Ars Technica has a good roundup of the actual issues involved in the whinefest going on over the recent IE 7 “standards mode” vs. IE 8 “standards mode” switch.
One comment (with a sub-comment), one story.
The Comment
The meta tag for switching IE 8 into various rendering modes seems like an imperfect solution to a real problem that a large swath of the “standards movement” wants to pretend doesn’t exist, (or that it’s Microsoft’s problem, not their own).
Sub-Comment: Developing a “standards compliant” rendering engine is not easy, and it’s not quick. It took the Mozilla Organization 4 years to get their browser out, and it was mostly incompatible with previous versions of Netscape. It took another few years before they came up with a browser people wanted to use. This isn’t just about Microsoft dragging it’s feet or not wanting to play nice.
The Story
I did an eight month contract up in Redmond. In general, I wanted to see what life was like at a big software company. Specifically, I wanted to see what Microsoft was really like on the inside.
A few months into my gig there I got an email from one of the internal group lists that strongly warned people not to try out the IE 7 or Vista Betas, because it would break a number of important internal web applications.
I can only begin to image the executive and managerial battles that went on as hundreds of non-web developer, and non-software engineer department heads used this information to go gunning for the IE team as a bunch of incompetent boobs.