51–60 of 78 posts
Not really very relevant. Anyone who knows what a benchmark is is already running something other than IE. And who would install a Chrome plugin for IE when they could just as easily use Chrome?
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Microsoft has economic incentive to stay competitive on many fronts. I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster, to make their browser more standards compliant, and to substantially improve security. It makes no strategic or tactical sense for them to do otherwise -- to improve the browser is not to make the desktop less attractive.
I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster, Then why haven't they made it as fast as a grad student volunteer did in 2 months for FireFox [1]? This kind of stuff has been pretty well researched in the past couple of decades :-P 1. Scroll to "How We Did It", here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/trac...
Is it really so hard to imagine what life on the inside looks like?
Microsoft is a huge institution. There are hundreds of engineers working on IE. Their work is segmented and bucketed. Some poor engineer has probably spent the last several years doing nothing but maintaining the EOT font format. There are reorganizations, new decisions to realign the next release to meet the goals of other teams, etc. Every decision -- at any level -- requires buy-in from multiple parties with overlapping responsibility. There are, in short, too many cooks in the kitchen.
I'm not saying it isn't ridiculous. But this is how it is inside Microsoft.
On one hand, I think this is pretty funny. On the other, I think it's a stunning display of just how much muscle Google really has to flex (and perhaps more importantly, how much they're willing to flex). It will be interesting to see how Google continues to treat companies it considers competitors over the next few years. The big guys like Microsoft will be able to handle it; but the smaller guys might have to start…
I would love to compete against Google. I would pretty much beg for the opportunity to do it. Other companies are too reactive; you do something, they do something, the entire competition is just a boring back-and-forth game of mostly minor incremental improvements of dubious benefit to the end users.
But Google? Now that would be fun. A lot of fun. If you let them get ahead of you even once, you've just dramatically decreased your odds of winning, and they have an awful lot of smart people working for them. You'd have to be more nimble, and you'd have to be able to guess at what they were going to do before they did it ... and then you'd have to do it better, and do it before they do.
Beating Microsoft is like playing chess in the park. Beating Google ... that's like playing speed chess with Big Blue. It would be a blast.
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Maybe users who must use IE because of the policies of their company?
But if that's the case, isn't that likely because they have internal applications that are IE only? It seems more like a marketing thing--Overcome people's inhibitions by letting them feel like they "only" installed a plugin and are still running IE.
Also, although it is hard to believe, some people actually think IE is a good browser. I don't understand how or why, but some people actually do.
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This is misleading. Webkit, the core component of Chrome, has been worked on for far more than 2 years.
Except they only benchmarked javascript performance. V8 is only about 2 years old.
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Microsoft has no lack of talented engineers, what they do lack is vision.
"Vision" isn't an easily defined quantity. What MS lacks is incentive to make a browser with fast JavaScript performance, as they make most of their money off desktop apps, many of which web-based apps are looking to replace. So actually, the opposite is true: MS has a big economic incentive to slow down JS performance in browsers, because it will make them more money selling desktop softare. One way to do this is to…
The internet is a killing blow for MSFT's business model, because it devalues all their proprietary assets. And when MSFT relents a bit to the internet and tries to play along, it does this with the same business model that sells software with closed standards (Silverlight)or is protected by patent (.net).
The browser represents a piece of software that enforces neither of these business model components that MSFT absolutely depends on, and it represents the door to computer interaction. This is really bad for MSFT as it exists today. MSFT will be a very different company 20 years from now, but I don't expect it will change without a serious fight given what's at stake. We shouldn't be surprised if MSFT engages in some practices which might be anathema to anybody just expecting a good software product from a company with substantial resources.
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I don't think this is flexing a lot of muscle, though I could be wrong of course. The VM was written by one very talented, experienced guy and his assistant. Let's say it cost $200k. The plugin probably cost a trivial amount (there is for example an open-source IE plugin for Firefox that is pretty small sourcecode-wise: http://ietab.mozdev.org/ ). So all in all a small bet with a large potential upside.
I don't think the technical aspect of what they've done is flexing muscle. It's interesting for sure, but in the end, it's a plugin (a very cool one, yes). The muscle flexing is that they're willing to subvert a competitors product instead of just promoting their own product as a superior offering. Can you imagine the outrage if Microsoft had done this and offered a plugin to Chrome or Firefox that would make them re…
On one hand, I think this is pretty funny. On the other, I think it's a stunning display of just how much muscle Google really has to flex (and perhaps more importantly, how much they're willing to flex). It will be interesting to see how Google continues to treat companies it considers competitors over the next few years. The big guys like Microsoft will be able to handle it; but the smaller guys might have to start…
Worried? Are you kidding? I would love to compete against Google. I would pretty much beg for the opportunity to do it. Other companies are too reactive; you do something, they do something, the entire competition is just a boring back-and-forth game of mostly minor incremental improvements of dubious benefit to the end users. But Google? Now that would be fun. A lot of fun. If you let them get ahead of you even once…
If I had to rank-order the various humiliations I've seen, this comes near the top. Microsoft: "here's our best stab at what a great browser looks like - and it took us 14 years to get here". Google: "we've been working on a codebase for 2 years. We decided to release it as a patch to your browser. Our brief foray into this area has improved your best effort by 10x". Ouch!
Why wasn't there a post about this before? This post must be complete bullshit.