LOL even IE8 fails @ PNGs

[Red Squirrel]

We are testing out IE8 at work to possibly deploy as we are currently on 6, and just for fun I checked how my site looks in it, and it STILL fails to render PNGs properly! holy crap, how hard is it to get it right? The shading is way off, the colors are way off. It's brutal.

Really don't know why some people insist on using that. Has other minor issues but it's all stuff settings can fix.

 

[SonicIce]

you mean the transparency of 32bit rgba png's?

 

[Red Squirrel]

you mean the transparency of 32bit rgba png's?

Actually I did not check the transparency, but I'm guessing that's a fail too. It's sad really. Though the whole shading is wrong, like if you have a PNG image on top of a jpg background, both images being the same or at least same colors so it "flows", the PNG will be different shade. Guess the fix to that would be to convert all jpg's to PNGs so they all end up being the same shade.

 

[SonicIce]

show what you mean exactly, im interested

 

[Red Squirrel]

Check out http://www.uovalor.com with IE, then with any other browser. The logo on top is a PNG on top of a jpg background, in the W3C compliant browsers the color shading is normal (ex: you can't see when the image starts or ends as it blends with the background) but in IE it screws up the shading. You'd think after 8 versions they would have fixed that.

You can also reproduce this by making an image, saving it as jpg and as png, put one as the background and the other inline, and they'll be different colors.

 

[x-alki]

I hear you RedSquirrel. I designed a logo for a website as a .png. The admin of the site said it looked good but others said the BG's didnt match. It took me awhile to figure out why.

I have know idea why it hasnt been fixed but it's frustrating.

 

[Cogman]

*nm* Dang it, I knew I shouldn't comment on colors . Yeah, they are screwing up the png rendering, which is really inexcusable considering the png library is essentially public domain.

I mean, seriously, what is to screw up? Pngs are essentially zlib compressed bitmaps...

 

[GaryJohnson]

http://phazed.com/blog/possible-png-palette-bug-in-ie-8-beta-1/

Internet Explorer renders PNGs in a slightly incorrect color gamut. If a GIF and PNG image of several colors are placed side-by-side on a page, a user can often see a slight difference in color. This is due to an incorrect handling of the gAMA ancillary chunk. Tools exist to get rid of these chunks

One such tool:
http://psydk.org/PngOptimizer.php

 

[Red Squirrel]

http://phazed.com/blog/possible-png-palette-bug-in-ie-8-beta-1/


One such tool:
http://psydk.org/PngOptimizer.php

Yeah knew there was tools (think there's greasemonkey scripts too but not sure), but we should not have to use anything, imo that's just a bandage. MS should get it right and fix it. Sadly IE is still the most used browser so when coding a site it has to be kept in consideration. IT's even harder now as there are 3 versions to code for instead of just 1. 6,7,8 and they all render pages different ways. 7 and 8 are close enough mind you, but they all seem to screw up various CSS elements differently especially when it comes to borders, and table sizing.

 

[Trevelyan]

I will never, ever forgive Microsoft for IE6....

But I've been very happy with IE8 from a developer perspective. IE7 is bearable.....

 

[ShawnD1]

Check out http://www.uovalor.com with IE, then with any other browser. The logo on top is a PNG on top of a jpg background, in the W3C compliant browsers the color shading is normal (ex: you can't see when the image starts or ends as it blends with the background)

I see what you're saying. It looks like a single image in Chrome, Opera, and Firefox. In IE it looks like 2 images thrown together.

IE is such a pile of crap. I remember many years ago a few forums I posted on would allow HTML tags, so I used that to iframe to a script on my own server that would cause the CD tray to open for anyone who was using IE. Lots of interesting forum posts resulted from that one

 

[Red Squirrel]

I see what you're saying. It looks like a single image in Chrome, Opera, and Firefox. In IE it looks like 2 images thrown together.

IE is such a pile of crap. I remember many years ago a few forums I posted on would allow HTML tags, so I used that to iframe to a script on my own server that would cause the CD tray to open for anyone who was using IE. Lots of interesting forum posts resulted from that one

LOL yeah it's brutal the stuff IE lets through... They improved in that aspect but I'm sure "remote control vulnerabilities enabling the attacker to gain full control of your PC" will still be found. I don't get why IE is so unsecure... it's a read only application - you read stuff, it does not need to write stuff to you, so how in the world do they manage these exploits?

I remember once if you put this in an html file it would actually crash the browser:

<input type crash

Yep, just that in a html doc. Think that was IE 5.5 though.. that was a huge disaster too lol.

 

[lxskllr]

I can see the overlay in FireFox, but it's more subtle than it is in IE8.

 

[gszx1337]

What the hell? IE still fails at CSS2 and STILL fails at pngs! I'm getting tired of this browser. Every time I design a site I keep running into a problem that I can fix, but "OOPS! That won't render correctly in IE!" Ugh, Jebus help me when I get into development.

 

[Red Squirrel]

What the hell? IE still fails at CSS2 and STILL fails at pngs! I'm getting tired of this browser. Every time I design a site I keep running into a problem that I can fix, but "OOPS! That won't render correctly in IE!" Ugh, Jebus help me when I get into development.

Yeah and worse is we still need to design for IE6, 7 and 8 and they all render differently! WTF? MS should honestly just give up, and ship with Firefox or something. Not like they make any money off IE alone. Of course that would be a lot of pride swallowing, but the fact that they release it that buggy is pride swallowing on it's own. Is it that hard for a team of 1000+ people to make a W3C compliant browser?

 

[Fenixgoon]

looked fine to me :confused;

 

[MrChad]

What the hell? IE still fails at CSS2 and STILL fails at pngs! I'm getting tired of this browser. Every time I design a site I keep running into a problem that I can fix, but "OOPS! That won't render correctly in IE!" Ugh, Jebus help me when I get into development.

IE 8 is fully compliant with CSS 2.1.

 

[MrChad]

Yeah and worse is we still need to design for IE6, 7 and 8 and they all render differently! WTF? MS should honestly just give up, and ship with Firefox or something. Not like they make any money off IE alone. Of course that would be a lot of pride swallowing, but the fact that they release it that buggy is pride swallowing on it's own. Is it that hard for a team of 1000+ people to make a W3C compliant browser?

You should follow the IE development team blog. There are quite a few good articles. Here is one. http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx

Microsoft is perfectly capable of writing a W3C compliant browser. The difficulty is that they have a lot of customers who have written websites and web applications to work with Internet Explorer and the way it handles HTML/JavaScript/CSS/etc. Breaking these behaviors in the name of standards compliance may make the geeks of the world happy, but it will piss off a lot of customers.

They've taken a more gradual approach, allowing web masters to code to IE "standards mode" (which behaves more like a proper W3C compliant browser) or to "quirks mode" (which behaves like IE used to). It's frustrating and it's a hole they've dug for themselves, but sometimes business needs trump technical wishlists.

 

[gszx1337]

IE 8 is fully compliant with CSS 2.1.

Hmm, maybe it was IE7 I was thinking about.

Yeah and worse is we still need to design for IE6, 7 and 8 and they all render differently! WTF? MS should honestly just give up, and ship with Firefox or something. Not like they make any money off IE alone. Of course that would be a lot of pride swallowing, but the fact that they release it that buggy is pride swallowing on it's own. Is it that hard for a team of 1000+ people to make a W3C compliant browser?

Well, YouTube recently dropped IE6 support, so that's one down.

As for shipping with a different browser, I fully agree. Hell, Google Chrome is under BSD, so MS could just take that and re-skin it.