Hacker News Reader

Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

We have a already have lot of competition. In fact, it's never been better: Chrome, Firefox, WebKit, Chromium, Opera. You can even get the source code for Firefox and Chrome and contribute. I'm glad Microsoft is making a better go at it, but honestly, Microsoft could have built a more compliant browser any time they wanted too.

https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html

View on HN

Chrome and friends aren't webkit anymore, but only by way of forking. Otherwise Chrome, Chromium and Opera 15+ are the same engine. The family tree kind of looks like this:

    -- Internet Explorer
    
    -- Firefox
    
    -- Safari
      \
       -- Chrome, Chromium, Opera 15+

    -- Opera 12 (abandoned)

I'm a little unclear on how differentiated Webkit and Blink are in practice, but sadly we have only 3.5 major engines competing at this point.

    -- Konqueror
      \
       -- Safari
         \
          -- Chrome, Chromium, Opera 15+

If you want to go further Firefox's lineage is interesting but it's parent browsers are all dead.

Everyone forgets the people who created/invented the things Apple puts in its software.

  -- NCSA Mosaic
    \
     -- Spyglass Mosaic
       \
        -- MSIE
          \
           -- Spartan

I'd be really interested to know how much code from Spyglass or NCSA Mosaic survives in modern versions of Internet Explorer (and even Spartan).

Spartan/IE engineers -- any info?

    -- Internet Explorer 6-8
    -- Internet Explorer 9-10
    -- Internet Explorer 11
    -- Internet Explorer new?

    -- Firefox
    
    -- Konqueror (abandoned?)
      \
       -- Safari
         \
          --Chromium, Opera 15+
             \
               -- Chrome
         \ 
           --IOS safari

    -- Opera 12 (abandoned)

and that's why i use and only advertise firefox. It is the only browser that respect webdevelopers.

Konqueror is not abandoned, but Rekonq is generally the premier KDE browser nowadays. Any KDE install still includes Konqueror, even if it is not the default browser, because its backends power a lot of various parts of a KDE desktop.

What about chrome doesn't respect web developers? Chrome's web debugging in browser is very good, and until recently firefox didn't even compete in that regard.

Are you kidding? Firebug was the gold-standard for a very long time, and for a very good reason. If you're talking Firefox's built-in tools, then sure, but talking about Firefox while ignoring extensions is laughable.

IE invented that. and ie + visual studio to debug JavaScript is years ahead of both chromium and Firefox. does that mean you should now love ie?

Firefox didn't make Firebug though. Chrome has supported developers directly a lot longer than Firefox has.

what's the difference of Firefox doing something vs Firefox enabling people to do something?

the later is actually even better.

also, Firefox has venkman before all that.

sign. kids and Google marketing

And Chrome's developer tools were based on the stuff written by Apple for Safari.

"but sadly we have only 3.5 major engines competing at this point." I actually, don't think rendering engine competition is a great thing. I think competing browser products is a great thing. Think about node.js and io.js or rails and merb... it's not necessarily a good thing. Everyone kind of assumes that more rendering engines is good thing but I think it's just important that we have at least one healthy open source option. We have 3

blink webkit gecko

The closed source solutions are the ones we need to hope and pray die away trident. They're evil because there is no hope for any innovation as we saw in the last decade with IE6. MS can do anything they like to re-market their browser but as long as it's closed source engine it has no place in the web IMO. I hope it reaches 1% market share and is forced to go the way of Opera.

Let's not forget links and w3m.

I'm surprised no one mentioned lynx first.

I would have mentioned lynx but wasn't sure it still existed.

Blink unloads a lot of legacy components in a way that Microsoft is attempting to do now.

We got the Gecko family of browsers, the Trident family of browsers, and the WebKit family of browsers. Sure, there are varying JS engines, and Blink and Servo are on the way, but WebKit is the 900lbs gorilla. It is a monoculture in a lot of ways. I use and promote Firefox because I want to check the other vendors.

Microsoft makes, hm, how can I be positive here ... patchy software. There are always lots of rough patches reflecting pointy-haired boss decision making process, and there's cruft that builds up. But, very often you'll see these weird, beautiful bits just sticking out all over the place in Microsoft code. The weirdo geniuses at MSFT are allowed to do their thang and leave their mark. And the seminal releases of their software are always the best. Like, there are parts of IE6 that make me go, "how the HELL did Microsoft pull this tech off in 2000?" IE6 was this crumbly tower of awesome. If IE6 were a game, I won that game.

Anyhow, if development on Spartan goes RIGHT, then this browser will be the 2015 version of IE6. It will be the completest vision of kickassitude. There will be weird, crazy bits, and it'll take Microsoft and the rest of us a decade to untangle the proprietary parts. I can feel my blood pressure rising already!! The rage and the triumph and the glory!

IE6 was pretty damned awesome at release... IE5.x was a bit of a mess in that transition, but 6 was pretty damned awesome (proprietary bits included)... That said, it got stale pretty fast (by the time Phoenix was renamed Firefox) and slid even faster as others worked to make a better browser experience. The sad thing is, we're just now shedding IE8, and IE9 is still holding on... I'll be happy once I can get to an IE10+ only position...

For me, one thing I've been wanting to do is a compute heavy challenge-response for API requests.. meaning web workers, and that's only IE10+ ... will probably do a proof of concept with node (server) with scrype (client/server) against a pool of computed hashes... which could be very interesting in terms of reducing a DDOS against an API.

Nah, it won't mean a thing. Microsoft still has almost 60% of the desktop browser market share.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri...

Unfortunately, they have no mobile market share, and this is where most people will be browsing the web.

http://9to5mac.com/2015/02/24/ios-android-duopoly-marketshar...

It's interesting that Opera Mini commands just under 8% of the mobile market share.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri...

It's also interesting to note that the "Android browser" (so not Chrome) still has a significant market share 15.65%.

So they in fact don't have 60 percent market share of the browsing market anymore. The mobile markets count, if you're a developer.

That's correct and that's what I said:

"Unfortunately, they have no mobile market share, and this is where most people will be browsing the web."

> Microsoft could have built a more compliant browser any time they wanted too.

That time is now, can we not be excited for it? Have you heard the parable of the prodigal son?

Haven't they? Since IE7, every new version is more and more compliant. IE11 gives a good experience and seems easy to work with (at least with the web dev I do). It just seems that they got sick of the baby steps approach and needed to start from scratch. They figured out yet another way to handle legacy code and want a new engine, and by new I mean, a Trident-based engine without some/most of the fluff IE has for legacy sites. Especially the active-x fluff that has no place in non-enterprise browsers.

I really don't see this as some big move. They've been doing this stuff for years. I think the consumer oriented Spartan browser is a clever move, but MS was getting there anyway. Seems like they're being clever and using Spartan and web-standards as a way to sell Win10. We're not getting these toys on 7 or 8. Want the new fancy browser? Get Win10.

No. Despite the experience of those who do a little bit of web dev, those of us who treat the web as our operating system still curse IE on a daily basis.

I hope that all those who currently talk about how wonderful IE11 is take note that Microsoft is, essentially, saying they're abandoning it for all these reasons.

If I were to rank the browsers in the order in which they give more issues to me:

  1. Safari iOS
  2. Firefox
  3. Chrome / Chrome Android
  4. IE11 / IE11 Metro

I only curse IE9/IE10 when they don't support a moden feature, but I don't mind using display:table instead of flexbox (to name an example) as long as it gets the work done in IE9/IE10.

Although I don't bother testing IE10- to be honest, I just blindly trust the document modes of IE11, I'd rather spend time testing different mobile devices than testing different IE versions.

PS. I might be biased in the sense that I have been doing web development since like 15 years ago, and I'm already accustomed to the broken box model of IE. With Firefox I literally have to ask myself every time "what the f%@k did I do wrong???", but with IE literally is "oh you silly IE, I just have to set X and Y extra attributes and it's done".

If you are having problems in the other browsers, and not IE, then you're doing it wrong. Never, ever use IE as a reference for how things should work. THAT is the reason you are having trouble with the other browsers.

Your assumption is wrong, IE is usually the last browser I test. In my experience the rendering of Webkit and Gecko have more issues than Trident.

I don't remember every edge-case I have faced since ever, but for example, the following selector used to fail with Webkit browsers, and the response from Apple were "WONTFIX for performance reasons":

.checkbox:checked + .sibling + .second_sibling { display:block; }

Also, in my experience, the sites that look broken in IE11 (ex. Facebook) is because the website author (or the compatibility lists from MS) set an old/faulty document mode via X-UA-Compatible.

I'm not trying to claim that IE is a better browser than Firefox/Chrome, because this is subjective (and personally I prefer Opera), but I'm trying to say that you must not develop a website in Firefox/Chrome assuming they never have faults.

IE is not as broken as people claim, and there are edge cases where IE is right and the other browsers wrong.

Opera, Chrome and Chromium are based off the same engine which is a fork of WebKit. If anything competition has gone down the last couple of years with WebKit based browsers becoming the standard despite its bugs & non-standard behavior. It reminds me of IE6 in its heyday.

No web developer worth his salt writes code for any one browser. You write code to the standard and test in browsers. Anyone doing differently should be fired on the spot. I'm not aware of any professional web developer who does that.

what.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com