yet another sound strategic move to make Mozilla better than the rest. If that means a certain amount of rendering warts then so be it

I assume there is a pref to disable this feature...correct?

I know i sound pathetic but the fact is that i unfortunately have to use daily sites that aren't corectly coded for web standards nor mozilla. Some of those sites detect document.all and if not present simply reply with a annoying message of 'browser not supported' or so. Others, decide to show a downgraded interface if they don't detect ie (for no apperent reason except lack of evangelization/documention or developper lazines). So i was thinking maybe there can be a way (preferably available in the interface, or -if not possible- a preference) through whitch i could enable a complete ie-stealth mode (user agent, document.all & other hacks) on a per site basis so as to be able to finnaly close ie for everything else except except windows update.

"First do no harm' more websites that work under firefox means that more people will keep firefox

This sounds good, but now I can see people saying "Great, now I don't have to detect anything!" and they'll just go ahead and use document.all.

Possibly - I personally would never target code at one browser or another and I would like to think that neither would most other developers. However, I really don't know. I think self respecting devs wouldnt, but I do not know how much they account for. A lot fo the stuff I see coded for IE only is a few years old, which makes me thing the cowboys behind the code are now estate agents or whatever they moved to next following the dot com bubble bursting.

So, I would hazard a perhaps optimistic guess that devs these days at least code switch on document.getElementById ...

I remember seeing some Opera banners on SuSE webpage (saying something like "Download SuSE's favorite browser"), so it's possible that the IE-compatible browser The Register is mentioning, is Opera.

Great, now no one has to write standards compliant HTML! That was sarcasm, BTW.

One of Mozilla's main goals is standards compliance. While this addition may mean that a few sloppily coded sites will allow Moz/FF users in, it plays into the warping of the standards that MS uses to maintain their marketshare. Just because Opera (iirc) implements document.all doesn't mean anyone else should, even if it's just a stub to allow users to experience deeper malfunctions in sites foolishly coded to IE. Moz and Opera should instead present users with warning prompts saying "this site is not compliant with web standards and may behave unexpectedly."

Wouldn't it had been smarter to just display a small yellow bar, like it does the pup-up blocking in Fx, to say that this site uses document.all which is not a DOM supported method and that some feature will not work until the website is correctly updated?

Or something of that nature.

I agree it's a bad idea to have this within the Mozilla builds. It seems to go the wrong direction in giving a user a faulse sense of compliance. No longer will they just run document.all and wonder why it's not working. Now they'll just use it w/out understanding that it's not correct syntax (there is no DOM/DOM2 validators unfortunately).

Uh... So what's the point? Is this to support a half dozen geocities sites? It's been a long time since I ran across a site in the wild that only supported the IE4 way of doing things.

It not being a standard notwithstanding, I always thought that document.all was a great idea. And the only reason, NS didn't adopt it is because MS came up with it first. document.all gives you access to the collection of all controls on the page - very intuitive.

This is a dark day for standards. It might have been tolerable if Mozilla displayed an error exhorting users to contact the Webmaster of a broken site. But instead there's basically no error message at all, because let's face it: no one checks the JavaScript Console except for developers. I don't mean to knock the JavaScript Console -it's ridiculously useful for Web development- but an error displayed only there is an error which may as well not be displayed at all.

So essentially, we're just rewarding poor development practices here. This should have been made an optional extension at best; rolling it in has just slammed yet another nail in the coffin of the W3C.

n/t

I don't see how it would harm coding practices in the future. No one is not going to stop object detection because of this, otherwise their scripts will soon have problems a few lines into them (unless very simple AND every browser did the same). Even then, would you change how you switch from getElementById and rely on this? No.

I don't see this helps very much because:

1) relatively few scripts out there go right into it without a document.all check 2) of those that do, once you get past document.all, you're likely to run into other ms-only js anyway and get stuck

Then again, it will help a few gimpy legacy form check scripts and such out, so why not? And guess what? My cc processor just came out with a page [b]last week[/b] to modify how their page appears to your customers and here's the type of dumbass code they wrote:

function Link1() { document.colorform.hexval1.value=document.colorform.hexval.value; document.all("font1").style.color=document.colorform.hexval.value; return true; }

So, there ya go.

How about an extension that on seeing document.all used issues the following extra HTTP request:

Head / HTTP/1.1 Host: www.site.com User-Agent: Bad Code Deteced On Your Site - see http://www.foo.org/d.all/ for details

I certainly hope document.all will only be available in quirks mode.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of websites use document.all?

When I first jumped onto Mozilla years ago, I thought they should have a document.all conversion to document.getElementById but then I realized the value of supporting only standards. If this was the route we were eventually going to take we should have supported document.all and document.layers from Moz1.0 we would have a lot more users by now.

At the rate Mozilla is adding support for quirks, misfeatures, proprietary junk, and so forth, from IE (and the forums, newsgroups, and Bugzilla continue to be full of people continuing a drumbeat in favor of further moves in that direction), if someday Mozilla actually does win the browser war and become the majority browser, it won't actually matter; Web authors around the world won't be using correct, standards-compliant code any more than they now are, as they continue to put out sloppy tag soup that depends on all the quirks of the current popular browsers, in which category Mozilla will then fall. And, if some future Mozilla version were actually to attempt to promote greater standards compliance by *removing* some of those quirks, everybody would blame the browser, not the badly coded sites, just like they do now; they'll tell their friends "Don't use Firefox 2.0 Beta... it's badly broken. It doesn't even show those neato blinking marquees in WhizzzBanggg.com correctly! Hopefully, they'll fix it by the final release... it's a shame, because Firefox used to be such a great browser!"

hah! I knew they would add it eventually. It doesn't really bother me. I would rather have mozilla work all the time even on crappy sites than have to explain while web designers don't know how to code to standards. The end user doesn't care about standards they just want it to work, from my experience.

I think it is nice for the mozilla team to take be proactive with dead sites from the NN4/IE4 era. These sites/their developpers are dead, fired or just never learned the new stuff after they discovered the web. This kind of features must be adopted with care, because the main focus and the area where mozilla will mostlý benefit is making people code for standards.

...but right now Mozilla/Firefox just doesn't have the market share to leverage developers to use standards-compliant code. Get the market share first (which I think the adoption of some document.all support is geared towards), then you have enough clout to dictate how developers build their sites. Think about it. It's what Netscape used to do when they dominated the browser world, and it's what IE does now.

Imagine if Gecko-based browsers could reclaim 10+% of the market again, THEN slowly phase out document.all support in future versions. The potential that at least 1 out of ever 10 people who visit your site may not be able to utilize it properly will go a long way towards driving developers to code for standards than all the "it's the right thing to do" speeches we can give. But before any of that can happen, you have to get the product into the hands of a wider market.

What if Mozilla was to host a "Hall Of Shame" for sites that didn't comply to standards? The Mozilla browsers could automatically detect bad sites and provide this feedback back to the Mozilla servers. As a web designer I think I would freak if I saw one of my sites up there.

By doing this, end-users aren't bothered in the slightest, but we - the "guardians of web standards" (and anyone else interested) - could see the bad apples out there and take whatever action was required.

What if Mozilla was to host a "Hall Of Shame" for sites that didn't comply to standards? The Mozilla browsers could automatically detect bad sites and provide this feedback back to the Mozilla servers. As a web designer I think I would freak if I saw one of my sites up there.

By doing this, end-users aren't bothered in the slightest, but we - the "guardians of web standards" (and anyone else interested) - could see the bad apples out there and take whatever action was required.

A few years ago, I suggested IE JScript compatibility for the mozilla browsers. At that time, folks at the Mozilla responded like this. "Why should we support non-standard browser technology?" It was so aggressive.

I didn't like the IE, but why people keep using the IE was that many popular sites were written in IE JScript only. You should understand the importance of Korea market in IT world. We call Korea "MS nation". However although MS depencency is comparably lower than Korea, many sites in the US also depend on IE only JScript. So, for marketting-oriented strategy, it is neccessary to make the Mozilla work with that kinds of script also.

Think of the MS strategy. They first step into standard technology or popular technology, for example Javascript. They increase their power in that field, and slowly change and add some modifications that other browsers can't use. Then.. suddenly.... many sites depend on their technology. So, other browsers can't be used for browsing such sites.

I'm glad to hear that now the mozilla can support document.all.

If you want to go further, why don't you visit sites like www.cyworld.com, www.kbs.co.kr, www.imbc.co.kr, www.bugsmusic.co.kr, etc?

Hello friends, I am relatively new to java scripting and I read in few of the postings that document.all is disabled in latest version of mozilla. I have a question regarding this. Can I use if(document.all) condition while scripting to perform any action? Say to display some text in iframe... If not, I guess I need to define a div and use document.getElementById. Is that right?

This is a mostly a pretty silly conversation. People want to use browsers that work with the sites that are already out there. When people on here say "standards," I have to laugh. INTERNET EXPLORER --IS-- the standard. Enough with all the holier-than-thou idealistic standards stuff. Mozilla/Gecko/Firefox ought to support the theoretical standards as much as possible, but it ABSOLUTELY HAS TO support the REAL ONES. A "standard" is not what some acronym-having organization says it is. It's what people actually use. If the EWRDGFW organization says that Betamax video tapes are the video media standard, it doesn't make it so. Nobody loves Internet Explorer. But it is the standard. Mozilla/Firefox are trying to catch up, and doing a pretty good job. #2 has to adapt to #1. It's always been that way. And wishing it wasn't doesn't change a thing; some people need to get over themselves.

p.s. I haven't followed the whole recent conversation on this topic, but if Mozilla really is going back and forth between supporting doc.all that is the worst thing they can do. I tested it out in a recent version of Firefox and the support does seem to be there -- as it should be. And it's also silly to claim that there are anything remotely approaching elegant standards for HTML. The whole thing is a huge hodge-podge of various languages, standards, and approaches anyway. There is no one elegant all-encompassing standard out there; a browser's job is just to properly render webpages, and that's it. For most people on this planet, "properly" means "the same way Internet Explorer renders them." HTML "standards" are important, but so are IE standards. If Microsoft decided the day should have 25 hours, they could win a bunch of followers; and we're only talking about some small subset of HTML here.

I signed up just to say that rt2's post is just about the best post I've read on browser compatibility so far. I agree 100%.

I've been coding for 7 years now, at 3 different companies. At the first two companties. we coded blissfully unaware of the issues of browser compatibility. We use IE, like more than 70% of other people, and if it works in IE, we were happy. It is the job of the browser to display whatever we code, and IE is the standard. Getting the program to work flawlessly is enough of an effort in IE, without having to worry about other wannabe browsers and their "standards".

If Mozilla wants to overtake IE in the market, it must be able to do everything IE can do, AND MORE, not less. I like my code be neat and maintainable just as much as the next guy, and therefore, I don't want to litter my code with if statements, and write the same code a hundred different ways, just because the creators of some browsers have delusions of grandure, and believe everyone should conform to THEIR way of doing things. It's not going to happen, so adapt or die. If 70% of the users used Mozilla, then Mozilla could dictate all they want, but for now, they need to comply with the standards set by IE.