IE9 Preview Touts Cross Browser Compatibility 181
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 development team has announced the availability of the third IE9 platform preview release on the IE blog. Dean Hachamovitch writes, 'The third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, available now, continues the deep work around hardware acceleration to enable the same standards-based markup to run faster. This is the latest installment of the rhythm we started in March, delivering platform preview releases approximately every eight weeks and listening to developers. You'll see more performance, same markup, and hardware-accelerated HTML5.' The announcement focuses on cross-browser compatibility, noting that when 'developers spend less time rewriting their sites to work across browsers they have more time to create amazing experiences on the Web.' Curiously, however, the video embedded in the page works only in some browsers. Dear Microsoft, IE9 supports many royalty-free, web-compatible formats out of the box (HTML, CSS, WOFF, PNG, and the like) so why not at least one more?"
WebM will probably fail (Score:1, Interesting)
I bet Google doesn't even care if it succeeds; odds are, they have it out there to put pressure on MPEG-LA with respect to licensing fees. They're not going to suddenly switch YouTube over to all WebM.
I know y'all want a totally unencumbered codec to win out here, but there probably isn't one in existence, and the leading candidate isn't as good h264.
Also, companies like Apple and Microsoft aren't actually conspiring against open source, nor do they have a financial incentive to see WebM lose out on patent litigation grounds (they don't make money from MPEG-LA licensing).
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:3, Interesting)
When one of your biggest clients happens to be GM or Blue Cross, it doesn't happen very quickly or ever. I think there are still quite a few Win 2000 machines over there.
Whoah that's about time, i'd almost believe it.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
IMO, with the existence of javascript libraries like jQuery or prototype, javascript isn't the issue. IE6 has so many bugs to keep up with (double margin, float bugs) that it forces you to create 1 1/2 websites (code that only runs on IE6 is the 1/2.) You tell it I want a a 6px border and place it 10px from the top and you can end up with a 12px border and 12px from the top. So you end up writing code to say, if its IE6, give it a 3px border and 8px from the top (knowing that it will double your 3px and add a few pixels to the latter.) So to answer your question, if we didn't write code specifically for IE6 (even without javascript) some sites would look so bad that they would be unusable in IE6. Stupid blue E.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of our sites are relatively simple and use formats & javascript libraries we've developed that support IE 6 without any issues at all. If a new or existing client wants this kind of site we don't "break" the IE 6 support - we simply let them know that any future upgrades or additions may not be able to do everything they want (either we can't add the 'fancy' stuff because it would require reworking of the infrastructure or it would break IE 6 compatibility). We always give them the option and if they are willing to spend the extra money on IE 6 compatibility we'll do it but we design the entire site to work the same in all browsers so they have a limited feature set to choose from.
We see dwindling IE 6 visitors but we're also aware that some of our clients still have a large percentage of IE 6 visitors. Because of that we don't offer certain features or enhancements to them. We're upfront about it and they are willing to live with the less fancy site as long as it meets the needs of their visitors.
Re:Cross Browser Compatibility? (Score:3, Interesting)
HTML5 Canvas Support (Score:5, Interesting)
The best part about this preview is the addition of HTML5 Canvas support, the lack of which would be a serious impediment to cross platform deployment of a large number of useful applications.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Interesting)
The real questions is "how many man hours, and how much of our client's money, should we spend trying to handle IE 6 compatibility and functionality?"
Thats for the client to decide.
Its as if you think that if IE6 was eliminated from the landscape, that you would get to do the job in less time for the same money. Thats not how markets work. If your job gets easier, so does your competitions job.
Re:Microsoft supports H.264 (Score:3, Interesting)
And still, nobody cares. ;) ;)
The specs are available. There are open source codecs (=encoder/decoder) for it.
And nobody cares what MPEG LA wants.
They gave the information out, and did not demand something in return. Now it’s too late. <stew-beef>MPEG LA, go fuck yourself!</stew-beef>
IE9 and WebM (Score:4, Interesting)
I saw another article [theregister.co.uk] over at The Register about the new IE9 preview.
There was one section I found particularly interesting in there:
So... IE9 will support WebM if it's installed, but not Theora.
While this is not supported out of the box, this could actually be a tipping point for WebM.
Without IE9's WebM support, things looked like this:
H.264 support: IE, Safari, Chrome
WebM support: FireFox, Chrome, Opera
In that case, H.264 looked like the winner. But if you add IE9 to the WebM column, you suddenly have support for WebM from everyone but Apple.
Now the trick will be to convince MS to support this out of the box...
Reminds me of a situation I had with a new phone.. (Score:5, Interesting)
back then I was scrapping for money, camera phones were relatively new, I needed a digital camera and couldn't afford one, and I could get a phone with decent camera, with a contract, for very reasonable money. And I needed a new phone anyway.
So I picked one. It could make photos okay, but to get them I could only send them through MMS to my email, for exorbitant fees. To download them I needed a special RS232-based cable... and the dealer didn't have them. No import, not available, if ordered from the net, including shipping, it would cost more than the phone, and about as much as a digital camera. But hurray, there are cheap chinese USB cables that supposedly work!
And they do, for everything EXCEPT downloading the photos. A 3rd party app can download thumbnails of the photos. The official app doesn't recognize the cable. The fora are filled with people asking how to get the photos, the universal answer is "get the official cable".
Quite pissed off, I first hacked together a RS232 cable using the plug from the chinese one and a handful of electronics. I found out the only difference from the "unofficial RS232" was that official had DTR and RTS shorted, the knock-off - unconnected. Still not satisfied I began reverse-engineering the AT command set the phone used to talk with the computer. I found commands to request list of photos, download and delete them, then how to extract the photo from the junk the phone sends as reply to request... I wrote a Perl app that worked with any serial, even the emulated RS232 over USB. It was clunky, it worked from command line only, but it worked with any cable.
I posted it on the official fora. To my surprise, instead of ban&delete, I received a surprised question from the developers: Why? Why would anyone want to use it? We have the official app which is infinitely better!
I explained how there are no official cables in my country. How I bought a phone for the camera, and I can't use the camera. That I understand they want to profit from their cables, but sorry, I feel cheated, I want to use the camera. Oh, and I listed an extract from first page of the support forum, about 20 posts of cable problems, to which my program was a solution.
That was the last I used my app. A new version of the official app was released less than a week later, and it ignored the DTR/RTS, working correctly with all cables.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, I don't get it either. A long time ago I worked on a web app that supported IE3, IE4 and Netscape. All the layout was done with tables. Validation was done both on the server and in JavaScript. We sniffed the browser and turned off JS if the browser was not whitelisted. The site would still work - it just needed to round trip to the server if a form contained an invalid date for example. On a browser with decent JS support you could skip that step and reduce the server load a bit.
IE3 was very quirky, IE4 wasn't too bad and Netscape got most stuff right even though it was a bit old. But the corporate desktops we were aiming at demanded IE3 compatibility so we made sure that we didn't need much sophistication on the client.
Why it's "OMG totally impossible" to support IE6 is frankly beyond me.