Microsoft made quite a few changes to Internet Explorer in Update 1

Ma Rio

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It may be that I understood it wrong, but I feel what MS is doing is wrong.
They are making workarounds and exceptions.

It shouldn't be that IE should fix "itself", because it's mostly not their fault.
It's the websites that are crappy, and they should be the ones fixing.

Right now, MS is making custom fixes for sites that aren't optimised, and things can't go that way, because you can't go from one website to another and make your browser work with it.
You should make your browser the way it is, and the web designers/developers/guys-doing-stuff should make their site work with all browsers. Aren't there any standards here?

I also feel like the big mess of lies called "user-agent string" is partially responsible for the problems. If browsers didn't lie about what they were, stuff would probably work better.

Just say that you're using an IE 11 and that's it, no Mozzila/5.0 no other bull****.

I'm not a tech expert, nor a developer. I'm just a tech-savvy guy who understands (mostly) how technology works. So I may be completely wrong here, but that's just the way I feel it is.
 

Ma Rio

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Another thing. Now MS will try to imitate Apple's Safari. COME ON... HOW BAD IS THAT?
Again lying what you really are and just copying other's work.
Don't do that, it doesn't matter how good it looks like, it isn't!
And then they wonder why people still go for an iPhone.
 

Donny James

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It may be that I understood it wrong, but I feel what MS is doing is wrong.
They are making workarounds and exceptions.

It shouldn't be that IE should fix "itself", because it's mostly not their fault.
It's the websites that are crappy, and they should be the ones fixing.

Right now, MS is making custom fixes for sites that aren't optimised, and things can't go that way, because you can't go from one website to another and make your browser work with it.
You should make your browser the way it is, and the web designers/developers/guys-doing-stuff should make their site work with all browsers. Aren't there any standards here?

I also feel like the big mess of lies called "user-agent string" is partially responsible for the problems. If browsers didn't lie about what they were, stuff would probably work better.

Just say that you're using an IE 11 and that's it, no Mozzila/5.0 no other bull****.

I'm not a tech expert, nor a developer. I'm just a tech-savvy guy who understands (mostly) how technology works. So I may be completely wrong here, but that's just the way I feel it is.

Remember to the average user who isn't tech savy in anyway will wonder why IE11 on WP wont load these mobile web pages. And guess what conclusion they will come to. They will most likely blame MS and WP for being crappy. So the quick answer to keep their good name is to fix it on their end.
 

Donny James

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So how long do you think it will take or the internet to correct itself. There are folks out there still using IE6. You can't tell the vast majority of web devs to fix themselves so you can look good. No you have to do what it takes to make yourself look good. Its almost like saying "I shouldn't have to create virus protection software, No you hackers stop creating viruses that mess up my computers." Therefore relying on others to make your product look good. Which is not stable ground.
 

colinkiama

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i love these changes. Now I can have the same web experience like it is on an iphone, android or even my pc. On my windows phone. How awesome is that!
 

drachen23

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Re: Microsoft made quit the changes to Internet Explorer in Update 1

It shouldn't be that IE should fix "itself", because it's mostly not their fault.
It's the websites that are crappy, and they should be the ones fixing.

MS is doing the right thing here and makes me as a Web dev and a WP user happy. Webkit, specifically mobile Safari, is pretty much the standard the mobile web works on these days. If IE and Safari both work the same, that saves valuable testing and development resources that could be used doing other things. As a web developer, that makes me happy. As a user, I want the sites that I visit to look good and work as expected.

Just to give you an idea what kind of a pain in the behind this can be for developers, this is how you would close a full-screen image viewer in a sane world. It's one simple line:

document.exitFullscreen();

This is how I had to do it in a real-world project:

function exitFullscreen() {
if (document.exitFullscreen) {
document.exitFullscreen();
} else if (document.mozCancelFullScreen) {
document.mozCancelFullScreen();
} else if (document.webkitExitFullscreen) {
document.webkitExitFullscreen();
} else if (document.msExitFullscreen) {
document.msExitFullscreen();
$lightbox.detach(); // MS-only hack for IE11
$('body').append($lightbox);
}
}

Designers love to use the newest, coolest effects and features, and this is a very simple example of how non-standardization makes things worse. I have to test for each browser and notice which browser requires extra shenanigans to work properly.

Here's the other thing: I care about IE11 because it's half our IE traffic. I don't care much about WP (even though I use a WP phone) because it's 0.25% of our total traffic. I wouldn't have put that ugly hack in if it was a WP-only issue. Now I don't need to worry. If I can support mobile Safari, WP should work. This is good for devs and users.
 

booraa

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I have seen this exact behavior in many web sites. You can set the viewport of a browser to a mobile resolution, double the pixel density to replicate retina, and make everything everything else identical to a mobile browser, but there are sites that do nothing other that look at the user agent. Google, for example, shows the mobile site to Firefox when simply changing the user agent to "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11D257 Safari/9537.53".

More infuriating is sites that detect a mobile user agent and then redirect to a completely different site URL. I know what I typed in, I don't need a website second guessing, and forcing me to see m.crappysite.com instead of the real web page. The worst of these offenders even rewrite the whole link, so that if you follow a specific link to see a specific page, the redirect sends you back to the mobile home page, making the link completely inaccessible.

Responsive sites allow good display in a desktop browser set to any width, and a mobile browser of any width. Good CSS and scripting can load different images and different menus. Web 2.0, though, is mainly startups that say "download our app" to wrap a mobile website and steal your phone's location and contacts.

Mobile IE has the setting "Window preference" : mobile or desktop version. Maybe this can instead be "pretend to be an iPhone.".

The ultimate problem is that Microsoft the Monopoly has decided not to let any other browsers on their locked-down platform. If I could run Firefox, every problem would be solved, as the experience would be under my control.
 

booraa

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As an aside though, it is funny in the linked IE Blog article to see Microsoft on the losing end of the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy. The overuse of the protest phrase "web standards" is only because Microsoft is no longer in market share control of propretary extensions that break the web.
 

Studio384

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Re: Microsoft made quit the changes to Internet Explorer in Update 1

MS is doing the right thing here and makes me as a Web dev and a WP user happy. Webkit, specifically mobile Safari, is pretty much the standard the mobile web works on these days. If IE and Safari both work the same, that saves valuable testing and development resources that could be used doing other things. As a web developer, that makes me happy. As a user, I want the sites that I visit to look good and work as expected.

Just to give you an idea what kind of a pain in the behind this can be for developers, this is how you would close a full-screen image viewer in a sane world. It's one simple line:

document.exitFullscreen();

This is how I had to do it in a real-world project:

function exitFullscreen() {
if (document.exitFullscreen) {
document.exitFullscreen();
} else if (document.mozCancelFullScreen) {
document.mozCancelFullScreen();
} else if (document.webkitExitFullscreen) {
document.webkitExitFullscreen();
} else if (document.msExitFullscreen) {
document.msExitFullscreen();
$lightbox.detach(); // MS-only hack for IE11
$('body').append($lightbox);
}
}

Designers love to use the newest, coolest effects and features, and this is a very simple example of how non-standardization makes things worse. I have to test for each browser and notice which browser requires extra shenanigans to work properly.

Here's the other thing: I care about IE11 because it's half our IE traffic. I don't care much about WP (even though I use a WP phone) because it's 0.25% of our total traffic. I wouldn't have put that ugly hack in if it was a WP-only issue. Now I don't need to worry. If I can support mobile Safari, WP should work. This is good for devs and users.
As a web developer - and so am I - you shouldn't be happy. It's not Internet Explorer that needs to fix this, its Safari, Chrome and everything based on Webkit, that needs to fix this.
 

S_C_B

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Websites still look bad to me after the update. Whatever MS did isn't visually apparent to me. Maybe I'm not going to the right websites.
 

drachen23

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Re: Microsoft made quit the changes to Internet Explorer in Update 1

As a web developer - and so am I - you shouldn't be happy. It's not Internet Explorer that needs to fix this, its Safari, Chrome and everything based on Webkit, that needs to fix this.

Not sure what you mean. MS is just as guilty of adding proposed features to their browser before the spec is finalized as Webkit or Mozilla. As far as I know, no production browser actually implements the proposed document.exitFullscreen() method. IE11 certainly doesn't. The MS-specific version above is document.msExitFullscreen().

I don't know how this is a Webkit problem to fix. The real problem is that devs shouldn't be using bleeding-edge features, but that's not going to happen. If a stakeholder or client says "Why can't we do this neat thing that they do on the NY Times site?" me saying "No, it's not a finalized WC3 standard yet" isn't going to fly, so I need to use the vendor-specific versions of non-final features and APIs. That's just the reality of the situation. There's probably no way to get the WC3 to move faster, so the vendor-specific prefixes are at this point the least-worst way of doing this in the meantime. Having one vendor support another's prefixes eases this nonsense a bit.
 

Ma Rio

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Thanks for explaining it drachen23. God damn it, the world could be a normal place, but then theres that one guy/group of people/company/whatever that starts making problems!
 

Ma Rio

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As for the things Microsoft did on the back end (supporting non-standard features), that's actually good. It's really good as long as those non-standard things haven't replaced some good, standard things.

As for the user-agent string changing, I feel it's bad, and shouldn't have been done, because websites already did recognise WP as a standalone platform, and offered it a specific web-design. That caused more problems than good because now users get Android and iPhone spam ("Fix your Android, 3206 Errors and 16 Viruses" etc.) and experience they shouldn't get (offering of Android/iPhone apps and similar).

I have to admit I rushed into this discussion (and also the one I started) without much knowledge, but it all seems better now that I thought about what happened.

At the end, meh, nothing so special, but still, just give us back the old UAS, and it will be perfect.
 

Ed Boland

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Nov 17, 2012
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I guess they're never going to fix not being able to view embedded YouTube videos on older versions of Vbulletin based forum sites. (iPhone and Android users can see these YouTube videos just fine!)
Hell, now after the update, I don't even get the black "HTML5 Trial error" boxes anymore... all that's displayed are white blank boxes! :(

They'll probably say that all the thousands of forum sites on the internet need to upgrade their forum software huh? Pisses me off that it works fine on other platforms though!

wp_ss_20140804_0001.png
 

tamanasi

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As for the things Microsoft did on the back end (supporting non-standard features), that's actually good. It's really good as long as those non-standard things haven't replaced some good, standard things.

As for the user-agent string changing, I feel it's bad, and shouldn't have been done, because websites already did recognise WP as a standalone platform, and offered it a specific web-design. That caused more problems than good because now users get Android and iPhone spam ("Fix your Android, 3206 Errors and 16 Viruses" etc.) and experience they shouldn't get (offering of Android/iPhone apps and similar).

I have to admit I rushed into this discussion (and also the one I started) without much knowledge, but it all seems better now that I thought about what happened.

At the end, meh, nothing so special, but still, just give us back the old UAS, and it will be perfect.

User string manipulation is not an option.. Totally rubbish... That's not a way to resolve those ie issues.. I was happy using my previous ie version than using this impersonator... The servers sometimes look me like an android and serve me those apks... Can't even download the apps directly from the sites... 😒
 

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