11–20 of 190 posts
If they change the UA, why didn't they take this opportunity to get rid of these ridiculously long UA's that mention competing browser brand names, and just make their UA string the following: "Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0"
Because apparently lots of websites still (mistakenly) check for "Mozilla" and "Gecko".
With moves like this, it seems they're walking the talk.
Correct me if I'm wrong. If a web developer is hell-bent on detecting ie, they could look for the presence of the activex API (like jQuery currently does in order to provide a uniform AJAX interface).
Basically, they're moving to a standards-compliant model like WebKit or Gecko and they want to take advantage of all the standards-compliant layouts that developers are producing. But the only way to do that is to break with the past and not support all the madness inherited from legacy IE versions.
Correct me if I'm wrong. If a web developer is hell-bent on detecting ie, they could look for the presence of the activex API (like jQuery currently does in order to provide a uniform AJAX interface).
this is good news. it will no longer stop IE users from visiting those sneaky sites who block users for using IE. it also makes it clear that Microsoft is finally serious about making a good browser that people WANT to use. now if they make their developer tools anywhere as good as firebug they'll have a winner. hiring some of the firebug team might be a good idea.
I have no problem targeting IE11 as an end-user platform for my apps, especially now since it appears that it's a very good , if not great, browser, but I have absolutely zero desire to use Windows as a day-to-day OS for development. A large portion of the tooling that I (and I suspect a vast majority of other engineers) require either doesn't exist on Windows, or if it does, it's crippled or hacky.
Essentially, moving to IE over Chrome/Firefox nets me little to no appreciable gain, and comes with a huge negative problem of drastically impacting my productivity.
this is good news. it will no longer stop IE users from visiting those sneaky sites who block users for using IE. it also makes it clear that Microsoft is finally serious about making a good browser that people WANT to use. now if they make their developer tools anywhere as good as firebug they'll have a winner. hiring some of the firebug team might be a good idea.
If they change the UA, why didn't they take this opportunity to get rid of these ridiculously long UA's that mention competing browser brand names, and just make their UA string the following: "Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0"
Removing those cruddy bits of the UA would make it so that those pages would render incorrectly.
Correct me if I'm wrong. If a web developer is hell-bent on detecting ie, they could look for the presence of the activex API (like jQuery currently does in order to provide a uniform AJAX interface).
Of course. They're not trying to make it impossible to detect IE. They're trying to make sure that all the "IE mode" quirks and workarounds out there in the wild don't get triggered on IE11 and break things. Basically, they're moving to a standards-compliant model like WebKit or Gecko and they want to take advantage of all the standards-compliant layouts that developers are producing. But the only way to do that is t…
I think that was the professed and proclaimed goal for every IE version since 8, or maybe even back at 7? I keep hearing that for years, and what this intention delivers in the end is yet more "IE modes":
n "browser modes" times 2 "document modes". Quirks mode. "Compatibility view."
So for IE 11, web developers would have two choices: test your page in a total of 10 IE mode-combinations. Or just serve "the Crawler/Geocities version of our site" to IE users no matter what version they're using.
Which is of course what MS/IE wants to avoid. But hey they could just pull an "Apple Inc." and license WebKit, or pull a "Google Inc." and make your browser auto-updating. Without prompts, progress indicators or restarts, just as invisible and efficiently as Chrome does by default. Presto, no more headaches with IE for BOTH users AND web devs. Maybe some MS egos would get a little dent, maybe some enterprise consultancy shops would have to cut down on man-days sold for IE-specific work. Ah yes. I can see why IE won't go this way any time soon---or only way after it has been finally and fully obsoleted even in the remotes of backwater net-cafes and even the slowest of Enterprise-IT depts...