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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”

#151

Post by BlackAura »

Aardwolf wrote: post #11
lucian1900 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because apparently lots of websites still (mistakenly) check for "Mozilla" and "Gecko".

This is over 15 years ago that IE was related to Mozilla. These "lots of websites", is this about websites from 1995, or modern ones?

ASP.net used to do user agent sniffing extensively. It used it for feature detection, but also to serve different HTML and JavaScript to different browsers. I think it still does, actually, but I've not looked at it in a while.

Microsoft obviously thought that user agent sniffing was a great idea until pretty recently, because they use it a lot.

Use of user agent sniffing is built right into the framework, and also into Webforms (controls, server-side events, and the like). Often, completely different HTML and JavaScript is generated for different browsers (whether you want it to or not).

Worse still - things built on top of ASP.net used user agent sniffing even more. For example, ClickOnce required that the browser report which versions of the .net framework are installed, and the server does different things depending on that information. IE's user agent strings can get very long, reporting the browser version, OS version, CPU architecture, various service pack levels or revisions for different things, half a dozen versions of .Net, Infopath, Windows Media Center, Zune software, whether it's a TabletPC or not, RTC API, and a whole bunch of other fragments that I don't even recognize (SLCC?), and even occasionally advertising that the browser has some malware installed.

It's nearly impossible to switch this stuff off in ASP.net, and the browser database is often out of date. So new browsers or browser versions are often served broken pages (because the "unknown browser" fallback doesn't actually work). This happened when IE 10 was released, for example. Existing browsers are often detected incorrectly, and served a degraded version of the page (happened a lot to Firefox and Opera, back in the IE 6 / IE 7 era).

At least in ASP.net MVC you can ignore the browser detection most of the time. You can't really disable it in ASP.net itself.

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

#152

Post by encoderer »

bad_user wrote: post #122
MichaelGG wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take, for instance, SQL Server. It's become quite an interesting and capable platform over the last decade. It used to be that Microsoft took the stance that hardware improvements were the customer's benefit, so they'd license per socket, full stop. They used to mock Oracle with their licensing depending on what kind of CPU and how powerful it was. Latest SQL Server? Yep, you pay depending on the CPU vendor (AMD or I…

Just use something open-source - you'll get the Awesome [1] edition on any kind of chip. I never understood why some people prefer to buy licensed stuff from Oracle or Microsoft. Do you like pain? [1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/oh-you-wanted-aweso...

Because there's not an OSS equivalent to Oracle?

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

#153

Post by yuhong »

stan_rogers wrote: post #134
chasing wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100%. As someone who's been doing web development since 1995, I have wasted an enormous amount of my life dealing with IE-specific bugs. This is enough for me to feel uncomfortable even thinking about Internet Explorer and has tainted me against Microsoft products in general...

Do you remember NS 4.x and JSSS/translated CSS at all? I do. IE was many, many times better and easier to develop for. (And, frankly, their box model, equivalent to border-box, was the right way to go.)

I read about the Netscape "Mariner" cancellation shudder.

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

#154

Post by yuhong »

spamizbad wrote: post #116
zaatar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Disclaimer: I worked on IE from 2007-2013) Yes, the current IE team is extremely strong, and has only gotten smarter & stronger during the time I worked there. There's tons of meetings I've walked out of where we made a decision to do X rather than Y because "the standard says to do X" and it was the guiding principle for decision-making.

That's really good to hear. But why was the non-standard way even an option?

Many of the IE specific stuff dates back to the IE4/5 era, and back then Netscape was not much better.

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

#156

Post by adamconroy »

de90 wrote: post #148
aidos wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL Server has some extra tools, as you've pointed out. You can probably find open source tools equally as powerful (and, by definition, more flexible) to perform those tasks. Granted, you may have to invest some time finding and learning those tools - but really, that's just life. Sometimes it's worth putting in the effort [1]. I've found that the main difference is how you work as a developer. If you're happy using…

It feels like using the mouse is the tradeoff for using Microsoft products. I use Visual Studio and SQL Sever at work, and they are such a productivity boost, but I hate how often I have to use the mouse. The problem is many of the benefits of using their products perks would be difficult to navigate around with a keyboard. At times it's frustrating how often you have to use the mouse, but other times it's so great c…

Learn the shortcuts, it isn't very hard.

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

#157

Post by kibibu »

yuhong wrote: post #154
spamizbad wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really good to hear. But why was the non-standard way even an option?

Many of the IE specific stuff dates back to the IE4/5 era, and back then Netscape was not much better.

After developing for Netscape 3 and 4, IE4-6 were a breath of fresh air.

if(document.layers) ...

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

#158

Post by encoderer »

masklinn wrote: post #83
megaman821 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have cursed at working around IE quirks more times than I can remember, but I don't dump all the blame on Microsoft. Why is this the top comment, it is just a rant/whine? What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web? Microsoft has given customers a choice on whether to update their browser or not, and by in large they haven't. Then it becomes Microsoft's fault…

> What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web? Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then unless untold amounts of time was wasted and untold amounts of pain experienced to get it to work. When Microsoft got the market leadership they just stopped every investment in it until forced to get back in the game, and GP fears the same wi…

> Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then

I think you're mis-remembering a little. Or maybe you had a different job than I did.

Back then, the web WAS IE6. There was nothing else. And it really was, for a time, a popularly-praised relief from the previous browser wars. I didn't have a standard but then again, at least I had a standard. You can design for IE6 and be sure it would "just work" everywhere because IE6 was the only option. Market share in the mid 90's IIRC.

The real crime is, as you went on to explain, the utter stagnation. And of course insult was added to injury when Firefox was released. For years then we DID legitimately have the trouble of designing for one modern browser and one curmudgeon who just happened to still have 4/5th's of the market. Lame.

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

#159

Post by kibibu »

skrebbel wrote: post #104
T-hawk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

That's interesting, and I can see it being potentially self-perpetuating.

It's broken because Opera numbers are too low to allocate resources to fix, because nobody uses Opera on their site (more than once) because it's broken, because Opera numbers are too low...

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

#160

Post by yuhong »

kibibu wrote: post #157
yuhong wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the IE specific stuff dates back to the IE4/5 era, and back then Netscape was not much better.

After developing for Netscape 3 and 4, IE4-6 were a breath of fresh air. if(document.layers) ...

It is unfortunate Netscape "Mariner" was cancelled.
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