I'm really pleased with all the positive progress browsers have made recently. Today however I realized that despite all that, a lot of things have actually changed for the worse. Take a look at Microsoft's new take on "active content" for example. Plugins such as Flash, Windows Media Player or Quicktime now require an additional click in order for them to be active. That means if you have a Flash movie embedded that has a button on it, it actually requires two clicks to press that button once. Obviously Microsoft forced this upon IE users in order to fix a whole bunch of security issues. Good thinking, bad execution. To fix a security issue by introducing a usability issue is questionable enough already, but the activation can be circumvented so easily (Microsoft even provides an article explaing how to do it), it's rare that you'll find a site that doesn't do it. This would be a minor annoyance, but as I found out today, applying the work-around to Flash movies works fine in IE but causes Firefox to no longer cache the movies. Even the work-around script provided by Adobe suffers from that problem. So in order to get a simple Flash movie to work across browsers, you'll actually have to use something like conditional comments and serve a different piece of code to IE and "the rest".

But wait, there's more. Microsoft recently released Office 2007 which I have to say is really awesome. The changes they made to it and particularly the new user interface is absolutely great. One change however is a complete mystery to me: Outlook 2007's new HTML rendering engine. We all know that previous versions of Outlook used the Trident (IE) HTML rendering engine for displaying HTML mail. So when you had to write an HTML mail (e.g. a newsletter), you could be sure that most of what worked in IE would also work in Outlook. For Office 2007, they took out Trident (which wasn't such a bad idea) and included the Word HTML rendering engine. Now the Word engine is really bad at dealing with HTML and even worse at dealing with CSS. So now if you have to create a fancy newsletter, you're forced to build it with layout tables which I don't even know how to pronounce. The real issue however is not that the Word engine sucks, it's that they didn't remove HTML mail support completely because if there's one thing that makes spam so annoying (apart from the fact that it's spam), it's that it's always HTML mail. Today a colleague showed me an HTML newsletter he had received that was done entirely with images. It didn't include a single line of selectable text. Nice going, Microsoft.

I could go on, but I won't (for now).