3 ms·
I guess you missed the articles here about about Microsoft's massive commitment to backward compatibility and why they do it? From just the other day :http://n
by ryanwatkins 16y ago
I guess you missed the articles here about about Microsoft's massive commitment to backward compatibility and why they do it?
From just the other day :http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281045 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281045
and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
Ditching the current rendering engine would break a ton of apps.
- alanh 16y agoThose “web” apps are then already broken, by definition.
- bzbarsky 16y agoThey are broken from the _user's_ perspective, yes. They are not necessarily broken from the app developer's perspective. Changing IE so as to break them would cause MS a good bit of grief (and depending on the contracts they have with people might cost them money directly).
- ryanwatkins 16y agoThey're not 'web' apps, they're apps built to a specific platform. Many of those are internal intranet apps, and some are not even networked - they're actual apps that use the IE rendering engine for UI. You may not like that they're not built to your "web" standard (or whatever that standard was 10 years ago), but other people just care if their apps still work. These apps are built to a Windows platform, and not a web standard. A platform that the current IE rendering engine is a component of. MSFT has a commitment to backward compatibility for some very strong business reasons. And people build to MSFT's platforms and buy their operating systems, in part, because of this commitment to compatibility.