Hacker News Reader

Comment by bnegreve | Hacker News Reader

What does running HTML5 nativelly means ?

It means in a browser with a rendering engine made for that one platform, and not made more generically for cross-platform support.

That is the most charitable reading, and how even that reading is supposed to be meaningful is beyond me. Basically, since MS can't demonstrate in any meaningful way that their not-cross-platform engine does anything better, they're offering up "it runs better because it's made for Windows" as a truism.

"IE - Not Available Outside Windows!"

That's all the "native" label means, unless they can show that by making it "native," they get better performance than cross-platform browsers.

I don't really understand why everyone is getting so worked up about this. I take it as meaning that MS is going to implement IE10 with as much low level integration to the OS as possible, i.e. it can make efficiencies by not having to support multiple platforms.

This is not the same thing as adding proprietary extensions to HTML5 that people seem to be inferring. Although IE9 doesn't support all of the HTML5 spec, so far as I've seen it hasn't added anything proprietary or invalid according to the spec, I don't see why they would change this for IE10

"I take it as meaning that MS is going to implement IE10 with as much low level integration to the OS as possible, i.e. it can make efficiencies by not having to support multiple platforms."

Then what they need to say, if they can prove it, is something more like "IE is faster than Chrome." If they're doing that at the expense of being single-platform, that's a tradeoff, not a feature to announce.

And if being single-platform doesn't make them faster than Chrome, what does this announcement mean? "Despite making this tradeoff, we are still bested."

Yup I actually agree with you. This whole native argument for me means speed when compared to multi-platform browsers, so if that doesn't turn out to be true, then there isn't much value in saying it (and a bit embarressing for MS).

My main point though was that all this talk has very nothing to MS introdcuing non-standard html5 in IE10, which loads of people seem to be implying.

I think it means that there are less steps between HTML code and instructions. Less layers of abstractions, no crossplatform compromises - straight from HTML to DirectWhatever. I don't understand the controversy, it kinda makes sense to call it native when it is optimized for a single platform. Similarly to running x64 code natively and .net, java or VB6 running non-natively through abstractions.

Didn't they demo it running on ARM? Is running a browser on the various ARM SoCs and the various combination of x86 and GPU really a single platform just because they all run Windows 7?

Yeah it doesnt make much sense to me either, but i think what they mean is they want to make the association that you MUST use Windows and IE10 to run HTML5 apps, which obviously, is ridiculous.

I assume they also want to add "features" onto HTML5 too, in a similar fashion to ActiveX.

Its just the way Microsoft think, they have a very proprietary mindset, IMO.

Why would Microsoft adding features to HTML5 be any worse than the -webkit- -chrome- and -mozilla- CSS extensions that I see everywhere?

Because those extensions are typically used to provide functionality that is intended for eventual inclusion in the CSS spec.

One would expect "Microsoft adding features to HTML5" to involve something other than participating in the cooperative advancement of a nice universal standard.

I know. FYI with IE10 they created CSS3 grid layout and submitted it to W3C.

Whatever the MS marketing department wants it to mean.

What further re-inforces this POV is that the word "native" is used in said blog post by Dean Hachamovich [0] no less than fifteen times.

[0] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/04/12/native-html5-f...

I believe they're talking about video, which is what most non-technical people think first of when they hear "HTML5".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com