A Mozilla Plugin to Help Overcome IE Rendering Flaw

least_weasel writes "An article on Ars Technica reveals Mozilla's intention to create and release a plugin for Internet Explorer that would allow the often-criticized IE to utilize some of the cooler rendering code developed for Firefox. The current WIP focuses on rendering using HTML5 standards, but the plans seem to be more ambitious than just fixing this one small piece of IE. The article covers some of the plans, hurdles, and potential benefits. It also spills the beans on the code name for the project: Screaming Monkey."

Spill the beans?

[EvilRyry]

I've been reading about this for months. Its not exactly top secret.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:ScreamingMonkey [mozilla.org]

Re:Interesting, but difficult

[AKAImBatman]

Java is already installed on most OEM computers. And as I mentioned in the last sentence, Flash can be used to create a similar shunt. Flash has even greater market penetration [zdnet.com] than Java. It's not 100%, but it's about as close as you can get. As a bonus, most users without Flash would be savvy enough to be using FireFox anyway. (Given that one has to actively AVOID having Flash installed these days.)

Re:HTML5 is a standard now?

[hr.wien]

HTML5 comes in two flavours [w3.org]. One is straight HTML5 which is based off HTML4 (same parsing rules), the other is XHTML5 which is strict XML and requires the application/xml content type. None of them are really related to XHTML2 [w3.org] which is mostly dead at this point.

Re:FireFox

[lilo_booter]

It generally isn't though - for most people, it just comes across as though someone got the expression hideously wrong and negated the intention of their statement in the process.

Re:tacit recognition of fail

[theCat]

This is entirely correct; the market leading browser is non-standard in many ways, and that breaks standards as a concept, or might have. But that is just a tactic towards a strategic goal, and it was the strategic goal to which I alluded in my post. Standards largely won out, so today we say IE is borken rather than saying it is the One True Way. Nice play, MS.

Standards are like the white blood cells of the Internet, and are the chief way that the system is able to work at all given the complexity and chaos of its origins. Without standards, it would eventually fall apart due to internal "diseases" born of the Not Coded Here mentality of corporations. MS probably wasn't so worried about the threat of email, or IRC, or gopher-space. But a graphic application that ran over resources and data spaces not-on-the-desktop must have made Bill Gates soil himself.

Thanks for the critique.

-- act fast decide fast --

Re:Er...

[colfer]

From TFA: "Unfortunately, scripted manipulation of VML [with exCanvas] is too slow to be used for highly interactive web applications."

Still it does seem crazy to expect enough people to install the plugin to make it universal enough for developers, as Flash is now.

Then the rest of the article is about Adobe. "This is purely speculation, but If Adobe decided to ship [the new Moz plugin] as part of the next major iteration of the Flash plugin, it would rapidly accelerate adoption and get it onto lots of computers."

Re:Look to the beam in your own eye

[Ant P.]

You want SVG as background-image? Here you go [mozillazine.org]. Fast enough to do this [mozillazine.org] in realtime? I honestly couldn't say, I'm more excited that their CSS3 support is finally catching up to Konqueror 3.5.

Re:Look to the beam in your own eye

[Tweenk]

you can't even center a div consistently across IE (#yourdivsparent{text-align:center;}#yourdiv{text-align:left;}) and non-IE (#yourdiv{margin:0 auto;}).

CSS centering (margin: auto) works properly even in IE 6.0 but only if you use a Strict doctype. This is particularly annoying on auction sites where you can type your own HTML but are usually forced to use the Transitional doctype of the site.

Re:Er...

[larry bagina]

opera, safari, and firefox all support canvas natively. excanvas uses vml, which is ie specific.

Idealistic

[dreamchaser]

You missed the key word there...professional. It means one who makes money from their profession. Developing to standards is great but it doesn't necessarily put food on the table. Idealism is nice, but it can cause one to starve. My guess is you are still in school and haven't had to pay any bills?

IE Still Required

[Anonymous Coward]

For some websites and their applications, such as Netflix's Instant Watch application, the IE engine is still required. When ever I want to watch a movie over Netflix, I have to use IE7 instead of FF3.

Re:Er...

[ksd1337]

Ha. But while the jocks drive their nice cars and play gold on office time, the nerd builds his huge operating system-funded empire, and most likely, the jock will be using that operating system.

NOT Screaming Monkey

[metalpet]

ScreamingMonkey is a project that aimed at providing IE with a JS runtime able to run EcmaScript 4 programs.

Since ES4 is apparently dead, I'm not sure where that leaves ScreamingMonkey.

The canvas stuff is a different project that follows the same general approach, but on a different browser component.

Re:Exactly backwards

[the entropy]

You forget about the web developers who need to get their sites working under all major browsers though.

Most web devs these days will develop a site according to standards, test it under firefox, opera, safari, etc... Notice that it works just fine under those(with sometimes the need for minor tweaking) then proceed to hack it up to support IE6 (and 7 to a lesser extent)