IE7 not CSS compliant - argh, here we go again!

Interesting Slashdot thread started by Jeff Reifman, in which he claimed that IE7 was basically non-compliant with CSS web standards: he measured it as IE 52% compliance vs. Firefox 93%. In fact in his article he notes that the IE7 compliance is only marginally better than IE6 (54% for IE7 and 52% for IE6). Here's a full explanation of those stats.

This is all the more appalling because at the end of May, Tony Chor (the Group Program Manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team) spoke to the Webstock conference in my hometown Wellington NZ and stated that standards was a high on the agenda for IE7 (along with things like security). He said that Microsoft will support "not only official standards, but defacto standards". As they say in my country, yeah right...

So why is IE7 in such a bad position currently in regards to standards compliance? Paul Thurrott has been harshly critical of IE7 so far, saying that it leaves developers and users in the lurch:

"Microsoft doesn't plan to fully support the latest CSS standard in IE 7.0. Instead of using well-established Web standards, IE 7.0 will continue to foist proprietary technologies on Web developers, forcing them to choose between two competing ways of creating Web sites. [...]

The most critical point in Wilson's post, in my mind, is Microsoft's admission that it will fail the crucial Acid2 browser-compliance test , which the Web Standards Project (WaSP) designed to help browser vendors ensure that their products properly support Web standards."

Whether the issue is backward-compatibility problems, as Microsoft is claiming, is beside the point. It's disappointing that IE7 will perform so poorly in regards to CSS and web standards, particularly as I came away from that Webstock conference optimistic that IE7 would finally put an end to IE's poor record with CSS.

While Ed Bott seems happy with IE7's security in regards to phishing etc, to me Right now IE7 is living in the old proprietary standards world that's only part of being a secure browser. Web developers (and users) need to be secure in their knowledge that CSS will render correctly across browsers. Right now IE7 is living in the old proprietary standards world (that they created as market leader). Sure it'll take a big effort from Microsoft to rid themselves of backwards compatibility issues, but they don't seem to be going out of their way to make a decent start on that.

Perhaps Microsoft is relying on their huge lead in the browser market, and the fact that IE7 will come pre-installed on Vista, to continue their non-compliant browser dominance. Oy, I really thought Microsoft was over that tactic...

UPDATE: After this post, I interviewed IE7 Group Program Manager Chris Wilson to get his thoughts on IE7's standards support.