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Comment by sid0 | Hacker News Reader

The argument for one browser vendor switching from engine A to another engine B "just like that" is entirely invalid unless engine B is strictly better than engine A. And by the looks of it there are areas in which IE9 Trident is going to be better than WebKit (e.g. hardware acceleration), which means that the argument is invalid. The argument for Mozilla switching to WebKit similarly falls flat -- Gecko is better than WebKit in several areas -- it is the only engine capable of rendering Firefox's interface, for instance.

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"IE9 Trident is going to be better than WebKit (e.g. hardware acceleration)"

You must be joking. It's great that they have finally decided to add SVG support, but bragging about SVG "hardware acceleration" when they won't even commit to supporting the canvas tag is unconscionable.

It's also this kind of thing that makes it clear that either the IE team has its priorities completely out of whack or that Microsoft is trying to throw a spoke in the wheel of progress on the web.

Edit: I don't know what you hope to gain by downvoting. It doesn't change the fact that IE is and, from all indications will continue to be, the odd browser out.

> You must be joking. It's great that they have finally decided to add SVG support, but bragging about SVG "hardware acceleration" when they won't even commit to supporting the canvas tag is unconscionable.

No, it's not just SVG that will be hardware accelerated. Everything will be rendered in the GPU.

> It's also this kind of thing that makes it clear that either the IE team has its priorities completely out of whack

On what basis do you make this judgement? Why is supporting canvas better than making everything hardware accelerated?

"On what basis do you make this judgement?"

Because for the vast majority of web development, having browsers with similar performance to other browsers while supporting the same standards is vastly more preferable than having one widely-used browser with better performance in some areas that continues to make cross-browser development difficult or impossible.

I disagree. I think given the choice to do only one thing out of the two, browser vendors should focus on things that fundamentally improve users' experiences with what they already have than implement random specs. I think the lack of canvas is disappointing too, but I think if the IE folks had decided to implement Canvas but not use Direct2D I'd be much more disappointed.

(Of course, you could be awesome like Mozilla and do both, but that's a different matter.)

This difference of opinion is exactly why the argument is invalid unless engine A is strictly better than engine B. WebKit is not strictly better than IE9 Trident.

Right, MS is actively trying to slow down progress. Republicans eat old people's medicine, democrats want to kill babies. Facebook wants to steal your soul, Google wants your first born child. Sure.

I said "either." It's completely plausible that their prioritization process is disfunctional.

What's your explanation for why IE is consistently out of sync with the rest of the browser landscape?

You're not getting the point. It doesn't matter that you provided an alternative, it's that you suggested the idea at all. That sort of sectarian bile I'd expect to find at Slashdot, not here.

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