10 ms·
A Modern Browser
- us 16y agoIn this case, Microsoft is staying classy. Mozilla, just barking to be the loudest dog on the playground. Sad...
- Pewpewarrows 16y agoExcept that they responded to none of the real concerns with IE9 being labeled as a Modern Browser, and instead listed off the same marketing drivel we've been hearing from their camp for the past year.
- kenjackson 16y agoThey did respond. They said Mozilla's definition is wrong. No use arguing using the definition your opponent has if you don't agree with it.
- yuhong 16y agoAnd I do agree. Firefox 3.x I'd consider relatively modern.
- kenjackson 16y agoYeah, Mozilla's argument seems odd. It is basically saying that IE9 is not modern because it is about on par with their shipping browser (FF3.6x) -- and lets not forget that IE9 has a better UI, better tab isolation, JS perf, and rendering perf than FF3.6x. If anything Mozilla should immediately urge all FF3.6x users to move to Chrome. I think a more true, yet less controversial statement from Mozilla would be, FF 4 will leave IE9 (and FF3.6x) in the dust with respect to standards conformance. I'd even agree with that. But saying that IE9 is not modern seems dishonest.
- billybob 16y agoSure. In one sense, anything is "modern" if it's developed this year, regardless of its feature set. So modern is probably the wrong word. But the argument that a version of IE which hasn't even come out yet doesn't have features that other browsers have had for years are valid points. I guess "IE9 sucks" was deemed not to be tactful enough.
- wonderyak 16y agoI agree with you that they are trying to be classy. The problem is that they are just plain wrong and they have no supporting evidence besides 'OMGZ WEB SOKETS.'
- drivebyacct2 16y agoDid you hear they're releasing Firefox 5, 6, and 7 this year too?
- drivebyacct2 16y agoThanks for the downvote. Way to be uninformed. http://www.inspiredgeek.com/2011/02/07/mozilla-plans-to-release-firefox-4-5-6-7-four-firefox-versions-in-2011-wow/ http://www.inspiredgeek.com/2011/02/07/mozilla-plans-to-rele...
- juiceandjuice 16y agoSome of the things they don't support aren't new, and are important for an "immersive experience" Perfect example: CSS transitions. It's been around a while... like 3 years. Having no support and nothing to show for, in respect to something with an Editor's draft out from the W3C, (css transitions, for example), just proves you're really good at dragging your feet.
- kenjackson 16y agoIt looks like CSS transitions just showed up in 2009 (http://www.webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/ http://www.webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/) And even then it was just a proprietary vendor extension. It's not like it was part of the draft standard at that tmie. If MS adds a new feature to IE, does that start the clock on when everyone else needs to implement it?
- juiceandjuice 16y agoThat's CSS animation. There's a blog post from Surfin Safari dating back to 2007 for CSS transition, and a Mozilla article dating back to 2009 (might have been implemented before that) So... two implementations older than 2 years.
- kenjackson 16y agoThe only thing I see in 2007 about this is an announcement that they're going to do it. Can you find a pointer to the blog entry announcing that it is available?
- masklinn 16y agohttp://www.webkit.org/blog/138/css-animation/ http://www.webkit.org/blog/138/css-animation/ > We have another cool new CSS feature to talk about: animation specified in CSS. There is a lot of ground to cover here, so we’ll start with the basics first. There are two technologies here, though both sometimes use the word "animation" they're separate: they implemented transitions in 2007 (using transition-* properties [0]), transitions are used to smoothly go from one state to an other and they are implicit: you only say which CSS property will transition and over which duration and the browser will handle all the decisions within that scope. CSS animations[1] were added in 2009[2]. They are related to transitions but they're explicit and keyframe-based. Much more complex, but much more flexible as well (for instance you can have back and forth movements with animations, but not with transitions). [0] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-transitions/ http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-transitions/ [1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-animations/ http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-animations/ [2] http://www.webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/ http://www.webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/
- Pewpewarrows 16y agoSince the comments on Tim Sneath's original post are broken at best, I'll paste my original reply here: First, IE9 doesn't fully support mature HTML5 and CSS3 standards. Congrats, the only tests you pass are the ones that your own department submitted to the W3C. Everyone else's show IE9's Release Candidate as having less support than other browsers released 1-2 years ago. Second, nice job cherry-picking a single paragraph out of one of the few comments in the Hacker News thread supporting your position. You also conveniently omitted the scalding final line of that paragraph: "It's just a shame they're not providing it on XP." This is typical of your response in general: you've responded to absolutely 0 of the actual criticisms of your product, and instead decide to praise the few improvements you happened to make over IE8. You're only providing your new browser to a small fraction of the OS market, it still doesn't support stable and mature spec features, the ones you do support are still wildly broken (canvas, ahem), and you remain silent through it all. I had high hopes when you initially announced your plans for IE9 all those months ago. It's a damn shame they turned out to be nothing more than marketing smoke and mirrors.
- fname 16y agoYou're only providing your new browser to a small fraction of the OS market I still fail to grasp the argument of IE9 not being released for XP. I mean, the OS is ten years old, upgrade already.
- fleitz 16y agoThe Chrome, Safari, and Firefox teams seem to be able to deliver a very good experience on XP. It's kind of lame that the Microsoft team can't deliver the same thing for an OS that they took part in building. If anyone knows XP inside out it should be the IE team. They even have access to the 'secret' APIs. And if the IE team doesn't know XP inside out they have excellent resources at Microsoft to speak to the people who do know, like Mark Russinovich, or the NT Kernel Team. IE9 not running on XP has everything to do with Microsoft internal politics and nothing to do with technical limitations of a 10 year old OS. The fact that people are still running a 10 year old OS is a testament to what the XP team has built.
- natmaster 16y ago"Modern browsers enable rich, immersive experiences.." To use their own example: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/VideoCity/Default.html http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/VideoCity/Default... vs http://videos-cdn.mozilla.net/serv/mozhacks/flight-of-the-navigator/ http://videos-cdn.mozilla.net/serv/mozhacks/flight-of-the-na... Which one is more 'modern'?
- geuis 16y agoNot really sure. The MS one runs extremely slow in Chrome 10 (dev build), but the Flight of the Navigator never finishes loading at all.
- natmaster 16y agoSounds like Chrome isn't a "modern browser" then.
- marckremers 16y agoBoth crashed my Chrome tabs. But both demo's look they're from 1988 anyway.
- dermatthias 16y agoFor me, a modern browser is one that runs on all the three major operating systems: Linux, MacOS and Windows. And not just on one of them.
- jawee 16y agoA browser can be fully modern and platform specific; I fail to see your argument. Could a browser not be specifically developed for Haiku, Mac OS 9, or any other current or legacy platform and still be a modern browser even if it has the full feature set of Chrome?
- tmcw 16y agoFrom the linked "Download Squad" "thinking" > Don't be mesmerized by the tawdry typography, though: with juicy propaganda it's always what isn't said that matters. There is no mention of IE9's hyperspeed JavaScript engine, Chakra. There's no mention of pinned tabs or per-process tabs or Tracking Protection Lists. It feels a bit like a scrawny, bespectacled geek throwing stones at a fat billionaire with three trophy wives -- the nerd is probably right, but the pimp doesn't really care. the next paragraph, somehow, begins with > There's no doubt that Firefox 4 implements a broader range of Web technologies -- and don't get us wrong, it is an excellent browser -- but more stuff doesn't necessarily equate to better stuff. This is what passes for logic nowadays?
- tzenes 16y agoDoes Tim Sneath, not realize that "modern browser" was just the rhetoric Paul Rouget was using to classify HTML5 support (and JS api, CSS3, etc)? Who cares what you define "modern browser" to be? Rouget's point that IE9 still doesn't support the feature set that FF3.6 did is a valid concern. Will MS push for larger feature set support? Will I have webworkers on IE9? What about javascript strict mode? When do I get SMIL Animations? These are the questions I care about, not "what does modern browser mean?"
- sid0 16y agoHTML5 is descriptive, not prescriptive, so the complaint about features not being ready doesn't make sense. They're ready when browsers ship them.
- masklinn 16y agoTo be fair, HTML5 is a mix: a mix of stuff which already exists and was standardized (from a number of browsers) and of new stuff which was built from ground up for the occasion.
- sid0 16y agoAnd yet the new stuff is ready only when at least two implementations ship it. This currently means at least two out of Gecko, WebKit and Opera. Does Microsoft really never want to be one of the two?
- smoody 16y agowhy can't 'modern' also mean 'compatible?'
- AndyKelley 16y agoIn order to get to the content, I had to click "Continue" on a window that said, "This site is insecure. Are you sure you want to continue?" Once I passed that, I got to see the "Agree to Legal Terms" page. I didn't want to read legal terms, I wanted to read about "A Modern Browser," so I don't know how many more obstructions there were after that. Just thought it was kind of ironic.
- necolas 16y agoThe elephant in the room is Google Chrome. Both IE9 and Firefox 4 (I think) lack Chrome's automatic updates. They simply cannot bring new features and bug fixes to users as quickly as Chrome can. You can spend 1-2 years working on a major release, but if the competition is rolling out automatic updates every 6 weeks, you're at a major disadvantage.
- EricBerglund 16y agoThe thing is that people think of browsers as a single market with all browsers competing directly with each other. In reality, I think we're starting to get to a point where browsers are differentiating and targeting different groups of users. Chrome uses automatic updates to drive innovation and chase after the "power user" types who care about HTML5 and having the latest and greatest. On the other hand IE needs to maintain its core user base which is enterprise and business users where stability and support are far more important than <canvas> support. Automatic updates would be a horrible idea of IE because it would alienate these users. Hopefully people are starting to realize that there is not one "best" browser, there are a number of different browsers, each with their own perks and downsides, and it's down to each individual user to pick the one that best suits their needs.
- ianb 16y agoThere are plans to move Firefox to a release model much closer to Chrome after Firefox 4.
- moxiemk1 16y agoMicrosoft has had automatic updates for years now, I believe. Firefox seems to have no problem prompting me to update it when its required. I'm not sure I understand what disadvantage they're at?
- SpikeGronim 16y agoThe difference is that I notice when Windows updates, and I don't notice each time that Chrome updates.
- twodayslate 16y agoSeems to be a good answer to me. I want something that works and is fast. I could care less what technology it is using... as long as it does what I want it to do.
- rsoto 16y agoI don't understand how they can defend that position. Yeah, it's their job and they might be very proud of their work, but they can't be that dumb. Haven't they learned the lesson? Everytime they try to come with something, the community backfires even harder. Let's just remember what happened with the IE9 team[1] and the Hotmail team[2] on reddit's AMA. 1: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/related/dkk3l/iama_we_are_members_of_the_ie9_product_team_here/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/related/dkk3l/iama_we_are_membe... 2: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ej32l/we_are_the_hotmail_development_team_lets_talk/?limit=500 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ej32l/we_are_the_hotma...
- gizmomagico 16y agoI don't understand how they can defend that position. Yeah, it's their job and they might be very proud of their work, but they can't be that dumb. They're not dumb - they're full of shit, just like always.
- bkhl 16y agoHonestly, I don't understand why so many people are frustrated about what defines the modern browsers. If you are not happy about a product, you don't have to use it. If you don't use it, the manufacturer will know that something is wrong. Plus, the word, modern, is so vague. As Microsoft did, it can mean totally different things to different people. HTML5 isn't standard, yet. There is very little number of websites that fully utilize the capabilities of HTML5. Now, go grab a cup of coffee and do something more productive :)
- JeremyBanks 16y agoI don't think most are concerned with IE9 because they'll be using it themselves. It's more than they'll have to develop to support it, and if Microsoft put a reasonable effort into this it would mean much less work for web developers.
- nkassis 16y ago"Modern browsers enable rich, immersive experiences that could hitherto only be delivered through a plug-in or native application. They can blend video, vector and raster graphics, audio and text seamlessly without sacrificing performance." Ok, when can we expect WebGL support then?
- eitland 16y agoThe real takeaway from this story seems to be that Microsoft reads and responds to #HN
- arctangent 16y agoThe author of the linked article manages to be wrong twice by referring to HN as "YCombinator" - confusing the company with the forum, and misspelling the name of the company (which I believe should have a space in it). Only MS can make so many errors within such a limited window of opportunity ;-)
- jokermatt999 16y agoI can't speak for Microsoft, but I tend to refer to Hacker News as Y Combinator News simply to avoid misunderstandings. It's easier to get the name wrong than to explain "No, not that kind of hacker. There's a non-pejorative definition as well...."
- Garbage 16y agoAm I the only one who thinks Microsoft should drop IE and start using Webkit ?
- diamondhead 16y agoAm I seeing right? An IE developer is claiming that modern browsers implement features/standards when they are ready?! What are we talking about, is this about the web that Microsoft had been trying to block for years? How dare!
- sergimansilla 16y agoThis post is incredibly vague, and it is missing the point. First of all, it doesn't explain the huge lack of standards in IE9 that Paul Roget mentions. And second, it forgets that IE has a really awful record on making browsers (IE has been the biggest drag on the web being more usable and modern for the last 10 years). At least Paul's post gives a tangible and definition of what 'modern' means in form of checklist points that are easy to prove true or false just by looking at the browser implementation. How do you measure 'modern', Microsoft? You will have to do better than saying it is 'faster' and that provides 'rich, immersive experiences'. Mozilla hasn't stopped pushing the web to its boundaries and making a big effort to put standards first during all these years. And there is no doubt that the new Firefox will be a much better browser than the new IE (check out the beta). Also, where is the strict mode in IE9?