The iPad is the new IE6 | Hacker News Reader

The iPad is the new IE6

blog.millermedeiros.com

38 pointschewxy24 comments

Title should probably read "ipad is the new ie6 in regards to html5 video". Not really anything too interesting in this post, but the author does list out specific bugs and hacks required to fix them here: http://blog.millermedeiros.com/html5-video-issues-on-the-ipa...

However the above article references iOS 4.2, so I am wondering if any of these are fixed in iOS 5

The great thing about iOS vs. IE is that most people upgrade their iOS version when asked to. IE is almost never upgraded in comparison.

Whinge all you want about iOS 4.2. It's fading fast.

Why are people voting up this story? There is no useful information in it.

Also, what's with the "X is the new IE6" meme. Six months ago it was Firefox 3.6 is the new IE6. Guess what, Firefox 3.6 has dropped to around 3%.

I guess my point is that a lot of articles really add little value, and there are only so many minutes in the day.

It's not just in regards to video. We are porting a very complex application from flash using Google Closure framework (which was meant to be maximally cross-browser). The code is still sprinkled with if (iOS) {} statements. Our app embeds as a widget on third party pages, and setting vertical iframe size is a nightmare on iOS, just to give you the most recent example: it took a week of my time (takes about 10min in Flash).

It's not the new IE6 because in 5 years virtually everyone will have updated to new versions of mobile safari.

iOS has high rates of people upgrading to new versions. The biggest problem with IE6 was corporate users never upgrading.

It's probably worth knowing the limitations of the platform you're developing for before you start developing for it.

That's true, but sometimes

1) you don't have access to that type of information because either it is unknown, or it is unpublished.

2) you have no choice because the people selling your product have already made a promise to the customer.

Exactly. Or you know that the iPad has a ton of HTML5 media limitations when you start, but when you actually start working with <video> and <audio>, you realize that you're not only fighting stuff like "click to start playing", but there are bugs where seeking doesn't work if you try to do it too soon after loading (undocumented), the system AV player will crash from time-to-time, requiring you to reboot the device (undocumented), etc...

The iPad's browser is alright on static sites, but once you start pushing up against the limits, it becomes a very crashy, buggy platform like IE6. It's still lightyears ahead of the Android Browser, and a bit ahead of Chrome for Android, IMHO.

Apple bug tracker sucks, you can’t even see if anyone reported the same bug before

I generally don't report bugs to Apple because of this. When I do, I put nearly zero effort into the report because I have no idea if it is a waste of time or not.

I'm also not positively impressed when "Engineering" requests more information me that is clearly so generic and irrelevant to the problem at hand that it is almost certainly a bot.

Just this week I didn't report a sandbox related issue that they should have liked to know about.

http://blackpixel.com/blog/1558/radar-or-gtfo/

seriously... report it.

That's an interesting article, its basically advising you to submit to an abusive relationship because its the best chance you've got. Faulting people for deciding that they don't like it, so they're not going to participate.

We are aware of and tracking this issue under the Bug ID listed above in the bug >State (Duplicate/XXXX). To check the status of the original bug report, please update your report directly and we will provide you with any available information.

So not only are their bugs secret, they're so super-duper secret you don't even get read access to the original when your ticket is marked as a dupe? And on top of that you have to intermittently beg to find out of there was any update to the status of the original ticket? They don't even have a box in their tracker software for "Add note to pleeb's tickets".

And once you do that, you're still not done. You have to go put your ticket on a 3rd party site that duplicates the ticket functionality so that other people with the same problem have even some visibility into the beast, and then you get to go pimp your ticket on twitter.

Oh, and don't forget to engage one of the men behind the curtain, your "evangelist" directly. Because after all that bullshit you went through, you still haven't networked with somebody who can go and grease some wheels for you inside of Apple.

I'm shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that people are saying "fuck that noise" and not filing a bug at all.

> Just this week I didn't report a sandbox related issue that they should have liked to know about.

Well, that'll show them, for sure!

What about non-video features? From my (poor) experience, it worked without tweaking on the ipad. I guess a big difference between IE6 and this is how one would want to build a different web experience for the ipad but would expect ie6 to just work.

Sounds like more of a rant on change and smaller hardware.

Flash won't help you on less hardware, neither will html5 for any software rendered/scripted animation. Video was always a pain until Flash, but Flash is only software rendered and HTML5 video uses hardware on iPad/iOS etc. So even if it did have flash it would run slower.

The big problem is we are in 2012 and mobile hardware is about as fast as 2001 computers, so yes it is a pain but nothing like the old Netscape 3/4 IE 3.02/4.0/5.5 woes, IE6 pain doesn't even compare to that. It is getting better my ranting friend.

As an aside, What is the most reliable way I can test how a website will appear/work on an iPad without buying one?

All I can find on google is suggestions for changing the user agent string. What if I want to test using the ipad browser engine , JS engine?

If anything is sailing up to be the new IE6 it is Google's Chrome. Like MS advocated vbscript instead of javascript, Google is trying to replace javascript with a non-standard language called dart. Instead of supporting H.264 for video, Google pushes WebM which is not so open after all and no-one support.

How is WebM "not open"? It's clearly more open than h.264, and it's open source and free - which you'd think is the ideal for the web going forward.

Chrome, Firefox, Opera support WebM, so that's 50% of the web browser market share right there. If Youtube would default to WebM, and let Flash as fallback for now, it would have a huge effect on WebM's adoption, much more than Apple ever had with h.264 versus Flash.

>Like MS advocated vbscript instead of javascript, Google is trying to replace javascript with a non-standard language called dart.

...which can compile to JavaScript to preserve compatibility.

> Instead of supporting H.264 for video, Google pushes WebM which is not so open after all

Citation needed.

> and no-one support.

Chrome, Opera, Firefox support it.

From 2011.01.31.

In other news: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3660341

Makes one wonder who the fuck is running this site.

Thanks for your down-votes, that maybe actually shows that someone still cares.

All articles on this site is submitted by users. Read the fucking FAQ.

This article is over a year old, and some big points in it weren't even true at the time of its publishing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com