Modern Browsers Ship
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bethesignal.org
I reckon they shipped IE7 at exactly the most damaging time for the web because If they waited another year or so then it might have been long enough to kill off IE altogether.
They had the best browser back when IE4 launched. Given the amount of pain IE has caused over the years, it surprises me that any self respecting web developer could ever forgive them.
"IE you are dead to me."
Some (including standardistas and other web luminaries) argue it was a good thing overall (though it got long in the tooth around 2005-2006) because it allowed the web to settle and developers to better understand what they were working with (because the target got static, it became possible to explore in depth, not just in breadth).
> They had the best browser back when IE4 launched.
They also had the best browser back when IE5 launched and back when IE6 launched.
Now there's a frightening thought.
I remember Opera was my browser of choice around that time, it was a seriously nippy browser back then, way ahead of it's time. Unfortunately the fact that there was no free version prevented them from getting a decent share of the browser market. Later on, they did eventually release a free version but with an ad banner in the navigation bar (of course Opera is now completely free and doesn't have any ad banner).
I'm convinced the source code that became so unmanageable for the Netscape team started with frames.
The alternative to MSIE was Netscape Communicator 4 (which had been stagnating since 1998), Mozilla 1.0 itself was still more than a year away.
Regardless, I'm definitely not going to thank MS for this since I'm pretty sure your argument was not their intended effect (What was their intended affect anyways? Did they just not care? Concern over the threat the web posed to their OS?) and I will continue to promote IE's competitors until someday IE dies a horrible death and sinks into oblivion.
I'm also guessing you're of a similar view (albeit not as hardcore) and playing devil's advocate anyways ;)
There would not have been an incubation period where new ideas and standards could be worked out. Had Microsoft just pushed forward I suspect we would have a lot of "web standards" that wouldn't have much purpose beyond furthering Microsoft's monopoly. I'm not suggesting that Microsoft took this time off purposely to incubate new ideas, but it could be looked at as a beneficial side effect.
Mind pointing me to some specific examples of these arguments?
More than anything it was because MS was afraid of continuing IE development. IE is what got MS into all the regulatory anti-trust trouble in the first place, MS was too afraid to make a new mis-step with IE which could land them in even more trouble.
Has Microsoft stated this or is it speculation on your part?
The Apple I know is the one from the 1990s who had things locked down so tightly, hardware and software, bit loyal developers who put their best efforts into the platform, as if to destroy any ecosystem that built up around their successful products.
And I still feel that things haven't changed - if you can make money from iOS apps today, that is wonderful - but be prepared to get bitten one day.
I voted you up, but I'll note that one of the secondary reasons I wanted a PowerBook in 2004 was because Windows seemed so dominant and I didn't like the idea of Microsoft being able to completely control the Internet. OS X was the only OS at the time capable of competing with Windows for average users. Now, because of Firefox, Apple, and Google, it looks highly unlikely that Microsoft could in effect control the Internet even if they wanted to.
Mission accomplished, then.
Major versions of IE tend to be (are always?) synced to OS releases. What effect did the Longhorn Reset have on the sabbatical Microsoft "decided to" take?
Does anyone know? I can't imagine I'm the only one to ask this in the intervening 4.5 years, but my Google searches aren't finding anything.
See http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Microsoft-take-so-long-to-relea...
During that same five year period MS screwed up virtually everything else they were working on. It's not surprising they also could't come to grips with getting IE out.
To put it another way, do you suspect malice with how long Vista took? Probably not. I suspect that with Vista struggling all resources were moved to getting Vista back on track -- as important as IE is, Windows moreso.
> It's not surprising they also could't come to grips with getting IE out.
It's not that they couldn't get it out, there was no IE7 project until they reactivated MSIE in 2005.
"With the release of IE6 Service Pack 1 in 2003, Microsoft announced that future upgrades to Internet Explorer would come only through future upgrades to Windows, stating that "further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."
I think Vista messed up their plan. It doesn't sound like they just thought they were done. At least that was what they said in 2003. Now maybe you're saying internally something else was happening, but I hadn't heard that before.
Apparently in 2005 they then announced that they needed to do an out of band release for security.
Another part of the team went on to build some ill-fated re-skinnings of IE, such as MSN explorer.
So yes, the Longhorn train wreck was a big reason for the sabbatical, but not the only one.
Pentium 90MHz processor or faster!
Flash forward to 2010-11 and Google is doing the same thing with Android and Chrome (and Firefox is following suit). This is actually a BAD thing, even though we all have broadband, etc. now.
There's some kind of happy medium between significant, reasonably well-paced releases and shoving stuff out the door constantly.
"Real artists ship," but they don't spam you with incremental releases.
Not really Google's fault, but perhaps Android isn't a great example.
I am not aware newer browsers break backwards compatibility. Newer browsers usually work better at the things they were already good at. If you want to target a larger audience, pull your analytics and draw your line at the set you want to serve. Usually any reasonable line will cover mostly everybody.
This is the kind of excuse Microsoft uses - when you can't improve your software, you call it "stable" and "mature".
They have decided not to support h.264 at a time when every developer had to already have implemented a fallback anyway, again its not broken.
Here's an example bug where the antialiasing was screwed up:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=20064
And here's one demonstrating the (much worse) problem that you could get completely different colours showing through, although the screenshot isn't great because it only shows a small issue, not the much more offensive result if you had a larger corner radius:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=128
Spending literally one minute with Google would find you numerous related problems with screenshots attached.
Pretending this wasn't a problem with Chrome and related browsers is like an IE fan pretending that no-one ever really needed CSS hacks because (insert excuse here). There were numerous complaints about this for several months from practising web developers.
> They have decided not to support h.264 at a time when every developer had to already have implemented a fallback anyway, again its not broken.
If we all have to implement fallbacks anyway, why bother supporting any modern browser features at all?
They had H.264 support. They took it away. That means stuff that used to work in Chrome won't any more. It doesn't matter what words you use to describe that situation, the result is still the same.
> If we all have to implement fallbacks anyway, why bother supporting any modern browser features at all?
because graceful degredation is how the web works, if we enforced every browser implemented every single thing exactly the same way then nothing would ever happen.
since firefox will never have implemented h264, chrome removing it is a step towards a consistent platform, not away from it.
Considering the repeatedly defensive position about ie and bringing up fairly minor points to criticize chrome, plus the fact you replied to this hours after it went of the first few pages, are you really not Elepsis and a microsoft employee?
As I told you in the other thread, I have nothing to do with Microsoft. Not everyone who disagrees with you, or indeed with the majority opinion in any given discussion, is a troll/sockpuppet/astroturfer. And this discussion is still on my HN home page right now, never mind when I posted my previous comment several hours ago.
h.264 was never a standard for browsers to implement. It is widely in use, yes, but not a standard. This is why there was such a huge issue over <video>, because Firefox, Opera, and Chrome didn't want h.264 in the standard.
Firefox and Opera have much larger marketshare, and they weren't implementing h.264. It was DOA as a "standard" long before Chrome dropped it.
the bottom line is that that it's the nature of the beast; it creates [your choice quantitative adjective] inconvenience.
No, it's not. There is a reason not to implement h.264 - it's patent encumbered and eventually there will be licensing costs that will make free implementations impossible.
There is a difference when company G takes a stand against a bad standard and company M that can't implement simple features correctly despite the fact that it can dedicate humongous resources to its development.
Shockwave / Flash / nearly every other application in the world tells you your software is old, and asks if you want to update it, and it will keep telling you this until you check the "don't tell me again" box. Which few people do. So instead they get irritated that it always pops up, and get used to clicking "no" because they didn't want to deal with it then, and don't want to deal with it now. A year passes, they get a virus through an old exploit, and they blame the software instead of their habits / their IT department's dogma (which is not always incorrect, but frequently problematic).
Chrome, on the other hand, keeps itself up-to-date in the background, at all times, and doesn't ask you to deal with it. It doesn't even inform you it's doing so, aside from a minuscule little up-arrow on the wrench that disappears on the next launch - no progress bars, no delay, no "restart now", no alerts, nothing. There's no question if someone's using version X or Y; they have the latest of their branch. Period. Or they'll get it in a day or two, and problem solved.
Transparent updates, especially when they're nigh-totally transparent, are in an entirely different world than "do you want to update yes/no/cancel". It's apples and granite, or oranges and wolverines - there's no comparison ("apples are sweeter than wolverines").
Transparent updates are great, until something goes wrong. What happens if someone manages to hijack the DNS entry to make 50 million Chrome installations download an update from a poisoned well? Or Google's quality control misses something and pushes out a buggy update that breaks Chrome's ability to reconnect and obtain a fix for that update? (This has already happened to companies the size of Skype and McAfee.) Or an update simply introduces a behavior that users don't want, like Microsoft using Windows Update to inflict WGA everywhere.
The net benefit of transparent updates is still probably greater than explicit updates, but both ways have costs and we shouldn't pretend that either is zero.
I suppose it's a mitigating factor on the part of requiring user opt-in, should a problem occur, but that's (IMO) only a fortunate side-effect. It's like saying that walking is better than driving, because if you run into something you'll only bruise your shins.
I'm not saying chrome's way doesn't have its upsides but there is also a good argument for mantaining older releases.
http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
On the other hand, if you're doing an intranet site with a company that only has one browser, you might have dispensed with writing correct code and only written the hack.
Its' temporarily practical in a time crunch, but not a good practice since the next update may kill your hack.
Note that there are also other cases where incompatible changes are made (e.g. ES5 is not exactly compatible with ES3 in various edge cases, CSS2.1 today is not quite compatible with CSS2.1 a year ago in edge cases, etc). The various standards groups an implementors try to minimize the damage from such changes, but it still happens at times.
Heck, Chrome 9 or 10, made major changes to the HTML parser to follow the HTML5 draft. Sites that depended on the old behavior (which different between browsers, so they presumably browser-sniffed and then sent different content to different browsers) likely broke. They certainly did in Firefox when Firefox changed to the HTML5 parsing algorithm.
Not to offend anyone, but Chrome major version releases tend to feel relatively incremental compared to what I had come to expect from Firefox.
Will be interesting to see if Firefox can keep to their new release schedule after 4. Otherwise it seems that Chrome just iterates to fast compared to Firefox. Chrome 9 is a long way ahead of Firefox 3.6, sure Firefox 4 might even it up but if every release has this kind of beta time Chrome will just keep skipping ahead.
I'm pretty sure that the reason I can't come up with the differences is that the change is so gradual. I know Chrome has been improving, it's just not a dramatic change like FF 1 to 2 or IE 6 to 7. But Chrome 4 to 9 doesn't even seem like a dramatic change. if they were using normal versioning, I don't even know if it would be time for Chrome 2.0 yet.
tl;dr Chrome's major version releases are supposed to be incremental.
Check the Wikipedia pages for each major browser to see just how much changed in the versions represented. (Perhaps I should link them!)
Not my experience. IE8 seems to have its act together, at least on CSS 2.1 compliance. Granted, conditional comments are still necessary for IE6 and IE7, but MS has made big improvements.
This modern browser crap is getting old. I have no problem browsing internet with both IE9, Chrome, and Firefox.
June 2010 lynx 2.8.7 Oct 2006 lynx 2.8.6 Feb 2004 lynx 2.8.5 ...
lynx, now with WebGL, WebSockets (disabled) and IndexedDb!
I decided to start in 2006 to catch Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7, otherwise you don't fully see the gaping hole which represents the Dark Ages of the modern web. (Safari was added later, and 2.0 happened to slot in at the start of 2006.)
Edit: My attempt at it. Not as pretty, but a bit more readable:
Even better, roll it back to 1991!
Edit: and another pony request - how about putting the release date in the tooltips (yyyy-mm-dd) to clarify any confusion about when exactly it was?
The reason it shows IE7 and IE8 is to illustrate that all of the modern browsers are shipping pretty regularly, while IE only has two releases on there.
To get an accurate picture the diffs between updates should be compared, Chrome made version numbers meaningless.
On the chart Chrome whole number releases are new feature releases. Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 are seperate because they are similar feature releases. 3.6.0 to 3.6.1 are not.
2006
9.1
2008
9.5
2009
10
10.10
2010
10.5
11
Edit: Actually, I just noticed that Opera 9.1 and 9.5 are there, along with Firefox 3.5, so scratch that!
Ultimately all it says is Chrome do lots of smaller releases, IE few bigger ones, the others in the middle.
Which is what Tyrannosaurs said. Then you objected to something he didn't actually say....
See, that's where I disagree: a ground up rewrite with a new user interface gets the web precisely nowhere, particularly after years without a release.
Chrome 7 was a significant release. Hundreds of bug fixes truly means something (imagine if there were an IE6.5 with hundreds of bug fixes). The HTML5 parser is a huge deal, plus File API, late-binding SSL... all of these are about delivering actual benefits to web developers and users.
And that's why my retort to a mostly silly discussion was that Modern Browsers Ship. Because delivering a better web to developers and users is the whole damned point. Anything else is masturbatory.
So go ahead, be as picky as you want about what's major and what's minor. You'll just be missing the entire point. :-)
The Point: "Modern Browsers" are the browsers that actually get around to actually @#$@ing SHIPPING new features and NOT TAKING FOREVER TO DO IT. Iterate faster and get new crap to users NOW.
thing is, 'new crap' is also unfamiliar crap. Unfamiliar to developers. 5 browsers, 5 teams of developers, results is 5 different ways of doing things. -moz-border-radius and the like are BAD for the web, because everyone shipped new crap without any kind of agreement on how it was supposed to work. And now we've got vendor specific code in our websites. That's not how the web is supposed to work.
Impatient browser vendors shipping unfinished specs like css3 are as bad as proprietary spec extensions like 'filter' etc.