Web Devout tidings

Yes, I know. I’ll be testing its standards support, too. Firefox 3 will be released this coming Tuesday, the 17th. I won’t have the standards support information done yet for either browser, but I hope to finish the CSS sections this weekend and put that up by Tuesday.

It’s browser testing season again. Since the first Firefox 3 release candidate has been released, I will begin testing its standards support and adding it to the site. As usual, I’m going to start with the CSS section and post an update when the initial test data is complete.

Rather than using a standard test suite, I prefer to write custom tests as I go. This allows me to get into the nooks and crannies of standards support, but it does take longer. Starting now, I’m going to save all of the test cases of bugs that I find, and at some point I’ll make those test cases publicly available.

My testing process usually works like this: I initially assume that everything with a “Y” in the last version also has a “Y” in the new version, so I’m not testing for regressions in my initial test data. This saves a lot of time, and I can add regression information later as it is found. Next, I go through each “I” and “N” and retest the browser’s support. Features that still have “N” support go by quickly, so it’s the “I” features that take the bulk of my time. The time it takes to complete a section depends on a number of factors, such as the demands by my day job, how scorching hot the weather is, and whether or not the pizza has arrived yet.

In regard to Safari 3 information, that will not be part of this test session. Adding information for a new browser from scratch is a ton more work than updating for a new version, and I want to get the Firefox information out there quickly. At some point, though, I’m going to bite the bullet and do the Safari 3 testing, even if the information isn’t very thorough at first (the IE, Firefox, and Opera information started off very rough as well). Until then, here are some sites you can check out for Safari (WebKit) support information: SitePoint Reference, Wikipedia, Quirksmode.

Microsoft has released the first beta of Internet Explorer 8. I won’t give a final assessment of its standards support and whatnot until the final release, but here are some of my impressions on the beta so far:

• It’s really really slow. I feel almost like I’m using Amaya. In particular, the Web Devout site is nearly unusable because the heading backgrounds take forever to render (they are just tiled 2×1 alphatransparent PNGs).
• Switching to IE 7 mode requires a browser restart. That’s a little annoying, especially since it doesn’t gracefully restore your session like Firefox does during addon changes.
• It broke the Web. I took a run through Alexa’s top 20 sites (cue rant about Alexa’s methodology), and about half the sites had big glaring display glitches. Yahoo is busted up, CNN is bleeding content… even Microsoft’s own Live.com looks like it has seen better days. I predict that the Web is about to have a lot more meta tags.
• Web Devout’s headings are standing tall, but not very proud. It looks like IE 8 has a problem with negative margins in generated content. In fact, IE 8 seems to have lots of problems with generated content (which I pretty much expected). Other than that, it’s actually making a good effort at rendering Web Devout properly without any IE-specific rules that apply to IE 8. Still not up to scratch with the other browsers, though.
• IE 8 still fails 9 tests in the brief CSS test suite I made for IE 7 a while ago.
• Did I mention it’s really slow?

Keeping in mind what IE 7 beta 1 was like, I’m hoping IE 8 will improve a ton before the final release. But for now, the browser is too slow and buggy to actually use, and it doesn’t help web developers much because there will probably be a lot of additional changes before anything in the engine is final. I’ll dive into it more once Microsoft announces that it’s layout-complete.

There were some premature announcements around the blogosphere the last couple of days, but Firefox 2 has now been officially released. It is primarily a user interface upgrade. Some of the changes include a built-in inline spell checker, a built-in phishing site detector originally developed by Google, automatic session restoration in the event of a crash, a search engine manager, new icons and tab styles, and other odds and ends.

In terms of standards support, very little has changed. Almost all platform development work since Firefox 1.5 has been going into Gecko 1.9 development which will be rolled into Firefox 3, to be released next year. This was done to allow extra time for the major improvements that are being made for Firefox 3. Some of the platform improvements in Firefox 2 include JavaScript 1.7 with client-side session and persistent storage support from the Web Applications 1.0 working draft (an open standard-in-development, although not affiliated with the World Wide Web Consortium) and improvements to SVG support.

You can download Firefox 2 from the Mozilla website. Firefox 2 will be rolled out as an automatic update for Firefox 1.x users within the next few days.

Internet Explorer 7, the first platform update in over five years, has now been officially released as a finished product. IE7 offers a new user interface with some added features long offered by other browsers, as well as a few unique gadgets. To help reduce the impact of security vulnerabilities, they have added a phishing site detector similar to the ones the soon-to-be-released Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9.1 will have, and they have also made ActiveX an opt-in feature. Most of the vulnerabilities themselves will likely carry on from IE6 to IE7, and the Internet Explorer development team has indicated that their response to security vulnerabilities will remain basically the same as it was with IE6.

Most importantly for web developers, IE7 offers some long-overdue improvements to its support for web standards, mainly in the area of CSS. Some of the most annoying bugs in real-world web development, such as the non-definite treatment of the height and width properties and various float and margin bugs, have been fixed. There is now at least preliminary support for min-height, max-height, min-width, max-width, position: fixed, and background-attachment:fixed on more elements. Box stretching using the top, right, bottom, and left properties is now supported. :hover is now supported on additional elements, although there are a few bugs with it. .class1.class2 now works as expected. :first-child, the > combinator, the + combinator, attribute selectors, and other new selectors are now somewhat supported, though with a few show stopping bugs (see below). PNGs are apparently now automatically routed to the AlphaImageLoader filter, enabling alphatransparency without the need for extra hacks. There are some known problems with this new implementation, particularly when using PNGs as backgrounds in combination with other Microsoft filters. There is a new XMLHttpRequest object that similarly wraps the ActiveX control, providing a native-like interface to the object. The abbr element is now supported as well.

These improvements have cleared out a lot of the immediate rubble that was in our way on the path to standards, but it is only the first milestone on a long journey. All of the above CSS additions still have a number of bugs that are left to be addressed in future releases. Many other bugs are also unaddressed in IE7. The problematic hasLayout model still exists in IE7, and even more properties trigger it than before. :focus, :lang, :after, :before, border-spacing, caption-side, clip, content, counter-increment, counter-reset, display:table, display:table-row-group, display:table-row, display:table-column-group, display:table-column, display:table-cell, display:table-caption, empty-cells, many list-style-type values, outline and related properties, quotes, and the inherit values on nearly all properties remain completely unsupported despite other major browsers offering good support for all of them. Furthermore, there are some serious new bugs, including one that prevents floats from being cleared in certain situations, as well as a fundamental problem with selectors that prevents :first-child and sibling combinators from behaving correctly around HTML comments or other non-element constructs. I personally reported the most serious of these bugs to Microsoft during the beta process, but these problems still remain in the final release.

Other remaining issues include the complete lack of support for XHTML (XHTML pages served with the typical text/html content type header are instead treated like regular HTML, not XHTML, by most browsers including Internet Explorer; the correct content type is application/xhtml+xml, which IE still doesn’t support), broken support for the object element for simple tasks like embedding images, incorrect support for the q element, no support for alternate stylesheets, and no significant work done on the scripting engine other than providing a native-like wrapper for the XMLHttpRequest object, providing interfaces for the new CSS properties, and fixing some memory leaks. More standards support information can be found in the Web browser standards support section.

The high-priority automatic update is expected to be deployed sometime in November, most likely either on the 1st or on November’s Patch Tuesday (the second Tuesday of the month). Internet Explorer 7 is only supported on Windows XP SP2 and the upcoming Windows Vista. Internet Explorer 7 can be downloaded from the official Internet Explorer site.

All-in-all, the developers did put a lot of work into this release and made about as much progress as one can expect in the time they had. Still, they were very far behind to start with, given the project’s long slumber from back in 2001, and it looks like Internet Explorer will continue to make up our development ceiling for the foreseeable future. Here’s to hoping for steady improvements in the future.

From previous announcements, it is expected that Microsoft will release a new version of Internet Explorer approximately every 12 to 18 months. Indications are that the next version will improve on CSS support as well as scripting/DOM support. Some early SVG support is also a possibility, although there hasn’t been confirmation on this.