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?"
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Funny)
I'll be writing shit web code for IE6 forever anyway.
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I'll be writing shit web code for IE6 forever anyway.
That really blows. We're informing our web clients that we're no longer supporting IE 6 and that any IE 6 visitor will land on a "nice, soft" page requesting that they upgrade to one of the many other available browsers. We just got one client to agree to upgrade their 25 employees from IE 6 to IE 8 (they already had FF installed but they have some 3rd party sites that require ActiveX).
If you're stuck doing it for an employer or client you may be better served by spending some time nudging them away from
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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.
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They DO know that Win2K support ends in less than a month [wikipedia.org] yes?
What if you don't need support? ;)
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So you will be writing security updates for Windows 2000 by yourself, or backporting them from XP? Or just hoping that firewall and antivirus are all the updates you need?
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Swing and a miss. This thread is quite obviously discussing large corporations running windows 2000 on its workstations. These boxes will no longer receive security updates. I don't care where they move to(linux, mac, or update windows), but they should get off that sinking ship.
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Well, if they are single purpose boxes sitting behind a firewall, with few/no users (depending on corporate purpose) then having a security update is going to matter in about fractions of a percent of the time. If you have someone constantly downloading and installing crap, you might have an issue.
I ran 2000 right up until two years ago then XP with little to no updates or virus software. I ran/run this box without issue (and yes, I did check every so often to see if there was a problem.) In fact, this b
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er... Windows XP is 9 years old... not exactly "new shiny".
Out of curiosity, which Ubuntu version are you using? 6.06?
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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.
Those monsters make changes at a glacial pace. You'll be on IE 7 by 2015. Good luck and invest in lots of ice cold beer.
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Why? If they're ripping up their old infastructure to upgrade, it makes no sense to move to IE7 when moving to IE8/9 would be just as easy. Then again, moving to a proper browser shouldn't be much more difficult, either...
Because part of the reason companies like that take so long to change is that they've got to test a given piece of software for 5 years before they can certify it as reliable enough. So they're going to start testing IE7 later this year, and then certify it in 2015 ;-)
Dan Aris
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Ah. An EDS...errr..HP employee? I remember when IS&S over at GM was spouting off 10 years ago about their 'new' IT model was going to move faster and how they would never be stuck with legacy platforms ever again. When I told them it wouldn't work, they just laughed. Who's laughing now?
Probably those in management who got nice bonuses or kickbacks for selecting the platform they did. And when they can (and probably do) justify the relentless improvement/upgrade cycles to upper management as the "cost of technology advancement" and repeat the same scenario ad-infinitum, I doubt a single red flag is raised. If you think about it that way, chances are, you will be the one to stop laughing, while those who picked and set up such a system will keep on laughing...
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Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
Because IE 6 was designed to fail horribly when it can't understand the web page. Therefore web site developers have to make it work in IE or give it a way to fail nicely.
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Actually, there was no designing involved in the failing parts. The code just ran into unspecified territory. You could say the outcome was determined by natural selection. ;)
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, there was no designing involved in the failing parts. The code just ran into unspecified territory. You could say the outcome was determined by natural selection. ;)
Or... you could say it was designed into it in many areas where Microsoft intentionally ignored standards and inserted their own method of doing things. I would agree with you, if it weren't for all the memos, emails and such that went back and forth at Microsoft about trying to kill Netscape dominance by doing such things (see the DOJ case against MS for more info).
While the PP may seem like a conspiracy theorist, the fact is, ensuring web code would fail on IE unless written to Microsoft's specs/"standards" was indeed an intentional move on their part, combined with their push into the business world for their various technologies that only worked on IE. The intent, as I noted above, was to ensure that they would gain more marketshare over Netscape and take the Internet playing field away from them. They succeeded, and hence, we have IE6 (and IE7 and IE8) to code workarounds for.
I for one still remember the day of going to websites that were IE6 only...
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
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So make it look indecent in IE6? Why is that necessarily worse than telling someone who, for reasons unknown, is continuing to use IE6 that they are not allowed to view your website unless they use the browsers you think they should be using?
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Because it could double your development time and therefore development cost.
I agree with you...most of the time. Most people should design their sites for standards compliance and leave as is for IE=6. You can use a "IF IE 6" tag to show a banner at the top of the site saying something to the effect of "This site doesn't look right. That's because your browser is a piece of crap. You can, however, continue to use this site. It just won't look very nice or work very well. Here's a link to list of reasons w
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As it turns out, Google provides a non-Javascript version of Google maps, on which all the processing is done server side and then returned to the client. So, click on "+" (which is just hyperlink text -- no CSS) and a new page loads with a zoomed in map, and likewise for the other
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Hmmm...that's interesting. And quite impressive, really. Congratulations to Google!
However Google are a big enough company, and Maps is an important enough product that gets enough visitors, that it was worth their while to do this. For most people the extra time, cost and the low percentage of IE6 hits makes it not worth the effort.
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.
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Well, not exactly. It does not force you to do anything. It’s the irrational need to support the die-hards and thereby reinforce the belief that their behavior is correct.
Meanwhile 99% of the web users regularly update their Flash client because otherwise the sites “stop working”.
So in my book it’s the own fault of the industry, that it did not have the spine but the irrational fear to lose the worst part of their customers.
I quickly dealed with this, by making using their “the
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Well, not exactly. It does not force you to do anything. It’s the irrational need to support the die-hards and thereby reinforce the belief that their behavior is correct.
It's RATIONAL to support the 60% plus Internet base out there, in order to have a site that can continue to make money (because one sells a product or information) regardless of one's desire to see IE6 die a horrible and quick death. Fixed that for ya!
Meanwhile 99% of the web users regularly update their Flash client because otherwise the sites “stop working”.
So in my book it’s the own fault of the industry, that it did not have the spine but the irrational fear to lose the worst part of their customers.
I quickly dealed with this, by making using their “the site does not work” logic on themselves: The “browser outdated” error page I redirected them to, looked exactly like the genuine IE error pages. Including a link to complain to customer support to fix IE’s bugs. To the users it looked like their browser failed. So they fixed it. Done. :)
Meanwhile... prompting people with what seems like a malware message, since they already ignored Windows' suggestion to upgrade IE to a more recent version (via Automatic Updates), probably wont work very well. While it works for high profile software that p
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What about using conditional includes, which IE supports, to display a message that says "this website will look like crap until your idiotic browser is updated"? You seem to be mostly worried about layout, a better example would be one of those bugs where legit code actually hides or overwrites content. An ugly but functional website is one thing, a non-functional website is a whole different story and equally possible.
If your customer is a corporate type entity then you code to what they want and inform
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As a web developer with more than ten years experience who doesn't use any kind of "IE only" hacks and code, I disagree.
IE wastes time, because it's the only browser that needs extra care, but when you know what it can and can't do properly, you know how to code css that just works on every browser, IE 6 included, without hacks and without extra CSS files for IE.
Writing extra IE-only css code is a sign of incompetence.
Javascript is a different matter, but jQuery takes care of that problem just fine (mostly).
Makes a rather boring and "old fashioned looking" site... heck, you cant even do xmlHTTPRequests without an IE only hack. Or border spacing of certain elements. Or border thickness. Or dynamic and static DIV placement. Or a variety of other very simple CSS stuff.
But yeah, I guess if one skips all of that, one can make a site that works in everything without IE conditionals. Probably not a good idea nowadays except for simple sites.
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Opera isn't the only browser that needs extra care, its just that it needs a retarded amount of extra care.
Example: Take a select, input, button and textarea. Set them to have the same width, border, padding and margin (non-zero). Look at it in every browser. Do they appear the same width? NO! they do not. The margin of error is different between gecko, webkit, opera and ie.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
What you suggest is like asking: Why can't we make programmes also run on Windows 95, just without all the fancy effects of Aero?
Like it or not websites will become more interactive, even
See also Google Docs, or http://www.jsdesk.com/ [jsdesk.com]
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Note, however, that the AJAX version of
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
I am, I suppose, well behind the times. Some years ago, websites were able to publish information and update the databases they sat in front of (to do things like take orders for merchandise or carry on a conversation), all over secure connections. Thus, in the beginning the web established usefulness as a publishing medium. Then it was a tool to get things done.
Since then, pretty much everything I've seen in various "WebX.0" applications has done the same stuff in different ways.
So...beyond what we had years ago, what sorts of "interactivity" actually serve a useful purpose?
I'm not trying to be an obtuse old man. Seriously, I'd like to know. Maybe there's some really useful thing that I should be doing via the web that I'm not doing now. But I can't really think of what that might be and I'd like some help to figure it out. What new interactivity justifies the visual pollution and system crud that are (apparently) required to make use of it?
Note - "Mobile" apps don't count. I can understand why I might need some specialized program when I'm trying to get something done while moving around. I haven't bought into the "I live through my smartphone" lifestyle, though. I'm asking about things that are useful to me when I sit down at my desktop computer.
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Just minor things like... form input validation for your database update forms without having to do a form submit. Auto-complete for common fields. Drop-downs that can be updated based on what you select from another drop-down.
Oh, and fancy UI stuff too, but since you wanted information related to publishing information and updating databases, I limited my response to those activities.
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: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.
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Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
"I am not a web developer, so I am a bit confused about why websites are unable to provide even a basic level of support for IE6 -- perhaps a simple page without any fancy effects that just gives people whatever information they were looking for. Is it really that necessary to use Javascript for everything?"
Good question, but it's not that simple.
See, CSS and Javascript were DESIGNED to "fail gracefully". You could put some useful style on say a list or a heading, then use CSS to format it. If the browser support was not there, you would see the base elements.
Now this failback would understandably be UGLY (your prettified CSS list menu would look like a 1994 bulleted list), but it would WORK.
If Microsoft chose not to support the CSS standards, they could have done so. It's optional.
The ONLY way Microsoft could ruin CSS and Javascript was by agreeing to go along with the standard, and then change all the meaning. It's like if you spoke a slightly different language than your neighbor, and every 3rd word you spoke had different meaning to your neighbor (as in, every 3rd word was a normal term to you, but an unexpectedly offensive curse word to them).
If a browser did not support said standards, we could have all designed for CSS and IE6 would get a vanilla plain text page.
Microsoft knew that novice web developers would code and test in the "popular" browser first, then test other browsers afterwards. If that was how you developed, you were an unwitting tool in Microsoft's effort to destroy the open web.
It worked, for a time.
Then web developers revolted, by figuring out how to document Microsoft bugs. In the end, we developed this pseudo-language that ran on top of CSS and Javascript, so we could "hide" markup and styles from either IE or from the standards browsers.
All this effort wasted uncountable hours of web developers.
Was this deliberate sabotage by Microsoft? Let's just say that in the US anti-trust trial against Microsoft, emails from Bill Gates were revealed. Bill's emails essentially stated he didn't want to see MS developers "wasting time fixing bugs in HTML that only affect competitive browsers". (Meaning, if your HTML/CSS generation in some desktop app generates horrible invalid code... DON'T fix it... just let the IE guys know so they can write undocumented code to show your page "properly").
Literally, there's a story here how grass-roots web developers fought back to save the "information highway" from being effectively privatized as one company's property.
This is why so many people HATE IE and IE6.. even if they're not the type of people who normally hate Microsoft.
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I'd like to see people with IE6 browser just forced to use the mobile page. Kind of a passive aggressive way of saying "upgrade now."
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IE6 has approximatedly a 10% of browser share, and it's falling quickly. Why bother.
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Not according to NetMarketShare [hitslink.com] and others. The marketshare is still higher than that.
As a point of reference to how it would affect us... with 17% marketshare, one of my sites has 170,000 unique visitors that would be "left out in the cold" if I did not support IE6. That number is higher per other browser share sites that point to around 20% and around 23%... meaning near a quarter of a MILLION potential lost site visitors/customers.
Perhaps if you run a small site with a few visitors, (let's say 1000),
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I'd like to invite you to check out the lynx [isc.org] and links [sourceforge.net] web browsers.
The problem with MSIE6 is that it adds nonstandard extensions to HTML and CSS, does not (natively) support the full PNG spec, it is pathetically insecure, it adds padding to certain HTML elements in a lot of situations where everybody else assumes padding=0 so by making a web page in standard HTML/XHTML that looks gorgeous in every single other web browser will be horribly broken in MSIE6.
MSIE7 and MSIE8 have progressively gotten a TON bett
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Neither of which I use -- there are plenty of desktop applications, including no-cost applications, which are just fine for that and generally do more.
"online banking that doesn't take weeks to navigate"
I have never had any trouble with online banking, and I doubt it is because I am some kind of super-leet hacker.
"even legal free and low-cost on-demand video programming"
Which I saw and us
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Hey, you can make fun of me all you want, and claim that I am stuck in the 90s, but there is really nothing that Javascript heavy websites bring to the table except for fancy effects in web browsers.
And there's nothing that a GUI brings to the table except for fancy effects on a computer screen?
If you seriously can't see any useful purpose for Javascript, then I submit that you really don't understand people, software functionality, or the ways of the world in general.
Dan Aris
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I am not a web developer, so I am a bit confused about why websites are unable to provide even a basic level of support for IE6 -- perhaps a simple page without any fancy effects that just gives people whatever information they were looking for. Is it really that necessary to use Javascript for everything?
Or anything but the most basic HTML? Or CSS? Yeah... I guess if you skip all of those, it's possible...
But here's the thing... doing that also means doing a bunch of extra work for the "IF IE6..." section. It is more intelligent to spend that time adding a bunch of IE6 workarounds to get the same functionality that users of better browsers have.
The only other alternative is to have a very basic site with limited capabilities for everyone - in this day and age, for any complex site, or content driven sit
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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,
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Because designing a page for modern browsers. You put in all the new cool effects to enhance the user experience... (Normal non-tech people actually like a nice modern interface). If you are going to make a non-effect version that is just more work for you to do... For a small group of people who should upgrade anyways.
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I'll be writing shit web code for IE6 forever anyway.
That really blows. We're informing our web clients that we're no longer supporting IE 6 and that any IE 6 visitor will land on a "nice, soft" page requesting that they upgrade to one of the many other available browsers. We just got one client to agree to upgrade their 25 employees from IE 6 to IE 8 (they already had FF installed but they have some 3rd party sites that require ActiveX). If you're stuck doing it for an employer or client you may be better served by spending some time nudging them away from IE 6 because it will save you painful hours in the long run.
When your "clients" are "anyone who uses the Internet and may be interested in your product or information" such a tactic does not work. Trying it, and checking the bounce rate on Google Analytics will confirm this.
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Easy. Just put it into a flash applet and you're guaranteed cross-browser compatibility.
And people wonder why Flash is so popular on the web.
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I don't know about you, but I find it much easier to develop a cross-platform, high-level ("time to market"), integrated (SWT), and well-engineered (to handle "scope creep") client in Java than Javascript.
But I find it even easier to well separate the business and presentation aspects of my client (N.B. netizens: the client isn't only a place for rendering the Pretty) and write UIs using the native toolkit for the 2 or 3 environments I expect clients to use.
The whim of the PHB is a killer, but proofs-of-con
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"Web app" referred to HTML+Javascript, not an ActiveX control. ActiveX is essentially a method for throwing a native Windows app into a browser window, and Slashdotters hate it because in a corporate environment it just gets the job done. And why just get the job done when you can push new, bloated tech for its own sake?
Straight information (a web of hypertext) can be presented with the limited CSS support of IE6. But the pointless marketing department demands to make the page look pixel perfect (I don't wa
Cross Browser Compatibility? (Score:2)
Re:Cross Browser Compatibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you are an optimist, Microsoft's promise of "cross-browser compatibility" means:
We will properly support the standards - AND THIS TIME we REALLY mean it!!
If you are a pessimist (or I might add, a realist) then Microsoft will make this an OPTION - and non-default at that... and when you select it, you are warned about losing certain web features or compatibility (similar to how they warn you against saving Office files in any "open" file format).
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Easy. When the spec is ambiguous you look at the competition and implement the spec in the same way as the majority.
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Nope, they don't want to be tied down to such non-marketable terms such as "standard" or such constricting terms like "compliant".
"Cross Browser" sounds WAY sexier and "compatible" sounds much less like they HAVE to do something.
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No, "cross browser" accurately describes what people want. Nearly always, when some internet nerd starts whining about "standards-compliance", they no clue what the standards actually are, and what they really mean is "Make it work like Firefox".
Realistically, there are hundreds of "standards" which no browser supports, and there are numerous de facto unofficial standards which people expect to work. (Prime example of the latter is transparent PNGs.) "Cross-browser" accurately describes this set of common p
Re:Cross Browser Compatibility? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Apologies for replying to myself.)
The biggest problem when discussing web standards is that the vendors themselves propose the standards. So Apple is the most compliant with Apple's proposed standards, while Microsoft is the most compliant with Microsoft's proposed standards, etc. From the W3C's POV they are all the same, while the marketplace sorts these things out into common "cross-browser" features versus things which are considered "proprietary".
In other words, nobody cares that CSS3 rounded borders aren't an official "standards compliant" feature, it is a "cross browser" feature and they want rounded fucking corners on their website.
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A few browsers which more or less by accident behave similarly, now that's a vision that Microsoft can get behind! That situation can be manipulated. Objective standards, on the other hand, are the enemy of relativism.
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Actually, Microsoft is generating a tons of CSS test cases, which more of an objective measure than the checkbox marketing which usually is used by browser vendors.
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Yes, that makes it seem like they're going out of their way to avoid using the phrase "standards compliant". People familiar with IE's history of compliance should take this with a grain of salt. Maybe redmond is slowly starting to realize that the web isn't about their browser, it's about standards. Or it's just another case of their usual corporate verbosity.
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I don't know if you've noticed, but the standards are pretty shit. (Well, HTML5 is much better.) All browsers venture outside of the standards for various things, so it's more important to be cross-browser compatible (i.e. venture outside of the standards in the same direction the other guys are going) than it is to be strictly standards-compliant.
Now accelerated to pwn your machine 100% faster (Score:3, Funny)
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Hey, he’s not trolling but exactly right. This exact thing is the single biggest problem with IE.
If I missed them taking it out of there (Got proof? Since MS did already lie about this more than once.), I take my statement back.
But if not, the moderator is the troll here.
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Better Is Better Than Worse (Score:2)
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?
I guess it can't hurt to ask, but I doubt MS is going to come that far in just one major version upgrade.
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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?
Is this a game of "Spot the Star Trek reference"? Because I think they spelled his name wrong...
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Cross Browser - Hehe (Score:2)
Bill Gates: IE9 will support ALL browsers
that's right both of them.
IE6 AND IE7!
And yes I like country music!
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Whoah that's about time, i'd almost believe it.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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Safari runs the new Asteroid Belt demo just fine at about 15 FPS.
For me:
:20 FPS, but doesnt work right (only animates when receiving user input, FPS is mostly without displaying anything)
Opera 10.54 : 31 FPS
Safari 533.16
Chrome 5.0.375.70 : 1 FPS
IE9 Preview : 60 FPS
So Opera is the only official browser that can run that Asteroid Belt Demo.
Microsoft supports H.264 (Score:2)
And that's a good thing. I'd rather see them support H.264 than WMV.
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H.264 is still a proprietary codex.
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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>
Without Firefox... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did anyone else think that we really have to thank the Mozilla team for this? Without Firefox, none of this would have happened. Wed’d still use IE6.
Firefox tends do go a bit downwards in quality, lately. But I don’t care. Thank you, Mozilla team! Every single one of you. Everyone who installed and promoted it. And the team who made the great logo and CI, that’s so fashionable that non-geek women put in on their t-shirts.
*grabs web-Oscar, steps down from the podium and runs away with it!*
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.
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Firefox tends do go a bit downwards in quality, lately.
I don't want to debate this point in general, but it's worth noting that Firefox 3.7 alphas (which also have Direct2D hardware acceleration) match IE9 performance on those canvas demos.
Still, it's a good thing that IE9 brings this to the table. It's like what Chrome did to JS - after they rolled out V8 with its insane speed improvements, and everyone saw the numbers, there was a rush of all browser writers optimizing their JS engines, adding JIT and whatnot - so even those who don't use Chrome benefit from
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Did anyone else think that we really have to thank the Mozilla team for this? Without Firefox, none of this would have happened. Wed'd still use IE6.
Firefox tends do go a bit downwards in quality, lately. But I don't care. Thank you, Mozilla team! Every single one of you. Everyone who installed and promoted it. And the team who made the great logo and CI, that's so fashionable that non-geek women put in on their t-shirts.
And if Netscape hadn't screwed the pooch in the first place, IE wouldn't have obtained
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I would argue that Apple et. al. and Webkit is forcing Microsoft to up their game rather than Mozilla/Firefox because of the mobile market. Very few outside of Mozilla uses FireFox's rendering engine. Google, Palm, Apple, and soon Blackberry are all adopting webkit. That means in the mobile market there is webkit with an overwhelming dominance in that market. Especially when RIM switches their browser. I see very few Windows Mobile devices anymore and even those I do see are usually running some versio
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.
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...
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Now the trick will be to convince MS to support this out of the box...
I suspect it would go like this:
1. Wait for a few years to see if Google (or someone else) gets sued over WebM.
2. If the above doesn't happen, add support for WebM out of the box.
Why risk it when you can let others do so at their own expense?
In the meantime, if WebM becomes the codec for YouTube, I'd expect OEMs to preinstall it on sold machines in the same way they typically preinstall Flash (and other crap) today. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to see Google pay them for it (they already have some deal
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IE9 will support WebM if it's installed, but not Theora.
I somewhat support this. Codecs should be system libraries and provide support equally to all requestion applications, rather than an application specific library.
Safari has that level of support already (Score:2)
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.
Apple/Safari will support Theora if the Xiph quicktime component is installed, too. So Apple already offers the same level of "support" for Theora that Microsoft is promising.
Requiring users to download and install some codec is probably a non-starter in both cases, though.
Because those are standards; WebM is not (Score:2)
HTML, CSS, WOFF, and PNG are vendor-neutral open standards. So are AVC and AAC. WebM is not a standard.
W3C and ISO/IEC are standards bodies and Google is not. An AVC-based YouTube competes fairly with all other Internet video, but WebM creates incompatibilities and confusion that will drive publishers to YouTube.
HTML, CSS, WOFF, PNG, AVC, and AAC are not vulnerable to submarine patents, and WebM is.
There is a ton of content in HTML, CSS, WOFF, PNG, AVC, and AAC, and there is nothing in WebM.
AVC is the same
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Also, companies like Apple and Microsoft aren't actually conspiring against open source,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents [wikipedia.org]
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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.
The enterprise cap on H.264 royalties is $5 million/year.
That is the cost to Google.
The cost to Disney/Pixar - and it covers every distribution channel and outlet the mega media corporation owns.
Broadcast. Cable. Satellite. Internet. Cellular...
The independent tv broadcaster has the option of paying a one-ti
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The enterprise cap on H.264 royalties is $5 million/year.
That is still a hell of a lot of money. You can charge me a one off distribution fee (even that is OTT), but taking a slice of my distribution costs, especially for content I am not charging for is ridiculous. Is a site simply showing holiday videos or product samples meant to be pay every time it is shown?
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They're not going to suddenly switch YouTube over to all WebM.
Huh? They're already doing that.
the leading candidate isn't as good h264.
There have been some tests on Theora vs WebM vs H.264. The latter rips everyone to shreds in high profile, with WebM in the middle, and Theora far behind.
But that isn't really used for web streaming today in practice, and e.g. most smartphones can't decode it fast enough. Compared to H.264 base, it's a match - depending on the specific video, either WebM or H.264 gives picture that is very slightly better, for the same file size. Theora still lags behind in most cases.
Long st
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You're the one with no grasp on reality.
Do you seriously think people watching Youtube videos give a shit about microscopic differences in encoder quality?
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Still rather warm.
The problem I foresee is supporting multiple versions of the same browser. IE6, a 10 year old browser (in August) still holds 7.1%, IE7 (nearly 4) holds 9.1%, IE8 holds 16% and now yet another IE version on the way. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp [w3schools.com]
How many conditional statements will I need to support 4 versions of IE?
If anything, it's getting hotter (for developers)
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Unless you are writing a wide audience Internet facing e-commerce site, I would forgo any special measures to support IE6 completely. That is what Microsoft wants you to do. IE6 is so old that going out of your way to support it is usually a waste of time.
IE7, on the other hand, probably needs to be supported for two more years, and IE8 for five, on most general purpose websites. Seven years is more than enough.
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Oh, right....because the 7% still running IE6 are going to stampede over to IE7/8/9.
I'd be willing to bet that after 3 or 4 more years, the IE6 share will be as low as 4% maybe even 3%. By then, we'll have IE10, and 5 IE versions to support.
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Feature detection, wow, what a concept.
I could then bank on 38% effectiveness (lowest score held by IE)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Browser_Feature_Detection [mozilla.org]
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