A new Microsoft browser?
quirksmode.org
quirksmode.org
This is how you start an article. I didn't read any farther, but my already high opinion of quirksmode.org is even higher.
Edit: if it's unclear, this is not accusing anyone of bias: good writing should make any involvement in the subject matter explicit. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_of_impropriety The article is sponsored by modern.ie which is a Microsoft initative. I happen to agree with the article, however being forthright about these matters would strengthen its point.
The "inverted pyramid" someone else linked to here means that the information is presented from most to least important, so you can stop reading the article anytime when it starts to bore you, and still know you have read everything you want to know.
I should say, though, that it does mean that the content of that summary, and of the headline, becomes extremely important. For instance, you could nominally cover a news story, but write a boring headline and summary, and very few people will trudge through that to find the really important details later on. You do sometimes find that occurring on the BBC site, especially when it's a story which might raise a lot of controversy within government.
Was there a time when teletext was actually used? Honest question, I was under the impression that it just never managed to catch on.
IE still has a major slice of the browser market share and this probably ain't going to change soon. IE>9 have all been decent browsers for the time that they were released, although they do seem a bit out of date 6 months later. At the moment, if both Firefox and Chrome implement a new web platform feature, it's often available to ~60% of web users within three months because of the release cycle and auto updates. IE going to a 6-week major release cycle could probably push this up to 80%-90% of users getting a feature within three months, which would be awesome. (IE mobile is pretty small for market share, so I'll ignore it at the objection of my Windows Phone using friends.)
Safari pretty much now works on a yearly major release cycle - which is better than waiting two or three years, but it still sucks. Switching on Mac OS X to Chrome or Firefox (or Opera) is simple enough. iOS, however, is pretty much limited to whatever mobile Safari happened to have when WWDC rolled around (save for minor updates whenever iOS 8 becomes 8.1, for example). I sort of hope Apple uncouples core app versioning and updates from iOS and Mac OS X updates soon, because that's mean they could move Safari to a much shorter release cycle. iOS Safari is probably the most widely used mobile browser, and keeping it at the bleeding edge would do wonders for the mobile web.
Whereas I would really like IE not to do that, and ideally Firefox and Chrome to move to longer cycles (minimum 6 months, preferably annual) for their main public releases.
One good reason for this is that there is no point in having browsers support new features within moments of someone conceiving them unless developers are also keeping up with new developments at the same pace. Take three major browsers on a six-weekly cycle and you literally need to be updating your skill set every two weeks and have projects to work on where those new skills are actually useful. Unless all you do is write trendy web development blogs for a living, you are not likely to be in this category.
Another good reason is that both Firefox and Chrome have horrible records for quality since going to six-weekly release cycles, both in terms of bugs/regressions and because they frequently implement new features that tick boxes but have such poor quality of implementation that they aren't actually useful for production work anyway. For example, right now, both Firefox and Chrome have numerous glitches and performance problems in popular HTML/CSS features like animations, web fonts, multimedia elements, and SVG, to the extent that you can't reliably assume even relatively simple applications will work without extensive and ongoing testing.
Recent versions of IE stand in sharp contrast to that pattern, and as such I think IE now provides both a valuable brake on the industry and a demonstration that having a solid, fast implementation of some features is far more useful in practice than having unreliable and/or slow implementations of more features.
(Edit: It's disappointing to see multiple downvotes yet no responses. This happens all too often when I express the unpopular-but-based-on-hard-data view that Firefox and Chrome are often slow and/or buggy when it comes to new features, even though numerous articles and blog posts giving specific examples in the areas I mentioned are yours to read for the price of a Google search.)
If my project has an annual update cycle, I want to be certain that any new browser features I'd like to use are widely supported and have been tested in-the-wild for as long as possible before I commit to them. The rapid release cycles of the browsers gives me that, and also ensures that there will be blogs and StackOverflow questions providing useful documentation on the best ways to use the new features by the time I'm ready to learn about them.
Sure, but then if the features aren't going to be incorporated into new projects almost immediately, browsers don't need to push out new releases (and the attendant risk of regressions) every few weeks either. The biggest claimed advantage of the rapid release cycles doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
If my project has an annual update cycle, I want to be certain that any new browser features I'd like to use are widely supported and have been tested in-the-wild for as long as possible before I commit to them.
That seems perfectly reasonable to me. Unfortunately, I think it's also reasonable to assume that lots of other people who might be interested in that same feature will behave the same way. It's therefore not reasonable to assume that those new features have in fact been thoroughly tested in-the-wild before you rely on them.
A related concern is that with the very rapid release cycles, you never really know when an implementation is "final". We've seen fundamental changes over recent years in everything from the syntax for new CSS features to the layout of controls on multimedia elements, sometimes more than once in the same browser within a few months of each other. At least if you ship functionality updates several months apart you offer a degree of definitive behaviour and stability.
also ensures that there will be blogs and StackOverflow questions providing useful documentation on the best ways to use the new features by the time I'm ready to learn about them.
It seems you've had better luck than me. I frequently find that when we run into issues with relatively recent developments in browsers, there are a handful of other people writing blog posts or writing SO questions that show we're not alone, but no-one actually has the answer.
It's also worth considering that just because the main production release of a browser only updates, say, annually, that doesn't necessarily mean that the browser can't also have developer releases going out more regularly for those who want to experiment with new features.
I do agree with your points about the rapid release of browser bugs alongside the new features. I've had multiple occasions where clients have told me "You changed something and broke the site" on a project I haven't been working on, only to find out it's only broken in Chrome. My response to them that it's a bug in Chrome that's been reported, affects lots of websites, and will probably be fixed in a few days/weeks, and there's little or nothing I can do about it, is never satisfying.
Most Chrome and Firefox releases (in my experience) have been relatively minor, and focused on security and bugs. Lets take a look at the last 4 releases of Chrome:
http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/11/stable-chan... http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/10/stable-chan... http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/09/stable-chan... http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/08/stable-chan...
What argument could be made that longer release cycles would mean less bugs? Is there going to be better QA? More stringent testing? Why would shorter release cycles mean less testing?
No, longer release cycles would mean similar number of bugs, and security holes would just sit out there longer. Chrome and Firefox is an example of doing it right.
Serious security issues should be fixed as soon as possible anyway. This has absolutely nothing to do with a regular schedule for planned releases, and all of the major browser developers will already issue an immediate out-of-band update for a sufficiently dangerous vulnerability.
What argument could be made that longer release cycles would mean less bugs?
Well, for one thing, you can't regress something if you don't change it. Both Firefox and Chrome typically introduce a bunch of breaking changes every update. Sometimes these are unintentional bugs. Sometimes they are deliberate policy decisions, and in this case newer features are at far greater risk of backward-incompatible changes, as with the CSS syntax and multimedia controls examples I mentioned in another post to this thread.
The thing is, if your site/app used to work and it doesn't work any more after your customer updated their browser, and now you're getting paged in the early hours to be second/third tier support, it is highly unlikely that you care about niceties like whether the browser developers consider the change to be desirable. So if nothing else, every time every browser pushes out a major update, a lot of people building sites or apps need to be testing that their own projects still work, which is clearly a much greater overhead if you do it eight or nine times per browser per year than if you only have to do it once or twice.
You can automate some aspects of that testing to reduce the burden. However, in the nature of web sites, some things will always need manual examination. No unit test is going to tell you that Chrome has a layout bug where your element that is styled to have a 100px width is being calculated at width 50px anyway and your entire home page doesn't render properly as a result, nor that resizing a responsive page in Firefox so it satisfies different media queries and then changing it back to the original size might result in a different layout (both real examples I've personally seen in recent months, BTW).
IE has issues with implementations even with their slow release cycle, as does Safari. While in theory a quicker release cycle probably should result in less stability and more bugs, there doesn't really seem to be this correlation in practice. A good way to check this out is to have a look at caniuse.com and see which browsers have issues with feature implementations (although caniuse is lagging behind a bit of recent). IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari will all have issues. To Apple's credit, Safari is the only browser which seems to be willing to regularly remove buggy features.
Anecdotally, the bug tracker for every major project I currently work on would disagree. That's a fair range of projects, using very different sets of browser features but including quite a few relatively recent developments.
A good way to check this out is to have a look at caniuse.com and see which browsers have issues with feature implementations
Caniuse is great, but it's not even close to the level of detail I'm talking about here. For example, it currently lists no known issues with HTML5 video elements, where IIRC one project I work on that uses that feature extensively was tracking 17 related open issues as of a few days ago, including at least one for every major browser.
When I write about that kind of experience, I sometimes get asked why we don't do more to support the browser developers by filing detailed bug reports when we find these issues. Sadly, the answer is simple: the projects I work on all have relatively small teams and would literally have to hire another full time employee just to report browser bugs, because we find that many. And a heavy majority of them are in Firefox or Chrome.
IE is like the hare. It sprints ahead with each massive update, but then sleeps for a year or more, only pushing security fixes via Windows update. Chrome is the Tortoise, forever moving, always making progress.
http://zoompf.com/blog/2012/09/internet-explorer-is-the-hare...
Older IE got updates through Windows Update. The last IE version for WinXP was IE 8.
If IE 12 doesn't come with a transparent IE compatibility mode and just starts a IE 11 window, corporate admins will probably set IE 11 as default browser.
So developers of enterprise websites are stuck with IE 11 and its almost finished but a bit broken HTML5 support for years to come :(
If IE is there primarily to access the corporate intranet and other work-related sites, as usually seems to be the case in this kind of environment, then that stability is a feature, not a bug.
The last thing you need as a sysadmin for an organisation with thousands of members is someone who thinks they know better "upgrading" their browser to a new version that no longer works properly with critical business sites/apps, has unknown or at least untested-by-IT security issues that therefore may or may not require mitigation at corporate tooling level, and so on. This is particularly true if, as almost invariably seems to be the case, that individual won't be the person who takes the flak when something breaks, violates regulatory compliance, creates a security problem, etc.
I doubt there is a single organisation anywhere in the world that has IE locked down at corporate level, yet where any legitimate business purpose would be better served by having browser software updated every few weeks.
Intranet is more liberal. But a lot of enterprises add their internal portals to the trusted list if they still depend on ActiveX (as a depressingly large number do).
Chrome and Firefox's extensions are better. Although Firefox's extension model is a little clunky due to how old it is (or at least it was last time I used it).
[0]: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/182428-ironic-iframes-a... [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5block/cjpalh...
New-style "Jetpack" add-ons in Firefox and add-ons in Chrome are very similar. I have the same add-on for both platforms, and there's about 80% code commonality. If Microsoft does something reasonably similar, that would be convenient for add-on developers.
First couple of Google results:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa744101(v=vs.85).as...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5643819/developing-intern...
Or possibly because the API's microsoft proposes are pretty horrible; I've worked on FF and chrome extensions, and I investigated IE support - but IE's extension model is truly terrible. Just take a look at that stackoverflow link you posted. What a mess. I wouldn't mind a clean C++ or .NET api, but the current API certainly isn't that.
With the IE model, you need to create a VS project, add a ton of boilerplate (see that stackoverflow example), and generally it's a ton of work just to get started. With a Chrome extension, you get an itch (some website has some jank, or you just want to hide all images with a certain dimension), you peek at it with the inspector, write some lines of JS or a custom CSS file, add an XML file and you're good to go.
Being able to write a quick hack to scratch an itch makes the Chrome/FF/Safari model more approachable. Once you have your foot in the door you're then more likely to make the step to write a full-featured extension (your MVP gave you a bunch of ideas).
It's similar to why PHP is popular. "I have this HTML page and I just want to add this one dynamic visitor counter. Do I want to build a Rails application, or paste in 3 lines of PHP and change the filename extension?"
(From Vermeer Technologies, Inc., the original FrontPage server extensions folks - fun random fact: it's why SharePoint service URLs have "_vti_bin" in their path)
8 is the latest for XP/Vista
11 is the latest for 7/8/8.1
9 is still popular because not everybody upgrades browsers, but giving users who don't upgrade browsers a new option is unlikely to be helpful.
Communicating to them that IE is going away and that they should upgrade to a modern browser, "Spartan" or otherwise, would possibly help this situation, as the author suggests.
So instead of replacing IE6 with the competition, replace it with Spartan and MS gets to keep their browser market share and Corp IT can keep running IE6 apps.
Anticompetitive maybe, but Microsoft embedding IE into Windows didn't break Netscape or other browsers in any functional way from my recollection (and I was using NN 2/3/4, Opera, IE 3/4/5/6 on 28.8 and 56k modems at the time).
The whole browser choice lawsuit business was strange; it was far from the worst bit of anti-competitive behaviour, and has been superceded by closed platforms on phones. The "halloween" documents and funding of SCO were more objectionable to me.
Otherwise, in the eventual anti-trust trial, Microsoft won the browser case 2-1 on appeal.
I don't think this is a good thing at all. People choose to use different browsers partly because they have different UIs, and UI changes are particularly jarring as evidenced by all the "I'll use browser Y" complaints when browser X changes something about their UI... only to be followed later by "I'll use browser X" when Y changes. There's no longer any real choice, it's just an illusion of choosing between narrowing alternatives.
Especially to see browsers' UI turning into clones of Chrome is sad, since I personally hate the "hide everything away that could possibly confuse users" and the associated "treat users like idiots" mentality that's particularly prevalent in browsers today. IE is one of the few browsers remaining that had relatively more UI, but I'm not surprised to see it disappearing... the trend seems to be to turn browsers into glorified televisions, with UIs like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8670503
Edit: see details in post below.
The people over at Microsoft are not idiots - even though Microsoft is no longer the new hotness, they still pay developers well, and have some pretty tight engineering going on. So when you say "The Event constructor is broken out of the box", my first instinct is to assume that the Microsoft engineers have implemented the constructor in their way for reasons that you're not smart enough to have grasped.
But, as I said, I know that you aren't a young inexperienced programmer, so you probably have some good reasons to make the claim, which leads me to the point of this rambling post - why is the Event constructor broken in IE? I'm curious to know what specific problems you have with it.
IE11 has no CustomEvent constructor. You have to polyfill it with https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/CustomEvent. Microsoft's official Twitter account @iedevchat has pointed people to the same one: note the article article says for IE10, but the issue and fix is required for IE11.
It's a simple fix, but CustomEvent is ancient, and it's surprising what didn't make it into IE11.
Sure it has overstayed its welcome. But I hate the revisionist attitude of some, who were still in school when all this went down.
They promised that they have changed in regards to that, but those are just words in the wind, time will tell on that. Also, they were lagging behind HTML5 standards for a long time, then they sort of caught up, now they are lagging behind on ECMAScript 6 features.
Every time I check, it is Microsoft's fault that I still can't use an otherwise widely implemented feature.
Quality implementation and standards adoption is the name of the game in the browser market. After 10+ years in that market, my opinion is that they have neither. The only reason they are still playing is end-user and corporate inertia.
That's no longer the case.
> They promised that they have changed in regards to that, but those are just words in the wind, time will tell on that.
No, they aren't just words. For example, in the ES6 committee everything I've heard is that Microsoft has been doing fantastic work, right now.
> Quality implementation and standards adoption is the name of the game in the browser market. After 10+ years in that market, my opinion is that they have neither.
I don't think that's fair either. The implementation of canvas in IE9, for example, is a very high quality Direct2D-based GPU implementation. (D2D is still arguably the best widely-used GPU vector graphics implementation around.)
From Zune (iPod competitor), to Kin, to Origami (small touchscreen laptop), to Games for Windows Live (steam competitor), to Live.com (google competitor v1), Bing.com (google compeititor v2), Expo (craigslist competitor), whats-it-called? (twitter competitor for natural disasters), Expression, Silverlight (flash competitor), Windows Live Spaces (wordpress competitor), Windows Phone...
Microsoft loves to start things, then leaves them to rot.
The Micro-Cycle:
1) See someone make money. Get starry eyed.
2) Rush into industry with product.
3) Let product/service rot.
4) Sunset product/service.
Any company with more cash than cultural relevance will do the same.
I don't think bing belongs on your list though. It's not making headway in the market, but it's not dead yet either.
Microsoft can drop the occasional service, but they rarely run from big platform bets. Most above-mentioned products were small fish or even just websites -- with the exception of Silverlight (but that's because in-browser media plugins as a category have been basically obsoleted across the whole market) and Zune (again, mp3 players have been basically obsoleted), they don't really sit on the same shelf as Office, Windows, Xbox, Windows Phone, Bing, VisualStudio or SQLServer.
Search and mobile are way too strategic to be dropped. There's no "there" anywhere else for a company as big as Microsoft!
They can lose $3B/yr for a long, long time!
Unfortunately Microsoft does not break out its Bing revenue separately (and a Microsoft spokesperson referred us back to the earnings release when asked) so exactly how much Bing rakes in is anyone's guess, but the company did note Bing managed a 40% ad revenue increase in its recent fourth quarter ended June. CEO Satya Nadella, one-time leader of the division, also noted Bing would reach breakeven within two years.
So Nadella thinks it'll break even in 2016.
0. http://www.thestreet.com/story/12821420/1/microsoft-is-using...
[1] http://beta.techradar.com/news/portable-devices/other-device...
People are also weary of Google doing this and you see comments on it in almost every discussion on HN of a Google product.
But they are. Keep, Fit are prime examples of stretching but offering a mediocre "service".
The way I see it, Google turned hard into a direction from building services with APIs into data collection silos. Google+ with Photos, Keep, Fit, Now. The data is even isolated from each other or really hard to access : - you can't access Keep data anywhere, or what you upload on it - Google+ Photos are available on web, not in Drive. You can see Drive photos in it, but you can't edit them with auto awesome
Fit is so basic that it offers practically nothing that it doesn't already exists out there. Data representation is in a form of one graph of total calories/steps. It does require you to enable location tracking though, to be able to automatically track steps/workouts (how suprising), which takes a major effect on the battery life.
Google is coming for your data and coming hard.
Hey! When did Windows Phone die?
Not everyone remembers, but it was viewed as near-impossible to dethrone Palm, but inside of what, 5 years?, MS had Palm selling WM devices.
You seem to be claiming this is going to happen to IE as well? Seems a bit far fetched, given it is still used by millions of people and something like 20% of all desktop browsers used is IE.