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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

They're in the same damned-if-you-do position they've always been in. Every time they release something that breaks new ground, the "standards" folks move in the other direction and leave them behind. Look at SVG, DOM and CSS for examples where Microsoft moved first, only to see "Standards" written to suit the next version of Netscape's (later Mozilla's) browser.

So if they were to implement HTML5 as it stands today, they'd release IE9 to find that the other browsers had coordinated with the W3 to release the final standards alongside FF4 and a new version of Chrome.

That's how it worked back when NN6 came out, and how it's worked ever since. It's hard to have sympathy for Microsoft in particular in this area, but that's what they're up against.

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Why do the other guys seem to have an easier time capturing the standards process?

In the past, the "other guys" were the driving force behind the standards movement, so they could essentially write the standards as they built their product. They also had reason not to like MS very much (since they were involved in anti-trust litigation at the time), so they did things that in hindsight appear to be simply out of spite.

An example of this would be the CSS Box Model, which had reference implementations in both IE and NN at the time the spec was written. The spec changed how width was calculated, leaving every existing browser incompatible, and leading to silly things like Netscape.com not rendering correctly in the first released version of Netscape 6.

Nowadays, it's a mystery why MS gets left out of the loop. The standards committees are still non-MS dominated, so conspiricy-theorists could conclude that there's still some collusion between the Mozilla & WebKit teams and the W3. Or it could simply be Microsoft not wanting to get burned yet again.

The knee-jerk answer is that the IE team's ideas often seem to come from a crack pipe. Not to say that every single one of their ideas has been bad, or that everyone else's ideas always turn out great, but IE has a lousy track record. There are more than a few instances where the IE version is either internally inconsistent (many of the IE6 CSS bugs) or provably worse than the competition (JS event handling springs to mind).

Ah, but their Box Model is miles faster. Common sense would tell you that knowing an element specified to have a width:100px will actually take up 100px on the screen will speed up rendering. Actual practice shows that it is indeed really fast.

There's a reason why Twiddla is so fast on IE. It's because we intentionally leave the Doctype of the whiteboard, thus enabling IE to use its fast Quirksmode rendering engine. Testing showed that adding a Doctype didn't effect FF or Chrome performance at all, but simply slowed IE down to their level.

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