> "We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan"
Oh joy, another browser from Microsoft to test. :\
Oh joy, another browser from Microsoft to test. :\
We have to support Ie7,8,9,10,11 and 11 for metro in and out of compatibility mode across three fucking platforms due to control styling differences. Now we have Spartan and whatever shtcrock will ship as legacy.
We'll lose IE7 when vista is dead. We'll be left with enterprise IE11 well into 2028!
Why? In financial services all our clients are cheap, dumb and incompetent. Unpatched win7 from "managed service providers" is the reality. If yore lucky they're not some hideous terminal services shit crock.
This is why we go "oh joy".
Its also why everyone who works at the places goes home to Apple and Android kit.
Blame companies for demanding an app specific to one version. Blame the developers for writing apps that only work on one version. Blame Microsoft for making breaking changes between versions. But only one of those things is Microsoft's fault. They've been pushing people hard to update their browser since IE7 was released.
Later edit : Multiple implementations of a standard is a good thing.
Except that is hardly the case.Competition is good,that's what forced IE to evolve as it was losing marketshares. But let's not kid ourself thinking all the players are in it for web standards.
> Yes, let's all use Webkit. Much better.......
Because IE supremacy used to be better...
I dare say that if all operating systems were nix, that might also be a good thing. It certainly would make life easier for developers.
I understand the problems of monocultures when they are controlled by a single profit-motivated company, but is a monoculture based on open source software so bad? Besides, both webkit and *nix systems aren't exactly monocultures because they have so many different implementations.
This will make things harder to maintain, and if you have enough investment, you'll eventually want to fork it (Blink).
People don't really use different Webkits - there's Chrome and Safari (incompatible forks) and Opera (declining market share) and that's about it, really.
Making all OS' Nix would again be a bad thing, because there'd be no level playing field.
The current Unix players are similar in some ways, but have different APIs and behaviours (so OpenBSD has better randomness, Linux has some cool perf monitoring stuff, OS X has its GUI lib) and what you'd essentially find is that there'd be loads of incompatibilities that'd make developing cross-platform a nightmare. Since not all devs run all common operating systems, it'd be hard to motivate fixes.
So, you'd develop for one of them, not all - and then you're not in a much better place than the situation with Windows - where you can share a lot of your code cross-platform anyway, or write in a JIT'd language etc.
How?
Windows and Unix have evolved entirely different ecosystems. Most developers have a tendency to exist entirely in 1 or the other with only a little interaction between them.
I personally am able to use either environment comfortably, but that's actually a big part of the value I bring to certain environments. But that isn't the norm.
For a developer's perspective being able to write once and have it work everywhere is pretty darn big "pro". What are the practical "cons" that outweigh this?
I agree, as long as they are by companies, organizations, and teams other than Microsoft. And that's what we indeed have already: Gecko, WebKit, Blink (and Blink is new, which is great). I very much look forward to additional open engines (and POSIX-compliant operating systems, for that matter) by companies, organizations, and even unofficial teams of dedicated individuals that are not Microsoft, of which there are many.
Firefox on Android is pretty great.