Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

Post by yuhong » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 7:38 AM UTC

EdSharkey wrote: post #88

stupidcar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE has been evergreen since version 10. The biggest change is that this is not Trident. It is a new rendering engine, called EdgeHTML, which started as a fork of Trident. That might sound odd, but Trident and the rest of IE had accumulated years of technical and backwards-compatibility debt: All the different document modes and obscure features from the ActiveX era that couldn't be removed because enterprise intranet…

They should have done this EdgeHTML rewrite/legacy cruft split with IE9 rather than layering on more kludges. They should eliminated native code apps in user mode in Vista and forced developers to ship only managed code with legacy native code apps running in a virtual machine sandbox. They should have finished WinFS and transcended the files and folders thang. (No, SQL Server does not count as WinFS, it should have…

Post by squiggy22 » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 7:50 AM UTC

badsock wrote: post #105

badloginagain wrote: post #53

I'm willing to give Spartan a chance, honestly. The ModernIE initiative taken by Microsoft the past few years feels like Microsoft gave IE to a team of competent engineers and told to run with it. They dropped support for older versions of IE and upgraded the technology behind it. Firefox is too slow. As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times. I may be an outlier but I think most people wh…

I think you're being too mild in your side note. The first half of the IE6-9 era was part of a deliberate scorched-earth strategy to harm the open Internet, and the second half was them furiously backpedalling from that when it failed. It wasn't a technical decision, it was cynical business strategy, and having their IE brand get trashed is the least of what they deserve. I'm kind of annoyed with how quickly people a…

Post by warbastard » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 8:57 AM UTC

rspeer wrote: post #123

girvo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has profiling turned up? Because in my experience, Firefox is faster on the apps I work on for Javascript performance, so I'm really curious what sort of performance profile your app has.

I've noticed that SVG performance in Firefox is about 10x slower than Chrome -- is that what d3 is using?

Post by blumkvist » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 9:09 AM UTC

brc wrote: post #153

CHY872 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You maintain your own browser so that you can influence the development of the web. For example, Apple used Safari's influence to push touch events, Microsoft tried to use its influence to standardise pointer events, Google's been pushing NaCL, Dart etc. In order to consistently have weight with changing CSS, HTML rendering etc you basically need your own browser - and most of the changes we've seen in the last few y…

There is also the issue of your army of tech staff doing demos and presentations using your competitors tools, or shipping your operating system with somebody elses browser installed. Microsoft need a browser and always will.

Post by eloy » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 9:36 AM UTC

ploxiln wrote: post #77

badloginagain wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a really good insight. I've always owned mid-high range computers, but browsing has always been much slower than my computers relative processing power. It's odd how I've come to accept that slow browsing is acceptable just because no one has "figured it out" yet.

Everything gets faster: computers have 4x the memory and processing power of 10 years ago, browsers are easily 10x faster than they were 10 years ago. However it appears that the average web page has gotten more than 40x slower. (They're also not really pages, they're "apps".) People my age or a bit younger (early 20s) say craigslist and hackernews look "hideous" but dammit this is how web pages are supposed to be.