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Update: CSS and js support in ie Mobile for Windows phone 7

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Yesterday, we posted a blog entry that detailed some upcoming JavaScript and CSS support enhancements that we are planning on making to the IE Mobile browser for Windows Phone 7. One of these changes, support for -webkit-text-size-adjust, stirred up a bit of controversy that caused us to stop and think further on the issue.

Our original intent in adding support for this WebKit-specific property was to make Web developers’ lives a bit easier by not having to add yet another vendor-prefixed CSS property to their pages to control how text was scaled. Even more specifically, we intuited that the most common use case for this property was to explicitly set it to “none” in order to tell the browser not to scale a particular section of text.

For example, if you have a picture in your page with an associated caption, you would use this property to prevent the browser from scaling the text, which would cause it to remain on a single line, reflecting the original intent of the designer, as in the following example:

facepalm

After hearing the community’s feedback on this issue (and a couple of face-palms when we realized the broader implications of implementing other browser vendors’ CSS properties), we’ve decided that it’s best to only implement the -ms- prefixed version and not the -webkit- one.

We thank all of the passionate Web contributors who weighed in on the issue, and we’re looking forward to building a great mobile Web browser that all developers can develop for with clarity and certainty.

Best Regards,

Joe Marini
Principal Program Manager
Windows Phone

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2010
    Wow, just discovered this blog. A couple of months back in 2009, I found this blog and the last update was like in 2007 about Pocket IE for Windows Mobile 6.0 O_O. It was pretty bizarre. Anyways, nice to see that the IE Mobile team actually exists (lol) and has some personality and life (that older blog was just scary). And hopefully, for the next major version of Windows Phone 7, we can add all the good stuff that IE9 will be getting. Please make it happen guys! Lets show those webkit lovers that Trident can mean something on the phone like it does on the PC (with Trident 5.0 in IE9)

  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2010
    Thanks for listening to the community on this one, and for having the conversation in general.

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2010
    No problem, Dan. Proof positive that we do listen. :-)

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2010
    Hi Tom, Yes, we are building in the ability to update the browser independently of firmware. -joe

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2010
    Not that I like IE very much (IE6 and 7 still forces me to spend several extra hours working around issues), but I'm glad you took this decision. Vendor prefixes should strictly be used only by their native rendering engine. After all, this is the same problem that created the user-agent mess: http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history I think it's great that you are open with these kinds of decisions too, and just didn't decide to support these things "behind the scenes".

  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2010
    cool Star Trek pic :)

  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2010
    cool Star Trek picture :)

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2010
    @saurik Want to make a web designer miserable? Have the same CSS rule do two divergent things depending on the browser? It's why designers get so frustrated with IE 6 and 7 on the desktop. That they behave differently is fine and expected, but when it's not part of the standard, don't go emulating while making a fundamental underlying divergent implementation assumption that alters behavior. Revel in vendor-specific quirks until standards are settled upon and every browser (ideally) interprets the rules the same way. There are, after all, custom rules for Gecko, WebKit and Presto. Why not Trident?

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2010
    Support HTML 5 and CSS3 and you'll make a lot of developers lives a lot easier. DO IT.

  • Anonymous
    July 27, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 27, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 28, 2011
    I'm a developer for a large Mobile Web Development firm. We have been anxiously awaiting Windows Phone 7 since it's announcement. Sadly, we purchased an HTC HD7 for testing and have come to discover that is just as horrible as Windows Mobile 6; No support for inline-block, improper support for floats, and no float clearing. Until you guys get your act together and start producing a product that supports basic CSS, we're going to continue to tell our clients that we will not support your browser, and users of it will get an unstyled plain-text version of the site, while people using Webkit, Blackberry, and Netfront will get the full experience.