No, really…stop laughing…they mean it this time. Honest. IE8 will be standards compliant.

Bwaa-ha-ha-ha! Oh, that’s rich! I can’t keep a straight face when I say that. Microsoft really must think we’re idiots. We’ve heard this tune before with IE7. Now we’re in a morass of backwards compatibility.

It would be one thing if Microsoft forced the upgrade to the latest version just as, oh, EVERY SINGLE OTHER BROWSER DOES. But they don’t. So I, for one, am dreading IE8 as yet another browser that I have to support. Build it for Safari and Firefox, and smile. Check it in IE and weep silent tears for the angel that just lost its wings.

Until Microsoft honestly and truly dumps their coprporate mindset of dragging the last 10-15 years of technology along with backwards compatibility because some fortune 500 IT department doesn’t want an upgrade is ridiculous. Nay, reCOCKulous.

Now, I hope I’m wrong. Let’s hope the 8th time is the charm.

I actually started this post for a reason. Ars has an interesting article on IE8’s standards compliance. Check it out here:

Wisdom and folly: IE8’s super standards mode cuts both ways

A client asked me the other day what web standards were and why I seemed to hate Internet Explorer so much.

My response was thusly given:

Web standards are an agreed upon set of rules. Like, we all agree that a square is a square and a circle is a circle.

Microsoft, on the other hand, tells us that we, the entire internet development community, do not know what the hell we’re talking about. A square is clearly NOT a square (not to be confused with a squircle). It is, instead, roughly defined a polygonally rendered object oriented box-like ActiveWidget that may or may not have four equal sides (except when rendered in quirks mode). For our own damn good they’ve unilaterally embraced and extended the standard (now called ActiveCube 2008 Professional Edition) to include a fifth side on certain occasions.

And at the end of the day, they’re still not going to draw the damn box on the screen, so we can all go fuck ourselves.

I was browsing the Google Analytics reports for my various sites, and I noticed some trends that surprised me. Since the numbers you tend to find aren’t broken out in meaningful ways, I thought I’d share my findings with you.

First, the numbers:

Surprising Conclusions

1. Holy cats! Firefox surpassed combined IE6 & IE7 usage for the first time in the Creative/Technical audience with a 47%/43% split.
2. There is a remarkable disparity between usage patterns between my sites aimed at technical or creative audiences and those aimed at consumers. While I expected there to be some difference, this disparity is much larger than I expected. Only 43% of the Creative/Tech audience use IE6 & IE7, while 81% of the Consumer audience do.
3. A year after its launch, 39% of the Consumer audience still uses IE6. <rant>This represents a complete failure on Microsoft’s part to manage the upgrade transition well, and is nothing less than a nightmare for developers.</rant>
4. Vista is a bomb. 9 months out, and it has only 12% of the Creative/Technical market and 9% of the Consumer market.
5. Mac use on the Creative/Technical sites outnumbers Vista use 2-to-1 (Mac 7,395 visits in the last 30 days vs. 3,521 Vista visits in the same time period).

First, let me disclaim that this is hardly a scientific study. I just found the results interesting, and I thought you might, too.

As I was comparing the numbers between various sites, I noticed a natural grouping in terms of percentage variance between my Creative/Technical-oriented sites and my Consumer-oriented sites. Breaking these out revealed these surprising numbers. The aggregated numbers above are taken from a little over 60,000 visits from 6 sites (3 of each type) in the last 30 days.

I debated whether or not to include the underlying raw data. Since these are client sites, I’d rather not share the actual hard data, so take my findings and conclusions with a grain of salt.

Feel free to comment/react/challenge below.