4 ms·

You weren't the person I was responding to, so I really can't tell if we agree or disagree. I think we agree on many of the same points, but disagree perhaps on

You weren't the person I was responding to, so I really can't tell if we agree or disagree. I think we agree on many of the same points, but disagree perhaps on the whole picture. In its day, IE 6 was great and devs embraced it. When 90+% of the web was IE traffic, why bother wasting money developing for fringe browsers? > - Open source is important. I think if MS continued with IE's development, open source wouldn't be such an important issue. It became one because MS became a bad steward. But, I agree that being open source makes it unlikely that Chromium will stagnate in the same way. > - Continuous updates are extremely important. > - Bundling browser updates with OS updates is an awful idea. MS had a living standard. It was widely regarded as part of "embrace, extend, extinguish." Continuous updates & breaking away from the OS are important for security. They're bad for standards. > - Web standards are important, especially living standards. If you need a browser that's at most 6 weeks old to run a new site, what good is a standard? The Web was supposed to gracefully degrade, but that's not what's happening. Instead, devs are building sites & apps that only work in Chromium-based browsers and popping up splash screens that inform you you need to switch to use this site. This is something that in a post IE6 world we said we wouldn't do again, and yet here we are. I think the only real difference between what Google & MS did in terms of snubbing the W3C is that Google embraced the WHATWG. > - Plugins are a bad idea, let's not do those anymore. The difference between plugins, extensions, and add-ons to an end user is non-existent. There's certainly an improvement to security. But, otherwise end users frequently choose Chrome (or Firefox) based on what extensions are available.

scrollaway 8y ago
> If you need a browser that's at most 6 weeks old to run a new site, what good is a standard? Is this argument in good faith, or do you genuinely not remember the IE6 days? We were talking about IE6 support still … what… four years ago? That's almost FIFTEEN YEARS. The point isn't that you need a "six weeks old" browser, the point is that you can't let it get so bad that you are no longer able to use features less than a decade old. I mean there's young web devs out there that wrote compatibility shims for a browser that's older than they are.
- nirvdrum 8y ago
  Feel free to read through my post history if you really want to question my intentions. By the way, I also built a TechStars company that automated the detection of rendering issues across different browsers, I've written BHOs for IE6 - IE10, I'm a core Selenium developer, and I wrote the code that does screenshots for the IE driver in Selenium. I have a pretty good grasp on browser technologies and their timeline. Yes, I've encountered sites & apps that require the absolute latest version of Chrome, which is on a 6 week update schedule. I've tested 10s of thousands of different sites. You really don't need to quote parts of that and then tell me it's not the point. So, let's just assume for a moment that I'm not lying, and by some miraculous sequence of events your life experiences ended up being different from mine. Given all that, my question still stands. What's the point of a standard if it's a constantly shifting target, developers target it and they lock you out if you're not running the latest version of a specific browser? Placing IE6 in the context I clearly outlined, where it was an actively developed browser and considerably better than Netscape on SeaMonkey... how is what MS was doing any different than what Google's doing now? Both see the standards bodies as being too slow to act, so they roll out their own improvements, devs adopt them and lock out others. The only difference I can really see is MS only documented their changes, rather than creating a competing standards body à la WHATWG. That may even be the best thing for progress. Even during IE6's active period, it's how we ended up with technologies like Ajax. But being an "open standard" is meaningless when it only runs on one constantly shifting target. That's the world we're converging on again because it's convenient for developers to do so. Side note: You and I are obviously talking about two different classes of web devs. The ones I'm talking about, constantly adopting new technologies and locking out everyone else, gave up on IE6 long ago. Many of them don't run Windows and have never built a site that works on anything other than a Chromium-based browser.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    Good job working on Selenium and thanks for your work on it, I use it a bunch. As for the rest of your post I've no idea what you're on about or how it relates to my reply, sorry.
    - 8y ago

scrollaway 8y ago

> If you need a browser that's at most 6 weeks old to run a new site, what good is a standard? Is this argument in good faith, or do you genuinely not remember the IE6 days? We were talking about IE6 support still … what… four years ago? That's almost FIFTEEN YEARS. The point isn't that you need a "six weeks old" browser, the point is that you can't let it get so bad that you are no longer able to use features less than a decade old. I mean there's young web devs out there that wrote compatibility shims for a browser that's older than they are.

nirvdrum 8y ago
Feel free to read through my post history if you really want to question my intentions. By the way, I also built a TechStars company that automated the detection of rendering issues across different browsers, I've written BHOs for IE6 - IE10, I'm a core Selenium developer, and I wrote the code that does screenshots for the IE driver in Selenium. I have a pretty good grasp on browser technologies and their timeline. Yes, I've encountered sites & apps that require the absolute latest version of Chrome, which is on a 6 week update schedule. I've tested 10s of thousands of different sites. You really don't need to quote parts of that and then tell me it's not the point. So, let's just assume for a moment that I'm not lying, and by some miraculous sequence of events your life experiences ended up being different from mine. Given all that, my question still stands. What's the point of a standard if it's a constantly shifting target, developers target it and they lock you out if you're not running the latest version of a specific browser? Placing IE6 in the context I clearly outlined, where it was an actively developed browser and considerably better than Netscape on SeaMonkey... how is what MS was doing any different than what Google's doing now? Both see the standards bodies as being too slow to act, so they roll out their own improvements, devs adopt them and lock out others. The only difference I can really see is MS only documented their changes, rather than creating a competing standards body à la WHATWG. That may even be the best thing for progress. Even during IE6's active period, it's how we ended up with technologies like Ajax. But being an "open standard" is meaningless when it only runs on one constantly shifting target. That's the world we're converging on again because it's convenient for developers to do so. Side note: You and I are obviously talking about two different classes of web devs. The ones I'm talking about, constantly adopting new technologies and locking out everyone else, gave up on IE6 long ago. Many of them don't run Windows and have never built a site that works on anything other than a Chromium-based browser.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  Good job working on Selenium and thanks for your work on it, I use it a bunch. As for the rest of your post I've no idea what you're on about or how it relates to my reply, sorry.
  - 8y ago