3 ms·

While I applaud IE team for doing an amazing job in recent time, I can't help but point out the fact that their motivation for making IE more compliant has to d

by pavs 16y ago

While I applaud IE team for doing an amazing job in recent time, I can't help but point out the fact that their motivation for making IE more compliant has to do with selling more of their products and perhaps had little to do with making the best product. And they did it only after they realized that they are loosing browser market share by large number in a very short period of time. I am not suggesting that mozilla/Opera/Chrome developers don't care about money; but making the best browser for them was not a reactionary motivation to their low browser market share. At least for Opera, they have been right up there, or as long as I can remember, as the most standard compatible browser. Yet their browser market share never went above 1% (statcounter). And they are still making it better, recently developed the fastest JS engine. My point being. I can't trust a company/developer who is reactionary to the market share and their profit line as opposed to doing their job good in the first place. AFAI am concerned, as long as I have the choice, I will never use IE.

est 16y ago
> their motivation for making IE more compliant has to do with selling more of their products and perhaps had little to do with making the best product. If you mean it, Firefox should have supported H.264. Mozilla/Opera aren't so innovating in the old days. I remember there was a HUGE ad in the toolbar area of Opera when it's still a shareware. I have to use a no-ad patch/crack. Tons of innovating features exists before Mozilla, there were lots of thirdparty IE shell browsers like MyIE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_Explorer_shells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_Explorer_shel... They were quiet because there weren't so many buzzword or hype nor any marketing campaign backed by Google.
kenjackson 16y ago
The motivation for all of these companies is money, except maybe Mozilla Foundation, being non-profit. It's just that many times your interests are aligned with different things. For example, Opera makes its money from the browser. Plain and simple they need to sell their browser. And really they have no other product. Google is a very different story. Let me give you an example, do you think Google would ever release a version of Chrome that allowed you to block all advertising? Even if that was the best user experience possible, they want to sell you ads. There plan to do it is to make the rest of the experience so good that you stay on the web and click ads. But they won't do anything, regardless of how beneficial to the user, where there's a reasonable possibility that they'd drastically reduce their profit. I personally don't buy the whole "good company" "bad company" thing. But I do look for companies whose profit is aligned with my interest. That changes over time (both my interests and the company's), but I simple don't have this belief that some companies are "gooder". That died with my belief in Santa Claus.
- josefresco 16y ago
  Footnote *The Mozilla Foundation is essentially funded by Google. Yes it could be any other tech company but for now it's Google.
- csytan 16y ago
  > But I do look for companies whose profit is aligned with my interest. This is excellent advice for building a business (especially in the B2B space). Thanks!
Daniel_Newby 16y ago
> I can't trust a company/developer who is reactionary to the market share and their profit line as opposed to doing their job good in the first place. They did a damn good job in the first place. IE 5.5 was such a tremendous step forward in reliability and consistency that web apps stampeded towards it and away from the alternative, the hideous Netscape 4.72. Before anybody could plan for it, tens of billions of dollars of activity had moved to IE, and Netscape's market capitalization was a smoking crater. The catch was that the web apps of that time were brittle, something like Perl or PHP code with HTML snippets hard-coded into it. The brittleness of these apps prematurely standardized the quirks of IE 5.5/6. Microsoft had no choice but to put the product line on long-term support. Consequently, a lot of app authors sensibly decided to target IE 6's carved-in-stone quirks rather than emerging standards. At that point IE 6 was there to stay for the long haul; trying to migrate away would have been tilting at windmills. What we are seeing today is that (1) the emerging standards of 1998 have finally been carved into stone, (2) the web app frameworks have finally gotten good enough at separating logic from presentation to make rewrites worthwhile, and (3) IE challengers finally accumulated enough development to compete. This is not because Microsoft was evil, but because you have to climb a tall hill to replace a pretty good solution with an ideal solution.
- btilly 16y ago
  The rumor that I've heard is that Microsoft sold a bunch of support contracts for IE 6 with huge potential penalties if Microsoft failed on its end. This gave them huge financial incentives to support the quirks of that browser for as long as those contracts were still valid.

by pavs 16y ago

est 16y ago

> their motivation for making IE more compliant has to do with selling more of their products and perhaps had little to do with making the best product. If you mean it, Firefox should have supported H.264. Mozilla/Opera aren't so innovating in the old days. I remember there was a HUGE ad in the toolbar area of Opera when it's still a shareware. I have to use a no-ad patch/crack. Tons of innovating features exists before Mozilla, there were lots of thirdparty IE shell browsers like MyIE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_Explorer_shells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_Explorer_shel... They were quiet because there weren't so many buzzword or hype nor any marketing campaign backed by Google.

kenjackson 16y ago

The motivation for all of these companies is money, except maybe Mozilla Foundation, being non-profit. It's just that many times your interests are aligned with different things. For example, Opera makes its money from the browser. Plain and simple they need to sell their browser. And really they have no other product. Google is a very different story. Let me give you an example, do you think Google would ever release a version of Chrome that allowed you to block all advertising? Even if that was the best user experience possible, they want to sell you ads. There plan to do it is to make the rest of the experience so good that you stay on the web and click ads. But they won't do anything, regardless of how beneficial to the user, where there's a reasonable possibility that they'd drastically reduce their profit. I personally don't buy the whole "good company" "bad company" thing. But I do look for companies whose profit is aligned with my interest. That changes over time (both my interests and the company's), but I simple don't have this belief that some companies are "gooder". That died with my belief in Santa Claus.

josefresco 16y ago
Footnote *The Mozilla Foundation is essentially funded by Google. Yes it could be any other tech company but for now it's Google.
csytan 16y ago
> But I do look for companies whose profit is aligned with my interest. This is excellent advice for building a business (especially in the B2B space). Thanks!

Daniel_Newby 16y ago

> I can't trust a company/developer who is reactionary to the market share and their profit line as opposed to doing their job good in the first place. They did a damn good job in the first place. IE 5.5 was such a tremendous step forward in reliability and consistency that web apps stampeded towards it and away from the alternative, the hideous Netscape 4.72. Before anybody could plan for it, tens of billions of dollars of activity had moved to IE, and Netscape's market capitalization was a smoking crater. The catch was that the web apps of that time were brittle, something like Perl or PHP code with HTML snippets hard-coded into it. The brittleness of these apps prematurely standardized the quirks of IE 5.5/6. Microsoft had no choice but to put the product line on long-term support. Consequently, a lot of app authors sensibly decided to target IE 6's carved-in-stone quirks rather than emerging standards. At that point IE 6 was there to stay for the long haul; trying to migrate away would have been tilting at windmills. What we are seeing today is that (1) the emerging standards of 1998 have finally been carved into stone, (2) the web app frameworks have finally gotten good enough at separating logic from presentation to make rewrites worthwhile, and (3) IE challengers finally accumulated enough development to compete. This is not because Microsoft was evil, but because you have to climb a tall hill to replace a pretty good solution with an ideal solution.

btilly 16y ago
The rumor that I've heard is that Microsoft sold a bunch of support contracts for IE 6 with huge potential penalties if Microsoft failed on its end. This gave them huge financial incentives to support the quirks of that browser for as long as those contracts were still valid.