Genuinely surprised that IE still sucks | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely surprised that IE still sucks

blog.binarybalance.com.au

6 pointsgaelian10 comments

Have you tried 10? I ran a speed comparison in my VM and noticed it was faster than Chrome on some pages (anecdotal not speed tested).

The majority of people in windowsland can't upgrade to 10 because they're holding on for dear life to XP. 10 being a better browser than 6 isn't going to persuade those people to upgrade their OS. They'll just switch to Firefox and Chrome to get a better browsing experience on their OS version of choice.

I haven't tried 10. But I'm hopeful about it.

It isn't surprising that IE still sucks. In part, it sucks for the same reason that Safari sucks, which is updates (or lack thereof). Google Chrome, when it was first released, was a crappy browser with an excellent update and installation infrastructure. But that's not the whole story.

All the little tweaks that have gone into Chrome have been through two versions of public testing in Chromium and other varieties, and they are mature. Even better, they come from an open-source ecosystem, where innovations aren't driven by corporate needs. Google Chrome absolutely sucks for some corporate applications, in some really simple areas.

Try slip printing from Google Chrome. It won't work. Internet Explorer on the other hand isn't just a browser, it's an infrastructure. One that is tightly integrated into the OS and where you can override everything. In the mid-2000s, one didn't see a lot of alternatives to either Firefox or Firefox, but the number of alternative shells to IE, some of which were even popular, were overwhelming. More than that, an incredible number of applications actually had IE running underneath, for whatever reasons. Usually to display information, such as a help browser, or to provide some way of integrating one's application with the WWW.

And that is the problem with Internet Explorer. It was never designed for add-ons. It was designed to be an add-on. It was never designed to be updated, it was designed to be integrated. It was never designed to have excellent JavaScript, it was designed to have excellent integration into things like DirectX and even AJAX.

There is a reason that IE was ahead, and still is in many ways. IE doesn't suck considering what it is. It may suck for the thing it says on the tin that it's being used for, but there's no reason not to use Chrome for web browsing. Internet Explorer may be a sucky browser, but it's some pretty good infrastructure as it happens. IE is plumbing, Chrome is something else entirely. And IE happens to be the only kind of plumbing out there in the real marketplace. It may be a curse, but there is no better alternative for many of the things it can do.

"It may be a curse, but there is no better alternative for many of the things it can do."

What things are those?

It's curious that a straightforward question has been voted down. The previous poster made some vague claims about IE being "plumbing" and the best alternative for some "things it can do" but doesn't mention what they are. Other than ActiveX integration which is not exactly a stunning recomendation.

Oh, I didn't downvote it.

I guess one main difference is that a plugin for Internet Explorer can do so much more than a plugin for Chrome can, and that the basic philosophy for IE is that it's a relatively thin wrapper around mshtml.dll, one of the most deservedly overutilised pieces of software of the past decade. Sure, you can embed Webkit in things, but it hasn't happened all that much quite yet. Webkit has even been designed for that, in some part.

But Internet Explorer has perfected it back in about '97, and that's the legacy that IE is still built on. It has been doing VML since '98, and that serves as the foundation of a canvas implementation that works even in IE6. XMLHTTP has been in the thing in '99. You could run ActiveX widgets in IE. That was the biggest feature of them all, probably, and it's still widely used. Maybe not here, but in China, IE's market share in May was 72%, not including IE shells. Not least of all because all the banks usually want some ActiveX plugin that keeps your keyboard entry more secure (whatever). Chrome and Firefox were 15%. Combined. South Korea, in July 2011? More than 92%.

Horrible a browser as IE6 was and still is, the target market was rich application software that could use things like DirectX and VML and VRML and XMLHTTP and all these kinds of outdated technologies that we've left behind once Mozilla arrived and gave us some fresh air.

Sure, IE didn't do much in the way of progress in terms of the Acid Test or JavaScript or CSS or HTML, but that was because the target market wasn't really the same. The target market for IE was business in the early 2000s. And it succeeded spectacularly, leaving a bad browser to drive oft-rotten legacy applications.

It has provided a stable set of features for almost 15 years. They may not be the best technologies... but the implementation was good enough. And all of that in a browser that had a 95% market share. There are so many hooks and places where IE can be extended that are a bit mindblowing. IE6 was a sucky browser around a fairly well thought out ecosystem that was settled. There are still things that can be done in IE that can't be done in Chrome. It was sucky, but it worked, and IE has a thousand features in the background that most people never even noticed. That, and group policies.

That said, I hate IE6 and IE7 as well as those F12 Developer Tools with a passion that will burn a thousand years. But it's not all bad.

I agree the browser is not all bad if you take into account the original target market. But I stand by my surprise that even after the writing has been on the wall for so long, times clearly changing even in the enterprise market, MS still hasn't made it a priority to improve the day-to-day experience for today's user.

Maybe I'm just expecting too much.

I thankfully haven't been required to touch the monstrosity in a long while, but the overwhelming consensus in my community of web professionals is that ie's javascript engine will never be on par with V8.

I really don't think it's very important that it is though. Whether their JS engine two (ten?) times slower than another won't really matter for the majority of browsing.

They've really improved the rendering engine and standards support but the experience of the application as a whole is still way behind their competition.

Modern IEs failings come from a collection of bad/sloppy UX choices.

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