this is rachelandrew.co.uk » IE8 and the future of the web

I Used The Web For A Day On Internet Explorer 8 — Smashing Magazine

A fascinating look at the web today with IE8. And it’s worth remembering who might be experiencing the web like this:

Whoever they are, you can bet they’re not using an old browser just to annoy you. Nobody deliberately chooses a worse browsing experience.

The article also outlines two possible coping strategies:

1. Polyfilling Strive for feature parity for all by filling in the missing browser functionality.
2. Progressive Enhancement Start from a core experience, then use feature detection to layer on functionality.

Take a wild guess as to which strategy I support.

There’s a bigger point made at the end of all this:

IE8 is today’s scapegoat. Tomorrow it’ll be IE9, next year it’ll be Safari, a year later it might be Chrome. You can swap IE8 out for ‘old browser of choice’. The point is, there will always be some divide between what browsers developers build for, and what browsers people are using. We should stop scoffing at that and start investing in robust, inclusive engineering solutions. The side effects of these strategies tend to pay dividends in terms of accessibility, performance and network resilience, so there’s a bigger picture at play here.

Persuading Microsoft to Implement Canvas « Processing.js Blog

The 26 step process required to add +1 to a feature request in IE. Franz Kafka is alive and well and living in Redmond.

Microsoft breaks IE8 interoperability promise | The Register

Håkon is not happy with the default settings in IE8. Deep in the preferences, "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View" is checked.

IEBlog : Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8

Praise Jeebus! The IE team are doing the right thing regarding the default behaviour of version targeting in IE8. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Baseline’s evolution on MDN | MDN Blog

These updated definitions makes sense to me:

1. Newly available. The feature is marked as interoperable from the day the last core browser implements it. It marks the moment when developers can start getting excited and learning about a feature.
2. Widely available. The feature is marked as having wider support thirty months or 2.5 years later. It marks the moment when it’s safe to start using a feature without explicit cross-browser compatibility knowledge.