. I don’t have those things. Unless I’m at a conference socializing with Web people, I live alone, eat alone, drink alone and mostly move through the world alone caring about the Web and the people who work it with a consuming, fiery passion. You can make fun of me all you want, say I’m wasting my time, I’m Don Quixote, self-destructive, I’m tilting windmills, I should get a life, I’m a dreamer, an idealist, a stupid girl.

And you’d be right.

But I can’t be what I’m not, so for those people I hurt or upset or angered or enraged or whatever it is that I did to deserve the deluge of hate mail in my inbox, I truly am sorry.

Here’s the list of fixes for IE Beta 2.

  • Peekaboo bug
  • Guillotine bug
  • Duplicate Character bug
  • Border Chaos
  • No Scroll bug
  • 3 Pixel Text Jog
  • Magic Creeping Text bug
  • Bottom Margin bug on Hover
  • Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
  • IE/Win Line-height bug
  • Double Float Margin Bug
  • Quirky Percentages in IE
  • Duplicate indent
  • Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
  • 1 px border style
  • Disappearing List-background
  • Fix width:auto
  • HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
  • Improved (though not yet perfect) object fallback
  • CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
  • CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
  • Alpha channel in PNG images
  • Fix :hover on all elements
  • Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body

Okay? OKAY?

Filed under:   general
Posted by:   Molly | 21:37 | Comments (71)

Comments (71)

  1. soloplus says Tuesday 2 August 2005 at 10:35

    Hi Molly,

    Never complain about your innate passions! Judge bad, feel worse! Imagine good, feel better!

    Imagine being me, with the same lifestyle, but passionate about IT in public schools.

    We don’t even GET to put up with web-server frustrations because that level of involvement is beyond our basic funding.

    Basically, what Microsoft does for network computing matters because it is THE true paradigm that students of today need to understand to become the workers of tomorrow.

    Each persons passion matters further down the line and there is always another person suffering a higher level of abuse, so just imagine why it’s all good…

    …and then say, “IT’S ALL GOOD!”

  2. Makathe Sanda says Tuesday 2 August 2005 at 19:41

    Well. i have some good news for people using ie beta 7. Lots of people have complained that they can’t get some functions to work. the most popular of these is Flash. since lots of websites use this. i have found a work around for this problem. I am testing longhorn ( well now called ‘Vista’, i prefare it to be called longhorn as compared to vista, sounds way more cachy.. don’t u think either way back to my point)and unfortunately i have not found a way around this at the moment. well now to use flash. it’s really easy. before u go installing IE7, or maybe just uninstall IE7 for the mean time. install firefox and download the flash addon to firefox. now all u need to is reinstall ie7. and you are done. now ie7 can use flash just as well as firefox or ie 6. hehehe. the reason i belive this works, and please correct me if i am wrong, is that ie7 is installed as a shell addon just as ie6. ( in other words ie uses this just like how windows explorer used ie6 or 5) so when a pre-exciting software is installed prior to an upgrade . it does require a reinstallation of the flash software. this means that when u go to a page ie7 looks for software or a plugin that will manipulate what ever has been requested in this case flash. and becuase it’s already installed there is no need for ie7 to go around and look for an update or software. well i think that is it. thanks for creating a blob like this either way..

  3. Rob Belics says Wednesday 3 August 2005 at 08:15

    Paul Thurrott, today I believe, calls IE a cancer on the web that must be boycotted. He says switch to Firefox, or at least Opera or Safari.

  4. Wesley Walser says Wednesday 3 August 2005 at 12:22

    It’s about time someone mentioned that beta software is software that isn’t finished yet.

  5. Phil Sherry says Thursday 4 August 2005 at 07:02

    If ever there was a case of “Don’t shoot the messenger” then this is it.

    Yes, IE sucks, but I’m all for it being made to not suck as much as it does today. Thanks for helping. Carry on, please. And carry on being a girl, too. 🙂

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  8. Sandi says Sunday 14 August 2005 at 05:08

    From one girl to another… you tell those giving you hell to take a long walk off a short pier … keep on going, and e-mail me if you’d like. You’re one lady I’d like to get to know better.

  9. Garry says Friday 19 August 2005 at 08:11

    >> Who will be left for web developers to hate once Microsoft gets its shit together?

    >The users that won’t upgrade, of course 🙂

    Spare the Windows 2000, ME, 98 users, then, who won’t be allowed to upgrade. Bravo M$. Leopard never changes, yadda, yadda.

  10. Daniel says Wednesday 31 August 2005 at 18:04

    Hurray!

    Molly, thank you very much. Not in a “poor Molly” way, but in a very “giant-with-shoulders-fit-for-standing-on” way. Or the equivalent in proper English 😉

  11. Stan says Saturday 14 January 2006 at 03:18

    Somehow by being an advocate and defending Microsoft and doing one thing – asking for patience from the community while all this unravels – has made a lot of people mad at me. This includes friends, some within WaSP and at least two I really have deep personal feelings for. That hurt so much I crawled into a bottle of wine and cried for most of the day.

  12. Mike Cherim says Wednesday 1 February 2006 at 06:56

    I’m not a big Microsoft fan, and IE gives me grief as a developer sometimes, and I will likely have to rip out some star hacks on older sites and put them in a conditionally-served style sheets. That’s the way it is. Bite the bullet now, have less grief in ten years.

    But the hating really needs to stop. Some people hate MS for being so in, others hate them for being so wrong, some people hate MS because they have such market share, because they are a corporation (even hated by people who shop at Wal*Mart, I bet), and some people hate them because they need to hate something, or like smoking it makes them look cool. In any case, unless Bill Gates has murdered someone’s mother, the “hate” isn’t justified and shows an incredible lack of understanding and maturity. It is a hater’s problem. A disease.

    I read your article, Molly, and it saddens me. I know you are behind a lot of the goodness on the web, trying to make things better. I share that with you. A vision. I’m a pragmatic idealist. So the very notion of you getting hate mail because you don’t openly and overtly “hate” MS and try to give, instead, well-rounded views about the state of things is hard to take.

    Keep up the good work, Molly. Remember that for every person whose soul is poisoned and tainted with the hate curse (feel sorry for the fools), there are 1000 people who don’t. It’s a shame you now have to take this moment to sort them out.

  13. Regan says Monday 15 May 2006 at 07:32

    itz sooooo much fun 4 girls only!!!!

  14. Michael says Sunday 22 April 2007 at 14:31

    Hi Molly, very nice articles …keep on this good work 😉

    Greetings from Germany,
    Michael

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  16. joerge says Monday 17 September 2007 at 09:58

    a great site is

    Boot und Yacht Webkatalog

    regards
    joerge

  17. Antony says Wednesday 17 October 2007 at 14:00

    Beta software isn’t just ‘not yet finished’, it is experimental in its existance; an opportunity to see not only whether the software works, but whether there is significant demand or potential demand for it in the long term.

  18. unix.gen.tr says Wednesday 28 May 2008 at 12:45

    thanks for your sharing

  19. porno says Wednesday 6 August 2008 at 09:29

    Go Molly! I like the way you give someting back to the world.

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