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Comment by SchizoDuckie | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to 2014, where Microsoft web stuff still works best in Microsoft Internet Explorer...

They had an actual shot on getting up to par with proper HTML5, with funky ms extensions being optional where absolutely neccessary. Instead, they rely on an astounding number of non-cross-browser methods and features, as they have done since '95

https://github.com/winjs/winjs/issues Most issues listed currently are about stuff that just doesn't work on any other browser/platform than IE

Footnote: I'm a web developer myself and I use Windows 8.1. How tempted have I been at fiddling with the winjs flavour myself? not at all.

Footnote2: I do have to give them credit for the roadmap though. It seems like they're on the right track https://github.com/winjs/winjs/wiki/Roadmap

Footnote3: I've been fooled into thinking that Microsoft was on the right track again and again.

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It wouldn't be fair to mention this without mentioning of the 3 fixes landed since that repo was created, 2 are for cross-browser compatibility bugs..

That aside, I love how this negativity only seems to stick to Microsoft when every other major player has their own private set of bits that only work well on their platform (WebOS, Firefox OS "proposed standard" mobility APIs, Chrome endless variety of "we're doing it so it's going to be a standard" APIs, etc). It's no excuse, but it's hardly unique to MS

THIS.

I think Scott Hanselman put it best with his recent 'Microsoft killed my Pappy' post...

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx

Really? Since when is mentioning hardware specs considered "open sourcing"?

Quote: We've open sourced Azure hardware specs, opening SDKs, and we're making systems more pluggable than ever.

Datacenter hardware designs are valuable. They solve physical limitations of heat dissipation, airflow, as well as compute power density problems and electrical stuff.

Companies building their own DCs spend a lot of money on doing this, so companies like Microsoft (I think Facebook do it too) showing off their designs is really useful.

Just IMO, but perhaps it doesn't "stick" because none of the other folks spent years trying to use their effective OS monopoly to extinguish everything that wasn't their proprietary browser.

Also, ActiveX. ;)

If you substitute "ActiveX" for "Native Client", this almost describes one of the new kids

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't NaCl meant to be cross-platform? ActiveX was basically "hook directly into Windows (and only Windows) from the browser." It gave many free-license to create "Windows-only" webpages, in addition to producing many security holes during its run. This is where much of the resentment comes from.

How many security bugs does NaCl have compared to ActiveX? How do Microsoft's attempts to sandbox ActiveX compare to the efforts made to sandbox NaCl? IIRC, you could format the C: drive in ActiveX with a couple of lines of code (by design). NaCl (so far as I know) isn't supposed to allow that.

As far as I'm concerned, NaCl and ActiveX aren't even in the same ballpark.

There's a giant difference between "only work well on their platform" and "purposefully designed to only work on their platform."

There is NO EXCUSE for a TOGGLE to not work, cross-browser, in the year 2014.

http://try.buildwinjs.com/default.aspx#toggle

Works for me on Android Chrome. What browsers don't display this correctly?

I'm on Chrome 33 (latest stable) @ Windows 8.1 and it doesn't work.

You're right, it doesn't work on my Desktop either. It's very weird that it works fine on Chrome for Android.

It works for me if I enable touch emulation (Google Chrome on Linux). I don't see the styling that you apparently get in IE though.

Doesn't work on Chrome 33 on Win 7.

Does work on BlackBerry Z10 - no tap to toggle, but press and drag to toggle.

Safari 7.0.2 Firefox 28 Chrome 33.0.1750.152

all on os x 10.9.2

Doesn't in android stock browser on ICS. If I had a more powerful phone, I'd use chrome, but on my G2, it's kinda slow...

Doesn't work in FF 28.0 on x64 linux.

Does NOT work in Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 8 (Lumia 1020).

Doesn't work in Chrome on Ubuntu 14. Doesn't work in Firefox on Ubuntu 14.

The github issue for that is listed right under it. It looks like they may be pulling them in automatically via tags on the issues. If so, that's one of the best documentation -> issue systems I've seen.

For example the new Google Maps runs horribly slow in Firefox, I have to open Chrome sometimes just to get a map to render.

I share/understand your cynicism, but am hopeful that Microsoft is really turning a corner with the latest management change. The messaging has certainly been a lot more cross platform. And something like WinJS you don't do in a day or a week, I could easily believe that throughout its life it was a 'windows only' thing until the strategy changed and now its a cross product thing but carrying a lot of technical debt from that previous positioning.

Lucky for both of us there is a built in barometer for seeing how committed Microsoft is, in the form of the Github issues list.

"hopeful" "turning a corner"

Word used to describe the latest coming out of Microsoft for decades now. And each time we're left wanting.

I, for one, am no longer hopeful. Internet Explorer has been and continues to be hostile to the web.

Really? What aspects of IE 11 are "hostile to the Web"? It looks pretty OK to me.

They killed the DNT header to generate some cheap PR.

The funny thing about the do-not-track header, is when you setup Windows 8 it's on by default... then on the next page all the things that send data to MS are also enabled.

IE still refuses to support push notifications: http://caniuse.com/#feat=eventsource. Curse you IE!

Understood, but as I said they have a chance to show us they are sincere by making WinJS a really exceptional cross platform tool. I am a firm believer in keeping your hopes high and your expectations low.

http://status.modern.ie

I was recently commissioned by a mid-size company to port their web-based issue manager app from Microsoft Silverlight to plain HTML + a server side language.

Their reasoning was that as Microsoft is pulling the plug on Silverlight, the company did not want to implement new features in their issue manager app inside a dying platform. So they decided to first port their app to a vanilla thing and from then on continue developing their app further.

Am I comparing Silverlight with WinJS? No. But will this company rush to invest time and money into yet another pumped-up Microsoft product? No either.

Microsoft's earnings are tightly coupled to the tech churn they themselves instigate; it is impossible to count on their new technologies until each gains self-perpetuating inertia.

"Trust, Users and the Developer Division" discussion 2 months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7107544

Like any other commercial vendor.

I had a conversation the other day on my commute about rough (or failed) SAP migrations/implementations and it was clear that the buyers and other supply chain folks fallback to emailing excel spreadsheets when things hit the fan. This ubiquity of their products and it being the lowest common denominator means they will never go out of business. Like it or not Microsoft products are the glue that holds the business world together.

> Like any other commercial vendor.

Like any commercial vendor optimized around selling software licenses. A commercial vendor optimized around selling software-backed services and complete solutions has different incentives, since they end up eating the costs of churn. Unsurprisingly, lots of companies that do the latter are built around (and often sponsor) open source software.

Perhaps. Service providers ensure the services they provide are often needed to get the job done in a timely manner. More subtle, but effective. All companies have to make money.

Sure, and that can be problematic -- see Intuit's intensive lobbying to keep tax filing onerous to protect TurboTax's niche -- but that's a different specific issue than promoting software churn (well, except in Intuit's specific case, where while they demonstrate the problem that can exist with solution providers, they are also a licensed-software provider that can also be seen as promoting software churn at the same time.)

Not entirely fair, considering: (1) these are marked as issues that need to be fixed, and (2) many of them are related to IE implementing the CSS-grid W3C draft, vs. coming up with their own proprietary technologies.

(Your comment was modified since I hit reply, but I think my point still stands, especially that it isn't strictly MS-extensions, but actual standard drafts)

I did notice some of them only to work in IE since it uses the MS- prefix. However they are also marked as an issues that would be fixed later. So hopefully it be corrected soon but since its already open sourced and the syntax is merely CSS3, its won't be that hard to go ahead and fix it yourself.

Working on a project that relies heavily on CSS3, I have come to the conclusion that most browsers still depend on vendor specific prefixes. Take the CSS animation for instance, without the inclusion of "-webkit-", it fails to work in the latest Chrome and Safari while having no issues on Firefox or IE.

[1] http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/tryit.asp?filename=trycss3_a...

LESS or SASS/Compass are you friends :) ...and the only way to maintain sanity when doing heavy edgy CSS3. Once you have your mixins abstracting away browser prefixes and common patterns, you can get to the new level of style patterns reuse with higher-order-functions-like features like LESS's mixins that can take mixins as arguments (great for the @keyframes prefixes madness at first, afterwards only your masochism and imagination set the limit). I'll never be able to stand the pain of writing "plain ol' CSS by hand" again...

You can use autoprefixer[1] to apply vendor prefixes automatically. In fact, CSS is madness without it in my opinion.

1. https://github.com/ai/autoprefixer

Their main target with this library is Windows Store Apps though - not web sites or applications. I'm sure they'll work on cross-browser compatibility, but I don't think it's one of their priorities.

It's their number one goal, actually: https://github.com/winjs/winjs/wiki/Roadmap#the-present

> Welcome to 2014, where Microsoft web stuff still works best in Microsoft Internet Explorer...

Not much different than everyone else. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, all have features that work best in their own browsers.

"The WinJS is a library of CSS and JavaScript files. It contains JavaScript objects, organized into namespaces, designed to make developing Windows Store app using JavaScript easier."

Just to point out, at the moment the big part of those signaled bugs does not work also in IE version < 11. This must stress the fact that, at the beginning, winJS was used only for windows app store and only recently it is being opened towards a cross platform evolution

Every browser has non-cross-browser methods and features. Also, the IE in 2014 is not as bad as it use to be.

If Microsoft is open sourcing this code nothing prevents from the OO community to help them from making it more compatible with rest of the browsers.

It's not for web. It's for WinStore/Metro apps.

Footnote: You should read it first before jumping into a conclusion.

From the posted article:

<h2>Bringing WinJS cross-platform</h2>

Did you click on read more? Even if you didn't, just scroll a bit down and there is the WinJS in production code section which show off some example apps. That didn't tip you off about WinJS?

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