Why do IE version changes break websites?

[Demo24]

This seems to happen on a lot of the websites I have to support for my users, which are generally government sites. Which for whatever reason seem to code for IE. Every time IE updates it always seems to break something on these sites and the response is always 'drop it back down to ie8 or 9', which I typically ignore and use IE11 compatibility mode (works worlds better than ie10's).

What is so different that causes me so many headaches and why does it take them so damn long to get caught up to the latest version? Even some of my vender websites take a surprisingly long time to catch up on IE versions.

 

[Rhonda the Sly]

A variety of reasons, from Microsoft making significant changes to the rendering engine from 7 to 10 to changes in handling document modes and the user-agent string.

Changes like these cause a variety of problems such as sites not recognizing IE or it's version to sites serving IE11, for example, code meant for IE8.

 

[cubby1223]

As someone who puts together the occasional website, the day when all people flat-out refuse to use IE cannot come soon enough.

Not that I know what sites you're working with, biggest reason I come across for different browsers to render a page differently is when a site was written with improper html or css, and one of the browser versions just "happened" to render it the way the creator wanted it to look, while the other browsers interpret conflicting information in an alternate way.

 

[mikeymikec]

Older versions of IE were somewhat more quicky and less standards-compliant, so website designers had to put in IE-targeting hacks to make it work the way they wanted it to.

I haven't had to design websites for a few years so I don't know if recent versions are less quirky, but I've got the impression that IE is becoming more standards-compliant so therefore a lot of the old IE hacks are backfiring.

 

[Zxian]

I haven't had to design websites for a few years so I don't know if recent versions are less quirky, but I've got the impression that IE is becoming more standards-compliant so therefore a lot of the old IE hacks are backfiring.

This. IE10 and 11 actually render most things just fine. It was the webdevs who wanted to use bleeding-edge CSS2 and CSS3, which were supported by Firefox, Opera, and Chrome, that caused all the issues for IE6/7/8.

 

[Demo24]

I see, this makes sense now. Still incredibly annoying! Most of these sites are probably just government contracts so the end vendor could not care less about it once they get their money.