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Browsers
81–90 of 316 posts
Re: Browsers
#82There are several comments on this post wondering why a browser monoculture is bad or speculating that a browser engine monopoly is inevitable and ought to be accepted. Let's just replace 'browser' with OS (ironically the similarities are becoming more with each passing day) above... would we still say the same? Is an OS monoculture good, regardless of whether it is inevitable? Have we forgotten the power that MS had…
Unfortunately that's not really a valid comparison at all. Browsers all try to stay compatible with each other. OSes do not in any way try to stay compatible with each other. Programming apps for Linux, Mac, and Windows requires entirely different code. Programming for Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari do not (or at least not supposed to unless you're used new APIs or edge cases) You can't currently make an alternative b…
I disagree. MS has recently pushed the “linux on top op windows” solution. Making windows programs run on linux has attracted plenty of ressources (commercial and unpaid): open framework clones, wine, steam play vm’s. The same can be said for osx. iOS and Android not so much though.
Re: Browsers
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
IE, at its height, was available outside windows. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac At that time, 2001-2002, IE6 was highly praised. You don’t get to 96% marketshare by being something everybody hates. The hate came later when CSS demand ramped up and it became clear IE6 used a non-standard box model. Worse still MS essentially abandoned the browser, the result of total marketshare dominance,…
> IE6 used a non-standard box model. Which we all use now anyway because it was right way to do it... * { box-sizing: border-box; }
That is a matter of opinion.
I don't do that and I avoid code that does. In the days of IE7 I learned to write CSS code that was conformant to both box models. Now I just write to the standard box model. CSS isn't something that will ever be particularly challenging once you have gone through the extremes of edge case use cases.
Re: Browsers
#84Honestly I just see all this, even despite the author claiming taking time to "mull it over", as a knee-jerk reaction. There is little evidence that MS changing to Blink/V8 will have any tangible impact on the web. Microsoft has hardly offered much as far as competition and diversity goes since IE6, basically the only web "innovations" they're responsible for is a bunch of IE-specific APIs that didn't work in any oth…
> Microsoft has hardly offered much as far as competition and diversity goes since IE6, basically the only web "innovations" they're responsible for is a bunch of IE-specific APIs that didn't work in any other browser. I don't have much love for MS, but this is just wrong. XMLHttpRequest, the precursor to fetch, pretty much allowed "web 2.0" to exist. Now we use fetch, but they introduced it first. box-sizing: border…
You seem to have missed the part of my comment that said "since IE6"
AFAIK the box-sizing box model you mentioned was implemented since the beginning of Trident, well before IE6 came about.
XHR was available from IE5 onwards (only accessible via ActiveX object, it didn't become available as a native window property in JS until IE7 but the feature was still available), so again isn't "since IE6". If you think whether it was available in native JS matters, note that Mozilla had a native JS XHR object available in 2002, well before it was available in IE7 in 2006.
I specifically mentioned "since IE6" because that was the point at which Microsoft had decided they'd won the browser war, and ceased to innovate. From that point onwards they have been playing a perpetual game of catch-up, constantly lagging behind other browsers in implementing new specifications and features.
setImmediate is not standardised for good reason, there are already more appropriate use-case specific solutions: use `requestAnimationFrame` if you are working with animations/visual changes use `postMessage` or WebWorkers if you are working with transporting or processing heavy data
There's no browser use-case enabled by `setImmediate` that isn't supported by one of the above. It does however make sense for `setImmediate` to be implemented in node because a node environment lacks the two APIs mentioned above and doesn't really have any way of achieving the desired outcome short of forking child processes.
Re: Browsers
#85People keep telling me that Firefox is super fast!
But it's slower than Chrome and my laptop runs hotter.
Sorry.
Re: Browsers
#86I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearly too much), but none of them tell me why. I understand that it was bad in the IE6 days, but IE6 was also closed source and could only be run on Windows (see also the irony of Microsoft discontinuing IE on Mac, not wanting to compete with Safari, a browser made…
IE, at its height, was available outside windows. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac At that time, 2001-2002, IE6 was highly praised. You don’t get to 96% marketshare by being something everybody hates. The hate came later when CSS demand ramped up and it became clear IE6 used a non-standard box model. Worse still MS essentially abandoned the browser, the result of total marketshare dominance,…
Couple of corrections: IE6 actually fixed the box model (that was the difference between the new standards mode vs quirks mode that matched IE5), and IE on the Mac used a completely different rendering engine (Tasman instead of Trident).
Re: Browsers
#87I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearly too much), but none of them tell me why. I understand that it was bad in the IE6 days, but IE6 was also closed source and could only be run on Windows (see also the irony of Microsoft discontinuing IE on Mac, not wanting to compete with Safari, a browser made…
IE, at its height, was available outside windows. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac At that time, 2001-2002, IE6 was highly praised. You don’t get to 96% marketshare by being something everybody hates. The hate came later when CSS demand ramped up and it became clear IE6 used a non-standard box model. Worse still MS essentially abandoned the browser, the result of total marketshare dominance,…
It was sort-of available for Mac. IE for Windows was based on the Trident layout engine. The Mac version was based on the Tasman layout engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(layout_engine). While they were both branded as "Internet Explorer", they weren't the same browser.
Re: Browsers
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's great that it follows all these standards, but the browser (due to recent changes) and the company behind it doesn't seem to follow some necessary ethical standards.
It's open source, the recent changes you mention (which I'm not aware of, a reference to these changes would be nice) can be reverted and the ethics of the company behind it aren't really relevant because it's an open-source project, the only way Google really benefits from it's use is if they receive contributions back to the Chromium project, which also benefits everyone else.
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Re: Browsers
#89I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearly too much), but none of them tell me why. I understand that it was bad in the IE6 days, but IE6 was also closed source and could only be run on Windows (see also the irony of Microsoft discontinuing IE on Mac, not wanting to compete with Safari, a browser made…
One very obvious point which somehow hasn't been named yet, is security.
If Blink has a security vulnerability, like the recent WebSQL remote code execution, then in a monoculture that means everyone has this vulnerability.
Re: Browsers
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
IE, at its height, was available outside windows. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac At that time, 2001-2002, IE6 was highly praised. You don’t get to 96% marketshare by being something everybody hates. The hate came later when CSS demand ramped up and it became clear IE6 used a non-standard box model. Worse still MS essentially abandoned the browser, the result of total marketshare dominance,…
It was sort-of available for Mac. IE for Windows was based on the Trident layout engine. The Mac version was based on the Tasman layout engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(layout_engine) . While they were both branded as "Internet Explorer", they weren't the same browser.
Tasman was actually quite good, too. It was a great deal better than trident in many regards, ranging from the ability to properly handle transparent PNGs to more complete and correct CSS support. IE for Mac was a great browser for years after IE 5/6 had grown long on the tooth. I always wondered why it didn’t get ported to Windows to replace Trident.