http://norman.walsh.name/2008/01/26/X-UA-Compatible 11 16 2008-01-26T19:07:02-05:00 $Date$ Norman Walsh 2008 Norman Walsh Well played! Spectacular! Five Stars! Home run! Perfect! Microsoft rolls out a new bit of technology that they can legitimately pitch as a solution to a problem (or problems) that real customers already think they have. It's a solution that encourages vendor lock-in: if you're generating those special meta tags for IE-bugs-du-jour, why not tell your readers that they should only use the “right browser” for your site? That should help shore up IE's sagging numbers. It's a pitch-perfect presentation of FUD. Afraid customers won't buy your insert-product-or-service-here if your website doesn't work? (Why yes, of course, we worry about that every day!) Are you unsure about the experience your customers are getting now? (Well, yes, we don't really have the resources to test every possible combination. Who does?) Do you doubt that the existing mechanisms are working, that they'll continue to work in the future as we deploy newer and better browsers? (Gosh, now that you say it, I know there have been problems.) It potentially raises the bar for competitors because they have to support every conceivable collection of bugs indefinitely! And, for extra bonus points, they got respectable people in the web standards community to go along. Sweet! Technically, maybe it's a bad solution to the wrong problem. But who cares, it's win-win-win in every other respect! [The author isn't generally prone to wearing a tinfoil hat and ranting conspiracy theories, and he has had a rotten day. We fear he may regret this posting tomorrow. —Ed.]