Web Devout tidings

In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t exactly made a lot of progress on the standards support testing. And I don’t anticipate that changing any time soon. I don’t have much time outside my day job (which has been increasingly demanding in the last couple of months), and the free time I have is usually spent taking a break from work or working on other projects that have higher importance for me.

I know I’ve been saying this for a long time, but I think the solution is to build a community-driven system that lets the public file, categorize, and vote on bug reports. Reports that have been confirmed by enough users would get added to a table structure like we currently have. A simple wiki wouldn’t be sufficient; more than 95% of the change requests I get in the current system are incorrect or of unusable quality, which has led me to basically ignore those submissions altogether. I really think a more robust system, with test cases and links to the bug reports on the vendor’s bug trackers, would be ideal. But then it’s an issue of actually writing such a system, and that again requires free time.

At some point, I’ll do something. When I start making promises about how I plan to use my free time, that’s when I tend to suddenly lose motivation to follow through on those plans. So, for now, I suggest looking into other resources for standards support information, but stay subscribed to my RSS feed.

Okay, it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but the graphics card on my Windows laptop putzed out today (just as Michael Scott was sneaking back into the building), and I won’t be able to get it fixed/replaced until at least next week. That means I’m not going to have any IE 8 standards support updates this weekend. I still have my Linux desktop computer, so I’ll use this time to work on the information for other browsers instead.

I need to start this post with a giant asterisk: I’ve barely done any regression testing yet. With the exception of one regression a commenter found, my initial results assume that IE 8 doesn’t have any standards support bugs that weren’t in IE 7. This is a big assumption, since IE’s CSS engine was largely (perhaps entirely) rewritten for IE 8. I expect IE 8 to have a number of new bugs which aren’t yet documented in my tables, and those bugs will be discovered and documented over time.

Alright, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the current results. IE 8 has fixed almost every single CSS 2.1 compliance bug from IE 7. I’m currently counting a total of 17 “Incomplete” values (7 of which are due to the single regression mentioned above), with everything else being a “Y”.

This is a huge deal. While I can’t yet comment on the CSS 3, HTML, or DOM support, IE 8’s CSS 2.1 support is now right up with the competition. We still have to see how it holds up after more regressions are found, but it is currently ranking as the #1 most CSS 2.1-compliant web browser I’ve tested. This is truly excellent work from the IE team.

In the next version of IE, I would like to see some focus on getting rid of a number of “temporary glitches” I’ve noticed. They appear to be similar to the reflow bugs that plagued Firefox 2, in that merely hovering your mouse over the element or interacting with stuff around the element will often correct the glitch. An example is the tabs in the Webpage test system. I don’t think there’s any neat little box in my tables where I can document these issues; they seem more related to IE just losing track of stuff during painting.

I’m going to do the CSS 3 testing next.

I just wanted to give a little update about where I am on the standards support testing for IE 8. I just got the final version installed this morning, and I’m committed to getting the CSS results out by the end of the weekend.

I’m currently about a third of the way through the CSS section, and so far IE 8 is looking very good. It isn’t all “Y”s, but it’s been pretty close so far. I’m not making any final judgments until I’m done testing, but I suspect that IE 8 is now what I’d consider a “modern” browser in CSS support.

I also made a slight change to the Webpage test page to help with testing: When visiting it in IE 8, there is now a checkbox that says “IE 7 mode”. When you check it and hit the “Display” button, the output will be the IE 7 rendering. This is accomplished via the X-UA-Compatible HTTP header.

Stay tuned.

I know I’ve gotten behind on browser testing, but I’ll definitely be reserving some time in the next couple of weeks to run the newly released IE 8 release candidate through the gauntlet, as well as bringing the Firefox and Opera information up to date. Safari might even get some love, if I can find enough time to get it all done.