Version targeting

Very interesting explanation of what Microsoft is planning with ie8 and version targeting. I don’t know how I feel about it from a standards view, but it does seem convenient. From Andy Budd’s analysis:

The big irony is that, by doing this, Microsoft have set up the ideal conditions to marginalise their own browser. Clueless developers won’t know about this behaviour so every new site they build will automatically be rendered as IE7. Clued-up developers will use this as an excuse to freeze support for IE and turn their attentions to better browsers. Users will see less benefit from upgrading and will be more likely to turn to other browsers. In fact the only people to benefit are the small minority of web standards developers who use Internet Explorer as their primary browsers.

I think that’s mostly right actually. I wrote the first paragraph of this post before reading his discussion. When I said convenient, it was very clearly in my mind meaning locking sites to ie7 and never looking back. The part I would disagree with though is that this what a lot of corporate people want.

In large companies the intranet people are not on the cutting edge of anything. The intranet people aren’t even the IT people, often different departments, using some crazy content management system. Microsoft isn’t shooting themselves in the foot, their customers are. Microsoft is only accommodating them in a way that doesn’t fuck them over also. Microsoft can still keep making better browsers, like ie8, ie9 etc, while letting their slow corporate customers sit happily in 1998. Whether anyone is interested in good browsers from Microsoft is another very real question though.