Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfoutz | Hacker News Reader

That's a cute argument, but Microsoft never held a gun to a developer's head and said "use this feature or else!" Neither will Google.

IE was just a nice feature to have available. If you happen to need a web browser control, there's one built in for you right there on every copy of windows. You could get in touch with Netscape and figure out what's required to redistribute their runtime, or just make the call to load up the ActiveX control. whichever is easier for you, dear developer.

Notifications will work great on chrome, and non-chrome clients will kinda degrade gracefully by throwing a javascript error. It's fine. it's just there if you decide you need it, no gun to your head.

View on HN

> That's a cute argument, but Microsoft never held a gun to a developer's head and said "use this feature or else!" Neither will Google.

I'd rather not go back to websites that have to specifically say which browser you have to run them in on the homepage. The web needs to be based on standards, not proprietary code.

Standards are two ends of one spectrum, but the code that the article is about is open source, so it's neither proprietary nor standard. It's just a feature in an open source project.

I think you're right. Back when ActiveX was the thing to hate, it was annoying because web developers didn't care to support multiple browsers, not because ActiveX simply existed. Using ActiveX was probably a rational solution when you realized that 99% of your users could use it, and it was just those crazy Mac and Linux users that were out of luck. It sucked when you were a Mac or Linux user, that's for sure.

Now that each browser has a significant number of users, web developers have learned that they need to either target the standards or maintain different versions of their application for every browser. And pretty much every web site and app I've seen does this: it works the same in Firefox as it does in Chrome. (Actually, for many years, my former bank said "this website only supports IE and Firefox, don't use Chrome". But Chrome worked anyway.)

So I think complaining about notifications in Chrome being the end of the open web is a bit premature. The open web began when developers started trying to support multiple browsers. It will only end when they stop doing that.

Microsoft purposefully built the add/remove applications list using the IE control despite it being a poor use for the job just so European courts couldn't force them to decouple IE from Windows

Reply on news.ycombinator.com