Re: HTML5 vs content type sniffing

On Sat, 2 Feb 2008, Julian Reschke wrote:
> > ...
> > The browser the largest market share is already deployed; its behaviour
> > can't be changed. The next version of the browser with the largest market
> > share has no market share. That's one of the reasons Microsoft developed
> > their new <meta> tag that requires pages to opt-in to particular sets of
> > bugs -- they want to guarentee that when they release IE8, it can render
> > exactly everything that IE7 can render. If IE8 had different behaviour than
> > IE7, then people wouldn't adopt it.
> > ...
> 
> Following that reasoning, people wouldn't adopt IE7 instead of IE6. But 
> they do. May be not as many and as happily as Microsoft would like, but 
> they do.

So few people have adopted IE7 instead of IE6 (as opposed to other 
browsers instead of IE6, or even more commonly, just staying with IE6), 
and at such a slow rate, that Microsoft have decided to both make IE7 a 
required security update _and_ make IE8 ship with IE7's renderer, and use 
that renderer by default. And that's with just the minor mistakes in IE7; 
if browsers did what was proposed earlier in this thread, one can easily 
predict the situation would be much worse (from Microsoft's perspective).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Saturday, 2 February 2008 20:15:51 UTC