Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in

news.techworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–78 of 78 posts

Re: Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in

#71

Post by natrius »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #70
icefox wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't enabled by default so users still have to turn it on at this point. AdBlock was the highest voted feature that users wanted and was the biggest feature I could include that Chrome could not. From a bang for my time/effort AdBlock was a winner.

Hallelujah! Thank you for making that leap. I'm no longer as fond of Firefox as I once was. It has persistent memory issues, and is getting more and more bloaty. But, it's also got AB+, and that for a lot of people is a killer feature. I think there are a bunch of sound counter-arguments to the people saying that AB+ will kill their websites: one, users are sick of websites with more advertising-related content than…

Passive AdBlock use is a very implicit, inconsiderate way of telling people to get a new business model. How about, "Hey, the ads on your site are annoying, and I think I almost got a virus from one. I suggest you fix it. In the meantime, I'm using AdBlock on your site."

There are perfectly good reasons to block ads, but far too many people take a brute force approach to it that will result in good sites going away, or charging users instead of advertisers. I think both of those outcomes suck. If you want to block ads, I'm sure you can spare 30 seconds to let people know why and how to get you to stop.

Re: Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in

#72

Post by known »

apr wrote: post #25
nostrademons wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but the guy who did V8 is the same guy who did Beta, Self, and HotSpot. That's like 20 years of experience in writing high-performance VMs for dynamic languages right there.

Microsoft has no lack of talented engineers, what they do lack is vision.

Browser based technologies will cut short Microsoft's desktop revenues.

Re: Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in

#73

Post by bad_user »

davepeck wrote: post #52
andreyf wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It is incorrect to conclude that Microsoft's lack of achievement in X implies (1) its lack of ambition for improving X, or (2) [as ancestor suggested] its determination to sabotage X. 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 sev…

Look, apologies for their behavior aren't enough.

I know they have good people in there, but the fact is that they are pulling us back. They couldn't get off their asses to work on IE 7 until Firefox became a credible threat.

This is the most compelling evidence that Microsoft always thinks about preserving the status-quo instead of advancing the state of the art. It's their decision and their company, but I'm not going to accept apologies for them lightly.

They want to change their image, then they should play nicer with their competition and with us. I don't know how they could do that, but off the top of my head ... why not open-source Silverlight to make it a true standard? But they won't do that since they need control. And round and round we go.

Re: Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in

#74

Post by davepeck »

bad_user wrote: post #73
davepeck wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is incorrect to conclude that Microsoft's lack of achievement in X implies (1) its lack of ambition for improving X, or (2) [as ancestor suggested] its determination to sabotage X. 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 sev…

Look, apologies for their behavior aren't enough. I know they have good people in there, but the fact is that they are pulling us back. They couldn't get off their asses to work on IE 7 until Firefox became a credible threat. This is the most compelling evidence that Microsoft always thinks about preserving the status-quo instead of advancing the state of the art. It's their decision and their company, but I'm not go…

> They couldn't get off their asses to work on IE 7 until Firefox became a credible threat.

This is very true and I've always felt it is a strong condemnation of what goes on inside Microsoft. I neglected to mention this sorry bit of history in my posts above mostly because it's a bit old news. Today, IE is a fully-staffed, heavily armed, etc.

I don't think I apologized for Microsoft. There is no excuse for having previously shut down IE, or for having such poor execution now that the IE team is back. There are, however, explanations... ones which hopefully help to dispel the myth that Microsoft is, today, intentionally holding the browser back. The truth is much more mundane.

Re: Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in

#75

Post by acg »

icey wrote: post #65
andylei wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is kind of unfair. the lessons microsoft and the development community have learned from working on browsers were all things that the Chrome team gets for free. they also get to start from scratch, whereas the IE team has to work on an outdated codebase and provide lots of legacy support.

Microsoft is free to rewrite IE from the ground up any time they'd like. The only legacy support they need is the same specifications that all other browsers are supposed to adhere to.

There are APIs for browser extension that Microsoft will want to continue to support as they are no doubt used by partners/corporations. It's not just about how well the web renders. The same way that firefox would be unwilling to start from scratch without providing support for the present plugin framework.

Re: Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in

#76

Post by fishercs »

there needs to be a way to force the rendering agent to be used, this would make the plugin agent much more viable instead of having to call cf: in front of a web address. I can see this being a good thing but also could be a bad thing, this doesn't fix the browser vulnerabilities that are still out there, merely your rendering engine. I would hate for people to be misled into thinking their version of internet explorer 6 is the latest and greatest because of the chrome rendering agent.

Re: Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in

#77

Post by sili »

andreyf wrote: post #32
tjic wrote: post #4

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!

MS makes money off desktop software, so putting a fast JS interpreter in IE would only benefit their competitors making web apps. It would border on negligence to their shareholders. Google, on the other hand, has economic incentive to promote faster browsers, as they're looking to make money off of web-based services.

Web-based apps are here to stay and over time will get bigger. By refusing to play the game, MS is burying its head in the sand and pretending the problem does not exist.
Post reply on HN