IE 7 Will Break Windows Vista Website
I have all but stopped ranting about the shortcomings of IE over the past year or so because it’s basically all old news by now. However, I found out yesterday that Microsoft recently updated their Windows Vista site. Unfortunately, if your using anything beyond Internet Explore 6 it won’t look all that pretty once you get past the home page.
Windows Vista Website in Firefox:

Windows Vista Website in Safari:

If IE 7 will address it’s CSS short comings then it will certainly break the Windows Vista site. Sometimes I wonder if there is a single, knowledgeable frontend developer in Redmond. If I wanted to be optimistic, I would think Microsoft has good frontend guys, but they aren’t allowed to do their job like they want to…who knows.
Is it so much to load the Vista site up in Firefox or Opera to see if it checks out? It takes all of 5 minutes so my guess is either:
- They are forbidden to use FireFox on campus.
- They didn’t bother checking it at all.
- They checked it but just don’t care.
- They checked it but are uncertain on how to fix it.
My guess is b. With Microsoft putting out stuff like this, how can we expect to be excited about the release of a better Internet Explorer. I’d be interested in hearing someone’s take on this from the IE team or the WASP’s Microsoft Task Force.
So, Is this just the mistake of one developer or what we’ve come to expect from Microsoft?
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Discussion
I agree 100%, I noticed the same thing with the MSN beta home page
http://www.cameronolthuis.com/2005/11/did-msn-do-this-on-purpose/
By the way I noticed this on your footer, I use FF in Windows.
Your Footer
Haha! I asked for that one. Yes, I’m are of it and unlike the Vista website I will be correcting it soon. ;-)
I think Microsoft is just determined to find out how long they can continue to deliver pure, destilled crap...
By the way – Firefox isn’t spelled “FireFox” anymore…
I tried to go to the Vista site using Firefox under Windows. It looked fine.
kourge: Thanks for the heads up, this might only be a Firefox Mac issue.
The CSS of the Windows Vista Website is not commendable!
Looks fine with FF1.5 on Tiger for me… I mean, aside from the sloppiness of it.
The bigger concern I would have as a MS dev is the fact that it’s completely unusable in Opera, and barely tolerable in Safari, though hardly anything I would call production ready.
In your style sheet you need to add text-decoration: none; to your #post-actions rule.
I’m positive their developers are using MSDN as a reference, which can explain the bad practices. There is just loads of bad advice on that portal (for instance, the Vista page relies on JavaScript for simple roll-overs).
It also might have something to do with Microsoft web-development tools. Last time I saw a presentation of the new ASP.net on Channel 9, the project type settings weren’t focused on standards (for instance, HTML 4.01 Trans, HTML 4.01 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Trans, XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.1), but on target browsers (Internet Explorer 5, Internet Explorer 6, ..). But what really made me laugh was, when a developer stated that the definitions may be expanded, if someone perhaps wanted to target the project for an Opera browser. Why do they keep targeting clients in 2006?
It seems they just don’t gasp the concept of adhering to standards with their software.. Mostly of course in favour of including cool special features, that ought to win them the developers. The good thing is, that today there aren’t many features, that couldn’t be reproduced in a standards compliant way, targeting more platforms than their proprietary inter.NET stuff.
I think this is a good thing, because people that have switched to browsing and developing on open-source platforms, see Microsoft-centric development for what it really is, a bad practice. What used to be “We are sorry but Netscape is a lesser browser”, is now becoming “We’re a little confused here.. We seem to have lost touch with the internet”. Not even the table-less layouts they have been producing lately (start.com, msn.com, ..), can put them back in touch with real standard-centric design.
They’re out, and I hope they stay out long enough, to have to crawl back in with some real dedication to cross-browser, cross-platform compatibility (before they swoop the web with proprietary XSLT destilled crap).
There you go, just my 1 comment with 309 words ;-)
P.s.: Compliments on the blog.
Update: Please change the comments so the gravatar uses the image currently set in the background as the default. This way it hates my transparent gif :-)
I wish Firefox on Windows and Mac OS X would behave the same. It’s frustrating to develop on a Mac, testing successfully in Firefox, and then seeing the Windows version bump up the pixels to break the design. You then have to find a happy medium.
Not cool. Why does this happen?