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The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine

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Re: The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine

#181

Post by Aldo_MX »

icantthinkofone wrote: post #46
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't they? Since IE7, every new version is more and more compliant. IE11 gives a good experience and seems easy to work with (at least with the web dev I do). It just seems that they got sick of the baby steps approach and needed to start from scratch. They figured out yet another way to handle legacy code and want a new engine, and by new I mean, a Trident-based engine without some/most of the fluff IE has for le…

No. Despite the experience of those who do a little bit of web dev, those of us who treat the web as our operating system still curse IE on a daily basis. I hope that all those who currently talk about how wonderful IE11 is take note that Microsoft is, essentially, saying they're abandoning it for all these reasons.

If I were to rank the browsers in the order in which they give more issues to me:

  1. Safari iOS
  2. Firefox
  3. Chrome / Chrome Android
  4. IE11 / IE11 Metro
I only curse IE9/IE10 when they don't support a moden feature, but I don't mind using display:table instead of flexbox (to name an example) as long as it gets the work done in IE9/IE10.

Although I don't bother testing IE10- to be honest, I just blindly trust the document modes of IE11, I'd rather spend time testing different mobile devices than testing different IE versions.

PS. I might be biased in the sense that I have been doing web development since like 15 years ago, and I'm already accustomed to the broken box model of IE. With Firefox I literally have to ask myself every time "what the f%@k did I do wrong???", but with IE literally is "oh you silly IE, I just have to set X and Y extra attributes and it's done".

Re: The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine

#182

Post by gtjrossi »

bsimpson wrote: post #53
EdSharkey wrote: post #15

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',…

Why the fuck did anyone ever think vendor prefixes are a good idea? If you want to prefix, prefix with versions. I should be able to type `-beta-mask-image: url()` and any browser that implements that version of the spec can pick it up. There's no good reason to have to type the same exact thing 3 times to target each browser engine.

It was most often not the case that (a) vendor prefixed APIs matched a particular "version" of a spec nor (b) were interoperable across browsers at any point (e.g. -moz-foo didn't necessarily have the same behavior as -webkit-foo).

The issue isn't vendor versus version prefixes. The issue is sites using early versions of an API, relying on them, and then never removing/upgrading that code.

-webkit-border-radius for example doesn't necessarily match a particular version of a spec. Unprefixed, standard border-radius has been in all the browsers for several years [1]. Yet over 60% of page views (according to Chrome data [2]) still requires this property. So other browsers are forced to support the webkit version of this property for compatibility, which may not have a particular version of a spec for those browsers to reference when implementing support.

If you're interested, I gave a talk with other browsers at Mozilla HQ last week about some new ideas for how we can further improve the strategy for experimental APIs going forward. Check it out and give me feedback if you'd like (@jacobrossi on twitter).

https://air.mozilla.org/web-compatibility-summit-talks/ (Starts around 31 minutes into the video)

[1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-gradients [2] https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/css/timeline/popularity...

Re: The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine

#183

Post by Touche »

jonathansampson wrote: post #125
Touche wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is this is the narrative they are trying to promote but I remove code from my projects all the time but don't feel it makes it a different project.

Spartan isn't a subset of IE either. We've added support for nearly 50 standards, and more. The delta between IE and Spartan is massive, and growing quickly.

Interesting, if it's a complete fork does that mean IE is not going to be maintained? I thought IE was going to continue on for the time being. If there isn't a common codebase does that mean you're going to be duplicating work? Why?

Re: The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine

#184

Post by cromwellian »

(general reply to some of the negative comments in this thread)

When someone is taking the right steps, I think they should be praised. Whatever bad feelings about Microsoft people have, they seem to be a newly revitalized company of late, are implementing cultural changes the way they interact with other ecosystems, and are shipping more open source, and seem to be playing well with others.

We should reward good deeds, not punish them.

Re: The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine

#185

Post by zanny »

gcb0 wrote: post #148
Mithaldu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

-- Internet Explorer 6-8 -- Internet Explorer 9-10 -- Internet Explorer 11 -- Internet Explorer new? -- Firefox -- Konqueror (abandoned?) \ -- Safari \ --Chromium, Opera 15+ \ -- Chrome \ --IOS safari -- Opera 12 (abandoned) and that's why i use and only advertise firefox. It is the only browser that respect webdevelopers.

Konqueror is not abandoned, but Rekonq is generally the premier KDE browser nowadays. Any KDE install still includes Konqueror, even if it is not the default browser, because its backends power a lot of various parts of a KDE desktop.

Re: The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine

#187

Post by cm127 »

Chronic31 wrote: post #126
pjbrunet wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 wasn't aware of this. Source? Coincidentally, I'm not seeing results when I Google: google sabotage java.

Re: The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine

#188

Post by taf2 »

Mithaldu wrote: post #30
melling wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a already have lot of competition. In fact, it's never been better: Chrome, Firefox, WebKit, Chromium, Opera. You can even get the source code for Firefox and Chrome and contribute. I'm glad Microsoft is making a better go at it, but honestly, Microsoft could have built a more compliant browser any time they wanted too. https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html

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.

"but sadly we have only 3.5 major engines competing at this point." I actually, don't think rendering engine competition is a great thing. I think competing browser products is a great thing. Think about node.js and io.js or rails and merb... it's not necessarily a good thing. Everyone kind of assumes that more rendering engines is good thing but I think it's just important that we have at least one healthy open source option. We have 3

blink webkit gecko

The closed source solutions are the ones we need to hope and pray die away trident. They're evil because there is no hope for any innovation as we saw in the last decade with IE6. MS can do anything they like to re-market their browser but as long as it's closed source engine it has no place in the web IMO. I hope it reaches 1% market share and is forced to go the way of Opera.

Re: The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine

#189

Post by Throwaway90283 »

pjbrunet wrote: post #114
Throwaway90283 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see some competition as well, but in my perspective, they're taking the wrong approach. This entire project seems to be about improving compatibility with older websites, by adding more algorithms and layers to the rendering process. I don't believe everyone is using Firefox and Chrome because they have better compatibility than IE. I think they should focus on cutting the fat, and making the lightest wei…

"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…

I should clarify, I think they should be strictly following web standards, and by doing so, they help to force those sites not following standards to update their code, or die. I don't want my browser using extra resources, and having extra features and menus to improve compatibility with someone's sloppy, hacked together website from the 90s. I'd rather that site appear broken because it's not following standards, and by doing so, it's encouraged to update, or be replaced by someone else.

I believe this would allow for a smaller browser footprint, and we'd see better coded websites in the long run, instead of carrying them through.

For example, we get a new IE browser, that follows standards to the T. If your site doesn't work in IE, it's not because "it's IE, use a real browser", it's because you didn't code your site properly. In the video they talk about how they would previously look at the top 10k websites and ensure compatibility, and now they're looking at millions and billions. They shouldn't look at anything. If Reddit doesn't work in the new version of IE, because they're not following standards, then so be it. Don't look at methods of relaxing those standards and bending the rules to get Reddit working. Leave it broken, and let the users apply pressure to Reddit because the site isn't working in IE. As I said above, they can't laugh off IE anymore, because it's not some dumb, outdated browser. Instead, it's following standards, so Reddit is broken, not IE. It would be the gold standard... in standards. You check to make sure your site works in IE, because if it does, then you coded it right. If your site displays fine in Firefox and Chrome, you don't really know if it's coded properly, or if they just held your hand to make it display correctly.

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