Why I'm not happy about IE9(stefanp.tumblr.com) |
Why I'm not happy about IE9(stefanp.tumblr.com) |
The first thing is this primal "everything microsoft does is evil" reaction. The author tries to rationalize, but in the end it's just "well IE9 is bad because it can be good for Microsoft".
The use of fallacies such as "most of them are probably Microsoft fan boys" is also quite irritating. People disagree with you? Fanboys! Blinds! Fools! Heretics!
Then, the article ends with the strange argument "IE9 should be cross platform". Should Microsoft port all their clients to other plaftorms? The goal with IE9 is to provide Windows with a as good as possible browser.
Yes Microsoft did play the embrace and extend game and we should thank them, because frankly, IE6 introduced a lot of useful features back then. The world changed and I don't think such approach would make sense now.
The real thing to be angry about is when they decided to stop development on IE.
And you don't have to believe MS is evil to know that they are still pulling these Windows power-grabs. Windows promised Mac compatibility with Silverlight, only to yank our PowerPC support in v 2.0 just a year later (leaving ~half of Mac users in the cold).
I don't think MS is any more "evil" than any other tech company (just worse at PR maybe), but until they demonstrate they've changed their ways, you can't blame people for expecting them to still be up to their old games.
The writing was on the wall.
Apple stopped supporting PowerPC six months later.
Which is exactly what they’ve been doing the past two releases. IE7 was a sincere attempt at catching up in the CSS department and get with the program on web standards adherence/compliance. IE8 was a sincere attempt at getting up to speed with the JavaScript side of things. IE9 is a sincere attempt at getting up to speed with HTML5 and CSS3, and whilst they aren’t yet including some of the things we may personally wish to see most (e.g. CSS Transitions), claiming they have yet to “change their ways” is nothing more than an unhelpful attempt at putting Microsoft in the “evil“ corner.
Microsoft themselves have long been trying to get people to upgrade from IE6 and Windows XP. Sure, part of that is just for their own business purposes, but at the same time they honestly want to help the web forward—the current state of affairs hurts them more than us, these days. There is no chance they’ll ever go back to dominating the industry like they did in the late ’90s and early ’00s, because of the steady “re-mergence” of the Mac and the myriad mobile platforms we’re collectively shifting to. All they can do now is to provide a browser on the Windows platform that isn’t so far behind on things that it becomes a compelling reason for people to leave Windows itself behind. And to do that, they know they have to play along in the standards game, which has long taken over the industry.
Cannot agree more. People tend to forget things like AJAX came from IE.
That doesn't ring true. We already have four other excellent web browsers on Windows, as mentioned by the article. All are relatively similar in terms of features and under active development by great teams. At best, Microsoft could only hope to very marginally improve on what already is available for free. So a nice standards-compliant IE9 will not make Windows any more or less attractive an OS than it already is.
Browsers are expensive and onerous to create. What could Microsoft's motivation possibly be to produce one for free, besides embrace-and-extend?
Not users. What would the ability to run IE9 add to the Linux or Mac desktop? Another web browser? Do we really need one?
Not Microsoft, who would have to invest massive amounts of effort into porting it, and large parts of the Windows codebase too.
Honestly, I wonder if the author of this article was deliberately trying to think of something to criticise about IE9, and this was the best he could do.
For non-web developers who use non-Windows operating systems, IE9 is an irrelevance. For web developers who use any operating system, IE9 has to be a good thing, because it means more browsers out there that are closer to the standards.
I'm sad that you think I was trying to come up with something - I just wrote about this strange (but honnest !) feeling I got, as people talking in nice terms about IE hasn't happenned in a while.
In fact I don't think I'm criticizing IE itself at all.
Perhaps I could re-phrase my point more simply: I don't think IE 9's standards support means "the web wins" in the long run, since IE is still tied to Windows for strategic reasons.
You're of course right that it's a good thing for web devs right now, though.
I don't think your argument makes any sense, sorry. If you were talking about IE6, I'd agree, but standards compliance means never having to use the exact same browser for anything.
So what? How is the Web threatened or at risk or even _impacted at all_ by IE9 being Windows-only? With IE9 supporting standards so thoroughly, it very directly means that IE9 being Windows-only doesn't make a lick of difference anymore.
The game for the Web is standards. With all major browsers supporting standards, browser and platform themselves are irrelevant factors for the Web to prosper as a platform and a medium.
Further, there may be reasons why IE is not so portable to other platforms. Considering the fact that IE9 is not currently (and probably will never be) available for even Windows XP, I don't think that a cross-platform version is a realistic expectation.
IIRC, IE is an integral part of the Windows OS (for whatever business/architectural reasons) and this means that producing a Linux/Mac version may be more work that you think it is.
By that argument, with IE9 making web developers lives happy, and much more importantly, making users' lives happy with a decent default browser on the most popular OS are bad things.
Two things occur to me: 1. Windows still has a dominant market share, if they were going to do evil I don't see what's stopping them 2. Having a good browser might protect their browser market share but I'm not convinced it protects their OS market share. Maybe if IE was way way better than anything else it would stop people going to Mac OS, but it isn't and there are plenty of other more significant barriers to changing your OS.
I think it's more plausible that their investing in browsers because they want to help their online services market share, and having that search box default to Bing on 50% of PCs is hugely valuable.
PS Safari runs on linux only under Wine as far as I know.
They're playing the cards they have at any given time - when it means supporting standards, they do that. And when they're totally dominant, they tend to set the standards.
I'm not even suggesting it might be intentional - the IE team and the MS top management don't necessarily have the same long-term goals is all.
Maybe the IE team would even love to go cross platform and compete as a browser and not as a part of a larger platform.
You can debate whether IE6 was a good or bad thing in this regard, but it still happened.
It feels unlikely that anyone will ever dominate the browser market like that again.
They don't benefit now from using it over Safari. They benefit from it just as a promise from MS that they won't screw up the web just to sell more Windows PCs. As long as it's relatively easy to obtain IE for Mac, it's not a useful tool to sabotage the standards in a platform lock-in grab.
However, I agree with you that it seems totally unrealistic to expect MS to do this. Not because they're evil, but just because why bother?
Agreed.
> If they had known what would occur they probably won't have done it.
Huh?
http://www.yafla.com/dennisforbes/How-I-Came-To-Despise-AJAX...
It was first added "to" Internet Explorer by the MSXML team (by a guy sneaking in some functionality for the Exchange Outlook Web Access team). It was actually a great example of the power of modular "ActiveX" (which in that case was abused to mean simply COM) scripting -- they didn't need to release a new browser to support it. Of course there are endless downsides to reusing a plug-in structure that had little controls or security, however it did have some merits.