IE 9 is already out there. It works on Vista and 7 only though. If only Google comes up with a way to work fully with MS's Group Policies, Chrome will most surely take over the enterprise world. I think the big enterprises which use MS technologies keep IE still going. It's not like they have a choice though.
I'm sorry you're getting downvoted for that little insight.
I won't give any contractual undertaking to a client that anything I produce will run on Chrome when delivered, because it's a moving target and for some projects it updates faster than a complete test cycle.
If Mozilla are now switching to crazy-fast auto-updates as well, then I'm going to have to start excluding Firefox too.
At this rate, IE will be the only browser I will be able to commit to testing on and supporting. If that's not irony...
Oh great, someone to usher in a whole new generation of "This site only supported in Internet Explorer" javascript popups.
You already said your clients aren't asking for it and you're not providing it, are Chrome and FF honestly breaking your HTML4 and CSS2, or are you just exaggerating the problem rolling releases cause? Because given the choice between slow as shit browser releases tied to OS updates and anything else, I'll choose the latter because it's less headache.
> You already said your clients aren't asking for it and you're not providing it, are Chrome and FF honestly breaking your HTML4 and CSS2, or are you just exaggerating the problem rolling releases cause?
Yes. See the examples in my earlier posts to this discussion, several of which have directly broken my (and many other people's) sites for customers using those browsers.
> Because given the choice between slow as shit browser releases tied to OS updates and anything else, I'll choose the latter because it's less headache.
actually, about 12 weeks from the time a version enters dev channel to when it enters stable. If that's not enough time, then sure, stick to a slower releasing browser...or hire better devs. No one I've worked with in the last 3 years or so has had significant work keeping their apps from regressing, even as the rate of browser development has been increasing (and certainly no where near as much work as adding IE6 support to new applications).
There is a big difference between moving conservatively and not moving at all.
Automated testing of UIs will only ever cover a relatively limited range of observable behaviour we might care about. Like a lot of unit testing, it's one of those ideas that works really neatly if you're writing a simple database front-end or calculator that deals only with easily parsed/rendered data that is input and output via well-defined, programmable interfaces.
Unfortunately, most UIs aren't built with that kind of code. Tools like Selenium aren't going to help you spot that the browser is rendering your page elements with a z-order bug, the canvas/SVG output has an aliasing problem, and your entire page design is getting a flickering scrollbar effect because of a change in the font rendering when the underline for a link appears. (And those are just examples of possible browser bugs, not even counting testing your own code to make sure the UI is rendering properly to a human looking at a screen.)
Isn't XHTML pretty much a dead end now? Since everyone went for HTML5 support, you can still make XML-compliant HTML5 pages and serving XHTML-compliant pages is a tricky business - is there any reason for IE to support it?
It doesn't matter if people use an XHTML syntax. As long as these files are sent from the web server using text/html, and don't kid yourself most of them are, then they are still rendered as HTML.
The true benefit of using the XHTML syntax is that you can use XML tools (that might be part of an existing tool chain) to output and manipulate your pages before they are served.
One thing that surprises me is how when MS comes up with non-standard technologies for IE it makes them look like the bad guys, but when Google comes up with non-standard stuff (aka bleeding edge innovation) everyone embraces it. Imagine Microsoft launching something like the IE App Store.
Yea, I realized that embrace and extend is not the worst of MS's evils. For example, MS extending ODF would have been much better than what MS did with OOXML.
IE's worst sins were MS-only extensions for which standards already existed. Goog, on the other hand, at least aims for backwards compatibility and standards compliance (see SPDY and false start SSL handshakes)
Compared to the latest browsers from everyone else, yes.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's style seems to be to release browsers that are obsolete before they're even available. IE9 is a nice step ahead, but it leaves out a lot of nice technologies that could have moved the web forward. As Mozilla shifts to faster releases, and Chrome, Safari and webkit in general steam ahead, it's sad to think that we won't see IE 10 for another couple of years at the soonest.
The way IE is developed is a relic of the desktop software era. Mozilla recognized that to keep up with Google, they needed to change how their browser is developed and released - I pray that something vital is changed to make that possible for MS and IE as well.
> Unfortunately, Microsoft's style seems to be to release browsers that are obsolete before they're even available.
I still don't understand why people think this crazy rush to get new browser versions out as rapidly as every couple of months is a good thing.
Even if browsers support new features that fast, full-time professional web development agencies aren't going to keep up with the developments at the same break-neck pace, never mind anyone else. Even if they did, I doubt many of them would risk their reputation designing live sites for serious clients using unproven novelty technologies.
While Microsoft's release cycle is perhaps longer than I would choose, at least they have some stability as a result. We may have hated IE6, but we did so only after several years of it being clearly the best browser in town, which people often forget. In any case, at least its quirks and foibles were well understood, and workarounds were widely documented and used basically successfully. Ditto for IE7, and anything from IE8 onwards is pretty decent as far as web standards go. For all the anti-IE criticism, the Web developed from a novelty to a routine part of daily life on Microsoft's watch, and about half the people in the world still use IE to get stuff done, despite all the possible alternatives available to them.
Right now, with these absurdly rapid release cycles, it just feels like Google and Mozilla are having a big game of mine's bigger than yours is. I'd rather they stopped breaking actually useful stuff in releases they are pushing to the browsing public: Google have broken everything from rounded corners to HTML5 video, while Mozilla have fundamentally stuffed tried and tested tech like Java applets and basic typography by trying to be too clever with new technologies in recent versions. I'd rather the Chrome and Firefox teams caught up with basics that most people actually care about: Firefox 4 still doesn't do sensible tab isolation years after IE and Chrome did, while Chrome still doesn't seem to have an ad blocker worth anything, for example.
Meanwhile, I really don't care that they can hide the URL bar now; I have a 1920x1200 screen and I like to know what site I'm really visiting. I don't care that Google support "open" video formats like VP8; the serious video publishing world uses the technically superior H.264, and Google just removed support for that in Chrome for purely political reasons.
Please note that none of this means they can't issue security or performance updates as necessary. But Microsoft do that too, they just don't feel the need to slap a big "this is a shiny new version!" sticker on it every time.
> The way IE is developed is a relic of the desktop software era.
Contrary to trendy opinion among bazillionaire wannabes on Hacker News, the vast, vast majority of the world's IT infrastructure still lives in the desktop software era, and most web-based or mobile-based software sucks on technical, usability and basic functionality grounds. And I write that as someone who makes his living working with those technologies, just trying not to suck at it quite as badly.
>I still don't understand why people think this crazy rush to get new browser versions out as rapidly as every couple of months is a good thing.
Because the alternative system involves way too much pain in upgrading for users, apparently. Three monolithic releases in an entire decade is a better plan, you think? The technologies involved with the web move too quickly to still be thinking about IE 6 and IE 7 in 2011.
>While Microsoft's release cycle is perhaps longer than I would choose, at least they have some stability as a result. We may have hated IE6, but we did so only after several years of it being clearly the best browser in town, which people often forget. In any case, at least its quirks and foibles were well understood, and workarounds were widely documented and used basically successfully. Ditto for IE7, and anything from IE8 onwards is pretty decent as far as web standards go.
All I can assume from that statement is that you're not a javascript or CSS developer. IE 6 was the best because Netscape had their 'air supply cut off' and was not really in the game in 2001. IE 6 and 7 continue to cause problems for me, personally, and if I was the only one, we would not be having this discussion.
>For all the anti-IE criticism, the Web developed from a novelty to a routine part of daily life on Microsoft's watch, and about half the people in the world still use IE to get stuff done, despite all the possible alternatives available to them.
Yes, after MS beat down the company who pioneered bringing browser technology to the masses, the web grew while IE was the most popular browser. Yes, about half of the world uses IE - mainly people who don't understand what a browser is, and click the big E on their desktop. Including software with other software that has monopoly level market saturation is successful, can you believe it?
> I'd rather the Chrome and Firefox teams caught up with basics that most people actually care about: Firefox 4 still doesn't do sensible tab isolation years after IE and Chrome did, while Chrome still doesn't seem to have an ad blocker worth anything, for example.
IE doesn't even have a spell check, much less an ad blocker. How about Web GL? If I recall from the Reddit threads from the IE team, Microsoft insists they can't put IE9 on XP mainly due to hardware acceleration. For 2D only?
>Please note that none of this means they can't issue security or performance updates as necessary. But Microsoft do that too, they just don't feel the need to slap a big "this is a shiny new version!" sticker on it every time.
How many significant updates to IE 8 have there been? How often was Chrome or Firefox improved during that time, noticeably? Waiting until MS releases a new version of Windows and everyone buys a new computer in order to run it has left web developers with a lot of problems.
>the vast, vast majority of the world's IT infrastructure still lives in the desktop software era, and most web-based or mobile-based software sucks on technical, usability and basic functionality grounds.
Some people are still using DOS, but that's not really the point. I expect at some point, the enterprises who haven't already figured it out will realize that developing or purchasing inflexible, monolithic software that is upgraded with great pain and expense every five years is not ideal. Hundreds of millions of people are using internet based software (and I'm not talking about Google Apps - I mean applications such as this site) each day, and they work. Meanwhile, I can't open an IT magazine without seeing the word 'cloud' 8,000 times, so... we'll see what happens to the world of desktop software, hmm?
IE is a deplorable web browser in the opinion of the vast majority of web developers I've ever encountered. it's the only one that you have to fire up virtual machines to test on three or four different versions even when using Windows. The development models of webkit and Mozilla have resulted in far superior software, ...
> Three monolithic releases in an entire decade is a better plan, you think?
Strawman. I said no such thing.
> The technologies involved with the web move too quickly to still be thinking about IE 6 and IE 7 in 2011.
Ah, an interesting perspective of your own, I see. :-)
I need to support the platforms that my customers and/or my clients' customers are using to browse the web. Right now, I'm pleased to say that IE6 is no longer relevant to any current project I'm working on. IE7 still has enough market share to count, but most people I care about in relation to my commercial interests are now on IE8 or IE9. The pace of technology development matters far more to those of us writing web pages than to users, who typically only notice what browser they are using when something doesn't work, and even then only if it did work in some other context.
> All I can assume from that statement is that you're not a javascript or CSS developer.
Why? Because I have a different view to your own? I am currently working on several web-based user interfaces for different commercial projects/clients. They all work just fine in recent IE versions. At the most, we have graceful degradation for a few visual effects if you go back to IE7.
> Yes, about half of the world uses IE - mainly people who don't understand what a browser is, and click the big E on their desktop.
I think this is where we basically disagree. You seem to want to play with shiny new toys. I'm a shiny-loving geek too, but from a business perspective, I care about building useful stuff that benefits the web browsing public, and therefore either my own business interests or those of my clients. It doesn't matter at all to me why IE became the dominant browser for a long time, only that whatever functionality it provided was sufficient to do so. It is just a tool, serving a purpose, like any other browser software.
> IE is a deplorable web browser in the opinion of the vast majority of web developers I've ever encountered.
With due respect, what your web developer friends like isn't really the point. I care about users.
Are those users getting a significantly better experience using other browsers with rapid development cycles rather than IE? I have already listed several fundamental bugs that have resulted from the recent development processes at Google and Mozilla in my earlier post. Those bugs have in several cases visibly affected my or my clients' users. For all its ills, the reason IE6 lasted so long was that Microsoft never retrospectively screwed things up on that scale.
Meanwhile, since we're playing the "in my experience" game, all these fancy new technologies that are half-supported in leading edge Google/Mozilla browsers seem to generate far more heat than light, and I have yet to receive a single request from any client that would benefit from them, nor to my knowledge encountered any web site I use myself as a geek that benefits from them, with the possible exceptions of HTML5 <video> and <canvas>, which of course are only trendy substitutes for things we managed to do before anyway. (I have had to suffer using Google Docs with one client, and to describe it as unreliable, painfully bug-ridden, and missing the most elementary features that desktop office suites have literally had for decades would be rather kind. If that is the future Google are bringing us with all these new toys, I'll stick to tedious installers for Windows software, thanks.)
> I have already listed several fundamental bugs that have resulted from the recent development processes at Google and Mozilla in my earlier post.
I see that you mentioned "broken" rounded corners and html5 video.
(1) For border radius, if you were stung by the change, you would had to have been using the vendor prefixed version of the property, which isolated you from a breaking change in the final property. Feel free to blame that one on the CSS working group, for changing the definition, or yourself, for not planning for the possibility that an explicitly-prefixed experimental property could change before being finalized.
Experimental implementations need to be made before a spec is finalized. You should absolutely use them, but only in circumstances where you monitor any spec changes and update your pages appropriately. If you can't, don't.
(2) For the video element, you might want to actually test for a bug before claiming to have been bitten by it: h264 support hasn't been removed yet. h264-encoded videos will play just fine in chrome.
Meanwhile full adblockers have existed in chrome for some time, and while tab isolation has been somewhat delayed in firefox, plugin isolation has done wonders for total crash rates.
Finally, there's a point that is well worth repeating these days: the W3C requires working implementations for specs to become finalized recommendations. The fact that you can use the latest HTML5 and CSS3 features, even if their spec isn't finished yet, isn't some kind of nefarious plot, and vendor prefixes, as annoying as they can be, just mean that we won't be burdened later if specs change before they are finished.
No one is forcing you to use shiny new things or experimental effects Stick to core functionality -- which I think you'll find all the vendors have done a great job at keeping from regressing -- and you'll be fine.
> For border radius, if you were stung by the change, you would had to have been using the vendor prefixed version of the property
The rounded corners issue I talked about wasn't a mark-up issue, it was a basic rendering bug. It took several attempts to fix, over a period of months. During that time, any sites that used even simple rounded corners with an unfortunate combination of colours would get a horrible show-through effect or at best a poorly anti-aliased rendering in Chrome.
Rounded corners were surely one of the most anticipated CSS3 features, just the kind of thing where a rapid release cycle is supposed to move the web forward according to advocates, and they regressed it, badly, for several months.
Moreover, as long as Google and Mozilla keep releasing "experimental" CSS features with syntax and capabilities that aren't yet standardised, they are on a path where the only options are supporting alternative, non-standard functionality indefinitely or breaking existing web sites that were written using the experimental features at some unspecified point in the future. That's starting to sound like IE vs. Netscape all over again.
> For the video element, you might want to actually test for a bug before claiming to have been bitten by it: h264 support hasn't been removed yet.
Google dropped support for H.264 in the Chrome development builds some time ago, and the change is scheduled to be pushed to users of the official release imminently.
> Meanwhile full adblockers have existed in chrome for some time, and while tab isolation has been somewhat delayed in firefox, plugin isolation has done wonders for total crash rates.
If you've got a full ad-blocker for Chrome, I'd love a link. I've never found one anything close to as capable as things like Ad Block Pro in Firefox.
As for tab isolation in Firefox, it's not just a robustness issue, it's also a performance and potentially a security issue. One tab loading slowly or running screwed up JavaScript can still block your entire browser for several seconds, which can be very annoying.
> Stick to core functionality -- which I think you'll find all the vendors have done a great job at keeping from regressing -- and you'll be fine.
No, they haven't. I have given you four specific examples, and while you could argue that the two Chrome ones (CSS3 rounded corners and HTML5 video support for H.264) were experimental, there is no denying that the two Firefox ones (Java applets and the basic typography engine) are fundamental, well established, and seriously broken in several recent Firefox 3/4 builds. Please check my posting history from a few weeks ago for details; I gave specific citations to the last guy who seemed unable to believe it.
Of course, if you're going to argue that we shouldn't worry about any problems with experimental features, particularly either regressing them or cutting off support when a standardised alternative becomes available, then you're basically undermining the entire premise of this discussion, which was that rapid release cycles advance the web more quickly. As I've been saying for a while, I don't think going back to the race between IE and Netscape is going to advance the web for users in any useful way. It's just going to create a nasty, half-defined mess that most developers are going to ignore most of the time anyway, and that breaks things in user-visible ways the rest of the time.
>The rounded corners issue I talked about wasn't a mark-up issue, it was a basic rendering bug. It took several attempts to fix, over a period of months.
You're going to have to point to a bug report, because I don't know what you're referring to. Webkit had poor rendering of border-radius with a varying radius (the edge would be discontinuous), it had an issue where box-shadow would break with rounded corners, and it had an issue where the element background color would show show up slightly outside of any border color. All were bugs, but none were regressions, as far as I know.
> Moreover, as long as Google and Mozilla keep releasing "experimental" CSS features with syntax and capabilities that aren't yet standardised, they are on a path where the only options are supporting alternative, non-standard functionality indefinitely or breaking existing web sites that were written using the experimental features at some unspecified point in the future. That's starting to sound like IE vs. Netscape all over again.
That's just the reality of web development. We should have had a stable foundation for content, styling, and scripting for a decade now, but the standards are now finally being advanced at a decent rate. In order to do this, we need both experimental and working implementations. You'll note that Opera has -o- prefixed css properties and Microsoft has -ms- prefixed properties. That's how it works...implementations are built while specs are being written, but nothing is standardized until interoperable implementations exist. For more: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/prefix-or-posthack/
> Google dropped support for H.264 in the Chrome development builds some time ago, and the change is scheduled to be pushed to users of the official release imminently.
You're making me second guess myself, but AFAIK, they didn't and it isn't. The announcement was that they will sometime soon, but that was to give people time to switch. I was just able to play h264 videos in dev and canary builds on my windows and mac machines.
> If you've got a full ad-blocker for Chrome, I'd love a link. I've never found one anything close to as capable as things like Ad Block Pro in Firefox.
There's "AdBlock" and "AdBlock Plus." I think the second is made by the same guy that makes AdBlock Pro, but I don't really keep up with it. I have click to play enabled for plugins and that'sufficient blocking of annoying things for me.
No idea what's up with applets, but the irony of bringing up the font rendering change in Firefox 4 is that Firefox 4 was a long in development, monolithic release. Whether the style of font rendering is a regression or not is up for debate (there were also tradeoffs that had to be made working with GDI and directx), but really it's just a change people don't like, which has nothing to do with changes in release rates. UI and UX regressions happen all the time; that's why it's great to have a choices.
Finally, there are two points here:
1) Only use experimental features if you're willing to be a participant in the process, even if that just means keeping up with implementation changes
2) Point (1) would only prevent quick release cycles from advancing the state of the web if implementations didn't converge and specs weren't finalized at a rate faster that e.g. IE's release rate. They do, and since HTML5 and CSS3 have moved to a more modular spec format (rather than the decade long process for CSS 2.1), we are going to see the effect of a lagging IE10 over the next two years.
All that said, legacy browsers will have a worse effect, so it's really not that bad. I'm not saying that Microsoft is bad (although required browser updates after, say, 3 years with only an opt-out option would make me a happier camper), I just think that the faster release cycles are better for the web (for developers, users, and advancing web standards), and that the growing pains we've experienced have actually been quite mi...
You say Google and Mozilla are moving to fast, MS is doing things right. So...?
> Ah, an interesting perspective of your own, I see. :-)
Yes, I think people should upgrade their browsers more than once every 4 or 5 years. Call me crazy.
> The pace of technology development matters far more to those of us writing web pages than to users, who typically only notice what browser they are using when something doesn't work, and even then only if it did work in some other context.
When I spend an extra five days getting a project right in IE, or writing a totally separate version for this browser, yes, users are being deprived of something useful I could have done instead. When IE's quirks and flaws cause my page to not work, users notice something didn't work.
> Why? Because I have a different view to your own?
No, because you said IE 6 and IE 7 are essentially trouble free.
> I think this is where we basically disagree. You seem to want to play with shiny new toys.
Yes, I don't want to have to cobble together a separate version for some browser from 8 years ago. Again, IE is the only one that works anything like this.
>With due respect, what your web developer friends like isn't really the point.
Thanks, but actually it is since we're discussing my opinion and the opinions of developers. I thought.
> I care about users.
So do I, I'd like for them to have my software in a more performant, more reliable form, more quickly.
> Are those users getting a significantly better experience using other browsers with rapid development cycles rather than IE? I have already listed several fundamental bugs that have resulted from the recent development processes at Google and Mozilla in my earlier post. Those bugs have in several cases visibly affected my or my clients' users.
You seem to have no concept of how the long standing, never fixed bugs and design flaws in IE 6, 7 and 8 have affected users.
> For all its ills, the reason IE6 lasted so long was that Microsoft never retrospectively screwed things up on that scale.
No, IE 6 lasted that long because MS didn't update it for six years, and then tied the new version to a widely disliked OS. Developers were forced to bend over backwards to support IE 6 due to it's continuing market share. MS never 'messed it up' because they never even tried to improve IE 6 between 2001 and 2006.
> I have yet to receive a single request from any client that would benefit from them, nor to my knowledge encountered any web site I use myself as a geek that benefits from them, with the possible exceptions of HTML5 video and <canvas>.
So, none of your clients expect high performance JavaScript. IE 9 is still remarkably slow compared to every other browsers.
I've had a hard time finding IE enthusiasts other than corporations, neophytes and MS developers. It seems rather apparent you fall into the latter category.
I'm sorry, but you're still just producing strawmen. I don't like coding for IE, I just don't like coding for fast-moving targets that keep introducing bugs either.
Also, you seem to have an awful lot of serious problems with older versions of IE on your projects. Spending days getting a project right in IE? Writing a totally separate version? Long-standing bugs affecting your users in visible ways? User-visible problems with JS performance in IE9? Some of those were certainly problems with IE6 and to some extent with IE7, but if you're really still suffering those problems with IE8 -- the topic of this conversation, and the latest version supported on all popular Windows versions -- then I have to think that either you're in a remarkably specialised field or you're doing something wrong.
I hope I'm not getting carried away in this discussion, given my passion for the topic and disappointment in IE. Apologies if so.
I suppose you see cutting edge as frivolity, but yes, IE is entirely incapable of the more advanced and interesting things that Firefox and Chrome can now do. Hence, one might write a degraded version for IE, or a separate version in Flash. The thing is, all other browsers are very good about getting their users to upgrade, so I don't really think about a degraded Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome version.
S I've coded myself into corners testing with Firefox and Safari, then had to redo it a lot for IE to work. Maybe it's just mainly painful memories from when I was starting out.
About 4% of our users are using IE9 currently, so I haven't heard much user feedback about the JScript speed. I do hope everyone upgrades soon, of course.
I don't work for an enterprise, and I am the only full time developer in my (micro) company. With everything I have to do, testing in 5-6 versions of IE has been a big problem for me in the past. Given that my experience does not seem to be isolated or anomalous, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.
I hope I'm not getting carried away in this discussion, given my passion for the topic and disappointment in IE. Apologies if so.
I suppose you see cutting edge as frivolity, but yes, IE is entirely incapable of the more advanced and interesting things that Firefox and Chrome can now do. Hence, one might write a degraded version for IE, or a separate version in Flash. The thing is, all other browsers are very good about getting their users to upgrade, so I don't really think about a degraded Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome version.
S I've coded myself into corners testing with Firefox and Safari, then had to redo it a lot for IE to work. Maybe it's just mainly painful memories from when I was starting out.
About 4% of our users are using IE9 currently, so I haven't heard much user feedback about the JScript speed. I do hope everyone upgrades soon, of course.
I don't work for an enterprise, and I am the only full time developer in my (micro) company. With everything I have to do, testing in 5-6 versions of IE has been a big problem for me in the past. Given that my experience does not seem to be isolated or anomalous, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.
I hope I'm not getting carried away in this discussion, given my passion for the topic and disappointment in IE. Apologies if so.
I suppose you see cutting edge as frivolity, but yes, IE is entirely incapable of the more advanced and interesting things that Firefox and Chrome can now do. Hence, one might write a degraded version for IE, or a separate version in Flash. The thing is, all other browsers are very good about getting their users to upgrade, so I don't really think about a degraded Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome version.
S I've coded myself into corners testing with Firefox and Safari, then had to redo it a lot for IE to work. Maybe it's just mainly painful memories from when I was starting out.
About 4% of our users are using IE9 currently, so I haven't heard much user feedback about the JScript speed. I do hope everyone upgrades soon, of course.
I don't work for an enterprise, and I am the only full time developer in my (micro) company. With everything I have to do, testing in 5-6 versions of IE has been a big problem for me in the past. Given that my experience does not seem to be isolated or anomalous, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.
Perhaps Google and Mozilla have made mistakes, and update too often - but their situation is so clearly superior to Microsoft's, who can't even figure out how to get some people to upgrade from a browser released 10 years ago, that it's clear which system is working better. As usual, the ideal style lies somewhere in between.
Now, most of that I can agree with. I have nothing against moving the industry forward, and of course I wish all my users and my clients' ones would upgrade in timely fashion.
My main observations in this discussion is simply that moving the industry forward only works if it's done at a pace where the content providers can take advantage of it. Personally, I don't for an instant believe that Google's and now Mozilla's release schedules with only a few weeks of gap help to achieve that goal. Meanwhile, they can and have screwed things up that have worked fine for years and are in widespread use on web sites today, and I think they are in real danger of reverting to the completely non-standardised web of yesteryear, which makes developing corner cases specially for IE look like a walk in the park.
For what it's worth, I find it even more disturbing that even so-called standards groups, particularly WHATWG, now seem to be moving to "evolving" documents. They seem to have utterly missed the point of what standards are for.
As you've probably realised by now, I'm no worshipper at the altar of Redmond either. I do wish they would consider releasing faster than every couple of years, and I don't buy their nonsense argument about IE9 being unable to run on XP for a microsecond. (What they say may well be technically true, but it smacks of the kind of arguments they made a few years about during the anti-trust case, that they can't possibly separate browser from $OS because of $DEPENDENCY, where $DEPENDENCY appears to have been easily avoidable if they'd coded things up a bit differently.)
Great, if after ten years of trailing everyone else by orders of magnitude they're going to take the lead I'd be thrilled and quite impressed. Benchmark results do have a way of changing by the time products come out of 'preview releases', though.
Using Chrome Frame is just a matter of adding "<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge,chrome=1">" to a page. I haven't used it yet, but the Chrome team recently announced at Google I/O that users can install Chrome Frame without the need for admin rights. Given that Google is taking an effort to promote Chrome Frame and making it accessible to several users restricted by corporate IT policies, there should be more adopters soon.
Google are actively encouraging people to circumvent corporate IT policies?! No wonder so many corporate IT departments are sticking by Microsoft: at least they make it reasonably straightforward for sysadmins to manage policies across a whole workplace.
I hadn't heard of Chrome Frame until this discussion, but the basic suggestions at http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/ sound a lot like "This page best viewed in $BROWSER at $RESOLUTION". Didn't we learn that lesson yet?
I appreciate the links from a personal perspective, but they don't seem to contradict the advice on the Google Chrome Frame project page I mentioned, which actually suggests redirecting users to an installation page if they visit your site in IE and don't already have GCF installed. That sort of tactic is usually associated with either malware or the 1990s where I come from...
In any case, there is something very shady about the whole project. If people want to use Chrome, let them use Chrome, but please let's not start making IE pretend it's Chrome (or was it the other way around?). How on earth are corporate IT support people supposed to deal with requests for help from non-technical people once we start down that path?
Modern browsers share several things in common. If you're not a modern browser, then you're a legacy browser.
Modern browsers have most of these:
Super-fast JavaScript engines
Hardware acceleration for graphics and text
HTML audio and video elements and APIs
SVG for vector graphics
ForeignObject for bringing HTML into SVG
HTML canvas element and API for 2D
Some useful CSS 3 support like border radius, text shadow, transforms and transitions, etc.
HTML History API
WebGL for 3D graphics
Web Workers
Application Cache
These are the features that let Web developers build a richer caliber of Web applications. IE 9 is a little bit short on some of these items, but I think it's got enough to qualify it as being part of the gang of Modern browsers.
IE 8 has none of this. IE 8 was really not much more than IE7 with improved CSS 2.1 support, and IE7 wasn't much more than IE6 with tabbed browsing.
So, yes, IE 8 is a legacy browser. It's the new IE6 -- the boat anchor around the necks of Web developers who want to move the Web forward.
Even worse, Microsoft is leaving behind hundreds of millions of users who are currently running IE 7 and 8, saying that IE8 is the end of the road for Windows XP. It's pretty clear that Microsoft is making the big break with legacy between IE8 and IE9. 8 is the past, 9 is the present.
Well, modern browsers have some form of most of those, often different to the form in any other modern browser.
HTML5 video is a great example. It's a nice idea, but as long as everyone is having childish arguments over which formats they're going to support, many of us who have to produce real world applications for real world users are still going to use Flash. (Sorry, Apple.)
If and when the sorts of features you described are standardised such that web developers can write one version of their code and have a fair chance of it running on all modern browsers, then you'll have a case. Until then, I'm afraid it's just your personal, and inevitably biased, wish list.
> These are the features that let Web developers build a richer caliber of Web applications.
Can you give us some examples?
> IE 8 has none of this. IE 8 was really not much more than IE7 with improved CSS 2.1 support, and IE7 wasn't much more than IE6 with tabbed browsing.
Writing silly things like that makes you look rather foolish. For example, you've just defined "super-fast JavaScript engines" as a necessary criteria for a modern browser, and then immediately glossed over orders-of-magnitude improvements in real world JS performance between successive versions of IE. Of course faster JS engines are never going to do any harm, other things being equal, but IE8 runs JS fast enough to be useful.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 839 ms ] threadSeriously, though, isn't 9 current and 10 expected soon?
Chrome updates are released every few days, who is supposed to test if all internal apps still work?
I won't give any contractual undertaking to a client that anything I produce will run on Chrome when delivered, because it's a moving target and for some projects it updates faster than a complete test cycle.
If Mozilla are now switching to crazy-fast auto-updates as well, then I'm going to have to start excluding Firefox too.
At this rate, IE will be the only browser I will be able to commit to testing on and supporting. If that's not irony...
You already said your clients aren't asking for it and you're not providing it, are Chrome and FF honestly breaking your HTML4 and CSS2, or are you just exaggerating the problem rolling releases cause? Because given the choice between slow as shit browser releases tied to OS updates and anything else, I'll choose the latter because it's less headache.
I think he is not saying that they are breaking the sites right now, just that occasionally bugs happen in chrome that can break the sites.
Yes. See the examples in my earlier posts to this discussion, several of which have directly broken my (and many other people's) sites for customers using those browsers.
> Because given the choice between slow as shit browser releases tied to OS updates and anything else, I'll choose the latter because it's less headache.
False dichotomy.
There is a big difference between moving conservatively and not moving at all.
Unfortunately, most UIs aren't built with that kind of code. Tools like Selenium aren't going to help you spot that the browser is rendering your page elements with a z-order bug, the canvas/SVG output has an aliasing problem, and your entire page design is getting a flickering scrollbar effect because of a change in the font rendering when the underline for a link appears. (And those are just examples of possible browser bugs, not even counting testing your own code to make sure the UI is rendering properly to a human looking at a screen.)
Now consider how bad IE8 must be. It doesn't support some 10 years old standards, such as XHTML.
The true benefit of using the XHTML syntax is that you can use XML tools (that might be part of an existing tool chain) to output and manipulate your pages before they are served.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's style seems to be to release browsers that are obsolete before they're even available. IE9 is a nice step ahead, but it leaves out a lot of nice technologies that could have moved the web forward. As Mozilla shifts to faster releases, and Chrome, Safari and webkit in general steam ahead, it's sad to think that we won't see IE 10 for another couple of years at the soonest.
The way IE is developed is a relic of the desktop software era. Mozilla recognized that to keep up with Google, they needed to change how their browser is developed and released - I pray that something vital is changed to make that possible for MS and IE as well.
I still don't understand why people think this crazy rush to get new browser versions out as rapidly as every couple of months is a good thing.
Even if browsers support new features that fast, full-time professional web development agencies aren't going to keep up with the developments at the same break-neck pace, never mind anyone else. Even if they did, I doubt many of them would risk their reputation designing live sites for serious clients using unproven novelty technologies.
While Microsoft's release cycle is perhaps longer than I would choose, at least they have some stability as a result. We may have hated IE6, but we did so only after several years of it being clearly the best browser in town, which people often forget. In any case, at least its quirks and foibles were well understood, and workarounds were widely documented and used basically successfully. Ditto for IE7, and anything from IE8 onwards is pretty decent as far as web standards go. For all the anti-IE criticism, the Web developed from a novelty to a routine part of daily life on Microsoft's watch, and about half the people in the world still use IE to get stuff done, despite all the possible alternatives available to them.
Right now, with these absurdly rapid release cycles, it just feels like Google and Mozilla are having a big game of mine's bigger than yours is. I'd rather they stopped breaking actually useful stuff in releases they are pushing to the browsing public: Google have broken everything from rounded corners to HTML5 video, while Mozilla have fundamentally stuffed tried and tested tech like Java applets and basic typography by trying to be too clever with new technologies in recent versions. I'd rather the Chrome and Firefox teams caught up with basics that most people actually care about: Firefox 4 still doesn't do sensible tab isolation years after IE and Chrome did, while Chrome still doesn't seem to have an ad blocker worth anything, for example.
Meanwhile, I really don't care that they can hide the URL bar now; I have a 1920x1200 screen and I like to know what site I'm really visiting. I don't care that Google support "open" video formats like VP8; the serious video publishing world uses the technically superior H.264, and Google just removed support for that in Chrome for purely political reasons.
Please note that none of this means they can't issue security or performance updates as necessary. But Microsoft do that too, they just don't feel the need to slap a big "this is a shiny new version!" sticker on it every time.
> The way IE is developed is a relic of the desktop software era.
Contrary to trendy opinion among bazillionaire wannabes on Hacker News, the vast, vast majority of the world's IT infrastructure still lives in the desktop software era, and most web-based or mobile-based software sucks on technical, usability and basic functionality grounds. And I write that as someone who makes his living working with those technologies, just trying not to suck at it quite as badly.
>I still don't understand why people think this crazy rush to get new browser versions out as rapidly as every couple of months is a good thing.
Because the alternative system involves way too much pain in upgrading for users, apparently. Three monolithic releases in an entire decade is a better plan, you think? The technologies involved with the web move too quickly to still be thinking about IE 6 and IE 7 in 2011.
>While Microsoft's release cycle is perhaps longer than I would choose, at least they have some stability as a result. We may have hated IE6, but we did so only after several years of it being clearly the best browser in town, which people often forget. In any case, at least its quirks and foibles were well understood, and workarounds were widely documented and used basically successfully. Ditto for IE7, and anything from IE8 onwards is pretty decent as far as web standards go.
All I can assume from that statement is that you're not a javascript or CSS developer. IE 6 was the best because Netscape had their 'air supply cut off' and was not really in the game in 2001. IE 6 and 7 continue to cause problems for me, personally, and if I was the only one, we would not be having this discussion.
>For all the anti-IE criticism, the Web developed from a novelty to a routine part of daily life on Microsoft's watch, and about half the people in the world still use IE to get stuff done, despite all the possible alternatives available to them.
Yes, after MS beat down the company who pioneered bringing browser technology to the masses, the web grew while IE was the most popular browser. Yes, about half of the world uses IE - mainly people who don't understand what a browser is, and click the big E on their desktop. Including software with other software that has monopoly level market saturation is successful, can you believe it?
> I'd rather the Chrome and Firefox teams caught up with basics that most people actually care about: Firefox 4 still doesn't do sensible tab isolation years after IE and Chrome did, while Chrome still doesn't seem to have an ad blocker worth anything, for example.
IE doesn't even have a spell check, much less an ad blocker. How about Web GL? If I recall from the Reddit threads from the IE team, Microsoft insists they can't put IE9 on XP mainly due to hardware acceleration. For 2D only?
>Please note that none of this means they can't issue security or performance updates as necessary. But Microsoft do that too, they just don't feel the need to slap a big "this is a shiny new version!" sticker on it every time.
How many significant updates to IE 8 have there been? How often was Chrome or Firefox improved during that time, noticeably? Waiting until MS releases a new version of Windows and everyone buys a new computer in order to run it has left web developers with a lot of problems.
>the vast, vast majority of the world's IT infrastructure still lives in the desktop software era, and most web-based or mobile-based software sucks on technical, usability and basic functionality grounds.
Some people are still using DOS, but that's not really the point. I expect at some point, the enterprises who haven't already figured it out will realize that developing or purchasing inflexible, monolithic software that is upgraded with great pain and expense every five years is not ideal. Hundreds of millions of people are using internet based software (and I'm not talking about Google Apps - I mean applications such as this site) each day, and they work. Meanwhile, I can't open an IT magazine without seeing the word 'cloud' 8,000 times, so... we'll see what happens to the world of desktop software, hmm?
IE is a deplorable web browser in the opinion of the vast majority of web developers I've ever encountered. it's the only one that you have to fire up virtual machines to test on three or four different versions even when using Windows. The development models of webkit and Mozilla have resulted in far superior software, ...
Strawman. I said no such thing.
> The technologies involved with the web move too quickly to still be thinking about IE 6 and IE 7 in 2011.
Ah, an interesting perspective of your own, I see. :-)
I need to support the platforms that my customers and/or my clients' customers are using to browse the web. Right now, I'm pleased to say that IE6 is no longer relevant to any current project I'm working on. IE7 still has enough market share to count, but most people I care about in relation to my commercial interests are now on IE8 or IE9. The pace of technology development matters far more to those of us writing web pages than to users, who typically only notice what browser they are using when something doesn't work, and even then only if it did work in some other context.
> All I can assume from that statement is that you're not a javascript or CSS developer.
Why? Because I have a different view to your own? I am currently working on several web-based user interfaces for different commercial projects/clients. They all work just fine in recent IE versions. At the most, we have graceful degradation for a few visual effects if you go back to IE7.
> Yes, about half of the world uses IE - mainly people who don't understand what a browser is, and click the big E on their desktop.
I think this is where we basically disagree. You seem to want to play with shiny new toys. I'm a shiny-loving geek too, but from a business perspective, I care about building useful stuff that benefits the web browsing public, and therefore either my own business interests or those of my clients. It doesn't matter at all to me why IE became the dominant browser for a long time, only that whatever functionality it provided was sufficient to do so. It is just a tool, serving a purpose, like any other browser software.
> IE is a deplorable web browser in the opinion of the vast majority of web developers I've ever encountered.
With due respect, what your web developer friends like isn't really the point. I care about users.
Are those users getting a significantly better experience using other browsers with rapid development cycles rather than IE? I have already listed several fundamental bugs that have resulted from the recent development processes at Google and Mozilla in my earlier post. Those bugs have in several cases visibly affected my or my clients' users. For all its ills, the reason IE6 lasted so long was that Microsoft never retrospectively screwed things up on that scale.
Meanwhile, since we're playing the "in my experience" game, all these fancy new technologies that are half-supported in leading edge Google/Mozilla browsers seem to generate far more heat than light, and I have yet to receive a single request from any client that would benefit from them, nor to my knowledge encountered any web site I use myself as a geek that benefits from them, with the possible exceptions of HTML5 <video> and <canvas>, which of course are only trendy substitutes for things we managed to do before anyway. (I have had to suffer using Google Docs with one client, and to describe it as unreliable, painfully bug-ridden, and missing the most elementary features that desktop office suites have literally had for decades would be rather kind. If that is the future Google are bringing us with all these new toys, I'll stick to tedious installers for Windows software, thanks.)
I see that you mentioned "broken" rounded corners and html5 video.
(1) For border radius, if you were stung by the change, you would had to have been using the vendor prefixed version of the property, which isolated you from a breaking change in the final property. Feel free to blame that one on the CSS working group, for changing the definition, or yourself, for not planning for the possibility that an explicitly-prefixed experimental property could change before being finalized.
Experimental implementations need to be made before a spec is finalized. You should absolutely use them, but only in circumstances where you monitor any spec changes and update your pages appropriately. If you can't, don't.
(2) For the video element, you might want to actually test for a bug before claiming to have been bitten by it: h264 support hasn't been removed yet. h264-encoded videos will play just fine in chrome.
Meanwhile full adblockers have existed in chrome for some time, and while tab isolation has been somewhat delayed in firefox, plugin isolation has done wonders for total crash rates.
Finally, there's a point that is well worth repeating these days: the W3C requires working implementations for specs to become finalized recommendations. The fact that you can use the latest HTML5 and CSS3 features, even if their spec isn't finished yet, isn't some kind of nefarious plot, and vendor prefixes, as annoying as they can be, just mean that we won't be burdened later if specs change before they are finished.
No one is forcing you to use shiny new things or experimental effects Stick to core functionality -- which I think you'll find all the vendors have done a great job at keeping from regressing -- and you'll be fine.
> For border radius, if you were stung by the change, you would had to have been using the vendor prefixed version of the property
The rounded corners issue I talked about wasn't a mark-up issue, it was a basic rendering bug. It took several attempts to fix, over a period of months. During that time, any sites that used even simple rounded corners with an unfortunate combination of colours would get a horrible show-through effect or at best a poorly anti-aliased rendering in Chrome.
Rounded corners were surely one of the most anticipated CSS3 features, just the kind of thing where a rapid release cycle is supposed to move the web forward according to advocates, and they regressed it, badly, for several months.
Moreover, as long as Google and Mozilla keep releasing "experimental" CSS features with syntax and capabilities that aren't yet standardised, they are on a path where the only options are supporting alternative, non-standard functionality indefinitely or breaking existing web sites that were written using the experimental features at some unspecified point in the future. That's starting to sound like IE vs. Netscape all over again.
> For the video element, you might want to actually test for a bug before claiming to have been bitten by it: h264 support hasn't been removed yet.
Google dropped support for H.264 in the Chrome development builds some time ago, and the change is scheduled to be pushed to users of the official release imminently.
> Meanwhile full adblockers have existed in chrome for some time, and while tab isolation has been somewhat delayed in firefox, plugin isolation has done wonders for total crash rates.
If you've got a full ad-blocker for Chrome, I'd love a link. I've never found one anything close to as capable as things like Ad Block Pro in Firefox.
As for tab isolation in Firefox, it's not just a robustness issue, it's also a performance and potentially a security issue. One tab loading slowly or running screwed up JavaScript can still block your entire browser for several seconds, which can be very annoying.
> Stick to core functionality -- which I think you'll find all the vendors have done a great job at keeping from regressing -- and you'll be fine.
No, they haven't. I have given you four specific examples, and while you could argue that the two Chrome ones (CSS3 rounded corners and HTML5 video support for H.264) were experimental, there is no denying that the two Firefox ones (Java applets and the basic typography engine) are fundamental, well established, and seriously broken in several recent Firefox 3/4 builds. Please check my posting history from a few weeks ago for details; I gave specific citations to the last guy who seemed unable to believe it.
Of course, if you're going to argue that we shouldn't worry about any problems with experimental features, particularly either regressing them or cutting off support when a standardised alternative becomes available, then you're basically undermining the entire premise of this discussion, which was that rapid release cycles advance the web more quickly. As I've been saying for a while, I don't think going back to the race between IE and Netscape is going to advance the web for users in any useful way. It's just going to create a nasty, half-defined mess that most developers are going to ignore most of the time anyway, and that breaks things in user-visible ways the rest of the time.
You're going to have to point to a bug report, because I don't know what you're referring to. Webkit had poor rendering of border-radius with a varying radius (the edge would be discontinuous), it had an issue where box-shadow would break with rounded corners, and it had an issue where the element background color would show show up slightly outside of any border color. All were bugs, but none were regressions, as far as I know.
> Moreover, as long as Google and Mozilla keep releasing "experimental" CSS features with syntax and capabilities that aren't yet standardised, they are on a path where the only options are supporting alternative, non-standard functionality indefinitely or breaking existing web sites that were written using the experimental features at some unspecified point in the future. That's starting to sound like IE vs. Netscape all over again.
That's just the reality of web development. We should have had a stable foundation for content, styling, and scripting for a decade now, but the standards are now finally being advanced at a decent rate. In order to do this, we need both experimental and working implementations. You'll note that Opera has -o- prefixed css properties and Microsoft has -ms- prefixed properties. That's how it works...implementations are built while specs are being written, but nothing is standardized until interoperable implementations exist. For more: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/prefix-or-posthack/
> Google dropped support for H.264 in the Chrome development builds some time ago, and the change is scheduled to be pushed to users of the official release imminently.
You're making me second guess myself, but AFAIK, they didn't and it isn't. The announcement was that they will sometime soon, but that was to give people time to switch. I was just able to play h264 videos in dev and canary builds on my windows and mac machines.
> If you've got a full ad-blocker for Chrome, I'd love a link. I've never found one anything close to as capable as things like Ad Block Pro in Firefox.
There's "AdBlock" and "AdBlock Plus." I think the second is made by the same guy that makes AdBlock Pro, but I don't really keep up with it. I have click to play enabled for plugins and that'sufficient blocking of annoying things for me.
No idea what's up with applets, but the irony of bringing up the font rendering change in Firefox 4 is that Firefox 4 was a long in development, monolithic release. Whether the style of font rendering is a regression or not is up for debate (there were also tradeoffs that had to be made working with GDI and directx), but really it's just a change people don't like, which has nothing to do with changes in release rates. UI and UX regressions happen all the time; that's why it's great to have a choices.
Finally, there are two points here: 1) Only use experimental features if you're willing to be a participant in the process, even if that just means keeping up with implementation changes 2) Point (1) would only prevent quick release cycles from advancing the state of the web if implementations didn't converge and specs weren't finalized at a rate faster that e.g. IE's release rate. They do, and since HTML5 and CSS3 have moved to a more modular spec format (rather than the decade long process for CSS 2.1), we are going to see the effect of a lagging IE10 over the next two years.
All that said, legacy browsers will have a worse effect, so it's really not that bad. I'm not saying that Microsoft is bad (although required browser updates after, say, 3 years with only an opt-out option would make me a happier camper), I just think that the faster release cycles are better for the web (for developers, users, and advancing web standards), and that the growing pains we've experienced have actually been quite mi...
You say Google and Mozilla are moving to fast, MS is doing things right. So...?
> Ah, an interesting perspective of your own, I see. :-)
Yes, I think people should upgrade their browsers more than once every 4 or 5 years. Call me crazy.
> The pace of technology development matters far more to those of us writing web pages than to users, who typically only notice what browser they are using when something doesn't work, and even then only if it did work in some other context.
When I spend an extra five days getting a project right in IE, or writing a totally separate version for this browser, yes, users are being deprived of something useful I could have done instead. When IE's quirks and flaws cause my page to not work, users notice something didn't work.
> Why? Because I have a different view to your own?
No, because you said IE 6 and IE 7 are essentially trouble free.
> I think this is where we basically disagree. You seem to want to play with shiny new toys.
Yes, I don't want to have to cobble together a separate version for some browser from 8 years ago. Again, IE is the only one that works anything like this.
>With due respect, what your web developer friends like isn't really the point.
Thanks, but actually it is since we're discussing my opinion and the opinions of developers. I thought.
> I care about users.
So do I, I'd like for them to have my software in a more performant, more reliable form, more quickly.
> Are those users getting a significantly better experience using other browsers with rapid development cycles rather than IE? I have already listed several fundamental bugs that have resulted from the recent development processes at Google and Mozilla in my earlier post. Those bugs have in several cases visibly affected my or my clients' users.
You seem to have no concept of how the long standing, never fixed bugs and design flaws in IE 6, 7 and 8 have affected users.
> For all its ills, the reason IE6 lasted so long was that Microsoft never retrospectively screwed things up on that scale.
No, IE 6 lasted that long because MS didn't update it for six years, and then tied the new version to a widely disliked OS. Developers were forced to bend over backwards to support IE 6 due to it's continuing market share. MS never 'messed it up' because they never even tried to improve IE 6 between 2001 and 2006.
> I have yet to receive a single request from any client that would benefit from them, nor to my knowledge encountered any web site I use myself as a geek that benefits from them, with the possible exceptions of HTML5 video and <canvas>.
So, none of your clients expect high performance JavaScript. IE 9 is still remarkably slow compared to every other browsers.
I've had a hard time finding IE enthusiasts other than corporations, neophytes and MS developers. It seems rather apparent you fall into the latter category.
Also, you seem to have an awful lot of serious problems with older versions of IE on your projects. Spending days getting a project right in IE? Writing a totally separate version? Long-standing bugs affecting your users in visible ways? User-visible problems with JS performance in IE9? Some of those were certainly problems with IE6 and to some extent with IE7, but if you're really still suffering those problems with IE8 -- the topic of this conversation, and the latest version supported on all popular Windows versions -- then I have to think that either you're in a remarkably specialised field or you're doing something wrong.
I suppose you see cutting edge as frivolity, but yes, IE is entirely incapable of the more advanced and interesting things that Firefox and Chrome can now do. Hence, one might write a degraded version for IE, or a separate version in Flash. The thing is, all other browsers are very good about getting their users to upgrade, so I don't really think about a degraded Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome version.
S I've coded myself into corners testing with Firefox and Safari, then had to redo it a lot for IE to work. Maybe it's just mainly painful memories from when I was starting out.
About 4% of our users are using IE9 currently, so I haven't heard much user feedback about the JScript speed. I do hope everyone upgrades soon, of course.
I don't work for an enterprise, and I am the only full time developer in my (micro) company. With everything I have to do, testing in 5-6 versions of IE has been a big problem for me in the past. Given that my experience does not seem to be isolated or anomalous, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.
I suppose you see cutting edge as frivolity, but yes, IE is entirely incapable of the more advanced and interesting things that Firefox and Chrome can now do. Hence, one might write a degraded version for IE, or a separate version in Flash. The thing is, all other browsers are very good about getting their users to upgrade, so I don't really think about a degraded Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome version.
S I've coded myself into corners testing with Firefox and Safari, then had to redo it a lot for IE to work. Maybe it's just mainly painful memories from when I was starting out.
About 4% of our users are using IE9 currently, so I haven't heard much user feedback about the JScript speed. I do hope everyone upgrades soon, of course.
I don't work for an enterprise, and I am the only full time developer in my (micro) company. With everything I have to do, testing in 5-6 versions of IE has been a big problem for me in the past. Given that my experience does not seem to be isolated or anomalous, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.
My main observations in this discussion is simply that moving the industry forward only works if it's done at a pace where the content providers can take advantage of it. Personally, I don't for an instant believe that Google's and now Mozilla's release schedules with only a few weeks of gap help to achieve that goal. Meanwhile, they can and have screwed things up that have worked fine for years and are in widespread use on web sites today, and I think they are in real danger of reverting to the completely non-standardised web of yesteryear, which makes developing corner cases specially for IE look like a walk in the park.
For what it's worth, I find it even more disturbing that even so-called standards groups, particularly WHATWG, now seem to be moving to "evolving" documents. They seem to have utterly missed the point of what standards are for.
As you've probably realised by now, I'm no worshipper at the altar of Redmond either. I do wish they would consider releasing faster than every couple of years, and I don't buy their nonsense argument about IE9 being unable to run on XP for a microsecond. (What they say may well be technically true, but it smacks of the kind of arguments they made a few years about during the anti-trust case, that they can't possibly separate browser from $OS because of $DEPENDENCY, where $DEPENDENCY appears to have been easily avoidable if they'd coded things up a bit differently.)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/22/douglas_crockford_ja...
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/23/internet-explor...
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=81517
http://news.iphoneworld.ca/inews/Windows+Phone+has+fastest+b...
If you're using it, any experience to share ?
Just asking if it works well.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list?can=2&q=la...
I hadn't heard of Chrome Frame until this discussion, but the basic suggestions at http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/ sound a lot like "This page best viewed in $BROWSER at $RESOLUTION". Didn't we learn that lesson yet?
> Google I/O 2011 - http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/html5-today-wi...
> Google I/O 2010 - http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/using-chrome-f...
"at least they make it reasonably straightforward for sysadmins to manage policies across a whole workplace."
> Google recently came up Administrative templates for Chrome. But I wonder why they didn't push it enough to IT departments - http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?answer...
In any case, there is something very shady about the whole project. If people want to use Chrome, let them use Chrome, but please let's not start making IE pretend it's Chrome (or was it the other way around?). How on earth are corporate IT support people supposed to deal with requests for help from non-technical people once we start down that path?
Modern browsers have most of these:
Super-fast JavaScript engines Hardware acceleration for graphics and text HTML audio and video elements and APIs SVG for vector graphics ForeignObject for bringing HTML into SVG HTML canvas element and API for 2D Some useful CSS 3 support like border radius, text shadow, transforms and transitions, etc. HTML History API WebGL for 3D graphics Web Workers Application Cache
These are the features that let Web developers build a richer caliber of Web applications. IE 9 is a little bit short on some of these items, but I think it's got enough to qualify it as being part of the gang of Modern browsers.
IE 8 has none of this. IE 8 was really not much more than IE7 with improved CSS 2.1 support, and IE7 wasn't much more than IE6 with tabbed browsing.
So, yes, IE 8 is a legacy browser. It's the new IE6 -- the boat anchor around the necks of Web developers who want to move the Web forward.
Even worse, Microsoft is leaving behind hundreds of millions of users who are currently running IE 7 and 8, saying that IE8 is the end of the road for Windows XP. It's pretty clear that Microsoft is making the big break with legacy between IE8 and IE9. 8 is the past, 9 is the present.
AFAIK from the bugs IE8's CSS code seems like a rewrite, while IE7's CSS code seems like hacks on top of IE6's CSS code.
Well, modern browsers have some form of most of those, often different to the form in any other modern browser.
HTML5 video is a great example. It's a nice idea, but as long as everyone is having childish arguments over which formats they're going to support, many of us who have to produce real world applications for real world users are still going to use Flash. (Sorry, Apple.)
If and when the sorts of features you described are standardised such that web developers can write one version of their code and have a fair chance of it running on all modern browsers, then you'll have a case. Until then, I'm afraid it's just your personal, and inevitably biased, wish list.
> These are the features that let Web developers build a richer caliber of Web applications.
Can you give us some examples?
> IE 8 has none of this. IE 8 was really not much more than IE7 with improved CSS 2.1 support, and IE7 wasn't much more than IE6 with tabbed browsing.
Writing silly things like that makes you look rather foolish. For example, you've just defined "super-fast JavaScript engines" as a necessary criteria for a modern browser, and then immediately glossed over orders-of-magnitude improvements in real world JS performance between successive versions of IE. Of course faster JS engines are never going to do any harm, other things being equal, but IE8 runs JS fast enough to be useful.