Status IE – IE's feature status and plans • Hacker News Board

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#51

Post by tkmcc » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 6:35 AM UTC

fishy929 wrote: post #48

elisee wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft had a competing proposal to WebRTC called CU-RTC-Web which, as far as I understand it, proposed to get rid of the Session Description Protocol (which is text-based and thus difficult to parse/edit) and provide lower-level APIs instead (details here: http://www.tokbox.com/blog/what-the-cu-rtc-web-vs-webrtc-deb... ). I've just started reading up on ObjectRTC but I believe it plans to offer an API to replace S…

> which is text-based and thus difficult to parse/edit That's not what I normally conclude when I think "text-based."

I think he means programmatically :).

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#52

Post by AdamTReineke » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 6:40 AM UTC

devnetfx wrote: post #28

AdamTReineke wrote: post #2

Chrome's dashboard: http://www.chromestatus.com

Thanks for the link. I always found it hard to know what is happening in new versions of chrome and which feature became available when. This is exactly what I needed - Thanks! Also found chrome dashboard easier to use than IE dashboard but that's understandable as this is new effort. And, if anyone from IE team is here, how about some consistency with developer tools with other browsers as well. The web developer UI…

I'm actually on the dev tools team. I'll pass along the feedback to the PMs.

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#53

Post by dave1010uk » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 6:43 AM UTC

I see WebP but no mention of WebM video at the moment. Any reason it's not there?

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#54

Post by grn » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 6:51 AM UTC

You can also download Virtual Box VMs with different versions of IE http://modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads. Indispensable when developing on Linux!

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#55

Post by pyalot2 » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 7:54 AM UTC

adrianba wrote: post #45

pyalot2 wrote: post #44

Note that this site lists WebGL as "IE11+". That's false. IE11 has a flavor of webgl that's experimental (prefixed or not) that's reported as version WebGL 0.92 (this is basically an invalid specification conformant string, it's either 1.0 or something not done). Huge gaps and bugs remain in Microsofts WebGL implementation which make it nearly impossible to use except for specific select usecases that Microsoft optim…

We shipped an update to the IE11 WebGL implementation to developers today as part of Windows 8.1 Update. We will roll this out to all IE11 users through Windows Update starting next week. There will be further updates to our WebGL implementation in the summer. If there are specific use cases that you're interested in support for, please let us know what they are so that we can prioritise the order of our implementati…

The most important thing is to run the webgl conformance test (online https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-confo... github https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGL) every day on a variety of machines with different configurations (I assume you have an automated test farm).

Another measure that's also very useful is to run the webgl performance regression test suite every day to see if performance got worse or better with the changes.

Unfortunately there isn't a comprehensive GLSL syntax test suite, but GLSL has been much of a sore point in IE where some syntax that's valid GLSL would work except in IE (such as uniforms separated by a comma).

I've submitted some tickets to IE (and added more conformance tests to cover them) for some of the gaps (gl.SAMPLES, gl.STENCIL_BITS, gl.SUBPIXEL_BITS).

A thing that's also a sore point is IEs lack of support for very common extensions such as OES_texture_float_linear, WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc, WEBGL_depth_texture, OES_standard_derivatives, OES_vertex_array_object, ANGLE_instanced_arrays, OES_element_index_uint, WEBGL_lose_context. You can get an overview of the state of support on http://webglstats.com/

A note on floating point texture extensions. If you implement one extension (for instance OES_texture_float) you should really implement the companion extensions as well for texture_float_linear and color_buffer_float. Only the triplet of extensions provides comprehensive overview of support.

Personally I'd like to see these run in IE of course: http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/15/soft-shadow-mapping/ http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/04/high-performance-js-... http://codeflow.org/webgl/deferred-irradiance-volumes/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/trails/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/barycentric-wireframe/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/ssao/

I think the demos above are fairly good usecases for gaps that you might have, because they exercise a lot of functionality, they're not bound to some specific framework (like three.js) but they are WebGL conformant.

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#56

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 8:10 AM UTC

tkmcc wrote: post #51

fishy929 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is text-based and thus difficult to parse/edit That's not what I normally conclude when I think "text-based."

I think he means programmatically :).

[deleted]

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#57

Post by jakub_g » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 8:29 AM UTC

AdamTReineke wrote: post #2

Chrome's dashboard: http://www.chromestatus.com

Does someone know if there's there something similar for Firefox available / planned?

The best I can think of is googling for release notes for current beta/aurora [1][2] for "coming soon" but it lacks long term things.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/29.0beta/releasenotes/

[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/30.0a2/auroranotes/

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#58

Post by jakub_g » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 8:32 AM UTC

Semi-related for cross-browser ES6 compat:

http://kangax.github.io/es5-compat-table/es6/

Shows future versions of Firefox and Chrome but not yet IE.

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#59

Post by giovannibajo1 » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 8:33 AM UTC

I would like to know from the IE team if there's a specific plan to fix the browser update issue, that is the fact that IE is by far the slower browser when it comes to user upgrades. It's exciting to see features in IE1x+, but we all know that those will be a tiny fraction of users for a long time.

I think that gaining consensus in developers' mindset goes through forcing updates like Chrome and Firefox do; don't care if it's monthly, quarterly or yearly, but users shouldn't even realize that an update was pushed to their machine. This model has shown that it works for browsers, and not only that, it has also proven to be the best model. Is there any actual actionable plan on this?

Adding new features in IE15 is fine and good, but won't buy a dime in developer consensus, when we still waste time supporting 5-years-old IE browsers at any given time.

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#60

Post by anton_gogolev » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 9:04 AM UTC

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #59

I would like to know from the IE team if there's a specific plan to fix the browser update issue, that is the fact that IE is by far the slower browser when it comes to user upgrades. It's exciting to see features in IE1x+, but we all know that those will be a tiny fraction of users for a long time. I think that gaining consensus in developers' mindset goes through forcing updates like Chrome and Firefox do; don't ca…

I'd argue that IE is primarily used in corporate settings, when silently upgrading software is a big no-no. Everything has to be tested by the IT/IS department and rolled out in a controlled fashion.