"If people start to switch over, then more sites will be developed to work in IE Lightning." Based on this sentence, I get the feeling you don't appreciate the value of web standards? If Microsoft wants to be taken seriously ever again (they had 10+ years to make that effort with IE before they lost the browser war) all they need to do is render pages correctly, not in their own special way. That also means not inven…
Your last sentence describes Google.
Absolutely correct. We should be trusting neither.
Chrome and friends aren't webkit anymore, but only by way of forking. Otherwise Chrome, Chromium and Opera 15+ are the same engine. The family tree kind of looks like this: -- Internet Explorer -- Firefox -- Safari \ -- Chrome, Chromium, Opera 15+ -- Opera 12 (abandoned) I'm a little unclear on how differentiated Webkit and Blink are in practice, but sadly we have only 3.5 major engines competing at this point.
-- Konqueror \ -- Safari \ -- Chrome, Chromium, Opera 15+ If you want to go further Firefox's lineage is interesting but it's parent browsers are all dead.
Everyone forgets the people who created/invented the things Apple puts in its software.
I feel like the "A new Web rendering engine is born" section covers quite honestly why they have chosen to fork IE. It seems, to me, to be pretty frank and doesn't contain much "doublespeak." PS - This was originally a reply to a comment which got removed.
The amount of that article which was focused on legacy was very depressing. When it started to go about how it would break some Little League site that was IE specific that got me very unexcited. Microsoft today needs to learn the lesson of Apple in the very late 90s and just say "no".
Apple didn't have a huge market to lose. Or to sustain through several decades of compatibility.
Also, Microsoft makes the vast bulk of its income (90-95%) from partners. It can't just decide to change everything, it has to move thousands of partners along.
Browser war? Sure. But regardless of the improvements MS makes, they still have years worth of a bad reputation they have built up to get over. It will take leaps and bounds for them to ever build up the respect that Mozilla and Google have for building web technology.
YES! 1-2-3-4, I declare a browser war! Finally. This is the Microsoft I've been waiting for! No more rolling over and no defeatist talk of adopting WebKit or whatever. Microsoft is going to use its muscle and position to make a truly competitive browser. We need more competition, and we need the default browser in Windows to be just as good as Chrome and Firefox. Microsoft, I hope you pull every -ms- vendor flaggin',…
I upvoted this for sarcasm. But upon reflection I think maybe I missed the point. I guess a lot of it hinges on your interpretation of the words "competitive" and "parity". I'm hoping that it means the expression "IE issue" gradually becomes the exception rather than the norm.
These days most of my bugs are Firefox acting differently than I expect it to (though perhaps compliant to standards).
I haven't really had to say "IE Issue" unless I was dealing with 8 and lower.
Because the vendors sometimes proposed incompatible variants of the same feature before it was standardized. And they would implement it behind their individual prefixes so that you could experiment with both the IE and FF variants, for example.
If you don't implement the same spec, bump the version. This is not a complicated idea. Instead of -webkit-mask-image and -moz-mask-image, have -beta-mask-image and -gamma-mask-image. When IE comes along and wants to play with WebKit's implementation, they implement -beta-mask-image and all the sites that use it get IE support for free.
They did.
-moz and -webkit and -ms and -o.
Unless we're actively working in synchrony, your "beta" won't be my "beta".
"If people start to switch over, then more sites will be developed to work in IE Lightning." Based on this sentence, I get the feeling you don't appreciate the value of web standards? If Microsoft wants to be taken seriously ever again (they had 10+ years to make that effort with IE before they lost the browser war) all they need to do is render pages correctly, not in their own special way. That also means not inven…
Your last sentence describes Google.
I thoroughly disagree. Net Neutrality, today, is case in point. Until Chrome came along, Firefox was going it alone against IE. Until Google Fiber came along, we all had less than 10Mb downloads for $80/month.
There's much, much more. Pick better battles. Google is not your enemy.
If people in the past have written bad js which worked in IE, Microsoft aren't now going to break that code. They don't consider saying "tough luck" to businesses with code which works for them today acceptable.
my problem is they're selling this as a "clean break" with no baggage. but then in the same breath explain how they've found a way to still accommodate that baggage and calling it a "long tail". IE is still gonna live next door (to be used for enterprise/compat) probably for a while. I don't understand what they are saying about solving incompatibility issues of IE-specific code in Spartan - which is presumably NOT I…
Basically, they took Trident, refactored it and stripped out all the compatibility shims, and made it into EdgeHTML, which they will be working on making similar to WebKit/Blink/Gecko in terms of how it renders web pages. For pages that still need IE, you can switch to Trident, which will still be around.