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Comment by gitarr | Hacker News Reader

As long as Microsoft will not implement the same features, in a similar time frame and in a compatible way as the other browser vendors they should be blamed and shamed.

The article says IE9 is a damn good browser without qualifying why they think that it is, I respectfully disagree.

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As long as Microsoft will not implement the same features, in a similar time frame and in a compatible way as the other browser vendors they should be blamed and shamed.

First Microsoft thinks HTML is too limited and creates new APIs which gets turned into drafts, which in turn gets standardized, albeit slightly differently from how Microsoft did it in the first place.

They get to choose to break all sites written for this API while still in draft, or get to break the standard. Whatever they do, people curse them for it.

Microsoft then says "You know. We get it. That sucked. We created that situation. It was our fault. Next time around, we wont mess around with draft-specifications in a release browser, luring people into prematurely using non-final specifications in production web-sites".

And now everyone hates Microsoft for being slow.

Evidently, as long as your name is "Microsoft", everything you do will be wrong, either it is a) pushing the limits, b) implementing the drafts, c) being compatible with deployed code, d) being compatible with the negotiated specification or e) waiting for the specification to be finalized.

Can someone please point me to the option f) which makes everyone happy?

If we held Google, Mozilla etc to these same super-hypocritical standards, I'm pretty sure everyone would just stop making web-browsers, since all you got for it was hell from ungrateful bastards.

You have no sympathy for the fact that they've done the right thing in rebuilding the browser from the ground up to prevent future problems which has been what's slowing them up?

From an engineering perspective this is absolutely the right thing to have done, something technologists would have encouraged them to do at the time in the long term interest of the product. It has short term draw backs (some constraints on functionality in the current version) but was the best decision for the product and, given that IE as the default browser on Windows will always have a significant market share for the web in general, for the web in general.

Sure, say that it's not as good as Firefox and Chrome right now but "blamed and shamed"? It feels to me as if you're coming pretty close to beating up on someone for doing the right thing.

They are behind the other vendors as a result of decisions they made in the past. They make my job more difficult daily and make the web worse for millions of people.

The decision not to provide an upgrade path beyond IE8 on XP has been a particular road-block in getting people onto better rendering engines.

Of course I'm glad they are improving but ideally I'd rather they got out of the browser game entirely.

If you like standards and you like an open web, you want more players, particularly those willing to throw resources into it, in the game.

While it will always be messy around the edges, five companies with 20% market share each would be the best thing for a genuinely open web.

Your job is being made more difficult by using non-final HTML draft-specifications in production web-sites and relying on them to work in all browsers before the spec is finalized.

That is your choice. You made that problem yourself.

That's just silly. Since the changes wrought by WHATWG to the standardisation process it's become obvious we can start using a lot of this stuff in parallel with the progress to a final published spec. Are you seriously saying that nothing in the specs is meant to be implemented until 2013 or whenever the final date is?

I wouldn't go that far but if you use stuff that's in draft you need to accept that adoption of that standard may be patchy and / or inconsistent.

If they really wanted to do the right thing, they'd have just given up and used WebKit.

Instead of starting over and building another browser rendering engine from scratch, they could have switched to Webkit, putting their development cycles to better use contributing to a mature, stable, Open Source browser. Thereby improving the web for everyone, and making their browser the better for it. Why is it commendable that they had such an opportunity and instead decided to re-invent the wheel (again)?

I agree. The speed at Chrome and Firefox are evolving is mind-boggling. There's WebGL, WebRTC, new Audio APIs, transitions, css filters and it feels like every other week there's something new that isn't just implemented but actually pushed out to the user. Microsoft is nowhere close to that.

There's WebGL, WebRTC, new Audio APIs, transitions, css filters and it feels like every other week there's something new that isn't just implemented but actually pushed out to the user

And all that before any of the features has been standardized and finalized.

And now we hate MSIE for in the past doing what Chrome is doing now while at the same time we hate the current MSIE for being what we demanded MSIE to be in the past.

Mindboggling indeed. Sounds like Chrome is the new MSIE to me.

Agreed. Microsoft is on a much slower development pace than Chrome and Mozilla, which theoretically shouldn't affect how how many features they build in the next version that comes a year later.

I mean let's say Chrome implements 1 major feature every 6 weeks, so that's 8 major features they add in a whole year for Chrome. So even if Microsoft doesn't update their browser every 6 weeks, but only once a year or once every 2 years, that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a similar amount of new features in the new version. But instead, they have significantly fewer. Even in IE10 there are a lot of things missing that have already been implemented in Chrome and Firefox, or are about to, and since they are not coming in IE, that means devs will have to wait another 2 years or more for them to arrive in IE11.

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