How we used user research data to help design Compatibility View

There have already been a few posts on Compatibility View in Internet Explorer 8 (here, here, here, here, here, and here), but none have gone into detail about the user research data we used to help design this feature. We collected data on Compatibility View throughout the IE8 beta releases and have made multiple decisions about its design based on our data from lab studies, field studies, instrumentation, and community feedback. What I’d like to do is go through some common questions we’ve received about the user experience of Compatibility View, and explain how user data has influenced our decisions. Hopefully, this will give you some insight into our design process and how we use data to make feature design decisions.

Current design

So that we’re on the same page, let’s do a quick review. The current design places the Compatibility View button at the end of the Address Bar, next to the Refresh button in the default layout, on sites that do not include the compatibility meta tag or HTTP header. The button has a “page” icon on it. The first two times a user is on a page with the button visible and refreshes the page, a notification balloon will pop pointing to Compatibility View.

Now that we’ve reviewed the design, let’s look at some of our top questions.

Why put the icon next to the Refresh button?

One of our top concerns with Compatibility View has always been its discoverability. If users can’t find this feature, they could have a severely compromised experience. When we first tested Compatibility View in our user research labs, it was a button on the Command Bar named “Emulate IE7.”

To test it, we created a task in which participants were asked to use a site that we knew would be unusable before switching to Compatibility View. When they arrived at the site and found it unusable, we asked them, “What would you do if you came to a site that looked like this?” The most common response by far was to click the Refresh button. After probing deeper into why people would try to “fix” a page in this way, most responses focused on a specific incident in the past where the participant had seen a page that was “off” somehow and refreshing the page had fixed the issue. Another common response was to look for something in the Tools menu.

Side note: We use the term “fix” a page in this article a lot because that is how our participants referred to what they were doing. We know the technical accurateness of this term is debatable in a lot of cases but we’re sticking with how our participants thought about the scenarios.

Almost no one thought to use the “Emulate IE7” button, even though they had seen an explanation of it earlier in the session. The main problem was that the word “Emulate” had little to nothing to do with “fixing” sites to our participants. It was a technical description of the feature instead of describing what the user was looking for in these situations. Also, we knew that the problem wasn’t that it didn’t stand out enough. I mean, it was a BIG button that was totally new in the Command Bar. Our problem wasn’t that it didn’t catch user’s eyes, it was that it didn’t fit into user’s mental models.

Based on this data, we knew that the majority of users will likely look to the Refresh button when they encounter a page that needs to be “fixed.” To take advantage of this natural tendency, we place the Compatibility View button next to the Refresh button – next to the most likely place a user will look when a page looks “off.” Additionally, to catch the small percentage of users who we expected to look in the Tools menu, we added a link there as well.

Why use that icon?

We knew that having a button with a name as long as “Emulate IE7” was not going to work being placed next to the Refresh button. It would take up too much space and we already knew that the idea of emulating IE7 in IE8 was strange for most users. We brainstormed and developed a series of potential icons that could work for Compatibility View. One challenge we faced was that communicating what Compatibility View does with only an icon is quite difficult. We tried various iterations such as showing blocks misaligned, representing areas of the page that could be out of alignment. These versions were too abstract to communicate the general idea and often it’s not a case of elements being misaligned (e.g., menus might have the wrong background color). We decided on the “page” icon because this correlated best with how participants were describing the pages that were not rendering correctly (e.g., “broken”, “screwed up”).

In refining the final design, we worked to make it fit as part of our family of icons in the address bar, including stop, refresh and go. We tried options that had different colors and textures for the page but found the page white design was most recognizable as a “web page”. We used the same colors, line weights and gradients present in the other icons to “ground” the icon to the overall address bar design.

When we tested the icon in the lab, we found that the majority of participants understood that the icon had something to do with the page with a problem they were looking at. Seeing the icon led most people to read the tooltip that explains the feature. After reading the tooltip, we saw many positive reactions to the icon and that it made sense given what the feature does.

Some reviewers felt that showing this icon on pages that were potentially fine would confuse users and make them think that the page was broken somehow, but we saw no indication of that in our studies. Participants did not even look toward the Compatibility View button unless they were in situations where it could potentially help them, which was one of our design goals.

Will people understand what it’s for?

We expect most users to understand Compatibility View and when to use it.  Of our lab participants who read the Compatibility View tooltip, the notification balloon, or tried the feature, all have understood the feature’s purpose. Most importantly, everyone who understood the the feature, continued to use it on the sites they encountered that had issues. This was true for our lab participants and also for our field research participants.

Why have balloon notifications?

After a few rounds of testing in the lab, and getting feedback from participants in our field research, we still saw some participants didn’t notice the Compatibility View button, even after they hit Refresh on a page with layout issues. Quite naturally, they got into an automatic pattern of quickly clicking Refresh and then putting their eyes right back to the page content to see if it fixed their problem. We had an important decision to make--do we add some kind of notification that lets the user know about Compatibility View when it could help them? The upside is that more people who would benefit from Compatibility View will find it. The downside is that we are adding another notification to the system.

We tested a build with the notification balloons in the lab and in our field research and found that displaying a balloon did in fact help more people discover Compatibility View. We didn’t take the decision lightly but felt the added awareness was worth the added notification.

Why have two balloon notifications?

Originally the balloon notification only showed once when a user refreshed a page displaying the Compatibility View icon for the first time. As I mentioned above, even showing this once was a strongly-debated decision. But, there were many concerns that once was not enough so we tested the possibility of showing the notification up to three times (after the first three times someone refreshed a page displaying the Compatibility View icon).

In the lab, we showed participants from one to three different sites with layout or content problems. At each site we asked them what they would do if they came to a site like this. Most clicked Refresh as we expected. What we found was that of people who saw the notifications, about two thirds reacted to the first notification and the other third reacted to the second notification. Showing the second notification caught the attention of a group of people who were very focused on the content of the page at the first site but were more likely to notice things outside of their normal pattern at the second site.

There was also a group who saw all three notifications and dismissed or ignored them all. We believe these users would not pay attention to the notification no matter how many times we showed it.  This lead us to not show the notification three times “to be safe” because we had no evidence that showing the notification more than two times will catch any additional users and there is a real cost to over communicating with users (e.g., data in the recent e7 blog post about Action Center).

Conclusion

I hope this gives you some insight into how we as an engineering team use user research data to make some of our design decisions. As you can see, a lot of time, research, and deliberation can go into a feature (and this was just a summary, I didn’t even get into our instrumentation data). We always want to base important decisions on the best data possible and that includes data from the lab, field, instrumentation, and community feedback. If you’d like to find out more about user research at Microsoft, please check out our user research website.

Jess Holbrook
User Experience Researcher

Ben Truelove
User Experience Designer

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 19, 2009
  Great design analysis. The Compatibility View button is well implemented, simple and easy to use.

• Anonymous
  June 19, 2009
  "Fixing" a page with the refresh button still works in many cases, for example this IE8 bug which removes 4k from the page's markup: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/835130/ie-8-dropping-memory-pages

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  While I applaud the efforts to fix IE, your marketing department is doing you a huge disfavor. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/get-the-facts/browser-comparison.aspx So on one side we have this post, which, while not perfect, indicates you guys want to do a good job with IE8. On the other hand we have a bunch of lies that indicates you guys want to mislead people. So, which one is it?

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  Pies: commenting on this may lead to deleted posts, as I realized yesterday.

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  Rather than fretting "oh nos, them there's lies and y'all are a bunch of lyin liars"-- dontcha think it might be a lot smarter to be specific?   I don't see anything in the "Comments" section of their check-chart that is inaccurate, tho it'd be fair to say that "ease of use" is always subjective.  It's also fair to say that if you download enough addons for other browsers, they can mostly match IE's features on this chart.  But when other browsers compare to IE, they don't count IE addons. And the other guys continue to spread their own lies and FUD.  Consider www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/security/ for example.  It shows a chart showing how Firefox is "safer" than IE.  Except that the chart is from 2006 and compares Firefox against IE six, which is obviously pretty stupid.  Know why they haven't updated their chart?  Because their current numbers make IE look better.   Check out http://www.cio.com/author/452818

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  @Ian: "Rather than fretting "oh nos, them there's lies and y'all are a bunch of lyin liars"-- dontcha think it might be a lot smarter to be specific?" Sure. I'll point out the most obvious: web standards. Other browsers handle these things that IE does not:

• XHTML
• SVG
• MathML
• Many nice CSS3 properties
• More complete / less buggy JavaScript support IE8 apparently passes a few more CSS2 tests. How could that possibly count as a tie?

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  Oh, and I forgot about HTML5 support. The list goes on. PS: the check mark for Firefox regarding Developer Tools got added afterward, as you can see from this screenshot of the old version: http://img2.generation-nt.com/ie8-get-the-facts_0902C302F300373851.jpg

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  Stifu, when you compare apples and oranges, I don't think you can fairly say that apples are better than oranges or oranges are better than apples. Complaining that they decided it's a tie is pretty weak. IE8 has partial HTML5 support, just like all other browsers.   The original chart was technically more accurate: While Firebug may be the cat's pajamas, it's not part of Firefox itself.  While that point may seem academic, we're back to the issue that Firefox and others aren't going to give credit to IE for having great tools (VSWeb, Fiddler, HTTPWatch, etc).

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  @Ian: "Stifu, when you compare apples and oranges, I don't think you can fairly say that apples are better than oranges or oranges are better than apples." Then why compare apples and oranges in the first place? And it's not really an apple/orange situation, anyway. And even if it was, that doesn't make jumping to silly conclusions any more acceptable. Let's face it, web standards support has always been one of the weakest points of IE. This has improved a lot with IE8, that's right, but not enough to brag about being better or even just as good as others. Not to mention that in most cases, the most standards compliant mode of IE8 is not used. So even if IE8 had the best standards support in the world, it wouldn't matter that much if it this mode was only activated on 5% of the sites, displaying the rest in either quirks or IE7 mode. Also, in real life, you'll find more webmasters using opacity or border-radius (even though still in draft) than some obscure CSS2 properties like display: run-in, because they're more useful, and that's what matters. "IE8 has partial HTML5 support, just like all other browsers." But it's less complete than the one of the other browsers, as they admit themselves on that page.

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 21, 2009
  I can force a page into comptibility view, but I can't force it into ie8 mode

• Anonymous
  June 21, 2009
  Personally I think it would be pretty dandy if browsers stated which standards they supported, and web pages had a mechanism for transmitting which standards they required. It would put an end the inane complaints that particular browsers weren't supporting web standards because they didn't implement particular ones. Unfortunately this isn't tenable for a number of reasons. Ah well. If the W3C standards were supposed to be an all-or-none situation, they wouldn't be split up as they are. The standards are supposed to be loosely coupled. But for some reason there are so many people clamouring for lock-in to the W3C style of doing things for misguided reasons. As things currently stand they are mostly doing this against implementations of non-standards which is laudable. However, if for example a superior standard for vector graphics was ratified by some non-W3C institution, they would stand against that as well. I am interested to know. The HTML 4 script tag allows for scripts to be attached in whatever language the page creator wants. The recommendation page itself has examples in 'Javascript', VBScript, and TCL. Does Firefox support anything aside from Mozilla JavaScript? And if not, why not, and why isn't it being attacked for this?

• Anonymous
  June 21, 2009
  A bunch of comments were removed from this blog post that DID NOT break the rules specified for this blog - solely because they exposed the sham behind the IE8 marketing on this page. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/get-the-facts/browser-comparison.aspx Please re-publish the deleted posts or explain why you are applying censorship on this blog when the IE browser is compared to more capable browsers with better technology like Opera, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

• Anonymous
  June 21, 2009
  Rules for comments on the IEBlog are covered here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2004/07/22/191629.aspx Anyone is obviously welcome to post off-topic, non-respectful, and/or "non fun" comments to their own blogs.   The Web is a wonderful thing.

• Anonymous
  June 21, 2009
  The Web is a wonderful thing indeed but the censorship on the IE Blog is beyond compare. MSFT decided to post a bunch of marketing hype that was called out because it was obviously very, very stretched to the point of almost being liable. Commenters pointed out the flaws and lies in the "facts" presented. Removing the comments without specific reasoning to indicate the justification is censorship. Were the comments off-topic? - No, the comments on this post are entirely related to IE and more specifically the false statements in the recent marketing. Were the comments non-respectful? - No. No one person was vilified, nor were names called against anyone or any company. Were the comments "non fun"? - No. The comments were well poised and provided an item-by-item retort to the "facts" quoted in the article. Please un-hide the comments and let the community decide if they are appropriate or not.  Judging by the number of comments on this blog that indicated the same flaws in the marketing - I can't see how you'll find any companionship in applying censorship to the open web. Which outside of the censorship on this blob - is indeed - a wonderful thing. Jake

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  Jake: the comments are most likely deleted rather than hidden, so forget it. Just keep in mind only off topic praises are allowed, not off topic criticism.

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  @not quite et al. Were the comments off-topic? - Yes, they were! Just to remind you, if you've forgotten, the topic is: "How we used user research data to help design Compatibility View". As Eric Law pointed out: "Anyone is obviously welcome to post off-topic, non-respectful, and/or "non fun" comments to their own blogs." The problem with this blog is, that almost every topic is diluted by irrelevant discussions on matters, that have no connection to the given blog-post whatsoever. The net effect: myself, and I assume a lot of others, hardly bother to read the comments anymore, because in 95% of the cases it is a waste of time. @ EricLaw I would prefer a change in the setup of this blog: a new thread "off topic", where all comments not related to the given topic are moved to. Those interested in the REAL topic would then have a valuable resource, and those commenting on other things would not have to scream "censorship", because their comments would still be there (the rules could even be suspended or weakened for this "off topic" thread). Cheers! Harry

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  I do like what you guys did with IE8. It's a huge step forward, but some of the UX decisions you made with the compatibility view were disappointing at best. Using an icon to designate that a page is "broken" is a misnomer at best. The icon seems to designate that leading to an incorrect assumption on the part of the user. I would also have placed the icon in the status bar and not to the left of the refresh button which could accidentally be touched. Lastly, I would only display one balloon notification but only once and only after hitting the button with a message that it can be undone. A little disappointed with this. I'm sure you did extensive UX testing, but I would imagine with a wider study it would've changed the outcome.

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  @Chris: I'm not sure what leads you to conclude that further study would have resulted in a different outcome?   For clarity, it's important to reiterate that users who see pages that do not lay out correctly consider them "broken"-- it's this that led us away from the "Emulate IE7" title which had no meaning for them. @Harry: I agree, the comments here aren't as valuable as they could be, often due to their off-topic nature, and the positioning of personal opinion as irrefutable fact.   Of course, such problems are endemic in pretty much all public forums. @not quite: As noted previously, offensive and abusive language are not permitted in comments on this blog.  This is so for a number of reasons, not the least of which that we have readers of all ages and sensibilities, and this is the official source for a professional software development organization.   There are many sites on the web with more relaxed policies, and those who do not wish to abide by the rules on this blog should post elsewhere.

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  EricLaw: "and the positioning of personal opinion as irrefutable fact." You mean, like that IE comparison chart? :) I've got a few of my comments deleted, yet I didn't use offensive or abusive language. It could have been seen as provocative, but it was always polite. But whatever. Any real news about IE coming soon? So we can comment on something interesting again.

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  @Stifu: :-) We have a schedule of upcoming posts, most of which concern IE8 and topics that span all IE versions.  For the next version of IE, we're still in a "listening phase"; we've gotten some great feedback and suggestions, but nothing we're ready to blog at this point. If you're looking for some more content to chew on, please check out my blog over at http://blogs.msdn.com/ieinternals/.  I'm trying to provide some deep-dive content on some lesser known areas of the browser.  If you have a suggestion for a topic, please send it my way over there.  Thx!

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  All of my trust, user's trust, is going to be hand in hands with internet Explorer, I mean, they do such a job. The outrageous men would tear it, but I dis-believe that they have such disrespect for this software.

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  @on behalf of: Nice work on the cleanup.  The ranting is still mostly senseless and lacks credible references for claims made, but at least it's only offensive to reality.

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  @philmore & @on behalf & @Judah: Glad to see some open commentary on the status quo. We can argue if there are facts to back up philmore or the original IE marketing but its fairly pointless since both sides are hard to prove definitively. I think we can all agree though that the IE marketing is humorous at best and philmore's comments merely reflect a frustrated user and developer community that would prefer open discussion of a feature roadmap for IE rather than endless self-back-patting on a job half done. @Harry Richter's comments are spot on. Since this is the only pseudo 2 way communication option with MSFT we have to override the posted topic to open up discussion on the topics that matter. If another open forum is opened up I'm sure many of us would be happy to move aside and take off-topic conversations elsewhere but with the current options available (read: none) we don't have much choice.

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  IE8 Get The Facts Campaign - Gets It Wrong http://saviorodrigues.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/ie-8-get-the-facts-campaign-gets-it-wrong/ The best part is... this guy is actually a self-confessed "a bit pro-microsoft" guy.  Yet even he feels the campaign is off the mark.

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  Another response to the "Get the FUD" campaign: http://www.centernetworks.com/ie8-comparison-chart A few key points:

2. Privacy - Really? The don’t even give a nod to Chrome? Chrome was the first major browser to offer private (or “incognito”) browsing.

3. Developer tools - Really? Microsoft is trying to say that IE includes better developer tools? Firefox’s built-in javascript console still beats the heck out of the IE javascript console. Add on top of that the add-ons that are available for Firefox, and IE falls flat. The IETester “MyDebug” toolbar does offer a few great tools, but that has nothing to do with Microsoft; that’s a completely independent product.

4. Customizability - are they serious? They’re spinning “we’ve bloated the heck out of our browser by giving our users no choice as to what features they want” into “we win!” There’s no browser out there that beats Firefox in terms of customizability. There most likely never will be (which is unfortunate, because I would really like to be able to download an extremely barebones browser, then customize it with my desired features).

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  The IE8 comparison chart has been revised. This is the updated version (author unknown) http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3391/3638511291_d34e8a8c1d_o.png

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  There is at least one big bold barefaced lie. The claim that the web standards which IE8 fails to meet are "evolving" is a flat out lie. Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome all pass the majority of Acid3 tests. IE8 passes only about 20% of them. The levels of the web standards that are tested by Acid3 have been stable for 5 years or more in most cases, and some of them have been the standard for over eight years and IE STILL doesn't meet them. It is not really a case that the web standards in question are "evolving" so much as it is the case that IE is a dinosaur when it comes to web standards compliance. These are "the facts" that one needs to "get".

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  Recent Sunspider JavaScript Test Results: Times are in Milliseconds (LOWER #'s are better) http://webworkerdaily.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/speedgraph.png?w=453&h=408 Chrome, Firefox and Opera were 2,000-8,000ms FASTER than IE8.

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  Gee, lots of off-topic comments.  Let's take it from the top folks: @Natasha, I'd hardly call this a two-way communication mechanism with Microsoft, given that no one is really communicating here, just throwing barbs back and forth, and virtually no one from Microsoft is participating (probably for that reason). You'd probably be better off in the IE newsgroups, which have tons of readers and have been around forever. @MoreVoices, Yes, other browsers have phishing and malware protection too.  But independent studies show that IE8's anti-malware is WAY more effective. Other browsers block less than 50% of attacks. Actually IE8 matches most of the other browsers in terms of what HTML5 is supported, although others have a lead in CSS3.  Of course, most of the CSS3 spec isn't in candidate Recommendation yet, and the CSS working group itself rates CSS2.1 compliance above CSS3 in terms of priority. Firebug is lovely. Shame that it's not installed by default. I like that I can hit F12 on any random IE8 machine and get a working debugger. You're wrong about Chrome's process isolation; IE8 beta had it first. But really, it's not super-important who's first, it's important that the features work well, and this one does work pretty well. Opera does have good customizability. Shame they can't maintain my customizations across upgrades. Firefox has a similar problem with addons but it seems to be improving. @morevoices,@anotherresponse Yes, Chrome has incognito mode, but they don't have a filtering feature, so Google's "AdSense" ads (which are on most of the pages you care about) can track you everywhere you go on the web.  Firefox doesn't have a filtering feature either, although you can at least download a plugin for Firefox to do this.  Google (obviously) wants to track you and I doubt we'll see a filtering solution out of them. @Mitch74, When you call people you've never met "uneducated" you're obviously trolling. I'm going to ignore the rest of your comment, since I don't much care for mud-wrestling. @jameson, I'm not sure what a "barefaced lie" is in your book, but you're spreading untruths here. ACID3 specifically tests things which are not a part of Standards (Candidate Recommendation/Recommendation stage) yet, which anyone can easily see by doing any research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3). So, yes, standards are still evolving. The fact that other browsers are trying to get out of standards probably isn't the end of the world, but it's important to recognize that this is how IE got in so much trouble in the first place (most standards weren't yet ratified when implemented by IE in the 90s, so when the changed standards were ratified, IE wasn't compliant, and chose compatibility over compliance). @Sunspider: Yes, yes, microbenchmarks are faster in other browsers, and this isn't news. IE8 does much better (300%-500%) than IE7 but is still slower than latest versions of other browsers. But, microbenchmarks don't tell the full story, which has been pointed out here a lot.

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  [typo fix] s/get out of standards/get out AHEAD of standards

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  It's always best for progressive companies to listen to their users and use the user research data to develop new products. The use of "Compatibility View" instead of "Emulate" is a good common sense, because "Emulate" has little meaning in this kind of situation to a less technical person. If I didn't know about this feature and encounter problem viewing any page, I would naturally refresh the page, poke into the Tools menu to see if any feature there can be helpful or clear the browser cache.

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  "Tom"-- reposting the (inaccurate) work of others (Curtiss Grymala) without citing your source is both bad form and likely a violation of applicable laws.  Grow up.

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2009
  The "rules" of the internet should be the standards as defined by the W3C. Many posters of this blog, including some from Microsoft have stated this, and some have beaten MS over not compying to these standards (even if they are not finished, and in some cases the browsers that implement this uncooked stuff may even find, that they are not standards-comliant when the final verdict is handed out). What seems strange to me is, that many of those, that scream "EPIC FAIL", fail miseably, when asked to comply to the rules themselves! The rules of this blog say: Keep it on topic. Now the topic in this case is, just in case you've forgotten: "How we used user research data to help design Compatibility View". Asking somebody to comply with the rules, but breaking them at every opportunity themselves, just gives a glimps of the character of said person. And to me, that translates to: EPIC FAIL! It was probably naive to assume, that after I wrote my comment on June 22nd, that the discussion would return to the topic at hand. Stronger measures seem to be necessary to get this blog to where it should be. I would therefore like to ask the mods of this blog to root out the weeds, and to delete all comments or portions of comments, that do not deal with the REAL topic (including my comments, when they are no longer relevant, and including any following comment that says censorship). There is plenty of space in the world wide web, where any kind of topic can be discussed, but THIS blog is supposed to be a resource for enhancing the knowledge of developpers, and not a place for Microsoft-bashing. Thanks Harry

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  @Matthew: call me a troll if you want, fact is that if you don't educate one, or one studies by himself (gets educated), on what the Internet is, then he can't know how the Internet works, its possibilities, problems and danger. For example, and this post does hint at it, most users that find a page rendering badly in IE 8 think the page is broken - the page could offer correct CSS to all browsers (which IE 8 will render beautifully) but won't "work" due to an unimplemented object in IE (say, DOM2's event object). Take a recent page, made by a standards-conscious professional Web author (the one that knows that developing a ; there is no question the page itself isn't broken (it validates as HTML 4.01 Strict, as CSS 2.1): it was detecting and offering hacked code to browsers responding to conditional comments like ![if lte IE 7] use Jscript+IEDOM ![endif] else use ECMAscript + DOM2. This is the IE-team and MSDN recommended method of doing browser detection, so don't come and tell me I'm outta my mind. Well, in this page's case, IE 8 will render the CSS and the base HTML, but won't be able to run the scripts (bye-bye AJAX); the page will appear broken (it "won't run") but it's not; people that know how the Web works will say "IE 8 can't run this page properly" (they will try with another browser next, and I betcha it'll run with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.) and they will then try the IE 7 compatibility mode that will, incidentally, run the compatibility mode of the page, and work. Users that don't know better will just say that IE 7 compatibility mode 'fixed the page' - while it would just mean that the page didn't have a fix for IE 8, but did have one for IE 7. This post DID say that at first, the IE developers used the technically correct 'Emulate IE 7' label, but switched to a broken page icon because their users found it more logical from an IE user point of view (MS usability test labs, the post's side note: use of 'fix' is debatable). What can be said about it? Well, the typical IE user thinks that a badly displayed page means the page is broken (obviously, it's not always true), not that IE can break it - while some other users know better. If they know better, maybe they learned something the typical user doesn't know? So they are more educated on the way of the Internet? So they are educated Internet users? Stop me if I'm wrong, I thought that 'educated users' in a context meant people that know how to use something from said context.

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  @Tom I will like to add something else to what you've said about IE8 comparison chart. Security... If IE8 is so secure, why Outlook 2010 will not longer use IE to render e-mails, switching to Word render engine. In the other hand at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102109301033.aspx, the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 e-mail editor white paper cites the following about that change "Administrator and Developer improvements .... • E-mail rendering and editing use the Office Word technology and are not dependent on Internet Explorer updates .... " Should we read between lines "IE updates" as IE security updates?

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  @German, as pointed out above, "Tom" didn't say anything he posted; he just ripped off someone else's (misleading) statement. Now, in response to your question: Why on earth would you assume that Outlook's choice of rendering engine changed for anything related to security? That's an unfounded assumption, and you know what they say about assumptions. You're ignoring the totally obvious point that Outlook 2007 (which doesn't use IE to render email either) doesn't require a particular version of IE, which means that the Outlook team couldn't assume that they'd have IE8 even available to render email; only IE6 could be assumed.

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  @Ian - are you serious? Outlook is using IE6 to render emails? No wonder Outlook renders like garbage! I am so glad that I don't use Outlook  - I had no idea it was so unsecure under the covers as well as horrible at rendering HTML content. As for how Outlook is designed can it not use the latest Trident engine it finds in the Windows Install?  Wouldn't that make more sense? I thought IE6 was dead but now I have to re-think that statement considering how many users are still suffering with Outlook as their email client. Ugh! it just never ends!

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  I just came across this after reading all the comments about the infamous IE8 comparison FUD chart. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ie.html In short: "Using Internet Explorer is So 2006. You deserve a better browser: Firefox is safer, faster and easier to use than IE." Couldn't agree more! It physically pains me to use a PC that only has IE installed.

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  “Firefox 3 remains our Editors' Choice over Microsoft Internet Explorer...”

• Robert Vamosi, June 2008, CNET "When users have a choice.... they don't choose IE"
• Me

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  @OMG: You clearly didn't read or understand what I wrote. @best,@oh: You mean IE's competitors bash them? That's news?   CNET (such a reputable source) liked FF3 over IE7? Shocking. Of course, you're not posting all the quotes that rave about IE8. This is becoming such a stupid game. I hope no one is reading this.

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  @Ian, pls explain what you mean about IE6 and Outlook then as I got the same impression that @OMG got that Outlook is using the IE6 rendering engine rather than the IE7 or IE8 rendering engine. I'll agree with @OMG on this one (if it is true) since IE6's rendering capabilities are almost 8 years old now. Further to this on the mobile side I know that mobile IE is not using IE7 or IE8 yet.  This seriously limits web development when you have to cater to devices/browsers that are years behind the technology curve. As for your "rave about IE8" comment @Ian - please post a URL to ANY article "raving" about IE8. To be valid it must not be an MSFT site or a funded by MSFT article. IE8 has been out for 3 months now and I have yet to read a single article that "raves" about it.

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  Sorry to post a slightly offtopic question, but this seems to be the best place to ask: Does IE8 provide a way to gain focus from an inactive tab through javascript, similar to the way window.focus works if you don't use tabs? IE7 did not support this, basically voiding the window.focus call if tabs were active. Understable but very inconvenient for our use case. It is possible to activate window.focus through a registry setting or something similar in IE8? If that is not possible, is it possible at least to activate an arbitrary tab directly through the windows API? We're using a ducktape tool now that basically sends CTRL-TAB commands to IE (7 and 8) on the appropriate moment, but this is a very fragile solution. thanks a lot, Mathieu

• Anonymous
  June 25, 2009
  @DT > The HTML 4 script tag allows for scripts to be attached in whatever language the page creator wants. The recommendation page itself has examples in 'Javascript', VBScript, and TCL. Does Firefox support anything aside from Mozilla JavaScript? Firefox will not handle vbscript and TCL. It must be noted that ECMAScript-10262 3rd edition is an official and standardized specification; vbscript is not and, if I recall correctly from the MAMA study, only 3% of webpages declare vbscript. Firefox will accept declared scripting media types application/ecmascript and application/javascript as proposed and recommended by RFC4329 ( www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4329.txt ) : not IE 8. Bug 338278 was filed on this particular issue at connect IE beta feedback and it was closed by design and it was NOT reactivated: Bug 338278: "application/javascript" and "application/ecmasscript" media types not recognized regards, Gérard

• Anonymous
  June 25, 2009
  @Ian, > idea what the ratio of quirks/strict is I'm pretty sure the MAMA (Metadata Analysis and Mining Application) study has such data. ( dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-w3c-validator-research-2/?page=2#doctype ) Using a transitional doctype does not necessarly mean the webpage will trigger web-standards-compliant rendering mode though... the doctype must include the url of the DTD. So... @Stifu > even if there are no stats for how many sites trigger IE8 mode, the whole point is that other browsers use their strictect rendering mode more often than IE8 does. How many sites trigger document.documentMode = 8 is the kind of data which Microsoft can find/survey and which will be very useful, even critical for long term decision. Other browsers (that I know of) do not use their strictest rendering mode (document.compatMode == CSS1compat) much more often than IE 8 does. Their backward-compatible "quirks" rendering mode is different though (is less "IE-bugward") and is well documented. When IE triggers backward-compatible "quirks" rendering mode, the other browsers (with smaller market share) will very often do the same. regards, Gérard

• Anonymous
  June 25, 2009
  Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome all pass the majority of Acid3 tests. IE8 passes only about 20% of them.

• Anonymous
  June 25, 2009
  @Marakra: Acid3 is more a collection of bug tests: it was designed to hit only existing bugs in common browsers when it was made, and each point actually represents a dozen tests (total amount of tests performed by Acid3 is around 1,300, all targeted at released and supported browsers at the time). In short, and like Webkit/Safari and Opera demonstrated last year, a browser that renders Acid3 correctly may not be actually standards-compliant; Mozilla's approach on that matter, for example, was to fix 'obvious' bugs in Acid3 immediately (that's why Firefox 3's score went from 64 to 73 during its beta phase) and implement missing features required to comply with other tests before passing them (this is also why current Firefox 3.5 builds don't reach 100%: they miss some SVG SMIL features required to pass the test). On IE's side, however, Acid3 is a gross oversimplification on missing features:

• missing SVG support
• missing DOM2 support
• missing downloadable font support (valid argument though, tested standards don't ensure IP protection) Ensure that IE won't pass Acid3 until it implements features that might, in some way, not be required by the Web (SVG, although it's very nice, isn't actually required to open a page) for the moment. One may hope, however, that when CSS3 reaches recommendation status, its use of SVG syntax and evolved DOM reliance will force IE developers to support these technologies - because frankly, it would be illogical to support SVG syntax and rendering in CSS, and not as standalone!

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2009
  Sorry to be On-Topic here ;-) but I'd like to know a bit more of the details of this "research" e.g. Of "N" number of sites tested, "X" were running in Standards Mode, "Y" in IE7 standards, and "Z" in quirks mode. Of those sites... {####} were inTERnet sites {####} were inTRAnet sites Our numbers indicate that {X} number of sites that had "Forced IE7" mode, have since updated their content to run in IE8 Standard mode. {Y} number of sites currently reported they were "forcing" IE7 mode... Plus some idea of the volume of data that you've received? Data collected from {X} thousand/million sites... And if you have the data... from IE8 installs, how many end users have "used" (e.g. toggled) the compatibility mode. and any other useful or interesting stats.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2009
  @steve Thanks for the questions. Sorry to be On-Topic here ;-) but I'd like to know a bit more of the details of this "research" e.g. Of "N" number of sites tested, "X" were running in Standards Mode, "Y" in IE7 standards, and "Z" in quirks mode. Of those sites... {####} were inTERnet sites {####} were inTRAnet sites In our research lab, we tested up to three sites with each participants that had some layout issues not running in Compatibility View. Our numbers indicate that {X} number of sites that had "Forced IE7" mode, have since updated their content to run in IE8 Standard mode. {Y} number of sites currently reported they were "forcing" IE7 mode... Plus some idea of the volume of data that you've received? Data collected from {X} thousand/million sites... I don't have these numbers for you, sorry. And if you have the data... from IE8 installs, how many end users have "used" (e.g. toggled) the compatibility mode. We estimate 18-30% of IE8 users have clicked the Compatibility View button based on our sample (the range is a 95% confidence interval). The important thing to keep in mind is this is just how many people have clicked it. They may have clicked it because they needed it or because they didn't need it but wanted to see what it would do or clicked it on accident. Our telemetry data doesn't give us peoples' intentions, just what happened. and any other useful or interesting stats.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2009
  @Jess - thanks for the feedback. I take it "up to three sites" was a typo? I'm guessing you tested hundreds if not thousands of sites ;-) If any other stats do become available I'm sure that a blog post of the details would be very welcomed. thanks again, steve

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2009
  @steve No, "up to three sites" is accurate but I am referring to testing with participants in our usability labs, not our total test coverage. For that, you are correct, the testing was in thousands upon thousands. Thanks.