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Comment by geetee | Hacker News Reader

I'm bewildered by the many "under consideration" entries. When all the other major players support something, and you want to be taken seriously, why aren't you throwing more engineers at the problem?

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If feature status were a Facebook relationship status, many might say "it's complicated." ;-) Most of the time, it's not actually a question of engineering resources. Stay tuned as we update more and more stuff to "In Development".

(I work for IE)

For what it's worth, it does look like things are moving in the right direction, so I hope the trend continues!

I'm curious--does this imply internal-politics problems (e.g. getting other departments to expose, and possibly backport, APIs that Chakra needs to consume to do the features), or just weird engineering challenges specific to the Chakra codebase?

I could see some conflicts of interest issues too. (e.g. implementing WebRTC could be against their interests - since Microsoft owns Skype, they might not want to lower the barrier of entry to a competitor.)

Microsoft are contributing to Object RTC, so I see this as unlikely.

In the past when they've spoken about why they delayed implementation it was often due to security issues (e.g. Webgl) or due to the standards proposal not being mature enough and them being worried that supporting it would lock in a bad version of the spec because people would build code on top.

And here are some that they ship[1] that according to that page aren't in other browsers (or are listed as in development for one or more other browsers) 1. CSS Device Adaptation (@viewport) 2. CSS Scrolling Snap Points 3. Exclusions 4. Encrypted Media Extensions (only they and Chrome ship it) 5. Grid 6. IME API 7. Regions 8. Screen Orientation API 9. Streams API 10. Web Crypto API

[1] These are listed with a status of "Prefixed" on modern.ie/status.

Anyway, I think most of those aren't part of the w3c standards (yet). But I think it's good to see them publicly state their roadmap.

It's a good point. It makes it embarrassingly (for Microsoft) clear who the leaders are when it comes to browsers.

That said, despite Google's leadership in this area, Chrome's support of "new browser features" is often sloppy. They ship some features in quite broken states, and don't get around to fixing them until a lot later. The Chromium issue tracker has over 56,000 open issues. Google are going for quantity over quality when it comes to new features.

They are considering if they can skip some features just to retain some lock in, or competition is already too strong for them to do it. That's "under consideration". "Not considered" means they decided that competition is too weak yet and they can just skip that in order not to increase interoperability (for example WebRTC). Implemented features means they think competition has won and they have no choice but to go along even if they didn't want before (for example WebGL).

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