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Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

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Re: Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

#101

Post by samatman »

resu_nimda wrote: post #73
Aardwolf wrote: post #7

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"

Not being very familiar with browser standards, I found this bit pretty funny: navigator.appName is now set to “Netscape” This may seem like a sneaky attempt to trick developers, but this behavior is actually specified in HTML5.

I like the idea that in a thousand years, two pieces of code may well be asking one another: "What is the Navigator?" "Netscape", for absolutely no reason, in a piece of ancient, sealed code that no one but a classics scholar would touch.

Re: Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

#102

Post by nwilliams »

sixothree wrote: post #46
BillyMaize wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way about everything MS has produced/is planning on producing in the near future. IE, Windows 8, Xbox One, Microsoft Office, the list just goes on.

Everything about Windows 8 to me just feels like a kick in the groin from Microsoft. For many years now they've claimed that .Net was the present and future of Microsoft development; yet it seems they've shoved it into the back seat and likely next into the trunk of deprecation.

> For many years now they've claimed that .Net was the present and future of Microsoft development

And then the iPad and post-PC era happened, killing Silverlight in the process and PC sales are still in steady decline.

Re: Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

#103

Post by skrebbel »

rapind wrote: post #67
bsimpson wrote: post #33

I was at CES last year, and the showing of the IE team was my favorite part of the trip. They were a bunch of younger guys who basically said "We know the guys who used to work here did some terrible things in our name. We're changing that, and we're here to tell you about it." They seemed like really cool dudes. I even went over to the mall to try a Surface when they came out. Then, I realized Windows 8 is still Win…

Do you really think the fault is with a bunch of greybeards? More accurate would be: "We know the guys who used to work here did some terrible things because they were told to by people who still run the company . We're changing that, because we're being allowed to for now , and we're here to tell you about it." Ballmer: "I know, let's have a bunch of kids at CES promoting this fictional younger / hipper image becaus…

Sounds like competition is working!

Re: Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

#104

Post by skrebbel »

T-hawk wrote: post #86
aclimatt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Mozilla" part of the user agent has been maintained for historical reasons, and could potentially break compatibility if removed. Originally it was used to detect frames. It may not be used in the majority of user agent sniffers these days, but I doubt Microsoft is interested in testing their luck removing it. http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

We have a real test case. Opera has identified directly as "Opera" not "Mozilla" since forever (unless you configure it otherwise), and at least 95% of websites work fine with it. And of the small minority that do fail in Opera, faulty user agent sniffing could represent only a fraction of those. Opera 12.15 identifies as this for me: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.15 We could lose that…

Significantly more than 95%. Opera has been my main browser for the past 5 years, and in the beginning it wasn't all perfect, but I've had 0 problems on at least 99% of sites in the last 3 years. Opera filled the last holes and devs became better.

Interestingly, some high-profile applications such as Basecamp still suck in Opera, for no apparent reason.

Re: Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

#105

Post by yuhong »

dualogy wrote: post #20
ajross wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Basically, they're moving to a standards-compliant model like WebKit or Gecko 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: tes…

Well, remember that the IE components are global system files that require at least restarting Windows Explorer and often a reboot to update and all versions of IE follows the lifecycle of the underlying version of Windows. I have proposed rapid release IE in the past but it'd have to be separate from the current IE installation.

Re: Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

#107

Post by [deleted] »

venomsnake wrote: post #23
thesis wrote: post #15

Really tired of all the different versions of IE. Why oh why can't it just be "Internet Explorer" without all these individual versions that pigeonhole themselves?

Because of the "brilliant" decision to integrate the IE engine way too deep into windows to the point of unseverability. So you get one-two IE versions per OS lifecycle. Enjoy ...

[deleted]

Re: Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

#108

Post by yuhong »

trafficlight wrote: post #30
venomsnake wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the "brilliant" decision to integrate the IE engine way too deep into windows to the point of unseverability. So you get one-two IE versions per OS lifecycle. Enjoy ...

At the very least they could push real updates more than once a Service Pack.

They have to support all these versions for the lifecycle of the underlying Windows version. Trivia: I personally reported a security bug in IE6/7 that was fixed in the May 2013 security update.

Re: Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

#109

Post by bskap »

tracker1 wrote: post #53
chadzawistowski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 8 may still be Windows, but WinRT is very much the System 9 -> OS X transition. Windows 8 supports both the old Win32 APIs and the new WinRT APIs.

That was going to be my comment as well... The WinRT kernel was started "fresh" to be mostly compatible, without the weird crufty legacy support. I think the biggest things holding back RT is that it's only on locked down ARM platforms, and low-level SDKs aren't widely available. I would speculate that RT will become the main windows kernel by Windows 10. Then again, I'm less likely to even be running Windows by then…

WinRT isn't a kernel, it's a shell. It's like saying that Android is going to replace Linux.

Re: Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

#110

Post by ksk »

pessimizer wrote: post #93
ksk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it being open source have anything to do with it? People didn't like it when MS did it because it introduced additional unwanted bloat in the OS that was annoying to decouple.

People had/have more than one reason for disliking it. One was that they were forcing their proprietary webbrowser product deeply into the OS for no reason other than to disadvantage any possible competition. If IE had been open, people could have competed by modifying and extending IE.

>If IE had been open, people could have competed by modifying and extending IE.

But who would have been ready to put in $100M in ~1995 on a browser besides Microsoft? Remember there was no money to make in the market. Whats interesting is MS actually made an offer to Netscape to bundle their browser with the OS before they started work on IE. Netscape was barely surviving by selling server software. Not to mention that they too broke standards much like IE - adding several non-standard CSS elements, tags, proprietary DOM, etc. Ofcource some of these Netscape specific tags later got introduced into the official spec, but they weren't at the time.

If you look at webkit which recently got forked - without Apple and Google, Webkit would immediately die. No amount of volunteers or the fact that it was open source would be able to keep it alive while being a realistic competitor to other browsers. New operating systems, new Web standards, new JS engine improvements would all pose immense challenges that require an organized commercial effort to tackle.

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