6 ms·

I think the old "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer" is back (only ... with chrome as the new ie)

by _ZeD_ 10y ago

taf2 10y ago
Except chrome is open source and actually improves multiple times a year...
- lucideer 10y ago
  Chrome is closed-source (though based on the open-source Chromium project so it can nicely claim the associated kudos of an open-source project). IE also "improved" rapidly back in the IE4/5/6 days, adding features such as CSS filters and AJAX. These "improvements" were considered much needed progress by developers at the time; later, with the wisdom of hindsight, rightly seen as proprietary extensions with little to no consideration for interoperability. And if you think the Blink team's membership of, and contributions to, WHATWG/W3C/&c. automatically ticks all the friendly interoperability boxes, you've clearly never encountered monstrosities such as https://compat.spec.whatwg.org/ https://compat.spec.whatwg.org/ (created and maintained by Mozilla)
  - taf2 10y ago
    IE 6 did not improve for many years (7?) until Firefox got them to do IE7- also comparing the parts of chrome to the parts of IE6.... I'm not sure I buy your quick dismal of the open source difference between the two engines. I can download and compile chromium which is almost identical to chrome. What equivalent did we have with IE from 2000 until today I still can't download IE and compile from source?
    - lucideer 10y ago
      In terms of improvement, I was referring to IE4->IE5->IE6 I'm not really sure what you mean when you say "I'm not buying your quick dismissal": I never dismissed anything nor made out either that there is or isn't a large difference between the engines. I just corrected a statement that is definitely factually incorrect (and unfortunately believed by all too many). On the actual differences between them, Chrome may be "almost identical" to Chromium, but unless you're working for Google, or have very comprehensively disassembled it, the differences is not easy to measure. What could be tiny in binary size could still be a massive change in behaviour, particularly in terms of things like telemetry. Beyond that, they are of course not equivalent, they're just analogous. Finding a few tiny chinks in the comparison is not the same as invalidating it though. The primary analog is the approach to interop, and the resultant behaviour of the development community. Participation in standards bodies is an improvement over the IE6 days, but if you take a deeper look at Blink development, you quickly realise it's a pretty insignificant one in practice. Google controls the HTML5 spec. (the editor is a Google employee and the WHATWG is not a democratic body like the W3C), and outside of that the Blink team basically just implement what they want and specify later, rather than the reverse. The response of the development community: supporting the monopoly by ignoring interop - is pretty self-evident from links like this one.
      - taf2 10y ago
        so 1997 to 2001? MS was innovating. What about from 2001 to 2006? 5 years of zero development? Big difference between Chrome and IE6. IE7 (2006 - 2009) IE8 (2009 - 2011) You can't seriously tell me this is comparable progress to Chrome/Mozilla/Safari? My issue with anyone equating IE6 to recent browsers is they are not comparable. It was really bad during the IE6 days and we had no alternative. Today when new features land in Chromium they are opensource, available for the Mozilla, Webkit, and IE teams to study. IE is still closed source. Whether it calls itself Edge or IE it is still a closed source browser. A closed source browser is what allowed 5 years of zero. If you want to point out privacy concerns with Chrome please run Chromium - https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium or run Firefox. These are at least Open Source e.g. our internet is free. IE is the ultimate evil to the internet and any business that operates on the internet should remember IE is a threat because it is closed source.
        lucideer 10y ago
        As I already said above, I'm analogising; pointing out minor inconsistencies doesn't undermine the comparison. No two scenarios are ever identical. The post-IE6 history you're referring to is a bit moot: we have yet to see where Chrome will go. Minor factual note: the Edge engine is open-source, so your arguments for studying Chrome's implementation source applies equally to Microsoft at this stage. > IE is the ultimate evil to the internet This is straying very quickly into hyperbole. The debate about open-/closed-source somewhat misses the mark anyway. Opera (Presto) was always entirely closed-source and it did much more for the open web than most. The killer is market dominance - lack of diversity leads to bad things. And IE has long since lost its market crown.
        Manishearth 10y ago
        > the Edge engine is open-source, Only the Javascript engine is open source, fwiw. That's not the majority of the browser. (Unless EdgeHTML was open sourced since I last checked.)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - geofft 10y ago
    > Chrome is closed-source (though based on the open-source Chromium project so it can nicely claim the associated kudos of an open-source project). My impression is that there aren't any closed-source bits in the browser itself (i.e., there are no proprietary patches to Chromium code), it's just the Google account integration, plus things like Hangouts or Cast or whatever which mostly take the form of extensions, plus things like the Flash plugin. (Also, that compat page looks very non-monstrous; the vast majority are just aliases for non-webkit-prefixed names, and of the remainder, nothing is anywhere comparable to CSS filters or XHR. Is there a reason this exists for the -webkit prefix but not for the -moz or -ms prefixes?)
    - zerocrates 10y ago
      > Is there a reason this exists for the -webkit prefix but not for the -moz or -ms prefixes? I assume because the feeling is that -moz prefixes no longer form part of the "de facto web." Targeting for desktop Chrome isn't as common anymore, but this document seems squarely aimed at the mobile space, where Safari-specific (and to a lesser extent Chrome- and Android-specific) functionality is more or less epidemic.
    - Manishearth 10y ago
      > the vast majority are just aliases for non-webkit-prefixed names This ignores the history of many of these. The webkit-prefixed names came first, and the standardization folks just decided to make the unprefixed forms work the same way. If Chrome implements something as a prefixed property that folks start to use, standardization will be heavily skewed towards their syntax and semantics. Also, the document does not include some things like -webkit-gradient which Firefox still implements (though I'd like to try and remove it). -webkit-gradient has more features than standardized foo-gradient and causes some complexities in the Firefox code. (-webkit-gradient wasn't a Chrome thing, however, it was an Apple thing. There's a long and boring history here) > but not for the -moz or -ms prefixes? There aren't (m)any webpages out there using moz/ms-prefixed properties that don't use the webkit or standardized versions too. Also, IIRC Firefox and IE stopped prefixing things earlier on (could be wrong here).

I think the old "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer" is back (only ... with chrome as the new ie)

by _ZeD_ 10y ago

I think the old "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer" is back (only ... with chrome as the new ie)

taf2 10y ago

Except chrome is open source and actually improves multiple times a year...

lucideer 10y ago
Chrome is closed-source (though based on the open-source Chromium project so it can nicely claim the associated kudos of an open-source project). IE also "improved" rapidly back in the IE4/5/6 days, adding features such as CSS filters and AJAX. These "improvements" were considered much needed progress by developers at the time; later, with the wisdom of hindsight, rightly seen as proprietary extensions with little to no consideration for interoperability. And if you think the Blink team's membership of, and contributions to, WHATWG/W3C/&c. automatically ticks all the friendly interoperability boxes, you've clearly never encountered monstrosities such as https://compat.spec.whatwg.org/ https://compat.spec.whatwg.org/ (created and maintained by Mozilla)
- taf2 10y ago
  IE 6 did not improve for many years (7?) until Firefox got them to do IE7- also comparing the parts of chrome to the parts of IE6.... I'm not sure I buy your quick dismal of the open source difference between the two engines. I can download and compile chromium which is almost identical to chrome. What equivalent did we have with IE from 2000 until today I still can't download IE and compile from source?
  - lucideer 10y ago
    In terms of improvement, I was referring to IE4->IE5->IE6 I'm not really sure what you mean when you say "I'm not buying your quick dismissal": I never dismissed anything nor made out either that there is or isn't a large difference between the engines. I just corrected a statement that is definitely factually incorrect (and unfortunately believed by all too many). On the actual differences between them, Chrome may be "almost identical" to Chromium, but unless you're working for Google, or have very comprehensively disassembled it, the differences is not easy to measure. What could be tiny in binary size could still be a massive change in behaviour, particularly in terms of things like telemetry. Beyond that, they are of course not equivalent, they're just analogous. Finding a few tiny chinks in the comparison is not the same as invalidating it though. The primary analog is the approach to interop, and the resultant behaviour of the development community. Participation in standards bodies is an improvement over the IE6 days, but if you take a deeper look at Blink development, you quickly realise it's a pretty insignificant one in practice. Google controls the HTML5 spec. (the editor is a Google employee and the WHATWG is not a democratic body like the W3C), and outside of that the Blink team basically just implement what they want and specify later, rather than the reverse. The response of the development community: supporting the monopoly by ignoring interop - is pretty self-evident from links like this one.
    - taf2 10y ago
      so 1997 to 2001? MS was innovating. What about from 2001 to 2006? 5 years of zero development? Big difference between Chrome and IE6. IE7 (2006 - 2009) IE8 (2009 - 2011) You can't seriously tell me this is comparable progress to Chrome/Mozilla/Safari? My issue with anyone equating IE6 to recent browsers is they are not comparable. It was really bad during the IE6 days and we had no alternative. Today when new features land in Chromium they are opensource, available for the Mozilla, Webkit, and IE teams to study. IE is still closed source. Whether it calls itself Edge or IE it is still a closed source browser. A closed source browser is what allowed 5 years of zero. If you want to point out privacy concerns with Chrome please run Chromium - https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium or run Firefox. These are at least Open Source e.g. our internet is free. IE is the ultimate evil to the internet and any business that operates on the internet should remember IE is a threat because it is closed source.
      - lucideer 10y ago
        As I already said above, I'm analogising; pointing out minor inconsistencies doesn't undermine the comparison. No two scenarios are ever identical. The post-IE6 history you're referring to is a bit moot: we have yet to see where Chrome will go. Minor factual note: the Edge engine is open-source, so your arguments for studying Chrome's implementation source applies equally to Microsoft at this stage. > IE is the ultimate evil to the internet This is straying very quickly into hyperbole. The debate about open-/closed-source somewhat misses the mark anyway. Opera (Presto) was always entirely closed-source and it did much more for the open web than most. The killer is market dominance - lack of diversity leads to bad things. And IE has long since lost its market crown.
        Manishearth 10y ago
        > the Edge engine is open-source, Only the Javascript engine is open source, fwiw. That's not the majority of the browser. (Unless EdgeHTML was open sourced since I last checked.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- geofft 10y ago
  > Chrome is closed-source (though based on the open-source Chromium project so it can nicely claim the associated kudos of an open-source project). My impression is that there aren't any closed-source bits in the browser itself (i.e., there are no proprietary patches to Chromium code), it's just the Google account integration, plus things like Hangouts or Cast or whatever which mostly take the form of extensions, plus things like the Flash plugin. (Also, that compat page looks very non-monstrous; the vast majority are just aliases for non-webkit-prefixed names, and of the remainder, nothing is anywhere comparable to CSS filters or XHR. Is there a reason this exists for the -webkit prefix but not for the -moz or -ms prefixes?)
  - zerocrates 10y ago
    > Is there a reason this exists for the -webkit prefix but not for the -moz or -ms prefixes? I assume because the feeling is that -moz prefixes no longer form part of the "de facto web." Targeting for desktop Chrome isn't as common anymore, but this document seems squarely aimed at the mobile space, where Safari-specific (and to a lesser extent Chrome- and Android-specific) functionality is more or less epidemic.
  - Manishearth 10y ago
    > the vast majority are just aliases for non-webkit-prefixed names This ignores the history of many of these. The webkit-prefixed names came first, and the standardization folks just decided to make the unprefixed forms work the same way. If Chrome implements something as a prefixed property that folks start to use, standardization will be heavily skewed towards their syntax and semantics. Also, the document does not include some things like -webkit-gradient which Firefox still implements (though I'd like to try and remove it). -webkit-gradient has more features than standardized foo-gradient and causes some complexities in the Firefox code. (-webkit-gradient wasn't a Chrome thing, however, it was an Apple thing. There's a long and boring history here) > but not for the -moz or -ms prefixes? There aren't (m)any webpages out there using moz/ms-prefixed properties that don't use the webkit or standardized versions too. Also, IIRC Firefox and IE stopped prefixing things earlier on (could be wrong here).