The iPhone is the new IE 6, says mobile developer | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone is the new IE 6, says mobile developer

guardian.co.uk

39 pointsronnier20 comments

Koch said the iPhone is the new IE6 of 2000. As in, really great and popular.

He's just advocating we don't make the same mistake we made in 2000 (only developing for one platform).

I realize TFA is a troll, but the problem wasn't just that it was one platform. As I understand it, IE6 was at one time better than other browsers. The problem was it was a de-facto standard, MS stopped innovating, & it became increasingly outdated. Webkit follows standards & is open source.

Webkit is not much different than IE6 was 9 years ago. It implements SOME parts of SOME of the standards (no browser implements everything, the standards even contradict themselves in places). It also implements a large array of "features" that don't exist in any published standard, or are only part of a draft standard. Just like IE6 did, and which it is so widely criticized for doing now.

MS stopped innovating because they were almost dismantled by the DOJ a year after releasing it, in large part due to that browser.

"no browser implements everything, the standards even contradict themselves in places"

Thank you. I feel this is almost universally misunderstood.

If all browser makers followed the standards exactly we'd have no innovation. And those who malign various browsers for not fully implementing "the standards" would be wise to remember that the <blink> tag was once part of said standards.

It's not an all or nothing proposition. Standards aren't perfect, yes, & browsers aren't perfect either, but there are degrees to it. For example at this rate it'll be a decade before IE supports html5 video.

I don't disagree with the facts as stated. I'm just saying they would be relevant if webkit had 90% market share and somehow went back in time to fail acid3 and stopped releasing new versions and nobody forked it. Then you might be able to compare it with IE6.

I can't say I understand your analogy. For me, developing a site that renders correctly in WebKit, Firefox and Opera takes X amount of time, whereas adding just IE6 support takes something like 2*X additional time. WebKit plays nice with standards (it was one of the first to be ACID2 compliant) and it's open source. When IE and Netscape were the big players, neither did a good job at standards support IIRC, and one browser rendered content completely different from the other (then again, websites were much simpler back then, so it wasn't as obvious). I don't see how that era is comparable to this one.

Also, my understanding is one of the big reasons why Microsoft stopped innovating IE is because so many developers left after 6's release, and Microsoft became complacent with its skeleton crew. This might have been systemically caused by the DOJ lawsuit, but either way it's not a legitimate excuse. IE6 held the web back for years, which played into Microsoft's interest of maintaing its desktop paradigm. I don't think that's a coincidence.

I actually like Microsoft for the most part (I even worked for them), but IE6 is (was?) like an abusive relationship.

This is kind of like saying Obama is the the new Hitler but we mean the popular, democratically elected Hitler of 1934 not the genocidal maniac he became later.

Having read the article in my RSS feed first and then seeing this headline here, the soundbiteification is a little painful. Dvorak himself would have a hard time coming up with a troll title that good.

Figured this was one to (read comments && read article)

I think the difference between IE6 and WebKit is that in all of Apple's documentation they say WARNING DO NOT USE -WEBKIT EXTENSIONS -- THESE ARE NOT STANDARDIZED YET AND ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE and explain the dangers of using standards that are currently in development.

Microsoft is kind of the opposite, encouraging people to use ActiveX, Silverlight, etc. as hard as they can.

Except that ActiveX and Silverlight are arguably products that require adoption. -webkit extensions are not of this nature.

A lot of people are saying "the difference with IE6 is that the iPhone is standards-based and open," but I don't think that's right. The problem that PPK is pointing out is that developing for a single browser is bad, full stop. It doesn't matter if the browser is the holy incarnation of HTML5 itself, if you're not testing a wide variety of browsers - or worse, relying on proprietary extensions that you know not to be compatible - you're making the same mistake that was made with IE6.

It's more like WebKit is the new reference implementation for HTML5. Look at the changelog: http://trac.webkit.org/ I see submits from Chromium, Apple, Google, Nokia, RIM and others.

When I think of IE6 I think of "popular (but frozen) platform that we have to take pains to support," but that's not the iPhone at all. Safari is very standardsfull, and still moving forward.

Beyond that, the good point - to develop for standards, not to a particular browser - is obscured by a cloud of anti-iPhone rants.

This is just a rehash of a bunch of posts from two years that compared the iPhone to IE4.

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/The_IPhone_Is_Internet_Explore...

http://www.joehewitt.com/blog/iphone_is_ie4_a.php

http://www.martingordon.org/blog/2007/08/20/on-the-iphone-no...

"Mobile browser detection is really hard. None of the reports I've read so far show how they detect browsers."

From my experience it's pretty easy, here's one way to do it: <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”mobile.css” media=”only screen and (max-device width:480px)” />

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/

This test will only tell you "this is a mobile browser." It will not tell you "this is an iPhone browser and not a BlackBerry browser." That's the kind of detection that he's talking about.

Notice that part where he talks about mobile browser developers spoofing the iPhone user agent string to get to a 'mobile' version of a web page and how this might skew 'MobileSafari' penetration numbers if this is not accounted for.

Funny I said the same thing earlier :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077119

um, ie 7 is the new ie 6.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com