4 ms·
This is a very different situation in quite a few ways. For one, IE was not just a big browser, but was almost completely dominant. For another, many of IE's br
by cgranade 15y ago
This is a very different situation in quite a few ways. For one, IE was not just a big browser, but was almost completely dominant. For another, many of IE's browser-specific features were Windows-only by design, such as ActiveX.
Here, we have an open source rendering engine that clearly delineates browser-specific features (each of which is well-documented). The use of a prefix makes it possible to use the browser-specific features offered by WebKit without sacrificing compatibility with other browsers, something Microsoft actively resisted. For quite a while, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to make sites that looked and felt right both in IE and in other browsers.
Had Microsoft extended standards in a way that played nice with the rest of the community, maybe they would have had someone saying something like this in their defence. Instead, they used browser-specific features as a way of undermining standards.
- ootachi 15y agoNaCl is specific to individual processor architectures by design, much like ActiveX was specific to Windows. Prefixed WebKit features are certainly not consistently well-documented. CSS animations, transforms, etc. had to be carefully reverse engineered by other browsers.
- calloc 15y agoNaCl is not part of WebKit.
- jacobolus 15y agoCSS animations and transforms were released along with formal specs. The Webkit developers read mailing lists, hang out on IRC, etc. If anyone thought these were underspecified or ambiguous, they could easily ask for answers or adjustments to the spec. It’s not like the Webkit folks were trying to hide anything.
- ootachi 15y agoThe spec was not released alongside the implementation of animations and transforms. It was released much later.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jacobolus 15y agoYou’re right. CSS animations were announced and added to Webkit betas in October 2007, and it took until the beginning of April 2008 for Apple to put up their proposed formal spec. I’m not sure when they first hit a publicly released version of Safari. Still, 6 months is pretty short in browser spec time, and pretty much no one was using these features in the wild until much later.
- flomo 15y agoI don't think Microsoft was acting "not nice" - most of their extensions were submitted to the W3C (and even ActiveX was standardized by X/Open, however pointlessly). However, the major vendor, Netscape, simply was not going to adopt any IEism under any circumstances. The biggest issue with being frozen on IE6 was not so much the standards but all the terrible bugs.
- surrealize 15y agoNetscape had a cross-platform browser. Fully implementing ActiveX in a cross-platform way was not feasible.
- flomo 15y agoKeep in mind that at the time, Netscape was even more proprietary than Microsoft. (Layers instead of DOM, JavaScript SS instead of CSS) And if you want to get technical about it, in theory you could support ActiveX on any platform. The problem was the controls were all Win32 software. There probably would have been some marginal benefit for Netscape to support it on Windows.