Why keep up the pissing match? Who are they talking to?
They consistently do their own thing instead of going with standards, and they are always behind the curve. They seem to be trying to catch up with standards but have been unable to make any sort of impressive progress. To be honest, if they've put five years into it and are still so far behind, they need to fire some people.
Does anyone actually consider IE to be a valid contender for browsers? Personally, I gave up years ago.
I guess I'm just confused as to why this article, and the other similar ones from this past week, are even news.
Because they need to educate the clueless who decide to make their internal web applications IE-dependent. Making an internal web app IE-only is one of the most common and crippling mistakes corporate IT makes.
You are assuming Microsoft wants to adhere to standards. I find it more likely their strategy is to fragment the market because the day web applications become the norm, as opposed to desktop applications, they become OS-independent and Microsoft will have its main advantage (the Windows software ecosystem) negated.
They won't allow that.
They know IE9 is a bit crap, and they'll release an IE10 with proper history API, gradients, transforms and the rest when they can. They'll have a working web office someday too.
In the meantime they'll pimp IE9, the Office 'web apps' and other substandard ones to their customers until their kickass version 3 products come out.
§ Withstanding there are probably a few people in MS who really still love fat client.
That will never happen. Web apps have critical issues that can't be solved even by HTML8.
But let's look at the market... Have web apps displaced desktop apps? No. Have they displaced mobile apps (as per HN mantra 90% of iPhone apps could be web apps)? Not even close.
Now why is this? It's because web apps offer a significantly poorer user experience across the board.
* with all the progress that's been made in performance, web apps are slower than native apps and will continue to be. There is only so much that you can offload from JS.
* web-apps don't have access to the platform's entire range of graphics capabilities, including standard widgets, animations and so on.
* web apps don't have access to special platform functionality such as GPS, sensors, camera, etc.
Furthermore, the biggest mobile players have all started to invest in native mobile apps to the detriment of web apps. Including Google. It's in their interest to lock-in users to their platform, even more so since Android became a major player.
These issues can be worked around eventually (maybe).
The core issues with web apps can't be worked around:
1. Web apps are using a text-transfer protocol with a pile of hacks on top to make it stateful. To this day engineers are still working on solving this problem (web sockets, web sql, etc). They can't solve it.
2. One does not own web apps, one merely rents them.
That is true today, but to say the issues can't never be solved is a bit of stretch:
- Speed issue: NaCl.
- Standard widgets: HTML5 already have input type=datetime, color picker, address book, and many more.
- Animation: WebGL.
- GPS: Geolocation API is available today on most browsers.
- Sensors: Accelerometer API is available today on some browsers.
Now I'm not saying that web app will certainly become the norm, but it's not impossible.
* web apps don't have access to special platform functionality such as GPS, sensors, camera, etc.*
Take a look at PhoneGap. This is definitely becoming less of an issue, and I wouldn't be surprised to see even more progress on it.
Including Google. It's in their interest to lock-in users to their platform, even more so since Android became a major player.
I can't speak for others, but Google's native apps are merely frontends to their web service. I regularly switch between the native and web versions of both GMail and Google Reader on my phone. There's slightly different feature sets (syncing/refreshing tends to be no issue on the web, but it's kind of weird on the native apps. The UI is better on the native apps. I can open links in background tabs for the web, but I have to switch apps for native, etc), but I could completely stop using the native apps with 0 issue.
Other than that, I strongly agree. I've never had to worry about my internet being slow or down to use a native app, and I know I can use them years later with no issue.
I am curious - why would the protocol need to be stateful? What are you trying to accomplish?
> 2. One does not own web apps, one merely rents them.
No. You can buy apps and host them on your own servers, on your own PCs.
One does not own native apps, one merely licenses them.
Not giving a damn isn't the same as not being affected by. IE slows down innovation and productivity on the web. Everyone's internets are worse for it, and it's a ball-and-chain everyone's paying to drag behind us.. whether or not everyone's aware of it.