21–28 of 28 posts
Hence, IE6 remained stagnant until MS started feeling some heat from Firefox.
As long as most sites don't require ie, because i don't have windows.
A great rant by a practitioner who wants progress to go faster, ideologies and committees be-damned. But, a little revisionist about why browser innovation slowed. It wasn't Microsoft yielding to standards demands that slowed their pace; it was Microsoft's de facto victory in (for a time) neutralizing the business possibilities of competitive browser development. It took a while for alternate models that could sustai…
My impression of IE is that Microsoft stopped developing it right at the point when they realized "Oh shit! If this gets any better, it could replace Office!"
And no, I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer; it's just my personal opinion.
I know for a fact that my grandparents would find it a big deal to have to launch different browsers for different sites, and I'd venture to suggest that the majority of web users feel the same.
The question is whether a browser innovation war would provide benefits that would compensate for the inconvenience of installing and using several browsers. I think it would. Actually, I think it would be much better than the first time around, because we've finally reached the point where most web sites can work across all browsers. (Perhaps it would be best if the impulse toward complete compatibility and uniformity across browsers came and went like the tide.) A web site that only worked with one browser engine would be at a severe disadvantage compared to a similar web site that worked in all browsers. Browser innovations would have to enable really radical improvements before they were adopted. That's assuming that web developers are smarter this time around, which I think they are. If there's a surge in incompatible innovation, you won't see banks or insurance companies jumping on the bandwagon. Nor will you see any plain-jane sites that mysteriously require one browser or another. If a site requires you to launch a certain browser, it will be immediately obvious why, or you'll never go back to that site again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression of IE is that Microsoft stopped developing it right at the point when they realized "Oh shit! If this gets any better, it could replace Office!"
I don't know much about the past, but in at least the past 3 years, Microsoft has been incredibly committed to IE development and enabling it to be more standards-compliant than ever. They've been consistently pouring money, time, manpower, etc. into making IE the best browser that's out there. This is one excellent example of the fruits of our labor: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/ And no, I'm not sp…
When a single someone can make a tiny javascript file that fixes nearly all the rendering problems in your browser (Dean Edwards, IE6.js, IIRC) then it starts to look really bad for your abilities as a multinational megacorp that's supposed to employ some of the finest programming minds.
My impression is that it's still a pretty small team, if only they'd done it consistently over the last 10 years.
I think the real solution is not to provide more advanced features in the browser, but to provide more primitives. Lots of programming languages over the years have, at least for a while, compiled to C. C is an almost universal primitive. The web doesn't have a universal primitive. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are high level languages. If you try to use a high level language without ever accessing lower level functions,…
Can you explain what some of those lower level functions are on the web that need a lower level language? As far as I can tell, the lowest level of the web is sending a static document to the requester via HTTP. Any lower than that and you are talking about TCP/IP sockets, etc. In the domain of Operating Systems this makes more sense, because the OS or kernel is generally written in the low level language that is bei…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression of IE is that Microsoft stopped developing it right at the point when they realized "Oh shit! If this gets any better, it could replace Office!"
I don't know much about the past, but in at least the past 3 years, Microsoft has been incredibly committed to IE development and enabling it to be more standards-compliant than ever. They've been consistently pouring money, time, manpower, etc. into making IE the best browser that's out there. This is one excellent example of the fruits of our labor: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/ And no, I'm not sp…