41–50 of 144 posts
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That's not really a good tactic, because Google could just change its policies.
It could also add significant attention to the issue, and backfire horribly.
Microsoft would just say they are responding to Chrome's accelerated release schedule and redefining what a "major" release is.
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In what sense is Google a "client-side innovation"?
The Google Spider grabs pages from other servers. That's a web client. It's a web client that was easy to write when Google was started, but is almost impossible to write today. If search engines hadn't been invented 20 years ago, they'd be impossible to invent today. The only reason they still work is tremendous work on Google's end to have its spider be able to spider complex AJAXy pages, and that content creators…
Do you think they'll really drop IE8 once IE10 is released next year? Firefox 5 will be released tomorrow. FF 3.6 support will be discontinued? Actually, it would be great if Google could nudge everyone to keep upgrading.
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With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. What?
I think he's saying that it makes scraping harder. But today JS frameworks like jQuery give us the means to do anything we want javascript-related, in any browser that half-supports javascript. By deprecating IE7 they're just saying they're going to drop all of the extra hacks they had to use to keep IE7 working. A lot of what newer browsers give us is just better rendering. You can replace a mess of tables and neste…
Do you think they'll really drop IE8 once IE10 is released next year? Firefox 5 will be released tomorrow. FF 3.6 support will be discontinued? Actually, it would be great if Google could nudge everyone to keep upgrading.
And once again, they list specific version numbers for IE, Firefox, and Safari, but just say "Chrome" for Chrome, even though later it groups Chrome with the rest of the two most recent. I guess it's because they don't know for sure what versions of Chrome will be the two most recent released, but it's still kind of funny.
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With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. What?
15 years ago, I could reasonably write a search engine. Myself. 1 person. In a few weeks (modulo bandwidth and server farm). I write a program that grabs a web page, and reads out keywords. Today, if I grab a web page, quite often, that web page has nothing except for JavaScript code. That code grabs the actual content from the server, lays it out, and animates it. To write a web search engine, I need to write a comp…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. What?
15 years ago, I could reasonably write a search engine. Myself. 1 person. In a few weeks (modulo bandwidth and server farm). I write a program that grabs a web page, and reads out keywords. Today, if I grab a web page, quite often, that web page has nothing except for JavaScript code. That code grabs the actual content from the server, lays it out, and animates it. To write a web search engine, I need to write a comp…
You won't need to write a complete JavaScript library. Look at all the testing suites that automate browser instances, Selenium being the most well-known.
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The latest builds of Firefox and Chrome both work fine on XP, so they could theoretically force users to upgrade away from IE altogether.
They can't, many businesses rely on Microsoft's browser lockdown support. For example strict IE from browsing through the local disk or restricting settings from being modified. Firefox and Chrome have virtually no lockdown support.
I'm quite grateful to Google for this. As a web developer, I'd always hoped that some big industry player would start forcing people to use modern browsers, and now it's happening. As small players, dropping support for older browsers kind of pulls us into the morass of a Nash equilibrium. Everyone would benefit if all web developers could agree on requiring modern browsers. We'd all be saved the pain of supporting o…
As a web user, I'm not grateful. I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. All websites look slightly better, but the client side dies a little bit every time. In the web circa '96, anyone could write a web spider or web browser, and everyone did. There was tremendous innovation both client-side and server-side. Client-side innovations included things like…
In transportation:
It used to be that everyone could buy a horse and build a buggy and get around. Then cars came along and it got a lot more complicated and expensive to build a vehicle that was state-of-the-art, but tinkerers could still do it.
Now there are only a few big players who are capable of innovating and building the best and newest vehicles.
Now that I think about it though, there is still space for tinkerers and inventors in the automobile space. But You can't expect those automobiles to compete with those made by, e.g., Toyota.
In the same way, it's still possible to write a spider without a javascript renderer. It just won't be able to compete with Google.
One last point: the state of the web is based on the collective decisions of all internet users. Ultimately, people building things on the web decided more often than not that ajax-ifying things benefited their users.
If users had wanted a web client that would spider the web and shop for them, they would have latched onto it during the time of great innovation that you think is now gone. But they didn't. The things that users wanted are the things we see today, assuming that there isn't some horrible inefficiency in the feedback loop between web-builders and their users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. What?
15 years ago, I could reasonably write a search engine. Myself. 1 person. In a few weeks (modulo bandwidth and server farm). I write a program that grabs a web page, and reads out keywords. Today, if I grab a web page, quite often, that web page has nothing except for JavaScript code. That code grabs the actual content from the server, lays it out, and animates it. To write a web search engine, I need to write a comp…